Speaking From Among the Bones

by Alan Bradley

  I thought for a moment of poor Mr. Twining, Father’s old schoolmaster, who lay in a plot of common ground on the far side of the riverbank behind St. Tancred’s. His father, evidently, had not been a magistrate.

  “Mrs. Cottlestone, though, had arranged for a tunnel to be dug between Cassandra’s tomb and the family crypt, so that her daughter—or at least the soul of her daughter—could visit her parents whenever she wished.”

  “You’re making this up, Daffy!”

  “No, I’m not. It’s in the third volume of The History and Antiquities of Bishop’s Lacey. You can look it up yourself.”

  “A tunnel? Really?”

  “So they say. And I’ve heard rumors—”

  “Yes? Tell me, Daffy!”

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t. You know how cross Father can be when he thinks we’re filling your mind with specters.”

  “I won’t tell him. Please, Daffy! I swear!”

  “Well … “

  “Pleee-ase! Cross my heart with a silver dart!”

  “All right, then. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. Mr. Haskins told me that once, when he was digging a new grave next to Cassandra Cottlestone’s tomb, the edge gave way, and his shovel fell in the hole. When he found he couldn’t fish it out with his arm, he had to crawl in headfirst and—you’re quite sure you want to hear this?”

  I pretended to be biting off my fingers at the knuckles.

  “At the bottom of the grave, beside the shovel, was a mummified human foot.”

  “That’s impossible! It couldn’t have lasted for two hundred years!”

  “Mr. Haskins said it could—under certain conditions. Something to do with the soil.”

  Of course! Adipocere! Grave wax! How could I have forgotten that?

  When buried in a damp location, a human body can be wonderfully transmogrified. The ammonia generated by decay, in which the the fatty tissues break down into palmitic, oleic, and stearic acids, working hand in hand with sodium and potassium from the grave soil, could turn a corpse into a lump of hard laundry soap. It was a simple matter of chemistry.

  Daffy lowered her voice and went on. “He said that not long before this, he had sprinkled red brick dust on the crypt floor to see if rats from the riverbank were finding a way into the church.”

  I shuddered. It was less than a year since I’d been locked in the pit shed on the river’s edge, and I knew that the rats were no figment of my sister’s imagination.

  Daffy’s eyes widened, her voice now no more than a whisper. “And do you know what?”

  “What?”

  I couldn’t help it: I was whispering, too.

  “The sole of the foot was tinted red, as if it had stepped in—”

  “Cassandra Cottlestone!” I almost shouted, the hair at the nape of my neck standing on end as if suddenly blown by a cold, invisible breeze. “She was walking—”

  “Exactly,” Daffy said.

  “I don’t believe it!”

  Daffy shrugged. “Why should I care what you believe? I give you a fact and you give me a headache. Now buzz off.”

  I had buzzed off.

  While I was lost in recollection, Feely’s sobs had subsided, and she was now staring sullenly out the window.

  “Who’s the victim?” I asked, trying to cheer her up.

  “Victim?”

  “You know, the poor sap you’re going to carry down the aisle.”

  “Oh,” she said, tossing her hair and coughing up the answer with surprisingly little urging on my part. “Ned Cropper. I thought you’d have already heard that at the keyhole.”

  “Ned? You despise him.”

  “Wherever did you get that idea? Ned’s going to own the Thirteen Drakes one day. He’s going to take it over from Tully Stoker and rebuild the whole place: dance bands, darts on the terrace, lawn bowling … blow a breath of fresh air into that coal hole … bring it into the twentieth century. He’s going to be a millionaire. Just you wait and see.”

  “You’re warped,” I said.

  “Oh, all right, then. If you must know, it’s Carl. He’s begged Father to let me be Mrs. Pendracka and Father has agreed—mostly because he believes Carl to be of the bloodline of King Arthur. Having an heir with those credentials would be a real feather in Father’s cap.”

  “Sucks to you,” I said. “You’re pulling my leg.”

