Come Away, Death

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘They are still in the locked tin box. The children feed them under my supervision. Sir Rudri, I think, has forgotten all about them.’

  ‘And the snakes that became so much attached to us?’

  ‘They are still in the sanctuary, child. The warden offered no objection. The last of them that I saw was when he was feeding them with goats’ milk out of an earthenware saucer. It made a charming scene,’ she continued, visualizing it again, ‘and was completely in keeping, let us hope, with the spirit of the history of the valley.’

  ‘Well, what are we going to do about him?’ Alexander inquired.

  ‘I’m going to put him right. I don’t think it’s anything more than a —’

  ‘Don’t be technical. I don’t understand the jargon. Good luck to your efforts, anyway. Poor Rudri! If I had thought he would take it so badly or remember it against me so long, I’d never have played the trick on him that I did. They’re queer people, the Welsh.’

  ‘So are the Scots,’ said Mrs Bradley tartly. Alexander looked at her and grinned. ‘How’s that bite of yours getting on?’ she inquired, abruptly changing the subject. She unfastened her portable medicine chest and treated the inflamed and swollen leg. ‘I should not walk about, child. If that gets any worse, one of the chauffeurs must drive you into Corinth.’

  ‘What I want is whisky,’ said Alexander Currie simply.

  ‘A good idea,’ replied she, putting away her lint and bottles neatly. ‘We will give the job to Gelert. He needs a little change.’ She hailed him. He was seated in the shadow of another bit of the wall, and came over to her when she called.

  ‘I can’t think why those cruise tourists haven’t shown up here yet,’ he remarked as he came within distance for conversation.

  ‘They were before us,’ Mrs Bradley answered. ‘They came straight away here on the afternoon of the day they came upon us in the morning at Epidaurus.’

  ‘Thank God. Then we shan’t be seeing them again.’ He seated himself on about three inches of Mrs Bradley’s coat, which was spread on the ground, and looked interestedly at the grave-circle. ‘Is it true that some of the party have been making finds here?’ he asked. Mrs Bradley grinned.

  ‘It was quite like a treasure hunt,’ she remarked. Gelert, who was intelligent, lifted his eyebrows.

  ‘Father again?’ he inquired. ‘Good Lord! The man ought to be put in a home! He must be absolutely cracked.’

  ‘So much so,’ said Mrs Bradley lucidly,’ that whilst you go off in one of the cars and find whisky, and, if you like, some Fortnum and Mason food, I shall conduct your father to Epidaurus, and Aesculapius there will work a miraculous cure.’ Contrary to the expectation of Gelert, who was in the habit of making little bets with himself as to the kinds of things she would laugh at, on this occasion she did not so much as smile.

  ‘I wish he would cure my leg,’ said Alexander Currie.

  ‘Let us give him the chance. I may need your help with Sir Rudri,’ Mrs Bradley replied immediately.

  No help, however, was needed. By three in the afternoon, Sir Rudri, having been shown Alexander’s inflamed and swollen leg, remarked that it was a judgement on Alexander, that he had heard of legs being amputated for less, and that some people’s blood was continually out of order because they were accustomed to eat and drink to excess. Eventually, having talked himself into a good temper, he proposed that the party should return to Epidaurus for a cure.

  ‘Not the whole party,’ Mrs Bradley put in. ‘Just Alexander Currie, you, and myself.’

  ‘And who is to manage Armstrong?’ demanded Sir Rudri, staring at both of them from underneath beetling brows. ‘Gelert’s gone hopping off in one of the cars on some tom-fool errand of his own, and young Dick’s worse than useless.’

  ‘He doesn’t sound exactly insane, you know, does he?’ said Alexander Currie, when Sir Rudri had gone off to order Armstrong to accompany them to Epidaurus.

  ‘No. But I didn’t want Armstrong with us, child. Never mind. Perhaps we can lock him in the museum when we get there.’

  But this idea was never put into practice. Alexander Currie’s leg was so seriously inflamed that at six o’clock that evening Ian, Cathleen, Mrs Bradley, and Alexander himself were driving towards Corinth as rapidly as Ian’s imperfect knowledge of the road would allow. Fortunately it was not very far. It was an interesting drive. At the apex of the Argive Plain the road ran for three miles through a defile not more, in places, than eighteen feet wide. On either side of the road the great walls of the mountains Hagios Elias and Zara towered two thousand feet above the travellers.

