Speaking From Among The Bones (21 page)

This shameless toadying was like playing the game even after the last seats in the pavilion had emptied. But my seeming generosity of spirit would leave the door open for later questioning, should it be necesssary.

“Think about what I said,” Miss Tanty called out when I was already at the door. “The three of us with our heads together would be a force to be reckoned with.”

I gave her a noncommittal smile and started down the stairs, past the musical portrait gallery. I paused for a moment to have a second squint at the vinegarish gentleman presenting Miss Tanty with the music trophy. I had seen his face somewhere before, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember where.

Just for fun I jumped down the last three steps and landed on my feet with a bang in the foyer.

“Geronimo!” I shouted. It was a battle cry made famous by the American paratroopers, or so Carl Pendracka had told me.

To my right, in the drawing room, a man standing at Miss Tanty’s desk straightened with a jerk and spun round in surprise. He had been rifling through her papers.

It was Adam Sowerby.

He stared for no more than a split second before a broad grin began spreading across his face.

“By Jove!” he said. “Caught in the act. You gave me a jolly good start.”

“You’re a private detective,” I said.

“Well,” he replied, “I shall have to admit that there are certain aspects of my career which do not involve gillyflowers.”

“You’re a private detective,” I repeated. I was not going to be circumlocuted, or whatever the word was. I would have to ask Daffy.

“Yes. Since you put it that way, yes.”

“I thought as much,” I said. “It’s printed on your card: inquiries.”

“Very astute of you.”

“Please don’t condescend to me, Mr. Sowerby, I’m not a child. Well, actually—strictly speaking, and in the eyes of the law—I suppose I
am
a child, but still, I resent being treated like one.”

“I shall throw myself prostrate before you and weep hot tears into the carpet,” he said with a grin, waving his arms like a madman.

I marched toward the door.

“Flavia—wait.”

I stopped.

“Sorry. It’s hard to quit being an ass in an instant. Rather like running a motorcar off the road and into a hayfield: It takes a few yards to come to a halt.”

“Perhaps we should step outside,” I said, “before Miss Tanty comes downstairs and finds you burglarizing her belongings.”

“Good lord!” he said. “You mean to say she’s at home?”

“Upstairs,” I said, pointing with my chin.

“Then it’s
exeunt omnes
for us,” he whispered, putting a long forefinger to his lips and taking high, exaggerated steps toward the door like a black-masked housebreaker in the pantomime.

“You really are silly,” I told him. “I wish you’d stop.”

W
E WERE STANDING ON
the riverbank at the end of Cater Street, well away from Miss Tanty’s ears. We had walked there in total silence.

Now, the only sound was that of the running river, and the muted muttering of a few ducks that paddled round in circles on the current.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “Old habits die hard.”

“Is that part of your cover?” I asked. “Being an ass?”

I had heard the term “cover” used in one of the Philip Odell mysteries on the BBC wireless. “The Case of the Curious Queen,” if I remembered correctly. It meant pretending to be someone else. Someone that one wasn’t.

I had only occasionally had the opportunity to try the technique myself, since nearly everybody in Bishop’s Lacey was as well acquainted with Flavia de Luce as they were their own mothers. It was only when I was a safe
distance from home that I was able to take on another character.

“I suppose it is,” Adam said, giving his nose a twist with his fingers. “There. I have switched it off. I am quite myself again.”

His grin was gone and I took him at his word.

“Miss Tanty thinks we should join forces,” I told him. “Form some sort of detection club.”

“Share information?” Adam asked.

“Well, yes, I suppose that’s what she was getting at.”

“I wasn’t aware of her detective aspirations,” he said. “Perhaps I should have been. Which means, of course, that that ghastly performance in the church yesterday was all a sham. As was her well-advertised breakdown this morning. Very clever of you to have spotted it.”

“I didn’t spot it,” I said. “She confessed before I was halfway in the door.”

“But why? It makes no sense. Why go to all that trouble and then blow the gaff with no provocation whatsoever?”

Now he was talking to me as if I were a grown-up and I have to say I loved it.

“There can be only one reason,” I told him, returning the favor. “She needs to make an ally of me.”

Adam’s eyes went hooded for a moment, and then he said, “I think you may be right. Are you prepared to play along?”

