Come Away, Death

by Gladys Mitchell

  It was gold, earth-encrusted – a fattish, pale bit of metal, about seven inches by four, beaten out in designs of fish. ‘What do you think of that?’

  Mrs Bradley gazed at the wonder, and shook her head in congratulatory amazement.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘Cretan origin, if it’s genuine, but I don’t, as I say, believe it.’

  ‘That’s what I feel about it, too. It’s like the gold plate that they found here when they excavated the grave-circle. How do you think they missed it? And where can I keep it hidden until we get back to Athens? I don’t want anyone else to see it until the museum gets it and puts it on show. Already, I rather fancy, somebody knows I’ve got it, and I found it only yesterday.’

  ‘Presented by Mr Ronald Dick – I know,’ said Mrs Bradley. She and Dick looked again at the beaten gold.

  ‘I know some collectors who’d give a fortune for this,’ said Dick. ‘I wish I knew where I could keep it. I wouldn’t have some of these people see it for anything. Sir Rudri is horribly immoral – I remember him when we dug up a barrow in Devonshire, and I shall always believe that that statuette of his – the Roman one —’

  ‘Came from Pompeii,’ said Mrs Bradley. She considered him, her head on one side. ‘And Alexander Currie played that nasty trick on Rudri, and Gelert is in need of money, and Ian can’t afford his college fees, and Armstrong’s capable of anything – even of impersonating a god and of pushing a mortal into a grave – yes, yes!’ She then cackled harshly, but with sincere amusement.

  ‘It’s all very well,’ said Dick. Mrs Bradley waved her claw.

  ‘Take heart, dear child. I have a botanical case which should meet your purpose exactly. I will lend it you. But tell me why Armstrong should come behind you by night and push you into the excavations like that?’

  Dick took off his glasses and wiped them.

  ‘I think I annoy him,’ he said. ‘I believe I give him a slight feeling of inferiority.’

  He was so obviously in earnest that Mrs Bradley, adjusting her expression to fit this fact, pursed her lips and nodded solemnly.

  ‘I see, dear child,’ she said. They returned to the base and she found the botanical case and gave it to him.

  ‘I wish you’d take charge of it,’ he said. ‘I’m nervous about Armstrong. He might already know something. I wouldn’t trust him. He was trying to search me, I’m sure, before he shoved me into these graves.’

  ‘I must take care not to explore the grave-circle by night,’ said Mrs Bradley, receiving back the case and its priceless contents. She put it in the bottom of her sleeping-sack. Armstrong and Dmitri, who had placed their sacks at the bend in the path where it led down on to the road which was not visible from the Lion Gate, came strolling up about a quarter of an hour later, and found her reading a volume of modern poetry.

  ‘Breakfast?’ said Armstrong. Dmitri bowed and smiled. Mrs Bradley patted the coat on which she had seated herself.

  ‘Sit down, Mr Armstrong, and tell me all the gossip of the night.’

  ‘What night?’

  ‘Last night.’

  ‘Was there any gossip?’

  ‘Mr Dick fell into the excavations and nearly broke his neck.’

  ‘Oh that!’ said Armstrong. He laughed, lifting his flawless head to look up at the lions above the lintel. ‘I know nothing about it. What was he doing there, anyway?’

  ‘He was practising mediumship,’ Mrs Bradley replied very solemnly.

  ‘Oh? Raising spooks? I say, Dmitri —’ He addressed the Greek youth lispingly. Dmitri nodded and smiled.

  ‘I also,’ he said, addressing himself to Mrs Bradley, ‘I also am immoral with women.’

  ‘I have no doubt of it,’ replied Mrs Bradley, in the tones of congratulation he seemed to demand.

  ‘The English,’ said Dmitri, seating himself and clasping thin hands round his knees, ‘are like the Greeks in all things, and I admire them. It is the English and the Germans, and, to some extent, the mobile French, who have made the Greeks what we are. I do not remember the Turks’ – he spat conscientiously – ‘not even in hatred nor in horror. We are cruel, too. Cruelty, it is of man. Also the politics. In England you are politics in mind, and affect not. In Greece, too, we read the newspapers always – all the time.’

  ‘I have noticed it,’ said Mrs Bradley, cordially.

  ‘Of a quite. We, too, are the sport, but we love more seriously. The Stadion, good. We the patriotic. We imitate with respect the old Greeks. Do you like my country?’

