Speaking From Among the Bones

by Alan Bradley

  The answer was obvious: His toady, Marmaduke Parr, had told him.

  “It’s not only that,” Father went on. “As you very well know, a murder has been committed in the crypt.”

  I offered up a small prayer of thanks. At least it hadn’t been Inspector Hewitt who had rung up, ordering me to keep away.

  “Did he mention poor Mr. Collicutt? The chancellor, I mean?”

  “As it happens,” Father answered, “he did not. But nevertheless, I want you to stay—”

  “Mrs. Richardson fainted at the altar,” I put in before he could say another word. “She mistook me for her daughter, Hannah.”

  Father looked up at me, his face harshly lined in the cold moonlight. He had not shaved, and the stubble of his whiskers glittered cruelly. Never had he looked so old.

  “The vicar told me about her,” I said. “I didn’t ask.”

  The kitchen clock ticked. Father let out a long sigh.

  “I can’t see you,” he said, after a while. “My eyes are not what they once were. Bring a candle from the pantry. Don’t put on the electric light.”

  I fetched a pewter candlestick and a box of wooden matches, and a minute later, by the flickering light of a wax candle, we were facing one another across the kitchen table.

  “Denwyn and Cynthia have not had the easiest of lives,” Father said.

  “No,” I replied. I was learning that the best conversations consisted of keeping quiet and listening, and speaking, when one spoke at all, in words of a single syllable.

  “He blames himself,” we both said at the same time.

  It was incredible! Father and I had spoken the same three words at the same instant—as if we were reciting in unison.

  I did not dare smile.

  “Yes,” we both said.

  It was downright eerie.

  Father had only talked to me—really talked, I mean—on one other occasion, which was the time he was incarcerated in a jail cell in Hinley, charged with the murder of Horace Bonepenny. On that day, he had talked and I had listened.

  Now both of us were speaking at the same time.

  “It was an accident pure and simple, or at least as pure and simple as any accident can be. Tragic. Still, in the circumstances, there was nothing for it but to get on with things. There was a war on. Everybody, in one way or another, was suffering loss. It was a bad time to be deprived of a little girl.”

  “Were you here when it happened?” I asked, shocking myself. Where did this sudden boldness come from?

  A shadow crossed Father’s face. The kitchen clock ticked on.

  “No,” he said after a moment. “I wasn’t.”

  He had, as I well knew, been with Dogger in a prisoner-of-war camp. It was not a topic of discussion at Buckshaw.

  How odd, I thought: Here were these four great grievers, Father, Dogger, the vicar, and Cynthia Richardson, each locked in his or her own past, unwilling to share a morsel of their anguish, not even with one another.

  Was sorrow, in the end, a private thing? A closed container? Something that, like a bucket of water, could be borne only on a single pair of shoulders?

  To make matters worse, there was the fact that the entire village was sheltering each of them in a cocoon of silence.

  Those dear damned people! Both the blessers and the blessed!

  I felt the color rising in my face as I remembered that I had vowed to place flowers, publicly, on Hannah Richardson’s grave.

  But I would not trouble Father by telling him that. He had enough to worry about.

  “What are we going to do with you?” he asked suddenly.

  “I don’t know, sir,” I replied.

  The “sir” came out of nowhere. I had never addressed my father in that way before, but it seemed perfectly the right thing to do.

  “It’s just that sometimes … sometimes—I think that I am very like my mother.”

  There! I had said it!

  I could only wait now to see what damage I had done.

  “You are not like your mother, Flavia.”

  I gulped at the blow.

  “You are your mother.”

  My mind was a swarm—a beehive, a tornado, a tropical storm. Were my ears actually hearing this? For the past several years my sisters had increasingly tried to convince me that I was adopted; a changeling; a lump of coal left by a cruel Father Christmas in their stockings.

  “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this for some time,” Father said, fidgeting as if he were looking for something lost in the pockets of his dressing gown. “I may as well come straight to the point.”

  My chin was trembling. What was going to happen? What was he going to say?

  Was he about to tear a strip off me for ruining my best coat?

