A Case of Grave Danger

by Sophie Cleverly

  ‘What?’ Oliver leaned closer to the desk to peer at the book. Bones looked up, pressing his nose against me.

  ‘This could be it,’ I whispered. ‘Miss Emily Stone.’

  Bones whined suddenly – almost like a howl. My skin broke into goosebumps.

  Miss Stone was our other governess. Our first governess, actually. I had been fairly young when she was let go – the first of our servants to leave. So many of them had then left – I didn’t think anything of it.

  I looked up at Oliver. ‘She was thin, pale, light-haired … just like the Black Widow. No scar, but – like you say, she might have acquired that.’

  ‘What was she like?’ he asked.

  I shrugged. ‘I barely recall her beyond that.’ I tried desperately to search the depths of my memory. ‘She was only with us for a short time. I think … I think she could be a bit cold and distant, but she taught me well enough.’

  ‘Is that all?’ He bent over the ledger, as if it were somehow going to reveal more secrets to him. ‘You don’t remember anything else that could help?’

  I slammed the book shut, making Oliver jump and Bones cower under the desk. ‘That’s all I have! I was so young, Oliver. What more is there to say?’

  He sighed, bent down and started stroking Bones until he stopped quivering. ‘All right, miss. I know.’

  Now I felt bad. ‘It’s not you, it’s Father, and all this, I just—’ My apology was interrupted by a knock on the door of the shop.

  With a glance at Oliver I headed to answer, but Bones beat me to it, his tail now wagging hopefully. He thinks it’s Father come home, I thought, but I didn’t have anywhere near such high hopes.

  I turned the key in the lock and opened the door. ‘Sorry, we’re closed—’ I started, but a bright flash went off in my face, blinding me, a puff of smoke filling my nose. Bones sprang into a crouch, growling and snapping.

  I blinked rapidly and when I could finally see again, I found myself looking up at four men, all wearing peaked caps. Three of them had notebooks, while the fourth stood behind the offending camera that had just struck me senseless. ‘I … what is this?’ I coughed through the acrid smoke.

  ‘Miss Veil?’ one of them said. He pointed to himself with his pencil. ‘Jim Dean, Gazette and Herald. Is it true that your father is in prison for the recent murders?’

  I gaped at him.

  ‘Miss Veil,’ one of the others said, ‘Tempest Smith, Weekly Bugle. They’re calling him the Undertaker of Death. How do you feel about that name?’

  A small crowd of nosy onlookers was forming behind the journalists. I felt my face burn brighter and brighter red. ‘Please, leave us alone.’

  ‘No comment, then,’ Tempest Smith replied, shaking his head sadly as if I’d let him down. My chest felt tight.

  The last of them stepped forward from behind the large tripod that the photographer was using. ‘Miss Veil, Jeffery Briar of the Morning Times here – will you go to watch your father hang?’

  I felt the world begin to spin and blur around me.

  ‘Murderer!’ someone cried with enthusiasm from the crowd. ‘Vile villain!’

  I was aware of Bones leaping forward, nipping the man on his ankle, and suddenly Oliver was beside me, tugging Bones back and grabbing the door. ‘No more questions!’ he shouted at them. ‘Leave us alone!’ He pushed me back, and the door closed to another crack as the camera flash went off once more.

  Like a house of cards, I fell to the floor, piece by piece.

  Time was running out … I had to get to the bottom of this crime, and quickly …

  Because the vultures had found us.

  other came rushing in, with Thomas trailing not far behind. Bones circled the room, growling at the door, while Oliver flattened himself against it.

  ‘What on earth is the matter?’ Mother exclaimed from high above me. ‘I heard a commotion!’

  My head was still spinning, and my mouth flapping uselessly.

  ‘R-reporters, ma’am,’ Oliver managed to stammer out. ‘Lots of them.’

  I looked up at the window. Having had the door shut in their faces, the reporters and local gossips had swarmed in front of the glass. I could see a line of eyes as they peered in.

  Mother’s face began to burn red with anger. ‘Thomas, shut the curtains!’ she ordered. ‘Oliver, lock the door!’

