Speaking From Among the Bones Read online

  In my mind, I ticked off the victims on my fingers: Horace Bonepenny, Rupert Porson, Brookie Harewood, Phyllis Wyvern.…

  One more corpse and I’d have a full hand.

  Each of them had come to a sticky end in our village, and I knew that Father was uneasy.

  “It isn’t right, Ophelia,” he said, “for a girl who’s—for a girl your age to be rattling about alone in an old church at night.”

  “There’s nobody there but the dead.” Feely had laughed, perhaps a little too gaily. “And they don’t bother me. Not nearly so much as the living.”

  Behind Father’s back, my other sister, Daffy, had licked her wrist and wetted down her hair on both sides of an imaginary part in the middle of her head, like a cat washing its face. She was poking fun at Ned Cropper, the potboy at the Thirteen Drakes, who had the most awful crush on Feely and sometimes followed her about like a bad smell.

  Feely had scratched her ear to indicate she had understood Daffy’s miming. It was one of those silent signals that fly among sisters like semaphore messages from ship to ship, indecipherable to anyone who doesn’t know the code. Even if Father had seen the gesture, he would not have understood its meaning. Father’s code book was in a far different language from ours.

  “Still,” Father had said, “if you’re coming or going after dark, you are to take Flavia with you. It won’t hurt her to learn a few hymns.”

  Learn a few hymns indeed! Just a couple of months ago when I was confined to bed during the Christmas holidays, Mrs. Mullet, in giggling whispers and hushed pledges of secrecy had taught me a couple of new ones. I never tired of bellowing:

  “Hark the herald angels sing,

  Beecham’s Pills are just the thing.

  Peace on earth and mercy mild,

  Two for a man and one for a child.”

  Either that or:

  “We Three Kings of Leicester Square,

  Selling ladies’ underwear,

  So fantastic, no elastic,

  Only tuppence a pair.”

  —until Feely flung a copy of Hymns Ancient and Modern at my head. One thing I have learned about organists is that they have absolutely no sense of humor.

  “Feely,” I said, “I’m freezing.”

  I shivered and buttoned up my cardigan. It was bitterly cold in the church at night. The choir had left an hour ago, and without their warm bodies round me, shoulder to shoulder like singing sardines, it seemed even colder still.

  But Feely was submerged in Mendelssohn. I might as well have been talking to the moon.

  Suddenly the organ gave out a fluttering gasp, as if it had choked on something, and the music gargled to a stop.

  “Oh, fiddle,” Feely said. It was as close to swearing as she ever came—at least in church. My sister was a pious fraud.

  She stood up on the pedals and waddled her way off the organ bench, making a harsh mooing of bass notes.

  “Now what?” she said, rolling up her eyes as if an answer were expected from Above. “This stupid thing has been misbehaving for weeks. It must be the damp weather.”

  “I think it died,” I told her. “You probably broke it.”

  “Hand me the torch,” she said after a long moment. “We’ll have a look.”

  We?

  Whenever Feely was frightened out of her wits, “I” became “we” as quick as a flash. Since the organ at St. Tancred’s was listed by the Royal College of Organists as a historic instrument, any damage to the dear old thing would probably be considered an act of national vandalism.

  I knew that Feely was already dreading having to break the bad news to the vicar.

  “Lead on, O Guilty One,” I said. “How do we get at the guts?”

  “This way,” Feely answered, quickly sliding open a concealed panel in the carved woodwork beside the organ console. I hadn’t even time to see how the trick was done.

  Switching on the torch, she ducked through the narrow opening and vanished into the darkness. I took a deep breath and followed.

  We were in a musty Aladdin’s cave, hemmed in on all sides by stalagmites. In the sweep of the torch’s beam, organ pipes towered above us: pipes of wood, pipes of metal, pipes of all sizes. Some were as small as pencils, some like drain spouts, and others as large as telephone posts. Not so much a cave, I decided, as a forest of giant flutes.

  “What are those?” I asked, pointing to a row of tall, conical pipes which reminded me of pygmy blowguns.

