Free The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches by Alan Bradley

during which they behaved as if hypnotized. And the floor was certainly dusty.
    The truth of the matter is, I wanted to throw myself down on the floorboards and have a jolly good wallow in the dirt myself. I was sick of this constant being on show that Harriet’s sudden reappearance had brought us: this going about in utter silence; this being dressed forever inour best; this perpetual watching of our words; this being always on our best behavior; these round-the-clock reminders of returning to dust.
    It was probably time to think about giving the place a good housecleaning.
    But not just yet. My sudden tendency to tears had shaken me.
    “What am I going to do, Esmeralda?” I asked.
    Esmeralda fixed me with her yellow eye: an eye as warm and mellow as the sun, and yet, at the same time, as old and cold as the mountains.
    And in that instant, I knew.
    Harriet.
    Harriet was in the house and I needed to go to her.
    She had something to tell me.

EIGHT
    I SLIPPED SILENTLY OUT of my laboratory, locked the door, and made my way towards the seldom-used north hall which paralleled the front of the house. Even though Dogger had installed Lena and Undine in one or another of these cavernous crypts, there was little chance of running into them if I kept my wits about me.
    Father had told us that he would be first to stand watch. And yet he was, as far as I knew, still in the drawing room, entranced by his grief. There would be little enough time, but perhaps if I hurried …
    At the south end of the west wing, I put my ear to the door of Harriet’s boudoir. I could hear nothing but the breathing of the house.
    I tried the door and found it unlocked.
    I stepped inside.
    The room was hung in black velvet. The stuff was everywhere: on the walls, across the windows; even Harriet’s bed and dresser were swathed in the dismal material.
    In the center of the room, on draped trestles—a catafalque, Father had called it—was Harriet’s coffin. The Union Jack had been replaced with a black pall bearing the de Luce coat of arms: per bend sinister sable and argent, two lucies haurient counterchanged. The crest, the moon in her detriment, and the motto “Dare Lucem.”
    “The moon in her detriment” was a moon eclipsed, and the “lucies,” of course, were silver and black luces, or pikes, a double pun on the name de Luce. “Haurient” meant simply that the pikes were standing on their fishy tails.
    And the motto, another pun on our family name:
Dare Lucem
—to give light.
    Precisely what I was attempting to do.
    At the head and foot of the catafalque, tall candles flickered with a weird glow in iron sconces, making the darkness dance with scarcely visible demons.
    An almost perceptible mist hung round the candle flames, and in the awful silence I detected a faint odor upon the air.
    I couldn’t hold back a shudder.
    Harriet was here—inside this box!
    Harriet, the mother I had never known, the mother I had never seen.
    I took three steps forward, reached out, and touched the gleaming wood.
    How oddly and unexpectedly cold it was! How surprisingly damp.
    Of course! Why hadn’t I thought of it before?
    In order to preserve it for the long trip home, Harriet’s body would most likely have been packed in the solid form of carbon dioxide, or “card ice” as it is called. The stuff had first been described by the French scientist Charles Thilorier in 1834 after he had discovered it almost by accident. By mixing crystallized CO 2 with ether, he had been able to achieve the remarkably cold temperature of minus 100 degrees on the centigrade scale.
    So inside this wooden shell there would have to be a sealed metal container—zinc, perhaps.
    No wonder the bearers at the railway station had moved so slowly under their burden. A metal casing filled with card ice, plus the oaken coffin, plus Harriet would strain the shoulders of even the strongest men.
    I sniffed at the oak.
    Yes, no doubt about it. Carbon dioxide. Its faint, pungent,