by Alan Bradley
“Phah!” Hob said. “They were afraid of her. Mrs. Perry leaned over and whispered to Mrs. Belaney: ‘They’re all afraid of that—’
“I’m not allowed to say the next word, but you must know the one I mean. I heard it with my own ears.”
“You’re a very clever lad, Hob,” I said, and he nearly burst into flames.
“I knew it!” he said, hugging himself. “I knew it!”
“Well, you are,” I assured him. “What else have you heard? About Poppy Mandrill, I mean. We can get to the others later.”
“She’s with the Puddle Lane Little Theatre.” Hob rolled his eyes as if I would understand. “They put on plays in the Town Hall. Pantomimes at Christmas. You know.”
I did indeed. We suffered in much the same way at Bishop’s Lacey with the same kind of dreary and awkward—but compulsory—comedies.
But why on earth would the dead Orlando be dressed for a Christmas pantomime? It was June, for goodness’ sake! Rehearsals wouldn’t even begin for months, and as for dress rehearsals—well, they were simply out of the question at this time of year.
“Is anyone holding a masquerade?” I asked.
“I don’t know that word,” Hob said.
“A masquerade? A dress-up party. Costumes. Highwaymen, for instance. Gents in powdered wigs, ladies in silk dresses like tents at the fête, and black beauty spots stuck on their cheeks.”
“Ugh,” Hob said. “Doesn’t sound very beautiful to me. I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“Why are they afraid of Poppy Mandrill?” I asked, trying to get my line of questioning back onto the track.
“She’s bossy,” Hob said. “Always giving people orders.”
“Isn’t that what a theater director is supposed to do?” I asked, only half seriously.
“Not in church!” Hob exclaimed, his eyes widening and his hackles rising visibly.
“Did you actually see that happen?” I asked.
Hob nodded several times to make his point. “Only once,” he said. “She shouted out at the vicar, right in the middle of his sermon.”
“Good lord!” I blurted. Even I wouldn’t have dared such sacrilege. “Do you remember what she said?”
“She said ‘Cut the cackle, Vicar. I’ve a train to catch.’ ”
“Was this on Palm Sunday, by any chance?” I asked. “About three months ago?”
“How did you know that?” Hob asked. “We all had our palm fronds in our hands. Lizzy Pleasance tried to strangle me with hers. I took mine home and made a straw soldier out of it.”
I couldn’t help wondering idly what Hob would have thought if I’d told him I usually twisted my own annual palm frond into a hangman’s noose.
Actually, naming the date was a brilliant bit of deduction on my part. I knew by bitter experience that the Palm Sunday morning service was the longest in The Book of Common Prayer. The Gospel was taken from Matthew, chapter 27.
Which, as I recalled, ran more than a thousand words. I knew this because I had counted them, one by one, following with my index finger, as our own vicar, Denwyn Richardson, had read them aloud on several Palm Sundays, back home in Bishop’s Lacey.
“You lot are getting off easily,” he had told us at Confirmation class. “Had you been unfortunate enough to have lived in about 1550, in the time of King Edward the Sixth—who died at the age of fifteen…younger than you, there, Ted Pullymore…yes, you, Ted…and who died coughing up green, black, and pink matter, leading some to believe he had been poisoned—you’d have had to sit still three times longer than we do nowadays. In those days, the Gospel reading for Palm Sunday combined Matthew chapters 26 and 27, and would have lasted somewhere between twenty minutes and half an hour. Fortunately, the many editors of The Book of Common Prayer, in their wisdom, took mercy upon our poor, aching sitters and slashed the reading substantially.”
That’s what I loved about Denwyn Richardson: He simply oozed history.
“And what about the dead man?” I asked Hob. “Orlando. Did you know him?”
“Orlando?” Hob snorted noisily. “Everybody knew Orlando.”
“Everybody except me,” I said. “I don’t even know his last name.”
“Whitbread,” Hob said. “Orlando Whitbread. His father used to be the rector of St.-Mildred’s-in-the-Marsh.”
Whitbread?