  They did as they were told, Thomas pulling the black velvet curtains (that were rarely ever drawn, and so released a cloud of dust) across the window and Oliver reluctantly moving from his defensive position to turn the key in the lock.

  ‘Mother,’ I said weakly from the floor, keeping my voice quiet so that Thomas wouldn’t hear. ‘They were saying such horrible things.’ I hated sounding like this, but I couldn’t hold back the despair.

  Mother dropped down beside me, which was not easy in her full skirts. She wrapped her arms round my shoulders. ‘Shh, it’s all right,’ she soothed me. ‘Don’t listen to them.’

  I wanted to tell her what they’d asked, what people had shouted out about Father, but I couldn’t bring myself to. I couldn’t do it to her. It was awful, truly awful. They all believed Father was a murderer, that he would hang.

  For a few moments, I just stared at nothing, feeling emptiness and hopelessness overwhelm me.

  Bones ceased his growling, pattered over and began to lick my face. It brought me back to reality with a thud. I rubbed his soft head gently.

  Mother sniffed and stood up, offering her arm to help me up too, away from the affections of the dog. ‘We shan’t use the front door,’ she said. ‘Not until your father is home. We’ll go through the cemetery.’

  ‘Oh, but Mother …’ Thomas began to protest, wiping his hands on his britches.

  She raised a finger at him. ‘I mean it, Thomas. This is for your safety. Do as you’re told.’

  Thomas’s lower lip wobbled and his brow narrowed, but he said nothing. I frowned at him.

  Mother breathed out sharply. ‘Let us all pray that they get tired and leave us alone. Come along.’ With one last angry glance towards the window, she left the shop, gesturing at us to follow. Bones trotted after her.

  Thomas scuffed his feet on the floor.

  ‘Stop it, Thomas,’ I snapped at him. ‘This isn’t the time to behave like a spoilt child. Mother and Father need us more than ever.’

  He continued pouting. Then he said, ‘I don’t understand! I don’t want to have to walk through the cemetery all the time! It takes so much longer to go that way.’

  ‘Well, we’re doing it,’ I told him. ‘For safety. You heard.’

  ‘No one tells me what’s going on!’ He threw his hands down at his sides, glared at me, and then shuffled out.

  I gave an exasperated sigh.

  ‘Is it really safer in the cemetery, though, miss?’ Oliver said. I turned to him. ‘What with the Black Widow possibly lurking out there …’

  I put my hand to my mouth. ‘The Black Widow! That’s what we were talking about!’

  I looked back at the open book on the desk and once again my eyes landed on Miss Stone’s name. Now that I thought about it, there had been something odd about her that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Miss Barker had been eccentric, of course, but I didn’t think she had a bad heart. Miss Stone, on the other hand … She seemed normal, but … what if there was something hidden underneath her quiet demeanour? Even picturing her in my memory made me feel slightly on edge. ‘I may not remember her well, but I think Miss Stone needs to be top of our list of suspects for the identity of the Black Widow,’ I told Oliver. ‘She’s the only one who really fits the bill.’

  ‘Seems a possibility. But how do we find out about her? We could try asking at the police station again,’ Oliver suggested, with a hopeful expression. He pulled a pencil out from behind his ear that I hadn’t even noticed was there.

  ‘Oh, you and your playing Jack Danger!’ I said, swatting him on the arm. ‘I’ve had enough of reporters for one day. But … yes,
that could work, if she’s known to them for anything. I don’t fancy running into Inspector Holbrook again, though.’ I shuddered. ‘We need to avoid the press too.’ Their horrible words echoed in my mind.

  Murderer. Villain. Undertaker of Death.

  I tried to pretend I couldn’t hear them. I drowned them out with my own words.

  Father is innocent. Father is innocent.

  We were running out of time. I needed the distraction of investigating.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘The servants who were here back then may have left, but Alfred the gravedigger has been here for years and years. Maybe he’ll remember something about Miss Stone.’

  Oliver nodded thoughtfully. ‘And if she is the Black Widow, he might have seen her hanging around here like a bad smell.’

