The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches (9 page)

Like a fizzler at a funeral
, I thought, but quickly forced it out of my mind.

The problem with bereavement, I had already decided, was learning when to put on and when to take off the various masks that one was required to wear: with anyone who wasn’t a de Luce, profound and inconsolable grief, complete with limp hands and downcast eyes; with family, a distant coolness which, to tell the truth, was not all that different from our everyday life. Only when one was alone in one’s own room could one pull faces at oneself in one’s looking glass, hauling the corners of one’s eyes down with first and fourth fingers spread, lolling one’s tongue out and crossing one’s eyes horribly just to assure oneself that one was still alive.

I can’t believe I just wrote that, but it describes precisely how I felt.

We might as well face it: Death is a bore. It is even harder on the survivors than on the deceased, who at least don’t have to worry about when to sit and when to stand, or when to permit a pale smile and when to glance tragically away.

A pale smile came into my mind because that was what Lena had given me as she looked up from the newspaper through which she had been leafing at far too fast a clip to be actually reading.

She took a last suck on her cigarette and crushed it without mercy in the ashtray before lighting another with a long match from the hearth.

In the corner, Undine was idly tearing off strips of the wallpaper.

“Undine, dear,” her mother said. “Stop doing that and run upstairs for my cigarettes. You shall find them in one of our portmanteaus.”

Father seemed at last to realize that we were all present, but even at that, he did not turn away from the window as he began to speak in a dull voice: “The lying-in-state shall commence at 1400 hours,” he said. “I’ve drawn up a rota. We shall each of us take turns standing vigil in six-hour watches in order of age, which means that I shall begin and Flavia shall finish. Kneeling benches have been laid on and Mrs. Mullet has seen to the candles.”

I thought I heard him swallow.

“From now until the funeral tomorrow, your mother is not to be left alone—not even for a moment. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”

“Yes, Father,” Daffy said.

And there fell one of those de Lucean silences during which you could hear the ancient stones of Buckshaw shedding their dust.

“Are there any questions?”

“No, Father,” we said in unison, and I was surprised to hear my own voice leading all the rest.

Feely and Daffy took his words as a signal of dismissal and left the room as quickly as respect allowed. Lena drifted idly off in their wake.

We stood there not moving, Father and I. I hardly dared breathe. What I should have done, of course—what my
heart was demanding me to do—was to run at him and throw my arms around him.

But I did not, of course. I had at least the decency to spare him that embarrassment.

After a time, perhaps because of my silence, he thought I had gone.

When he turned away from the window, I saw that his eyes were brimming.

Naturally, I couldn’t let him know that I had seen his tears. Pretending I hadn’t noticed, I walked from the room with my fingertips pressed together, as if in procession.

I needed to be alone.

Suddenly, and for the first time in my life, I felt as if I were one of those prisoners in Daffy’s French novels who finds herself shackled hand and foot at the bottom of an old well in a dungeon with the water rising.

The only thing for it was to go to my laboratory and do something constructive with strychnine. There had been that business of the poisoned beehive written up in the
News of the World
not all that long ago, and I had hoped to add to scientific knowledge—to say nothing of the art of criminal investigation—with a number of my own insights into the possibilities of poisoning at the breakfast table.

I climbed the stairs, fishing the key from my pocket as I went. When working with deadly potions I had found it best to keep the door tightly locked.

I twisted the doorknob and stepped inside.

Esmeralda, my Buff Orpington hen, lay stretched out
stiffly on the floor in a beam of sunlight, her neck and both legs fully extended, one wing unfurled as if she had been reaching for help. Sweep marks in the dust showed all too clearly her recent frantic floundering.

“Esmeralda!”

I dashed to her side.

Her only visible eye was staring at me blankly.

“Esmeralda!”

The eye blinked.

Esmeralda got dreamily to her feet and gave herself a good shaking, like a fat feather duster.

I cradled her in my arms, buried my face in the softness of her breast, and burst into tears.

“You goose!” I said into her feathers. “You silly goose! You frightened me half to death.”

Esmeralda pecked at my mouth, as she sometimes did when I put millet seeds between my lips for her to discover.

“How did you manage to get in here?” I asked, even though I thought I already knew the answer.

Dogger must have brought her up to my laboratory, as he did when she was being a nuisance in the greenhouse. And now that Dogger came to mind, I remembered he once told me that some chickens were given to treating themselves to dust baths during which they behaved as if hypnotized. And the floor was certainly dusty.

The truth of the matter is, I wanted to throw myself down on the floorboards and have a jolly good wallow in the dirt myself. I was sick of this constant being on show that Harriet’s sudden reappearance had brought us: this going about in utter silence; this being dressed forever in
our best; this perpetual watching of our words; this being always on our best behavior; these round-the-clock reminders of returning to dust.

It was probably time to think about giving the place a good housecleaning.

But not just yet. My sudden tendency to tears had shaken me.

“What am I going to do, Esmeralda?” I asked.

Esmeralda fixed me with her yellow eye: an eye as warm and mellow as the sun, and yet, at the same time, as old and cold as the mountains.

And in that instant, I knew.

