Speaking From Among the Bones

by Alan Bradley

  Surely Dogger must be wrong.

  “I thought people died from that,” I said.

  “They do. Sometimes. But in certain cases it becomes dormant—goes into a state of suspended animation—for years.”

  “How many years?”

  “Ten, twenty, forty, fifty. It varies. There is no hard-and-fast rule.”

  “Is it contagious?” I asked, wanting suddenly and desperately to wash my hands.

  “Not as much as you might think,” Dogger said. “Hardly at all, in fact. Most persons have a natural immunity to the organism which causes it—Mycobacterium leprae.”

  I had been aching for ages to ask Dogger about his vast storehouse of medical knowledge, an urge I had so far managed to keep in check. It was none of my business. Even the slightest inquiry into his shocked and troubled past would be an unforgiveable invasion of trust.

  “I have myself known of a case in which the bullae of the prodromal stage—”

  His words stopped abruptly.

  “Yes?” I prompted.

  Dogger’s eyes seemed to have packed their bags and fled to some far-off place. A different century, perhaps, a different land, or a different planet. After a long time he said: “It is as if—”

  It was as if I wasn’t there. Dogger’s voice was suddenly the rustle of leaves or the sighing of the wind in a vanished willow.

  I held my breath.

  “There is a pool,” he said slowly, his words strung out like beads on a long cord. “It is in the jungle … sometimes, the water is clear and may be drunk … other times, it is murky. An arm dipped into it disappears.”

  Dogger reached out to touch something which I could not see, his hand trembling.

  “Is it gone … or is it still there, invisible? One fishes in the depths, helpless, hoping to find—something—anything.”

  “It’s all right, Dogger,” I said, as I always did, and touching his shoulder. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not important.”

  “Oh, but it does—and it is, Miss Flavia,” he said, startling me with his intense presence. “And perhaps never more than now.”

  “Yes,” I said automatically. “Perhaps never more than now.”

  I wasn’t sure that I knew what we were talking about, but I knew that we had to keep on, no matter what.

  Without really changing the subject, I continued as casually as if nothing had happened. “Without giving away any confidences,” I said, “I can tell you that the person I am speaking of is Magistrate Ridley-Smith.” Dogger, after all, had he been with me in the crypt, might have seen him with his own eyes.

  “I have heard him mentioned, nothing more,” Dogger said.

  “The other, the one I asked you about earlier, is his son Jocelyn.”

  “Yes, I remember. Lead poisoning.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “You deduced that I had been at Bogmore Hall.”

  “I have heard the son spoken of,” Dogger said. “Servants talk. One hears things at the market.”

  “But not the father?” I prompted.

  “No. Not the father. Not, at least, a physical description.”

  “Poor Jocelyn!” I said. “If your diagnosis is correct, his mother was lead-poisoned and his father a leper.”

  Dogger nodded sadly. “Such things happen,” he said, “even though we try to pretend they do not.”

  “Will they live?” I asked.

  I had worked my way slowly up to the most important question of all.

  “The son, perhaps,” Dogger replied. “The father, no.”

  “Odd, isn’t it?” I said. “The leprosy, now that it has come to life again, will kill him.”

  “Leprosy in itself is rarely fatal,” Dogger said. “Its victims are more likely to die from kidney or liver failure. And now if you’ll excuse me, miss—”

  “Of course, Dogger,” I said. “I’m sorry for interrupting. I know you have things to do.”

  It had been a near thing. Dogger had come within a hairs breadth of sliding into one of his episodes. I knew that he wanted nothing more than to get to his room and fall quietly to pieces.

  The worst was over, at least for now, and he needed to be given the gift of being alone.

  “What’s up, Daff?” I said, barging into the library as if it were just another jolly day at Buckshaw. My sister was extraordinarily perceptive, even though she pretended she was not. If there had been a crushing call on the telephone, Daffy would by now have ferreted out all the details.

  In that way, she was a lot like me.

  “Nothing,” Daffy said, without looking up from her book-sorting. It seemed as if the warm feeling built up earlier by our sisterly ceasefire had leaked away like the sand in an hourglass.

