The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches

by Alan Bradley

  The yellow scrolls had most likely been achieved with sulfur and calcium, the black letters enameled with a paint compounded in the Middle Ages from a closely guarded formula containing precisely measured amounts of powdered iron or copper oxide, adhesive, and the glassmaker’s own urine.

  I read the words again.

  At first glance, it seemed as if the artist had made a stained-glass misprint. Sawson – Defifak, the letters appeared to spell out. The M looked like a W, the H like a K. It was only when your eye and brain locked in to the intricate curlicues of the Gothic lettering that you saw that “Sawson – Defifak” was actually “Samson – Delilah.”

  It was easy once you got the hang of it.

  Like so many other things.

  It was in that fraction of an instant—in that finest sliver of time—that the penny dropped.

  In my mind, the words “Lens Palace” took form: those urgent words that Harriet had scribbled in her own urine.

  Of course! How clear it all was, once you saw!

  The S was an A. The P was a D, and by all that was holy, the As were Es.

  Except for the second one, of course, which couldn’t possibly be anything but a U!

  When I had begun to thaw Harriet’s oilcloth wallet, the letters of her message had immediately begun to diffuse into the old fabric, becoming more spidery and fantastic with every passing moment.

  Her message had not been “Lens Palace.” It had, rather, spelled out the name of the woman who was now sitting next to me buffing her fingernails on the hem of her skirt.

  Lena de Luce.

  It was Lena who had followed Harriet from Singapore to India, and from India to that final confrontation in Tibet. Who else could it have been? For what other reason would Harriet have scribbled Lena’s name in invisible fluid on the outside of the packet containing her last will and testament?

  My blood ran cold—then hot.

  I was sitting next to a killer!

  This creature beside me, preening herself like the cat that ate the canary, had murdered my mother. Her own flesh and blood!

  Get a grip on yourself, Flavia. You mustn’t let her know.

  At this particular moment, I thought, on the face of this vast globe which is spinning in its gravitationally appointed place among all the other planets, you are the only one of its two and a half billion inhabitants—other than Lena, of course—who knows the truth.

  What was it Aunt Felicity had shouted through the rubber tube during our flight in Blithe Spirit?

  “We de Luces have been entrusted … for more than three hundred years … with some of the greatest secrets of the realm. Some of us have been on the side of good … while others have not.”

  It was as plain as the nose on your face: Lena was one of those who had not.

  Why hadn’t I listened to my instincts the first time I laid eyes on the woman? How could I have allowed her to sleep—she and her abominable daughter—under the roofs of Buckshaw? Even now, the very thought of it made my marrow itch.

  The question was this: Why had Lena come to Bishop’s Lacey?

  The full horror came crashing down upon me like the stones of the house that Samson wrecked.

  The man at the station—the man beneath the wheels of the train, the man in the long coat: “The one who was talking to Ibu,” Undine had told me.

  He had being trying to warn me—or at least to warn Father.

  “The Gamekeeper is in jeopardy. The Nide is under—”

  “Attack” was the word he was almost certainly going to say.

  But Lena had been there on the station platform!

  The man in the long coat had been talking to her. Undine had blurted that out during our playing of Kim’s Game.

  I had, in fact, confronted Lena with this fact in my laboratory, but we had been interrupted by the sudden arrival, outside the window, of Tristram Tallis in Blithe Spirit.

  And then, as if that weren’t enough, there had been that word: “pushed.”

  “Someone pushed him,” a woman’s voice had said on the platform.

  “Push over,” Lena had ordered, less than an hour ago as she wedged her way into the pew beside me. There had been something familiar about the voice, but I hadn’t had time to think about it.

  At the station she had cried out those words herself in order to distract attention.

  Of course! How fiendishly clever of her—and how cold-blooded.

  In the same calculating way, she had arranged to lure me to the Jack O’Lantern.

  “After the funeral,” she had said.

  Within the hour!

  But now, I realized, this much was certain: If Lena found out I was on to her, I was no better than a dead duck.

  The next funeral at St. Tancred’s would be mine.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  WHAT HAPPENED NEXT IS no more than a blur—as if the world had become a mixture of paints, or of fluids, in a spinning centrifuge.

  I realized that whatever the outcome, I could not confide in Inspector Hewitt. If the truth be told, I had been looking forward to patiently unknitting the knot of evidence for him and laying it out at his grateful feet.

  And Antigone’s, of course. I was beginning to suspect that Antigone Hewitt was pregnant. She had that same mysterious radiance about her which I had observed last autumn in Nialla Gilfoyle, the traveling puppeteer: a kind of warm luminescence that was so much more than just a healthy glow. I knew that the Hewitts had lost more than one baby in the making, and I could only pray that the next one would be a howling success.

  Saint Tancred, please watch over her, I begged.

  No, I could not possibly tell Inspector Hewitt. Aunt Felicity had made it quite clear that I was to discuss the Nide and its activities with no one but her. They were beyond Top Secret. The Gamekeeper had spoken.

  Nor, then, could I tell the Inspector anything about the stranger at the station: Terence Alfriston Tardiman, bachelor, of 3A Campden Gardens, Notting Hill Gate, London, W8, aged thirty-seven, Adam had said.

