The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches

by Alan Bradley

  That bump in her bloomers was me!

  How peculiar it was to be present in the scene, and yet not present, like the assistant in a conjuring show.

  What was I feeling? Embarrassment? Pride? Happiness?

  It was none of these things. It was the bittersweet fact that while Feely and Daffy were sharing that long-ago sunshine with Harriet, I was not.

  Now a close-up of Father approaching as if ambling out from the house. He glances up shyly and fiddles with something in his jacket pocket, then smiles at the camera. This scene was apparently filmed by Harriet.

  A quick change of scene, and as, in the background, Feely and Daffy dabble like ducks at the edge of the ornamental lake, Father and Harriet, filmed by someone else, picnic on a blanket in front of the Folly. This was the scene I had examined in the laboratory.

  She smiles at him, and he at her. He turns away to remove something from a wicker hamper, and in that instant, she becomes dead serious, turns to the camera, and mouths a couple of words, miming them in an exaggerated manner, as if giving instructions to someone through a windowpane.

  I was caught off guard. What had Harriet said?

  Normally, I’m a first-rate lip-reader. It is a skill I taught myself, first by sitting at the breakfast and dinner tables with my fingers stuffed into my ears, and later using the same technique at the cinema. I had sat at Bishop’s Lacey’s single bus stop with wads of cotton in both ears (“Dr. Darby says it’s a very bad infection, Mrs. Bellfield”), eavesdropping on early-morning shoppers as they headed for the market in Malden Fenwick.

  Unless I was greatly mistaken, the words on Harriet’s lips had been “pheasant sandwiches.”

  Pheasant sandwiches?

  I stopped the projector, pushed the reverse lever, and backed the film up, then viewed the scene again. The Folly and the blanket. Harriet and Father.

  She speaks the words again.

  “Pheasant sandwiches.”

  She articulates the words so clearly I can almost hear the sound of her voice.

  But to whom had she been speaking? Since she and Father were clearly in front of the camera, who had been behind it?

  What unseen third party had been present at that long-ago picnic?

  My options of finding out seemed limited. Feely and Daffy—at least Daffy, for certain—had been too young to remember.

  And I could hardly ask Father without admitting to finding and developing the forgotten film.

  I was on my own.

  As usual.

  “Feely,” I said, stopping her dead in the middle of the Andante cantabile from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 8, the Pathétique.

  Any interruption when she was playing made Feely furious, which gave me the upper hand automatically as long as I remained perfectly calm, cool, and collected.

  “What?” she demanded, jumping to her feet and slamming down the lid on the keyboard, which made a lovely sound: a kind of harmonic mooing that went on echoing through the piano strings for a surprisingly long time, like the Aeolian harps whose strings, Daffy had told me, were played by the wind.

  “Nothing,” I said, forming my face into its slightly-hurt-but-bearing-up-in-spite-of-it look. “It’s just that I thought you might like a cup of tea.”

  “All right,” Feely demanded. “What are you up to?”

  She knew me as well as the magic mirror knew the wicked queen.

  “I’m not up to anything,” I replied. “I was merely making an effort to be nice.”

  I had her off balance. I could see it in her eyes.

  “Yes, all right, then,” she said suddenly, seizing the opportunity. “I think I should rather fancy a cup of tea.”

  Ha! She thought she’d won, and the game had barely even begun.

  “Her Majesty is demanding a cup of tea,” I told Mrs. Mullet. “If you’ll be so good as to make one, I’ll take it in to her myself.”

  “Of course,” said Mrs. Mullet. “You shall ’ave it in two shakes of a dead lamb’s tail.”

  Mrs. M always said “in two shakes of a dead lamb’s tail” when she was peeved but didn’t want to show it.

  “ ‘A dead lamb’s tail’ is a way of saucin’ ’em off without gettin’ yourself into ’ot water. It means ‘kiss my chump’ without actually sayin’ so,” she had once confided, but had now, obviously, forgotten she’d told me.

