Come Away, Death

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘Someone exactly like Megan. I thought it was Megan dressed up.’

  ‘Now that’s what I call interesting,’ said Alexander Currie in tones of peculiar malice. Sir Rudri refused to pursue the subject, however.

  ‘She certainly was rather heavily built for a goddess,’ said Kenneth sweetly. ‘I didn’t know you meant Megan when you asked us.’

  ‘And she smelt a bit sweaty,’ said Stewart. Sir Rudri suddenly turned on them in a fury.

  ‘Get on back to the camp,’ he said, ‘as quickly as ever you can go! Go on! Get along with you! Get along! You’re missing your sleep! Ought to have been asleep some hours ago, some hours!’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Alexander Currie. Gelert, Cathleen, and Ian were ahead of the larger party, but their voices could be heard down the road. The litle boys hastened forward, deeming it the best policy, now that they had recovered their spirits and had their fun, to get out of Sir Rudri’s way, lest in his mind was still the idea of worshipping Artemis Orthia. ‘And we don’t want a real tanning,’ Kenneth said softly to Stewart. Ivor said nothing. He was wondering what his sister was doing, and whether she had run all the way to the station, and whether, before she left Selçuk, she had noticed the storks’ nests on the tops of the little houses. He had been horribly frightened when the goddess first ran into the glare of his father’s torch, but that feeling had almost gone. The theatrical nature of his sister’s appearance appealed to him. He visualized it again as he walked along.

  At the turning off the road which led to the ruined city, the rest of the party had halted. It was the first time that any of them had approached the ancient city by night from the dusty little road, and the thought of re-entering the dark passages of the theatre at that hour of the night filled even Gelert and Ian with superstitious discomfort. Very slowly, and keeping close up together, the group stumbled and lost their way, found the rough, winding path again, tripped, started back at the sight of the looming bushes, and drew sharp and nervous breath at the sound of the wind in the reeds of the silted, marshy harbour. At last they gained the theatre and negotiated the steep, very narrow little path which led up to it.

  ‘Which reminds me,’ said Alexander Currie, groping his way with the aid of the spotlight from the boys’ electric torch, ‘where’s Mrs Bradley?’

  ‘Here, child, nearly asleep. What a time you’ve taken to get back,’ said a beautiful, deep, soft voice from the depths of the back of the staging.

  ‘Golly!’ said Kenneth. ‘She came back here alone!’ It was, at any rate, as sincere a compliment as had ever been paid to Mrs Bradley’s courage. She cackled in acknowledgement of the tribute.

  ‘And where’s Dick?’ asked Ian suddenly.

  ‘He was with us as we came along the road. He must have lost the path when we went in single file, and we didn’t notice,’ said Gelert, hoping that no one would think it his duty to go and rescue the missing wanderer.

  ‘I’m not sleepy. I shall be glad, in fact, of a chance to think things over,’ Sir Rudri observed very readily. ‘I’ll go and see whether I can find him.’

  They heard him leave the theatre. He did not return, and, one by one, Cathleen last because she still felt uneasy, the party dropped off to sleep. At dawn he had not returned, and neither had Dick, and Gelert, who woke very early, not knowing that his father and Dick were not there, disengaged himself from his sleeping-sack, and stole out alone to walk in the early morning coolness.

  The ruins, eerie by night and informed with the strange power which seeps into such places in the darkness, were colder and more desolate in the dawn. The broken columns along the Sacred Way, its paving stones with the vegetation pushing up like rough hair between them, the banks, earth-covered, rising on either side and overgrown with bushes among which the loose stone even now asserted its greyish presence, the deserted nature of the place which man had abandoned, combined to make the picture of a city conquered by time and not by force of arms. Gelert wandered along the road which led to the harbour gateway, turned off it, climbed a bank, looked back towards the theatre, wandered back again, away from the sea marshes, and went to the library of Celsus, where he climbed the steps, and put his hand in the niche which once held a statue of Minerva. Then he went round, idly, touching the recesses in the walls where the book rolls of the consul Aquila once had had a home. The place was double-walled against damp. Between the walls was a passage leading to the sarcophagus of Celsus, the father of Aquila. Gelert stopped at the mouth of the passage. There were spots of fresh blood on the ground. Supposing that a jackal or a fox must have hunted in the ruins and found prey, he passed on down the narrow passage towards the sarcophagus. The passage made a turn at the end, and there was the solid imposing tomb, looking as though it had recently been placed in position. Face downwards at the end of the passage was the body of a man. It was naked to the waist, and was otherwise clad in the respectable twentieth-century trousers of Sir Rudri Hopkinson.