  “Who telephoned?” I asked. “I thought I heard it ring a while ago.”

  A ringing telephone at Buckshaw was such a rarity that it could be commented upon without suspicion.

  Daffy shrugged and opened The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

  Whatever it was that had upset Father, he had not shared it.

  Which, in a peculiar way was comforting. My sisters shared everything. Whatever Daffy knew, Feely knew. Whatever Feely knew, Daffy knew.

  What Flavia knew was, by comparison, like the bump on the log in the hole at the bottom of the sea. Deep, dark, and nobody gave a rat’s anatomy.

  Trying to cheer things up a bit, I said, “I’m looking for a good book to read. Can you recommend something suitable?”

  “Yes,” Daffy said. “The Holy Bible.”

  With that, she slammed shut Wildfell Hall and stalked out of the room.

  So much for shared blood.

  •TWENTY-FIVE•

  Supper was a charade.

  Father did not put in an appearance.

  Feely and Daffy and I sat picking at our food, being horridly decent to one another, passing the salt and pepper and the cold peas with elaborate pleases and thank-yous.

  It was dreadful.

  None of us knew for certain what was happening either with Buckshaw or with Father, and we didn’t want to be the first to ask—didn’t want to be the one to throw the last pebble: the pebble which would smash, once and for all, our fragile house of glass.

  As if words alone could cause its final fall.

  “May I be excused?” Daffy asked.

  “Of course,” Feely and I said too quickly, at the same time.

  I wanted to cry.

  I also wanted to go to my laboratory and prepare an enormous batch of nitrogen triiodide with which to blow up, in a spectacular mushroom cloud of purple vapor, the world and everyone in it.

  People would think it was the Apocalypse.

  The sea of glass like unto crystal … the star called Wormwood, the seven lamps of fire, the rainbow round about the throne, and the second angel pouring out his vial upon the sea where it became as the blood of a dead man.

  I’d show them!

  I’d give them something to think about.

  The blood of a dead man.

  It had all begun with blood, hadn’t it?

  That’s what was dribbling through my mind as I climbed the stairs.

  In the beginning there had been the blood of the flattened frog and the blood of my own family glowing with red iridescence under the microscope. There had been the stained-glass blood of John the Baptist and the blood that dripped from the brow of the wooden Saint Tancred. I had still not had the opportunity to tell the vicar the results of my analysis.

  There had been the red stain on the floor of the organ chamber where Mr. Collicutt was murdered, but that, of course, was not blood. It was red-colored alcohol from the organ’s broken manometer.

  Of Mr. Collicutt’s blood, there had been not a trace.

  Of course!

  Not a single drop.

  Not in the chamber where he was killed, not in the tomb where his body ended up, and not, so far as I had seen, anywhere in between.

  In the case of Mr. Collicutt, it was not so much a case of bloodstains as
the lack of them.

  The obvious conclusion was that he had not been stabbed or shot, and poisoning, somewhat to my regret, was out of the question.

  In spite of what Wilfred Sowerby, the undertaker, had told Adam about internal explosions, it was obvious that those injuries were inflicted after death.

  No blood.

  QED.

  You didn’t need to be a Professor Einstein to see that Mr. Collicutt had most likely died of suffocation. Actually, I should have spotted that as soon as I laid eyes on him.

  The gas mask itself told much of the story.

  And then, now that I thought about it, there had been that white ruffle at his chin. Like the Highwayman.

  A handkerchief. Shoved under the mask.

  But why?

  The answer hit me like a dropped brick.

  Ether! Diethyl ether!

  Good old (C2H5)2O.

  The stuff had been discovered either in the eighth century by the Persian alchemist Abu Abdallah Jaber ben Hayyam ben Abdallah al-Kufi, sometimes called Geber, or in the thirteenth century by Raymond Lully, sometimes called Doctor Illuminatus, and could in a jiff be concocted easily at home from sulfuric acid and heated cream of tartar. It could also be pinched from a hospital, or from a doctor’s surgery.