  “I am aware that your life has not always been—” he began unexpectedly. “That is to say, I know that you sometimes … “

  He looked at me in misery, his face flickering in the candlelight. “Damn it all,” he said.

  He began again. “As was your mother, you have been given the fatal gift of genius. Because of it, your life will not be an easy one—nor must you expect it to be. You must remember always that great gifts come at great cost. Are there any questions?”

  Dear Father! Even the most tender of his moments was a parade-square lecture. How I loved him.

  “No, sir,” I said, as if I were a sapper being charged with blowing up the enemy lines. “No questions.”

  “Very good. Very good,” Father said, standing up and rubbing his hands together. “Well, then, you’d better get some sleep.”

  And with that he was gone, leaving me alone at the table.

  I thought over all that he had said.

  His remarks about Harriet were not the sorts of things one ponders at a kitchen table. I needed to review them later, in the privacy of my room. In the comfort of my bed.

  One thing, though, was clear. Father had not expressly forbidden me to go near the church.

  •FIFTEEN•

  “They say ’e’s bleedin’ cause ’is bones ’as been bothered!”

  Mrs. Mullet ladled another dollop of her lavalike porridge into my bowl. Thoughts of being an Oliver Twist in reverse crossed my mind: “Please, ma’am, I don’t want any more.”

  “Eat it up, dear, while it’s ’ot. There’s a good girl. Remember:

  “Margaret Mullet tells no fibs

  “Ot por-ridge sticks to the ribs.

  ’Ere! I’m a poet and I don’t know it.”

  She giggled at her own wit.

  The very thought of this gray guck sticking to my ribs—or anything else—was enough to make my stomach go into hibernation.

  “Thank you, Mrs. M,” I said groggily, adding a generous slosh of milk to the oatmeal. Perhaps I could sip away at the liquid and leave the quivering horror hidden beneath the surface like the Loch Ness Monster.

  I’d barely slept and wasn’t at my best. The cleaning of my coat had been more chemically complicated than I had supposed and had, in the end, required me to duplicate Michael Faraday’s famous 1821 experiment in which he had synthesized tetrachloroethelyne by extracting it, by thermal decomposition, from hexachloroethane.

  Consequently, I had been up all night.

  “Actually, his bones haven’t been disturbed,” I told her. “They haven’t dug that deep yet.”

  “Well, ’e bloomin’ well knows they’re on the way,” Mrs. Mullet said. “Mark my words. Saints aren’t like your ordinary people. They knows things. They can see and ’ear things at a distance just like the television. They ’ear when Mrs. Frampton is prayin’ to ’ave ’er Elsie’s Bert win the pools so’s she can send ’er mother to Blackpool on ’oliday come June and get ’er out of ’er ’air for a fortnight so’s she can scrub the floors and beat the rugs. Mind you, I’ve said nothin’.”

  I was eating breakfast in the kitchen because, by the time I dragged myself out of bed, Mrs. Mullet had already cleared the table in the dining room.

&nb
sp; “I ’eard all about it from my friend, Mrs. Waller. She says there was blood all over the place like a’ abbotory.”

  “There wasn’t all that much,” I said. “I saw it myself.”

  Mrs. Mullet’s eyes widened.

  “No more than a couple of teaspoonsful if you collected it all together. Blood always seems greater in volume than it actually is.”

  If it was blood, in fact. I could hardly wait to get upstairs to my laboratory and analyze the residue of the stuff into which I had dipped my white ribbon.

  “Still an’ all,” she said. “Miss Tanty ’ad to be put to bed and the doctor called. A real fright, she ‘ad, babblin’ on about Mr. Collicutt and the four ‘orsemen of the pocket lips. Made no sense at all. Shock, if you ask me.”

  “I think you’re quite right, Mrs. M,” I said, my plans changing even as I spoke. “I’ll take her some flowers. I’ll tell her they’re from all of us here at Buckshaw.”

  “That would be nice, dear,” Mrs. Mullet said. “You’re always such a thoughtful child.”