  ‘Yes, I like it. But it’s time that something was done about the water-supply, don’t you think?’

  ‘But we make,’ replied Dmitri, wounded. ‘There is good water in Athens now. We show to improvement.’

  ‘Good, good,’ replied Mrs Bradley. Her voice, which she had purposely pitched louder, stirred the sleepers near at hand. First one dark cocoon, then another, moved, expanded, and reared up. Soon the company was out of its sleeping-sacks, clamouring to Dish for food.

  After breakfast Dick sought her out and asked to be given his Mycenean gold.

  ‘Hardly fair to thrust the responsibility on you,’ he said with a laugh.

  ‘I should give it to Megan to mind,’ said Mrs Bradley.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘And, who pray, may they be?

  The Initiated.

  Yes, by Zeus, and I’m the ass who celebrates the mysteries.

  But I’m not going to endure this much longer.’

  1

  PUBLIC OPINION BEING against the sacrifice of the cow, who proved to be disconcertingly friendly and of almost maudlin sociability, Sir Rudri reverted to his first idea of the goats.

  ‘It is unnecessary,’ said Mrs Bradley composedly. ‘You should make some clay cows and some statuettes of Hera, Rudri, dear child. So much nicer and so much less messy than the sacrifice of animals,’ she added coaxingly. Sir Rudri pondered.

  ‘We haven’t any clay,’ he pointed out.

  ‘Well, where did the original clay come from, dear child? It wasn’t, surely, looted from Crete.’

  ‘We’ll scout for some clay,’ said Ivor, hopefully. The little boys, glad of occupation, scampered away. The sun was not yet hot enough to be enervating.

  ‘Terra-cotta,’ said Gelert, who had returned to the languid manner which had been evident in him at first. ‘And the springs are bound to be dry, I would say, at this time of year.’

  ‘Never mind! Never mind!’ said Alexander Currie. ‘It’s something for those laddies to do. Leave them be.’ He broke off, noticing Ronald Dick. ‘Ah, how are the bruises this morning? You ought to have warned us you walked in your sleep, you know.’

  Dick flushed. He was tired of reciting his reason for having gone through to the excavations. It had been received sympathetically by Cathleen, amusedly by everybody else, including Megan. He was feeling very unhappy. Sir Rudri also seemed miserable. He gazed feelingly at the cow, now referred to by everyone as Io in memory of the priestess of Hera of that name who was transformed into a cow, and then gazed anxiously at the heights whereon the citadel stood, as though seeking counsel and instruction from those who no longer could give it. Mrs Bradley watched him carefully. There was no doubt that his mind was precariously balanced between pseudo-scholarly enthusiasm and some more obvious form of insanity. Sometimes he seemed to incline the one way, sometimes the other, but always it seemed to her, an unprejudiced observer, that he dipped deeper each time towards madness and that the vessel of his mind found greater difficulty now in righting itself than it had done before they left Athens. She had not liked the Iacchus business at Eleusis; still less had she liked the serpent business at Epidaurus; and least of all did she like this preoccupation with the idea of bloody sacrifice at Mycenae.

  The legends of the Atridae hung brooding over the heavy, broken walls, about the Lion Gate, and round the unguarded graves. The dark passion of Clytemnestra, the anguish of young Orestes, made heavy the lowering atmosphere, soaked beyond
bearing already, with the heat of dead air before a storm.

  Sir Rudri was not her only source of anxiety. The little boys, bored, and tired that morning for the first time since the pilgrims had left Athens, had been by turns listless and tiresome. Alerander Currie had been severely attacked by flies, and one of the bites showed signs of turning septic. He announced that the quality of the food had had an adverse effect upon the quality of his blood. He said this peevishly. Armstrong, too, was a perpetual menace to the general good-temper and forbearance, and Gelert had given up any attempt at cheerfulness, and all the morning had seemed determined to irritate his father and Alexander Currie, to upset Megan, and to pick another quarrel with Armstrong. He also asked why on earth they were all still hanging about. This from a young man who wished to remain away from Athens as long as he possibly could, seemed to Mrs Bradley unreasonable.

  As she was indulging in this contemplative review of the party, the manservant Dish came up to speak to her.