  Feely was by this time back into the Beethoven sonata. I put the teacup silently on the table and sat down in a bolt upright, attentive position with my knees together, my hands folded daintily in my lap, modeling my posture on Cynthia Richardson, the vicar’s wife.

  I even pursed my lips a little prunishly.

  When Feely had finished, I let a respectful silence hang in the air while I counted to eleven, partly because it was my age (although not for much longer) and partly because eleven seconds seemed to me a perfect balance between awe and insolence.

  “Feely, I was thinking …” I said.

  “How novel,” she interrupted. “I hope nothing was damaged.”

  I ignored her.

  “Have you ever thought of playing for the cinema? Like Brief Encounter, or the Warsaw Concerto in Dangerous Moonlight?”

  “Perhaps,” she said rather dreamily, forgetting her recent sarcasm. “Perhaps one day I shall be asked.”

  Feely’s only professional film performance had been as a pair of disembodied hands in a never-to-be-completed Phyllis Wyvern film, of which only a few scenes had been shot at Buckshaw before its star came to what I believe is called rather a sticky end.

  I knew how disappointed Feely had been.

  “I remember how beautiful your hands were in the film. It was remarkable, considering that you’d never before so much as seen a ciné camera.”

  I waited for her to contradict me but she didn’t.

  “Some people are fortunate enough to have had ciné films taken of them when they were children. They say that it builds much greater confidence for later on. Eileen Joyce said so on the BBC.”

  This was a brazen lie. Eileen Joyce had said no such thing, but I knew that since she was Feely’s musical idol, the mere mention of the famous pianist’s name would add credibility to my twisting of the truth.

  “Too bad there were no ciné films taken of you when you were a child,” I said. “It might have given you a leg up.”

  Feely, lost in thought, gazed out the drawing room window and across the ornamental lake.

  Was she thinking of that long ago day when she was seven? I couldn’t leave it to chance.

  “Odd, isn’t it,” I prompted, “that Harriet didn’t own a ciné camera? I should have thought that someone like her would have—”

  “Oh, but she did!” Feely exclaimed. “Before you were born. But when you came along she put it away—for obvious reasons.”

  Ordinarily I’d have made some rude comeback, but necessity, as someone once remarked—or should have remarked—is the mother of keeping your lip zipped.

  “Obvious reasons?” I asked. I was willing to suffer any indignity to keep this conversation alive.

  “She didn’t want to risk breaking it.”

  I laughed too loudly, hating myself. “I’ll bet she wasted lots of film on you, though,” I said.

  “Miles of it,” Feely said. “Simply miles, and miles, and miles.”

  “Where is it, then? I’ve never seen it.”

  Feely shrugged. “Who knows? Why are you so suddenly interested?”

  “Curiosity,” I said. “I believe you, though. It sounds so like Harriet to have wasted all that film on others. I wonder if anyone ever thought to take any films of her?”

  I could hardly put it any more plainly than that.

  “Not that I remember,” Feely said, and gave herself back to Beethoven.

  I stood behind her, peering over her shoulder at the music, an invasion of her personal boundaries which I know perfectly well gives her the creeps.

  Nevertheless, she ignored me and kept on playing.

&
nbsp; “What does Tempo rubato mean?” I asked, pointing at her penciled words in the margin.

  “Stolen time,” Feely said without missing a note.

  Stolen time!

  Her words hit me in the stomach like a sledgehammer!

  Wasn’t that what I was doing by developing a film that was taken before I was born? Stealing time from the past of others and trying to make it my own?

  For some stupid reason my eyes were suddenly full of warm water, dangerously close to brimming over.

  I stood for a while behind my sister, letting the Pathétique wash over me.

  After a time, I reached out and put my hand on her shoulder.

  We both of us pretended it wasn’t happening.

  But both of us knew that it was.

  Because Harriet was coming home.

  FIVE

  NOW, STILL CRADLED IN the comforting upholstery of the Rolls-Royce, I roused myself from my memories. We had not yet reached Buckshaw. Outside the car’s windows, the narrow lane was lined on both sides with spectators who had strung themselves out along the weedy verge to watch Harriet’s homecoming. So many of the dear village faces, I thought, starched into stiffness by the death of one of their own.