  “The Gemshorn stop,” Feely said. “They’re supposed to sound like an ancient flute made from a ram’s horn.”

  “And these?”

  “The Rohrflöte.”

  “Because it roars?”

  Feely rolled her eyes. “Rohrflöte means ‘chimney flute’ in German. The pipes are shaped like chimneys.”

  And sure enough, they were. They wouldn’t have been out of place among the chimney pots of Buckshaw.

  Something hissed suddenly and gurgled in the shadows and I threw my arm round Feely’s waist.

  “What’s that?” I whispered.

  “The wind chest,” she said, aiming the torch at the far corner.

  Sure enough, in the shadows, a huge leather trunklike thing was slowly exhaling with various bronchial wheezings and hissings.

  “Super!” I said. “It’s like a giant’s accordion.”

  “Stop saying ‘super,’” Feely said. “You know Father doesn’t like it.”

  I ignored her and, threading my way among some of the smaller pipes, hauled myself up onto the top of the wind chest, which gave out a remarkably realistic rude noise and sank a little more.

  I sneezed—once—twice—three times—in the cloud of dust I had stirred up.

  “Flavia! Come down at once! You’re going to rip that old leather!”

  I got to my feet and stood up to my full height of four foot ten and a quarter inches. I’m quite tall for my age, which is almost twelve.

  “Yaroo!” I shouted, waggling my arms to keep my balance. “I’m the King of the Castle!”

  “Flavia! Come down this instant or I’m telling Father!”

  “Look, Feely,” I said. “There’s an old tombstone up here.”

  “I know. It’s to add weight to the wind chest. Now get down here. And be careful.”

  I brushed away the dust with my hands. “Hezekiah Whytefleet,” I read aloud. “1679 to 1778. Phew! Ninety-nine. I wonder who he was?”

  “I’m switching off the torch now. You’ll be alone in the dark.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’m coming. No need to get owly.”

  As I shifted my weight from foot to foot, the wind chest rocked and subsided a little more, so that I felt as if I were standing on the deck of a swamped ship.

  Something fluttered just to the right of Feely’s face and she froze.

  “Probably just a bat,” I said.

  Feely gave a shriek, dropped the torch, and vanished.

  Bats were high on the list of things that turned my sister’s brains to suet pudding.

  A further fluttering, as if the thing were confirming its presence.

  Picking my way gingerly down from my perch, I retrieved the torch and dragged it along the rank of pipes like a stick on a picket fence.

  A furious leathery flapping echoed in the chamber.

  “It’s all right, Feely,” I called out. “It is a bat, and it’s stuck in a pipe.”

  I popped out through the hatch into the chancel. Feely was standing there in an angled beam of moonlight, as white as an alabaster statue, her arms wrapped round herself.

  “Maybe we can smoke it out,” I said. “Got a cigarette?”

  I was being facetious, of course. Feely was death on smoking.

  “Maybe we can coax it out,” I suggested helpfully. “What do bats eat?”

  “Insects,” Feely said blankly, as if she were struggling awake from a paralyzing dream. “So that’s no use. What are we going to do?”

  “Which pipe is it in?” I asked. “Did you
happen to notice?”

  “The sixteen-foot diapason,” she said shakily. “The D.”

  “I have an idea!” I said. “Why don’t you play Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor? Full throttle. That ought to fix the little sod.”

  “You’re disgusting,” Feely said. “I’ll tell Mr. Haskins about the bat tomorrow.”

  Mr. Haskins was the sexton at St. Tancred’s, who was expected to deal with everything from grave-digging to brass-polishing.

  “How do you suppose it got into the church? The bat, I mean.”

  We were walking home between the hedgerows. Scrappy clouds scudded across the moon and a raw crosswind blew and tugged at our coats.

  “I don’t know and I don’t want to talk about bats,” Feely said.

  Actually, I was just making conversation. I knew that bats didn’t come in through open doors. There were enough of the things hanging in the attics at Buckshaw for me to know that they generally got in through broken windows or were dragged in, injured, by cats. Since St. Tancred’s didn’t have a cat, the answer seemed obvious.