  At Corinth, Doctor Emil St Pierre, whom Mrs Bradley had known for thirty years, took Alexander and Alexander’s leg into his expert care, and the other three went to stay at a hotel. In the morning they inquired after the leg, and Mrs Bradley inspected it. The inflammation was subsiding, and the swelling had disappeared.

  ‘It is necessary that he should rest his leg a little,’ the doctor announced. ‘He shall join you in Athens in a day or two.’

  The others obtained a supply of bread, some cheeses, honey, grapes, and bottles of wine, and returned to Mycenae to provide the rest of the party with more palatable food than that which they had recently enjoyed.

  Sir Rudri appeared to be his usual self. The little boys, however, were disconsolate, although they attacked the new bread, the honey, the cheese, and the grapes with the hearty enthusiasm for which Mrs Bradley had hoped.

  ‘Somebody’s pinched the cow,’ said Kenneth later.

  ‘Most regrettable,’ said Armstrong, throwing back his head in silent laughter, a disconcerting habit he had formed since the second day of the expedition, Mrs Bradley’s casebook informed her.

  ‘Mr Armstrong,’ said Mrs Bradley, ‘where’s the cow?’

  ‘How do I know?’ said Armstrong. He was sitting next to Megan, and occasionally their fingers intertwined. There had been no storm. A high wind had blown it away. The air, although hot, was not oppressive. The spirits of the company gradually began to improve.

  ‘Bags I we trail the cow,’ suggested Ivor. The other little boys agreed. Having found her hoof-prints on a sandy patch, they trailed her over the hillside and on to the road, and up the farther bank. In a quarter of an hour they were back at the base. Kenneth looked mysterious and excited. Ivor looked pale and as though he were going to be sick. Stewart said solemnly:

  ‘We’ve found the cow, what’s left of her.’

  Mrs Bradley thought of the sacrificial knife, but it was still among her belongings, locked up in her twenty-inch despatch-case. She went with the boys to the cow. Io’s throat had been cut according to Homeric tradition, and with the still sticky pool of her coagulated blood some hundreds of flies were engrossed. A vulture, perched on her head, was so gorged that it did not make any attempt to fly. Her entrails, frankly displayed in the shape of a Greek letter A, were stinking to heaven in the sunshine, and were covered with every carnivorous insect known to Greek entomology.

  Mrs Bradley inspected the relics of Io with scientific detachment, and slowly shook her head.

  ‘A for Acrisius, A for Atreus, A for Agamemnon, A for Aegisthus, A for Alexander, A for Armstrong, A for ass,’ she observed, when they all had removed themselves from Io’s unpleasant vicinity. ‘Now I wonder which was intended, and by whom?’ No answer seemed forthcoming to these questions. Sir Rudri and Dick, escorted separately to the spot, pronounced themselves mystified, shocked, disgusted, and unwilling to believe that one of the party had killed the cow for amusement. Armstrong insisted upon photographing the remains as a preliminary to burying them, but it was Megan who borrowed Mrs Bradley’s parasol and a spanner out of the car and proceeded to inter the entrails. Cathleen had refused to inspect them, and nobody – for Dish refused his services, and Dmitri turned green at the smell – offered to assist the resolute girl in her labours.

  Armstrong came back with his camera over his shoulder, and smacked the palms of his hands together, looking rather p
leased with himself. Mrs Bradley gave Megan some wine for which she thanked her. But, raising the cup in the air, she poured the wine in a great splash on to the dusty ground. Mrs Bradley raised her eyebrows, but poured her some more. This time she drank. A little later she wandered away and found Armstrong asleep in the shade, his god’s face pillowed on his arm. Megan seated herself beside him, and with the parasol, which she retained by inadvertence, she began to trace on the earth. When Mrs Bradley came that way a little later, she found both Armstrong and Megan asleep, with the bitterly brooding Dick watching jealously from the shadow of the wall. A peacock – unmistakable outline – emblem of Hera, the patroness of Io – was drawn in the dust in the curve made between Armstrong’s head and his knees.

