Speaking From Among the Bones

by Alan Bradley

  “Well, sit down anyway,” I said. “You’re making me nervous.”

  “What I have to say to you needs to be said standing up.”

  I shrugged.

  “Shoot yourself,” I said, but she gave me not so much as the ghost of a smile.

  “Have you no sense?” she shouted. “Have you no sense at all?”

  I waited for the explanation, which I suspected would not be long in coming.

  “Can you not see what you’re doing to Father? He’s crushed, he’s ill, he doesn’t sleep, and you’re off stirring up trouble. How can you live with yourself?”

  I shrugged. I could have told her, I suppose, that just last evening, I’d had a perfectly civilized chat with him.

  And then I remembered that I had found Father sitting alone in the kitchen in the dark.

  Better to wait out Daffy’s anger. Even a flying bomb runs out of fuel eventually. But for the moment, Daffy was so infuriated that, even though she had glanced at her several times, she had not really registered Esmeralda.

  I listened for what must have been ten minutes as Daffy raged, pacing up and down the room, waving her arms, citing chapter and verse of my offenses since the day that I was born, dredging up incidents that even I had forgotten.

  It was an impressive spectacle.

  And then suddenly she was in tears, sobbing like a little girl lost, and I found myself at her side, my arm around her, and my own vision inexplicably blurred.

  Neither of us spoke a word and we didn’t need to. We stood there hugging one another like squids, damp, quivering, and unhappy.

  What was going to become of us?

  It was a question I had been hiding from myself for longer than I cared to remember.

  Where would we go when Buckshaw was sold? What were we going to do?

  These were questions which had no answers. There were no happy outcomes.

  If we were lucky, the sale of Buckshaw would bring in enough to pay off Father’s debts, but we would be left homeless and penniless.

  Father, I knew, would never accept charity. It was not in his blood.

  There was that word again: blood. It was everywhere, wasn’t it?—dripping from the severed head of John the Baptist, falling from the face of a wooden Saint Tancred, staining my hair ribbon, oozing in all its red wonder on glass plates under my microscope …

  Everywhere. Blood.

  It was what tied us together, Daffy and Feely and Father and me.

  I knew for certain in that instant that we were one. In spite of the stupid tales with which my sisters had tormented me, my blood was now screaming out to me that we all of us were one, and that nothing could ever tear us apart.

  It was the happiest and yet the saddest moment of my life.

  We stood there for the longest time, Daffy and I, hugging one another, not wanting to break away and have to look at one another. Faces, at times like these, were best left buried in shoulders.

  And then, incredibly, I heard myself saying, “There, there,” and patting Daffy’s shoulder.

  We might have laughed at that but we didn’t. Daffy at last, snuffling, pulled away and made for the door. Our eyes did not meet.

  Things were back to normal.

  I felt rather odd as I walked slowly down the east staircase. What was happening to me?

  On the one hand, something had made me follow Daffy from the room: some need to continue the contact that we had just made. On the other, I wanted to kill her.

  Of my two sisters, Daffy was the one of whom I was most afraid. It was, I think, because of her silences. She was most often to be found curled up with a book which in itself was a pretty enough picture, but curled up, nevertheless—coiled, like a snake.

  One never knew when she was going to attack, and when she did, her words were poisonous.

  I stopped on the landing to reflect.

  I was being torn apart from the inside: pressed with a sort of dopey gratitude which was trying to expand me, and at the same time crushed in from the outside by the enormous weight of our situation.

  Would I explode or would I be squashed?

  I continued, half in a daze, to the bottom of the stairs and made my way, without realizing it, to the kitchen.

  Mrs. Mullet was up to her elbows in a sink full of pots.

  “What’s the matter with you, dear?” she asked, drying her hands and turning toward me. “You look as if you’d seen a ghost.”

  Perhaps I had.

  Perhaps I had seen the ghost of what our family life might have been if all of us were not who we were.

  It was all so damnably complicated.

  Mrs. Mullet did something she had not done since I was a little girl. She knelt down and put her hands on my shoulders and looked up into my face.

  “Tell me about it,” she said softly, pushing my hair back out of my eyes. “Tell Mrs. M all about it.”