  I could all too easily imagine Mr. Collicutt’s last moments: the saturated handkerchief clapped to the nose, cold at first, then a fierce burning followed by numbness. The hot sweet taste of it as he gasped for air, the warmth of it in his stomach, the fading of the senses, the swirling darkness, and then—what?

  Well, death, of course, if the ether were applied for too long or in too great a quantity. Paralysis of the central nervous system and failure of the respiratory system could possibly result if great care were not taken. I had read the grisly details in Heinrich Braun’s classic text Local Anaesthesia, a well-thumbed copy of which Uncle Tar had kept on the shelf above his desk. His own experiments with procaine and stovaine (named for the Frenchman Ernest Fourneau, whose name, in French, means “stove”) were well documented in Uncle Tar’s microscopically inked notes in the margins.

  But who, nowadays, in Bishop’s Lacey, would be able to obtain ether? Probably very few.

  In fact, when you came to think of it, a medical doctor was likely the only person on earth who regularly carried the stuff with him everywhere in his bag.

  I needed to speak to Dr. Darby.

  Tomorrow was Easter Sunday. He would almost certainly—barring medical emergencies—be at church with the rest of Bishop’s Lacey, organizing, as he always did, the pace-egging and the egg hunt. I could catch him at the lych-gate and ask casually if anything had recently gone missing from his bag.

  But first I needed to sleep.

  Dogger must have brought Esmeralda in from the greenhouse, because I found her roosting contentedly on the iron ring of a laboratory support stand and there was a fresh egg in my bed.

  I would save it for the morning, I decided. Tomorrow was going to be a long day.

  Father would have us rousted out of our beds by five o’clock so we could have a light breakfast before the three-hour curfew.

  As Roman Catholics, we were bound to fast from at least midnight before receiving the Holy Eucharist. Only those who were gravely ill and in danger of death were permitted their toast and marmalade in advance.

  Father, however, disagreed.

  “A hot breakfast is indispensable, if not mandatory,” he used to tell us. “You never know when, or if, you might eat again.”

  It was a piece of wisdom he had apparently formulated during his military service, but we knew better than to ask questions. In discussion with the vicar, he had settled on a time of three hours as being sufficient to satisfy both tummy and spirit of the law.

  Father, I must say, is years ahead of his time. He sees nothing wrong with receiving Holy Communion at the altar of the Church of England rather than driving to Hinley for Holy Eucharist at Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows.

  “It is one’s bounden duty,” he never tires of telling us, “to trade with local firms.”

  Well, so be it, I suppose.

  We would be in our pew for the eight o’clock service, then return for the eleven o’clock service, the one with all the stops pulled out: choir, organ, the Psalms and responses chanted, a bang-up sermon—the whole McGillicuddy.

  I dug out from under my bed the set of recordings I had pinched from Feely’s bedroom, Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor which, according to Feely, was descriptive of sunlight and shadows on the icy fjords of Norway, with cakes of ice like diamonds the size of Buckshaw breaking away and crashing down into the sea.

  I wound up the crank of my gramophone, lowered the needle into the grooves of the spinning disk, dived under the covers, and pulled the quilt up to my ears as the music began.

  With the strings of the London Philharmonic singing me asleep, I was dead to the world before the spring ran down.

  I dreamt I was in St. Tancred’s churchyard where tables—perhaps a dozen of them—had been set up here and there among the tombstones. At the tables were seated the people of Bishop’s Lacey and surroundings, dressed all of them alike in harlequin suits of a diamond pattern. The rich colors of their silks made them seem like figures from a stained-glass window.

  On the table, in front of each player—or contestant, I wasn’t sure which—was an identical jigsaw puzzle, unopened, and behind each player stood a referee with a harlequin flag.

  O what great fun, I thought, a jigsaw tournament.

  A whistle was blown, the flags came swishing down, and the players tore open the boxes and began sorting like madmen. Already one or two of them were fitting flat-edged pieces into the border.

  A judge in powdered wig and pince-nez strolled among the tables, pausing to watch over the shoulder of each player for a few moments before scribbling notes in a great and ancient ledger.