  Mrs Bradley climbed to the citadel in the fierce afternoon glare, and looked across the Argive Plain to where the hill of Larissa, marking the site of Argos, stood high above the rest of the landscape, demonstrating its medieval fort. Of ancient Argos there was nothing to be seen. She could not see, either, the busy modern town.

  She contemplated the acropolis of Mycenae on which she stood. Even the ruins of the sixth-century temple, built on ruins a thousand years older than itself, had been almost obliterated by time and destructive mankind. She murmured as she gazed, the lament of Alpheus:

  ‘The goatherds pointed at thee. And I heard an old man say, “The giant-builded-city, the golden — here it lay.”’

  After this she went down to referee a game of noughts and crosses over which Ivor and Kenneth were quarrelling shrilly as they scrawled, like ancient Euclid, lines and circles, nothing but lines and circles, in the dust.

  Stewart squatted beside her. After a bit he said:

  ‘It was Armstrong, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I think it must have been, child,’ Mrs Bradley responded.

  ‘Why did he do it, do you think?’

  ‘I expect it was a combination of greed and sadism, child. The two sometimes go hand in hand.’

  Stewart detached the one he could understand.

  ‘He is greedy. He always stuffs food in his mouth when there’s plenty, and lots of it drops on the floor.’

  ‘Always?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ broke in Ivor, looking up. ‘He did it several times at home, and mother won’t have him to dinner any more, he’s so messy.’

  ‘Filthy of him to be messy with poor old Io, though,’ remarked Stewart. Ivor looked at Mrs Bradley expectantly.

  ‘But it was Sir Rudri himself who wanted to kill the cow,’ Kenneth pointed out as he took advantage of Ivor’s momentary distraction to fill up two or three squares with some hurried noughts.

  ‘Hey, rub those out!’ yelled Ivor, returning to things of importance. ‘You filthy cheat and cad! It wasn’t your turn!’

  ‘Don’t be an ass, man. It was!’

  ‘It wasn’t, I tell you!’ He rose to his feet and scuffled his sandalled feet all over the noughts and crosses. ‘I shan’t play any more games. You’re just a low, double-crossing swindler, you beastly ass!’

  ‘Oh, am I?’ said Kenneth, hitting him in the face. ‘Take that, you lousy little cissy!’

  The next minute they were hard at it, Stewart and Mrs. Bradley moving back a little out of the rising dust.

  ‘Ivor can win if he keeps his head,’ said Stewart. ‘He’s a better boxer than Kenneth. Feet! Feet!’ he added, as a coach instructing Rugby football forwards. ‘This is a very poor show. They can both do better than this,’ he added confidentially.

  ‘And what about you?’ Mrs Bradley politely inquired.

  ‘I’m training to be a professional,’ Stewart replied. ‘At least, that’s one of my ideas. Oh, step in and finish him off, you silly clown!’ he shrieked in exasperation as Ivor, lunging, missed Kenneth by several inches and, losing his balance, blundered on after the blow. Mrs Bradley, at this point, walked in and firmly separated the combatants, holding the shirt of each in a muscular grip of which neither had believed her capable, but saying nothing for fear of imbibing the dust which hung like gun-smoke over the whole arena.

  ‘Now let’s sit down and finish the grapes,’ she said, when the dust had died and the panting breath of the fighters had changed to more normal respiration. So they sought a patch of shade – not an easy thing to find at that time in the afternoon – and all sat amicably together, the erstwhile enemies engaged in a spirited contest to see who could spit the pips farthest. Stewart, however, with tongue thrust cannily against the pip in his mouth, his lips pursed solemnly, could spit much farther than either. Armstrong and Megan, having finished their afternoon siesta, came by and found the competition nearing its close because almost all the grapes had disappeared.

  ‘Dirty little beasts,’ he said reprovingly. Mrs Bradley looked at him and cackled.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘I think so, too. In that case we had best keep quiet till we know for certain.’

  1

  THE STORY OF the cow had shocked Sir Rudri. At tea he announced his intention of proceeding at once to Corinth.

  ‘Shan’t we spend another night here, father?’ asked Ivor.

  ‘No. I want to be far enough from here before the sun sets,’ Sir Rudri answered. He seemed eaten up with nervousness, a trait which his family (except his wife) deemed to have no place in his character. He glanced about him most of the time, and once he held up his hand and commanded them all to be silent.