  I suppose I could have, but I didn’t.

  “I think it’s just the thought of Feely getting married and moving away,” I said, my lower lip trembling. “I’m going to miss her.”

  Why is it, I wondered, even as I spoke, that we lie most easily when feelings are involved?

  It was a thought that I had never had before, and it frightened me. What do you do when your own brain vomits up questions to which you don’t know the answers? Questions that you don’t even understand?

  “We’re all goin’ to miss ’er, dear,” Mrs. Mullet said. “We shall miss ’er lovely music in the house.”

  That did it. I burst into tears.

  Why?

  It’s hard to explain. It was partly the thought that Mrs. Mullet was going to miss Ludwig von Beethoven and Johann Sebastian Bach; that she was going to miss Franz Schubert and Domenico Scarlatti and Pietro Domenico Paradis and a hundred others that had been hanging round the halls of Buckshaw for as long as I could remember.

  How empty the place was going to be. How bloody, awfully empty.

  Mrs. Mullet wiped my eyes with her apron.

  “There, there, dear,” she said, just as I had said to Daffy. “I’ve got some ’ot scones comin’ out the oven directly. There’s nothin’ like scones to dry up tears.”

  I smiled at the thought, but not very much.

  “Sit up the table and I shall put the kettle on,” she said. “A nice cup of tea is good for the gizzard, as the bishop said to the chorus girl. Oh! Sorry, dear! I oughtn’t to ’ave let that slip. It’s one of them sayin’s Alf picked up at ’is regimental dinner that makes you smile. I can’t think what come over me.”

  What was she going on about? There was nothing remotely amusing about what she had said. In fact, it made no sense at all.

  And yet it reminded me of something: the bishop.

  And the Bishop reminded me of the chancellor.

  “Do you know anything about Magistrate Ridley-Smith?” I found myself asking.

  “Just that ’e’s a Tartar,” she said. “Them Ridley-Smiths are an odd lot. Not right, like.”

  “I’ve heard about the one who was made of glass,” I offered, “and the one whose pet alligator ate the chambermaid.”

  Mrs. Mullet sniffed. “They were nothin’ compared with ’im,” she said. “’E’s a bad lot, magistrate or no. You keep clear of ’im.”

  “But Harriet used to visit Bogmore Hall,” I said.

  Mrs. Mullet stopped halfway to the Aga, the teakettle frozen in her hand.

  “Wherever did you ’ear that, miss?”

  The room had gone suddenly cold, as it does when you’ve gone too far.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said lightly. “Daffy or Feely must have mentioned it.”

  “Miss Daphne and Miss Ophelia know nothing about it. It was a secret between Miss ’Arriet and me. Not even the Colonel knew. I used to make up the food ’ampers and she delivered ’em.”

  “To Jocelyn Ridley-Smith?” I asked.

  “Now, you listen to me, Miss Smartpants. Don’t you mention that name again in this ’ere ’ou
se. They’ll think it’s all my fault and I’ll be given the sack for blabberin’. Now, off you go—and get them Ridley-Smiths off your brain.”

  “Do you think it’s a sin that Harriet made friends with Jocelyn?”

  “It isn’t a question of what I think. ’Tisn’t my place to think. I drags myself in ’ere every day and cooks for you lot and then I goes ’ome, and there’s an end of it.”

  “But—”

  “There’s an end of it,” Mrs. Mullet said loudly. “If I comes ’ome and tells Alf I’ve lost my place, I ’ate to think what ’e’d say. Now off you go.”

  And off I went.

  Mrs. Mullet had given me an idea.

  Mrs. Mullet and Alf lived in a picturesque cottage near the end of Cobbler’s Lane, a narrow track which ran off the High Street and went nowhere in particular.

  “It’s what they call a ‘colder-sock,’ Alf says,” she had once told me. “Ends all of a sudden, like a sock.”

  A ginger cat sat in a window, watching me with one open eye.

  I knocked at the door and tried to look respectful.

  I didn’t know much about the home life of the Mullets except those titbits that Mrs. M inevitably let leak. I knew, for instance, that Alf loved custard pie; that their daughter, Agnes, had left home in the last year of the war to study Pitman shorthand, and that her bedroom had been kept ever since as a shrine to the powers of the typewriter, but I knew little else.

