Come Away, Death

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘Gelert,’ he said, ‘Cathleen’s somewhere about. Did you know?’

  Gelert was immediately attentive.

  ‘What’s that? Cathleen? Where?’

  ‘She crawled away from the base, and I meant to follow her. But I didn’t catch up with her. She’s somewhere about. I believe she was one of the owls.’

  At this point Sir Rudri, whose momentary inaction had been for the purpose of deciding what next course to pursue, now ordered the Mystae back to their seats in the Hall.

  ‘If further manifestations occur —’ he began. Before he could complete his sentence they saw a dancing torch far out on the water. Iacchus, who had been brought from Athens by sea, appeared to be returning to the city.

  3

  Although they themselves were not aware of the cause, the stealthy departures of Cathleen and Ivor had wakened Kenneth and Stewart.

  ‘I say,’ said Kenneth, snuggling into his bag, ‘it’s rather beastly here.’

  ‘It is, rather,’ Stewart agreed. He shivered, and wriggled a little lower in his sack. ‘I say, where’s Ivor? Ivor!’ he softly called. There was no response. He crept from his sack and went over to inspect Ivor’s. ‘I say!’ he said. ‘He’s gone, and so has Cathleen. I say, do you think – I say, where have they gone?’

  At this point Megan woke up and told them crossly to go to sleep again. This advice she herself immediately followed.

  ‘We ought to tell someone!’ said Stewart.

  ‘Yes, but who, you ass? Anyway, I expect it’s quite all right. It’s sure to be, I should think.’

  ‘Yes, but why has he moved?’

  ‘Crawled up to see the fun,’ said Kenneth, suddenly inspired. ‘I say, I vote we go too! If there is anything to see, bags I to see it.’

  ‘Yes, but what about the profane departing? We’re not supposed to see the fun!’

  ‘Well, we’re not the profane, you ass! We’re heralds, aren’t we? If we’ve been there once, we can jolly well go there again. Anyway, I’m going to put my sandals on.’

  ‘All right, then, man. So will I.’

  They were soon creeping quietly up the path towards the Hall, unaware that Ivor was near them.

  ‘You go first. You snake better than I do,” said Kenneth.

  ‘No, let’s both. It’s quite all right if we don’t kick stones about or stumble. Don’t get too near, that’s all.’

  ‘Come on, then.’

  They crawled deviously up through the great Hall of the Mysteries and lay almost at the feet of Sir Rudri. But, although they lay there, motionless as Red Indians, nothing happened, and after about four minutes Kenneth touched Stewart’s leg and they glided away. Even Ivor, waiting and listening above them, neither saw nor heard their progress. Thus, before any of the excitement had begun, the two boys had returned to the base. They found Mrs Bradley awake, and armed with her small electric torch. She switched it on them as they approached.

  ‘What is happening, children?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing in the Hall,’ Stewart answered.

  ‘Cathleen and Ivor have gone,’ Kenneth blurted out.

  Mrs Bradley betrayed some interest in these tidings.

  She produced from her pocket – for she was fully dressed – the catapult which she had impounded before the party first left Athens for the celebration of the Mysteries, and put it into Stewart’s hand.

  ‘Have you any slugs?’ she asked.

  ‘Little round stones,’ said Stewart, feeling in the pocket of his shorts. He checked the tally. ‘Seven.’

  ‘Ample,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘If at any moment I say ‘Now!’ I want you to empty this weapon against the person upon whom I flash my torch.’

  ‘O.K.,’ said Stewart, pleased.

  ‘You, Kenneth, are to be prepared to run in any direction I say. Are you familiar with the lie of the land here? Do you know east from west?’

  Kenneth, a Scotsman, grunted scornfully.

  ‘Come, then.’ She led the way briskly and boldly towards the Hall of the Mysteries. She did not stop, however, but, keeping far out to the left and picking her way carefully between the scattered ruins, she walked still onwards towards the sea.

  Beyond the steps whereon the Mystae sat, the path wound serpent-wise between some unoccupied huts and some ruined walls. The little boys followed her closely. Suddenly she flashed her torch. ‘Now!’ she said clearly and sharply. There was a glare of white as the ring of light from the small torch picked out a fluttering garment. With commendable speed and accuracy Stewart slugged the gleam with a round stone from his catapult. At almost the same instant there was a slight sound on the slope to their right, a stone came bouncing down, a man’s voice said, ‘What’s that?’ and a girl’s voice stifled a gasped exclamation of fear; to conclude the display, somebody could be heard descending the slope in a manner which suggested that he had completely lost his footing. This person, of course, was Ivor.