  All thought they would be glad to leave the place of the Atrides, but when it came to the point of going to the cars the general feeling was voiced by Gelert, who had returned, without whisky, some hour and a half earlier. He said, looking back at the Lion Gate:

  ‘Half a minute. I want to have one more look at the Treasury of Atreus before we really go.’

  He went, and the others went with him. They stood in the entrance to the tomb, gazing at the blackness within. They did not go inside. One by one they turned and walked back to the cars. Gelert and Armstrong were the last to leave. When it was certain that the others had all gone, Armstrong said to Gelert, as he opened his smaller camera-case and took out a flattish piece of beaten gold carrying a design of fish:

  ‘Give me your opinion on this thing, Hopkinson, would you?’

  Gelert took the rough-edged rectangle of gold. Then he took a small lens from his pocket. After scrutinizing closely the bit of metal he handed it back and said:

  ‘Genuine, I should imagine.’

  Armstrong put it away with the greatest care, and with hands which trembled a little.

  ‘You can call it O.K. about that little affair in Athens, then, if it’s genuine,’ he said.

  ‘It’s genuine enough,’ said Gelert.

  ‘I shall have to get somebody at the museum to vet it, I suppose,’ said Armstrong in tones which he tried to make careless. Gelert nodded.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so, he said. ‘Where did you find it?’

  ‘On the acropolis. I – I dreamt where it would be, and there it was.’

  ‘You dreamt it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Armstrong in a voice which seemed to Gelert to be unnecessarily defiant. He did not press the question. He had heard that some people had psychic gifts of this nature, and he prided himself on his ability to believe such things. Together they walked after the others, and took the last two places in the cars. In Sir Rudri’s car this time were Ian, who was driving, Cathleen, Megan, and Ivor. Megan beckoned Armstrong into the vacant seat. In the second car came Dick and Dmitri, and in the third Mrs Bradley, Kenneth, Stewart, and Dish, who sat beside the driver. Gelert climbed in beside Stewart.

  The party had dinner in Corinth, and then drove on to Athens. After Corinth Mrs Bradley’s car took the lead, because the driver knew the road and Ian did not, and Sir Rudri’s car brought up the rear.

  Eighteen miles out of Corinth the cars crossed the Great Pass at two thousand four hundred feet, and thirty miles on reached Megara. From here the road ran between sea and mountains and then over fertile land through olive groves, cornf
ields, and vineyards. It was dark by the time they reached Megara. The road ran due east, and nineteen miles from Athens it skirted foothills near the sea. The hills were low and wooded – chiefly with pines. They could see them, dark branches and trunks which melted into the general darkness and were lost.

  The country became more open. Then they reached Eleusis with its factory chimneys, and from there, so familiar was the road, it seemed no time before they reached Athens. Sir Rudri, very cheerful, helped the girls out of his car. Gelert handed out Mrs Bradley. The drivers went off with the cars. Armstrong and Dmitri went with them, but Dick, who was saying a shamefaced, heartsick good night to Megan, was seized upon by Sir Rudri and almost dragged into the house.

  Marie Hopkinson was at home. Her daughter Olwen had been delivered of a fine boy and both were doing well. Marie had been back in Athens two days. She took Sir Rudri straight up to their room and pushed him into a chair.

  ‘You go to bed. You’d better see the doctor to-morrow. You look a wreck,’ she said. Sir Rudri shook his head. He looked haggard and tired out. All his enthusiasm had gone. His moustache drooped dolefully. ‘I’m all right, Mollie,’ he said. ‘I want to come down to dinner.’

  ‘Come on, then, my poor old man. I’ve been thinking about you all the time. Have they all been behaving very badly?’ She held him by the arm affectionately as he rose to his feet.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. They’ve all been very good.’ He tried to smile. ‘The fact is, I believe the expedition was doomed from the beginning. I ought not to have taken Armstrong.’

  ‘I knew there was something! I never liked that boy! What’s he been up to? Shall you take him to Ephesus, or aren’t you going on to Ephesus?’

  ‘Oh yes, I shall go to Ephesus. The fact is, Mollie, I don’t know what to do about Armstrong. I’m afraid I shall have to take him, whether I want to or not. He’s – you see, he intends to come. I never thought the day would come when I’d let myself be worsted by a – by a – really, I don’t know what to call him – I don’t know what he is.’