“What?”
I couldn’t help it: I was whispering, too.
“The sole of the foot was tinted red, as if it had stepped in—”
“Cassandra Cottlestone!” I almost shouted, the hair at the nape of my neck standing on end as if suddenly blown by a cold, invisible breeze. “She was walking—”
“Exactly,” Daffy said.
“I don’t believe it!”
Daffy shrugged. “Why should I care what you believe? I give you a fact and you give me a headache. Now buzz off.”
I had buzzed off.
While I was lost in recollection, Feely’s sobs had subsided, and she was now staring sullenly out the window.
“Who’s the victim?” I asked, trying to cheer her up.
“Victim?”
“You know, the poor sap you’re going to carry down the aisle.”
“Oh,” she said, tossing her hair and coughing up the answer with surprisingly little urging on my part. “Ned Cropper. I thought you’d have already heard that at the keyhole.”
“Ned? You despise him.”
“Wherever did you get that idea? Ned’s going to own the Thirteen Drakes one day. He’s going to take it over from Tully Stoker and rebuild the whole place: dance bands, darts on the terrace, lawn bowling … blow a breath of fresh air into that coal hole … bring it into the twentieth century. He’s going to be a millionaire. Just you wait and see.”
“You’re warped,” I said.
“Oh, all right, then. If you must know, it’s Carl. He’s begged Father to let me be Mrs. Pendracka and Father has agreed—mostly because he believes Carl to be of the bloodline of King Arthur. Having an heir with those credentials would be a real feather in Father’s cap.”
“Sucks to you,” I said. “You’re pulling my leg.”
“We’re going to live in America,” Feely went on. “In St. Louis, Missouri. Carl’s going to take me to watch Stan Musial knock ’em out of the park for the Cardinals. That’s a baseball team.”
“Actually, I was hoping it was Sergeant Graves,” I said. “I don’t even know his first name.”
“Giles,” Feely said, looking dreamily at her fingernails. “But why ever would I marry a policeman? I couldn’t bear the thought of living with someone who came home every night with murder on his boots.”
Feely seemed to be getting over poor Mr. Collicutt’s death quite nicely. Perhaps there was a drop of de Luce blood in her after all.
“It’s Dieter,” I said. “He’s the one who gave you the friendship ring at Christmas.”
“Dieter? He has nothing to offer but love.”
As she touched the ring, I noticed for the first time that she was wearing it on the third finger of her left hand. At the very mention of his name, she couldn’t keep from smiling.
“It is!” I’m afraid I shrieked. “It is Dieter!”
“We shall make a fresh start,” Feely said, her face more soft than I had ever seen it before. “Dieter is going to train as a schoolmaster. I shall teach piano and the two of us shall be as happy as dormice in cotton.”
I couldn’t help hugging myself. Yaroo! I was thinking.
“Where is Dieter, by the way?” I asked. “I haven’t seen him for a while.”
“He’s gone up to London to sit a special examination. Father arranged it. If you breathe a word I’ll kill you.”
Something in her voice told me that she meant it.
“Your secret’s safe with me,” I told her, and for once I meant it.
“We shall be engaged for a year, until I’m nineteen,” Feely went on, “simply to please Father. After that it’s all cottages and columbines and a place to turn handsprings whenever one feels the urge.”
Feely had never turned a handspring in her life, but I knew what she meant.
“I shall miss you, Feely,” I said slowly, realizing that my heart was in every word.
“How too, too touching,” she said. “You’ll get over it.”
• SIX •
WHENEVER I’M A LITTLE blue I think about cyanide, whose color so perfectly reflects my mood. It is pleasant to think that the manioc plant, which grows in Brazil, contains enormous quantities of the stuff in its thirty-pound roots, all of which, unfortunately, is washed away before the residue is used to make our daily tapioca.
Although it took me an hour to admit it to myself, Feely’s words had stung me to the quick. Rather than brooding about it, though, I took down from the shelf a bottle of potassium cyanide.
