Alan Bradley - The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches

What had become of the traitor that Harriet had been sent to bring to justice? Had she found him before she was betrayed?

Had she perhaps killed him?

Had Harriet been an assassin?

My blood thrilled. These were deep waters indeed!

I made a mental note to pay a visit to the Bishop’s Lacey Free Library at the earliest opportunity. The newspaper archives for 1939 might well be worth rooting through. I could always tell Miss Pickery, the librarian, that Daffy was encouraging me to take up knitting and had referred me to a photo of a not-too-difficult jumper that had appeared in one of the back issues, the name and date of which she had unfortunately forgotten.

In manufacturing a lie, it is important to get the amount of detail just so: Too much or too little is a dead giveaway.

Then, too, there was Mrs. Mullet. Hadn’t she asked Tristram if she should now be addressing him as “Squadron Leader”? Did the U.S. Air Force have Squadron Leaders? I’d never heard one mentioned. Perhaps she had slipped up.

And then I had this thought: What if Mrs. Mullet was a member of the Nide!

Surely there was no one in the entire universe more privy to loose talk in a village so near to the military airfield at Leathcote.

I almost dropped the pole in my excitement.

Could Mrs. M be a spook? It would make perfect sense, wouldn’t it?

And her husband, Alf, who was admittedly such a great authority on all things military.

It was, of course, one of those questions which Aunt Felicity had said must never be asked about the living, and perhaps not even about the dead.

Harriet, for instance.

There were so many things I would have to find out for myself.

“May I ask you one question?” I said to Aunt Felicity.

“You may,” she said. “But you mustn’t think I am obliged to answer.”

“What about Father?”

“Well, what about him?”

“Is he a member of the Nide?”

Terence Tardiman had obviously thought he was, since it was Father he had told me to warn at the station—yet in the ciné film, Harriet had mouthed the words “pheasant sandwiches” to Aunt Felicity alone. But hadn’t Father accompanied the others in their early-morning trip to consult with Dr. Kissing?

And Dr. Kissing himself—what role did he play in all this?

I think I realized then, simply by the look Aunt Felicity gave me, how deep these waters were: how deep, how murky, and how unfathomable. I’d simply have to learn to answer my own questions. That, perhaps, was the intended lesson.

“I believe we may be in for a rain shower,” Aunt Felicity said, holding her hand out beyond the edge of her parasol.

Without my noticing, the sky had clouded over in the west.

“This school,” I said. Surely I would be allowed to ask a question about myself! Father had already told me he’d discussed it with Aunt Felicity.

“Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy.”

“I should hate it. I’m not going.”

“I wish you would reconsider,” Aunt Felicity said. “For two reasons: the first being that you will change your mind when you have been there for a while, and the second being that you have no choice.”

I stuck out my lower lip. I wasn’t going to argue with the woman.

“One thing you don’t know about your mother is this, Flavia. She, like you, protested being sent out to Canada. But, like you also, she had no choice. She always said later that it was the making of her.”

“I don’t care!”

All right, I’ll admit it: “I don’t care” is the last bit of baggage to be tossed overboard in a losing argument, but it was all I had left. Aunt Felicity would surely take pity on a poor girl who was hardly twelve.

“Don’t be petulant,” she said. “It is a tradition in the de Luce family to hand down certain privileges—as well as obligations—to the youngest daughter, as was sometimes done in ancient Greece and Italy. Don’t tell me you’ve never noticed how much your sisters resent you.”

This was plain talk from a plain-talking old woman. Had she been aware of my torment all along?

“They know about the Nide?” I gasped.

“They don’t know, but they have always suspected that in some unknown way, they are being excluded from some mystery which you are not—and believe me, they will feel so even more keenly when they hear that Buckshaw has been left to you as part of your inheritance.”

“Has Father still not told them?” I asked. “I should have thought he—”

“They’ll find it out soon enough when the solicitors read out your mother’s will.

“You might not want to be around,” she added, and I thought I spotted a twinkle in her eye.

Did she see that I was wavering? I shall never know. Aunt Felicity is such a deuced clever old trout.

“Besides,” she said, “I am told that Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy boasts a first-rate chemistry laboratory. Rumor has it that they are about to install an electron microscope. The Academy is exceptionally well endowed.”

I could feel myself shifting, like a fish caught in the current.

“All the latest innovations,” Aunt Felicity went on. “Spectrophotometers and so forth—”

Spectrophotometers! Ever since reading about the hydrogen spectrophotometer in Chemical Abstracts & Transactions, I had been itching to get my hands on one of those beauties. Armed with the knowledge that each chemical has its own unique fingerprint, one was able to crack open the secrets of the universe, all the way from cyanide to the stars.

And although I was fighting to keep it down, the corner of my mouth was beginning to rise of its own accord.

“And the chemistry mistress,” Aunt Felicity said, far too casually, “a certain Mrs. Bannerman, was acquitted several years ago of poisoning her wayward husband. Perhaps you’ve heard of her?”

Of course I’d heard of Mildred Bannerman. And who hadn’t? Her trial had been covered in delicious detail by the News of the World . Mildred had done away with her husband by applying the poison to the blade of the knife he was using to carve the Christmas turkey. An old trick, to be sure: known to the ancient Persians but presumably not to a modern-day jury in Canada.

I could scarcely wait to meet her.

EPILOGUE

AND SO I AM to leave Buckshaw.

What a pity it is that Inspector Hewitt will no longer have me here to set him straight. I can only hope that Bishop’s Lacey experiences no more murders, and that if it does, they are less baffling to him than those of the past year.

It is true, of course, that I was not entirely successful in identifying Lena de Luce as the killer of Terence Tardiman. But hadn’t Inspector Hewitt, perhaps through sheer luck or trick of Fate, by his own methods, managed to run her down in the nick of time even without my assistance? It crossed my mind that I should send him a card of congratulations, until I thought better of it. He might take it as an insult.

Feely and Daffy will have no one to torture, although Feely will soon enough be gone, and Daffy left to subside into Bleak House forever and ever, amen, or at least until her reading is interrupted by the Apocalypse.

Today I made one final attempt to beg off being sent to Miss Bodycote for “finishing,” as Father put it.

“But what about you?” I had pleaded. “You’ll have only Daffy when Feely is gone.”

“I shall have Daphne,” he said. “And I shall also have Undine. I’ve already taken the necessary steps to have her stay with us at Buckshaw. After all, damn it, it’s the only decent thing to do.”

He was right, of course. And because Daffy would soon come to dote on the little girl—I was sure of it; they were birds of a feather—she would be coddled with books and buns. I could already imagine the pair of them hurling polysyllabic words at each other ad nauseam , or whatever that phrase is.