  The door opened and there stood Alf. He was a man of middle age, middle height, middle hair, and medium build. His only unusual feature was in the way he stood: ramrod straight. Alf, I remembered, had been in the army and, like Father and Dogger, knew a lot of things which must never be spoken of.

  “Well, miss,” he said. “To what do we owe this prodigious great pleasure?”

  The precise same words with which he had greeted me the last time I visited, six months ago.

  “I’m doing some research,” I said. “And I’d appreciate having your advice.”

  “Research, eh? Best come in and tell me about it.”

  Before you could whistle the first two bars of “Rule, Britannia,” we were sitting in a tiny kitchen that was as neat as a pin.

  “Pardon me for not layin’ on the ballroom,” Alf said, “but the missus don’t like havin’ ’er cushions made a mess of.”

  “It’s all right, Mr. Mullet,” I said. “I don’t, either.”

  “Sound girl,” he said. “Wizard good sense.”

  I plunged right in. “I was chatting with Mrs. Mullet today about the Ridley-Smiths,” I said, matter-of-factly.

  Which was true, as far as it went, but only just barely.

  “Ah,” Alf said, noncommitally, not looking at me. “Anything else?”

  “No—just the Ridley-Smiths. Magistrate Ridley-Smith, in particular.”

  “Ah,” Alf said again.

  “His wife was very beautiful,” I said. “I think I’ve seen a photograph of her.”

  “Funny old thing, isn’t it,” Alf asked, “’ow every village has its secrets? Some things just not talked about. Ever noticed that? I ’ave.”

  “And this is one of them, isn’t it?” I asked.

  Alf busied himself with the teakettle, in exactly the same way Mrs. Mullet had in the kitchen at Buckshaw. I suppose when people have been married for centuries, they become like joined paper cutouts of one another.

  “Lovely day,” Alf said, sitting himself down at the kitchen table. “Bit windy. Not bad for March, though.”

  “I’ve been to Bogmore Hall,” I said. “I’ve seen Jocelyn Ridley-Smith. I’ve talked to him.”

  There was only the slightest hesitation. If I hadn’t been looking out for it, I’d have missed it.

  “’Ave you, by George.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  It was a bit of a stalemate.

  Alf flicked a crumb off the tabletop, then bent down and picked it up from the floor, examining it as intently as if it were a bit of fallen moondust.

  “I need your help, Mr. Mullet,” I said. “I’m doing genealogical research for an article I’m thinking of writing: The Norman Roots of Certain Families Residing in the Parish of—”

  I could see by his grin, even before I finished speaking, that it wasn’t going to work.

  “The truth is, I know that you were in the army,” I said, changing tactics. “I know that because of the Official Secrets Act there are things you are still forbidden to speak of. I am not going to ask you about them. I am not going to ask you about my father, for instance, and I am not going to ask you about Dogger. It would be putting you on the spot.”

  Alf nodded.

  “But I am going to ask you about Mrs. Ridley-Smith because … well, because I need to know. It’s important to Jocelyn, too. I hope you’ll understand. It could be a matter of life and death.

  “Secrets or no secrets,” I added.

  I could tell by the way he avoided my eyes that he was wavering.

  “I know that you’re a great expert on the British military. Everybody in Bishop’s Lacey says so. ‘A walking encyclopedia,’ they call you.”

  “Is that a fact?” Alf said.

  “Yes,” I told him, crossing my heart with my first two fingers crossed, and extending my other hand so that he could see I wasn’t canceling out the cross with a negative sign behind my back. “It’s a fact. Mrs. Mullet says so, too.”

  I could see him softening.

  “You’ve ’eard of the Battle of Plassey,” he said. It was a statement, not a question.

  I shook my head no. Once I’d got him started, I didn’t dare interrupt.

  “How about Clive of India?”

  I shook my head again.

  “Shocking,” he said. “We shall correct that PDQ.”

  What could this possibly have to do with the Ridley-Smiths?

  I couldn’t begin to guess.