  Gelert knelt beside his father and tried to turn him over. The passage was not wide enough for this, but he was able to feel that the body was still warm. He thought it better not to attempt to drag him out of the passage, so he raced back to the theatre at risk of tripping and breaking his neck on uneven stones and half-hidden, broken columns and holes in the ground, and encountered Mrs Bradley coming away from the Hellenistic Agora.

  ‘Well met, child,’ she said.

  ‘Well met, indeed!’ said Gelert. ‘Have you a flask? Something’s happened to my father.’

  ‘Mr Currie has a flask.’

  ‘I’ll get him. Do go along and see what you can do. Library of Celsus. Over there.’

  ‘I know.’ She hastened off. She saw the bloodspots sooner than Gelert had done. They came from the Sacred Way, and led her into the passage to the sarcophagus.

  The passage was so narrow that it was impossible to do very much. Soon Gelert, Ian, and Alexander Currie came along, and with much difficulty and with great care Sir Rudri was carried back to the library steps, and laid in what might have been the main hall of the building, where Mrs Bradley examined him.

  His breast was covered with deep, wet, blackish gashes, some of them still oozing blood. Some of the blood had matted with the hairs on his breast. The highest wound was on the left shoulder, the lowest on the left side of the ribs a little higher than the level of the navel.

  ‘This is a mess,’ said Gelert, who was trembling. Mrs Bradley, kneeling beside the unconscious man, worked busily.

  ‘Bandages, Ian,’ she said, without looking up. ‘You know where I keep them. And tell Cathleen to keep the children away for a bit.’

  ‘Is he going to – will he live?’ asked Gelert.

  ‘Good gracious, yes, child. These are only cuts. I should think he became a little too enthusiastic over last night’s experiments, and has gashed himself, as the priests of Diana sometimes did. Wounds of this kind are often inflicted by the subject upon himself in moods of religious ecstasy.’

  She saw Sir Rudri carried back to the theatre and laid on his sack. When he was conscious again, in spite of the anxiety of the others, she left him, and walked back quickly to the Sacred Way. At the fountain the blood was splashed heavily on the stones. She followed the trail of it, lost it on the plants, found it again – she scarcely needed its guidance, for the track of it followed the Sacred Way back towards the site of the temple.

  She emerged on to the road. Dark and sinister, clotting the thick dust, the bloodstains, larger and more numerous, led her by the way she had come on the previous night. On the ground by the pond there was more blood. There seemed no doubt of what had happened. Suddenly her eye was caught by another object. Behind some bushes there grew a thin-trunked tree. Almost bending it double, something was hanging on this tree.

  Mrs Bradley, moving with great celerity, shot round the bushes, regardless of wild pig or anything else which might be lurking in them, and took a knife from her pocket.

  Hanging by the neck from the treetop, its heels
just reaching the ground and the tree bent over in an arch, was a figure dressed as they had seen the Artemis dressed the night before. Phrygian cap, great cloak, short tunic, buskins and all, the costume hung all of a heap on the hanging figure, which appeared to have shrunk to almost half its previous size.

  Disregarding everything else, however, Mrs Bradley cut the goddess down. The tree flew up with a force which, had she not cut, with a single slash, every strand of the cords, would have jerked the hanging figure into the pond. Birds flew screaming from every part of the landscape. There was a heavy crashing of a startled animal in the thickets. A black goat, strayed from its owner, gave a long cry of terror before it fled for safety.

  Mrs Bradley knelt by the figure she had cut down. The Phrygian cap had come off. The cloak gaped open. The short tunic displayed a thin, hard, hairy leg instead of the girlish thigh of the virgin Artemis. Pitiably grotesque in the panoply of the goddess of hunting and of maidens, Ronald Dick lay on the ground before her.

  ‘Dear me!’ said Mrs Bradley, setting to work on him. ‘Hecate in person!’

