Speaking From Among the Bones

by Alan Bradley

  It was obvious that Miss Tanty’s meals were lonely ones.

  Then there was, in a jiff, a cup of tea steaming in front of me, and I was feeling peculiarly grateful.

  “Drink it,” Miss Tanty said. “Take these. Eat them.”

  She shoved a saucer of shortbreads under my nose, then turned away and began fussing with something in a cupboard.

  “Those men,” she was saying, too casually—too conversationally. “Those men in the church. What were they doing to you?”

  “They thought I had found something,” I said. “They wanted me to hand it over.”

  “And did you?”

  “No,” I said.

  The great goggles swung round and fixed me in their gaze.

  “‘No, you didn’t find something? Or no, you didn’t hand it over.”

  I looked into her eyes, mesmerized, and no words came.

  “Well?”

  Too late, the truth came crashing down.

  “I have to go home now,” I said. “I’m not feeling well.”

  Miss Tanty’s hands appeared suddenly from behind her back. In one was clutched a glass bottle and in the other, a handkerchief.

  She sloshed liquid onto the linen and clapped it to my nose.

  Aha! I thought—(C2H5)2O.

  Diethyl ether again.

  I’d recognize its sweet, gullet-tickling odor anywhere.

  The chemist Henry Watts had once described it as having an exhilarating odor and the Encyclopaedia Britannica had called it pleasant, but it was obvious that neither Professor Watts nor the Encyclopaedia Britannica had ever had the stuff clapped over their noses in a blue-painted kitchen by a hulking and surprisingly powerful madwoman with bottle-bottom spectacles.

  It burned.

  It seared my nostrils—tore at my brain.

  I struggled to get to my feet—but it was no use.

  Miss Tanty had crooked an arm around my neck and, from behind, was pulling me down and backwards into the chair. Her other hand was holding the handkerchief firmly over my nose.

  “Teach you!” she was saying. “Teach you!

  I flailed my arms and kicked out, but it was no use.

  Less than ten seconds had passed and my brain was spinning like a whirlpool with a sweet, sickening oblivion. All I had to do was give in to it.

  To let myself go.

  “No!”

  Who had shouted that?

  Was it me?

  Or was it Harriet?

  I had heard the voice distinctly.

  “No!”

  Now she had let go of my neck and was digging with her hand in one of my pockets—then the other.

  I lashed out, fingers spread, and knocked Miss Tanty’s glasses from her face.

  It wasn’t much, but it was enough. I turned my head to one side and sucked my lungs full of fresh air—one quick deep breath and then another—and another.

  Without her powerful lenses, Miss Tanty looked round the kitchen, her mad eyes huge and weary, weak, watery, and unfocused.

  Fighting my way out of the chair, I dodged to the left but she blocked me with her hips like a rugby player.

  I dodged to the right, but she was there also.

  Even though I could have been no more than a blur to her, the woman managed to throw herself in front of my every move.

  There was no way out. No back door.

  Now she had her arm around my neck again, tighter than before.

  I saw only one chance.

  In desperation I reached out and grabbed the matchbox. I ripped it open and the wooden matches spilled out onto the tabletop.

  As Miss Tanty’s massive hand came sweeping round again with the handkerchief, I scraped a match’s head on the wooden breadboard and held it awkwardly out behind me.

  It went out.

  I had moved too fast.

  I seized another—struck it—and slowly, agonizingly slowly, bent my elbow back toward her.

  There was a moment’s grace, as if nothing had happened, and then a sound as if an exceptionally large St. Bernard had just said “Woof!”

  A great globe of fire rose up like an orange hot-air balloon to the low ceiling, then came roiling down the walls in waves of black greasy smoke only to boil up again around our ankles in a dense, choking cloud.

  For a paper-thin slice of time, Miss Tanty was a frozen statue, one arm holding a flaming torch aloft above her head like Demeter searching the underworld for Persephone, her lost daughter.

  And then she screamed.

  And went on screaming.