  ‘Mam,’ he began without preamble. ‘I should wish to explain once more that I can’t go on no longer with that there Mr Armstrong. I can’t put up with his insolence no longer, and it isn’t right I should try.’

  ‘Very well, Dish,’ replied Mrs Bradley, willing to placate somebody, if it would ease the general tension. ‘What’s the matter this time?’

  ‘Finding is keeping,’ Dish informed her mysteriously. ‘And what I finds is my own business, so long as it don’t belong to one of the party. And it’s no odds to no one if I don’t choose to say what I found, nor to put it on public show. But Mr Armstrong, he’s on at me all the time, to know what I picked up, and to let him see it, and photograph it, and let him make me an offer for it, and show it to Mr Currie, what, he says, collects old things. And I ain’t going to do it. I don’t want to, and if he goes on poking his nose in my business I want to know where I stands. That’s what, mam, with all respects and begging your pardon.’

  ‘What did you find?’ asked Mrs Bradley, deducing that the man was willing to give her this information although he had refused it to Armstrong. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve discovered a museum specimen, Dish?’

  Dish looked about him. Mrs Bradley rose. Armstrong, who did not seem to notice the intense, oppressive heat of the midday sun, was playing clock-golf with stones and a crook-handled walking-stick, and doing it very well. Megan was with him. In a minute they went out of sight, in search of the ‘ball’ which Armstrong had lofted neatly across a little dry watercourse. Dick, who was loitering behind them, still limping slightly from his fall, looked after them, then, turning his head and seeing the other two, Dish and Mrs Bradley, he shrugged his shoulders and strolled away with a dragging movement of his injured foot, until he, too, was out of sight.

  ‘Mr Dick has found something, too,’ said Mrs Bradley.

  ‘Gold?’

  ‘Yes, I think it’s gold, Dish.’

  ‘Two of us found something gold? Hardly makes sense, mam, does it, when you think how them graves must have been worked over, like.’

  ‘I said I didn’t believe it,’ said Mrs Bradley equably.

  ‘Isn’t it gold, then, mam?’

  ‘I’ve no doubt about its being gold, Dish, but I think it’s modern gold. I shouldn’t trouble about presenting it to a museum. Sell it for the price it will bring you when you get back to England.’

  ‘I don’t understand you, mam. Who’d leave modern gold about in a place like this, do you think?’

  ‘That, Dish, is a question which I don’t propose to answer. Are you fond of Sir Rudri, Dish?’

  ‘He’s been a very generous employer, mam. And Lady Hopkinson, she’s done me proud. I’d do a lot for her.’

  ‘Good. Well, my advice is, keep the gold if you want to, and keep your mouth shut. That’s what Mr Dick is going to do.’

  She walked away briskly, regardless of the sunshine as a lizard, and caught up Dick, who was walking towards Charváti.

  ‘Child,’ she said, ‘I’ve a disappointment for you. You are not the only person in this assembly to find gold objects in the excavations, I hear.’

  ‘More gold? Impossible!’ said Dick.

  ‘I am glad you think that,’ said Mrs Bradley dryly. ‘I don’t know what Dish has found,’ she added, after she had repeated her conversation with the man, ‘but, as you say, it is —’ – she did not repeat ‘impossible’, a word not at home in her vocabulary, but substituted ‘most unlikely’.

  ‘Sir Rudri!’ said Dick, alighting on the name like an eagle pouncing on a rabbit. Mrs Bradley nodded.

  ‘I shall be very glad to get him back to Athens,’ she remarked. ‘By the way, child, I’ve stolen his sacrificial knife. I thought it wise to do so.’

  ‘He has never got over that trick that Mr Currie played on him,’ said Dick. ‘I do think that was too bad. People ought not to make other people look fools.’ He jerked his head to indicate the direction from which they had come. ‘Did you see that blonde beast with Megan – with Miss Hopkinson?’ he asked, leaping, with the sureness of a chamois, on to the crag of his troubles.

  ‘I did,’ said Mrs Bradley, noting the connexion between this question and the general statement that people ought not to make other people look fools. ‘Don’t worry, child. We’re all a little bored and hot and fractious to-day, I think, Megan as well as the rest. She doesn’t like Armstrong at all. She’s probably working up to have a scene with you. It ought to stand you in good stead, child. Exercise your talent in such matters, and make sure that you end up with a delightful reconciliation, complete with proposal of marriage.’