  As I moved in for a closer look at the puzzles themselves (which seemed to depict either a saint with a golden glow around his head or a moonlit rock protruding from a midnight sea) I was warned off by a dark figure in clerical garb (could it be the vicar?) who, by hand gestures, made it quite clear that any interference would be punished at once by the man with the shovel.

  I spun round and found myself face to face with the punisher—the man with the shovel. Miss Tanty.

  I awoke instantly and sat up in bed, my heart pounding.

  If I had not known it before, I now knew how Mr. Collicutt had been killed and why.

  The clock showed that it was ten minutes to five. Too late to catch another forty winks.

  I jumped out of bed onto a cold floor, dashed cold water from the ewer onto my hands and face, and climbed into the starched frilly white frock Mrs. Mullet had laid out for me, like a railway driver climbing onto the footplate of his engine.

  Esmerelda’s egg, steamed, and a couple of pieces of bread toasted over the Bunsen burner made for a hearty breakfast.

  I took a cork from a drawer and charred it in the burner’s flame. When it had cooled, I applied it to my eyelids with special attention to the lowers, then rubbed at the soot until it had faded to a realistic purplish gray.

  As a finishing touch, I twisted my hair into a tangled rat’s nest and sprayed cold water from an atomizer onto my brow.

  I looked at myself in the mirror.

  With clots of egg still clinging to my lips, the effect was remarkably convincing.

  Father, Daffy, and Feely were already at the table as I stumbled into the dining room and looked around dazedly.

  I took my seat without a word and sat motionless, my hands folded dismally in my lap.

  “Good God!” Feely said. “Look at you!”

  Father and Daffy looked up from their dry toast.

  “I—I—I’m afraid I’m going to have to be excused,” I managed. “I’m sorry. I’ve hardly slept. I think it must have been something I ate.”

  I put my cupped hand to my mouth and puffed out my chee
ks.

  “Have a piece of toast,” Father said. “Then go straight back upstairs to bed. I’ll look in on you when we get home.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “But I’m not hungry.

  “A good long sleep will do me the world of good,” I added, echoing Mrs. Mullet.

  Back upstairs I changed from Easter frock to skirt and sweater, and from my Goody Two-shoes into plimsolls.

  Minutes later I was crawling—quietly, carefully—out the window of the Portrait Gallery on the ground floor.

  It had rained in the night and Gladys was wet. I gave her a good shaking, and the drops of cold condensation flew like a shower of diamonds in the moonlight.

  In less than ten minutes we would be at St. Tancred’s.

  •TWENTY-SIX•

  A frail fog drifted up from the river behind the church, floating like gray smoke among the graves, muffling the sound of the running water.

  A churchyard in the March moonlight should be enough to give anyone the ging-gang-goolies, but not this girl.

  After all, I had been here before.

  I pounded my chest with both fists and breathed deeply of the morning’s damp air—a mixture of dank earth, wet grass, and old stone, with a slight aftertaste of fading flowers.

  I could see why clergymen loved their jobs.

  The ladies from the Altar Guild would soon be here, so I’d have to be quick about what I’d come to do. With any luck, I’d have perhaps an hour, or at most an hour and a half before they arrived with armloads of Easter lilies.

  Not that I would need that long. My dream had helped the last bits of the puzzle to fall into place. Before the dream, although I’d had all the facts, I hadn’t seen how they fit together.

  But now, as sure as shandygaff, I knew what I was going to find, and where I was going to find it.

  I stepped into the porch and flicked on the torch, taking care to keep the beam focused on the floor. Seen from outside, the slightest glimmer on the stained-glass windows would make the church glow like a Tiffany lamp in the graveyard.

  I opened the inner door and passed from the porch into the main body of the church or, as Feely would have said, from the narthex into the nave. When it came to ecclesiastical architecture, Feely loved to toss around technical terms as if she were chatting over tea and ladyfingers with the Archbishop of Canterbury, or perhaps even the Pope. Did the Pope drink tea? I didn’t know, but I was sure Feely would be able to hold forth upon the subject until the cows came home with the cream.