Up until that moment, my usual response would have been to nod, but I did not.

“Yes,” I told him.

“Good,” he said. “And so shall I.”

He stuck out a hand and I shook it to avoid making a scene.

“Now that we’re partners, so to speak, there’s something you ought to know, but before letting you in on it, I must have your most solemn pledge that you won’t breathe a word.”

“I so pledge,” I said. I had heard the expression somewhere and thought that it suited the occasion admirably. We were
not
partners, but I wasn’t about to tell
him
that.

“I also want you to promise me that you will not go prowling about the church—at least not alone. If you feel that you need to go there for any reason, let me know and I shall come with you.”

“But why?”

I was hardly going to saddle myself with someone old enough to be my father.

“Have you ever heard of the Heart of Lucifer?”

“Of course I have,” I said. “We were taught it in Sunday School. It’s a legend.”

“How much of it do you remember?”

“Following the Crucifixion of Our Lord,” I began, parroting almost word for word Miss Lavinia Puddock’s account to our childish ears, “it is said that Joseph of Arimathea brought to Britain the Holy Grail, the vessel which had contained the Blood of Christ. When Joseph laid down his staff at Glastonbury Abbey, it took root and there sprang forth a bush whose like had never before been seen. This was the famous Glastonbury Thorn, and from its branches was carved the crosier, or shepherd’s
staff, of our own dear Saint Tancred, into which was set a precious stone called ‘the Heart of Lucifer,’ which was said to have fallen from the sky and thought by some to be the Holy Grail itself.

“It all seems rather a muddle,” I added.

“Well done,” Adam said. “You can see the crook of his crosier beside his face in the carving.”

“The one that’s leaking blood,” I said enthusiastically.

“Have you confirmed that in your laboratory?” Adam asked.

“I was about to, but I was interrupted. I saw you taste the stuff in the church. What did you think?”

“I shall wait upon your chemical analysis. Then we shall see if your test tubes agree with my taste buds.”

“What were you going to tell me?” I asked. “The thing that you said I ought to know?”

Adam’s face was suddenly serious. “In the latter years of the war, a person named Jeremy Pole, whom I had known slightly at university, was doing research at the Public Record Office when he made rather a startling discovery. While sifting through bales of quite boring charters from the Middle Ages he came upon a small book which had once been in the library, or scriptorium, of Glastonbury Abbey, which had been sacked—there’s no other way of putting it—by Henry the Eighth in 1539, in spite of the fact that the Benedictine monks were said to be at ease among royalty. I suppose that proves, if nothing else, that royalty was not at ease among the Benedictines. Westminster Abbey, as you will remember, began life as a Benedictine monastery.

“Their libraries were known to have been a treasure trove of rare and unique documents; that of Glastonbury, specifically, contained a number of early and original histories of England.”

As a matter of fact, I didn’t remember. It was a bit of history that I had never known, but I loved it that Adam pretended I did. He was definitely improving.

“Here was the odd thing about Pole’s discovery: Although this ancient little leather-bound book was sandwiched between many packets of moldy cowhide court rolls, there were no corresponding marks either above it or below.”

“It had been put there recently,” I said.

“Excellent. That, also, was Pole’s conclusion.”

“Someone had hidden it there.”

“Full marks, Flavia,” Adam said. “Well done.”

I resisted brushing off my shoulders.

“When he leafed through it, he found that it was a household book, written in Latin and kept by the Cellarer at Glastonbury, a certain Ralph: expenses, and so on, and so on. Nothing very exciting. A few notes here and there on what was happening at the abbey: great storms, deaths, and droughts. Not a chronicle, as such, but more a notebook kept by a busy man who was more concerned with the stillroom, the bees, and the state of the herb garden—which is why Pole brought it to my attention.

“As with many monastic documents, it was filled with scribbling round the edges—marginalia, we call it nowadays—little notes jotted in the margins about this
and that: such things as ‘don’t forget the eggs,’ ‘metheglin for Father Abbot’s stomach’—metheglin was a kind of spiced mead, a fermented honey offshoot of beekeeping—all the craze in the monasteries—the Guinness stout of its day.

“At any rate, Pole was leafing idly through these notes—they weren’t really his field, you know—when the word
adamas
caught his eye: Latin for ‘diamond.’ A most uncommon word to find among monkish writings.