  As the circle of the Mystae broke up to investigate the noise and rescue Ivor, Mrs Bradley hissed at Kenneth, ‘South!’

  Kenneth ran on towards the sea. She herself ran eastward. The quarry, however, quickly doubled back, and tore along the middle of the now deserted Hall towards the gate which led to the road. This time they saw him clearly, for his torch flared up triumphantly, and revealed him, white-clad and be-wreathed, the god Iacchus. Above them slithered, stamped, and pounded the Mystae, like a brood of satyrs disturbed at a midnight tryst. Iacchus stood still and beckoned. Then he turned in his tracks and doubled southwards, passing Kenneth less than four yards away. Kenneth pluckily made for him, but the flaring torch was suddenly extinguished. The darkness was black and seemed thick. Kenneth was suddenly frightened at finding himself alone among the ruins. He heard the voice of Stewart:

  ‘Kenneth! Are you there?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Kenneth, bold again directly. ‘I’ve lost him! Where did he go?’

  ‘We don’t know. Mrs Bradley says we’d better go back to the base.’

  ‘But —’

  ‘It’s no good. There he goes!’

  The great torch was alight again, it seemed. They saw it, far out on the water.

  ‘He must have gone on to the ship again,’ said Kenneth.

  ‘Then he must have flown,’ said Stewart.

  Mrs Bradley saw the torch, too. She was walking southwards again, towards the sea, flashing her torch, and calling softly, ‘Cathleen!’ But nobody answered, although she searched the ground and entered the huts. It was Megan, following her, who said at last:

  ‘I expect she’s gone back to the gate by now, Aunt Adela.’

  They returned to the base. Sir Rudri, Alexander Currie, Ivor, Gelert, and Dick came running along with the lantern.

  ‘Roll-call!’ said Sir Rudri. ‘Now, are we all here? Oh, Beatrice, was that you in the Hall just now? Did you see or hear anything there? What’s happening? What’s been happening?’

  The little boys, Mrs Bradley, Megan, and the party of the Mystae were soon accounted for. Dish, having done his sentry duty, had gone to sleep at the inn. Gelert was sent to picket the inn until daylight, and then to make sure that Dish had not left the place during the night. Cathleen they found, as Megan had prophesied, in her sleeping-sack; Armstrong was virtuously in his, which he had carried some way up the slope in order, as he had already explained somewhat sulkily, to be near at hand in case they wanted any flashlight photographs taken during the night. He blinked at them all in the beam from Sir Rudri’s lantern, and said he had heard a noise.

  Sir Rudri could scarcely contain his excitement at having discovered a listener to whom he could pour out afresh all his theories and hopes.

  ‘It was wonderful! Wonderful, my dear fellow,’ he asserted. ‘I should have liked a photograph above all things, but don’t distress yourself. There really wasn’t time.’ He was no longer angry with Armstrong, Mrs Bradley observed.

  ‘There was time all the while the second statue was standing up at the top of the steps,’
said Kenneth. Alexander Currie patted his son on the head as Sir Rudri scowled.

  ‘Profanity, Kenneth,’ said Sir Rudri. ‘It would have been profanity to have photographed the statue.’ He turned to the reclining Armstrong. ‘I am more than satisfied,’ he said. ‘After all, we were all witnesses. We can testify to what we saw.’

  ‘Ship and all,’ said Mrs Bradley heartily. She followed this promising remark with a deep chuckle which wiped the look of self-congratulation from Sir Rudri’s face and made him frown instead.

  ‘It isn’t a laughing matter,’ he said heavily. ‘Not a laughing matter at all. Mystae, return with me to the Hall. There is one more ceremony.’

  ‘Yes, one more. We have had the ritual marriage,’ said Mrs Bradley under her breath. Sir Rudri was the only person who heard her.

  ‘What do you say, my dear Beatrice? Surely not! You don’t mean you saw? – One has always supposed, of course, that that was the culmination of the revelation to the Mystae —’

  Mrs Bradley nodded solemnly.

  ‘One has always understood so,’ she observed, ‘I, for one, shall now have no further doubts.’