  “We’re going to live in America,” Feely went on. “In St. Louis, Missouri. Carl’s going to take me to watch Stan Musial knock ’em out of the park for the Cardinals. That’s a baseball team.”

  “Actually, I was hoping it was Sergeant Graves,” I said. “I don’t even know his first name.”

  “Giles,” Feely said, looking dreamily at her fingernails. “But why ever would I marry a policeman? I couldn’t bear the thought of living with someone who came home every night with murder on his boots.”

  Feely seemed to be getting over poor Mr. Collicutt’s death quite nicely. Perhaps there was a drop of de Luce blood in her after all.

  “It’s Dieter,” I said. “He’s the one who gave you the friendship ring at Christmas.”

  “Dieter? He has nothing to offer but love.”

  As she touched the ring, I noticed for the first time that she was wearing it on the third finger of her left hand. At the very mention of his name, she couldn’t keep from smiling.

  “It is!” I’m afraid I shrieked. “It is Dieter!”

  “We shall make a fresh start,” Feely said, her face more soft than I had ever seen it before. “Dieter is going to train as a schoolmaster. I shall teach piano and the two of us shall be as happy as dormice in cotton.”

  I couldn’t help hugging myself. Yaroo! I was thinking.

  “Where is Dieter, by the way?” I asked. “I haven’t seen him for a while.”

  “He’s gone up to London to sit a special examination. Father arranged it. If you breathe a word I’ll kill you.”

  Something in her voice told me that she meant it.

  “Your secret’s safe with me,” I told her, and for once I meant it.

  “We shall be engaged for a year, until I’m nineteen,” Feely went on, “simply to please Father. After that it’s all cottages and columbines and a place to turn handsprings whenever one feels the urge.”

  Feely had never turned a handspring in her life, but I knew what she meant.

  “I shall miss you, Feely,” I said slowly, realizing that my heart was in every word.

  “How too, too touching,” she said. “You’ll get over it.”

  •SIX•

  Whenever I’m a little blue I think about cyanide, whose color so perfectly reflects my mood. It is pleasant to think that the manioc plant, which grows in Brazil, contains enormous quantities of the stuff in its thirty-pound roots, all of which, unfortunately, is washed away before the residue is used to make our daily tapioca.

  Although it took me an hour to admit it to myself, Feely’s words had stung me to the quick. Rather than brooding about it, though, I took down from the shelf a bottle of potassium cyanide.

  Outdoors, the rain had stopped, and a shaft of warm light now shone in through the window, causing the white crystals to sparkle brightly in the sudden sun.

  The next ingredient was strychnine, which, coincidentally, came from another South American plant, and from which curare—arrow poison—was derived.

  I’ve mentioned before my passion for poisons and my special fondness for cyanide. But, to be perfectly fair, I must admit that I also have something of a soft spot for strychnine, not just for what is, but for what it’s capable of becoming. Brought into the presence of nascent oxygen, for instance, these rather ordinary white crystals become at first rich blue in color, then pass in succession through purple, violet, crimson, orange, and yellow.

  A perfect rainbow of ruin!

  I placed the strychnine carefully beside the cyanide.

  Next came the arsenic: In its powdered form, it looked rather drab beside its sisters—more like baking powder
than anything else.

  In its arsenious oxide form, the arsenic was soluble in water, but not in alcohol or ether. The cyanide was soluble in alkaline water and dilute hydrochloric acid, but not in alcohol. The strychnine was soluble in water, ethyl alcohol, or chloroform, but not in ether. It was like the old puzzle about the fox, the goose, and the bag of corn. To extract their various essences, each poison needed to be babied along in its own bath.

  With the windows thrown wide open for ventilation, I sat down to wait out the hour it would take for all three solutions to be complete. Solutions in more than one sense of the word!

  “Cyanide … strychnine … arsenic.” I spoke their names aloud. These were what I called my “calming chemicals.”