  It was a scene most of them would remember for the rest of their lives.

  Tully Stoker; his daughter, Mary; and Ned Cropper, the potboy of the Thirteen Drakes, all of whom had been perched on a stile as we approached, jumped smartly to the ground and moved closer. Tully removed his cap, his eyes following the hearse.

  Ned craned his neck, trying to get a look at Feely in the backseat of the Rolls, where she rode behind me in silence with Father, Daffy, and Aunt Felicity.

  I was sitting beside Dogger, who was at the wheel, and I could see Feely’s face clearly in the mirror. She was staring straight ahead.

  No one spoke.

  Now we were creeping past the Misses Puddock, Lavinia and Aurelia, the joint proprietresses of the St. Nicholas Tea Room in Bishop’s Lacey. Both of them were dressed in a kind of ancient bombazine which had once been black but was now a shade of curdled brown; both clutched matching Victorian evening bags which were weirdly out of place in a country lane. I couldn’t help wondering what was inside them. Miss Aurelia gave us a cheery wave as we hove alongside, but her sister seized her hand and shoved it down roughly.

  Dieter stood a little way back from the verge, almost in the ditch, with his employer, Gordon Ingleby of Culverhouse Farm. Although Father had invited Dieter to join us on this sad occasion, he had politely declined. As a former German prisoner of war, his presence might be resented, he had said, and even though he wanted desperately to be at Feely’s side, he felt it best to keep a respectful distance—at least for now.

  There had been a row about this at Buckshaw, with much slamming of doors, raising of voices, reddening of faces, and, on the part of a certain person not to be named, tears, followed by the brutal kicking of a wastebasket and a flinging of oneself facedown upon one’s bed.

  Now, as we drove slowly past, Feely didn’t give Dieter so much as a glance through the glass.

  Ahead of us in the narrow lane, Harriet’s hearse glinted unnervingly in the dappled sunlight, seeming to shift out of this world and into another and back again as its polished paint reflected darkened versions of the moving fields, the trees overhead, the hedgerows, and the sky.

  The sky.

  Heaven.

  Heaven was where Harriet was, at least according to Denwyn Richardson, the vicar.

  “I think that I am quite correct in assuring you, Flavia, that she is sipping tea with her ancestors even as we speak,” he had told me.

  I knew he was doing his best to comfort me, but a part of me knew, all too well and from personal experience, that Harriet’s ancestors—and mine, come to think of it—were moldering away in crumbling coffins in the crypt of St. Tancred’s and quite unlikely to be sipping tea or anything else, unless it was the seepage from the church’s rotting rainspouts.

  He was a dear man, the vicar, but dreadfully naïve, and I sometimes thought that there were certain aspects of life and death which eluded him completely.

  Chemistry teaches us all that can be known about corruption, and I realized with a shock that I had learned more at the altar of the Bunsen burner than at all the altars of the competition combined.

  Except about the soul, of course. The only vessel in which the soul could be studied was the living human body, which made it as difficult as trying to study the soul of a Mexican jumping bean.

  We could learn nothing about the soul from a corpse, I had decided, after several firsthand encounters with cadavers.

  Which brought me back to the man under the wheels of the train. Who was he? What was he doing on the platform at Buckshaw Halt? Had he come down from London on Harriet’s funeral train with the other dignitaries? Presumably he had, since I hadn’t seen him there before the train pulled into the station.

  What had he meant about the Nide being under? And who on earth was the Gamekeeper?

  I didn’t dare ask. It was neither the time nor the place.

  The stony silence inside the Rolls told me that each of us remained lost in our own thoughts.

  To each of the mourners outside in the lane, I would be no more than a pale face glimpsed for a moment behind the glass. I wished I could smile at each of them, but I knew I must not, since a grinning mug would spoil their memories of this sad occasion.

  We were all of us mourners overtaken by the moment: It was not ours to shape. We must give ourselves over to being the Grieving Family, upon whom others must be permitted to shower sympathy.