  “Why are they opening his tomb?” I asked, changing the subject. Feely would know I was referring to the saint.

  “Saint Tancred? Because it’s the quincentennial of his death.”

  “The what?”

  “Quincentennial. It means five hundred years.”

  I let out a whistle. “Saint Tancred’s been dead five hundred years? That’s five times longer than old Hezekiah Whytefleet lived.”

  Feely said nothing.

  “That means he died in 1451,” I said, making a quick mental subtraction. “What do you suppose he’s going to look like when they dig him up?”

  “Who knows?” Feely said. “Some saints remain forever uncorrupted. Their complexions are still as soft and peachy as a baby’s bottom, and they have a smell of flowers about them. ‘The odor of sanctity,’ it’s called.”

  When she felt like it, my sister could be downright chatty.

  “Supercolossal!” I said. “I hope I get a good squint at him when they drag him out of his box.”

  “Forget about Saint Tancred,” Feely said. “You won’t be allowed anywhere near him.”

  “It’s like eatin’ cooked ’eat,” Mrs. Mullet said. What she meant, of course, was “eating cooked heat.”

  I stared doubtfully at the bowl of squash and parsnip soup as she put it on the table in front of me. Black peppercorns floated in the stuff like pellets of used birdshot.

  “Looks almost good enough to eat,” I remarked pleasantly.

  Sticking a finger into The Mysteries of Udolfo to mark her place, Daffy shot me one of her paralyzing looks.

  “Ungrateful little wretch,” she muttered.

  “Daphne …,” Father said.

  “Well, she is,” Daffy went on. “Mrs. Mullet’s soup is nothing to joke about.”

  Feely quickly clapped a napkin to her lips to stifle a smile, and I saw another of those silent messages wing its way between my sisters.

  “Ophelia …” Father said. He had not missed it, either.

  “Oh, it’s nothin’, Colonel de Luce,” Mrs. Mullet said. “Miss Flavia ’as to ’ave ’er little joke. Me an’ ’er ‘as an understandin’. She means no ’arm.”

  This was news to me, but I trotted out a warm smile.

  “It’s all right, Mrs. M,” I told her. “They know not what they do.”

  Very deliberately, Father closed the latest issue of The London Philatelist which he had been reading, picked it up, and left the room. A few moments later, I heard his study door closing quietly.

  “Now you’ve done it,” Feely said.

  Father’s money problems had become more pressing with each passing month. There had been a time when his worries made him merely glum, but recently I had detected something which I feared was far, far worse: surrender.

  Surrender in a man who had survived a prisoner-of-war camp was almost unthinkable, and I realized with a sudden twinge in my heart that the bone-dry little men of His Majesty’s Board of Inland Revenue had done to Father what the Empire of Japan had failed to do. They had caused him to give up hope.

  Our mother, Harriet, to whom Buckshaw had been left by her great-uncle Tarquin de Luce, had died in a mountaineering accident in the Himalayas when I was a year old. Because she had left no will, His Majesty’s Vultures had descended upon Father at once, and had been busily pecking out his liver ever since.

  It had been a long struggle. From time to time, it had looked as if circumstances might take a turn for the better, but recently, I had noticed that Father was tiring. On several occasions, he had warned us that he might have to give up Buckshaw, but somehow we had always muddled through. Now, it seemed as if he no longer cared.

  How I loved the dear old place! The very thought of its wilting wallpaper and crumbling carpets was enough to give me gooseflesh.

  Uncle Tar’s first-rate chemistry lab upstairs in the unheated east wing was the only part of the house that would pass inspection, but it had long been abandoned to the dust and the cold of neglect until I had discovered the forgotten room and commandeered it for my own.

  Although Uncle Tar had been dead for more than twenty years, the laboratory which his indulgent father had built for him had been so far in advance of its time that it would even now, in 1951, be considered a marvel of science. From the gleaming brass of the Leitz binocular microscope to the rank upon rank of bottled chemicals, from the forest of flasks and flagons to the gas chromatograph which he had caused to be built, based upon the work of the enviably named Mikhail Semenovich Tswett, Uncle Tar’s laboratory was now mine: a world of glass and wonder.