You could have knocked me over with a bit of goose down.
“Canon Whitbread?” I asked. “Not Canon Whitbread? Not the one who—”
“Choked on a rope?” Hob said. “Yes, that’s the one. I helped Daddy embalm him.”
·SIX·
WHAT CAN YOU POSSIBLY say to a child who has helped his father pump preservatives into the carotid artery of a hanged murderer?
Precious little, I discovered. There are no words suitable for the occasion; no words to convey my shock, my awe, my admiration, or my jealousy.
“Are you surprised?” Hob asked. “You seem surprised.”
“Not at all,” I said, leaping madly aboard the opportunity. “Tell me about it.”
“You look surprised,” Hob persisted.
“All right, then. I’m surprised. Astonished. Flabbergasted, in fact. Tell me about it.”
“Perhaps when I know you better,” Hob said.
Where did this little lad get his spunkiness from? What crazy corner of the universe animated his mind?
“All right,” I said. “I don’t mind. I’m really not all that interested anyway.”
Hob said nothing, but gave me a look that suggested I’d just been caught poaching his father’s chickens.
If undertakers, in fact, had chickens. I could think of various reasons why they might and might not keep poultry, none of them suitable for discussion with anyone other than the most confidential friends. And even then…
But before I could stop him, Hob was loping off toward home.
“Farewell,” he called back over his shoulder.
Had I scared him off by being too familiar?
Well, no matter.
But I didn’t think of the obvious question until he had already disappeared round a corner.
“Hob! Wait!” I called, but he didn’t hear me. Or pretended not to.
I could have run after him, but there was no time. Never mind, I decided, there will be other opportunities.
Meanwhile, Feely, Daffy, and Dogger would already be worrying about me. Or would they? I could never quite be sure.
In any case, I needn’t have bothered. By the time I got back to the church, Feely was still lost in The Art of Fugue, which was now nearing its end—or what passed as its end, since J. S. Bach had never finished the thing. At the point where he had abruptly given it up, Bach had noted on the manuscript that, at this point, the composer had died. Which was, Daffy said, a colossal joke that no one had yet spotted: that somewhere up among the stars, Bach was still waiting for someone to laugh.
I gave a quiet chuckle at the thought, and old Johann Sebastian, from somewhere beyond Pluto, raised two fingers and gave me the “V for Victory” sign.
Dogger and Daffy were sitting side by side in a back pew, eyes closed, hands folded on tummies like a pair of well-fed pigeons on a ledge at Westminster Abbey, listening contentedly to the music.
I slid in quietly beside them, and although Dogger opened the corner of one eye, Daffy may as well have been somewhere in the far-off Fiji Islands.
I walked my fingers slowly and quietly across the pew as if they were a hump-backed spider.
With my forefinger, I tapped out a message in code on the back of Dogger’s hand: a quick touch for a dot and a long touch for a dash. Jolly good thing I had been forced to learn the Morse system at Miss Bodycote’s, in Canada.
Dot-dash-dash-dot, dot-dash-dot, dash-dash-dash, and so forth, until I had spelled out the letters P-R-O-G-R-E-S-S.
For just a fraction of a moment I thought he hadn’t got it, but then I saw his head incline by about a sixty-fourth of an inch. If you hadn’t known D
ogger, you’d have sworn he hadn’t budged.
Now his hand was lightly touching mine: E-X-C-E-L-L-E-N-T, his fingers tapped.
A warm glow came over me, and I hoped I wasn’t flushing. I sneaked a glance at Dogger, but his eyes were still closed. How noble he looked! How like a god.
The Art of Fugue ended abruptly as I knew it would: cut off in mid-flight—just like Orlando Whitbread.
And, come to think of it, just like his father, late of St.-Mildred’s-in-the-Marsh.
As the music came to a stop, the organ made the usual little dying noises as the air left its lungs. Somewhere behind the tall ornamental pipes, leather bellows collapsed, and all the tiny tin and wooden arteries, deprived of wind, wheezed into a restless silence.
