The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches

by Alan Bradley

  “I would if I could. But the old girl—See? You’ve got me calling her an old girl!—needs hangaring. Plus the gentle hand of a good mechanic.”

  “Dogger could look after her,” I said.

  Dogger, after all, could do anything.

  He shook his head sadly. “I’m afraid I’ve sold her,” he said.

  I felt my heart sink within me.

  Blithe Spirit sold? I don’t know why, but it didn’t seem right. She had, after all, been sold before.

  “Look here,” Tristram Tallis said. “How would it be if I took you for a flip?”

  At first I didn’t understand him—didn’t know what he was suggesting.

  “A flip?”

  “A flight.”

  Could this be true? Could it actually be happening to me? I had once asked Father what Buckshaw looked like from the air. “Ask your aunt Felicity,” he’d said. “She’s flown.”

  I never had, of course. Now the opportunity was staring me straight in the face.

  “That’s very kind of you, Mr. Tallis, but I couldn’t possibly accept without permission.”

  I knew already what Father’s reply would be, even if I was willing to intrude upon him, which I wasn’t.

  What a disappointment, though: having to refuse my only chance to take to the air in Harriet’s Blithe Spirit.

  My spirits were already sinking when a second figure stepped from the shadows.

  It was Dogger.

  He handed me a red woolly jumper I had mislaid a week ago in the greenhouse.

  “Put this on, Miss Flavia,” he said, without so much as a smile. “The air can be remarkably cold in the mornings.”

  Then I, with a silly grin splitting my face from side to side in the damp dawn, was sprinting across the Visto towards Blithe Spirit.

  Tristram Tallis strapped me into the front seat and left me sitting there alone as he made a tour of inspection round the aircraft, touching here, wiggling there, peering at one thing and another.

  I took the opportunity to have a quick look round the cockpit in which I was sitting. I think I had been expecting something quite wonderful in a machine which was capable of flying up among the gods, but this one seemed horribly underequipped for such a journey: a simple stick that jutted up out of the floor and a couple of dials and gauges on a wooden panel.

  And that was all. Surely this thing was too frail to fly.

  I was beginning to think I had made a mistake. Perhaps I should beg off. But it was too late.

  After a couple of halfhearted swings at the propeller, Tristram returned to the cockpit, threw a switch, and gave it another try. There was an alarming mechanical clanking from the engine, a burst of smoke, and with a roar the propeller disappeared in a blur.

  The wings teetered alarmingly as he clambered aboard.

  “All set?” he shouted as he fastened himself in the back seat, and I, clutching the edges of the cockpit, managed a grim nod.

  The roar became a tornado and we began to move, slowly at first, but with ever-increasing speed until we were rattling along cross-country like the Hinley Hunt in full cry.

  Faster and faster still we went until I thought Blithe Spirit was about to tear herself to pieces.

  And then a sudden smoothness.

  We were flying!

  Rather than us rising up into the air as I had expected we would, the earth fell away beneath us like a carpet being jerked out from under one’s feet by some unseen practical joker.

  I had no more than a fleeting impression of the roofs of Buckshaw before the ornamental lake was floating quickly past below us.

  The sun was an enormous red fire balloon on the horizon as we rose up out of the shadows and into the sudden daylight.

  It was breathtaking!

  If Feely and Daffy had dashed to their windows at the noise of our takeoff, I would be no more to them now than a flyspeck in the distance.

  Just as I always was, I couldn’t help thinking.

  But beneath our wings, the marvelous toy world slid slowly by: hills, fields, woods and valleys, dales, dells, ponds and groves. Far below us, miniature sheep grazed in handkerchief pastures.

  It made me want to write a hymn. Hadn’t even Johann Sebastian Bach composed something about sheep?

  Away to the east, the rising sun struck a sharp glint off the river, and for a few moments, as we turned away from it, the Efon was a shimmering snake of rubies crawling off towards a distant sea.

