The Grave's a Fine and Private Place

by Alan Bradley

  I held out my hand to the third ruffian—Toothpick—and raised my eyebrows. His light blue neckerchief matched his eyes.

  “Cornell,” he said quietly. “Pleased to meet you, Miss—”

  “Dorchester,” I said. “Arabella Dorchester. But you can call me Arab. Everybody else does.”

  “Hold on,” Terence protested. “That’s not the name your sister gave us.”

  I arranged my features into a look of surprise.

  “Betty?” I asked, letting my mouth fall open in disbelief. “Oh, she’s such an awful liar! She’s always telling people she’s Lady Lancaster, or Dame Agatha Dimbleby. Who did she tell you she was?”

  “Ophelia de Luce,” said Nigel, looking like a man bamboozled.

  “That scallywag,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m so ashamed of her. I really must apologize on Betty’s behalf.”

  The three roustabouts were looking distinctly uneasy. I had deftly turned the tables on them and got the upper hand. There was no time to lose.

  “Now then,” I asked, taking command as if it were I who had arranged our meeting, “how long have you gentlemen been in town?”

  “Three days,” Cornell answered obediently. “Counting today, that is.”

  I shot him a beaming smile as a reward, and from that moment on the poor lad was eating out of my hand.

  “And you,” I said, turning to Terence. I had already sized him up as the ringleader. “Are you in charge of these great beastly machines?” I asked, waving a hand toward the parked pantechnicons. “Gosh, they must be jolly difficult to drive.”

  I almost reached out to feel one of his bulging biceps, but I restrained myself.

  Terence drew in a deep breath.

  I had him.

  “Well, then,” I said, rubbing my hands together. “About Cousin Orlando. I’m sure Aunt Gregoria would be willing to offer a generous reward for information. Just to put her mind to rest, you understand. Orlando was more or less her pet, you know. Actually, she spoiled him outrageously.”

  “We seen ’im round about—’ere and there,” Terence said, shifting his shoulders and looking away, trying to disguise the telltale glitter in his eyes.

  “I’m surprised to hear that,” I said. “I should have thought you’d have seen a great deal more of him. Cousin Orlando was simply mad about circuses. More than mad: He had a bee in his bonnet about them. He didn’t beg to run away with you, did he? To be trained as a clown? Offered to work for nothing?”

  “ ’E never said anything like that to us,” Nigel volunteered.

  Which told me what I wanted to know: They had talked to Orlando. He had still been alive when they arrived in town the day before yesterday. More to the point, they had been here when he died.

  “What did he say, then?” I asked, turning to Cornell.

  “We had a few drinks with him is all,” Cornell said, “at the Wooden Bird.”

  “The Wooden Bird?” I asked.

  “The Oak and Pheasant. It’s a kind of joke. We’ve always called it that.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  Cornell shrugged.

  “Who knows? Same reason the landlord is always called Gov’, no matter his real name. It’s a tradition. You might as well ask why they always drop bread in the churchyard, or dance round the Maypole with wooden hobbyhorses!”

  “Always?” I asked. “You’ve been here before?”

  “Shadrach’s has been stopping here since Napoleon was in nappies,” Terence said.

  “And which of you is Mr. Shadrach?” I said.

  All three of them laughed at once, as if their mouths were tied together with a string.

  “Mr. Shadrach went to his reward when Queen Victoria was on the throne, if you’ll pardon the expression,” Terence said.

  Again came the clockwork laughs—but only two, this time.

  “Then who’s the proprietor nowadays?” I asked. “Cousin Orlando may have approached him.”

  “Approached her, you mean,” Terence told me. “Mrs. Dandyman. ‘Dreadnought Dandyman,’ we call her.”

  The three of them broke into sniggers, and I noticed that Cornell looked cautiously over his shoulder.

  “Because she’s an old battleship,” he explained. “A dreadnought is a battle cruiser from the time of World War One.”

  “HMS Colossus and HMS Collingwood, for instance,” I said.