  Of course I was a thoughtful child. If Miss Tanty had lips loosened by laudanum, I wanted to be among the first to hear what came spilling out.

  Miss Tanty lived in a small house on the west side of Cater Street, which ran north from the High Street, just west of the Thirteen Drakes.

  I pulled up and parked Gladys at the gate just as Miss Gawl, the Treasurer of the Altar Guild, was coming out the front door.

  “I’m afraid she can’t see anyone, child. Doctor’s orders. Here, give me those flowers. I’ll put them in a vase and bring them round later.”

  I knew she wouldn’t. She would toss them out her back door and onto the rubbish heap. Not that it mattered. I had picked the wild bouquet in the same spot in front of the church as I had the first lot.

  “That’s very kind of you, Miss Gawl,” I said, handing over the flowers and pulling a look of worried concern down over my face like a balaclava. “How is she?”

  “She’s resting comfortably now,” she replied. “But she mustn’t be disturbed. We’ve given her an injection to help her sleep.”

  We’ve given her an injection?

  And then I remembered. Of course—Miss Gawl was the retired District Nurse. Which was why she had used the word “injection.” Anyone else would have said “We’ve given her something to help her sleep.” Or “given her a sedative to help her sleep. And they wouldn’t have said we—they would have said “The doctor’s given her something to help her sleep.”

  What wonderful things can be deduced from a simple four-letter word!

  I gave the woman my best village idiot grin.

  “I’d best be getting along then,” I said, resisting the urge to add, “to the Easter Cow Show.”

  There is a limit even to sauciness.

  I wheeled Gladys along toward the place where the street ended at the river. With elaborate stupidity, I picked up a handful of pebbles and, with tongue hanging out of the corner of my mouth, skipped them across the water’s surface.

  One … two … three …

  When I looked back, Miss Gawl was gone.

  I walked quickly back to Miss Tanty’s house, looked both ways to be sure that no one was in sight—then opened the door and slipped inside.

  The place was overheated—sweltering like a tropical jungle.

  On the right was a dining room with an oversized table and more chairs than we had in all of Buckshaw.

  To the left, a drawing-room-cum-music room with all the usual fittings: small grand piano, music stands, plaster busts of Beethoven and Mozart and another I didn’t recognize—aha!—Wagner: His name was engraved on the base—all three of them as cold-looking as if they had been molded from moon rubble. Beyond the study was a small conservatory, overflowing with exotic-looking plants. A parrot sat hunched in an elaborate wire cage.

  “Pretty Polly,” I said, trying to make friends.

  The parrot gave me a surly look.

  “Who’s a pretty bird, then?” I asked, feeling like a fool, but there are only so many topics of conversation one can have with a bird.

  The thing ignored me. Perhaps it was hungry. Perhaps Miss Tanty had been so disturbed that she had forgotten to feed it.

  I took hold of a chunk of suet which was jammed between the wires of the cage.

  The bird made a sudden lunge and I jerked back my hand before I lost a finger.

  I’m afraid I called Polly a nasty name.

  “Starve, then,” I told it, and turned back to the front entrance.

  The kitchen, at the back of the house, was the source of the high temperature. A great black stove was throwing off as much heat as the Queen Elizabeth’s boilers and the smell of cooking filled the air. I opened the largest oven and peered inside. An enormous roast of beef was basking in a bed of potatoes, carrots, onions, swedes, and apples.

  The meat was well browned. It had been baking for at least an hour.

  Miss Gawl had said Miss Tanty was resting, which probably meant upstairs.

  I returned to the front hall.

  “Hello, Quentin,” the parrot said conversationally from the conservatory. The stupid thing had probably realized I’d intended to feed it, and was now trying to suck up to me. But it was too late.

  Forgiveness is not one of my better qualities.

  To my left, the stairs had been painted to resemble the keys of a piano, the treads black and every riser white.

