Speaking From Among the Bones

by Alan Bradley

  I closed my notebook and shoved it into a drawer, then flew to the darkroom to put away the torch and the envelope.

  I had barely time to return to the window and hold a test tube of colored liquid up to the light—tea, as it happened—when the door opened and Dogger intoned, “Mr. Sowerby, Miss Flavia.”

  I counted slowly to seven, then turned round.

  “Come in,” I said. “How nice to see you again.”

  Adam gave out a low whistle as he looked round at my laboratory.

  “Good lord,” he said. “I had, of course, heard about your famous Closet of Chemistry, but I had no idea—”

  “Very few do,” I said. “I try to keep it as private as possible.”

  “Then I am very much privileged.”

  “Yes, you are,” I told him.

  No point in wasting time with false vanity when you possess the real thing.

  He drifted over to my microscope.

  “Ernst Leitz, by Jove,” he said. “And binocular, too. Very nice. Very nice indeed.”

  I nodded graciously and kept my mouth shut. Let’s wait and see, I thought, what the cat’s brought home.

  “I saw you at the church,” he said. “Quite ingenious, the way you rescued the vicar from those baying reporters.”

  “You were there?” I asked, surprised.

  “Lurking among the funerary entablature,” Adam said. Then when he saw the look on my face, he added quickly, “Keeping out of sight behind a tombstone, I mean. You were magnificent.”

  I flushed slightly. This was twice I had been told I was magnificent—first by Feely, and now by Adam Sowerby.

  I was not accustomed to dealing with such unexpected praise. I didn’t know what to say.

  “I expect you’re wondering why I’ve come,” Adam said, rescuing the moment.

  “Yes,” I said, although I hadn’t been.

  “Reason the first …”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a test tube, in which something was twisted.

  “Abracadabra,” he said, handing it to me.

  I recognized it at once. “My hair ribbon!” I said.

  “Stain and all.” Adam grinned.

  “Where did you find it?”

  “Where you dropped it. In the church porch.”

  I am not a person given to blaspheming, but I came perilously close.

  “Thank you,” I managed, setting it aside. “I shall analyze it later.”

  “Why not do it now, so that I can watch?”

  I was tempted to refuse, but the thought of glory did me in. Chemistry is such a lonely occupation that there is never an audience for its greatest moments.

  “All right,” I said, with no further persuasion.

  I put a bit of distilled water into a clean test tube, then carefully unscrewed the hair ribbon inch by inch from the glass container Adam had brought it in.

  “Stolen from one of my germinating samples,” he said. When he saw my look of alarm he added, “I sterilized it first.”

  With scissors, I snipped off the rather brownish-stained end of the ribbon and, with tweezers, immersed it in the water.

  I lit a Bunsen burner and handed Adam the test tube and a pair of nickel-plated tongs.

  “Hold it in the flame,” I instructed. “Keep it moving. I’ll be there in a jiff.”

  I went to a row of bottled chemicals and took down the nitric acid.

  “Take it off the flame,” I told him. “Keep steady.”

  I added a few drops of acid to the water in the test tube.

  “Thank you,” I said, taking over.

  I heated the liquid slowly, swirling the test tube and watching as the water and the nitric acid quickly took up the stain.

  I did this until the liquid had nearly evaporated, leaving not much more than a residue of sludge at the bottom of the tube. To this, I added a bit of alcohol, then filtered and set the mixture aside to cool.

  “What kind of blood would you expect to get from a wooden saint?” I asked as we waited. “Blood from the arteries has more oxygen and less nitrogen, while blood from the veins is the opposite. Since a carved saint doesn’t breathe, what’s most likely to be the chemical composition of his blood?”

  Adam said nothing, but he caught my eye and did not look away.

  He had known at once that there was more to my question than chemistry.

  When it was ready, I placed a drop of the residue on a clean glass slide and slipped it under the microscope. I was smiling even as the image came into focus.

  Adam was breathing pleasantly over my shoulder.