  She dropped the blazing handkerchief and blundered from wall to wall, beginning now to cough.

  Cough … scream … cough … scream.

  It was enough to shatter anyone’s nerves.

  Round and round the room she spun, crashing into the furniture like a monstrous and maddened bluebottle fly, rebounding from one smoking wall to another.

  By this time, I was coughing, too, and my face felt as if I had fallen asleep for hours in an August seaside sun.

  I stamped out the flames of the burning handkerchief.

  Miss Tanty was still screaming.

  “Stop it,” I told her, throwing open the window, but she paid me no attention, flying round the room with one wrist clasped in her other hand.

  “Stop it,” I said again. “Let me have a look.”

  I had already had a look, and could see that her hand was burned.

  “Stop it,” I told her, but she screamed on and on. “Stop it!”

  I slapped her face.

  I may not be as nice a person as I like to believe I am, because I have to admit that in rather an unexpected way, it gave me a great deal of pleasure to let her have it. Not because this was a creature who just moments ago had tried to murder me—not because there was any vengeance in the act, but somehow because it was, in the circumstances, the correct thing to do.

  She stopped screaming instantly and looked at me as if she had never seen me before in her life.

  “Sit down,” I ordered, and wonder of wonders, she meekly obeyed. “Now give me your hand.”

  She stuck out a reddened fist, staring at it as if it belonged to a stranger—anyone but her.

  I rummaged through half a dozen kitchen drawers before finding a lint dishcloth, which I draped over her wrist. I reached for the bottle of ether which she had put down on the draining board.

  I pulled out the stopper and poured it over the dishcloth, watching the look of cool relief which spread across her face as she looked up me in dumb adoration or something.

  I flung open cupboards beneath the sink and finally, in a swiveled storage bin, found what I was looking for: a potato.

  I half peeled it, then cut slices so thin that you could have read the Bible through them. With these, I made a wet poultice with which, having removed the cloth, I dressed her hand and wrist.

  “Hurts,” Miss Tanty said, staring up into my face with her great moon eyes, her glasses trampled to shards on the floor.

  “Hard cheese,” I told her.

  •TWENTY-EIGHT•

  I flew out of Miss Tanty’s house as if all the hunting hounds of Hell were at my heels, and perhaps they were.

  Round the corner and into the High Street I ran, and within a minute I was pounding on the door of PC Linnet’s cottage, part of which served as Bishop Lacey’s police station.

  In a surprisingly short time, the tousle-haired constable was at the door, pulling on his blue uniform jacket, his brow wrinkled, his eyebrows raised into a pair of upward pointing Vs.

  “Miss Tanty’s house,” I shouted. “Quickly! Attempted murder!” Leaving the astonished constable standing on his doorstep, I dashed off in the opposite direction toward Dr. Darby’s surgery.

  Would Miss Tanty still be in her kitchen when the police arrived? I had reason to believe she would. In the first place, the woman was in shock, and in the second, she was not constructed with sprinting in mind. And in the third, come to think of it, there was nowher
e to hide. Bishop’s Lacey was not big enough for bolt-holes.

  I was in luck. When I reached the surgery, Dr. Darby was already outside, using a pail and sponge to wash the mud and dust of a country practice from his bull-nosed Morris.

  “Miss Tanty’s burned her hand,” I told him breathlessly. “Ether explosion! I’ve already applied cold ether and a potato poultice.”

  Dr. Darby nodded wisely, as if this happened every morning before breakfast. As he ducked into the surgery for his bag, I was off again.

  I could be there before him. Or so I thought.

  But his Morris passed me even before I reached Cow Lane.

  I overtook PC Linnet just as he reached Miss Tanty’s gate.

  “Stay here,” he ordered, holding up a most official hand. “Outside,” he added, as if I might not have understood.

  “But—”

  “No buts,” he said. “This is now a crime scene. We have our orders.”

  What did he mean by that? Had Inspector Hewitt specifically forbidden me access?

  After all that I had done for him?

  Constable Linnet vanished into the house before I could ask a single question.