  ‘But I don’t stand a chance if that – if Armstrong is going to compete,’ wailed poor little Dick, from the depths of a cowardly nature. ‘He’s so awfully good-looking, and he’s – I mean, I’ve seen him with girls – and, of course, he’s as thick as thieves with Sir Rudri nowadays.’ He dropped his voice, his troubles forgotten for the moment. ‘You can understand, from what we all know of the nonsense about the second Iacchus, and the fiasco of the snakes at Epidaurus, that Armstrong has only to supply the proofs of all that spoofing to Mr Currie to make Sir Rudri look a bigger fool than ever. The trouble is, he can do it. He gets photographs of everything that happens. Of course, he’s wizard with a camera. Sir Rudri thinks he’s only taken the official photographs – if you can call them that – to prove the Iacchus business and the snakes of Aesculapius – the phenomena, as Sir Rudri called them in my hearing the other day – are genuine. But Armstrong took other photographs – he told me so – and has only got to demonstrate what beastly fakes the others are to show Sir Rudri up. I can’t bear him to have Megan! Even if I don’t get her – and I shan’t – I know I shan’t – I’ve never yet had anything I wanted – I’d do anything to prevent his having her.’

  ‘There’s not the slighest chance of his marrying Megan. You wait until we get to Athens – or even to Corinth – I’m going to telegraph to Marie Hopkinson,’ said Mrs Bradley, cheerfully. ‘Come, child. Let us return. Lunch must be on the table.

  ‘Lunch! The table!’ said Dick, with a hollow groan. Like the other young men he was by this time suffering from shortage of food. Mrs Bradley sighed and shook her head. She herself, if it was necessary, could exist upon an amount of food which would cause a sparrow to look round for more, but her heart bled for the young and the hungry.

  ‘We could take one of the cars into Nauplia for a meal,’ she suggested, but Dick shook his head, determined to spite his stomach as Megan had broken his heart.

  Suddenly he said:

  ‘You knew that bit of gold? It’s gone. I’m sure he’s got it. I can’t make a fuss out here, but I’m going to as soon as we get back.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s gone? I wish you had left it with me.’

  ‘I took it out of your case and buried it. It’s been dug up again, but nothing’s been said.’

  ‘Armstrong?’

  ‘It must be. Although, Sir Rudri – I wouldn’t trust him, either, over a find like tha
t.’

  2

  ‘I can’t see why on earth we’re to spend another night here,’ Megan said. ‘It’s quite ridiculous, father.’

  ‘But nothing has happened here yet. That damned fool Dick upset the auguries by falling into that hole last night and scaring the cow,’ said Sir Rudri. Dick went white and stood up.

  ‘You’d better take that back, sir, if you please. I didn’t fall – I was pushed.’

  A simultaneous shriek of laughter broke from the three little boys. Dick glared at them as though he could have strangled them, and walked away from the company up to the citadel in the heights. Here he sat down and suddenly burst into tears. The heat, the terrible feeling of oppression due to the approaching storm, his disappointment over the gold he had found, his distress about Megan and Armstrong, combined to unman him completely. Suddenly there was a scurrying sound. Cathleen plumped down beside him and put her arm on his.

  ‘Oh, Ronald!’ she said. ‘I am sorry. Sir Rudri must be mad. And Megan’s acting the fool! Don’t take any notice. She’ll get over it. She can’t like Armstrong, really.’

  ‘Sir Rudri is mad,’ Mrs Bradley was saying at the same time to Alexander Currie, as they sat in the shade of a Cyclopean wall after lunch. ‘Has he tried to persuade you to hunt in the excavations?’

  ‘Now that you mention it,’ Alexander answered, ‘I did receive some impression that he held the opinion that there were treasures still to be found here. I said it was impossible, and that, anyway, it was much too hot to dig.’

  ‘You’ve got to be a good man over all this,’ said Mrs Bradley. She patted him encouragingly on the shoulder. Alexander bore this patiently.

  ‘He can’t go to Ephesus,’ he said. ‘He isn’t fit.’

  ‘Ephesus!’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘I hope my responsibility will end at Athens, child.’

  ‘He’s determined to go to Ephesus. I expect we shall have to give in. It wouldn’t do to thwart him. By the way, did you ever hear what became of all those vipers?’