“The text noted, in surprisingly few matter-of-fact words, the death of the bishop: Tancred de Luci.”

For a few moments, my mind did not register what my ears had heard.

“De Luci?” I said at last, slowly. “Could it be—?”

“It’s altogether quite possible,” Adam said. “The de Luce name is, as you know, an ancient one, of Norman French origin. It has appeared in many different forms. There was, of course, famously, Sir Thomas Lucy, of Charlecote Park, in Warwickshire, who was said—probably wrongly—to have had a young man named William Shakespeare brought up before him on a charge of poaching the Charlecote deer.”

“Damn!” I said.

“Quite,” Adam agreed.

He picked up a pebble and shied it to one side of the dabbling ducks. There was a sudden excited quacking, a flutter of wings, and then they settled once more into their eternal dipping and diving.

“But there’s more,” he added. “Would you like to hear it?”

I gave him
such
a look.

“A few pages later, Ralph the Cellarer records that the bishop has been laid to rest—you’ll be interested in this—‘att Lacey.’ ”

“Not
Bishop’s
Lacey?”

“No. It wasn’t given that name until after his death.

“He was laid to rest, according to Ralph, who must have attended the funeral, ‘with greatte and soleymne pomp in hys mitre, cope and crosier.’ ”

“The crosier having the Heart of Lucifer set into it?”

“The very same,” Adam said in a low voice, as if there were some danger of us being overheard. “In the margin, Ralph made the note:
‘oculi mei conspexi’
and the single word
‘adamas’
—which means, more or less, ‘I have seen this diamond with my own eyes.’ It’s interesting that he chose to write the marginalia in Latin.”

“Why?” I demanded.

“Because it would have been as easily understood by everyone at the abbey as the English in which his notebook was kept.”

“Perhaps someone else made the note.”

“No, it was in the same handwriting. What it means is that we have an eyewitness report—or as near as damn it—to the fact that Saint Tancred was interred with his miter, cope, and crosier, the Heart of Lucifer, and all.”

“But why has nobody ever found this out?”

“History is like the kitchen sink,” Adam answered. “Everything goes round and round until eventually, sooner or later, most of it goes down the waste pipe. Things are forgotten. Things are mislaid. Things are covered up. Sometimes, it’s simply a matter of neglect.

“During the last century and a half, there have been amateur sportsmen who made a hobby of digging through the rubble of our island’s history, mostly for their own enlightenment and amusement, but with two recent wars, that’s come almost to a halt. Nowadays the past is a luxury which nobody can afford. No one has the time for it.”

“Do you?” I asked.

“I try to,” he said. “Although I am not always successful.”

“Is that all, then?” I asked.

“All?”

“All that you wanted to tell me? All that I’ve given you my pledge not to repeat?”

A shadow came over his face. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that it is only the beginning.”

He picked up another pebble, as if he were going to toss it carefree among the ducks, but thought better of it and let the stone drop from his fingers.

“The thing of it is,” he said, “that someone else within the past—say, ten years—has happened upon the scribblings of Ralph the Cellarer, and found them important enough to hide in a pile of old vellum. As is so often the case, I fear that there’s a diamond at the bottom of it all.”

“Saint Tancred’s crosier!” I let out a whistle.

“Precisely.”

“It’s in his tomb!” I said, hopping from one foot to the other.

“I believe it is,” Adam said. “Do you know anything about diamonds in history?”

“Not much,” I told him. “Other than that they were once thought to be both poison and antidote to poison.”

“Quite true. Diamonds were also thought to confer invisibility, to defend against the evil eye and, at least according to Pliny the Elder, to give men the power to see the faces of the gods:
‘Anancitide in hydromantia dicunt evocari imagines deorum.’
They were believed at the beginning of the sixteenth century, by a Venetian named Camillus Leonardus, to be
‘a help to lunaticks and such as are posessed with the Devil.’
He also believed they could tame wild beasts and prevent nightmares. The diamond in the breastplate of the Jewish High Priest was once believed to become clear in the presence of an innocent man and turn cloudy in the presence of a guilty one. And Rabbi Yehuda, in the Talmud, was said during a voyage to have placed a diamond on some salted birds which came back to life and flew away with the stone!”