  A moment later, Miss Tanty began screaming again.

  Father, Feely, and Daffy were walking along the road toward me as I came round the corner of the churchyard wall.

  The heat from the ether explosion had left my face feeling as if it had been irradiated, but now, at least, I knew firsthand how Madame Curie must have felt.

  My skirt and sweater were in ruins, my hair ribbons hanging in scorched remnants.

  “Look at you!” Feely said. “Where have you been? You can’t possibly go to into the church like that, can she, Father?”

  Although Father glanced in my direction, I knew he was not really seeing me.

  “Flavia,” was all he said, before looking sluggishly away and fixing his gaze on some far horizon of his own.

  “I thought you were sick,” Daffy said.

  Daffy was always the one to dredge up the incriminating details.

  “I’m feeling much better now,” I said, remembering suddenly that I still had burnt cork smudged around my eyes.

  “Good morning, all,” said a voice behind me. It was Adam Sowerby. I hadn’t heard him pull up in his silent Rolls-Royce.

  “What’s happened to you, then?” he asked. “Bit too much sun?”

  I nodded. I could have hugged the man.

  “I’ve just come from Dr. Darby’s surgery,” I said, which was true. “He says it’s nothing to worry about.” Which was a lie.

  “Hmmm,” Adam said. “Well, I’m no doctor, I’m afraid, but I do have a few clever tricks up my sleeve from my wanderings up the Limpopo, and so forth. If it’s all right with you, Haviland,” he said, addressing Father, “I think we—”

  Father nodded vaguely, not as if he had really heard, but as if he were trying to keep his head from rolling off his shoulders and into the dirt.

  “Let’s get on with it,” Feely said. “I need to run through the anthem, and I’ve no time for …”

  She waved a hand at me as if to add “this sort of thing.” She was anxious, I knew, to get at the organ. After all, today was her official debut on the bench.

  Father was still staring vaguely off across the fields, but as Feely and Daffy marched off toward the church door, he followed slowly—almost obediently.

  Daffy looked back over her shoulder at me as if I were a freak in the peep show.

  What on earth, I wondered, could be happening with the sale of Buckshaw? I had been so busy with my own concerns I hadn’t even thought to ask.

  Dared to ask.

  But now, seeing Father so like a wraith had moved something somewhere deep inside me.

  In a way, I was proud of him. Whatever devils were gnawing at his guts hadn’t kept him from his Easter duty. Somewhere inside, my father was a man who still had faith, and I hoped, for his sake, that it would be enough.

  “This way,” Adam was saying, and he led me round the church, through the churchyard, past the still-slumbering Cassandra Cottlestone to the river bank. I shuddered slightly as I recalled that it was here, on this very spot, that I had once encountered the murderer of Horace Bonepenny. That had been almost a year ago, but it might as well have been in another life.

  Adam scrambled down the damp bank and pulled out a cluster of daffodils by their roots.

  “You’re getting your boots muddy,” I told him.

  “So I am,” he said, glancing down, but he didn’t seem to care.

  He climbed back up and fished a penknife from the pocket of his vest.

  “Do you know what this is?” he asked, cutting a bulb into several slices.

  “A daffodil,” I said.

  “Besides that.”

  “Narcissine,” I said. “In the roots. C16H17ON. Deadly poison. If someone crosses you, serve them boiled daffodil blubs and pretend you thought they were onions.”

  “Phew!” Adam whistled. “You certainly know your onions, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do,” I told him. “And my daffodils as well.”

  He separated the cool slices of root and rubbed them gently, one at a time, on my face, singing as he worked:

  “When daffodils begin to peer,

  “With, hey! the doxy over the dale,

  “Why, then comes in the sweet o’ the year,

  “For the red blood reigns in the winter’s pale.”

  He had a pleasant voice, and sang the song with as much confidence as if he were used to performing it on stage.

  “What does it mean?” I asked. “The red blood reigns in the winter’s pale?”

  “That blood will out,” he said, “even in the coldest surroundings.”