  ‘The hanging woman!’ said Sir Rudri feebly, when he heard the dramatic news. He and Dick, both laid out in the shade by zealous nurses and attended with every care by the little boys, had become the heroes of the expedition. Kenneth, particularly, entranced by the thought that both of them had been set upon by members of a secret society for the preservation of Asia Minor from archaeologists, could not sufficiently volunteer his services on their behalf, and the other little boys were scarcely less pestilentially helpful and concerned.

  ‘For God’s sake go away and play at something, or eat something, or something,’ said Gelert at last, entirely exasperated by their solicitous anxiety over the patients’ condition. ‘Anybody would think you were a lot of young vultures waiting for both of them to peg out.’

  As the little boys did devoutly hope that Dick at least would expire of the effects of partial strangulation, this shot of Gelert’s was so near the mark that they complied with his request to remove themselves from the vicinity of the theatre.

  ‘I suppose we shall go home now,’ Stewart remarked dejectedly to Mrs Bradley when she met him practising shooting in the Arcadiane.

  ‘Where did you get the bow and arrows from, child?’ she inquired, not immediately answering the question.

  ‘Me?’ said Stewart. He looked at the little light bow and the feathered arrows guiltily. ‘I – I sort of found them, you know.’

  Mrs Bradley took the bow and one of the arrows from him. She tested the string, glanced keenly over the arrow with her bright, black eyes, and then, fitting the arrow to the string, she shot at a little fig-tree. The arrow struck the tree, but fell away. She went over and picked it up. She examined its tip and then inspected the tree-trunk.

  ‘Hardly a lethal weapon,’ she observed. ‘Where are the others, Stewart?’

  ‘Looking to see what else the goddess dropped when she hopped it away from the temple last night in the dark.’

  ‘Ah, yes, of course. And did she drop anything else?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think she had anything else to drop. But where do you think Dick got her clothes?’

  ‘I imagine she gave them to him, but he may have stolen them from her.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At Selçuk, child, before the train went back to Izmir this morning, I imagine.’

  ‘Lumme, then it was Megan!’

  ‘Well, I expect it was.’

  ‘Who put her up to it? Sir Rudri?’

  ‘I don’t know, child. I expect so.’

  ‘To give sucks to Mr Currie, that would be. He hates Mr Currie like poison.’

  ‘Nonsense, child.’

  ‘It isn’t,’ said Stewart sturdily. ‘May I have my bow and arrow, please?’

  ‘Certainly.’ She handed them over and walked back the way she had come. Dick was so far recovered that he was sitting up on his sack playing patience with two packs of cards which nobody in the company knew he possessed. He swept the cards together when Mrs Bradley seated herself beside him.

  ‘Well, child,’ she said. ‘How are you now, I wonder?’

  ‘Oh, better, thanks,’ stammered Dick. He seemed embarrassed, and took off his glasses and rubbed them on a silk handkerchief.

  ‘Did you wound Sir Rudri last night or early this morning?’

  ‘No – no, I didn’t. I – if you really want to know —’

  ‘You went to see Megan at Selçuk before she returned to Smyrna. Yes, I knew that.’ She nodded. Dick looked surprised.

  ‘You knew it was Megan?’

  ‘Yes, child. Did you know of the plot to deceive us all into thinking that we were favoured by a manifestation of the goddess?’

  ‘I told him afterwards that I thought it extremely idiotic.’

  ‘And he replied —?’

  ‘He went for me, of course, and knocked me unconscious. When I came to I was tied up to that beastly tree with just my feet trailing the ground.’

  ‘Very fortunate for you. Sir Rudri must be a strangely merciful man.’

  ‘He’s a monomaniac. That’s what he is, you know.’

  ‘A deceptive one,’ said Mrs Bradley, as though she were thinking aloud, as perhaps she was. She looked at Dick. ‘Did she give you the bow and arrows as well as the clothes?’

  ‘I didn’t know there was a bow and arrow.’

  ‘Oh, Artemis must have had a bow and arrow, surely?’

  ‘Must she? Oh, goddess of hunting. Yes, I see. What did she do with them, then?’

  She dropped them, and Stewart found them. I myself found rather a curious thing here the other day, you know.’

  ‘Did you? What was that? A skull, by any chance?’

  ‘It was. How did you know?’