Outdoors, the rain had stopped, and a shaft of warm light now shone in through the window, causing the white crystals to sparkle brightly in the sudden sun.
The next ingredient was strychnine, which, coincidentally, came from another South American plant, and from which curare—arrow poison—was derived.
I’ve mentioned before my passion for poisons and my special fondness for cyanide. But, to be perfectly fair, I must admit that I also have something of a soft spot for strychnine, not just for what it is, but for what it’s capable of becoming. Brought into the presence of nascent oxygen, for instance, these rather ordinary white crystals become at first rich blue in color, then pass in succession through purple, violet, crimson, orange, and yellow.
A perfect rainbow of ruin!
I placed the strychnine carefully beside the cyanide.
Next came the arsenic: In its powdered form, it looked rather drab beside its sisters—more like baking powder than anything else.
In its arsenious oxide form, the arsenic was soluble in water, but not in alcohol or ether. The cyanide was soluble in alkaline water and dilute hydrochloric acid, but not in alcohol. The strychnine was soluble in water, ethyl alcohol, or chloroform, but not in ether. It was like the old puzzle about the fox, the goose, and the bag of corn. To extract their various essences, each poison needed to be babied along in its own bath.
With the windows thrown wide open for ventilation, I sat down to wait out the hour it would take for all three solutions to be complete. Solutions in more than one sense of the word!
“Cyanide … strychnine … arsenic.” I spoke their names aloud. These were what I called my “calming chemicals.”
Of course I wasn’t the first to think of compounding several poisons into a single devastating drink. Giulia Tofana, in seventeenth-century Italy, had made a business of selling her Aqua Tofana, a solution containing, among other ingredients, arsenic, lead, belladonna, and hog drippings, to more than six hundred women who wished to have their marriages chemically dissolved. The stuff was said to be as limpid as rock water, and the abbé Gagliani had claimed that there was hardly a lady in Naples who did not have some of it lying in a secret phial among her perfumes.
It was also said that two popes had been among its victims.
How I adore history!
At last my flasks were ready, and I hummed happily as I mixed the solutions and decanted them into a waiting bottle.
I waved my hand over the still steaming mixture.
“I name thee Aqua Flavia,” I said.
With one of Uncle Tar’s steel-nibbed pens, I wrote the newly coined name on a label, then pasted it to the jar.
“A-qua Fla-via,” I said aloud, savoring each syllable. It had a nice ring to it.
I had created a poison which, in sufficient quantities, was enough to stop a rogue elephant dead in its tracks. What it would do to an impertinent sister was almost too gruesome to contemplate.
One aspect of poisons that is often overlooked is the pleasure one takes in gloating over them.
Then, too, as some wise person once said, revenge is a dish best eaten cold. The reason for this, of course, is that while you’re gleefully anticipating the event, the victim has plenty of time to worry about when, where, and how you’re going to strike.
One thinks, for instance, of the look on the victim’s face as she realizes that what she is sipping from the pretty glass is more than just orange squash.
I decided to wait a while.
Gladys was standing patiently where I had left her, her fresh-washed livery gleaming handsomely in the morning sunlight from my bedroom windows.
“Avaunt!” I shouted. It was an ancient word meaning “Begone!” which I had learned when Daffy read The Bride of Lammermoor aloud to us at one of our compulsory Cultural Evenings.
“Both of us!” I explained, although it wasn’t really necessary.
I leaped into her saddle, pushed off, pedaled out the bedroom door, wobbled along the hall, made a sharp left turn, and moments later was at the top of the east staircase.
From astride a bicycle, stairs appear to be much steeper than they actually are. Far below, in the foyer, the black and white tiles were like winter fields viewed from a mountaintop. I got a firm grip on the front braking handles and started down at an alarming angle.
“Bucketa-bucketa-bucketa-bucketa,” I exclaimed, one for each stair, all the way down, my bones rattling pleasantly.
