Speaking From Among the Bones

by Alan Bradley

  I counted to eleven. No, twelve.

  “Certainly, Vicar,” I said, biting my spiritual tongue. Not until I was almost at the door did I add, under my breath, “Would you like a nice cup of tea and a biscuit while I’m at it?”

  Sergeant Graves was nowhere in sight. The blue Vauxhall was gone, which meant, I supposed, that the police had done what they had come to do, and then had vanished.

  Which explained why the sergeant had allowed me into the church. My cleverly conceived “flowers-for-the-altar” scheme had been a waste of time. Then, too, Meg had come in and slammed the door explosively without so much as a village constable raising an eyebrow.

  I should have known it. The police had already been leaving, and now they were gone.

  Which was a shame, in a way. If I were completely honest, I would admit that I had been looking forward to renewing old acquaintances with Inspector Hewitt. The Inspector and I had what might presently be described as a lukewarm relationship—mental note: Look up origin of “lukewarm.” Possibly biblical? One of the finest passages in the Bible, at least to my way of thinking, was from Revelation: Because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.—a relationship which seemed, somehow, to blow hot and cold depending upon the Inspector’s glorious wife, Antigone. I had not yet sorted out the cogs and levers of our somewhat shaky triangular relationship, but it was certainly not for want of trying.

  I had more than once thrown myself upon this warm cool goddess, hoping that she would—

  Would what? Pledge herself to be my true sworn friend and secret sharer, forever and ever, world without end, Amen?

  Something like that, I suppose. But it had not quite worked out that way.

  I had blundered badly by asking her if, on an inspector’s salary, they could not afford to have children. Gracious as she had been in her response, I knew that I had hurt her.

  Although I was not accustomed to apologizing, I had done my best, but her lost babies had haunted my sleep for weeks.

  What had they looked like? I wondered. Had their hair been dark like hers, or fair and wavy, like his? Were they boys or girls? Did they smile when she cooed at them, and kick up their little feet? What pet names had she whispered to them, and, when it came to that, what final names were given to them before they were placed into the earth?

  Motherhood could be a grim old business, I decided, and one that could never, really, be shared. In spite of her gentle exterior, there was a part of the Inspector’s wife that was forever beyond knowing.

  Perhaps it was like that with all mothers.

  I was thinking that when a black Hillman turned in from the main road and came rushing toward me up the church walk, which was not meant to be used by motorcars. I recognized the driver at once: It was Marmaduke Parr, the bishop’s secretary.

  His car was so well washed that, as he climbed out of it, I could see the back of his white mane refected in its polished paint.

  “Good morning, Mr. Parr,” I said, instinctively anxious to keep him from going into the church. The vicar had troubles enough without having a petty bureaucrat from the Dioscesan Office barging in on what might yet prove to be a miracle.

  An oaken saint whose eyes wept blood would put an end forever to St. Tancred’s chronic financial problems. The Roof Fund, after half a century, would be liquidated, and with any luck, those never-ending concerts, fêtes in the churchyard, and games of Tombola in the parish hall would be laid to rest.

  “Reverend Parr,” he corrected, in response to my greeting. “Or Father Parr, if you prefer.”

  The man was biting off more than he could chew. Although he meant it as a snub, he was obviously not aware that for we de Luces, who had been Roman Catholics since the Resurrection, there could never be too many bells, books, and candles.

  Because the vicar was one of Father’s few friends, we attended St. Tancred’s by choice, rather than force. Father looked favorably upon the many innovations that Denwyn Richardson had brought to the parish and had, in fact, once told the vicar to his face, perhaps joking, that he’d always thought of the Oxford Movement as the fold returning to the sheep. All of this, though, was far too complicated to be discussed while standing about in the churchyard.

  Marmaduke Parr was staring at me petulantly, impatient to be on about his bullying.

  “Then good morning to you,” he said, and strode off toward the door.

  “I wouldn’t go in there if I were you,” I called out cheerily. “There’s been a murder. The place is closed. Off limits. It’s the scene of a crime.”