  •EIGHTEEN•

  “India, in them days, was like ’eaven and ’ell tossed into a stone kettle and boiled. Still an’ all, everyone was dyin’ to get into it—the French, the Dutch, the Portuguese, and yes, the English, too, all clawin’ away at one another to be top dog. To say nothin’ of the Mohammedans and the Moghuls what were tryin to ’ang onto what was rightly theirs.

  “More wars than you could count on all your toes and fingers put together, fought over a country full of snakes, elephants, lions, leopards, tigers, rivers, mountains, monsoons, and malaria.”

  “But why?” I asked.

  “Business,” Alf said. “Agriculture. Tea and timber. Rice. Coffee and cotton. Opium.”

  “Ah,” I said, as if I understood. “Who won?”

  “We did, of course.”

  “At the Battle of Plassey?” I asked, trying to be one jump ahead of him.

  “Among others,” Alf said. “That was just one of ’em. One of the best, though. Bengal, Trichinopoly, Pondicherry, Coromandel … they don’t make names like that nowadays.”

  He got up from the table and, opening a kitchen drawer, pulled out two handfuls of cutlery—a dozen knives, forks, and spoons, which he dumped with a clatter on the tabletop.

  “The Black ’Ole of Calcutta,” he said, sitting himself down again. “You must have ’eard of that?”

  “No,” I said.

  “’Undred and forty-six Englishmen packed into a cell no bigger than your butler’s pantry at Buckshaw. June. ’Ottest month of the year. Next mornin’, no more’n twenty-three of ’em left alive.”

  I tried for a moment to imagine myself opening the door of Dogger’s pantry and having a hundred and twenty-three dead bodies come tumbling out onto the kitchen floor, leaving another two dozen or so poor human beings cringing terrified in the shadowy corners. But I couldn’t. It was unthinkable.

  “’Eat somethin’ awful,” Alf went on. “No air. It’s murder, plain and simple. What do you do?”

  “Revenge?” I asked. It seemed to me the logical answer.

  “Revenge is right!” Alf sai
d, slamming his fist down onto the tabletop, causing the cutlery to jump.

  “’Ere’s the Bhagirathi River,” he said, quickly placing a knife. “And ’ere …” positioning a salt shaker, “is Suraj-ud-Dowlah, the last Nawab of Bengal. The enemy. He’s nineteen years old and ’as the temper of a cobra with a festered fang. ’As an army of fifty thousand foot, eighteen thousand horses, fifty-three pieces of cannon, and forty Frenchmen to work ’em.

  Alf had suddenly come to life. It was easy to see that he was as passionate about British military history as I was about poisons.

  “Over ’ere, to the west, is Clive, with the Thirty-ninth Regiment. Robert Clive. Not even a military man by profession, when you come right down to it. ’E’s a bookkeeper. A bookkeeper! But ’e’s a British bookkeeper.

  “But for all that, ’e once marched his men to battle through a storm—thunderin’ and lighinin’ to beat blue blazes. Natives thought ’e was some kind of a war god.”

  Alf sighed. “Those were the days, those were.

  “Now then, at Plassey, he’s got thirty-two ’undred men and nine guns. It’s the monsoon season. Rainin’ cats and dogs again. Outnumbered more than fifteen to one. What do you suppose ’e did?”

  “He attacked,” I said, guessing.

  “Too bleedin’ well true ’e attacked,” Alf said, swiveling a sugar spoon and hopping it across the table. “Suraj-ud-Dowlah took to ’is ’eels on a camel.”

  He swept the spoons and forks of the Nawab’s army off the table and onto the floor.

  “I’ll wash up later,” he said. “Five ’undred dead. British losses? Twenty-two dead and fifteen wounded.”

  I let out a low whistle. “How could that be?” I asked.

  “Nawab didn’t keep ’is powder dry,” Alf said. “Can’t fight with wet powder.”

  I nodded wisely. “Very interesting, I said. “Whatever became of him?”

  “The Nawab? ’E was executed about a week later by ’is successor.”

  “And Clive?”

  “Slit ’is own throat years later in London.”

  “Ugghhh!” I said, even though I was interested.

  “I suppose you’re wonderin’ why I’m tellin’ you all this,” Alf said.