The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches (30 page)

Dame Agatha Dundurn, her old military face upturned to the light, was putting her whole heart into it, as if she had written this mighty battle song herself and had finished leading, just moments ago, the overthrow of all the forces of evil.

Daffy, too, was singing her heart out, and what a lovely voice she had! Why had I never noticed it before? How could I have missed it?

I suddenly realized that there’s something about singing hymns with a large group of people that sharpens the senses remarkably. I stored this observation away for later use; it was a jolly good thing to know for anyone practicing the art of detection. Perhaps that was why Inspector Hewitt so often came to church.

I shot a glance in his direction just in time to see Antigone give his arm what she probably thought was a secret squeeze.

Now the organ and the congregation were taking a great
breath before launching into the final verse—and my favorite part:

Oh, how I adored the hobgoblin and the foul fiend! They were the making of this particular hymn, and if I had my way, more songs of praise would be required to include such interesting creatures.

As we sat down, the vicar gave Daffy an almost imperceptible nod. She picked up her bundle of papers and walked briskly to the lectern, where she shuffled them until I thought I’d go mad.

She produced her spectacles from somewhere and put them on, which gave her the appearance of a grieving owl.

“I barely remember my mother,” she said at last, her voice quavering only a little but suddenly small in the vastness of the church. “I was not quite three years old when she went away, so that I have only memories of a bright shadow who fluttered on the peripheries of my little world. I don’t remember what she looked like, nor can I recall the sound of
her voice, but what I do remember is how she made me feel—which was that I was loved. Until she went away.

“After she was gone, I stopped feeling loved and began believing that my sisters and I must have done something horrid to drive her away, although I could not for the life of me think what that might have been. We have never been given, you see, any reason for her leaving. Even now—now that she has been returned to us—we still don’t know the reason why she left.

“I hope you won’t mind my speaking so frankly, but the vicar told me that I must say what I felt and be honest about it.”

Could this possibly be true? Could it be that Feely and Daffy hadn’t the faintest inkling of Harriet’s activities? Was it possible that Aunt Felicity, who had been, and presumably remained, the Gamekeeper, intended to withhold the truth from them forever?

I looked over at Father, and he was just standing there—so cleanly shaven, so still, and so upright that I could have wept.

Daffy had paused and was looking from one member of the congregation to another. There was dead silence, and then a nervous shuffling of feet.

“By what we have observed yesterday and today,” she went on, “one can only presume that my mother’s body has been returned to us for burial by a grateful government, and for that, at least, I must express our thanks.”

The church had again in an instant gone so quiet you could hear the breathing of the saints in the stained-glass windows.

“But it is not enough,” Daffy continued, her voice now louder and accusing. “It is not enough for my father—nor is it enough for my sisters, Ophelia and Flavia. And it is not
nearly
enough for me.”

Somewhere behind me Mrs. Mullet let out a sob.

Daffy went on. “I can only hope that one day we shall be entrusted with the truth. We the bereaved deserve nothing less.

“The word ‘bereaved’ comes down to us from the Old English word
beréafian
, meaning ‘to be deprived of’—to be stripped, to be robbed, to be dispossessed—and it describes accurately what has happened to what is left of our family. We have been robbed of a wife and mother, stripped of our pride, and are soon to be dispossessed of our home.

“And therefore, I beg of you your prayers. As you pray today for the repose of the soul of our mother, Harriet de Luce, pray also for those of us who have been left behind, bereaved.

“We shall now join in singing another of my mother’s favorite hymns.”

I wanted to applaud, but I didn’t dare. “Bravo!” I wanted to shout.

A vast and ominous silence hung in the church. The multitude were staring at the roof, at their shoes, at the windows, at the marble memorial tablets on the walls, and at their own fingernails. No one seemed to know where to look.

“Play, Feely!”
I begged her mentally. But Feely let the silence lengthen until several people began coughing to break the tension.

And then the music came. Those six stunning notes sprang from the throats of the organ pipes!

Dah-dah-dah-DAH-dah-dah
.

They were unmistakable.

People looked at one another as they recognized the tune, first in astonishment and disbelief, but then with growing smiles at the sheer audacity of it.

Daffy began to sing in her fine, loud voice: “Ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay, ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay …”

And then someone else—I think it was, incredibly, Cynthia, the vicar’s wife—took up the words. Others joined in, somewhat uncertainly at first but growing in confidence with every beat: “Ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay, ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay …”

And now even more, until practically everyone in the church was singing: “Ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay, ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay …”

The booming bass of Mr. Haskins, the verger, came echoing from somewhere back behind the font.

The vicar was singing, Inspector Hewitt and Antigone were singing, Dame Agatha Dundurn was singing—even
I
was singing: “Ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay, ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay!”

Feely finished off with a flourish of trumpet stops, and then the organ fell silent, as if suddenly embarrassed at what it had done.

As the music faded and died up among the beams and king posts of the ancient roof, Daffy folded her papers and walked placidly back to her seat beside Father in the transept.

