The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches Read online

  “Please thank her, Dogger, but I had something in the village this afternoon. I couldn’t manage another bite.”

  I think it was the first time in my life I had ever lied to Dogger, and I think he knew it, too.

  “Very well,” he said, turning away.

  “If you don’t want them, then I shall eat them,” Lena said. I’d almost forgotten she was there.

  Dogger nodded but said nothing. He watched as she walked away towards the stairs and the kitchen.

  Poor Mrs. Mullet, I thought. Usually, by this time of day, she was safely home at her own hearth with Alf. She must have stayed past her time to see to the funeral meats and so forth. I must remember to take her aside later, I thought, and express my gratitude.

  There was so much to be grateful for, when you stopped to think of it, in spite of all our hardships.

  Dogger, for instance. This was the first time I had been alone with him since Aunt Felicity had told me his story.

  How could I ever begin to thank him? How could I ever begin to make it up for what he had endured?

  What can one possibly say to a person who, in saving one’s father’s life, has been made to endure the tortures of the damned?

  I wanted to hug him, but of course I couldn’t. It simply wouldn’t do.

  We stood there together for a few moments. I was the first to speak.

  “God bless you, Dogger,” I said at last.

  “God bless you, too, Miss Flavia,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, Dogger,” I admitted. “I didn’t actually have anything to eat. But I’m not hungry. Honestly.”

  “I understand,” he said with rather a sad smile. “I shall leave you to your task.”

  Only after he was gone did I think about what he had said.

  EIGHTEEN

  THE EVENING WAS WEARING on and I had much to do. I turned the key in the lock, removed the pall from Harriet’s coffin, and was preparing to lift the wooden lid when there was another knock at the door.

  I’m afraid I let slip a word which was not entirely suitable to the occasion.

  Well, I thought, at least I hadn’t gone too far with my experiment. Better to be interrupted sooner than later.

  I replaced the pall, turned the key, and opened the door.

  There stood Father.

  He looked dreadful—as pale as if Death itself were standing in the doorway.

  I had thought he was in bed, sedated. Whatever could be so important as to cause him to arise? Or had he been awake all along?

  Behind him, in the hall, were two of the men I had seen on the station platform. They were not wearing their bowler hats, nor were they carrying their umbrellas, but I recognized them at once.

  “This is my daughter Flavia—” Father began, but before he could finish, one of the two had brushed past both of us and into the boudoir. The taller one remained outside in the hall. I could now see that he was carrying a black bag somewhat like Dr. Darby’s, but considerably larger.

  I realized with a shock that I had seen his face before—and not just at the station. He had been pictured in the illustrated papers arriving in a trench coat at an old stone mortuary at the time of the Swindon Suitcase Murders.

  Now, here he was at Buckshaw: Sir Peregrine Darwin, the legendary Home Office pathologist, with his famous head of wild white hair and all. I could hardly believe it. What on earth could have brought him all the way down from London?

  “My daughter Flavia,” Father began again. “Flavia has been keeping—”

  “Thank you, Colonel de Luce,” Sir Peregrine said. “If we require further assistance, we shall send for you.”

  Send for him? Send for Father in his own house? Who do these people think they are?

  So gently that I hardly noticed it, Father took my arm and drew me out into the hall. The pathologist followed his colleague into the boudoir and the green baize door swung shut behind them. The key turned with a determined click.

  Father and I were alone in the hall.

  I think he could see that I was working up a rage, but before I could say a word, he bent down, put his mouth close to my ear, and whispered: “Home Office.”

  As if those two words explained everything.

  “But why?”

  Father put a forefinger to his lips to shush me, then crooked it and wiggled it as a signal for me to follow him.

  He opened the door of his bedroom and waved me inside.

  It was the first time I had been in Father’s room in a year, but it was precisely as I remembered it: as if, like the British Museum, nothing was ever touched from age to age, but only stared at.

