Alan Bradley - The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches

It is impossible for a young heart to remain gloomy for long, and I could already feel the muscles in my face growing tired from trying.

“The daffodils are so beautiful,” I heard myself telling Bunny, and I saw the tears spring to his eyes as he thought about how brave I was.

Bunny was unaware that the toe of one of his polished black shoes was planted directly on the black painted line: the line that split the house—and our family—into two.

When you came right down to it, it was all about lines, wasn’t it? This black line in the foyer, and the white one that Aunt Felicity had told me I must walk: “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.”

They were one and the same, this black line and that white line. Why hadn’t I realized that before?

“Even when it leads to murder.”

An icy chill seized me as a horrible thought crept from my brain to my heart.

Had Harriet been murdered?

“It was decent of the government to lay on a special train to bring her down,” Bunny was saying, his spread hands cradling his substantial stomach as if it were a football. “Damnably decent, but no less than what she deserved.”

But I hardly heard his words. My mind was racing in overlapping circles like a motorcycle in the Wall of Death.

Harriet … the stranger under the wheels of the train … were their deaths connected? And if so, was their killer still at large? Could their killer be here at Buckshaw?

“You must excuse me, Mr. Spirling,” I said. “I’m feeling rather …”

I did not need to finish.

“Take the girl to her room, Maude,” Bunny said in a commanding voice.

A little woman appeared beside him as if she had materialized from thin air. She had been there all along, I realized, but so tiny was she, so still, so quiet, and so transparent that I had not noticed her.

I had seen Mrs. Spirling around the village, of course, and at church, but always in the shadow of the looming figure of her husband, Bunny, in whose shade she was nearly invisible.

“Come along, Flavia,” she said in a voice far too deep for such a frail creature, and, taking my arm in an iron grip, she steered me towards the stairs.

I felt slightly ridiculous, being led along by someone who was shorter than myself.

Halfway up the first flight she stopped, turned to me, and said, “There’s something I want you to know: something I feel I must say to you. Your mother was a remarkably strong woman. She was not as other people.”

We continued upwards. At the landing she said, “How very difficult this must be for you.”

I nodded.

As we climbed the second flight she said, “Harriet always told us that she would come back—that no matter what happened, she would return—that we mustn’t worry. One always hopes, of course,” she said, letting go of my arm, “but now—”

At the top of the stairs she took my hand. “We came to think of her as being immortal.”

I could see that she was controlling the muscles of her face with only the greatest difficulty.

“I like to think that, too,” I replied, feeling suddenly and inexplicably wiser, as if I had just returned from a voyage of discovery.

“I don’t suppose you’ve had more than a couple of hours’ sleep in the past week, have you?” she asked. I shook my head stupidly.

“I thought not. The thing is to get you to bed. In you go.”

We had arrived at the door of my bedroom.

“I’ll have Bunny tell your father you’re not to be disturbed. I’d ask Dogger to bring you up some hot milk to help you sleep, but he’s busy with the hordes at the door. I shall bring it myself.”

“No need, Mrs. Spirling,” I said. “I’m so tired, I—”

I threw out a hand to brace myself against the door jamb.

“A few hours’ sleep will work wonders. I’m sure of it,” I told her, opening the door just enough to slip inside and peer back out at her.

“Thank you, Mrs. Spirling,” I said with a frail grin. “You’re a lifesaver.”

I shut the door.

And counted to thirty-five.

I dropped to my knees and applied my eye to the keyhole.

She was gone.

I took a piece of stationery from the drawer of my bedside table and wrote on it with a pencil, in an intentionally weak and spidery scrawl: Unwell. Ps. Do not disturb. Thnk you. Flavia .

I dragged the Ls a bit so they looked as if I hadn’t the strength to lift the pencil from the paper.

Checking that the coast was clear, I stepped out into the hall, stuck my note to the door with a bit of chewing gum purloined from the supposedly secret dragon’s horde of the stuff at the back of Feely’s U-wear drawer.

I locked the door and pocketed the key.

Moments later I was barricaded in my laboratory, ready to begin preparations for the most important chemical experiment of my life.

For nearly twenty years after the death of Tarquin de Luce, his notebooks had stood untouched: row upon row of sober black-clad soldiers. There was nothing I loved better than to browse in their pages, dipping into a volume at random, savoring each delicious chemical insight as if it were a treacle tart.

Needless to say, the word “poison” always caught my eye, as it did in a brief footnote in which Uncle Tar mentioned the work of Takaki Kanehiro, a Japanese naval surgeon whose work led to the discovery—by Eijkman, Hopkins, and others—that a solid diet of white rice produced in the body a nerve poison whose antidote, oddly enough, was the very husk which had been removed in preparing the rice for consumption!

It was a theory I had postulated myself after being subjected to a lifetime of Mrs. Mullet’s rice puddings, of which the least said, the better.

This antidote, which was at first called aneurin because of what its absence did to the nerves, turned out to be thiamine, which was later given the designation vitamin B 1.

The existence of vitamins, or “vital amines,” as he had called them, had been suggested by Kazimierz Funk: these somewhat mysterious organic compounds which are required by all living organisms but cannot be synthesized by the organism itself.

One of Uncle Tar’s many correspondents, a Cambridge student named Albert Szent-Györgyi, had written to ask his advice regarding his recent discovery of what he was then calling aneurin .

Aneurin again! Vitamin B 1.

Uncle Tar had replied suggesting that Szent-Györgyi’s aneurin might play an important role in the generation of the energy by which all oxygen-dependent organisms convert into carbon dioxide the acetate they derive from the fats, proteins, and carbohydrates of the diet.

Life, in short!

He also hinted that an injectable form of the vitamin called cocarboxylase hydrochloride was vital in restoring life to deceased laboratory rats that had been frozen.

I shall never forget the electric thrill that shot through me from head to toe upon reading these words.

The restoration of life! Precisely as promised in the Apostle’s Creed!

And yet cocarboxylase hydrochloride was only part of the story.

There was also the matter of adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, which had been discovered in 1929 at Harvard University Medical School: too late for Uncle Tar, who had died suddenly of a heart attack the previous year, but not too late for me.

I had first read about the stuff in Chemical Abstracts & Transactions , a journal to which Uncle Tar had fortunately purchased a lifetime subscription and which, nearly a quarter century after his death, was still being delivered by the postman every month to Buckshaw as regular as clockwork.