  ‘I didn’t. I thought that a skull would seem to you a strange thing to pick up among the ruins, but, really, of course, it is not, when one comes to think.’

  ‘No. Not when one comes to think,’ Mrs Bradley absently agreed. ‘Tell me, child, does your head ache?’

  ‘No, not now. I feel wonderfully better.’

  ‘Do you think Sir Rudri remembers what he did?’

  ‘Most unlikely, I should say. I’ve worked with him now for a long time in Athens, you know, and he really is the most unaccountable man.’

  ‘The whole expedition has been a little odd, don’t you think, child?’

  ‘Knowing Sir Rudri, no, I don’t think it has. Of course, it was odd of Cathleen and Ian to marry, but that was not the fault of the expedition, since it appears that they were married before it commenced.’

  ‘Yes. What did you think of the happenings at Eleusis, child?’

  ‘That they were not more strange than the happenings at Epidaurus and Mycenae. Sir Rudri is a very unaccountable man.’

  ‘Yes, you said so before, and I am sure you must be right. Do you really think Sir Rudri intended to kill you?’

  ‘I don’t think he thought about that. He wanted to finish the deception in style. He had produced for us Artemis in person; he then conceived the idea of presenting Hecate as well, in the guise of the hanging woman dressed in the garments of the goddess.’

  ‘But in the legend, surely, the woman hanged herself first, and was then clothed by Artemis.’

  ‘I believe that is so. Possibly he would get muddled.’

  ‘Unlikely, child, believe me.’

  ‘In any case, it doesn’t matter, does it? You cut me down, and for that I am very grateful.’

  He looked at the scattered cards. Mrs Bradley took the hint. She rose, shook out her skirt, and went across to her other patient, who was lying full length, quite still.

  ‘Don’t brood, child,’ said Mrs Bradley, squatting like a toad beside him. ‘Tell me what you’ve been up to.’

  ‘You said I was to keep quiet and not to exert myself, Beatrice.’

  ‘Yes, but that was several hours ago. How do the wounds feel now?’

  ‘A bit stiff and very s
ore. Two of them throb rather badly.’

  ‘Serve you right. You shouldn’t take your silly games so seriously. I wonder when Megan will get a ship back to Athens?’

  ‘This evening. I mean, there is a ship that leaves Izmir this evening. What’s Megan got to do with it?’

  ‘Don’t be childish, dear child. Everybody knows that Megan was the goddess Artemis, just as everybody knows that at Eleusis Armstrong was the god Iaccus, and at Epidaurus – who was it at Epidaurus, Rudri? The white figure in the Tholos two nights running?’

  ‘A white figure in the Tholos?’ For a minute she thought he was going to have a seizure. He struggled to a sitting position, appeared to claw at the air, grew purplish-red in the face, and puffy under the eyes, opened those eyes until they looked like those of a cod on a slab, and gave vent to several snorting sounds of mingled grief and fear.

  ‘And I never saw him! I never saw him!’ he said. Mrs Bradley reached for his pulse. She received the impression that the grief and the fear were genuine.

  ‘Tell me about it later on,’ she said, in her deep and soothing tones. ‘Rudri, did you know that Armstrong was dead?’

  ‘Armstrong dead?’ The news, instead of being a further shock, appeared to afford Sir Rudri some considerable relief. ‘I thought perhaps he might be about now. I’ve been looking forward to the news, I might tell you, Beatrice. It makes a lot of difference to me to know that the fellow is dead.’

  ‘But, Rudri, he was murdered!’

  ‘Murdered. That’s what I mean.’

  Mrs Bradley regarded him with serene interest for a minute or two. Then she gave him two little pellets to swallow, and a glass of the bottled water to drink with them.

  ‘I think,’ she said deliberately, ‘that I’ll leave you now, and walk into Selçuk to get some bottled beer. The walk will do me good, and the beer will be nice for lunch.’

  Sir Rudri grunted in acquiescence, or what she took to be such. She got up, dusted her skirt, and went to find Ian and Cathleen.

  ‘I want you both to go back with Megan to Athens,’ she said. ‘As soon as Sir Rudri and Ronald Dick feel well enough to travel we shall all come, but I want some people there to tell Marie Hopkinson that her husband will have to be kept under observation for a time.’