  “Look,” I said. “Four-sided prisms. Made up of acicular crystals. Like little needles,” I explained, in case he didn’t know the meaning of the word. “CH4N2O.”

  “Clever,” Adam said. “Damned clever of you to think of it.”

  I agreed with him totally.

  “You said the hair ribbon was only ‘reason the first’ for coming. What was reason the second?”

  “Reason the second? Oh, yes, I thought you’d like to know. They’re hoisting Saint Tancred from his tomb even as we speak.”

  “What?” I said it with several exclamation marks.

  “I thought you’d like to watch,” he said. “May I give you a lift?”

  “Ra-ther!”

  •TWENTY-TWO•

  We were bucketing along the road to Bishop’s Lacey in Adam’s open Rolls-Royce, Nancy, the wind whistling round our ears.

  “They decided to do it straightaway before anyone’s the wiser. The vicar tipped me off,” Adam said, shouting above the noise of the car’s cutaway body. “I knew you’d never forgive me if I didn’t let you in on it.”

  “But why?” I asked, perhaps for the third time. “You didn’t have to.”

  “Let’s just say I’m a kindly old gaffer.”

  “No,” I told him firmly. “I want the truth.”

  “Well,” Adam said, “I’ve always believed that when the bones of the great are are exhumed, it should always be done in the presence of the youngest person practicable—the one who is going to live the longest; the one who will carry down the years the memory of coming face-to-face, as it were, with history.”

  “And I’m the youngest person practicable? Is that that the only reason?”

  “Yes,” Adam said.

  Blast the man!

  “Then, too,” he went on, “I thought you might like to be first in the queue to have a squint at the Heart of Lucifer.”

  Now I was grinning like a fool.

  The Heart of Lucifer!

  I was struck with a sudden and remarkable idea.

  “If what you say is true,” I told Adam, “and it turns out that Saint Tancred was a de Luce, doesn’t that mean that the Heart of Lucifer would belong rightfully to Father?”

  “The Church might think otherwise,” he said, after thinking about it.

  “Oh, bother the Church. If they’re stupid enough to dump a priceless diamond in the grave, they can’t have wanted it very badly. It’s probably under one of those peculiar laws like flotsam and jetsam. I’ll ask Daffy. She’ll know.”

  Daffy had read aloud to us one of Victor Hugo’s novels in which the laws of flotsam and jetsam were explained to the point that you became seasick.

  “One way or another, it’s bound to be interesting,” Adam said, “although if I were you, I shouldn’t get my hopes up much.”

  He must have seen at once the dampening effect his words had on me.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ve been thinking.”

  I kept quiet.

  “Thinking that perhaps we should make a swap. Scandal for scandal. Tit for tat.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,” I said, not willing to give up my advantage a second too soon.

  “You tell me what you found in Collicutt’s bedroom, and I’ll tell you the results of his autopsy.”

  He grinned at me, daring me to say no.

  “Done!” I said. “It was mo
ney—and quite a lot of it. Six hundred pounds, hidden under his bed in a Players cigarette tin.”

  “Phew!” Adam whistled, and then he laughed. “And the police missed it?”

  “Evidently,” I said, and he laughed even more.

  “Now, then,” I told him, “it’s your turn. The autopsy. How did you find out about it? Did you pump Dr. Darby?”

  “Dear me, no! The good Dr. Darby is much more discreet than that. I merely had a word with my cousin Wilfred.”

  I must have looked blank.

  “Wilfred Sowerby, of Sowerby & Sons, your local undertakers. Furnishers of Funerals and Furniture. Bit of a tongue-twister, that.”

  Of course! I had forgotten about their connection.

  “The ones who chose Death while your side of the family chose Life,” I said. “Yes, I remember now.”

  How like the de Luces, I wanted to say, but it was not a thought I wanted to share.

  “Yes,” Adam said. “The Dismal Sowerbys.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  He was playing the fool again.

  “Ah, yes. The autopsy,” he said when I did not rise to his stupid bait. “Cousin Wilfred was most enlightening. Rupture of the internal organs. Everything from the esophagus to points south of the equator. Wilfred said he’d never seen a blowout anything like it. Quite spectacular, he said.”