  In spite of myself, I shivered, and it wasn’t just because Adam was rubbing the cooling poison onto my face and neck.

  Blood and daffodils. It sounded like the title of a mystery novel by some sweet old lady who dealt in death and crumpets.

  This whole business had been blood from beginning to end: my blood, bat’s blood, frog’s blood, saint’s blood, and Mr. Collicutt’s lack of.

  And daffodils. A fistful of daffodils and crocuses had brought me face-to-face with Miss Tanty. What was it she had said—Don’t waste your crocuses?

  “Do you suppose—” I asked.

  “Shhh!” Adam said. “We don’t want to get any of this in your mouth, do we?”

  With no encouragement on my part, he went on:

  “Daffodils,

  “That come before the swallow dares, and take,

  The winds of March with beauty.

  His words painted images in my mind, and I thought of Father and of Gladys and of flowers. We would never see another Spring at Buckshaw.

  “I hate daffodils,” I said, and was suddenly in tears.

  Adam went on, pretending he hadn’t noticed.

  “‘Violets … pale primroses … bold oxlips and the crown imperial … lilies of all kinds, the flower-de-luce being one.’ Old Bill Shakespeare was well up on the plant kingdom, you know.”

  “You’re making this up to make me feel better,” I said.

  “I assure you I’m not,” he said. “You’ll find it in The Winter’s Tale. You de Luces have been around for a remarkably long time.”

  “Ouch!” I said. Adam was now applying the daffodil juice to a particularly tender spot on my nose.

  “Yes, they do sting a bit, don’t they?” Adam asked. “I expect it’s the narcissine. The alkaloids have a tendency to—”

  “Oh, shut up,” I said, but now I was laughing at him.

  How could he ever understand?

  It was quite hopeless.

  “That’s you patched up, then,” he said. “Shall we go inside?”

  “Inside?” I asked, taking hold of my skirt and spreading it like a fan. “Won’t you be ashamed to be seen with me?”

  Adam only laughed and, taking my arm, led me upwards between the old stones of the chu
rchyard.

  Heads turned and bodies swiveled in pews as we made our way up the aisle. No sooner had we squeezed into the front pew beside Father and Daffy than Feely struck up the opening chords of the processional hymn.

  Now the choir was coming from the back of the nave, singing their rousing morning song as the organ roared.

  As they came abreast of our little party, not one of the singers failed to shift his or her eyes sideways for a furtive glance at me, although they pretended not to.

  There I sat as primly as I could manage, my eyes blackened with burnt cork, my face and neck reddened by the blast and shiny with the poisonous juices of the daffodil, my clothing filthy with dust from the organ chamber, scorched and charred with the soot of an ether explosion.

  Even the vicar’s eyes widened as he went past singing:

  “The lamb’s high banquet call’d to share,

  “Array’d in garments white and fair …”

  The diapason rumbled, shivering the age-stained pews, making the old wood tremble as it shook the fabric of the ancient church.

  •TWENTY-NINE•

  I don’t remember much about the Easter service. To me, it was no more than a blur of singing, standing, kneeling, and parroting responses.

  I was told afterwards that Feely was brilliant; that the choir sang like angels (even without Miss Tanty), and that the keyboard work set a new standard of musical virtuosity in Bishop’s Lacey. Of course, I had only Sheila Foster’s word to go on, and since Fossie was Feely’s best friend, I wouldn’t bet a bundle on her opinion.

  The unwritten rule for exiting St. Tancred’s was “Front rows first,” so that after the benediction, as we bolted for the doors, we always had the opportunity to see who had come in after us.

  As we shuffled toward the back of the church, there, completely unexpected, about four rows from the back and seated on the aisle, were Inspector Hewitt and his wife, Antigone. Because I was still suffering some embarrassment over my brash behavior last time we had met, I needed to proceed with caution. Should I look away, perhaps? Give an elaborate greeting to someone on the far aisle and pretend I hadn’t seen her? Fake a coughing fit and stumble past with eyes squeezed shut?