  Of course I wasn’t the first to think of compounding several poisons into a single devastating drink. Giulia Tofana, in seventeenth-century Italy, had made a business of selling her Aqua Tofana, a solution containing, among other ingredients, arsenic, lead, belladonna, and hog drippings, to more than six hundred women who wished to have their marriages chemically dissolved. The stuff was said to be as limpid as rock water, and the abbé Gagliani had claimed that there was hardly a lady in Naples who did not have some of it lying in a secret phial among her perfumes.

  It was also said that two popes had been among its victims.

  How I adore history!

  At last my flasks were ready, and I hummed happily as I mixed the solutions and decanted them into a waiting bottle.

  I waved my hand over the still steaming mixture.

  “I name thee Aqua Flavia,” I said.

  With one of Uncle Tar’s steel-nibbed pens, I wrote the newly coined name on a label, then pasted it to the jar.

  “A-qua Fla-via,” I said aloud, savoring each syllable. It had a nice ring to it.

  I had created a poison which, in sufficient quantities, was enough to stop a rogue elephant dead in its tracks. What it would do to an impertinent sister was almost too gruesome to contemplate.

  One aspect of poisons that is often overlooked is the pleasure one takes in gloating over them.

  Then, too, as some wise person once said, revenge is a dish best eaten cold. The reason for this, of course, is that while you’re gleefully anticipating the event, the victim has plenty of time to worry about when, where, and how you’re going to strike.

  One thinks, for instance, of the look on the victim’s face as she realizes that what she is sipping from the pretty glass is more than just orange squash.

  I decided to wait a while.

  Gladys was standing patiently where I had left her, her fresh-washed livery gleaming handsomely in the morning sunlight from my bedroom windows.

  “Avaunt!” I shouted. It was an ancient word meaning “Begone!” which I had learned when Daffy read The Bride of Lammermoor aloud to us at one of our compulsory Cultural Evenings.

  “Both of us!” I explained, although it wasn’t really necessary.

  I leaped into her saddle, pushed off, pedaled out the bedroom door, wobbled along the hall, made a sharp left turn, and moments later was at the top of the east staircase.

  From astride a bicycle, stairs appear to be much steeper than they actually are. Far below, in the foyer, the black and white tiles were like winter fields viewed from a mountaintop. I got a firm grip on the front braking handles and started down at an alarming angle.

  “Bucketa-bucketa-bucketa-bucketa,” I exclaimed, one for each stair, all the way down, my bones rattling pleasantly.

  Dogger was standing at the the bottom. He was wearing a canvas apron and holding a pair of Father’s boots. “Good morning, Miss Flavia,” he said.

  “Good morning, Dogger,” I replied. “I’m happy to see you. I have a question. How does one go about disinterring a dead body?”

  Dogger raised one eyebrow a fraction. “Were you thinking of disinterring a dead body, miss?” he asked.

  “No, not personally,” I told him. “What I mean is, what permissions must be obtained, and so forth?”

  “If I remember correctly, consent must first be given by the church. It is known as a faculty, I believe, and must be obtained from the Diocesan Council.”

  “The bishop’s office?”

  “More or less.”

  So that’s what the vicar had been talking about. A faculty had already been granted, he told Marmaduke Parr, the man from the bishop’s office. The bishop’s secretary, in fact.

  “There’s no going back,” the vicar had said.

  It seemed obvious that a faculty had been granted for the exhumation of Saint Tancred, and then for some reason withdrawn.

  Who, I wondered, would stand in the way? What harm could there be in digging up the bones of a saint who had been dead these past five hundred years?

  “You’re a corker, Dogger,” I said.

  “Thank you, miss.”

  Out of respect, I dismounted, wheeled Gladys discreetly across the foyer, and out the front door.

  On the lawn, at the edge of the gravel, was a folding camp stool, and beside it, several rags and a tin of boot polish. The day was warmer now, and Dogger had obviously been working outside in the fresh air, enjoying the sunshine.

  I was about to push off for the church when I saw a car turn in at the Mulford Gates. It was the odd shape of the thing which had caught my attention: rather boxy, like a hearse.

  If I left now, I might miss something. Better, I thought, to stifle my impatience and wait.