  How Harriet must have loved this, I thought: the freedom of it all—the sense of having left one’s body, but not one’s mind, behind. Unless you happened to be a bird, the body was of little use up here: You could not run or jump as you did on the ground, but only observe.

  In a strange way, being an aviator was like being a departed soul: You could look down upon the Earth without actually being present, see all without being seen.

  It was easy enough to see why God, having called the dry land “Earth” and the gathering together of the waters “the Seas,” saw that it was good.

  I could picture the Old Fellow lifting up the horizon like the lid of a stewing pot and peeking in with one red eye to admire His Creation: to see how it was coming along.

  It was good!

  Tristram was waving a hand, pointing downwards. Blithe Spirit tilted precipitously to one side, and I found myself looking down the wing at an oddly familiar collection of buildings.

  Bishop’s Lacey’s High Street!

  There was the Thirteen Drakes, inside which all those official people from the railway station—those bullies from the Home Office, presumably billeted in every nook and cranny, even unto the broom cupboards, if Daffy was to be believed—were dreaming their dreadful dreams of power.

  And down there, in Cow Lane, was the Bishop’s Lacey Free Library—and Tilda Mountjoy’s Willow Villa, even more gaudily orange than usual in the light of the early morning.

  We had now flown through half of a vast clockwise circle and were turning south again. Ahead I could see the Palings, that curious bend in the river at the edge of our estate, and I wondered what the Hobblers, that peculiar cult who had once baptized their babies at that spot, might have made of our flying machine appearing suddenly in the sky.

  A little to the east, the Gulley ran along the river to Goodger Hill, down which Gladys and I had so often raced and fallen breathless at the bottom.

  And there was the Jack O’Lantern, the skull-like outcropping which loomed over the Palings. I had promised to meet Lena there for a picnic after the funeral.

  Almost directly to the east, at the very bottom of Pooker’s Lane, was Rook’s End, and I smiled at the thought of Dr. Kissing. The old gentleman would already be up and puffing at his first cigarette of the day.

  Perhaps we could give him a bit of a show: Buzz the aerodrome, as the pilots at Leathcote would have said. It would be good to let Father’s old headmaster know that someone was thinking of him. I grinned at the thought of his speculating for hours about whom it might have been.

  Flavia de Luce was the last person on earth he’d ever think of!

  I waved frantically with both hands to get Tristram’s attention and pointed down at Rook’s End.

  He must have done this sort of thing before because the stick in front of me lunged suddenly forward and to one side, and we were hurtling down towards the earth at a terrific speed, the wings whistling and the wind howling in the wires like banshees.

  “Yaroo!” I wanted to shout, but I kept it to myself. I didn’t want Tristram to think I was immature.

  Just when it seemed we must become a permanent blot on the landscape, we pulled up out of the dive, and I watched as our winged shadow raced across the stony face of the Jack O’Lantern. We had cheated death.

  Now we were floating lazily along just above the treetops of the park at Rook’s End. As the house came into view, I noticed several motorcars parked in the forecourt. It would have been difficult to miss them.

  One was an apple green Rolls-R
oyce with the rear part of its roof peeled away to form a makeshift greenhouse. There couldn’t possibly be another like it in the entire world.

  It was Nancy, Adam Sowerby’s old Roller.

  And parked beside it was an angular mint green Land Rover.

  Lena de Luce!

  What the dickens was she doing here?

  Why would she and Adam be meeting at Rook’s End at such an ungodly hour of the morning? What could the two of them possibly want with Dr. Kissing?—for surely it was him they had come to see.

  Who else could possibly bring them to this remote and frankly uninviting home for decayed gentlefolk?

  My thoughts were interrupted by a sudden silence. Tristram had throttled back Blithe Spirit’s engine and we had entered into a gentle glide. Buckshaw was dead ahead.

  We’re going to crash! I was sure of it as the ground rushed up to meet us.

  But we slipped through the quiet air above the Mulford Gates, skimmed the treetops of the avenue of chestnuts, and alighted on the Visto as gently as a mayfly on a rose petal.