  All of this I knew without ever having been told. It had somehow been born in my blood.

  Perhaps this was what Aunt Felicity had meant when she had told me that day upon the island in the ornamental lake that it had been left to me to carry the torch: to carry on the glorious name de Luce. “Wherever it may lead you,” she had added.

  Her words still rang in my head: “You must never be deflected by unpleasantness. I want you to remember that. Although it may not be apparent to others, your duty will become as clear to you as if it were a white line painted down the middle of the road. You must follow it, Flavia.”

  “Even when it leads to murder?” I had asked.

  “Even when it leads to murder.”

  Could it be that the slightly dotty old woman sitting in rigid silence behind me in the Rolls had actually spoken those words?

  I knew that I needed now, more than ever, to get her alone.

  But first there was the arrival at Buckshaw to be got through. It was the part of the day I had been dreading more than anything.

  We had been briefed on the scheduled events:

  At ten A.M., Harriet’s coffin would arrive at Buckshaw Halt, which it had now done. It would be transported by hearse to the front door of Buckshaw, from which point it would be carried inside and placed on trestles in Harriet’s boudoir, which was upstairs at the extreme south end of the west wing.

  This seemed at first a peculiar choice of rooms for a lying-in-state. The enormous foyer with its dark wood paneling, black-and-white checkered floor tiles, and double rising staircases would have provided a much grander setting than Harriet’s private apartments, which Father had preserved as a shrine to her memory.

  Except for the looking glass on the dresser, and the cheval glass in the corner, each of which had been covered just yesterday with a black pall, everything in the boudoir, from Harriet’s Fabergé combs and brushes (one of which still had several strands of her hair caught up in its bristles) and Lalique scent bottles to her absurdly practical carpet slippers standing ready beside her great princess-and-the-pea four-poster bed, was precisely as she had left it on that last day.

  Only afterwards had it occurred to me not only that Father wanted Harriet to be returned to her private sanctuary, but that the room where she was to lie in state was connected to his own by a private door.

  Now Dogger was tu
rning the car in at the Mulford Gates, whose mossy stone griffins stared down impassively upon the procession. I thought, just for a moment as we swept past, that the drops of green water which still oozed from the smutty corners of their eyes after last night’s rain were actually tears.

  Out of respect, the “For Sale” sign had been uprooted and put discreetly out of sight until after the funeral.

  Up the long avenue we went, under the canopy of chestnuts.

  “Arrive Buckshaw 1030 hours,” it had said on the schedule Father posted in the drawing room, and it was so.

  Even as we stepped from the Rolls, the clock in the tower of St. Tancred’s, a mile to the north across the fields, struck the half hour.

  Dogger opened the car’s doors for us, one at a time, and we formed a respectful double line on both sides of the front entrance. There we stood, looking everywhere but straight ahead as Harriet’s coffin was hauled on chromium rollers from the hearse by six black-suited bearers—all of them strangers—and carried into the house.

  I had never seen Father look more haggard. A wayward bit of breeze ruffled the front of his hair, causing it to stand on end, like a man frightened out of his wits. I wanted to fly to his side and comb it down with my fingers, but of course I didn’t.

  I fell in behind the coffin, as I thought was only right: As youngest of the family, I would be a sort of flower girl—first in the procession.

  But Father stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. Although his sad blue eyes looked directly into mine, he said not a word.

  And yet I understood. As if he had handed me a fat procedures manual, I knew that we were meant to linger a bit longer out of doors. Father didn’t want us to see Harriet’s coffin being manhandled up the stairs.

  It’s things like this that really shake me: sudden terrifying glimpses into the world of being an adult, and they are sometimes things that I am not sure I really want to know.

  There we stood, like stone chessmen: Father, the checkmated king, graceful, but fatally wounded in defeat; Aunt Felicity, the ancient queen, her black hat askew, humming some tuneless tune to herself; Feely and Daffy, the rooks, the two remote towers at the distant corners of our castle world.