  The dark, heavy Gothic bed, the Queen Anne washstand—even the Stanley Gibbons stamp catalog on the table seemed to have been suspended in time.

  Father waved me to a chair, and as I settled, he made his way across the room to a window.

  Windows, I believe, were as essential to Father’s talking as his tongue.

  I waited for him to begin.

  “We must do as they tell us,” he said at last.

  “But why?” I couldn’t help myself.

  And yet, in my heart of hearts, I knew the chilling answer all too well. Sir Peregrine could have been sent here for only one reason.

  “The Home Office is in charge now,” Father said. “They have flown your mother home from Tibet, laid on the special train to bring her down to Buckshaw, and tomorrow, they shall take her to St. Tancred’s.”

  He did not add the words “after the autopsy,” but he might as well have.

  His voice broke a little, but he steeled himself and carried on. I could almost see a pointer in his hand as he briefed me on what was undoubtedly to him a military campaign. A tragic one, to be sure, but a military campaign nevertheless.

  His face was white at the window as he said: “At 1400 hours, your mother’s coffin, draped again in the Union Jack, will be brought down to the foyer, where it will rest for ten minutes to allow the household staff to pay their respects.”

  Household staff? Could he be referring to Dogger and Mrs. M? Other than the Various Governesses, or “VG” as we called them—who were best not spoken about—there hadn’t been household staff in the real sense of the word since I was a baby.

  “At 1415, the hearse, with the first of the floral tributes, will depart Buckshaw and arrive at St. Tancred’s at 1422. The family will—”

  Seeing that he was near to tears—or was it me?—I walked softly across the carpet and stood by his side at the window.

  “It’s all right, Father,” I said. “I understand.”

  Even though I didn’t.

  At that moment, I wanted more than anything to tell him about my accidental discovery of Harriet’s will. The fact that it was thought Harriet had died without leaving a will had been at the center of our poverty-stricken existence for as long as I could remember.

  On several occasions, kind Fate had seemed to dangle a financial solution under our very noses, only to snatch it away again as ruthlessly as if we were engaged in a rough-and-tumble round of Hook the Hankie.

  For instance, there had been the First Quarto of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet which had turned up in the library, but which Father had steadfastly refused to part with, although a certain Big Name on the London stage—oh, all right, it was Desmond Duncan—continued to contrive new ways to get his scheming hands on the precious little volume.

  And then there had been the Heart of Lucifer, that priceless diamond which had once ornamented the crozier of Saint Tancred and which had been recovered at the village church just a week ago, during the occasion of the opening of his tomb.

  After vanishing for a while as it worked its way through my alimentary canal, the stone had come to light at last, so to speak, and had recently been handed over to the bishop for further investigation by the Ecclesiastical Authorities, who, after consultation with the Garter King of Arms, Somerset House, and the Public Record Office were to make the final decision upon whether or not the fi
ve-hundred-year-old Saint Tancred de Luci had been one of our de Luce ancestors, and, hence, whether the stone was ours in law, common or otherwise.

  “Don’t hold your breath,” the vicar had advised Father.

  The discovery of Harriet’s will, then, would be crucial. But even so, some strange new urge was keeping me silent.

  Why couldn’t I just blurt it out and be done with it?

  The answer to that simple question was a complex one, and I wasn’t sure I even understood it myself, although my reasoning went something like this: In the first place, I had no right to interrupt Father’s mourning. Good news, it seems to me, has no place in the midst of tragedy, when it cannot be fully appreciated—when it is dampened and diluted by the atmosphere in which it is announced and robbed of its healing power.

  “Catharsis cannot possibly come until the bitter end,” Daffy had lectured us as she read aloud from Aristotle.

  Then, too, there was the less than admirable fact that I wanted to keep the will’s existence to myself for as long as possible. In some strange way, I needed to feed upon and relish the possession of information that nobody knew but me.

  I’m not really proud of that, but it’s true. There is a strange strength in secrets which can never be achieved by spilling one’s guts.