  I’d show them I knew my peas from my pickles. I had often enough pored over the ancient picture magazines which simply bulged to bursting with photographs of British Naval Power.

  Not one of the three seemed to be able to come up with a reply.

  “And where might I find Mrs. Dandyman?” I asked, following the line of Cornell’s glance, which was toward the largest of the pantechnicons—the one with the stallion and the cheetah.

  “Over there—in Bucking Horse Palace,” Nigel said. “Just don’t tell her we told you.”

  “Bit of a tartar, is she?” I asked.

  Terence gave off a noise that sounded as if his sinuses had collapsed.

  “Judge for yourself,” he said as he turned and walked away with Nigel and Cornell hard on his heels. Behind the backs of his two pals, Cornell twiddled his fingers goodbye.

  —

  A slight chill touched my bare arms as I stepped into the shadow of the pantechnicon. The sheer tonnage of the thing loomed over me like a vast red whale.

  My first task was to find the entrance, which was not easy. The metal skin of the thing appeared to be seamless, and the enormous murals of the beasts made it even more difficult to find a door. After a complete walk-around without success, I finally spotted a small set of folding stairs, cunningly concealed among the roots of a painted jungle tree. Only then did I spot the door, its hinges hidden by the artist’s idea of bark.

  Someone, I thought, is particular about her privacy. And I couldn’t help but wonder why?

  I gave the steps a gentle pull—more as a test than anything—and was astonished when they folded out and down without a sound.

  “Hello?” I called. “Mrs. Dandyman, are you there?”

  Again in silence, the steps folded themselves up as they retracted and locked into place with a metallic click. It was as if they had never existed.

  Hydraulic, I thought. How clever. They could be opened and closed from the inside as well as from the outside, which made sense.

  All I needed to do was find the push button.

  Which wasn’t all that difficult once you knew what you were looking for.

  And yes! Here it was: not a button, but a switch, cunningly disguised as one of the tiger’s claws.

  I looked round to see if anyone was watching me, but Terence and his chums had wandered away from the pantechnicon, leaving me alone in the shadow of the thing.

  No one would see me climb aboard (if I was able to). If I vanished from the face of the earth, no one would ever know where I had gone. Orlando’s fish-nibbled features sprang suddenly into my mind.

  “Mrs. Dandyman?” I called again. “I’d like to speak with you.”

  When there was no answer, I reached out and flipped the switch.

  The silent steps came down and, with the slightest hiss of air such as you might expect from an alien spaceship, like the one Michael Rennie stepped out of in The Day the Earth Stood Still, the metal door slowly began to open.

  “Hello?” I called out into the darkness, placing a foot on the lowest tread.

  When no one told me to keep out, or to go away, I took it as an invitation and climbed aboard.

  To my right was a heavy hanging curtain. I pulled it aside—foolhardy, perhaps, but I did it anyway—and walked through.

  I couldn’t suppress a gasp.

  The cavernous space—I hesitate to call it a room—was filled with paintings: a dozen or so, each on its own altar and each illuminated by a row of flickering candles.

  A private chapel, I thought.

  In one of the paintings, a man flayed to his bare muscles st
ood holding his own skin draped over his arm like a toga. In another, a nearly naked man was being grilled over a makeshift stove by men with lances. And in yet another, a woman armed only with a crucifix was using it as a blade to cut her way out of a dragon’s belly.

  “Chamber of horrors, isn’t it?” said a voice. “Better run away before something nasty happens to you.”

  I hadn’t seen her there, half hidden, as she was, by a hanging curtain.

  She took a step toward me, a pointed object in her hand.

  I was already preparing to take to my heels when I realized that her weapon was an artist’s paintbrush.

  As she stepped out of the shadows, I could see that the woman had been working on a canvas of a group of men, bound together by weighted chains, being tossed over the side of a ship and into the sea while, nearby on the shore, another man hung from a cross surrounded by a swarm of bees.

  “They’re beautiful!” I exclaimed. “Every one of them. That’s Saint Astius on the cross, isn’t it? He was covered in honey and left in the hot sun to be stung to death by bees.”

