by Alan Bradley
I came slowly down the east staircase rubbing my eyes after a restless night. My dreams had been of Buckshaw—dark dreams in which holes were appearing everywhere, as if some monstrous mole were blindly digging away at the house and its grounds, relentless and unstoppable.
I had awakened to find it well past nine in the morning. I would need to find Father and apologize, not just for missing yesterday’s supper, to say nothing of lunch, but also for this morning’s breakfast.
Father, as I have said, was a stickler for attendance. Excuses not allowed.
I dawdled along the corridor, dragging out the inevitable confrontation as long as I possibly could.
I stopped outside the drawing room door and listened. If Father were not here, he would be in his study, and I certainly didn’t want to disturb him there.
In a way, I would be off the hook.
I put my ear to the door and listened to the low murmer of voices. Although I could not hear what was being said, I knew by the way the paneling vibrated that one of the speakers was Feely.
I knelt down and applied my eye to the keyhole, but it was no good: The key was in the lock and my view was blocked.
I listened at the door again—pressing my ear tightly against the wooden panel—but it was no use. Even my supersensitive hearing was not enough.
The solution came—as brilliant solutions often do—in a flash.
On tiptoe, I loped back to the foyer and upstairs to my laboratory, chuckling as I went.
From a cupboard under one of the sinks I extracted a screwdriver, a length of rubber hose, and two funnels, used ordinarily for filling bottles but now destined for a much more exciting role.
Back along the upstairs corridor I went, along the unused north wing and through the baize door that led to family quarters. Directly across from Harriet’s boudoir, which Father kept untouched as yet another shrine to her memory, was Feely’s room. Besides Harriet’s it was the largest bedroom at Buckshaw, and the most luxurious.
I tapped at the door with a fingernail, to check that the coast was clear.
If Feely were inside—if it happened to be someone else’s voice I had heard in the drawing room—she would instantly answer the slightest sound with a loud and surly “What?”
Feely was the most territorial of all we de Luces, and as fearsomely protective of her domain as God is of Heaven.
I tapped again.
Nothing.
I tried the door and, miracle of miracles, it swung open. Feely must have gone downstairs in an almighty rush to overlook such a basic point of privacy.
I closed the door quietly behind me and tiptoed across the room. I was now directly above the drawing room, and didn’t want the sound of my footsteps to give me away. Not that they would, of course. Buckshaw was as solid as any ancient cathedral—high ceilings, thick floors—but still, one didn’t want to trip on the carpet and give away the game.
One of the marvels of Buckshaw, at least in its Victorian days, had been the conversion of its chimneys from their original smokestack design to a patent draft-regulating scheme. Through the ingenious knocking together of flues on the ground and second floors, by means of a crude valve—actually, no more than a cast-iron plate—the inhabitants could be protected against the danger of carbon monoxide poisoning from coal fires in the grate, should one of the chimneys become blocked by a jackdaw’s nest.
I had discovered these plates almost by accident while investigating in my laboratory, a more efficient way than opening a window of venting poisonous gases, such as hydrogen cyanide, and so forth, to the outside air without killing my own flesh and blood.
These iron plates at the back of each fireplace, coated with generations of soot, could with a little persistence be easily unscrewed and removed.
I should have brought something to catch the soot—an old quilt or blanket, perhaps—but it was too late now. I needed to listen in on Feely’s conversation with someone I was quite sure had to be the only visitor Buckshaw had received in months. The topic was almost certainly her wedding, whose details were, for some inexplicable reason, being kept from me. I didn’t want to miss a word more than was necessary.
I had heard somewhere that chimney sweeps had used sheets to drape the furniture which, from my viewpoint, couldn’t have been more convenient. Because it was closest to hand, I stripped back her comforter and whipped off the top sheet from Feely’s bed. I would replace it with a fresh one later.
I spread the sheet on the cold hearth, ducked down as if I were passing through a low door, and stood up with my head inside the fireplace.
