Speaking From Among The Bones (32 page)

As I had suspected, Mr. Collicutt had stuck the stone inside an organ pipe.

How clever of him
, I thought,
and how much more clever of me to figure out how to find it
.

The Heart of Lucifer! Imagine!

I could hardly wait to tell Father.

I was holding the giant gem between thumb and forefinger, turning it from side to side, sending reflections dancing in their thousands, when a voice behind me said:

“Seize her, Benson!”

And then everything happened at once. Someone grabbed my upper arm and dug powerful fingers into my muscles. My entire arm went weak.

I spun round, kicking out at my attacker even as I twisted away, having the pleasure of feeling my shoe meet shin.

“Damn you!” a pained voice said. “I’ll teach you to—” And then the torch went out.

My elbow had knocked it from between the organ pipes and it hit the wooden floor with a dull thud.

We were now in total darkness and I opened my mouth to scream. But I did not.

Rather, I did something I expect I will never forget.

Hands grabbed at me and slipped off again as I pulled back and banged among the pipes. The wind chest was somewhere in the corner. Perhaps I could scramble up on top of it and hide behind—

Powerful hands had seized one of my ankles and were twisting … twisting—

And then the torch came on. Someone had retrieved it from the floor and was shining the beam directly into my eyes.

“Where is it?” thundered a voice from the darkness behind the light.

The voice of Ridley-Smith, the magistrate. I was sure of it.

“Hand it over,” another voice demanded, and my arm was wrenched almost out of its socket. I could see strange fingers digging into my whitening wrist.

“Hand it over and be quick about it.”

“Hand what over?” I gasped. “Let go of me. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The stone!” a voice rasped, hot in my ear. I could smell the man’s breath and it was nothing to write home about.

My first reaction was to stall for time. How long would it be before help could arrive?

An hour? It might as well be an eternity.

Benson (for I could now see with my own eyes that he was my attacker) seized my shoulders and gave me the kind of shake a terrier gives a rat.

I could feel my brain slapping against my brainpan.

“No games,” he hissed, his temper short. “Hand it over.”

I held out my empty hands in front of me.

“There must be some mistake,” I told him, trying my best to stare with open-eyed honesty into the torch’s blinding beam. “Honest.”

Another shake, more painful than the first.

“You’re hurting me,” I told him, my head spinning. “Let me go.”

Another bone-rattling shake.

I couldn’t take much more of this. There was no escape. Both Benson and the magistrate were barring the only way out of this hellish chamber.

I needed to change tactics.

Slightly.

“All right,” I said. “I know that the two of you murdered Mr. Collicutt.”

The shaking stopped. First point went to me.

“Right here,” I added, gesturing with my hand to take in the entire organ chamber, my breath coming in gasps. “I know that—you and your men—have been tunneling in from the churchyard—to steal the stone—for ages—maybe years. I know that you, Magistrate Ridley-Smith—came across the account—of the Heart of Lucifer—in the Public Record Office—the documents held at Chancery Lane. You hid it there in a pile of ancient charters. Who else but someone in the legal professions would have access?”

I was breathing heavily—as overwound as a six-shilling clock.

The Magistrate said nothing. I hadn’t been convincing enough.

“Mr. Collicutt was one of your—” (What was the word? Flunkies? Hirelings? Daffy would know.) “Employees,” I settled for, aware even as I said it that it was a pretty weak choice of words. “He double-crossed you. You had a falling-out. You murdered him right here in the organ chamber. Method? Diethyl ether. Murder weapon?”

I paused dramatically.
Stretch it as long as you can
, I thought.

“A handkerchief soaked in ether and held in place by a gas mask. And then you dragged him off through the tunnel and dumped his body in the chamber on top of Saint Tancred’s tomb.”

There was a dead silence during which Benson let go of my shoulders.

“That’s why you forced the bishop to withdraw his faculty. You knew what they would find when the tomb was opened, and it was too late to move the body again.”

During all of this, Magistrate Ridley-Smith had remained silent. But now he spoke, his words curiously soft in the stone chamber.

“Is that what you think?” he asked. “Is that what you honestly think?”