  I sat down on the camp stool and studied the machine as it came flouncing along the avenue of chestnuts. Viewed head-on, it was certain from the tall Corinthian radiator of gleaming silver that it was a Rolls-Royce landau—in some ways, very like Harriet’s old Phantom II which Father kept stored away as a sort of shrine in the dimness of the coach house: the same broad skirts and the same gigantic headlamps. And yet there was something different.

  As the car turned side-on, I saw that its paint was apple green, and that the roof had been peeled away from just behind the driving seat, like a tin of opened sardines. Where the backseats had once been were rows of gray, unpainted wooden boxes, each crammed cheek by jowl with flowerpots, all of them open to the weather, rather like a gallery of cheap seats atop a charabanc from which the seedlings and the growing plants could view the passing world.

  Since Father had lectured us so often about the evils of staring, I instinctively pulled my notebook and pencil from the pocket of my cardigan and pretended to be writing.

  I heard the tires crunch to a heavy stop. The door opened, and closed.

  I snuck a quick peek from the corner of my eye and registered a tall man in a tan mackintosh.

  “Hullo,” he said. “What have we here?”

  As if I were a waxwork figure in Madame Tussaud’s.

  I went on scribbling nothings in my notebook, resisting the urge to stick my tongue out the corner of my mouth.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, coming dangerously close, as if to look at the page. If there’s one thing I despise, it’s a person who snoops over your shoulder.

  “Writing down number plates,” I said, snapping my notebook shut.

  “Hmmm,” he said, gazing slowly round at the empty landscape. “I shouldn’t imagine you add many to your collection in such an out-of-the-way place.”

  In what I hoped was a properly chilling manner I said, “Well, I’ve got yours, haven’t I?”

  It was true. GBX1066.

  He saw me staring at the Rolls.

  “What do you think of the old bus?” he asked. “Phantom II, 1928. The former owner, requiring something to transport a racehorse in comfort, took a hacksaw to her.”

  “He must have been mad,” I said. I couldn’t help myself.

  “She, actually,” he said. “Yes, she was. Quite mad. Lady Densley.”

  “Of Densley’s Biscuits?”

  “The very one.”

  As I was thinking about how to respond, he produced a silver case from his pocket, flipped it open, and handed me a c
ard.

  “My name’s Sowerby,” he said. “Adam Sowerby.”

  I glanced at the bit of pasteboard. At least it was tastefully printed in small black type.

  Adam Tradescant Sowerby, MA., FRHortS, etc.

  Flora-archaeologist

  Seeds of Antiquity—Cuttings—Inquiries

  Tower Bridge, London E.1TN Royal 1066

  Hmmm, I thought. The same four digits as his number plates. This man has connections.

  “You must be Flavia de Luce,” he said, extending a hand. I was about to give back his card when I realized that he intended us to shake.

  “The vicar told me I’d likely find you here,” he went on. “I hope you don’t mind my barging in like this, unannounced.”

  Of course! This was the vicar’s friend, Mr. Sowerby. Mr. Haskins had asked about him in the crypt.

  “Are you related to Sowerby & Sons, our village undertakers?”

  “The present incumbent is, I believe, a third cousin. Some of us Sowerbys have chosen Life, and others Death.”

  I took his hand and gave it an intelligent shake, looking directly into his cornflower-blue eyes.

  “Yes, I’m Flavia de Luce,” I said. “I don’t mind you barging in at all. How may I help you?”

  “Denwyn is an old friend,” he said, not letting go of my hand. “He told me that you could very likely answer my questions.”

  Denwyn was the vicar’s name, and I mentally blessed him for being so frank.

  “I shall do my best,” I replied.

  “When you first looked into that chamber behind the stone, what did you see?”

  “A hand,” I said. “Rather dried. Clutching a broken bit of glass tubing.”

  “Rings?”

  “No.”

  “Fingernails?”

  “Clean. Well manicured. Although his hands and clothing were filthy.”

  “Very good. And then you saw?”

  “The face. At least, a gas mask covering the face. Golden-blond hair. Dark lines on the throat.”