For a moment, the three of us, Daffy, Dogger, and I, sat in that uneasy vacuum that always comes into existence when the music ends, each one of us reluctant to be the first to speak.
In the end, it was me.
“We’d better get back to the Oak and Pheasant,” I said. “We’ll need to book rooms. I don’t expect we’ll be going home until further notice.”
“Those arrangements are already seen to, Miss Flavia,” Dogger said. “I shall go fetch the car.”
We had left the Rolls parked a short distance up the river at the boat rental establishment.
“Good old Dogger,” I said, patting his hand. “You are the one fixed point in a changing age.”
He smiled and vanished.
“Sherlock Holmes,” Daffy said, her eyes popping open. “ ‘His Last Bow.’ ‘There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast.’ ”
Even though she was quoting from memory, Daffy’s words shook me to the core. I was seized with a sudden crawling chill. Instead of the word “England,” she might have said “such a wind as never blew on us,” us meaning the de Luce family.
With Father’s death, the blight had already begun. This happy holiday was no more than the gentle and deceiving slope at the lip of the pit.
There was a clatter behind us on the stone steps, and Feely appeared.
“Come along, slugs,” she said, meaning Daffy and me. “I’m famished.”
Feely was like that. She could switch her attention from Gregorian chant to the state of her own gut in half of a horsefly’s heartbeat.
I had come to realize that I simply didn’t understand my older sister, and I never would.
As we came out of the church, I noticed that Orlando’s body had been removed from the riverbank. Constable Otter was nowhere in sight. Nor was Miss Mandrill.
A cluster of women in housedresses stood on—or close to—the spot where Orlando had until lately lain leaking into the grass. Even at this distance, and against the wind, I could hear the sound of their magpie chatter.
Back at the inn, we found that our rooms had already been assigned. Feely was to be given the best bedroom: a low-timbered chamber at the front of the building, which faced the church and in which, or so it was said, Queen Elizabeth I had slept on one of her many Progresses round her kingdom.
“Is there a single bedroom in all of England in which she didn’t?” Daffy asked sourly, but the landlord, who was accustomed to such impertinence, shot back:
“Yes. Mine.”
Daffy had the good grace to laugh, although I knew her well enough to recognize that it was insincere.
Daffy had been given a cozy little chamber, up one step on the west side of the building, which, in the days of Good Queen Bess, had been a small country house.
“Longer daylight for reading,” she said.
Although she had spotted a small library, which was little more than a couple of shelves banged together halfway up the stairs, she had written it off at a glance.
“Anthony Hopeless,” she said. “Ouida…Sabatini…Michael Arlen…Rider Haggard…and not so much as a single scribble by the Divine Charles.”
Meaning Dickens, of course, to whom she had constructed a small shrine in her bedroom at Buckshaw. Before coming away on our holiday, I had suggested she have the whole setup mounted on an oxcart as they did with their portable altars in the Middle Ages.
“We can tow it behind the Rolls,” I told her. “Think how handy it would be to have the whole lot of it: portrait of the Divine Charles, candles, snuffers, incense, first editions of Bleak House and The Pickwick Papers all right there at your fingertips in case you suffer withdrawal symptoms.”
Whereupon I had been driven from the breakfast table in a hail of bath buns, which, considering that they had been baked by Mrs. Mullet, was a good deal more life-threatening than it sounds.
As for me, I was to be quartered in a tiny room at the rear of the inn, which had once, the landlord assured me, been a small minstrel’s gallery.
“Don’t worry if you hear strange voices singing in the night,” he told me in a confidential tone. “They’re mostly harmless—even though the last lady wot heard ’em went stark mad,” he added, dropping into a dialect stage whisper, “an’ ’ad to be put in a straitjacket!”
I ignored him.
A glance out of the narrow single window told me that the only voices I was likely to hear would be those of the old gaffers sitting round the trestle tables in the sunken garden with their tankards of ale.
I raised the flyblown Holland blind to let more light into this murky chamber.