“Yes!” I shot back, trying to inject a certain tone of accusation into my voice.

“I’m afraid you have sadly misinterpreted the facts, young lady,” he said.

Ha
, I thought.
I know what he’s up to! Young lady, indeed!

He was going to sneak round the back and try to win me over with fake respect.

“
Have
I?” I asked, as coldly and condescendingly as I could manage given the situation.

“You have indeed,” he answered, putting such heart into his words that for a moment I was almost tempted to believe him. Had I detected in his voice a sense of being shaken?

“You have indeed,” he repeated. “The truth is quite the contrary.”

I let him see me bite my lip. How much longer could I stall?

“O, blessed ladies of the Altar Guild,”
I prayed.
“Sprout wings! Now! Fly to my defense!”

“What
is
the truth?” I heard myself blurt, recalling vaguely that Pontius Pilate had once used similar words but in quite different circumstances.

“The truth is that we tried desperately to revive Collicutt. Benson used a length of hose from the tower. Connected it to some sort of valve in the organ here. Tried to give him air. But it was no use.”

The air hose? I hadn’t thought of that! It would certainly explain the exploded intestines.

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

Even as I spoke I heard a sudden stirring in the church behind Benson and the magistrate, followed by the hollow banging down of a kneeling bench onto the stone floor.

Rescue was moments away!

“Help!” I shouted in as high-pitched and bloodcurdling a voice as I could manage. “Help me! Please help me!”

There was a shuffle of footsteps.

And then a large face appeared over the magistrate’s shoulder—a face with glasses as thick as the Heart of Lucifer.

It was Miss Tanty!

“What’s going on here?” she demanded.

N
EVER—NOT IN MY DOPIEST
dreams—would I have believed I’d be so happy to see the woman.

I brushed roughly past Benson and Magistrate Ridley-Smith and took shelter behind Miss Tanty, peering round from behind her ample skirts.

“What’s going on here, Quentin?” she repeated, looking accusingly from one of my attackers to the other, and then at me, her thick spectacles focusing that frightful gaze like twin burning-glasses.

“A misunderstanding,” the magistrate said, with an apologetic and counterfeit chuckle. “Nothing more.”

“Misunderstanding,” Benson echoed, as if entering his own plea.

“I see …” Miss Tanty said, wavering on the brink of what to do. She seemed to be of two minds, or perhaps even more.

For a long time she stared at them in silence, and they at her.

“Come along, girl,” she said suddenly and, whirling round, seized my arm.

I winced. I hadn’t realized how much Benson had hurt me.

Without another word, she led me to the center aisle, and down it we marched together, like some nightmare bride and groom, toward the door.

Outside, the fog had lessened, although the air remained cool. The churchyard was empty. It was still too early for the ladies of the Altar Guild. No one was in sight.

Out the door and down the walk we went toward the road, Miss Tanty pulling me along like a toy dog on a string.

I must have hung back.

“Come along, girl,” Miss Tanty repeated. “You’ve had a bad shock. I can see it in your eyes. We need to get you warm. Get something hot and sweet into you.”

I couldn’t have agreed with her more. My knees were already beginning to tremble as we turned east toward Cater Street and Miss Tanty’s house.

I was suddenly exhausted, as if someone had opened a spigot in my ankle and let my energy pour out onto the ground.

The idea of a cup of tea and a fistful of cookies was both oddly comforting and oddly familiar. Like a fairy tale once heard and long forgotten.

We were walking quickly now as we turned into Cater Street.

“I forgot Gladys!” I exclaimed, stopping suddenly. “My bicycle. I left her in the churchyard.”

“I’ll fetch her while you have your tea,” Miss Tanty said. “I shall ring someone up and have them drive you home.”

I had a sudden, ridiculous vision of the someone—Miss Gawl, perhaps—herding me along the narrow road to Buckshaw with a shepherd’s crook—or a bishop’s crosier—as if I were a wayward lamb.

“It’s very kind of you,” I said.

“Not at all,” Miss Tanty replied, with the most awful and comforting grin.

We reached her house so suddenly that we might have been transported there by magic carpet.

Is this what shock does?
I wondered.
Warps time?