  I snapped my fingers. ‘You’re right.’ I looked up at the clock. ‘He’ll be heading home now – but we can catch him first thing tomorrow morning.’

  Perhaps the whole world would believe Father’s guilt when they read the morning papers. But Oliver and I … maybe, just maybe, we could change the world.

  The next morning, once I was certain that everyone else was occupied – Maddy helping Mother see to the household chores and Thomas grumpily assembling his toy soldiers – I knew we could sneak out into the cemetery to find Alfred. The others needed to keep busy to distract themselves from what was happening, and I do too. I, however, had different methods.

  Bones, of course, insisted on following us. He quickly found his favourite stick hidden behind the lavatory in the garden and padded along beside us.

  ‘Good boy,’ I told him, remembering how he’d defended me before. ‘If we run into the Black Widow, you can bite her too.’ He wagged his tail in what appeared to be happy agreement. I hoped he would get the right person this time, though.

  The sky was the colour of milk, the trees like skeletons with a few crispy leaves still clinging on. As I opened the back gate, Bones happily ran out and began dancing through them, sending up spiralling clouds of amber.

  Oliver and I peered out, but there didn’t seem to be any sign of journalists. The cemetery was peaceful as usual. I breathed a sigh of relief.

  We had three gravediggers, and Alfred had been with us the longest. As we walked out that day I could see him taking a rest against a tree, mopping his furrowed brow with his handkerchief. His spade stood upright in the dirt. Even on a chilly day, digging was hot and exhausting work – back-breaking, even. I often wondered how he did it.

  Alfred looked up as Bones ran over to him and dashed around his feet in excitement. He leaned down and patted the dog on the head, making a fuss of him. Then he smiled and waved at me, and I waved back, before moving my thumb back and forth across my chest.

  Oliver looked at me questioningly.

  ‘He’s deaf,’ I explained. ‘Give me your notebook, would you?’

  Whenever I had a moment with Alfred, I would get him to teach me some of his finger signs. Unfortunately, I didn’t know enough to ask what we needed to ask. He could read lip movements, but he always said I spoke too fast for him (this was probably true – Mother often told me I could speak at a mile a minute). Unlike Oliver, he was a keen reader, so he’d always ask me to write things down instead.

  Oliver offered his notebook and pencil from his pocket. I took it and hastily scribbled a question as we walked over, crunching through the leaves. I handed it to Alfred, who peered down at it.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, blinking. ‘Miss Stone? Yes, I remember her. Strange woman. She used to sit and watch me digging sometimes, but she would never say a word to me. Gave me an odd feeling.’

  I turned over the page and scribbled again. Did she get sacked? Did you know anything else about her?

  ‘Scratched?’ He squinted at the words on the page.

  Oops – my messy handwriting. I rewrote the word and tapped it with the pencil.

  ‘Oh, sacked?’ Alfred read. ‘Perhaps. I didn’t know her, and as I say she never tried to speak to me. I think she lived not far from here, because she was often walking through. Could be she was sacked … The last day I saw her, she looked tearful.’

  That would make sense with what Maddy had said. Miss Stone certainly wouldn’t have been happy. I added another note. Have you seen her recently? In the cemetery?

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t … think so, Miss Violet. Not for years.’

  I frowned. He hadn’t seen her? But we knew the Black Widow had been here, and I had felt a growing certainty they were one and the same.

  Oliver had his hands in his pockets and was shuffling from foot to foot, looking around nervously. I wasn’t sure if it was Miss Stone or the journalists that he was worried about. ‘If the lady looks different though, miss?’

  Bones barked as if in agreement. ‘Hmm,’ I said to myself.

  I wrote a final question and handed it to Alfred. Have you seen a strange lady in black, with a veiled face and a scar?

  He stared down at this one for a few moments before answering. ‘Well, miss, every other woman around here is dressed in mourning clothes, you know. I don’t know if I’ve seen this one you’re looking for, but …’

  I motioned to him to give back the notebook and then added – around plot 239?