  The woman took another step toward me, her candlelit face blazing like a comet in the half-darkness, her gray hair streaming out behind her like the comet’s tail.

  Closer and closer she came until her nose was nearly touching mine. The odor of garlic on her breath was so overwhelming that when she spoke, I could smell every word.

  “Blimey!” she said. “You do know your saints, don’t you?”

  I was afraid that her next question would be to ask my name, but I needn’t have worried.

  “Who’s this, then?” she asked, pointing to the group of men who were being forced to walk the plank.

  Was it my imagination, or did one of them look uncannily like Orlando Whitbread? I had only seen him dead, of course, so it was difficult to tell.

  “The seven martyrs of Dyrrachium,” I said, ticking them off on my fingers. “Germanus, Hesychius, Lucian, Papius, Peregrinus, Pompeius, and Saturninus—alphabetically, that is.”

  I did not tell her that I had once won a prize by being able to regurgitate those names on demand. Poor Father Duffy, back in Hinley, was probably still shaking his head at the defeat of his house Goliath, Mary Rose Trethewey, who had a photographic memory but whom Fate had dealt a losing hand when I was given her question by mistake.

  Feely (who knew him from one of the music festivals) had tipped me off that Father Duffy was obsessed with the Albanian Martyrs, and that they were more likely than not to be hauled out of the hat like white rabbits, in order to defeat the Bishop’s Lacey home team.

  I had got their names off by heart by making a mnemonic of the first letters of the martyrs’ names: Give Him Large Portions of Potted Plums and Strychnine.

  G, H, L, P, P, P, S.

  Germanus, Hesychius, Lucian, Papius, Peregrinus, Pompeius, and Saturninus.

  Just like that, and I had come away with the trophy: a rather cheesy china teacup with my name (misspelled) painted on the back by Mary Margaret Tackaberry, the captain of the Crafts League.

  I didn’t notice until I got home that the Virgin Mary on the front of the cup was sticking out her tongue.

  “Very impressive,” Mrs. Dandyman said, turning to the skinned man.

  “Saint Bartholomew,” I said. “The patron saint of tanners.”

  “And this?”

  “The bloke on the barbecue?” I asked, becoming more sure of myself by the minute. “That’s easy: Saint Lawrence. I believe they still have the grill on display in a church in Rome.”

  Before she could question me further, it was time to gain the upper hand. I pointed to the woman escaping from the dragon’s gut.

  “Margaret of Antioch. The dragon is the devil in disguise. Serves him right. You’d think that he, of all people, would know that crucifixes are not just used against vampires.”

  Mrs. Dandyman lifted one of Saint Bartholomew’s candles out of its socket and held it up in front of my face. For a long time she examined my features, moving her light from right to left.

  “I’ve seen you before, somewhere,” she said. “But I can’t for the life of me remember where.”

  I shrugged.

  “I’m just a girl,” I said, hating myself even as I said it. “Ever so many girls have mousy hair. I’m just one of the mice.”

  Sometimes, you must manufacture camouflage with whatever is within easy reach, which, in this case, was my mouth. And my brain, of course.

  I needed to divert her attempt to put a name to my face. She might have seen my photograph in the newspaper not long ago.

  “I feel that I can trust you, Mrs. Dandyman, but you must give me your word that you won’t share with a soul what I’m about to confide in you.”

  Who, in the entire history of the world since Adam and Eve, has ever been able to resist so downright juicy an offer?

  “I give you my word,” she said, already licking her lips in anticipation.

  I touched the back of her hand with my fingers to change her promise into an unbreakable bond.

  “I’m the one who found Orlando Whitbread’s body,” I said, and I watched her eyes. “I need to talk to you.”

  ·THIRTEEN·

  “ORLANDO?” SHE GASPED. “HE’S dead?”

  Even by the warm light of the flickering flames I could see the color draining from her face, an effect which is virtually impossible to fake—and goodness knows, I’ve tried.

  If this woman wasn’t honestly shocked, she was the greatest actress I had ever seen.

  “When?” she asked. “Where? What happened?”