Dogger was standing at the bottom. He was wearing a canvas apron and holding a pair of Father’s boots. “Good morning, Miss Flavia,” he said.
“Good morning, Dogger,” I replied. “I’m happy to see you. I have a question. How does one go about disinterring a dead body?”
Dogger raised one eyebrow a fraction. “Were you thinking of disinterring a dead body, miss?” he asked.
“No, not personally,” I told him. “What I mean is, what permissions must be obtained, and so forth?”
“If I remember correctly, consent must first be given by the church. It is known as a faculty, I believe, and must be obtained from the Diocesan Council.”
“The bishop’s office?”
“More or less.”
So that’s what the vicar had been talking about. A faculty had already been granted, he told Marmaduke Parr, the man from the bishop’s office. The bishop’s secretary, in fact.
“There can be no going back now,” the vicar had said.
It seemed obvious that a faculty had been granted for the exhumation of Saint Tancred, and then for some reason withdrawn.
Who, I wondered, would stand in the way? What harm could there be in digging up the bones of a saint who had been dead these past five hundred years?
“You’re a corker, Dogger,” I said.
“Thank you, miss.”
Out of respect, I dismounted, and wheeled Gladys discreetly across the foyer, and out the front door.
On the lawn, at the edge of the gravel, was a folding camp stool, and beside it, several rags and a tin of boot polish. The day was warmer now, and Dogger had obviously been working outside in the fresh air, enjoying the sunshine.
I was about to push off for the church when I saw a car turn in at the Mulford Gates. It was the odd shape of the thing which had caught my attention: rather boxy, like a hearse.
If I left now, I might miss something. Better, I thought, to stifle my impatience and wait.
I sat down on the camp stool and studied the machine as it came flouncing along the avenue of chestnuts. Viewed head-on, it was certain from the tall Corinthian radiator of gleaming silver that it was a Rolls-Royce landau—in some ways, very like Harriet’s old Phantom II which Father kept stored away as a sort of shrine in the dimness of the coach house: the same broad skirts and the same gigantic headlamps. And yet there was something different.
As the car turned side-on, I saw that its paint was apple green, and that the roof had been peeled away from just behind the driving seat, like a tin of opened sardines. Where the backseats had once been were rows of gray, unpainted wooden boxes, each crammed cheek by jowl with flowerpots, all of them open to the weather, rather like a gallery of cheap seats atop a charabanc from which the seedlings and the growing plants could view the passing world.
Since Father had lectured us so often about the evils of staring, I instinctively pulled my notebook and pencil from the pocket of my cardigan and pretended to be writing.
I heard the tires crunch to a heavy stop. The door opened, and closed.
I snuck a quick peek from the corner of my eye and registered a tall man in a tan mackintosh.
“Hullo,” he said. “What have we here?”
As if I were a waxwork figure in Madame Tussauds.
I went on scribbling nothings in my notebook, resisting the urge to stick my tongue out the corner of my mouth.
“What are you doing?” he asked, coming dangerously close, as if to look at the page. If there’s one thing I despise, it’s a person who snoops over your shoulder.
“Writing down number plates,” I said, snapping my notebook shut.
“Hmmm,” he said, gazing slowly round at the empty landscape. “I shouldn’t imagine you add many to your collection in such an out-of-the-way place.”
In what I hoped was a properly chilling manner I said, “Well, I’ve got yours, haven’t I?”
It was true. GBX1066.
He saw me staring at the Rolls.
“What do you think of the old bus?” he asked. “Phantom II, 1928. The former owner, requiring something to transport a racehorse in comfort, took a hacksaw to her.”
“He must have been mad,” I said. I couldn’t help myself.
“She, actually,” he said. “Yes, she was. Quite mad. Lady Densley.”
“Of Densley’s Biscuits?”
“The very one.”
As I was thinking about how to respond, he produced a silver case from his pocket, flipped it open, and handed me a card.
“My name’s Sowerby,” he said. “Adam Sowerby.”
I glanced at the bit of pasteboard. At least it was tastefully printed in small black type.