  I would have to remain no more than a witness—an important one, to be sure—but a witness nonetheless.

  I don’t mind admitting it was a bit of a bitter pill. I would have to fade into the wallpaper, so to speak, and let the Inspector take all the credit.

  I could only hope that he and his henchmen had done their homework and were close to discovering on their own who had shoved Terence Tardiman under the train. Surely by now they must have discovered who at Buckshaw Halt had called out “Someone pushed him.”

  If they were still baffled, I would perhaps have to send them an anonymous letter, made up of cutout letters from various newspaper headlines, pasted up on a sheet of waxed butcher’s paper, and posted from a pillar box in Fleet Street to avoid suspicion.

  I should have to break my braces again to contrive a trip up to London, but it would be worth it. Perhaps Inspector Hewitt would suspect anyway, in his heart of hearts, the identity of the sender. He would recognize the fingerprints of my intelligence. Even so, he would never be able to prove it, or to admit openly that it was Flavia de Luce who had cracked the case.

  We would smile at each other pleasantly over crumpets, the Inspector and I, and ask each other if we took cream or sugar with our tea, both of us knowing, but not speaking, the delicious truth.

  I was dragged back into the present by the vicar’s voice saying: “Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay. In the midst of life we are in death—”

  Due to the circumstances, it had been agreed—although it was unusual—to have the committal to the grave inside the church as part of the funeral service.

  Harriet was to be laid to rest in the family vault in the crypt below. Her coffin would be moved there later, at such time as, the vicar told us, “the mourners have dispersed.”

  We were now nearing the end.

 
“Thou knowest, Lord,” the vicar said, “the secrets of our hearts.”

  I glanced over at Lena. I couldn’t help myself.

  She turned her head suddenly and met my gaze and held it, and I found that, try as I might, I could not look away.

  It is said that certain poisonous snakes are able to petrify small animals with their gaze: a fact which I had doubted until now, even though Mrs. Mullet had warned me against Gertie Mumfield who had the evil eye and whose ignorant stare was not to be returned at any cost.

  Whatever the case, I was simply unable to break the gaze in which Lena had locked me. Something unknown was passing back—and surprisingly forth—from her eye to mine: a silent telegraphic conversation which I was too inexperienced to decode.

  She knew that I knew. There could be no doubt about it. She was sucking the truth from my eyes and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

  Only with the greatest effort was I able to lower my lids, although it was like trying to force down a paint-encrusted window sash.

  I turned my head away and rolled my eyes down towards the floor before I dared open them again.

  To my horror, the vicar had already arrived at that part of the service where we would be asked to step forward, each in turn—Father, Feely, Daffy, me—to sprinkle a small handful of dirt from the graveyard onto Harriet’s coffin.

  “—thou most worthy Judge eternal,” he was now saying, “suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.”

  He nodded at Father, who rose up and tottered forward like an automaton which had not been actuated for a century.

  Daffy and I followed.

  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life—”

  How cruel those words were! I didn’t want to hear them.

  I clapped my hands to my ears and took a backwards step. In doing so, I must have caught my foot on the lower of the chancel steps. I reached out to steady myself from falling by grabbing the corner of Harriet’s coffin.

  As I regained my balance, I saw Inspector Hewitt coming quickly up the center aisle.

  Could he be that worried about me?

  Probably not, because Detective Sergeant Woolmer, moving like a heavy lorry, was already halfway up one of the side aisles—and Detective Sergeant Graves was blocking the other.

  What was going on here? Had they been asked to participate in the committal?

  Or had they—as I had desperately hoped—worked out the identity of the killer on the platform?

  There was a loud bang behind me.

  Lena had broken from her pew and was already at the top of the chancel steps. She reminded me for a moment of a panicked horse whose stable has been struck by lightning. Her nostrils flared, and as her head swung round, I could see the whites of her eyes.

  Into the choir she galloped, not seeming to realize that there was no way out. All the while, Inspector Hewitt was approaching the front pews with slow but deliberate steps.

  Sergeant Graves, smaller, lighter, and younger, had already reached the front of the side aisle. He was so close that I could have reached out and touched him. He stopped in his tracks as Inspector Hewitt raised a warning hand.

  In the far aisle, Sergeant Woolmer had not yet reached the front.

  Lena put a hand on the altar, as if she was planning to climb onto it, but she quickly found that it was too high. Spinning round, she saw that Inspector Hewitt and Sergeant Graves were on the move again, slowly closing in on her—trapping her in an invisible net.

  She ripped at her waist and stepped—shockingly, defiantly—out of her tight black skirt. She could not be hobbled: She needed to be able to run. Her silk slip glistened obscenely in the sunlight.

  Of the three policemen, Sergeant Woolmer was farthest from her, and she chose to make her break in that direction.

  Except for the insistent shuffling of one pair of shoes and three pairs of police boots on marble, all of this took place in near silence. It was uncanny: a scene from a silent film in the earliest days of experimental sound.