The furnishings were sparse, to say the least: a small bed complete with a chamber pot, a cheap wooden table with ewer and pitcher, a safety lamp with candle and glass chimney—presumably for emergencies in the night—a chair that was straight out of a painting by Vincent van Gogh, a sink that had seen goodness-knows-what, a hot plate and tin kettle, and an oval mirror with yellowed glass.
Dogger was already back, bringing with him my small traveling case from the Rolls. Unlike Daffy, who had insisted on dragging along a wooden packing case containing The Works of Charles Dickens, complete in twenty-six fat, red, heavy leather-bound volumes, I had brought only the bare necessities: a toothbrush, and Taylor’s Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence. In order to keep down the weight, I had selected only the second volume of that great work: the one containing the poisons.
I waited until the landlord, with his hand-rubbing ghost stories, was out of earshot, and even then, I closed the door.
“Dogger,” I asked, “where do they bury executed murderers?”
“Well, Miss Flavia,” he said, “that depends upon the times. In the eighteenth century, they were sometimes left hanging on the gibbet. The birds took care of the rest.”
I gave a delicious shiver at the thought.
“Some were buried at a crossroads,” Dogger went on, “as were suicides, until the practice was abolished by an Act of Parliament in the 1820s.”
“Why a crossroads?” I asked.
“It was believed that the meeting of four ways would reduce the chance of the ghost finding its way back home.”
“And nowadays?” In my excitement, I could hardly get the question out.
“Nowadays,” Dogger replied, “the bodies of executed murderers are the property of the Crown. They are buried in perforated coffins in unmarked graves within the precincts of the prison in which their sentence was carried out.”
“Not handed over to the family? Not turned over to the undertaker?”
“Not unless directed otherwise by the sheriff of the county,” Dogger answered. “Once buried, exhumation requires a formal license from the Home Office, which must be signed personally by the Home Secretary. Although I understand that this is frowned upon, and would be granted in only the most extraordinary circumstances.”
My mind was floundering to stay afloat.
Unless Hob was a downright liar, it was simply not possible for him to have been present at the embalming of Canon Whitbread.
In the first place, if the canon had been hanged at one of His Majesty’s pr
isons, the body would not have been embalmed. A perforated coffin could mean only one thing: that the speediest possible decomposition was desired. Embalming would only prolong it.
Which left only a handful of possibilities: that the body of the hanged canon had been turned over to the family after execution but before burial, upon receipt of a direct order from the sheriff; that the body on Mr. Nightingale’s slab had not been Canon Whitbread; or that Canon Whitbread had not, in fact, been executed.
I couldn’t contain my excitement.
“Where was Canon Whitbread buried?” I asked.
“Ah,” said Dogger. “That is the question, is it not? We shall have to find that out.”
We! Dogger and me. The two of us, on the case together.
My heart began to glow like a potbellied woodstove in a logger’s cabin.
“Where shall…we…begin?” I managed to say.
“With the parishioners of St. Mildred’s,” Dogger answered. “It is a fact often overlooked by the law that when it comes to murder, the parishioners know all the answers.”
“Did you say murder, Dogger?”
“I did indeed.”
Now, suddenly, I was glowing like the midsummer sun. Dogger had—independently—come to the same conclusion I had.
“We mustn’t discuss specific details,” I whispered. “In order not to contaminate each other’s evidence.”
“Of course,” Dogger agreed. “I was about to say the same thing myself, Miss Flavia.”
I let out a long, noisy breath—a hiss of almost serpent pleasure.
The murderer of Orlando Whitbread was doomed. From that very moment, he hadn’t the chance of a snowman in Hades to escape the team of Dogger and De Luce.
I desperately wanted to rub noses with my new partner but I didn’t dare. Eskimo kisses would have to wait until we were more firmly established.
“And now, miss,” Dogger said, turning to my single piece of luggage, “shall we unpack the poisons?”
·SEVEN·
THE “POISONS” TO WHICH Dogger referred were those discussed in the fat blue volume of Taylor’s Medical Jurisprudence, in its Ninth Edition, which I believe I have already mentioned.
