Speaking From Among The Bones (24 page)

“She was nervy,” Alf said. “Kept to ’erself, like. Spent all ’er time with ’er soldiers.”

He was watching me to see my reaction.

“Soldiers?”

“Tin soldiers. Thousands of ’em.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Tin soldiers? A grown woman playing with tin soldiers?

“She bought them for Jocelyn?” I asked.

“No, she died when ’e was born, remember.”

“Perhaps she was keeping them for when he was older.”

Alf smiled. “No. She had ’em since she was a girl. ’Anded down from ’er military ancestors. Each one ’ad added to the collection. It was ’er ’obby, like.”

“Soldiers,” I said. I could scarcely believe it.

“Soldiers,” Alf said, bending and picking up, piece by piece, the scattered pieces of cutlery from the floor. These
he replaced in neat rows on the table, naming each as he set it gently into position.

“First Division ’ere,” he said. “First Madras European Regiment. Second Division here—First Madras and Bombay European Regiments.

“Third Division, ’Is Majesty’s Thirty-ninth Regiment of Foot, one of ’em—and God only knows which one—bein’ ’er great-great-great, or whatever ’e was, grandfather.

“Fourth Division, the Bombay European Regiment, and ’ere, two thousand sepoys, the native foot soldiers, the First Bengal Regiment, Royal Artillery.

“That’s us, then,” he finished. “All present and accounted for.”

“But what about the Nawab?” I asked. “What about his fifty thousand fighters?”

“Oh, they were there, right enough,” Alf said quietly. “Old Beatty said she ’ad a little toy figure for every one of ’em. Every last blinkin’ one.”

He let this sink in.

“You mean—?” I asked.

“That’s right, miss,” he said. “ ’Ad a room built special. Kept it locked up tight as the Treasury, she did. Nobody allowed in but ’erself. Old Beatty only knew about it ’cause ’e was called in one time to carry ’er out when she’d fainted. That didn’t stop ’im ’avin’ a good look round, though.”

I edged forward on my chair, begging with my eyes for more.

“The whole battlefield at Plassey, she ’ad, laid out like a model. Exact scale replica of the real thing. ’Uge, it was.
Rocks, ’ills, pipe-cleaner trees. The Bhagirathi River was a mirror, tinted blue. Wonderful clever with their ’ands, the Indians. Filled the whole room, wall to wall to wall to wall. Marvelous to see, Old Beatty said.”

“And Mrs. Ridley-Smith—?”

“Locked ’erself away in there from mornin’ to night, movin’ the figures around, fightin’ the Battle of Plassey over and over and over again.”

“But her husband,” I said. “The magistrate, the chancellor—did he think she was—”

“Right in the ’ead? Nobody knows. ’E never mentions ’er name.”

A chill went through me. I would not think why until later.

“ ‘Depressed,’ they calls it nowadays. Back then it was more likely ‘the vapors’ or some suchlike.”

“What about her family? Were they like that, too?”

“Solid as rocks, the lot of ’em. Soldiers, lawyers, nabobs in the East India Company back to the year dot. They left ’er pretty well alone with ’er toys, at least accordin’ to old Beatty.”

“Thank you, Mr. Mullet,” I said, scraping back my chair and giving his hand a shake. “I’d better be getting along. I don’t want anyone to be worrying about me.”

The truth was, I needed to talk to Dogger immediately.

It was a matter of life and death.

As I pedaled past St. Tancred’s, my eye was caught by a crowd milling outside the front door of the church.

I skidded to a stop.

The vicar was standing in the porch, his hands raised.

“Gentlemen … gentlemen,” he was saying.

I parked Gladys against the wall and crept slowly forward through the crowd, trying not to be noticed. Most of the people were from Bishop’s Lacey, but a few of them were not.

One of the strangers was a tall, thin man in a gray trench coat and red bow tie with a notebook in his hand. At his side was another, shorter man, similarly dressed, holding a press camera up to his eyes.

“But they’re saying it’s a miracle, Vicar. Surely you can spare us a few words?”

The vicar tried without success to smooth down his disarranged hair, which was blowing in the wind. As he did so, a flashbulb went off.

“What did you think when you saw the blood?” another man called out. “We were told someone threw away their crutches. Is it true?”

A murmur went through the crowd.

“Gentlemen, please. All in good time.”

“What about the corpse in the crypt, Vicar?”