  At the last possible moment, just as she was about to run into the powerful arms of Sergeant Woolmer, Lena veered unexpectedly to the left and bolted into the chapel: the little chapel in which Samson lay with his head in the lap of his lady love, and in which he also crumbled the house of his tormentors.

  It was a bad mistake, and Lena must have realized that at once.

  She was cornered.

  She froze in her tracks, turned round looking this way and that, and even though it was for only a fraction of a second, my brain took a mental snapshot of her. In fact, if I close my eyes, I can still see her as she was in that moment—her long red hair broken loose from its moorings, her eyes wide, the tip of her tongue licking her lips—but only once. Her chest was heaving visibly as she glanced back over her shoulder, her ragged, rasping breath now clearly audible in the shocked silence.

  I wish I could say that there was a twisted look of hatred on her face, but there was not. Rather, she had the look of a woman who has realized halfway to the car that she has left her purse on the kitchen table.

  They stood like that for an endless moment, unmoving, Lena and the police, like actors frozen in a tiring tableau vivant.

  And then someone in the church—could it have been me?—let out a little cry.

  The spell was broken.

  Lena was in motion again—a bolt of lightning in a black jacket. In no more than a few strides, she had crossed the chapel. She sprang onto the small altar and, summoning all her strength, hurled herself at the stained-glass window.

  Samson and Delilah vanished in a shower of ancient glass. Shards and splinters of acid yellow and cobalt blue hung in the air, suspended in time before crashing down onto the marble in a wave that was somehow like the sea.

  A sea of glass.

  Lena had not gone fully through the window.

  It would have been better for her if she had.

  Those ancient craftsmen of the Middle Ages, working to the west of Buckshaw in Ovenhouse Wood, had mixed sand with the ashes of a reed called glasswort to make a window which would endure until the Last Trump: until that day when the door to Heaven would be opened, and the rainbow throne with its seven lamps of fire would be seen sitting in a sea of glass.

  To be certain of this, they had suspended their handiwork in a matrix of tracery: thin metal filaments to form a spider’s web of lead.

  And it was this metallic net in which Lena had embedded herself, half in and half out of the window.

  She must have severed an artery as she struggled, impaled on a thousand colored needles of glass, unable to move.

  At first her blood oozed, then became trickles and rivulets, each finding a fresh pathway through the broken shards, their streams joining finally in a river of red which dripped horribly onto the cold marble floor.

  It was all over in a remarkably short time.

  There was pandemonium in the church. Someone was screaming and Dr. Darby was making haste from the back of the nave.

  I found myself at the crossing, drawn as if in a dream past the pulpit and the lectern and into the little chapel. Inspector Hewitt tried to hold me back, but I shook him off—perhaps a little too roughly—and walked resolutely on until I was standing in front of the glass-littered altar, gazing up at the wreckage.

  Lena had ceased to move.

  Except for a few loose red hairs at the back of her neck, which stirred uneasily in the little breeze coming in round the broken glass, she hung impaled in perfect stillness.

  And then—

  I wish I didn’t have to write this, but I must.

  One of her eyes opened, turned slowly in its socket as if it didn’t know where it was—and came finally to rest on me.

  It widened.

  That blue, unfathomable eye. Staring.

  Before fading finally …

  That blue de Luce eye.

  So much like my own.

  TWE
NTY-NINE

  I HAVE SOMETIMES WONDERED what Lena was thinking as she died.

  I wonder if she had time to suspect, as she saw me standing there staring up at her, that Harriet had come back from the dead for vengeance.

  I hope in a way that she had, and in another way, I hope she hadn’t. I’m trying hard to be a better person, but it doesn’t always work.

  I am finding, for instance, that I’m having a great deal of trouble forgiving Harriet for being dead. Even though it was not her fault, and even though she died for her country, I feel deprived, and deprived in a way that I never felt before her body was found. Daffy was right: We deserved better.

  It makes no sense, I know, but there it is. The best I can do is to allow myself to hate her for a while. Well, perhaps not hate, precisely, but to be highly cheesed off with her, as Undine would put it.

  And Lena, of course. I deserved better from both of them.

  The drive back to Buckshaw was made in utter silence. There had been no lingering in the churchyard to receive condolences as there sometimes is. Because of Lena, and so forth, we had been quickly bundled into the Rolls by Cynthia and the vicar with gripped hands under cover of surplices and furtive pats on the shoulder.

  Since most of the congregation were still jockeying for a better view of Lena’s removal—some of them in the churchyard, even though one of the verger’s tarpaulins had been hastily rigged to cover the window and its captive—we had no real difficulty in making our getaway unnoticed.

  As Dogger pulled away from the lych-gate, we passed within a few feet of Inspector Hewitt, who was questioning Max Brock, his notebook at the ready. Max, since retiring from the concert stage, was rumored to have taken up writing “true confession” tales for some of the more lurid magazines, and I’ll bet he had gathered plenty of usable detail from the front pew where he had been seated.

  The Inspector didn’t give me so much as a passing glance.

  It was decided that Undine would ride back to Buckshaw with Adam and Tristram in her mother’s Land Rover. Aunt Felicity had protested, but Father put his foot down. It was the first time he had spoken all day.