Ah! Here it was—just above my head. By climbing up onto the grate I could easily get at the screws that held the plate in position. I felt out the slots with my thumbnails.
It is important to remember, when removing cast-iron fittings in chimneys, to be quiet about it, since brick transmits the slightest sound with wonderful efficiency.
The plate came away without a struggle, and I put it down carefully on the sheet.
Next I took the two funnels—a large one of tin and a small one of glass—and shoved the spout of each into opposite ends of the rubber hose.
I slipped the larger funnel into the new opening and then, playing out the rubber hose as if it were a rope, slowly … carefully … inch by inch … foot by foot—lowered away.
After what seemed like forever, the full length of the hose was dangling down the chimney. If my calculations were correct, the large funnel was now about level with the drawing-room fireplace.
I put the small funnel to my ear, just in time to hear Feely say, “I thought perhaps something from Elgar. ‘The Angel’s Farewell.’ It’s very British.”
“Yes, but rather too Catholic, don’t you think?” the stranger’s voice replied. “Based on a poem by the turncoat Newman. It would be tantamount to doing ‘Ave Maria.’ Don’t want to put wrong ideas into the girls’ heads. They’ll all be there, you know. They all adored him.”
I knew instantly that I was eavesdropping on a conversation between Feely and Alberta Moon, the music mistress at St. Agatha’s—Alberta Moon, who the vicar had said would be devastated to hear of Mr. Collicutt’s death. They were not discussing Feely’s wedding, but rather Mr. Collicutt’s funeral.
“Perhaps the Nunc Dimittis,” Feely said. “‘Lord now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.’ He played it so often at Evensong. I thought we might ask Miss Tanty to sing it as a solo.”
There was a cold silence, made colder and longer by the length of rubber tube through which I was listening.
“No, I think not, Ophelia. Miss Tanty, to be quite plain about it, hated his intestines.”
This was followed by a brittle laugh.
Feely said something which I couldn’t quite make out, but it sounded as if she were upset. I removed the glass funnel from the hose and jammed the end of the rubber tubing directly into my ear.
“… had many a jolly old girl-to-girl with her at the school before she hung up her hatchet,” Miss Moon was saying. “… in the days when we were still managing to be civil to one another.”
I’d forgotten that Miss Tanty had been Miss Moon’s predecessor at St. Agatha’s.
“And as difficult as it may be for you to believe, it is perhaps my bounden duty to inform you that she had what my girls would call ‘a mad pash’ for Crispin.”
Crispin? Aha! She was talking about Mr. Collicutt.
“Oh, don’t look shocked, Ophelia. Of course she was old enough to be his mother but still, as you ought to know by now, one must never underestimate the juices of a soprano.”
To my ears—or rather to my ear, since I was eavesdropping with a rubber tube shoved into just one of them—Miss Moon sounded more angry than devastated.
“I will not have that woman singing a solo at Crispin’s funeral! The would-be lover scorned being allowed to warble over the loved one’s remains? It is simply not on, Ophelia. You may put it out of your head. No, I shall do the honors myself. Purcel
l, I think. ‘When I Am Laid in Earth,’ from Dido and Aeneas. The very thing. I shall accompany myself and sing from the organ bench, so there shall be no need for you to learn the piece.
“No, no. No need to thank me. I’m sure you have quite enough on your plate these days without—Such a pity about Buckshaw, isn’t it? I saw the sign at the gates. Too shocking. But then we must look on the bright side. A little birdie tells me that you yourself will soon have cause to celebrate. We’re all so happy for you, Ophelia, really we are.
“What’s his name, from up at Culverhouse Farm? Victor? I know that you and Victor will—”
It was too much!
I picked up the small glass funnel from the grate and rammed its end back into the hose. I put it to my mouth and shouted into it, “Dieter! It’s Dieter, you stupid old sea cow!”
What had I done? Had I let a moment of anger destroy the de Luces’ last scrap of dignity? Was Saint Tancred, in the church, shaking his wooden head in bloody disbelief that one of his descendants could behave like such a drip?