  I used Sergeant Woolmer’s exact words, although I didn’t bother mentioning that the ban had already been lifted.

  He stopped in mid-stride and came slowly back toward me. His face and his eyes seemed paler than ever.

  “What do you mean?” he demanded.

  “A murder,” I explained patiently, one word at a time. “Someone’s been killed in the crypt.”

  “Who?

  “Mr. Collicutt,” I whispered importantly. “The organist.”

  “Collicutt? The organist? That’s impossible. Why, he was just—”

  “Yes?” I said, waiting.

  “Collicutt?” he asked again. “Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure,” I told him. “Everybody in Bishop’s Lacey is talking about it.”

  This was not quite true, but I had come to believe that there’s no harm in spreading a little fear where fear is due.

  “Good lord,” he said. “I hope not. I surely hope not.”

  Now we were getting somewhere.

  “Is there anything I can do to help?” I asked. “I was hoping to volunteer to assist with digging out Saint Tancred—sorting the bones, and so forth, but it looks as if that’s off.”

  “I should say it’s off!” he said. His face went in an instant from the color of curds to a blazing shade of beetroot. “It’s desecration! Those who are asleep in the Lord are not to be rousted from their graves for the idle entertainment of a pack of vacant villagers.”

  Vacant villagers, were we? Well! We shall see about that!

  “I understand you’ve put a stop to it,” I said.

  “The bishop has put a stop to it,” he said, drawing himself up to his full height—which was fairly substantial—as if he were wearing the bishop’s mitre on his head and gripping the bishop’s crozier in his closed fist.

  “And not only the bishop,” he added, as if a clincher were needed. “The chancellor, too, is dead set against it. He has withdrawn the faculty and forbidden the disinterrment. The archaeologists have been sent packing.”

  “Forbidden?” I asked. I was interested in the word, and not just because it had an amusing sound.

  “Strictly forbidden.” He said this with a note of doomsday finality.

  “And who is the chancellor?” I asked.

  “Mr. Ridley-Smith, the magistrate.”

  Mr. Ridley-Smith, the magistrate? I thought.

  Cassandra Cottlestone’s father had been a magistrate, Daffy had told me, and as such, was able to move heaven and earth—to the extent even of having his suicide daughter buried in consecrated ground.

  “That would be the Ridley-Smiths of Bogmore Hall,” I said.

  Everyone knew about the Ridley-Smiths of Bogmore Hall, at Nether-Wolsey. They were the subject of stories that had once been whispered behind elaborate paper fans, but were now likely chattered about over cigarettes in the A.B.C. teashop.

  I had heard, for instance, from Feely’s friend Sheila Foster, about Lionel Ridley-Smith, who thought he was made of glass, and his sister, Anthea, whose pet crocodile had eaten a chambermaid.

  “That, of course, was before the First War,” Sheila had said, “when chambermaids were thicker on the ground than they are nowadays.”

  And didn’t Miss Pickery, the librarian, have a married sister, Hetty, who lived in Nether-Wolsey?

  Hetty had suffered what Miss Mountjoy, the former librarian, had once referred to
as “a tragic accident” with a sewing machine. And what was it Miss Cool, at the confectionery, had contributed to my storehouse of knowledge about the mysterious but absent Hetty?

  “… the Singer, the needle, the finger, the twins, the wayward husband, the bottle, the bills …” she had told me.

  That, of course, had been almost a year ago, but with any luck, Hetty would be more than ever on the lookout for someone who was willing to babysit twins.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Marmaduke Parr said with a sniff. “The Ridley-Smiths of Bogmore Hall.”

  And before you could say “antitransubstantiationalist,” Gladys and I were speeding along the narrow tarmac on our way to Nether-Wolsey.

  By hook or by crook, by fair means or foul, I would make Chancellor Ridley-Smith eat his words. Strictly forbidden, indeed!

  To the south and west of Buckshaw was a crossroads, its left arm being, by way of Nether Lacey, more or less a backroad to Doddingsley. To the right was St. Elfrieda’s, and beyond it, a little farther to the south, lay Nether-Wolsey.

