Alan Bradley - The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches

Was he being what Daffy called “ironical”? She had once told me that the word meant the use of veiled sarcasm: the dagger under the silk.

“The smiler with the knife!” she had hissed in a horrible voice.

I gave the Inspector a sad smile, which seemed appropriate to the occasion, then turned and walked off along the lane. I picked up Gladys and resumed our way home across the fields.

When I was far enough away, and under the pretense of adjusting my pigtails, I sneaked a quick look back over my shoulder.

Inspector Hewitt was still standing precisely where I had left him.

Undine met me at the kitchen door.

“They’ve been looking for you everywhere,” she announced. “They’re furious—I can tell. Ibu wants to see you at once.”

In ordinary circumstances, I would have responded to such a command by sending up a reply that would have given Undine’s mother a perm that would be truly everlasting, but I restrained myself.

There was enough pressure in the house already without my adding more.

And so, like a perfect little lady, I turned and walked gracefully up the stairs.

I could hardly believe it.

Dogger had billeted the Cornwall de Luces in a bedroom above the north front: a musty room with moldy cream and green wallpaper which made the room look like a cavern hung with Roquefort cheese.

I knocked and entered before Lena could tell me to come in.

“Where have you been?” she demanded.

“Out,” I said. I was not going to make this easy for her.

“Everyone has been looking for you,” she said. “Your father collapsed at the foot of your mother’s coffin. It was dreadful. Dreadful!”

“What?” I could scarcely believe it.

“He wasn’t to stand watch until this evening,” I said.

“The poor man has barely left her side since they brought her into the house this morning. Your aunt Felicity was with him. Her vigil ends at 6:48, and they want you to relieve her—to take your father’s place.”

“Thank you, Cousin Lena,” I said. “I shall see to it.”

I stepped outside and quietly closed the door, leaving her to the Roquefort.

Safely alone in the hall, I leaned against the wall and took a deep breath.

I wasn’t worried about Father: Dogger would have put him to bed, and I had no doubt that everything in that department was under control.

Lena had made no mention of the doctor being called, so I was quite sure that it was a case of exhaustion, pure and simple.

Father had barely rested since the news had come of Harriet’s death, and now that she had been brought home to Buckshaw, he would be sleeping even less.

What concerned me was this: With only a few hours to go before my watch began, there was little time to prepare. Kind Fate had tripled the time I would have with Harriet: Instead of 4 hours and 48 minutes, I would now have more than 14 hours—albeit in three sessions: Father’s, Feely’s, and mine (interrupted by Daffy’s, of course)—to bring Harriet back from the dead.

There would be one chance—and one chance only—to convince the family of my worth. If I failed, I would remain forever an outcast.

There wasn’t a second to waste.

Everything now depended upon Flavia de Luce.

SIXTEEN

ALONE IN MY LABORATORY with the door firmly bolted, I began my final preparations.

Esmeralda looked on from her perch, completely disinterested.

The first step was to lay out a kit of the required tools: screwdriver, tin-snips, gloves, galvanized coal scuttle, and torch.

The first of these items was to open Harriet’s coffin; the second to cut through the metal lining; the third and fourth to receive whatever might remain of the dry ice in which I was counting on her being packed; and the fifth to add more light to the scene than would be provided by the flickering candles alone.

Then there were the hypodermic needles: two sturdy and somewhat suspicious specimens from Uncle Tar’s truly comprehensive collection of laboratory glassware.

I removed from my pocket and unwrapped from my handkerchief the two vials of adenosine triphosphate which Dr. Darby had so generously contributed to my scheme, followed by the bottle of thiamine which Annabella Cruickshank had handed over in open defiance of her brother, Lancelot.

If Undine or Lena had noticed the peculiar bulges in my jumper they had said nothing.

Next, in preparation for the act itself, I reviewed the relevant pages from Uncle Tar’s notebooks: those concerning the reanimation of the dead.

The resurrection of Harriet de Luce.

I pulled up a tall stool and began reviewing the spidery, handwritten texts.

It was obvious to even the most casual reader that Uncle Tar had actually experimented upon rabbits. Page after page was filled with his hand-drawn charts and graphs showing times, dosages, and results of his attempted resurrections of twenty-four rabbits, who had been given the names Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and so on, all the way up to Omega.

All of them—save Epsilon, who Uncle Tar suspected might have had a dicky heart to begin with—had been successfully revived from a state of clinical death and had lived to be experimented upon another day.

My eyes were heavy, not helped by my uncle’s minuscule handwriting, as they plowed over the pages. Once or twice I nodded—recovered with a start—yawned several deep yawns and—

I awoke completely disoriented. The side of my face lay flat upon the laboratory bench in a puddle of drool.

I shook my head groggily and rotated it upon my neck, trying to ease the dull headache that invariably comes with sleeping during the day.

I unlocked the door and hurried to my bedroom to have a look at the clock.

It was 6:44!

I had slept away whatever little remained of the afternoon and now had just four minutes to get to Harriet’s boudoir and take up my post. I would have to sneak back later for my tools and supplies.

With the speed of a music-hall quick-change artist, I removed my rumpled clothing and threw on my best black jumper and a clean white blouse. Long black stockings and a pair of detestable black goody-two-shoes completed the getup.

Using my fingers as a comb, I gave my hair a lick and a promise and straightened my pigtails.

Too late for decent grooming, I rubbed the crusty sleep from my eyes, removed a smudge of dirt from my chin with a bit of spit, and made haste for the west wing.

“You’re two and a half minutes late,” Aunt Felicity said, glaring at her wristwatch.

“I was held up by the crowd outside,” I said, which had a morsel of truth in it. The straggling line of silent mourners still stretched along the upper hall, down the stairs, across the foyer, out the door, and, for all I knew, all the way into the village.

I had asked the woman at the head of the queue—a stranger, I hasten to say—to wait a bit longer before entering: There was an urgent family matter that must be seen to before the public visitations resumed. She had stared unflinchingly at me with her offended duck eyes. To be honest, she gave me the fantods.

“Orp!” I had wanted to shout in the woman’s face. It was easier than saying “orpiment,” which was the layman’s term for As 2S 3, or “arsenic trisulfide.”

Before Aunt Felicity could reply, I changed the subject.

“I’m worried about Father,” I said. “What happened to him? I thought he wasn’t due to begin his vigil until now.”

“He couldn’t bear to stay away,” Aunt Felicity said. She nodded towards Harriet’s catafalque. “He came up the stairs with her and remained at her side until he crumpled. It’s a jolly good thing I was here to go for help.”

“Dogger?” I asked.

“Dogger,” she said. And that seemed to be that—until she added: “Whom else would I send for?”