  “Well?” Tristram demanded. We had come to rest and he was already climbing out of the back cockpit. “What did you think?”

  “Most instructive,” I said.

  TWENTY-TWO

  “DOGGER,” I ASKED, “WHAT possible reason could Adam Sowerby and Lena de Luce have for driving to Rook’s End before sunrise?”

  “I’m sure I can’t say, Miss Flavia.”

  “Can’t say—or won’t say?”

  My conversations with Dogger were often like that: a gentle game between two chess masters.

  “Can’t say. I don’t know.”

  “What do you know?”

  Dogger gave the ghost of a smile, and I knew that he was enjoying this as much as I was.

  “I know that each left in his or her own vehicle at approximately twelve minutes past five this morning.”

  “Anything else?”

  “And that the elder Miss de Luce—your aunt Felicity—accompanied them.”

  “What?!”

  It was unheard of that Aunt Felicity, who loved nothing better than to barricade herself in her bedroom armed with no more than toaster, tea, and the latest thriller, should go gallivanting round the countryside in the dark of the moon.

  Simply unheard of.

  “Where were they going?”

  “At a guess, Rook’s End,” Dogger said. “An assumption confirmed perhaps, at least in part, by your own aerial reconnaissance.”

  His placid, utterly impassive face told me there was more.

  “And?” I demanded. “What else?”

  “Colonel de Luce accompanied them.”

  My whole world tilted, as if I was still in the air, making a steep turn in Blithe Spirit.

  If it was unheard of for Aunt Felicity to venture out beyond the bounds of Buckshaw, the fact that Father would—

  No! I simply refused to believe it.

  “Are you sure?” I asked. Perhaps Dogger was having a gentle joke, although it seemed unlikely.

  “Quite sure,” he said.

  “Did he say where he was going?”

  “He did not. And I did not inquire.”

  Was there a message in Dogger’s words? Was he warning me to mind my own business?

  Dogger’s loyalty, I sometimes had to remind myself, was first of all to Father, and I must never, for any reason, impose upon that devotion.

  “Thank you, Dogger,” I said. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  “Not at all, Miss Flavia,” he said, with that look on his face. “I am always pleased to be of service.”

  Alone in my laboratory, I tried desperately to keep my mind occupied in the hours remaining before the funeral by resuming an experiment I had been considering when news had come of Harriet’s discovery in the Himalayas.

  It is a fact of nature that, given sufficient quantities, poison can be obtained from even the most harmless organic substances. Tapioca and rhubarb, for instance, contain exquisite death if the wrong parts of the plant are used in their preparation, and even our dear old friend water, H2O, is capable of poisoning if too much of the stuff is drunk in too short a span of time.

  I made a couple of notes but my heart just wasn’t in it. I threw down my pencil.

  Although I loathed the very idea, it was likely time to begin dressing for the day. Mrs. Mullet had fetched out and cleaned one of the mothballed school uniforms that Harriet, when she was my age, had been made to wear at Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy in Toronto, Canada: a black-belted horror worn with long black stockings and a white blouse that made me look like one of those grotesque but amusing creatures from Ronald Searle’s St Trinian’s cartoons. Like Father and Dogger, Mr. Searle had been a prisoner of the Japanese in Singapore, and his work was much admired by some of us at Buckshaw.

  I scrubbed my face and teeth, cleaned the remnants of my nails, sighed deeply, and turned to the task I most truly despised: the braiding of my hair into pigtails.

  I had tried everything I could think of to make it an adventure. I had pretended that I was a pirate, lashed to the mainmast in a howling hurricane, splicing the only rope that could secure the last remaining sail.

  Right over left … and up … and under. Left over right …

  “Ha, ha, me hearties. Simple as sin. Break out the grog!”

  But it was no use. Transforming a haystack of mousy brown hair into a length of romantic rigging was too much to hope for.