  I saw at once, as I approached, that it was not the prettiest village in England. Not by a long chalk. Even the trees looked tired.

  The most notable landmark was an ancient butcher’s shop huddled among terraced houses, its gray, unpainted boards sagging like a wooden drape, giving the place the pallor of the undead. In the flyblown window hung an odd arrangement of sausages, tied into strings and loops, and it took me more than a few moments to realize that they spelled out rather distastefully the word MEATS.

  A bell tinkled as I opened the door, and then, except for the buzzing of a solitary fly in the window, the shop fell back into silence.

  “Hello?” I called.

  The fly buzzed on.

  A glass case stretched halfway across the back of the narrow room, and in it were stretched out various slabs of raw meat in a grisly display of red, white, and blue that made my stomach wince.

  Behind the counter, mounted in an ornate wrought-iron stand, was a roll of pinkish butcher’s paper. A length of heavy string dangled handily down from a small wire cage fastened to the ceiling.

  At the rear of the shop, in a corner, stood a bloodied butcher’s block, and behind it was an open door which obviously led to the area behind the shop.

  “Hello?” I called again.

  There was no answer.

  I edged round the glass case and stuck my head out the door.

  The garden was littered with empty wooden crates. A reddened tree stump was obviously being used as a chopping block whose victims came from the chicken coops beyond.

  As I stood there not quite knowing what to do next, a tiny woman in a skirt, blouse, and bandanna emerged from the largest chicken coop, gripping a large brown hen by its feet.

  The bird hung struggling upside down, its stubby wings flapping helplessly.

  As she placed its neck on the block and reached for the hatchet, she spotted me in the shop’s open doorway.

  “Go back inside,” she said. “I shall be there directly.”

  Her bare spindly arm raised the polished blade.

  “No! Wait!” I heard myself saying. “Please …”

  The woman looked up, the ax poised.

  “Please,” I said. “I want to buy that bird … but I want it alive.”

  What on earth had come over me? Although I didn’t mind dead humans—in fact, in some ways I delighted in them—I knew in that instant I could not bear the thought of harm coming to any other creature.

  It hadn’t been all that long since I had been attacked in Bishop’s Lacey by a maddened rooster, and yet, in spite of that bloody free-for-all, my protective wings seemed at this very moment to be sheltering every chicken in the universe. It was a most peculiar feeling.

  “Alive …” I managed, my head spinning like a toy top.

  The woman put down the hatchet and flung the bird away from her. It flew—actually flew!—across the yard, made a half-decent landing, and began pecking at the hardened earth as if nothing had happened.

  I knew that if Daffy were here, she would have said “Curfew shall not ring tonight.” This particular hen, at least for now, would live to cluck another day.

  I had saved my first life.

  Is there life after death for chickens? I wondered. Given the prospect of the ax, the plucking, the seething pot, the heat of the oven, and the gnawings of our hungry teeth at the Sunday table, it seemed somehow unlikely.

  And yet … and yet, in spite of all that, perhaps there really was the reward of a heavenly roost somewhere above the bright blue sky.

  “I came away without my money,” I said. “I’ll bring it to you as soon as I can.”

  “Not from around here, are you?” the woman asked, walking toward me.

  “No, but not far,” I said, waving a vague hand toward the north.

  “Haven’t I seen you before?” she asked, close enough now to peer into my face.

  It was at that moment that I was struck with a brilliant thought: Tell the truth. Yes, that was it—tell the truth. What did I have to lose?

  “Perhaps you have,” I told her. “My name is Flavia de Luce.”

  “Of course,” she said. “I should have known. The blue eyes, the—”

  She stopped as if she had run into a stone wall.

  “Yes?”

  “We used to take poultry to Buckshaw,” she said slowly, “to Mrs. Mullet. I suppose she’s long gone?”

  “No,” I said. “She’s still with us.

  “Fortunately,” I was quick enough to add.

  “But that was years ago,” the woman said. “Years ago. Before—But tell me, what brings you to Nether-Wolsey?”