Harriet.

Harriet was in the house and I needed to go to her.

She had something to tell me.

EIGHT

I
SLIPPED SILENTLY OUT
of my laboratory, locked the door, and made my way towards the seldom-used north hall which paralleled the front of the house. Even though Dogger had installed Lena and Undine in one or another of these cavernous crypts, there was little chance of running into them if I kept my wits about me.

Father had told us that he would be first to stand watch. And yet he was, as far as I knew, still in the drawing room, entranced by his grief. There would be little enough time, but perhaps if I hurried …

At the south end of the west wing, I put my ear to the door of Harriet’s boudoir. I could hear nothing but the breathing of the house.

I tried the door and found it unlocked.

I stepped inside.

The room was hung in black velvet. The stuff was everywhere: on the walls, across the windows; even Harriet’s bed and dresser were swathed in the dismal material.

In the center of the room, on draped trestles—a catafalque, Father had called it—was Harriet’s coffin. The Union Jack had been replaced with a black pall bearing the de Luce coat of arms: per bend sinister sable and argent, two lucies haurient counterchanged. The crest, the moon in her detriment, and the motto “Dare Lucem.”

“The moon in her detriment” was a moon eclipsed, and the “lucies,” of course, were silver and black luces, or pikes, a double pun on the name de Luce. “Haurient” meant simply that the pikes were standing on their fishy tails.

And the motto, another pun on our family name:
Dare Lucem
—to give light.

Precisely what I was attempting to do.

At the head and foot of the catafalque, tall candles flickered with a weird glow in iron sconces, making the darkness dance with scarcely visible demons.

An almost perceptible mist hung round the candle flames, and in the awful silence I detected a faint odor upon the air.

I couldn’t hold back a shudder.

Harriet was here—inside this box!

Harriet, the mother I had never known, the mother I had never seen.

I took three steps forward, reached out, and touched the gleaming wood.

How oddly and unexpectedly cold it was! How surprisingly damp.

Of course! Why hadn’t I thought of it before?

In order to preserve it for the long trip home, Harriet’s body would most likely have been packed in the solid form of carbon dioxide, or “card ice” as it is called. The stuff had first been described by the French scientist Charles Thilorier in 1834 after he had discovered it almost by accident. By mixing crystallized CO
₂
with ether, he had been able to achieve the remarkably cold temperature of minus 100 degrees on the centigrade scale.

So inside this wooden shell there would have to be a sealed metal container—zinc, perhaps.

No wonder the bearers at the railway station had moved so slowly under their burden. A metal casing filled with card ice, plus the oaken coffin, plus Harriet would strain the shoulders of even the strongest men.

I sniffed at the oak.

Yes, no doubt about it. Carbon dioxide. Its faint, pungent, pleasantly acid smell gave it away.

How difficult would it be
, I wondered,
to—

Suddenly I heard the sound of footsteps in the hall. Father’s boots! I was sure of it!

I whipped round behind the catafalque and ducked out of sight, hardly daring to breathe.

The door opened and Father came into the room and the door closed again.

There was a long moment of silence.

And then there came the most heartbreaking sound I have ever heard as great shuddering sobs began slowly to break off from my father like floes from an iceberg.

I jammed my forefingers into my ears and screwed them down. There are certain sounds which are meant never to
be heard by children—even though I am no longer really a child—and the chiefest of these is the sound of a parent crying.

It was agony.

I crouched there behind the catafalque, above my head my frozen mother, a few feet away my convulsively crying father.

There was nothing to do but wait.

After a very long time, the muffled sounds seemed to have lessened, and I removed my fingers from my ears. Father was still weeping, but very quietly now.

He sucked in a convulsive, broken breath.

“Harriet,” he said at last in a hoarse whisper. “Harriet, my heart, forgive me. It was I.”

“It was I”?

Whatever could he mean by that? Father was obviously out of his mind with grief.

But before I could think about it, I heard him turn and leave the room.

It would soon be two o’clock, and the villagers would begin arriving at Buckshaw to pay their respects to Harriet’s remains. Father would not want to be seen with moist eyes and had obviously gone next door to his own room to regain his composure. I knew that when the mourners arrived, they would find him showing only the stony face of that cold-fish colonel in whose shell he lived.

Stiff upper lip, and all that.

There were times I could kill him.

I waited long enough to count to twenty-three, then
crept to the door, listened, and tiptoed like a wraith into the corridor.

Moments later, I was soberly descending the staircase into the foyer.

Miss Deportment of 1951.

As I reached the bottom step, the doorbell rang.

For a moment, I thought of ignoring it. It was, after all, Dogger’s duty to greet visitors, not mine.

“What a shabby thought, Flavia,”
an unwelcome voice said inside my head.
“Dogger has enough on his plate without having to run to the door for every passing stranger.”

My feet walked me across the foyer. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand in case of overlooked jam or drool, straightened my clothing, adjusted my pigtails, and opened the door.

If I live to be a hundred I shall never forget the sight that met my eyes.

On the doorstep stood the Misses Puddock, Lavinia and Aurelia, the latter holding a bouquet of papery silver-white flowers.