Alan Bradley - The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches

I twisted my head round and was just able to catch a glimpse of her. She was jabbing a bony finger to indicate the flying helmet, which she must have dredged from the depths of the cockpit, and she was obviously signaling me to do the same.

I reached under the seat and, sure enough, there was an identical helmet. I strapped it on.

Now the stick was waggling again, and I turned to see Aunt Felicity waving the end of a ribbed rubber tube. She put it to her ear, then to her mouth, and then her ear again.

At first I thought she was merely trying to entertain me: that she was miming some lurid magazine cover such as Thrilling Tales in which a pilot is wrestling at 5,000 feet with a boa constrictor which some nefarious villain has concealed in the cockpit, until I was made to realize by the violent and impatient shaking of the stick, that there was a similar tube beside me in the front cockpit and that Aunt Felicity wanted me to use the thing for speaking and listening.

I nodded and held the yellow tube to the ear-socket of my helmet.

Again the stick shook like a cornstalk in a hurricane. Aunt Felicity was pointing to her ear and I saw at once what she wanted me to do. There was a socket in the side of my helmet into which the tube was meant to be inserted. I plugged it in, gave it a twist, and Aunt Felicity’s voice was suddenly in my ear.

“Can you hear me?” she asked. I gave her a thumbs-up, which seemed the right thing to do in the circumstances.

“Good,” she said. “Now listen to me. We’ve precious little time and what I have to say to you is of the utmost importance. Do you understand?”

I gave her three more thumbs for emphasis as she banked Blithe Spirit round towards the west.

Beneath our wings, Buckshaw lay spread out in the sun, a dreamy mirage of green lands, a fairy-tale kingdom in miniature. From this altitude, you could not see the black line painted in the foyer that divided the house into two camps, nor could you detect the frost that had recently descended upon the house.

Or had it been there all along, and I had only recently learned to notice?

“Take a good look, Flavia,” Aunt Felicity’s metallic voice was saying. “You may never see the likes of it again.”

We were suspended in the air, the two of us, perhaps a mile above that special part of England which was ours. Tomorrow, after the funeral, it would probably belong to someone else.

Even if Harriet’s will untied Father’s legal entanglements, there was no money left to go on. Buckshaw had become a crushing burden that could no longer be borne.

Like Atlas, forced to put down the world from his shoulders in order to fetch apples from his daughters, the Hesperides, Father would not likely have the heart to take it up again.

In the old legends, anyone who willingly took up the Earth upon their shoulders was doomed to carry it forever: a curse, it seemed, with no way out.

“All of this belonged to your mother,” Aunt Felicity said through the speaking tube, shouting to be heard above the roar of the engine, her voice coming through the tube in machine-gun bursts. “She loved it here. Nothing was more precious to her … than her home and her family. Harriet went away only because she had no other choice. It was a matter … of life and death. Not your life and death or mine … but that of England .… Do you understand?”

I nodded and looked out at the England that was beneath our wings.

“Your father had already been taken prisoner by the Japanese … but your mother was unaware of that … when she volunteered to go on a mission … which only she could accomplish successfully. She was … devastated at having to leave her three children in the care of others.”

Aunt Felicity’s words brought back barely recalled memories of being dressed and fed by strangers—a failed succession of nannies and governesses, none of whom, I later learned, had been Mary Poppins.

“But your mother knew her duty,” Aunt Felicity went on. “She was a de Luce … and the life of England was at stake.”

Behind and below us to the southwest, Buckshaw Halt was vanishing in the slight haze that had appeared, and I remembered the words that Mr. Churchill had spoken to my father.

“She was England, damn it,” he had said.

“She was more than that, Prime Minister,” Father had replied.

Only now was I beginning to realize how much more.

Harriet had volunteered for the mission Dr. Kissing had spoken of in his so-called fairy tale: a mission to bring home to justice a traitor who had sold himself out, and England with him, to the Emperor of Japan.

“Under diplomatic immunity, she had made her way to Singapore,” Aunt Felicity continued, breaking into my thoughts, “where, unknown to her … your father was already attached to the Far East Combined Bureau. But before she could discover that … he was captured by the Japanese—on Christmas Day!—and thrown, with a handful of his staff, into Changi prison.”

Aunt Felicity’s voice came strangely to my ears, constricted to an insect buzz by the speaking tube. But her words were clear enough. Father had been imprisoned and Harriet was likely to be.

“At this crucial instant … the Japanese were still playing a double game. On the one hand, they had captured your father.… while at the same time, they were trying to demonstrate that they were … masters of the world. They even took your mother on a guided tour of the prison … at Changi … to show off to her the British officers they had in custody. She was to carry the word back to London … and the War Office would capitulate at once. Such was their thinking. Sheer madness!”

My mind was as blurred as the spinning propeller. How could this whole chapter of my family’s history have taken place without my suspecting? It seemed impossible. Perhaps Dr. Kissing had been right: Perhaps it was a fairy tale.

“It was there … in that dreadful compound at Changi … that your parents were thrust suddenly and unexpectedly face-to-face—your mother being shown the prisoners who had been trotted out for her inspection … your father being taunted with the sight of an English visitor. Neither of them knew the other was in Singapore … but neither batted an eye.”

Oh, how it must have torn their hearts , I thought. How killing it must have been to show not a flicker of recognition: to have to pretend that they had never been in love, had never married, and that their three children—the youngest no more than a baby, left behind in England to be brought up by strangers—had never existed .

I twisted round in the seat so that I could see Aunt Felicity. Her eyes were enormous—like an owl’s behind her goggles—as she gave a nod as if to say, “Yes! It’s true—every word of it.”

My own eyes stung with tears. I didn’t want to hear any more. I threw my hands up to cover my ears, but they could not block out Aunt Felicity’s words, which came seeping again through the rubber tube.

“Flavia, listen. There’s more—you must listen to me!”

I could not ignore the sound of crackling command that had suddenly come into her voice.

“The traitor your mother had come to deal with had apparently vanished. The political situation had become far too dangerous to remain in Singapore. She was making her way home … by way of India and Tibet. But … she was followed. Someone had betrayed her.”

My mind went numb. Black thoughts tossed in my mind like the billows of some dark sea.

Had Harriet been murdered? I had wondered that before but set it aside as incredible beyond belief. But was that now the suspicion of the Home Office? Was that why Sir Peregrine Darwin had shown up so unexpectedly on our doorstep? Was the killer still at large?