I put the funnel to my ear again and listened. There was nothing but silence.
And then a door slammed.
A moment later came the sound of heels on the hearth and then the unmistakable grating of fingers on the distant end of my rubber hose.
Strangled by the narrow tube, Feely’s thin voice, like that of an angered elf, came leaking from between my fingers and out the tiny trumpet of the funnel.
“I hate you!” it said.
•TWENTY•
How could a single village, nestled miles from anywhere in the English countryside, contain both a Miss Tanty and a Miss Alberta Moon? Mathematically speaking, of course, Providence should have placed them at opposite ends of the country—one at Land’s End and the other at John o’Groat’s.
I was thinking this as I came down the west staircase, Feely’s bagged sheet full of soot in my hand. I would scatter the stuff somewhere on the Visto where it would sooner or later be washed away by the rain. I had already found a clean sheet in a cupboard and installed it quite neatly on Feely’s bed. I would wash this one in the laboratory, hang it up to dry in my bedroom, and return it to storage at my leisure. No one would be any the wiser.
Feely was standing at the bottom of the stairs, tapping her foot.
I almost turned and ran, but I did not. Something in me froze my legs. Oh, well, sooner or later, she would find me anyway. There was no real escape. I might as well take my medicine now and get it over with.
As I stepped awkwardly off the last step, Feely came flying at at me.
I dropped the sheet, soot and all, and covered my eyes.
She seized me by the shoulders. She was going to crush the breath out of me—break my ribs, like the hulking American wrestlers we had seen in the newsreel at the cinema.
“You were magnificent!” she said, giving me a squeeze. “Thank you!”
I broke free, not trusting her.
“A few minutes ago, you hated me,” I pointed out.
“That was then—this is now,” Feely said. “I’ve had time to consider it. Perhaps I was a bit hasty.”
I knew that this was as close to an apology as I was likely to receive from Feely in this or any other lifetime.
“’Stupid old sea cow’!” Feely said, shaking her head. “You ought to have seen her face. I thought for a moment she was going to have an accident on our carpet.”
My sister could be remarkably crude when she forgot herself.
“You’re welcome,” I said, still basking a bit in Feely’s unexpected thanks and wanting the feeling to last for as long as possible.
With this abrupt ending of hostilities, my brain was suddenly bubbling over with goodwill, simply dying to share with her the news that she might have the blood of a saint flowing in her veins—to tell her about poor little Hannah Richardson, the tomb of Cassandra Cottlestone, and my discovery of Jocelyn Ridley-Smith.
I wanted to hug her, as I had hugged Daffy. I wanted to embrace her bones.
But I could not. It was as if both of us had been born north poles of the same magnet—as if, because of it, we should have been identical but were, in fact, repellent to one another—forever pushed apart by some mysterious but invisible power.
“When’s the funeral?” I asked lamely.
“Next Tuesday,” Feely said. “After Easter is out of the way.”
Although I was a little surprised to hear my pious sister refer to one of the greatest festivals of the Church as something to be got out of the way, I said nothing. I was learning, at least where Feely was concerned, to hold my tongue.
“Will they be having an open coffin?” I asked.
I was certainly hoping they would. It would be better, I thought, to remember Mr. Collicutt without the gas mask.
“Heavens, no,” Feely said. “The vicar does not approve of open caskets. In fact, he strongly discourages the practice. The Order for the Burial of the Dead emphasizes the resurrection, not the death. ‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord.’”
“I expect it puts a bit of a damper on things to have a corpse lying there bang in the middle with a poker face,” I said.
“Flavia!”
“Speaking of poker faces,” I said, “I ran into Miss Tanty in the church.”
I did not mention that there had been blood dripping from the rafters.
“So I am given to understand,” Feely said.
Blast! Was there no privacy in this village?
But who could have told her? Certainly not the vicar, and even more certainly not Adam Sowerby. She didn’t even know the man. Mad Meg, of course, was out of the question.