  The worst thing about dressing one’s own hair was the fact that it needed to be done backwards. It was like playing a game of “In a Glass Darkly” in Girl Guides, in which one must try to write one’s full name with pencil on a scrap of paper while looking in a mirror:

  —a game during which I always wished I had been born plain old AVA OXO, or at least someone with a more symmetrical name.

  The losers and the clumsy players were always hooted heartily, and it was at those times I most often found my thoughts turning to the subject of poisons.

  I secured the ends of the pigtails with a couple of blue ribbons tied into neat bows. Yellow was too cheerful for the occasion, red too gaudy, and orange out of the question.

  I stared at myself in the looking glass. Who was this girl with her mother’s face? It was as if I were wearing a Harriet mask for Carnival and had not noticed it until now.

  And, to tell the truth, it frightened me.

  Breakfast at Buckshaw was always a glum affair, and this morning was no exception. Tristram and Adam were seated at the foot of the table, as if to keep a respectful distance from the grieving family.

  Father, all in black, sat at the head, his palms flat on the table. He had touched not a crumb of his breakfast and it seemed unlikely that he would do so.

  Beside him, Feely was a pale ghost, nibbling absently at a piece of dry toast. She needed to keep her strength up if she was to be at the organ for Harriet’s funeral.

  Everyone from family to the vicar and his wife had tried to dissuade her, but all in vain. Feely was as steely cold in her stubborn resolve as only a wispy-looking musician can be.

  Daffy, cocooned in some kind of comic, musty Victorian mourning outfit, was helping herself to another kipper. Her acid glance defied me to say anything.

  When she was like this, even Father knew better than to risk a single word.

  Aunt Felicity sat at the middle of the table, well apart from both groups, humming mindlessly to herself like a hive of distant bees.

  Adam gave me the tiniest of nods before resuming his quiet conversation with Tristram, who did not give me so much as a glance. It was as if our early morning flight had been merely a dream—and perhaps it had. Perhaps it had never happened.

  A time traveler, materializing at our breakfast table from some far future, would have supposed that Mrs. Mullet was the only one of us who was flesh and blood with the deceased.

  Mrs. M, to be perfectly honest, looked a wreck. Her face was flushed, her eyes brimming with unshed tears, an
d her hair sticking out like jackstraws.

  She fished a kipper and a couple of bangers from their serving dishes and placed them on my plate. Her lips were even more tightly pressed together than they had been before—as if they were now additionally secured by C-clamps.

  She said not a word, and I realized in that instant how deep was her despair.

  I reached out to touch her hand but she was already gone.

  Breakfast broke up with no more than a few hushed words exchanged between the two guests at the foot of the table.

  I excused myself and left the room. I would go to my laboratory and try to set down in my notes the confusion that was in my mind.

  I was no more than halfway across the foyer when the doorbell rang. Dogger appeared from nowhere, as he often does so uncannily, and swung the heavy door back on its hinges.

  Two delivery men in overalls, their arms filled with flowers, stood waiting. Behind them, on the gravel sweep, their van, open at the back, overflowed with bouquets, wreaths, and carpeted arrangements of carnations, cornflowers, arum lilies, and forget-me-nots all nestled in beds of Queen Anne’s lace. There were gladioli, peonies, and roses; marigolds, chrysanthemums, and irises.

  It was as if the gardens of Heaven had been raided and the plunder delivered to our door with more than enough flowers to overflow the foyer.

  In spite of the early hour, a fresh queue of mourners had already formed, snaking round the van and making a straggling half circle in the forecourt.

  As the men spat on their hands and began the long job of moving the flowers into the house, Dogger produced a small notebook from his vest pocket and began carefully cataloging the names of the senders, which he read from the pasteboard cards attached to each arrangement.

  It was as if all the world had known Harriet, and all the world in mourning had sent their floral tributes.

  “Sorry about your mother,” a voice said at my ear. “Rotten bad luck. I should have hoped it would turn out better than this.”

  I spun round, knowing already that it was Adam Sowerby, or, to give him the whole McGillicuddy—as it was so prominently printed on his card, which I still had tucked away in the pages of a recent notebook: