by Alan Bradley
Was it coming from the organ casing in the chancel? Had a pipe become stuck? Or could it be the wind howling through a hole?
I remembered suddenly that I had come back to the church yesterday—before being distracted by the corpse of Mr. Collicutt—to look for a broken window through which a bat might have entered.
I tiptoed up the carpeted steps and into the chancel. The humming was louder here.
How odd! It almost seemed as if—yes, it was a tune. I recognized the melody: “Savior, When in Dust to Thee.”
Feely had been singing it as she practiced on the piano just a few days ago:
“Savior, when in dust to thee, low we bow the adoring knee.”
I had lingered in the hall to listen to the rather gruesome words:
“By the anguished sigh that told, treachery lurked within thy fold …”
Feely sang it with such feeling.
I remember thinking, They just don’t write hymns like that anymore.
The haunting words were running through my head now as I crept stealthily along the nave, all of my senses on alert for the source of the weird whining.
A floorboard creaked.
I turned my head slowly, the hair at the back of my neck standing on end.
There was nobody there. The humming stopped abruptly.
“Girl!”
It came from behind me. I spun round on my heel.
She was sitting in a oak clergy chair at the end of the choir stalls, whose elaborately carved wings had kept her hidden until I had come directly alongside. Hugely magnified eyes stared out at at me through thick lenses which were also reflecting, in a most unsettling way, the dripping stained-glass colors of John the Baptist’s severed head.
It was Miss Tanty.
“Girl!”
Except for a starched white doily for a collar, she was dressed all in black bombazine, as if her clothing had been stitched together from the cloth under which the photographer hides his head before squeezing the rubber bulb.
“Girl! What are you up to?”
“Oh, good morning, Miss Tanty. I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there.”
My words were greeted with rather a rude grunting noise.
“You were skulking, and don’t pretend you weren’t.”
In ordinary circumstances, someone who spoke to me like this never saw another sunrise. In my mind, at least, I dealt out poisons with a happy hand.
But in this case, because I needed information, I decided to make an exception.
“I wasn’t skulking, Miss Tanty. I brought some flowers to put on the altar.”
I shoved them almost into her face and the huge goggles moved from side to side, examining the blooms and stems as if they were colored serpents.
“Hmph,” she said. “Wildflowers. Wildflowers have no place on the altar. A girl of your breeding ought to know that.”
So she knew who I was.
“But—” I said.
“But me no buts,” she said, holding up a hand. “I am Chairman of the Altar Guild, and as such, it is my business to know what’s what. Give them here and I shall throw them on the rubbish heap on my way out.”
“I heard you humming,” I said, putting the flowers behind my back. “It sounded lovely, what with all the echoes and so forth.”
Actually, it hadn’t sounded lovely. “Eerie” was more the word. But Rule 9B was this: Change the Subject.
“Savior, When in Dust to Thee,” I said. “One of my favorite hymns. I recognized it even without the words. You have such a wonderful voice, Miss Tanty. They must always be simply pleading with you to make phonograph recordings.”
You could feel the thaw. In an instant, the temperature in the church went up by at least 10 degrees Celsius (or 283 degrees Kelvin).
She patted her hair.
And then without a word of warning, she drew in a deep breath and, with her hands clasped at her waist, began to sing:
“Savior, when in dust to thee, low we bow the adoring knee.”
There was no doubt she had a remarkable voice: a voice that, because of the way in which (at least at close range) it rattled your bones, might even have been called “thrilling.” It seemed to originate from somewhere deep in her body; from down among her kidneys, I guessed.
“By thy deep expiring groan, by the sad sepulchral stone,
By the vault whose dark abode …”
Her voice swept over me in waves, enveloping me in a kind of warm dankness. She sang all five verses.
And what feeling Miss Tanty put into the words! It was almost as if she were taking you on a guided tour of her own life.
When she had finished, she sat transfixed, as if dazed by her own powers.
“That was super, Miss Tanty!” I said—and it was.
I don’t think she heard me. She was staring up into the colored light, at Herodias and Salome, those two triumphant women etched in acid into glass.
“Miss Tanty?”
“Oh!” she said with a start. “I was somewhere else.”
“That was magnificent,” I said, having had time to choose a more refined word.
Her great bulging eyes swiveled round and focused on me like a pair of spotlights. “Now then,” she said. “The truth. I want the truth. What are you up to?”
“Nothing, Miss Tanty. I just brought these flowers …”
I produced them from behind my back. “… to place on the altar …”
“Yes?”
“In memory of poor Mr. Collicutt.”
A hiss came out of her.
“Give them here,” she rasped, and before I could protest, she stood and snatched the posies from my hand.
“Don’t waste your crocuses,” she said.
•NINE•
Boom!
A cannon-shot from the back of of the church.
Miss Tanty and I blinked at each other in surprise, then swiveled our heads toward the source of the noise.
The great church door, a massive thing of oak and studded iron straps, had slammed shut. There was a scurrying in the shadows.
“Who’s there?” Miss Tanty called out in a commanding voice.
There was no answer. A kind of feverish mumbling came from somewhere back among the shadowy pews.
“Who’s there? Make yourself known at once.”
“The vials of wrath. The blood of a dead man!”
The words came to our ears in a weird whisper made louder by the towering glass and the surrounding stone.
“Come into the light!” Miss Tanty commanded, as a bundle of animated rags worked its way jerkily along the kneeling-benches.
“For they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and thou hast given us blood to drink!”
“It’s Meg,” I said. “From Gibbet Wood.”
Mad Meg (I hesitated to use her nickname in front of Miss Tanty) lived in a hovel in the wood on Gibbet Hill, not far from the rotting remains of the eighteenth-century gibbet that had given both hill and woods their name.
“Mad Meg, you mean,” Miss Tanty said loudly. “Meg, come out here at once, into the light, where we can have a look at you.”
“The blood of saints, given for Meg to drink,” Meg said with a horrible wet snicker.
“Rubbish!” Miss Tanty said. “You’re talking nonsense.”
Meg had now reached a spot of light that fell at the end of a row of pews. Dressed in a rusty black garment which might have been one of Miss Tanty’s castoffs, she began moving toward us, her head nodding, the red glass cherry on her flowerpot hat bobbing with saucy detachment. She pointed with a filthy crooked finger to the timbers of the hammer-beam roof that arched above our heads.
“The blood of saints and prophets,” she repeated, again nodding her head at us as if to confirm her words, looking eagerly from Miss Tanty’s face to mine for some sign of understanding.
“The Book of Revelation,” Miss Tanty said. “Chapter sixteen.”
Meg looked at her blankly.
“Saints a
nd prophets,” she said in reply, her voice now a hoarse but confidential whisper. “Blood!”
Her pale staring eyes were almost as bulbous as Miss Tanty’s.
At the back of the church a long finger of dazzling daylight fell suddenly into the porch as the door swung open and two dark figures appeared. One of them I recognized at once as the vicar. The other … of course! It was Adam Sowerby. I had almost forgotten about the man.
They came strolling casually up the center aisle together, as if they were out for a pleasant walk in a country lane.
“Of course,” the vicar was saying, “as dear old Sydney Smith pointed out, bishops are fond of talking of ‘my see, my clergy, my diocese, as if these things belonged to them, as their pigs and dogs belonged to them. They forget that the clergy, the diocese, and the bishops themselves all exist only for the public good.’”
“The tormenting bishop and the tormented curate, and so forth,” Adam said.
“Exactly. ‘A curate trod on feels a pang as great as when a bishop is refuted.’ It is quite clear that something must be done.”
“Perhaps it already has,” Adam said.
The vicar stopped in his tracks.
“Oh dear!” he said. “Oh dear! I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Nor had I—until now,” Adam said.