  “This morning,” I told her. “In the river.”

  “Was it suicide?”

  I said nothing, a trick I had learned from Inspector Hewitt, which had proved to be one of the most useful weapons in my arsenal.

  “But no, that’s not possible,” she said, answering her own question. “That’s simply not possible.”

  “Perhaps it was an accident,” I suggested, sparing her what I believed to be the truth—at least for the time being.

  “Not likely,” she insisted. “Orlando grew up on the riverbank.”

  I continued my silence.

  “He was always as much at home in the water as Mole and Ratty. Boats, swimming, fishing. I’m surprised he hadn’t grown gills.”

  I recognized at once that she was referring to the animal characters from The Wind in the Willows.

  “Always?” I asked, choosing my question with care.

  “It seems like always. Shadrach’s Circus has been coming here year in and year out since the old man himself—blast him—was alive.”

  “Your father?” I asked, meaning Shadrach, whomever he might be.

  This produced an ironic and tight little laugh.

  “My great step-uncle,” she said. “He was a monster. Even the tigers lived in fear of him. In the days when we had tigers, I mean. Nowadays, we have only one: Saladin. Near-blind and toothless. He only growls because his bones ache.”

  “So you’ve known Orlando for a long time,” I said helpfully.

  “Since he was a boy, poor lad. He used to beg us to take him away with us. Not that he had any illusions of becoming a showman, but simply to escape from his father.”

  “Canon Whitbread,” I said, matter-of-factly. “The one who—”

  Mrs. Dandyman held up a restraining hand.

  “Yes, that one. Say no more about it. I find it distressing.”

  “But I thought everyone loved Canon Whitbread.”

  “And so they did—until he did away with three harmless old ladies who dared disagree with him. Love can forgive only so many murders.”

  She was being ironic, I was quite sure of it.

  Daffy had once explained to me that irony consisted of words from another world: that they did not seem to mean what you thought they meant, which was a contradiction in itself.

  “They’re words from the other side of the looking-glass,” Daffy told me, “and ought always
to be answered as such.”

  Could I trust Daffy? In cases like this, I had no other choice.

  I took a deep breath, counted to three, looked Mrs. Dandyman in the eye, and asked: “How many murders have you forgiven?”

  “None,” she answered. “Nor will I—ever.”

  I was flabbergasted by her words. Here was a woman after my own heart! How I rejoiced in meeting her!

  And yet I mustn’t let her know.

  In my own short life I had come to believe that murder is unforgiveable. Perhaps, in time, when I was older, I would come to see things differently, though for now, I was happy enough to be lumped with Saint Augustine, who prayed for purity—but, as he said, not yet.

  “Who were they?” I asked. “The women he did away with, I mean.”

  “The Three Graces, we used to call them, if somewhat inaccurately. Two Graces and an Annie, in fact, but there’s no sense in nicknames, is there? Grace Willoughby, Grace Harcourt, and Annie Cray. Faith, Hope, and Treachery. The Weird Sisters, others called them.”

  “Were they actually sisters?”

  “Good lord, no! It was just that they all stirred the cauldron of gossip more than was good for them—or for anyone else. There’s nothing so deadly as an acid tongue driven by a pious mind. That’s what Canon Whitbread said in one of his last sermons.”

  “Just before he poisoned them?” I asked.

  “Some say that, yes.”

  “And you?”

  “I keep to myself,” Mrs. Dandyman replied.

  She turned back to her easel and I suspected I was being dismissed.

  I was, after all, trespassing.

  “Why martyrs?” I blurted. “Why do you paint only martyrs?”

  “This world we live in,” she said, keeping her back to me, “is made up of saints and sinners. And of the two, there’s a shortage of saints. It’s as simple as that.”

  But was it? Did her words—which seemed to me to come too easily, as if she’d been asked this question before—mean that she saw it as her duty to supply the world with saints, even painted ones?

  Or to rid the world of sinners?

  Flavia, I thought, you are developing a suspicious mind.

  “One more question, if I may,” I persisted. “And then I’ll leave you to your work.”