  “Caused by?”

  I could hardly contain myself, but I kept still.

  “They haven’t a clue. At least, not so far.”

  I needed to change the subject. Quickly.

  “Huh,” I said, as if I weren’t interested. “Fancy that.”

  We went along without speaking for a minute or so, both of us wrapped in our own thoughts, and then I said, “Hold on—how can they be going ahead with opening Saint Tancred’s tomb? I thought the bishop had forbidden it?”

  “The bishop, it seems, has had a change of heart. As has Chancellor Ridley-Smith.”

  “What?”

  “It’s true,” Adam said. “Although bishops are not generally known for their flexibility, this one, it seems, has gone into reverse on the matter. He has withdrawn the withdrawn faculty.”

  “But why? Why would he do such a thing?”

  “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” Adam said with a cinema-star grin.

  Why were people always quoting this tired old line to me? The last time I’d heard it was from Dr. Darby, and before that, my sister Daffy.

  Why do people always quote Hamlet when they want to seem clever?

  Altogether too much Shakespeare, methinks!

  “Meaning?” I’m afraid I snapped, without really intending to.

  “Perhaps he was made to do so,” Adam said.

  “Ha!” I told him. “Nobody orders a bishop about.”

  I was no expert in theology, but even I knew that.

  “Do they not?” Adam asked, a little smugly, I thought.

  “You know something you’re not telling me,” I said.

  “Perhaps,” he said, looking more like the Cheshire cat with every passing second.

  What a maddening man he was!

  “You know who’s bossing the bishop and you won’t tell me?” I asked him.

  “Can’t tell you,” he said. “There’s a difference.”

  We were now approaching the marshy land which surrounded the church. Adam applied the brakes and stopped for a mallard that was waddling across the road.

  I jumped out and slammed the door.

  With eyes fixed straight ahead, I marched off toward the church, leaving Adam Tradescant Sowerby, MA., FRHortS, etc., to stew in his own clever juices.

  “Ah, Flavia,” the vicar said as I picked my way over the rubble into the crypt. “We’ve been expecting you.”

  “It’s awfully good of you to let me know,” I said, craning my neck to see over his shoulder. George Battle and his workers had drilled eyebolts into the bottom stone of the chamber—the slab upon which Mr. Collicutt’s corpse had been lying.

  “It’s actually the lid of the sarcophagus,” the vicar explained in a hushed voice, as if he were a BBC commentator covering some particularly solemn ceremony on the Home Service.

  A compact winch had been set up to lift the stone, and the ropes were already straining under its weight.

  “You’re just in the nick of time. Dear me, to think that in just a few moments we shall be looking into the face of—of course, given your proclivities, I knew you wouldn’t want to miss a moment of what promises to be—”

  “Heave!” said George Battle.

  With a hollow groan, the stone rose half an inch.

  “It is said that when certain Royal tombs were opened, the workers found the occupant unchanged by time, clothed in armor, crowned with gold, their faces as fresh as if they had just fallen asleep. And then suddenly, within a minute or so of being exposed to the air, they crumbled away to dust. The Royal personages, that is—not the workers.”

  “Heave!”

  The stone came up another grating inch.

  “You may be interested to hear, George,” the vicar said, “that the stonemason who opened the tombs of the regicides Cromwell and Ireton was paid seventeen shillings for his trouble.”

  George Battle said nothing, but hauled grimly again on his rope.

  “Heave!”

  Now a dark crack was showing round the edges of the slab.

  “Good heavens,” the vicar said. “I’m as excited as a schoolboy. Here, let me give a hand.”

  “Watch your fingers, Vicar!” George Battle shouted. “You’ll lose ’em if this bugger drops.”

  The vicar sprang back.

  The stone was now free of its channel, swinging slowly and heavily from side to side, like a two-ton marble pendulum.

  I felt the draft at once and smelt the tomb’s cold stink.