“Hullo!” he added, as he glanced up and spotted the three of us, Meg, Miss Tanty, and me, standing like abandoned brides at the altar. “What have we here? The Three Graces, if I’m not mistaken.”
The Three Graces? Which one was I? I wondered: Charm, Beauty, or Creativity?
And which was Miss Tanty? And Mad Meg?
“Hello, Meg,” Adam said. “It’s been a long old while, hasn’t it?”
Meg sank down in a deep and stately curtsy, her grubby fingers pulling her skirt out into an elaborate black tent and revealing striped stockings and a pair of shockingly battered workman’s boots of the Victorian lace-up variety.
“You’ve met?” I’m afraid I blurted. I couldn’t help myself. I could hardly believe that someone like Adam Tradescant Sowerby, MA, FRHortS, etc, Flora-archaeologist and all the rest of it, could possibly know the madwoman who lived in Gibbet Wood.
“Meg and I are old acquaintances, aren’t we, Meg?” Adam said, with a genuine smile, touching his hand to her tattered shawl. “More than acquaintances, really—colleagues, I should say. Pals, actually, when it comes right down to it.”
Meg’s mouth stretched wide in a smile which is best not described.
“Her consultations have kept me, on at least one occasion, from making a pharmacological fool of myself.”
“Blood,” Meg remarked pleasantly. “The blood of saints and prophets. Blood to drink.”
Her hand waved vaguely toward the shadows.
“And Miss Tanty, if I’m not mistaken,” Adam went on. “I’ve heard nothing but paeans of praise for the way in which you’ve breathed new life into the Altar Guild.”
Miss Tanty pulled a tight smile which, if anything, was more ghastly than Meg’s.
“One does one’s best,” she said, drawing herself up with rather a fierce glance at the vicar. I was afraid for a moment that the ferocity of her gaze, focused by the bottle-bottom thickness of her spectacles, would shrivel him up like a bug under a burning-glass.
“One can only hope,” she added, “to do one’s best in spite of all—”
“Dear me!” the vicar said loudly, consulting his wristwatch. “It is getting on, isn’t it? Wherever does the time go? Cynthia will be waiting for my contribution to the church leaflet. She’s become quite the Cassandra ever since the bishop donated his hand-me-down spirit duplicator to replace our dear old superannuated hectograph.”
Cassandra? Was he making an unwitting reference to the ghost of Cassandra Cottlestone, whose sudden uprising from the grave may or may not have been the cause of Cynthia’s alleged collapse? The only other Cassandra I could think of was the one used by William somebody as a pen name for his sometimes scandalous column in the Daily Mirror.
“Like the Times,” the vicar was saying, “Cynthia’s sheets are put to bed at midnight.”
I could hardly believe my ears! What was the poor dear man thinking about?
“‘The Vicar’s Vegetables,’ I’m calling my piece,” he continued. “Something for the congregation to chew on during the week, do you see? I thought that perhaps a bit of levity would go a long way to—but now—oh dear! Whatever will Cynthia think?”
What will Cynthia think? indeed! I thought.
The last I’d heard of Cynthia Richardson, she’d been given a sedative by Dr. Darby after being scared out of her bloomers in the churchyard by the ghost of Cassandra Cottlestone.
Either the injection was just another bit of village gossip, or the vicar was covering up. Cynthia could hardly be stupified by chloral hydrate and yet still, at the same time, be churning out church bulletins on her Banda machine. It made no chemical sense.
“I should have thought you’d be printing something about Mr. Collicutt,” Miss Tanty said, with a sly glance at the vicar.
Hold on, I thought. What’s going on here?
Just minutes ago the woman had been telling me not to waste my crocuses and now here she was practically begging on bended knee for Mr. Collicutt to be given screaming headlines in the church bulletin.
Adults can sometimes behave in the most peculiar ways.
I’ll have to admit that I’d almost forgotten about Mr. Collicutt myself. As discoverer of his corpse, I felt a certain responsibility toward him, but circumstances in the meantime had kept me from giving him more than a moment’s thought.