  With those thoughts in mind, I slipped my hand into Father’s, and the two of us stood together in silence for what seemed like a comforting eternity.

  As we stood there at the window, my father and I, I fell into what Daffy would have called a reverie, and everyone else a brown study.

  Images floated dizzily into and out of my mind: Harriet in the ciné film soundlessly forming the words “pheasant sandwiches”; those very same words in the mouth of Mr. Churchill; the horrible gleam of Harriet’s coffin before it was mercifully shrouded by the Union Jack; the tall man at the window of the laboratory; the man (was it the same man?)—or at least his arm—sticking grotesquely out of the steam beneath the wheels of the train; his last words—his message to Father: “The Gamekeeper is in jeopardy.”

  Had I done as he had asked? No, I hadn’t. My only excuse was that the time hadn’t been right. Whatever was I waiting for?

  If I couldn’t give him good news, I could at least give him bad.

  It didn’t make much sense, but there it was.

  “Father,” I blurted, “that man at the station—the one who fell under the train—he told me to tell you that the Gamekeeper is in jeopardy. He also said something about the Nide, but I’m afraid I missed it.”

  Father was galvanized. The muscles of his face twitched as if he were wired up to an array of chemical batteries in some fiendish laboratory experiment.

  His eyes came slowly and jerkily around to focus on my face. “Man? Station? Train?”

  Could he have been so distracted by grief, I wondered, that he didn’t see or hear the accident?

  Or was it murder? Hadn’t someone said that the stranger was pushed?

  “This man,” Father asked, his face, if possible, even more gray than it had been. “What did he look like?”

  “He was tall,” I said. “Very tall. He was wearing a heavy coat.”

  “Thank you, Flavia,” Father said, drawing himself up, pulling himself visibly together as if he were an aged war-horse hearing the bugle call to battle.

  “And now if you will excuse me,” he said, “I am freeing you from your vigil. You must go to bed now. We all of us have much to do tomorrow.”

  I was dismissed.

  There was no point in asking Father the meaning of the message. I would have to work it out for myself.

  And I knew exactly where to begin.

  The library door was shut, as I knew it would be.

  I gave three long scratches at the panel with what was left of my bitten fingernails, followed by a pause, then three short, and three long again: the signal for a brief truce that Daffy and I had privately agreed upon in happier days.

  Even though we were not presently at war, it was best to go warily. If there was one thing that infuriated Daffy, it was being what she called “a barger.”

  A barger was one who burst suddenly into a room without so much as a “kiss-me-quick-and-mind-the-marmalade”; an invader of privacy; an insensitive clot; a thoughtless blockhead.

  And I’ll admit that at one time or another, I had been one or more of these, sometimes by accident and other times not.

  “Come,” Daffy called, just when I was about to give it up.

  I opened the door with exaggerated care and stepped into the library. At first I couldn’t see her. She was not draped across her usual armchair, nor was she sitting by the fireplace.

  Bleak House had been returned to the bookcase, and Paradise Lost was now turned turtle on the table.

  When I located my sister at last, I saw that she was standing at a window, staring out into the darkness.

  I waited, to allow her the first word, but she said nothing.

  “Father sent me to bed,” I said. “He’s let me off my vigil early. Some men from the Home Office have taken charge.”

  “They’re everywhere,” Daffy said. “Mrs. Mullet says they’ve booked every last cranny at the Thirteen Drakes.”

  “Better than sleeping at Buckshaw,” I said, meaning it as a bit of a joke.

  Daffy snorted. “We’re already bursting at the seams with unwelcome bodies.”

  It seemed an odd thing to say, and for an instant, I was on the verge of asking if she included Harriet in that remark, but I restrained myself.

  “What with Lena la-di-da de Luce and that brat of hers, plus your precious Mr. Tallis—”

  “He’s not mine,” I protested. “I hardly know the man.”