I could already see the sensational headlines in tomorrow’s
Hinley Chronicle
and
The Morning Post-Horn
and so, I knew, could the vicar.

THE CORPSE IN THE CRYPT! SAINT WEEPS BLOOD!

With that kind of publicity, the bishop would soon have him paddling to a new post somewhere up the Amazon. The press was ruthless, but then so was the Church.

“Gentlemen, please … we must remember that today is Good Friday. Nothing must be allowed to profane—”

“Let me through,” I shouted. “It’s an emergency. Please let me through.”

I pushed my way into the crowd and stepped up beside the vicar. Taking his elbow in my hand, I said in a stage whisper just loud enough to be overheard by the newspaper reporters, “I’m afraid she’s taken a turn for the worse, Vicar. The doctor says she may not last. They need you to come at once.”

I hopped from foot to foot, squinting horribly, trying to force a tear to my eye.

The vicar looked at me as if he had just awakened suddenly on another planet.

“Please,” I whimpered, then added in a loud and rising wail, “before it’s
TOO LATE!
”

I pulled at his arm, swung him round, dragged him into the porch, slammed the heavy door shut, and shot the iron bolt.

“Phew!” I said. “What a siege. Just like in
Ivanhoe
. We can sneak out through the vestry.”

The vicar looked at me for a moment with empty eyes. He was even more shaken than I had thought. This whole business was taking its toll, to say nothing of his troubles with Cynthia.

I walked him to one of the back pews and sat down beside him.

“Everything’s going to be all right,” I told him. “I’ve almost got it figured out.”

His face, shaded with mauve from the colored windows above, turned reluctantly toward me.

“Oh, Flavia,” he said. “If only that were true.”

I
T WAS NOT UNTIL
I was halfway home that the indignation struck me.

“If only that were true,”
indeed! It was obvious from his words that in spite of his calling, the vicar was a man of little faith.

I had taken him by the hand and led him out through the vestry, tiptoed with him through the churchyard, and delivered him safely to the vicarage door. I had lurked behind a large tombstone and watched as the grumbling crowd slowly broke up and drifted away.

Not one of them had even thought of looking round behind the church. Not one had thought to follow us on our sad procession to the imaginary deathbed. They had all been so touched by my pretended mission of mercy, that nobody—not even the most hardened of the newspapermen—had tried the church door.

And yet the vicar had no faith in me.

I hate to admit how much that stung.

The best thing for soothing a disappointed mind is oxygen. A couple of deep inhalations of the old “O” rejuvenates every cell in the body. I suppose I could have gone upstairs to my laboratory for a bit of the bottled stuff, but to me, that would have been cheating. There is nothing like oxygen in its natural form—oxygen which has been naturally produced in a forest or a greenhouse, where many plants, by the process of photosynthesis, are absorbing the poisonous carbon dioxide which we breathe out, and giving us oxygen in exchange.

I had once remarked to Feely that, because of the oxygen, breathing fresh air was like breathing God, but she had slapped my face and told me I was being blasphemous.

The greenhouse at Buckshaw, I had found, always cheered me up instantly, although how much of that was due to Dogger’s presence and how much to oxygen I couldn’t say. Probably half and half. This much was certain: A greenhouse is a placid place. You never hear about ax murders taking place in a greenhouse.

My theory is that it is because of the “O.”

I found Dogger among the flowerpots, lashing gardening tools into bundles with heavy twine.

“Dogger,” I said casually, stifling a yawn as I bent over to inspect a potted polyanthus, “what would you say if I asked you the cause of wasted thumb muscles and drooping hands?”

“I should say you’d been at Bogmore Hall, Miss Flavia.”

I suppose I should have been dumbfounded, but somehow I wasn’t.

“You’ve seen the photograph of Mrs. Ridley-Smith?”

“No,” Dogger replied, “but I
have
overheard the idle chatter of servants.”

“And?”

“Most unfortunate. By what I have been able to piece together, a classic case of lead poisoning. The flexor muscles and, to a lesser degree, the extensors are affected. But you will have spotted that already, won’t you, miss?”

“Yes,” I said. “But I needed you to verify it.”

There was a silence as each of us considered how to handle what was inevitably coming next.

“You’ve known about it all along.” I ventured not to make my words sound like an accusation.

“Yes,” he said, and there was a sadness in his words, “I’ve known about it all along.”

There was another silence and I realized suddenly that it was because both of us were avoiding any mention of Harriet.