  Torn between the gentlemanly knowledge that he ought to respect her wishes if she did not want to carry the subject further, and an almost rabid desire to know exactly what she had seen, Sir Rudri said:

  ‘You are fortunate. I wish I had had the happy experience. But there! You probably have psychic qualities.’

  ‘I have never thought that,’ said Mrs Bradley mildly.

  Almost sadly, Sir Rudri, followed by the Mystae, returned to his own statue of Iacchus and poured the libation of water east and west. He prayed to the sky for rain, to the earth for increase. Mrs Bradley went back to Cathleen Currie, who was now sobbing exhaustedly, her head on Megan’s breast.

  4

  ‘So it was that fellow? I saw him following us. He was in the little church at Daphni looking at the mosaics, the first day we came here from Athens,’ said Ronald Dick next day.

  ‘I wonder that Mr Currie did not recognize him,’ Mrs Bradley suggested.

  ‘Mr Currie did not go into the church. He sat in the bit of shade and took off his boots, you remember.’

  Mrs Bradley did remember; she also remembered every one of Alexander’s blasphemous comments on the state of his feet, and the way the khaki-coloured sweat had poured down his angry red face. She remembered all his comments on convents in general and on the one at Daphni in particular. She sighed and quickened her pace a little, mindful of Marie Hopkinson’s injunction that she was to see that Sir Rudri and Alexander Currie did not quarrel. They were already in heated argument, although the day was young. She had no compunction in leaving Dick, for she knew he wanted to walk alongside Megan.

  ‘But I see no point – no point at all,’ Alexander was saying peevishly, ‘in going from Athens by sea to Nauplia and approaching Mycenae from the south. The best way, by far, is to take the train from Athens to Corinth, and go south to Mycenae from there.’

  ‘The only possible way to approach Mycenae,’ said Mrs Bradley, ‘is by way of Argos and Tiryns.’

  ‘Not only that,’ said Sir Rudri, who, all the morning, had been rendering himself an object of amusement or irritation to the party – according to their various temperaments – by a display of lightheartedness and kindly tolerance, the result of what he regarded as the peculiarly auspicious beginning to their researches. ‘Not only that, my dear Ronald, and my dear Alexander; remember, we go to Epidaurus before we visit Mycenae. Therefore we go by sea to Nauplia.’

  ‘You didn’t make it clear that we were to go to Epidaurus first,’ grumbled Alexander Currie.

  The pilgrims were walking back, in the heat and dust, from Eleusis to Athens, except for the boys, who had been left in charge of Dish to return by the first bus they could board. Dmitri was retained – much against his own wishes – to lead and minister to the oxen. These, decked with garlands – as indeed, were the whole company – in honour of Demeter, Persephone, and Iacchus, were being brought back along the Sacred Way with, on Sir Rudri’s part, rejoicing, and on the part of everyone else with a profound sense of thankfulness that most of the remainder of the pilgrimage was going to be made by car.

  ‘My feet!’ said Megan to Mrs Bradley, as they walked beside the empty ox-wain. Cathleen, pale and preoccupied, was walking beside the adoring Gelert, and little Dick trotted on the other side of Megan, and once he seized her hand, but she gave an exclamation of pain and dragged it away. Dick blushed, and stammered an apology.

  ‘Don’t apologize,’ said Megan. ‘I don’t mind having it held if you want to, Ronald, my sweet. But I bruised it on a mutual friend of ours last night whilst all the jollity was in progress, and it’s jolly tender this morning.’ She nodded towards Armstrong, who was of the party, but was stalking along beside Dmitri. Both looked stern and aloof – Dmitri because he hated to walk and had made a date with his girl which he would be unable to keep, and Armstrong because he had a painful bruise on the right buttock and another on the left shin. The flies bit all of them except Sir Rudri and Mrs Bradley. Alexander Currie they particularly teased and exasperated, and their onslaughts gave his argument an even more peevish and ill-tempered tone than usual.

  Nevertheless, he was glad to see the last of the bare cliffs of Salamis, of the cypress trees and the factory chimneys of Eleusis, and the ruined Hall of the Mysteries. When the argument dropped he did not attempt to revive it, but fell back unostentatiously until he was in step beside his daughter. He began to talk of family affairs, and Gelert, who detested such domestic conversation, and sensed that, in any case, Alexander did not want to include him in the talk, stepped up beside his father in Alexander’s place, and they were soon engrossed in an argument – ill-informed on the one side, and contemptuous on the other, respecting the merits of sixth- and eleventh-century mosaics.

