Speaking From Among The Bones (13 page)

“Yes, that’s right,” Marmaduke Parr said with a sniff. “The Ridley-Smiths of Bogmore Hall.”

And before you could say “antitransubstantiationalist,” Gladys and I were speeding along the narrow tarmac on our way to Nether-Wolsey.

By hook or by crook, by fair means or foul, I would make Chancellor Ridley-Smith eat his words. Strictly forbidden, indeed!

To the south and west of Buckshaw was a crossroads, its left arm being, by way of Nether Lacey, more or less a backroad to Doddingsley. To the right was St. Elfrieda’s, and beyond it, a little farther to the south, lay Nether-Wolsey.

I saw at once, as I approached, that it was not the prettiest village in England. Not by a long chalk. Even the trees looked tired.

The most notable landmark was an ancient butcher’s shop huddled among terraced houses, its gray, unpainted boards sagging like a wooden drape, giving the place the pallor of the undead. In the flyblown window hung an odd arrangement of sausages, tied into strings and loops, and it took me more than a few moments to realize that they spelled out rather distastefully the word
MEATS
.

A bell tinkled as I opened the door, and then, except for the buzzing of a solitary fly in the window, the shop fell back into silence.

“Hello?” I called.

The fly buzzed on.

A glass case stretched halfway across the back of the narrow room, and in it were stretched out various slabs of raw meat in a grisly display of red, white, and blue that made my stomach wince.

Behind the counter, mounted in an ornate wrought-iron stand, was a roll of pinkish butcher paper. A length of heavy string dangled handily down from a small wire cage fastened to the ceiling.

At the rear of the shop, in a corner, stood a bloodied
butcher block, and behind it was an open door which obviously led to the area behind the shop.

“Hello?” I called again.

There was no answer.

I edged round the glass case and stuck my head out the door.

The garden was littered with empty wooden crates. A reddened tree stump was obviously being used as a chopping block whose victims came from the chicken coops beyond.

As I stood there not quite knowing what to do next, a tiny woman in a skirt, blouse, and bandanna emerged from the largest chicken coop, gripping a large brown hen by its feet.

The bird hung struggling upside down, its stubby wings flapping helplessly.

As she placed its neck on the block and reached for the hatchet, she spotted me in the shop’s open doorway.

“Go back inside,” she said. “I shall be there directly.”

Her bare spindly arm raised the polished blade.

“No! Wait!” I heard myself saying. “Please …”

The woman looked up, the ax poised.

“Please,” I said. “I want to buy that bird … but I want it alive.”

What on earth had come over me? Although I didn’t mind dead humans—in fact, in some ways I delighted in them—I knew in that instant I could not bear the thought of harm coming to any other creature.

It hadn’t been all that long since I had been attacked in Bishop’s Lacey by a maddened rooster, and yet, in spite of that bloody free-for-all, my protective wings seemed at
this very moment to be sheltering every chicken in the universe. It was a most peculiar feeling.

“Alive …” I managed, my head spinning like a toy top.

The woman put down the hatchet and flung the bird away from her. It flew—actually flew!—across the yard, made a half-decent landing, and began pecking at the hardened earth as if nothing had happened.

I knew that if Daffy were here, she would have said
“Curfew shall not ring tonight.”
This particular hen, at least for now, would live to cluck another day.

I had saved my first life.

Is there life after death for chickens?
I wondered. Given the prospect of the ax, the plucking, the seething pot, the heat of the oven, and the gnawings of our hungry teeth at the Sunday table, it seemed somehow unlikely.

And yet … and yet, in spite of all that, perhaps there really was the reward of a heavenly roost somewhere above the bright blue sky.

“I came away without my money,” I said. “I’ll bring it to you as soon as I can.”

“Not from around here, are you?” the woman asked, walking toward me.

“No, but not far,” I said, waving a vague hand toward the north.

“Haven’t I seen you before?” she asked, close enough now to peer into my face.

It was at that moment that I was struck with a brilliant thought:
Tell the truth
. Yes, that was it—tell the truth. What did I have to lose?

“Perhaps you have,” I told her. “My name is Flavia de Luce.”

“Of course,” she said. “I should have known. The blue eyes, the—”

She stopped as if she had run into a stone wall.

“Yes?”

“We used to take poultry to Buckshaw,” she said slowly, “to Mrs. Mullet. I suppose she’s long gone?”

“No,” I said. “She’s still with us.

“Fortunately,” I was quick enough to add.

“But that was years ago,” the woman said. “Years ago. Before— But tell me, what brings you to Nether-Wolsey?”

“I’m looking for a woman named Hetty. I don’t know her last name, but she’s—”

“Patsy Pickery’s sister.”

Patsy? Was “Patsy” Miss Pickery’s name?

I put my hand in front of my mouth to suppress a smile.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s the one. Patsy Pickery’s sister.”

I enjoyed pronouncing the name, the way it rolled off my tongue in a limping rhyme: “Pat-sy Pick-ery’s sister.”

“Gone,” she said. “She’s took the kids and gone. Lived right across the road next the petrol station till Rory belted her once too often and she took the kids and— What do you want with her, anyway?”

“I wanted to ask her a question.”

“Maybe I can answer it.”

“It’s about Bogmore Hall,” I said, and I could see the woman’s face closing even before the words were out of my mouth.

“Keep clear of Bogmore Hall,” she warned. “It’s not the kind of place for someone like you.”

Someone like me? Whatever could she mean by that?

“There’s something I need to discuss with Mr. Ridley-Smith, the magistrate.”

“Got yourself into some kind of trouble, have you?” she asked, closing one eye like Popeye.

“No, not really.”

“Well, all the same—don’t go hanging round. Things aren’t right up there, if you take my meaning.” Her finger came, almost automatically, it seemed, to her head.