  “I’m looking for a woman named Hetty. I don’t know her last name, but she’s—”

  “Patsy Pickery’s sister.”

  Patsy? Was “Patsy” Miss Pickery’s name?

  I put my hand in front of my mouth to suppress a smile.

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s the one. Patsy Pickery’s sister.”

  I enjoyed pronouncing the name; the way it rolled off my tongue in a limping rhyme: “Pat-sy Pick-ery’s sis-ter.”

  “Gone,” she said. “She’s took the kids and gone. Lived right across the road next the petrol station till Rory belted her once too often and she took the kids and—What do you want with her, anyway?”

  “I wanted to ask her a question.”

  “Maybe I can answer it.”

  “It’s about Bogmore Hall,” I said, and I could see the woman’s face closing even before the words were out of my mouth.

  “Keep clear of Bogmore Hall,” she warned. “It’s not the kind of place for someone like you.”

  Someone like me? Whatever could she mean by that.

  “There’s something I need to discuss with Mr. Ridley-Smith, the magistrate.”

  “Got yourself into some kind of trouble, have you?” she asked, closing one eye like Popeye.

  “No, not really.”

  “Well, all the same—don’t go hanging round. Things aren’t right up there, if you take my meaning.” Her finger came, almost automatically, it seemed, to her head.

  “The Ridley-Smiths, you mean? The crocodile? The man who was made of glass?”

  The woman snorted. “Made of glass my fanny!” she said. “You listen to me. There are things that are worse than glass and crocodiles. You keep away from that place.”

  She waved her hand toward what I guessed was the southwest.

  “All right,” I said. “Thank you. I will.”

  As I turned and went back into the shop, she was not far behind me.

  “I’ll be back for the chicken as soon as I can,” I told her over my shoulder.

  I was already in the street with a foot on one of Gladys’s pedals when the woman came scurrying out of the shop, a wooden crate in her hands. Through its slats, the brown hen was craning her neck in all directions, her yellow eyes glaring fiercely out at this vast new and unsuspected world.

&nb
sp; “Her name’s Esmeralda,” she said, hurriedly strapping the crate to Gladys’s rear carrier.

  “The money—” I began.

  But before I could finish, the woman had scurried back into the shop and slammed the door.

  To the south of Nether-Wolsey, the road ran gently downhill. To the west, another rose steeply to a prominent ridge which brooded like a single dark eyebrow over the village. It might well have been an old hill fort.

  This was the direction the woman had indicated as she warned me about Bogmore Hall. It couldn’t be far away.

  I turned to the west.

  After a while the rising road became steeper and steeper, and was now little more than a stony path. Even in first gear Gladys was wobbling dangerously. I climbed off and shoved her slowly ahead of me up the steep slope.

  As I came up out of a deep cutting onto a flat plateau, there was no doubt that the dark Gothic pile ahead of me was Bogmore Hall. A crazy conglomeration of spiky gables gave it the look of a bundle of ancient lances shoved carelessly, points uppermost, into an oversized umberella stand.

  Cut off from the rest of the world, the house stood in the middle of a sea of wild grass from which protruded mossy chunks of broken stone which might once have been the cherubs and nymphs of urns and fountains. A chubby white arm stuck up out of the earth like a dead baby trying to escape its grave.

  Windows without curtains stared at me blankly, and the idea crept into my head that I was being watched by more than glass. A worn block of stone served as a doorstep, as if renovations had been begun in another century and then abandoned.

  It seemed rather a rum place for a magistrate to live.

  I leaned Gladys against a ruined railing and tugged at the rusty bellpull. Although I could not hear it, I knew that somewhere in the depths of the house a bell would be jangling.

  Nobody, of course, answered.

  I rang again: once … twice … three times.

  Even by putting my ear to the door I could hear nothing inside. And yet there remained that uneasy sense of being watched.

  Turning my back to the house, I strolled casually out onto what once might have been the front lawn, but which was now a tangle of clods embedded with last year’s weeds. I put a flattened hand above my eyes and pretended to be gazing out at the view which, from this elevation, really was quite spectacular.