  Alfred had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the layout of the graves and tombs. I felt sure he would know what I was talking about.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, scratching his beard. ‘There was a lady like that up there today. Not so long ago. You looking for her? She might still be there …’

  I shared a glance with Oliver, who was wide-eyed. He took his notebook back from Alfred and I hastily signed Thank you, thank you! as we ran away up the hill, Bones shooting ahead of us like he was chasing rabbits.

  here was a tomb in the cemetery, one of the very oldest, that I knew well. It belonged to a Mrs Sarah Bailey. We passed close by it as we ran, Bones somehow knowing exactly where to go as he always did.

  It had a poem engraved on it, a little faded now from years of wear. I’d first read it as a young child, clinging to my mother’s hand.

  Mortality behold and fear

  What a change of flesh is here

  In this tomb lieth a mother

  And eight of her children with her

  I remembered Mother shuddering as I read it aloud, stumbling over each word. ‘A horrible thought,’ she’d said. Even as someone who took death in her stride daily, the message made her deeply sad.

  I could feel the sadness of it too, but that wasn’t all. There was a deep love as well. A distant echo of laughter, and the smell of apple pie on the wind. The stone under my fingers felt soft and silky, like my mother’s dresses. I didn’t know then that only I could feel those things.

  The words had always stuck in my mind. I remembered asking Mrs Barker the governess about it, much later.

  ‘Memento mori,’ she’d replied.

  ‘What?’ I’d asked, screwing up my face in confusion.

  ‘It’s a Latin phrase,’ she said. ‘It means “remember death”, or perhaps “remember you will die”. You will see many reminders of death around a graveyard.’

  I thought to myself that I wasn’t likely to forget it, what with an undertaker for a father, but I still didn’t understand. ‘Why do they want to remind people of that? Do they want them to be sad?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Mrs Barker. ‘I don’t believe so. I believe it’s a call to live a better life. To do what you can with the time you have.’

  As we hurried past the tomb, I reached out and ran my fingers over the words, the soft feeling tickling my fingertips. What Mrs Barker had said had always stuck with me. It wasn’t scary to remember I would die, not for me. It was exhilarating. It meant that right now, in this moment, I was alive. I could do anything. It was now or never.

  But as we turned a corner of the path and I saw what I hoped for but what I was also dreading – the Black Widow was walking the path ahead of us – I prayed my death wasn’t about to come sooner than ex
pected.

  I shoved Oliver behind a tall column. ‘Stay here,’ I hissed. He was about to protest, but I pointed Bones towards him. ‘Bones, make him stay,’ I ordered.

  Bones was nothing if not obedient, and he gave a low growl at Oliver when he tried to move.

  ‘All right, all right,’ Oliver whispered back.

  It was for his own safety. If the Black Widow knew he wasn’t dead, she might want to change that – but I had to take the chance to talk. All I could think of was proving Father innocent.

  I steeled myself as I walked towards her. She had paused, fixing the spider brooch in her hair as she read the inscription on a stone angel with broken wings.

  Memento mori, the angel seemed to whisper to me. Now or never.

  ‘Miss Stone?’ I tried.

  The Black Widow peeled back the lace from her eyes, and the look she gave me made me think that she hadn’t heard the name in a long time.

  Now that I was seeing her face to face, in daylight, I knew that I did recognise her. She was older and she had that scar, and her hair seemed to have dulled. Yet I knew deep down that she must be the woman who had once been my governess. Her eyes had that sharpness to them. She was searching my face, and I got the feeling she was wondering whether or not to respond.

  ‘Young Miss Violet?’ she eventually replied. Her voice sounded a little croaky, as if from lack of use, yet it had a sweet and light tone to it. Was it false? You catch more flies with honey, after all.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, stepping closer to her with the utmost care. I felt as though I were a tamer approaching a lion that hadn’t been fed for some time. ‘You remember me?’

  Miss Stone smiled. Her smile was pleasant, which threw me off-guard a little. I’d expected a horrible sneer. She was really rather pretty, in a strange way, but with a coldness of expression that reminded me of an icy December morning. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I taught you your lessons for a while, did I not? Are you well?’

  ‘Quite well, miss,’ I answered, with the briefest of glances backward to make sure that Oliver wasn’t visible.

  ‘And your brother?’