  It was rumored that, at the time of his death, Uncle Tar had been at work upon the first-order decomposition of nitrogen pentoxide. If those whispers were true, he was one of the pioneers of what we have recently come to call “The Bomb.”

  From Uncle Tar’s library and his detailed notebooks, I had managed to turn myself into a cracking good chemist, although my interests were not so much given over to the splitting of atoms as to the concocting of poisons.

  To me, a jolly good dose of potassium cyanide beats stupid old spinning electrons any day of the week.

  The thought of my waiting laboratory was impossible to resist.

  “Don’t bother getting up,” I said to Daffy and Feely, who stared at me as if I had sprouted a second head.

  I walked from the room in utter silence.

  •TWO•

  Viewed through a microscope at low power, human blood looks at first like an aerial view of the College of Cardinals, dressed in their scarlet birettas and capes, milling about in Vatican Square, waiting for the Pope to appear on the balcony. Not that they have to, of course.

  But as the magnification is increased, the color fades, until at last, when we are looking at the individual red corpuscles in close-up, we see that, in reality, each one has no more than a pale pink tint.

  Blood’s red coloration comes from the iron contained in the hemoglobin. The iron bonds easily with oxygen, which it carries to the most far-flung nooks and crannies of our bodies. Lobsters, snails, crabs, clams, squids, slugs, and members of the European royal families, by contrast, have blue blood, due to the fact that it’s based on copper rather than iron.

  I suppose it was finding the dead frog that had given me the idea in the first place. The poor thing had probably been trying to make its way from the river that ran behind St. Tancred’s to the small marsh across the road, when it experienced a major misadventure with a motorcar.

  Whatever the case, the thing had been squashed flat even before I stuffed it into my pocket and brought it home for scientific purposes.

  In order to make the corpuscles more transparent under the microscope, I had mixed a sample of its blood with a one-in-four solution of acetic acid, then, as I adjusted the fine focus, I could see clearly that the frog’s corpuscles were flat disks—rather like pink pennies—while my own, which I had extracted with a q
uick jab of a safety pin, were twice the size, and concave, like dozens of red doughnuts.

  The idea of comparing my own blood to that of my father and sisters had come later, and indirectly from Daffy.

  “You’re no more a de Luce than the man in the moon,” she had snapped when she caught me snooping in her diary. “Your mother was a Transylvanian. You have bat’s blood in your veins.”

  As she snatched the leather-bound book from my hand, she gave herself a rather bad paper cut with the edge of one of its pages.

  “Now look what you’ve made me do!” she’d shrieked, holding out for my inspection her bleeding, quivering finger as it dripped spectacularly onto the drawing room carpet. In order to increase the dramatic effect even further, she had milked a few extra drops from the wound. And then, without another word, she dashed, half sobbing, from the room.

  It had been a simple matter to sponge up a good bit of the gore with my handkerchief. Father was always going on about the importance of carrying a clean honking-rag, and there had been several occasions upon which I’d offered up silent praise for such excellent advice. This was another of them.

  I had dashed at once to my laboratory, prepared a microscope slide from the blood sample, and made several quite good sketches of my observations, coloring them neatly with a boxed set of professional artist’s pencils that Aunt Millicent had given to Feely several Christmases ago.

  Then, through an incredible stroke of good luck, Feely, who was uncommonly vain about her hands, ripped a hangnail at the breakfast table a few days later, and it was Flavia on the spot—which is rather a good witticism, when you come to think of it.

  “Watch out! You’ve stained the table linen,” I said, whisking the napkin out of her fingers and handing her a wad of wooly lint from my pocket. “I’ll rinse this out in cold water before it sets.”

  In my laboratory, I had added another set of colored sketches to my notebook.

  The circular flattened discs of the red corpuscles, I had written, have a tendency to stick together. They display their characteristic red color only where they are seen to overlap. Otherwise, they are the pale yellow of the western sky after an evening rain.