Was it possible to be in shock and yet, at the same moment, observe oneself being in shock?

Miss Tanty fished in her pocket for a key and unlocked the door, which was odd, I thought, since nobody in Bishop’s Lacey locks their doors.

As we stepped inside and she shot the bolt behind us, the parrot called out from the conservatory, “Hello, Quentin. All hands on deck!” and it whistled four notes which I recognized as the opening of Beethoven’s fifth symphony.

“Dah-dah-dah-DUM!”

Hello, Quentin?
I thought. That’s what the bird had said when I was here before. It was also the name Miss Tanty had called Benson. No, wait—Benson’s name was Martin.

She must have been addressing the magistrate?

“Sit down,” Miss Tanty commanded. We had now magically arrived in her kitchen. “I’ll put the kettle on.”

I looked round at my surroundings and they were blue. It’s odd but true. That’s chiefly what I remember about it: Miss Tanty’s kitchen was blue. I hadn’t noticed it before.

On the table was a milk pitcher full of decomposing lilies, a small breadboard and half a loaf of Hovis bread, an electric toaster, a pewter candlestick with a partially melted candle, and a box of matches.

It was obvious that Miss Tanty’s meals were lonely ones.

Then there was, in a jiff, a cup of tea steaming in front of me, and I was feeling peculiarly grateful.

“Drink it,” Miss Tanty said. “Take these. Eat them.”

She shoved a saucer of shortbreads under my nose, then turned away and began fussing with something in a cupboard.

“Those men,” she was saying, too casually—too conversationally. “Those men in the church. What were they doing to you?”

“They thought I had found something,” I said. “They wanted me to hand it over.”

“And did you?”

“No,” I said.

The great goggles swung round and fixed me in their gaze.

“No, you didn’t find something? Or no, you didn’t hand it over?”

I looked into her eyes, mesmerized, and no words came.

“Well?”

Too late, the truth came crashing down.

“I have to go home now,” I said. “I’m not feeling well.”

Miss Tanty’s hands appeared suddenly from behind her back. In one was clutched a glass bottle and in the other, a handkerchief.

She sloshed liquid onto the linen and clapped it to my nose.

Aha!
I thought—
(C
₂
H
₅
)
₂
O
.

Diethyl ether again.

I’d recognize its sweet, gullet-tickling odor anywhere.

The chemist Henry Watts had once described it as having an exhilarating odor and the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
had called it pleasant, but it was obvious that neither Professor Watts
nor
the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
had ever had the stuff clapped over their noses in a blue-painted kitchen by a hulking and surprisingly powerful madwoman with bottle-bottom spectacles.

It burned.

It seared my nostrils—tore at my brain.

I struggled to get to my feet—but it was no use.

Miss Tanty had crooked an arm around my neck and, from behind, was pulling me down and backward into the chair. Her other hand was holding the handkerchief firmly over my nose.

“Teach you!” she was saying. “Teach you!”

I flailed my arms and kicked out, but it was no use.

Less than ten seconds had passed and my brain was
spinning like a whirlpool into a sweet, sickening oblivion. All I had to do was give in to it.

To let myself go.

“No!”

Who had shouted that?

Was it me?

Or was it Harriet?

I had heard the voice distinctly.

“No!”

Now she had let go of my neck and was digging with her hand in one of my pockets—then the other.

I lashed out, fingers spread, and knocked Miss Tanty’s glasses from her face.

It wasn’t much, but it was enough. I turned my head to one side and sucked my lungs full of fresh air—one quick deep breath and then another—and another.

Without her powerful lenses, Miss Tanty looked round the kitchen, her mad eyes huge and weary, weak, watery, and unfocused.

Fighting my way out of the chair, I dodged to the left but she blocked me with her hips like a rugby player.

I dodged to the right, but she was there also.

Even though I could have been no more than a blur to her, the woman managed to throw herself in front of my every move.

There was no way out. No back door.

Now she had her arm around my neck again, tighter than before.

I saw only one chance.

In desperation I reached out and grabbed the matchbox.
I ripped it open and the wooden matches spilled out onto the tabletop.