  When Alexander Currie was sure that the young man had relieved them permanently of his company, his tone altered. He suddenly dropped the subject of letters from home, illnesses and marriages in the family, and such other trivialities of existence, and asked suddenly and fiercely:

  ‘What were you doing last night?’

  ‘Poking about,’ replied Cathleen, her eyes on the road.

  ‘Poking about, were you? And what was the result of your poking?’

  ‘I found out that the second Iacchus was a joke.’

  ‘Did you so?’ said Alexander, his eyes gleaming as he looked at Sir Rudri’s back. ‘Tell me more about that.’

  ‘I can’t tell you much more, father. When I went up to see the statue it wasn’t there. The lighted torch was stuck on the rock with – with clay or something, I think, to look as though the statue was still in place, but the statue itself was gone.’

  ‘Are you sure of this?’

  ‘Yes, father, of course I am.’

  ‘And where was the statue?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that. I don’t know.’

  Alexander looked at her serious, beautiful profile.

  ‘Will not, you mean? Do you take me for a fool?’

  ‘Not always,’ said Cathleen, her obvious truthfulness managing to rob the observation of offence. Alexander Currie snorted.

  ‘That MacNeill has not followed you here?’

  ‘I don’t see how he could afford it, father. He’s got all he can do to pay his fees at College.’

  ‘You’ll not see a penny of my money if you marry him, Cathleen, mind that!’

  The tiring journey came to an end at last, and, later, Megan said, when both girls were doing their hair in Cathleen’s room:

  ‘It was MacNeill, then, at Eleusis, Cathleen?’

  ‘Who else?’ said Cathleen, reasonably. ‘I told him he was a fool to have come all that way.’

  ‘Was he Iacchus?’

  ‘No, of course he wasn’t. Megan, by Scots law, Ian and I are married.’

  ‘Married!’ Megan sat down on the bed, overcome by the tidings. She rallied, however, in
characteristic fashion.

  ‘Well, I do think you’re a fool!’

  ‘You’re welcome to your opinion,’ Cathleen replied, with spirit.

  ‘But what did you do it for, silly?’

  ‘I wanted to, and so I persuaded him. I didn’t know he would come out here, though, the gawp!’

  Megan began to giggle.

  ‘I’d like to see your father’s face when he knows!’

  ‘He won’t know. We shan’t live together until Ian has finished his course and got a job.’

  ‘If I were you, I should tell him and brave it out. And, Cath, why didn’t you yell the place down last night? I’d have found you much quicker if you had.’

  ‘I couldn’t. Everybody would have known. He didn’t mean anything, Megan.’

  ‘He’s a beast, that’s what he is!’

  ‘I lost Ian’s call. The darkness is very deceptive.’

  ‘But how —’

  ‘I expect he followed me. Twice I went to meet Ian. He must have followed me each time.’

  ‘But, Cathleen, that’s awful! You’ll have to tell my father. He’ll soon put a stop to that.’

  ‘I’ll be with Ian after this. He’s going to drive one of the cars. It will be all right after this.’

  ‘Well, I bet I left my mark on him, anyway, the nasty beast!’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘Xanthias!

  What is it?

  Didn’t you notice?

  What?

  He was scared stiff of me.

  Lord, yes, he was afraid you might be barmy.’

  1

  AT ATHENS MRS BRADLEY had a letter from Marie Hopkinson. After news about her daughter Olwen, Sir Rudri’s wife went on to talk about him.

  ‘I do hope,’ the letter ran, ‘that Rudri and Alexander are getting on together. I forgot to tell you about the Archaic Apollos. You know there are several – at least, I didn’t, until this awful quarrel began – but there are the Strangford Apollo, and the marble Statue of a Youth and the Sunion Apollo (I think) – anyway, Alexander played a horrid trick on Rudri and got a sculptor he knows to make a new one and fake it to look old. Then he pretended that a friend of his had found it somewhere in Sicily. My poor Rudri fell for this beastly thing and wrote an article on it for The Archaeologist and then right at the last Alexander wrote to the editor and questioned the authenticity of the statue. Of course Rudri was laughed at for being taken in. It really was too bad. He thinks he’ll never live down that article, it was so very scholarly, poor darling. He would do anything to get even with Alexander. It was all very malicious and upsetting. I still can’t think why he asked Alexander to go on the expedition. He must think he’s going to show off …’