Later, when I was back at Buckshaw, I would turn to a fresh page in my notebook and jot down the pluses and the minuses of the deceased Mr. C. But first, I would need to pump Miss Tanty for details. She, after all, was the one who had made an appointment with the dead man.
I was quite certain that, given time, I could extract enough gossip from her to shock even the most hardened tabloid editor in London. If only I could pry her away from Adam and the vicar.
“Yes, well …” the vicar was saying to Miss Tanty, “you really must excuse me,” and with that, he turned and trudged slowly down the aisle toward the door.
The image which trickled into my mind was of the plowman homeward plodding his weary way.
“Sowerby! Blood!” Meg was calling excitedly from the east aisle. As the others were still chatting, she had made her way back into the shadows among the pews and was beckoning with an unwashed finger.
Adam walked toward her and I followed. After a moment, so did Miss Tanty.
The vicar stopped in his tracks and turned.
I shall never forget that moment. It is etched into my memory like the image on a treasured Christmas card: the three of us, me, Adam, and Miss Tanty hovering round the crouching Meg like some weird nativity scene carved in wood; the vicar motionless, keeping watch over his flock by night in the far, shadowy fields of the darkened center aisle.
“Blood,” Meg said again, looking up at us, as if for approval, jabbing at the floor with her filthy finger.
On the stones at her feet was a red ooze.
“The blood of saints and prophets,” she said in a matter-of-fact voice.
In my memory, we are frozen in our places, although there must have been some bending and jostling for a better view of the red puddle at our feet.
Meg, complacent now that her work of convincing us is done, squats happily beside the mess, looking up at our faces in turn.
“For drinking,” she explains.
A shaft of sunlight struggles through the colored glass, illuminating the liquid.
A fresh drop falls from above, lands with an audible plop, sending out a tiny, but perfectly circular wave of ripples on the surface of the red puddle.
Meg’s bony finger points upward, to where the dark timbers of the hammer-beam roof stretch like the underside of the floorboards of heaven.
Up there,
far above our heads, the carved wooden face of Saint Tancred stares down at us as yet another red drop falls from it into our midst.
And another.
“Old man’s crying,” Meg says, simply.
•TEN•
Oddly enough, the first to react was Miss Tanty, who, with astonishing flexibility for someone her age, climbed down onto her knees and dipped a finger into the shimmering liquid.
With this she crossed herself, first on her forehead and then again on her breast. That smeared red stain on her white starched collar is going to be a bugger to get out, I thought.
“Forgive me, O Lord,” she said, clasping her hands under her chin and staring up rapturously for some reason at the kaleidoscope of colors that was the head of John the Baptist.
Adam produced a white linen handkerchief from his jacket pocket and dipped a corner of it into the ruby-colored ooze. After examining it closely, he touched it to his tongue.
Well, why not? I thought. Since everyone else is sampling the stuff …
Reaching round for my pigtail and untying the remaining white ribbon, I dipped it into the edge of the spreading pool just as another drop fell from the face of the saint in the rafters.
Adam caught my eye and gave me a look which said nothing and yet said everything—an invisible wink.
I don’t think the vicar actually saw any of this. He was still making his way toward us, shuffling awkwardly sideways through the long row of pews which separated us from the center aisle. It seemed to take him forever but when he reached us at last and was finally standing between Adam and me, he stared without a word at the bloody mess on the floor.
Now here’s a fine pickle! he must have been thinking. When the wooden head of a saint begins suddenly weeping blood in a remote village church, who do you call? The police? The archbishop of Canterbury? Or the News of the World?
“Flavia, dear,” he said, laying a quivering hand on my shoulder, “run outside and fetch Sergeant Woolmer, there’s a good girl.”
Instantly I felt my face becoming hot, the pressure building up inside my head like Mount Vesuvius.
Why were people always doing this to me? Ordering me about as if I were some kind of specialized chambermaid kept on hand for emergencies?