  “And your precious Adam Sowerby—”

  Adam Sowerby! I could scarcely believe my ears! I had met Adam, who claimed to be a flora-archaeologist and inquiry agent, during a recent murder investigation in which I had been able to point the police in the proper direction. Even after I had solved the case, and he had more or less declared us partners in investigation, Adam had refused to tell me whom he was working for.

  “What’s Adam Sowerby got to do with it?” I asked.

  “He’s here,” Daffy replied. “Drove down from London. Arrived a couple of hours ago. Dogger’s put him in one of the rooms in the Northwest Territories, with the rest of them.”

  The Northwest Territories was our playful name for that vast and desolate expanse of unused bedrooms whose few remaining sticks of furniture were kept draped with dusty sheets, awaiting some distant and unlikely day when Buckshaw might be restored to its former fortunes—unlike the abandoned and decaying east wing in which, by choice, I worked and slept.

  “No room at the inn, and so forth,” Daffy said. “He and Father are old friends, remember? So I suppose that makes it all right for him to be a barger.”

  Her bitterness surprised me.

  “Father probably needs old friends right now,” I said.

  “Father needs a good shaking!” she exclaimed, and as she turned abruptly away from the window, I could see the tears in her eyes.

  I was suddenly as tired as if I had trudged barefoot across the Sahara desert. It had been a brutally long day.

  My parched mind was shocked to hear my mouth uttering words I never thought would cross my lips: “Chin up, Daff. We’ll come through all this. I promise.”

  NINETEEN

  I SLEPT THE SLEEP of the damned, tossing and turning as if I were lying in a bed of smoldering coals.

  Whenever I did manage to doze off, my mind was filled with tattered dreams: Dogger, standing atop a hill, his white hair and his gardener’s apron flying and flapping in a wicked wind; Feely and Daffy as little children, watching a Punch and Judy show in which all the puppets—except the Hangman—had blank, formless faces; Harriet floating on an iceberg, paddling furiously with her hands to escape an Arctic tidal wave.

  I jerked awake to find myself sitting bolt upright, a strangled cry in my throat. M
y mouth tasted as if a farmer had stored turnips in it while I slept.

  I looked round in panic, for a moment not knowing where I was.

  It was that hour of the very early morning when all the world has begun to float to the surface of sleep, but has not yet really come awake. I cupped my hands behind my ears and listened for all I was worth. The house was in perfect stillness.

  As I swung my feet out of the warm bed and onto the cold floorboards, my brain came instantly up to full throttle.

  The will! Harriet’s will!

  I had shoved it into the coal scuttle and put it out of my mind.

  I had to retrieve it—and there wasn’t a moment to lose!

  I was dressed in a flash and creeping as stealthily as a cat burglar towards the west wing. Dogger, who had difficulty sleeping, would soon be up and about. Not that I wanted to hide anything from him—no, far from it.

  What I did want to do was to shield him from blame. There are a few instances in life where, in spite of everything, one has to swallow one’s heart and go it alone, and this was one of them.

  I had left the torch in Harriet’s boudoir and would have to rely on the weird half-light that was coming in through the windows at the end of the hall. Sunrise, I judged, would not be for another three quarters of an hour.

  Soundlessly I crept along the passageway, giving praise at every silent step for the invention of carpets. The soles of my bare feet could feel the grit left behind by yesterday’s parade of mourners, and I made a mental note to get out the carpet sweeper before breakfast and give the rug a jolly good cleaning. It was the least I could do.

  At the entrance to Harriet’s boudoir, I put my ear to the door and turned up the sensitivity.

  Not a sound.

  I put my hand on the knob and—nothing.

  It didn’t budge.

  The door was locked, and the keys were inside.

  For a brief, crazy moment I thought of fetching a ladder and scaling the outer wall, but I remembered that every one of the boudoir’s windows was firmly shut and locked.

  The only other way into the room was through Father’s bedroom. I would need to slip in without knocking, tiptoe to the door which connected to Harriet’s boudoir, then enter and leave without a sound.