Adam Tradescant Sowerby, MA., FRHortS, etc.
Flora-archaeologist
Seeds of Antiquity—Cuttings—Inquiries
Tower Bridge, London E.1 TN Royal 1066
Hmmm, I thought. The same four digits as his number plates. This man has connections.
“You must be Flavia de Luce,” he said, extending a hand. I was about to give back his card when I realized that he intended us to shake.
“The vicar told me I’d likely find you here,” he went on. “I hope you don’t mind my barging in like this, unannounced.”
Of course! This was the vicar’s friend, Mr. Sowerby. Mr. Haskins had asked about him in the crypt.
“Are you related to Sowerby & Sons, our village undertakers?”
“The present incumbent is, I believe, a third cousin. Some of us Sowerbys have chosen Life, and others Death.”
I took his hand and gave it an intelligent shake, looking directly into his cornflower-blue eyes.
“Yes, I’m Flavia de Luce,” I said. “I don’t mind you barging in at all. How may I help you?”
“Denwyn is an old friend,” he said, not letting go of my hand. “He told me that you could very likely answer my questions.”
Denwyn was the vicar’s name, and I mentally blessed him for being so frank.
“I shall do my best,” I replied.
“When you first looked into that chamber behind the stone, what did you see?”
“A hand,” I said. “Rather dried. Clutching a broken bit of glass tubing.”
“Rings?”
“No.”
“Fingernails?”
“Clean. Well manicured. Although his hands and clothing were filthy.”
“Very good. And then you saw?”
“The face. At least, a gas mask covering the face. Golden-blond hair. Dark lines on the throat.”
“Anything else?”
“No. The torch was throwing quite a narrow beam.”
“Excellent! I see that your reputation—which precedes you—is well deserved.”
My reputation? The vicar must have told him about those several earlier cases in which I had been able to point the police in the right direction.
I preened a little, inwardly.
“No dried petals … vegetation … anything of that sort?”
“Not that I noticed.”
Mr
. Sowerby gathered himself, as if he were about to ask a tender question. In a hushed voice, he said, “It must have been quite a shock to you. The poor man’s body, I mean.”
“Yes,” I said, and left it at that.
“The police have made quite a hash of the scene—removing the remains and so forth. Anything that may have been of interest to me is now no more than—”
“Dust on the sergeant’s boots,” I suggested brightly.
“Precisely. Now I shall have to go over the ground with a magnifying glass, like Sherlock Holmes.”
“What are you hoping to find?”
“Seeds,” he said. “Remnants of Saint Tancred’s interment. The mourners often tossed fresh flowers into the tomb, you know.”
“But there was nothing in the tomb,” I said. “It was empty. Except for Mr. Collicutt, of course.”
Adam Sowerby gave me a quizzical look. “Empty? Oh, I see what you mean. No, it’s hardly likely to be empty. The crevice where you found Mr. Collicutt is actually a chamber above the tomb proper. Its lid, if you like. Saint Tancred will still be nicely nestled somewhere down below.”
So that was why there had been no bones! My question was answered.
“Then it’s quite likely that you’ll still find seeds and so forth?”
“I should be surprised if we didn’t. It’s just that, in any investigation, one likes to start at the outside and nibble one’s way in.”
I couldn’t have put it better myself.
“And these seeds,” I said. “What shall you do with them?”
“I shall coddle them. I shall put them in a warm place and provide them with the nourishment they need.”
I could tell by the passion in his voice that seeds were to him as poisons were to me.
“And then?” I asked.
“They might well germinate,” he said. “If we’re extraordinarily lucky, one of them will be brought to blossom.”
“Even after five hundred years?”
“A seed is a remarkable vessel,” he told me. “Our one true time machine. Each of them is capable of bringing the past, alive, into the present. Think of that!”
“And then?” I asked. “After they’ve blossomed?”
“I sell them. You’d be surprised what some people will pay to be the sole possessor of an extinct flower.