“The Ridley-Smiths, you mean? The crocodile? The man who was made of glass?”

The woman snorted. “Made of glass my fanny!” she said. “You listen to me. There are things that are worse than glass and crocodiles. You keep away from that place.”

She waved her hand toward what I guessed was the southwest.

“All right,” I said. “Thank you. I will.”

As I turned and went back into the shop, she was not far behind me.

“I’ll be back for the chicken as soon as I can,” I told her over my shoulder.

I was already in the street with a foot on one of Gladys’s pedals when the woman came scurrying out of the shop, a wooden crate in her hands. Through its slats, the brown hen was craning her neck in all directions, her yellow eyes glaring fiercely out at this vast new and unsuspected world.

“Her name’s Esmeralda,” she said, hurriedly strapping the crate to Gladys’s rear carrier.

“The money—” I began.

But before I could finish, the woman had scurried back into the shop and slammed the door.

To the south of Nether-Wolsey, the road ran gently downhill. To the west, another rose steeply to a prominent ridge which brooded like a single dark eyebrow over the village. It might well have been an old hill fort.

This was the direction the woman had indicated as she warned me about Bogmore Hall. It couldn’t be far away.

I turned to the west.

After a while the rising road became steeper and steeper, and was now little more than a stony path. Even in first gear Gladys was wobbling dangerously. I climbed off and shoved her slowly ahead of me up the steep slope.

As I came up out of a deep cutting onto a flat plateau, there was no doubt that the dark Gothic pile ahead of me was Bogmore Hall. A crazy conglomeration of spiky gables gave it the look of a bundle of ancient lances shoved carelessly, points uppermost, into an oversized umbrella stand.

Cut off from the rest of the world, the house stood in the middle of a sea of wild grass from which protruded mossy chunks of broken stone which might once have been the cherubs and nymphs of urns and fountains. A chubby white arm stuck up out of the earth like a dead baby trying to escape its grave.

Windows without curtains stared at me blankly, and the idea crept into my head that I was being watched by more than glass. A worn block of stone served as a doorstep,
as if renovations had been begun in another century and then abandoned.

It seemed rather a rum place for a magistrate to live.

I leaned Gladys against a ruined railing and tugged at the rusty bellpull. Although I could not hear it, I knew that somewhere in the depths of the house a bell would be jangling.

Nobody, of course, answered.

I rang again: once … twice … three times.

Even by putting my ear to the door I could hear nothing inside. And yet there remained that uneasy sense of being watched.

Turning my back to the house, I strolled casually out onto what once might have been the front lawn, but which was now a tangle of clods embedded with last year’s weeds. I put a flattened hand above my eyes and pretended to be gazing out at the view, which, from this elevation, really was quite spectacular.

Then suddenly I whipped round.

A white face shrank back from an upstairs window.

I hauled at the bellpull again, this time ringing ever more insistently. But as before, the house remained in silence.

I tried the door but it was locked.

So that I could not be seen from inside, I flattened myself against the wall and made my way slowly, one step at a time, all the way round the house to the kitchen door, where, as Mrs. Mullet had once assured me, “There’s always a key under the mat.”

She was wrong. The key was not under the mat, but it
was
hidden under a broken flowerpot not two feet away from the doorsill.

I was never more happy that Dogger had taught me so much about the art of locks.

This was no ordinary household skeleton key, but one of the patent Yale variety. Whoever had this lock installed had meant to keep people out.

Odd, though, that they should leave the key so handily under a broken flowerpot.

I slid the key’s jagged teeth quietly into the lock, turned it, and slipped into the house.

The kitchen was a dim box, lighted coldly by a single window high on the wall. The gray slate floor made the room seem like a prison cell. The unlit stove offered no warmth or comfort.

I shivered at the general clamminess of the place and pulled my cardigan tight round my shoulders.

A broad door, designed, I supposed, for the wheeling-in of ancient feasts—boars’ heads and so forth—led into a short corridor and then, on the left, to a breakfast room in which two places were partially set with knives, forks, spoons, and eggcups. Someone was ready for tomorrow, I thought.

I moved silently through into the dim foyer: cracked tiles, dark portraits of sour old men in judge’s wigs, and the faint smell of kippers. A tall clock ticked unnervingly, as if counting the seconds to an execution. Perhaps my own.

What would I do if I were caught? Pretend that I had seen smoke at an upper window? But if that were the case,
why hadn’t I called out to alert the house’s occupants? Or, for that matter, shouted to them from outside?

How had I managed to find the key?

Perhaps I needed to use the telephone. Perhaps, while cycling, my blood pressure had fallen suddenly, leaving me dizzy and confused. Perhaps I was in urgent need of a doctor.

A bell went off!—and then another, echoing horribly in the empty foyer. Now my heart really
was
pounding. Had I set off a hidden alarm? A family of judges was likely to be well up on the subject of burglars.

But no, it was only the stupid clock, bonging away in the corner to keep itself company in the oddly empty house.

I looked into one or two of the rooms and found them much the same: high ceilings, bare floors, a stick or two of furniture, and the tall uncurtained windows I had noticed from outside.

It was evident from the very feel of the downstairs rooms that no one was about, and within a few minutes I was walking round as freely as if I owned the place.

Billiards room, ballroom, drawing room, library—all of them as cold as ashes. A small dark study was stacked to the ceiling with legal papers and folders, the lower, heavier ones of vellum and the lighter upper layers of yellowed paper.

Strata of people’s lives
, I thought,
heaped up in piles awaiting judgment. Or already judged. How many of these million documents
, I wondered,
have the name de Luce inked upon their dusty pages?

I sneezed and a floorboard creaked.