Father’s eyes were closed. Tears were trickling down his face. I placed my hand on top of his on the rail but he seemed not to notice.

People were still smiling at their neighbors, shaking their heads, whispering to one another, and everywhere except in the de Luce pew, a lingering glow hung in the air.

I turned round and looked at Dogger, but his face was, as they say in the thrillers on the wireless, inscrutable.

Daffy and Feely cooked this up together
, I thought. Behind closed doors they had plotted it note by note. I wished they’d let me in on their plan. I might have advised against it.

But now the vicar was coming forward.

“Now is Christ risen from the dead,” he said, without batting an eye, “and become the first-fruits of them that slept.”

As if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth; as if something wonderful hadn’t just happened in his church—a miracle, perhaps; as if “Ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay” hadn’t been the last words upon his lips, and upon everyone else’s to boot.

“For since by man came death,” he was now telling us, “by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive,” and on and on from there, wading through all those lovely words about the glories of the sun and the moon and the stars, until at last, as I knew he must, he came to that inevitable passage:

“O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”

Just like that. We had been torn from a jolly good singsong
and plunged back into grief. I was struggling with my feelings, staring at the stained glass as if help could possibly come from there, as if hope could possibly spring from the colorful chemicals of the glass.

The yellow scrolls had most likely been achieved with sulfur and calcium, the black letters enameled with a paint compounded in the Middle Ages from a closely guarded formula containing precisely measured amounts of powdered iron or copper oxide, adhesive, and the glassmaker’s own urine.

I read the words again.

At first glance, it seemed as if the artist had made a stained-glass misprint. Sawson – Defifak, the letters appeared to spell out. The
M
looked like a
W
, the
H
like a
K
. It was only when your eye and brain locked in to the intricate curlicues of the Gothic lettering that you saw that “Sawson – Defifak” was actually “Samson – Delilah.”

It was easy once you got the hang of it.

Like so many other things.

It was in that fraction of an instant—in that finest sliver of time—that the penny dropped.

In my mind, the words “Lens Palace” took form: those urgent words that Harriet had scribbled in her own urine.

Of course! How clear it all was, once you saw!

The
S
was an
A
. The
P
was a
D
, and by all that was holy, the
A
s were
E
s.

Except for the second one, of course, which couldn’t possibly be anything but a
U
!

When I had begun to thaw Harriet’s oilcloth wallet, the letters of her message had immediately begun to diffuse into the old fabric, becoming more spidery and fantastic with every passing moment.

Her message had not been “Lens Palace.” It had, rather, spelled out the name of the woman who was now sitting next to me buffing her fingernails on the hem of her skirt.

Lena de Luce.

It was Lena who had followed Harriet from Singapore to India, and from India to that final confrontation in Tibet. Who else could it have been? For what other reason would Harriet have scribbled Lena’s name in invisible fluid on the outside of the packet containing her last will and testament?

My blood ran cold—then hot.

I was sitting next to a killer!

This creature beside me, preening herself like the cat that ate the canary, had murdered my mother. Her own flesh and blood!

Get a grip on yourself, Flavia. You mustn’t let her know
.

At this particular moment
, I thought,
on the face of this vast globe which is spinning in its gravitationally appointed place among all the other planets, you are the only one of its two and a half billion inhabitants—other than Lena, of course—who knows the truth
.

What was it Aunt Felicity had shouted through the rubber tube during our flight in
Blithe Spirit
?

“We de Luces have been entrusted … for more than three hundred years … with some of the greatest secrets of the realm. Some of us have been on the side of good … while others have not.”

It was as plain as the nose on your face: Lena was one of those who had not.

Why hadn’t I listened to my instincts the first time I laid eyes on the woman? How could I have allowed her to sleep—she and her abominable daughter—under the roofs of Buckshaw? Even now, the very thought of it made my marrow itch.

The question was this: Why had Lena come to Bishop’s Lacey?

The full horror came crashing down upon me like the stones of the house that Samson wrecked.

The man at the station—the man beneath the wheels of the train, the man in the long coat: “The one who was talking to Ibu,” Undine had told me.

He had being trying to warn me—or at least to warn Father.

“The Gamekeeper is in jeopardy. The Nide is under—”

“Attack” was the word he was almost certainly going to say.

But Lena had been there on the station platform!

The man in the long coat had been talking to her. Undine had blurted that out during our playing of Kim’s Game.

I had, in fact, confronted Lena with this fact in my laboratory, but we had been interrupted by the sudden arrival, outside the window, of Tristram Tallis in
Blithe Spirit
.

And then, as if that weren’t enough, there had been that word: “pushed.”

“Someone pushed him,” a woman’s voice had said on the platform.

“Push over,” Lena had ordered, less than an hour ago as she wedged her way into the pew beside me. There had been something familiar about the voice, but I hadn’t had time to think about it.

At the station she had cried out those words herself in order to distract attention.

Of course! How fiendishly clever of her—and how cold-blooded.

In the same calculating way, she had arranged to lure me to the Jack O’Lantern.