Alan Bradley - The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches

This was a bit of a stretch, even for me, and I think he knew it. Although Buckshaw did have a firearms museum—or “muniment room,” as Father called it—most of the weapons in its glass cases had likely not been fired since the Roundheads and the Cavaliers had squeezed their triggers in the days of “Jolly Ollie” Cromwell.

“Good job you didn’t,” Tallis said. “I should have been hurt if you’d potted me.”

Was the man twitting me?

I decided to let it pass and find out what he was up to.

“You’re up early.” I tried to put a pinch of accusation in my voice.

“I couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d come down and check on Typhon . Sorry, Blithe Spirit , I mean. Oil and so forth.”

It seemed an unlikely excuse for a moment until I remembered that I felt the same way about Gladys.

“Since it might be our last day together, I thought I’d get an early start.”

Our last day together? Was he referring to me? Or to Blithe Spirit?

“Yes, that’s right,” he said, seeing the look of puzzlement on my face. “I’m selling up. Cashing in my chips. As the old song says, I’m off to Tipperary in the morning. I’ve been offered a post shuffling papers in South America.”

“That’s not exactly Tipperary,” I said. I didn’t know where Tipperary was, actually, except that it sounded as if it might be somewhere in Ireland.

“No, not exactly.” He grinned. “I hadn’t thought of that. Do you think I should wire them and tell them I’ve changed my mind?”

Now I knew he was teasing me.

“No,” I said. “You should go. But leave Blithe Spirit here at Buckshaw, so that when I’m old enough, I can learn to fly her.”

“I would if I could. But the old girl—See? You’ve got me calling her an old girl!—needs hangaring. Plus the gentle hand of a good mechanic.”

“Dogger could look after her,” I said.

Dogger, after all, could do anything.

He shook his head sadly. “I’m afraid I’ve sold her,” he said.

I felt my heart sink within me.

Blithe Spirit sold? I don’t know why, but it didn’t seem right. She had, after all, been sold before.

“Look here,” Tristram Tallis said. “How would it be if I took you for a flip?”

At first I didn’t understand him—didn’t know what he was suggesting.

“A flip?”

“A flight.”

Could this be true? Could it actually be happening to me? I had once asked Father what Buckshaw looked like from the air. “Ask your aunt Felicity,” he’d said. “She’s flown.”

I never had, of course. Now the opportunity was staring me straight in the face.

“That’s very kind of you, Mr. Tallis, but I couldn’t possibly accept without permission.”

I knew already what Father’s reply would be, even if I was willing to intrude upon him, which I wasn’t.

What a disappointment, though: having to refuse my only chance to take to the air in Harriet’s Blithe Spirit .

My spirits were already sinking when a second figure stepped from the shadows.

It was Dogger.

He handed me a red woolly jumper I had mislaid a week ago in the greenhouse.

“Put this on, Miss Flavia,” he said, without so much as a smile. “The air can be remarkably cold in the mornings.”

Then I, with a silly grin splitting my face from side to side in the damp dawn, was sprinting across the Visto towards Blithe Spirit .

Tristram Tallis strapped me into the front seat and left me sitting there alone as he made a tour of inspection round the aircraft, touching here, wiggling there, peering at one thing and another.

I took the opportunity to have a quick look round the cockpit in which I was sitting. I think I had been expecting something quite wonderful in a machine which was capable of flying up among the gods, but this one seemed horribly underequipped for such a journey: a simple stick that jutted up out of the floor and a couple of dials and gauges on a wooden panel.

And that was all. Surely this thing was too frail to fly.

I was beginning to think I had made a mistake. Perhaps I should beg off. But it was too late.

After a couple of halfhearted swings at the propeller, Tristram returned to the cockpit, threw a switch, and gave it another try. There was an alarming mechanical clanking from the engine, a burst of smoke, and with a roar the propeller disappeared in a blur.

The wings teetered alarmingly as he clambered aboard.

“All set?” he shouted as he fastened himself in the back seat, and I, clutching the edges of the cockpit, managed a grim nod.

The roar became a tornado and we began to move, slowly at first, but with ever-increasing speed until we were rattling along cross-country like the Hinley Hunt in full cry.

Faster and faster still we went until I thought Blithe Spirit was about to tear herself to pieces.

And then a sudden smoothness.

We were flying!

Rather than us rising up into the air as I had expected we would, the earth fell away beneath us like a carpet being jerked out from under one’s feet by some unseen practical joker.

I had no more than a fleeting impression of the roofs of Buckshaw before the ornamental lake was floating quickly past below us.

The sun was an enormous red fire balloon on the horizon as we rose up out of the shadows and into the sudden daylight.

It was breathtaking!

If Feely and Daffy had dashed to their windows at the noise of our takeoff, I would be no more to them now than a flyspeck in the distance.

Just as I always was , I couldn’t help thinking.

But beneath our wings, the marvelous toy world slid slowly by: hills, fields, woods and valleys, dales, dells, ponds and groves. Far below us, miniature sheep grazed in handkerchief pastures.

It made me want to write a hymn. Hadn’t even Johann Sebastian Bach composed something about sheep?

Away to the east, the rising sun struck a sharp glint off the river, and for a few moments, as we turned away from it, the Efon was a shimmering snake of rubies crawling off towards a distant sea.

How Harriet must have loved this , I thought: the freedom of it all—the sense of having left one’s body, but not one’s mind, behind. Unless you happened to be a bird, the body was of little use up here: You could not run or jump as you did on the ground, but only observe.

In a strange way, being an aviator was like being a departed soul: You could look down upon the Earth without actually being present, see all without being seen.

It was easy enough to see why God, having called the dry land “Earth” and the gathering together of the waters “the Seas,” saw that it was good.

I could picture the Old Fellow lifting up the horizon like the lid of a stewing pot and peeking in with one red eye to admire His Creation: to see how it was coming along.

It was good!

Tristram was waving a hand, pointing downwards. Blithe Spirit tilted precipitously to one side, and I found myself looking down the wing at an oddly familiar collection of buildings.

Bishop’s Lacey’s High Street!

There was the Thirteen Drakes, inside which all those official people from the railway station—those bullies from the Home Office, presumably billeted in every nook and cranny, even unto the broom cupboards, if Daffy was to be believed—were dreaming their dreadful dreams of power.

And down there, in Cow Lane, was the Bishop’s Lacey Free Library—and Tilda Mountjoy’s Willow Villa, even more gaudily orange than usual in the light of the early morning.

We had now flown through half of a vast clockwise circle and were turning south again. Ahead I could see the Palings, that curious bend in the river at the edge of our estate, and I wondered what the Hobblers, that peculiar cult who had once baptized their babies at that spot, might have made of our flying machine appearing suddenly in the sky.