  “Swing now, Norman. Grab that bar, Tommy. Easy! Easy!”

  The stone swung out of its setting, revealing a black and gaping pit. I leaned forward but could see only a few of the bricks that lined its side. The vicar put his hand on my shoulder and smiled at me. Was he imagining that I was his daughter, Hannah, returned from the grave to be at his side for this wonderful but terrifying moment?

  He squeezed, and I put my hand on his. We neither of us spoke a word.

  “And down … down … down—that’s it … down … down.”

  With an unnerving grinding noise, the stone settled onto the floor.

  “Well done,” Norman said, to nobody in particular.

  “Let’s have that torch,” Tommy said, and George Battle handed it over.

  Tommy scrambled up onto the ledge, straddling the pit, and shone the beam down into the abyss.

  “Blimey,” he murmured.

  The vicar was next. He stepped slowly forward, leaned in, and, dodging Tommy’s legs, stared for a long moment downwards.

  Without a word, he crooked his forefinger and beckoned me to come.

  Although only a couple of days had passed, it seemed as if I had been looking forward to this moment forever. Now that the moment had arrived, I found myself wavering.

  What was I about to see? A fresh-faced Saint Tancred? A diamond as big as a turkey’s egg—the Heart of Lucifer?

  I eased my face slowly over the edge of the pit and looked down.

  At the bottom, in the torch’s beam, perhaps ten feet deep in the earth, covered with dust and reeking slightly, was a heap of moldy fabric and old green bones.

  They lay in a lead sarcophagus whose lid had been ripped off and stood on end in a corner.

  A shriveled stick of carved black wood, shaped vaguely like a shepherd’s crook, had been tossed carelessly atop the pile, like a withered and badly weathered tree branch thrown onto the remains of a dead fire.

  Saint Tancred’s crozier, carved from the Glastonbury Thorn, fashioned, it was said, from the Holy Grail itself.

  At its thicker end, a ga
ping oval hole with twisted metal clasps showed clearly where something had been wrenched away. The Heart of Lucifer was gone.

  Someone had been here before us.

  •TWENTY-THREE•

  “My word,” the vicar said. “Someone has been here before us.”

  The two of us were shoulder to shoulder at the very edge of the pit, staring down into the shaft as if we were looking down a well. A cold, acrid draft blew up into our faces from a ragged opening halfway down the side. At the bottom of the pit, pitiful tatters of Saint Tancred’s robe shivered in the moving air.

  “They’ve knocked a hole in the wall,” I said.

  “A cave-in,” George Battle said, edging me aside and taking my place. “You get cave-ins in old churches.”

  Suddenly and quietly, Adam was behind us. He was wearing a soft peaked cap, rubber boots, and a sort of explorer’s vest covered in pockets bursting with scientific supplies. A bulky camera bag completed his kit.

  “If I may,” he said quite abruptly to the vicar, “I need to make my descent before anything else is disturbed.”

  “By all means. Albert, if you wouldn’t mind fetching Mr. Sowerby a ladder …”

  He was speaking to Mr. Haskins, who had come into the crypt behind Adam.

  “Ladder?” Mr. Haskins asked, as if he didn’t know the meaning of the word, or as if he didn’t want to be bothered.

  “There’s a ladder on the back of Mr. Battle’s lorry,” I said helpfully. “Several of them, actually.”

  “Norman,” Mr. Battle said, with a glance at his helpers. Norman, tall in the crypt, ducked his head and stepped out through the archway.

  Nobody said anything for the longest time, each of us shifting from foot to foot, looking everywhere but at one another.

  I wondered why.

  I glanced casually round at the remaining workers. Tommy from Malden Fenwick took advantage of the lull to light a cigarette. The other man, whose name I did not know, shook his head as Tommy held out the pack and offered him a smoke.

  There was no idle chatter. Just a couple of workmen waiting restlessly to get on with the job.

  Then Norman was back with the ladder, clattering through the crypt, breaking the spell of silence. With much banging and a few muttered instructions, the ladder’s end was maneuvered down into the saint’s grave.