  I climbed slowly up the rising keyboard, glancing as I went at each of the many black-framed photographs which crowded the walls on both sides: a younger Miss Tanty singing onstage in a long evening gown, her hands clasped at her ample waist; Miss Tanty being given a trophy by a sour gentleman whose expression indicated that he thought someone else should have been the winner; Miss Tanty standing in front of a medieval half-timbered house that looked as if it might be somewhere in Germany; Miss Tanty conducting a choir of girls, all of them—including Miss Tanty herself—dressed in school uniform of jumper, blouse, and black stockings; Miss Tanty front and center in the choir stalls of St. Tancred’s, to one side, the back of Mr. Collicut’s blond, curly hair just visible as he sits at the organ console. High in the background, just out of focus, is the carved wooden face of Saint Tancred.

  He is not bleeding.

  At the top of the stairs I turned to my right and made for the room at the front of the house. Miss Tanty would never settle for a back bedroom.

  Most of the doors were standing open; only one, the bedroom at the very front of the house, was closed.

  I twisted the knob and stuck my nose round the door.

  Hands crossed on her breast, the mountainous Miss Tanty was lying motionless on the bed. Although her thick spectacles were perched on her nose, her eyes were closed.

  I tiptoed across the room.

  It worried me somewhat that she was not snoring. Miss Tanty struck me as the kind of person who did nothing by halves, and I guessed that she was not likely a quiet sleeper. But then, perhaps, trained singers were taught to control their uvulas—those little fingers of flesh that dangle like pink icicles at the back of one’s throat—even when they were asleep.

  Was Miss Tanty asleep? Or had someone done her in? Had Mr. Collicutt’s killer returned for a repeat performance? Was someone killing choirs, one musician at a time? Would Feely be next?

  All of these thoughts were milling round in my mind at the same time.

  I had already spotted the dark bottle that stood on top of an overflowing bookcase which was wedged between the bed and the wall. I was leaning across the bed for a closer look when one of Miss Tanty’s eyes came slowly open.

  I almost swallowed my tongue.

  Magnified by the thick lenses, her watery eye was as large as the sudden rising of a bloodshot harvest moon.

  She blinked and the other eye came open, which was even more alarming than the first. Her pupils swiveled, floating in their soupy liquid, and settled on me.

  She seemed not at all sur
prised to see me. It was almost as if she had been waiting.

  “I—I let myself in. To see if you were all right,” I said. “I was worried about you.”

  Miss Tanty’s substantial body began shaking with silent tremors, beginning with her shoulders and her ample breasts, and working their way down to vanish at her ankles. It reminded me, if only for an instant, of one of Mrs. Mullet’s failed gelatin aspics.

  “Did you,” she said, and it was not a question.

  It took me a moment to realize that she was laughing. As her cheeks convulsed, she bit her bottom lip and her great wet eyes thrashed about in their sockets.

  It was a gruesome spectacle.

  “Ho!” she said. “Did you indeed.”

  She rolled over toward the night table and picked up the bottle. She worked the cork out with her thumbs and poured an inch of reddish-brown liquid into a handy glass.

  “For my vocal cords,” she said, and tossed it back with a single gulp.

  She made a token gargling noise as if to convince me.

  I recognized at once the smell of sherry. Mrs. Mullet used it in Christmas pudding as well as in what she called her “Sinful Stew.”

  “The vocal folds must be rewarded now and then,” Miss Tanty said, shoving the cork back into the bottle. “They must be treated like trained lions: the frequent whip tempered with the occasional reward.”

  Could this be the Miss Tanty who had to be put to bed and the doctor called? The Miss Tanty who had been given an injection to help her sleep?

  If that were true, she was the second woman in Bishop’s Lacey within a remarkably short time to require the needle. The first had been Cynthia Richardson, who’d had a fright in the churchyard. And now Miss Tanty, who’d had a fright in the church itself.

  The same Miss Tanty who was now treating her vocal folds to a second slug of sherry.

  “I’m sorry to walk in without an invitation,” I said, without mentioning Miss Gawl. “I knew what a great shock you’d had with the blood in the church, and so forth. I wanted to—”

  “Codswallop!” she said, fixing me with her swivel eyes. “I was no more shocked than you were.”

  “But—”

  The woman was laughing again, her flesh forming whitecaps.