Feely must have seen the look of puzzlement on my face.
“‘The successful organist,’” she quoted, “‘must have fingers long enough to reach the stops, legs long enough to reach the pedal board, and ears long enough to reach into the lives of every choir member.’ Whanley on the Organ and Its Amenities, chapter thirteen, ‘Management of the Choristers.’
“Actually, I heard it from the lips of Jezebel herself,” she admitted.
“Jezebel?”
I had made a note to pry Miss Tanty’s details out of Feely, but had hardly expected them to come gushing out before I had even, so to speak, fingered the lock.
“Oh, surely you must have noticed,” Feely said. “Those two old harpies, Miss Moon and Miss Tanty, primping and preening, hurling themselves onto the ashes at the feet of poor Mr. Collicutt. It was like watching a Roman chariot race.”
“And the perfumes!” I said, eager to join in the game. “Backfire and Evening in Malden Fenwick.”
“Jealousy,” Feely added, and I wondered for a moment why I didn’t talk to my sister more often.
But our laughter faded quickly, as it often does when it is artificial, and we were left in an embarrassed silence.
“Why would Miss Tanty cry out, ‘Forgive me, O Lord,’ when she saw the blood?”
I was assuming Miss Tanty had told Feely about the blood.
“Because she needs to be the center of attention—even when a saint bleeds.”
“She told me it was a performance,” I said, not volunteering that I had heard this later at Miss Tanty’s house. “She fancies herself a detective and wants to become involved in the case—wants someone to think she may even be the killer.”
“The killer?” Feely snorted. “Horse eggs! She couldn’t see to kill an elephant if it were standing on her toes. And as for being a detective, why, the woman couldn’t find her own bottom if it weren’t buttoned on.”
“God bless her all the same,” I said. It was a formula we used whenever we had gone too far.
“God bless her all the same,” Feely echoed, rather sourly.
“Which leaves Miss Moon,” I suggested subtly.
“Why would Miss Moon kill Mr. Collicutt?” Feely asked. “She doted on him. She brought him bags full of her dreadful homemade saltwater toffee. She even took it upon herself to
wash his surplices and handkerchiefs.”
“Really?” I asked, my mind flashing instantly to the white ruffle protruding from the gas mask.
“Of course,” Feely said. “Mrs. Battle has always drawn the line at doing her boarders’ laundry.”
Which gave me an idea.
“Your ears are already long enough to reach into the lives of every choir member,” I said with a grin. “You’re going to make a whizzo organist, Feely!”
“Yes, I expect I am,” she agreed. Then, pointing to the sooty bundle on the floor, she added, “Now clean up this god-awful mess before I tell Father.”
Mrs. Battle’s boardinghouse, an ancient structure of warped, weathered clapboards and peeling paint, stood in a rutted yard on the south side of the road, halfway between St. Tancred’s and the Thirteen Drakes. In earlier times it had been a public house, the Adam and Eve, its name and the words “Ales & Stouts” still faintly visible in faded letters above the door. The whole place sagged in the middle like a serpent and had a general air of dampness.
I knocked and waited.
Nothing happened and I knocked again.
Still nothing.
Perhaps, I thought, as with the butcher’s shop in Nether-Wolsey, the owner was in the garden.
I strolled casually round the back as if I were a rather dopey tourist who had lost her way.
The area behind the house was like an archaeological dig: heaps of sand like giant hedgehogs, their backs bristling with shovels. Everywhere were untidy piles of boards and bags of cement. Everywhere broken rocks were strewn about as if in a temper tantrum by a baby giant.
The home of George Battle’s stonemasonry business.
I peeped into a dim shed which stood to one side. More cement, a wooden box of trowels, an old-fashioned sloping desk with accounting books and inkwells, a row of pegs upon which hung various pieces of black rubber rainwear, an electric ring and enamel tea kettle, and a blanket flung into the corner which might once have been lain upon by a long-dead dog.
No point in snooping too much, I thought. Someone might be watching from a back window of the house.