Alan Bradley - The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches

“So you haven’t done much flying.”

“I shouldn’t say that,” he said quietly. “No, I shouldn’t say that at all. I’ve had my innings.”

“You were in the RAF!” I said as the light came on in my brain.

“Biggin Hill.” He nodded modestly. “Mostly Spitfires.”

Crikes! Here I was condescending to one of the young men Mr. Churchill had called “The Few”: one of those youthful warriors who had climbed high into the sky above England’s green and pleasant land to take on the German Luftwaffe.

I had seen their photos in the back issues of Picture Post that littered the library of Buckshaw like drifts of fallen autumn leaves: those boyish pilots who, in their life vests and sheepskin flying boots, draped themselves in canvas deck chairs in the grass, awaiting the grated voice from the Tannoy system to call them to action.

I couldn’t wait to introduce Tristram Tallis to Dieter! And to Feely!

“When I heard about your mother,” he said, “I knew I needed to bring Blithe Spirit back to Buckshaw. I—I mean—dash it all! I’m not very good at this sort of thing.”

But I understood him perfectly.

“My mother would have been grateful,” I told him. “And she’d have wanted me to thank you.”

“Look, this is deuced awkward,” he said. “I don’t know what your family will think of me barging in at a time like this—” He waved his hand vaguely towards where the long queue of villagers shuffled slowly and mournfully towards the house. “Dash it all! I mean, landing on your lawn as if Buckshaw were the bally old airfield at Croydon. I mean—”

“Think nothing of it, Mr. Tallis,” I told him, desperately trying to cover up the fact that I was floundering badly. When it came to the social graces, I was in far over my head.

How would Feely handle this? I wondered. I tried to put myself for a moment into my sister’s shoes.

“Perhaps you’d care to come in and freshen up,” I said, touching his wrist lightly and flashing him my most charming smile. “I expect flying gives you the most awful craving for a cup of tea.”

It was exactly the right thing to say. A broad schoolboy grin split his face, and a moment later he was leading the way, with alarmingly long strides, towards the kitchen door.

“You seem to have been here before,” I called to him, struggling to keep up.

I had meant it as a joke, but almost instantly, I realized what I had said. In a hidden room of my mind, a clinker fell in the bars of an iron grate and the fire blazed up.

That tall figure in the ciné film at the window of the laboratory. “Six foot three, or perhaps four,” Dogger had said .

Tristram Tallis stopped so abruptly in his tracks that I almost collided with his posterior.

He turned round. Too slowly …?

He pinned me with his hooded flyer’s eyes.

“Of course I’ve been here before,” he said. “The day your mother handed over Blithe Spirit.”

“Were you wearing an American corporal’s uniform?” I wanted to ask, but I did not. “Were you poring over papers at the window of Uncle Tar’s laboratory?”

“Oh, yes—of course,” I said. “I’d forgotten. How foolish of me.”

The shadow passed, and a moment later we were strolling side by side along the red brick wall of the kitchen garden as if we were old pals.

I thought—but only for a moment—of taking his hand, but rejected the idea at once.

It would have been excessive.

“I hope you don’t mind using the kitchen entrance,” I said, thinking of the long queue of mourners at the front of the house.

“It wouldn’t be the first time.” He grinned, holding the door open for me in an elaborate manner.

“Mr. Tristram!” Mrs. Mullet shrieked when she saw his face. “Or should I call you Squadron Leader now?”

She came rushing towards us, extending a soapy hand, withdrawing it before he could grasp it, and collapsing into a sort of comic curtsy that left her stuck on one knee.

Tristram hoisted her gallantly to her feet. “Is the kettle on, Mrs. M? I’ve come for a cup of that wizard tea of yours.”

“Just go right through to the drawing room,” she said, suddenly formal. “If you’ll be so good as to show Mr. Tristram in, Miss Flavia, I shall be in with the tea directly.”

“I’d prefer to stay here with you in the control tower,” he said. “Rather like old times.”

Mrs. Mullet was now blushing like billy-ho, rushing round the kitchen, darting into the pantry, and clasping her hands whenever she looked at him.

“I’ve come at a sad time,” he said, pulling out a chair at the kitchen table and folding himself into it.

“That’s right. Sit yourself down. I shall fetch you a bit of my Arval bread. I made it special, like, for Miss ’Arriet—for ’er funeral, I mean, bless ’er soul.”

She mopped at her eyes with her apron.

Meanwhile, my mind was flying circles above the conversation. “Squadron Leader,” Mrs. Mullet had said. And hadn’t Tristram himself claimed to have been with one of the Biggin Hill fighter squadrons during the Battle of Britain?

How on earth, then, could he possibly have been at Buckshaw before the War dressed in the uniform of an American corporal?

Well, of course, there had been that laughable film A Yank in the R.A.F. , which we had been made to sit through as part of the parish hall cinema series, in which Tyrone Power and Betty Grable hopped across the pond to help save us from a fate worse than death.

But Tristram Tallis was no Yank. I was sure of it.

“I’ll leave you two to catch up,” I said, with what I hoped was a considerate smile. “I have a few things to do.”

Up the east staircase I flew, two steps at a time.

First things first. The very thought of Lena being left alone in my laboratory was enough to give me the crow-jinks. I should have shown her out politely before making my mad dash to the Visto, but there hadn’t been time to think.

I needn’t have worried, though. The laboratory door was closed, and the room itself was empty of everyone but Esmeralda, who still sat dreamily perched on the test-tube rack, much as I had left her.

I checked the various traps I always leave set for unwary intruders: single hairs gummed across cupboards, ends of paper sheets jammed haphazardly in drawer openings (on the assumption that no snoop would ever be able to resist straightening them), and, behind each of the inner doors, a thimble filled to the brim with a solution of insoluble ferrocyanide of iron, or Prussian blue, which, once spilled, could not be washed away if seven maids with seven mops swept it for half a year.

My bedroom, too, was untouched, and I grudgingly awarded Lena a couple of mental marks for honesty.

Now, at last, having set the stage, I was ready to undertake the next and most difficult act: the tackling of Feely.

I had not forgotten my plan to resurrect Harriet: Oh no!—far from it. I had been banishing the idea from the forefront of my mind simply to keep from shrieking out with delight.

The very thought of how ecstatic Father would be was enough to make me hug myself inwardly.

As I crossed the foyer, the strains of the Adagio cantabile from Beethoven’s Pathétique came drifting along the hall from the drawing room in the west wing. Each note hung for an instant in the air like a cold, crystalline drop of water melting from the end of an icicle. I had once referred to this sonata as “the old Pathetic ” in Feely’s hearing, and had been rewarded with a near miss by a flung metronome.

This particular bit of Beethoven is, I think, the saddest piece of music ever written since the beginning of time, and I knew that Feely was playing it because she was devastated. It was meant for Harriet’s ears alone—or for her soul—or for whatever might remain of her in this house.