“She used to visit him, didn’t she?” I asked. “Jocelyn, I mean.”

“Yes,” Dogger said, simply.

“And you went with her!”

“No, miss. You must remember, I wasn’t yet at Buckshaw in those days.”

Of course! How stupid of me. What was I thinking of? Dogger hadn’t come to Buckshaw until after the war. He must have heard about the Ridley-Smiths, as I did, from someone else.

“But he’s a prisoner! How could they keep him locked up like that?”

“Is he locked up—” Dogger began.

“Of course he is,” I said, perhaps too loudly. “Behind a set of double doors!”

“—or is he being protected?”

Now I found myself speaking too quietly. “I hadn’t thought of that,” I admitted.

“No,” Dogger said. “People often don’t. One reads these stories in the daily press and jumps to conclusions. Facts are often in direct opposition to assumptions.”

“To the headlines,” I said, thinking for an instant of the vicar.

“Yes,” Dogger said. “As you know from your own studies, lead poisoning is not a pretty thing.”

It was true. I had read about what happened to women who had used it in hair dyes, or had slathered quack cosmetics containing carbonate of lead onto their faces: stuff with names like
Cosmetique Infallible
, and
Ali Ahmed’s Treasures of the Desert
.

I let my mind fly back to those fat books in Uncle Tar’s library in which I had first come across the details: Christison’s
A Treatise on Poisons
, Taylor’s
Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence
, and Blyth’s
Poisons: Their Effects and Detection
, which, since I had discovered them, had become my Old and New Testaments and my Apocrypha.

I thought of the gruesome but fascinating horrors that lay within their pages: the wrist drop, or lead palsy; the paleness, the bloodlessness, the headaches, the foul taste in the mouth, the cramping legs, the difficulty in breathing,
the vomiting, the diarrhea, the convulsions, the unconsciousness. I knew that if by some magic we had been able to peel back the lips of Ada Ridley-Smith in that old black-and-white photograph, we should have spotted at least a trace of the blue line where her gums met her teeth, the classic sign of plumbism, better known as lead poisoning.

No wonder the woman was depressed!

“Lead toy soldiers painted with lead paint,” Dogger said. “Intended to be looked at, not played with—not, at least, in such great numbers.”

“But Jocelyn—” I said.

“Unfortunately, the damage is already done.” Dogger shook his head. “He was born poisoned.”

It seemed too shocking a thought to be put into mere words.

“The brain of an unborn baby is a most susceptible target,” Dogger said. “Women suffering from lead poisoning, more often than not, lose the child.

“But not always,” he added. “Not always.”

“Tell me about the ‘not always,’ ” I said quietly.

“Children born of a lead-poisoned mother seldom survive more than two or three years. The odds are less than three in a hundred.”

“But what’s to be done?” I asked. “Surely we can’t allow him to be cooped up like that. It isn’t right.”

Dogger put aside the rakes and hoes. “Sometimes,” he said, “a jackstraw family life is the best that can be hoped for.”

He paused, and then went on as quietly as if he were
dusting furniture. “It may not be ideal, but still, it might be the best possible under the circumstances. The slightest interference might bring the whole thing tumbling down entirely like a house of cards.”

Suddenly I didn’t want to talk about this anymore. It was odd. Perhaps I was overtired. Father had more than once lectured us about overexertion, but perhaps he was right. I
had
had rather a hectic day.

“I have taken the liberty of preparing a nest for Esmeralda,” Dogger said, neatly changing the subject, “and laying on a supply of the approved feed.”

He pointed to a wooden box in the corner, where Esmeralda was nestling in a luxurious bed of straw. I hadn’t even noticed her.

“Dogger,” I said, “you’re a darling!”

I don’t know what came over me. It just slipped out. I was mortified. It was the sort of thing Feely’s friend Sheila Foster might have said.

“I’m sorry,” I told him, “I didn’t mean—”

And then I fled, leaving Dogger placidly at work amidst his atmosphere of oxygen.

What was happening to my world? Everything was topsyturvy. Buckshaw was to be sold. Father had told me I was Harriet and so more or less had Jocelyn Ridley-Smith. Daffy had hugged me. The vicar had doubted me. I had learned that I was likely a collateral descendant of a saint. I had already begun to love the hated Cynthia. I had allowed myself to burst into tears in front of Mrs. Mullet.
And now I had spoken down to Dogger as if I were a cinema star and he a mere hireling. The universe was changing in ways that I did not necessarily approve of.