The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches Read Free Page B

arm, and I was dragged stumbling along, gasping in her wake.
    A sudden shout broke from among the stragglers at the station. I thought at first it was Feely’s cruel treatment of me that had caused the outcry, but I saw now that people were running towards the edge of the platform.
    The guard’s whistle was blowing frantically, someone wasscreaming, and the engine banged to an abrupt halt with clouds of steam billowing out from beneath its driving wheels. I struggled free of Feely’s grasp and elbowed my way back along the carriages, squeezing past the possible Air Vice-Marshal, who seemed rooted to the spot.
    The villagers stood transfixed, many hands clapped to many mouths.
    “Someone pushed him,” said a woman’s voice from somewhere behind me in the crowd.
    At my feet, as if reaching for my shoes, a human hand stuck stiffly out, with awful stillness, from beneath the wheels of the last carriage. I knelt down for a closer look. The newly filthy fingers were wide open, reaching for help that would never arrive. On the wrist, which was almost indecently naked, tiny golden hairs stirred gently in the moving air beneath the train.
    My nostrils filled with the smell of hot, oily steam, and with something else: a sharp coppery odor which, once experienced, is never forgotten. I recognized it at once.
    It was the smell of blood.
    Shoved up nearly to the dead elbow was the still-buttoned cuff of a coat too long and much too heavy for such a lovely day.

THREE
    T HE R OLLS CREPT ALONG the lane at a snail’s pace behind the hearse.
    Even though Buckshaw Halt was little more than a mile from the house, I knew already that this sad journey was going to take simply ages.
    The analytical part of my brain wanted to make sense of what I had just witnessed on the railway platform: the violent death of a stranger beneath the wheels of the train.
    But a wilder, more primitive, more reptilian force would not allow it, throwing up excuses that seemed reasonable enough at the time.
    These precious hours belong to Harriet
, it was telling me.
You must not steal them from her. You owe it to the memory of your mother
.
    Harriet … think only of Harriet, Flavia. It is her due
.
    I let myself sink back into the comforting leather of the seat and allowed my mind to fly back to that day last week, in my laboratory.…
    Their drowned faces are not so white and fishy as you might expect. Floating barely beneath the surface in the blood-red light, they are, in fact, rather the color of rotted roses.
    She still smiles in spite of all that has happened. He wears a shockingly boyish expression upon his face.
    Beneath them, coiled like tangled tentacles of seaweed, black ribbons dangle down into the liquid depths.
    I touch the surface—write their initials in the water with my forefinger:

    So closely are this man and this woman tied together, that the same three letters stand for them both: Harriet de Luce and Haviland de Luce.
    My mother and my father.
    It was odd, really, how I had happened upon these images.
    The attics at Buckshaw are a vast aerial underworld, containing all the clutter, the castoffs, the debris, the dumpings, the sad dusty residue of all those who have lived and breathed in this house for centuries past.
    Piled on top of the moldering prayer chair, for instance, upon which the terrible-tempered Georgina de Luce hadonce perched piously in her powdered periwig to hear the whispered confessions of her terrified children, was the crumpled wreckage of the home-built glider in which her ill-fated grandson, Leopold, had launched himself from the parapets of the east wing scant seconds before coming to grief on the steel-hard frozen ground of the Visto, bringing to an abrupt end that particular branch of the family. If you looked carefully, you could still see the stains of Leopold’s oxidized blood on the glider’s frail linen-covered wings.
    In another corner, stacked in a stiff spinal curve, a pile of china chamber pots still