Free The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches by Alan Bradley Page B

to do.
    How was I to deal with all these people? Was I to greet them one by one? Usher them, one or two at a time, in an orderly fashion into the house and herd them up the stairs to the chamber of mourning?
    What was I to say to them?
    I needn’t have worried. My elbow was suddenly seized in an iron grip and a voice hissed into my ear: “Get lost.”
    It was Feely.
    In spite of the dark circles under her eyes, which, I noticed, had been artfully retouched, not to hide but to enhance them, she was the image of bereaved beauty. She simply
glowed
with grief.
    “Oh, Miss Lavinia,” she said in a weak, exhausted voice, “Miss Aurelia. How awfully good of you to come.”
    She stuck out a pale hand and touched each of them in turn on the forearm.
    As she turned her head Flavia-wards, she gave me
such
a glare!
    Feely had the knack of being able to screw one side of her face into a witchlike horror while keeping the other as sweet and demure as any maiden from Tennyson. It was, perhaps, the one thing I envied her.
    “We brought these, dear,” Miss Aurelia said, thrusting the flowers at Feely. “They’re
immortelle
. Xeranthemum. They’re said to represent, you know, the Resurrection and the Life. They’re from our greenhouse.”
    Feely took the flowers and sandwiched herself between the sisters as if for support, and was already moving with them into the foyer, leaving me alone on the doorstep to face what Daffy would call the madding crowd.
    I was taking a deep breath, determined to do my best, when a voice at my ear said, “I’ll look after this, Miss Flavia.”
    It was Dogger. And, as always, in the nick of time.
    With a grateful and yet bereaved smile, since we were still on public display, I turned and floated wistfully into the house. In the foyer, I took to my heels and was up the east staircase like a rocket.
    “The resurrection and the life,”
Miss Aurelia had said.
    There it was again! From the Apostle’s Creed:
“… the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.”
    I recalled instantly my own thought:
“I have restored my mother to life through the magic of chemistry.”
    After developing the ciné film upon which Harriet’s images appeared, those words had rung out in my mind like Christmas bells. Something else, too, had chimed: thesound of the inner shiver which indicated that something unknown was being stored up for a later time.
    Now it came shooting with full awareness back into my brain.
    I would bring my mother back to life! And this time, it would not be just a dopey dream, but an actual scientific accomplishment.
    There was so much to do—and so precious little time.

NINE
    F ATHER HAD DECREED THAT we, the immediate family, would take turns standing watch over Harriet. He himself would take the first shift of six hours, he had decided, from two until eight o’clock. Feely, as next oldest, would serve from eight till two in the morning, followed by Daffy until eight A.M ., at which time I was to take over until two in the afternoon. Aunt Felicity had at first been written off on grounds of age.
    “Nonsense, Haviland!” she had told him. “I’m as capable as you are. More, when you come right down to it. You must not deny me my vigil.”
    And so the rota had been rearranged. We each would be assigned a watch of 4.8 hours, which came out neatly, as Daffy pointed out, at 4 hours and 48 minutes per person.
    Aunt Felicity would stand watch from 2:00 this afternoon until 6:48 in the evening; Father from 6:48 until11:36; Feely from 11:36 until 4:24; Daffy from 4:24 until 9:12 in the morning; and me from then until 2:00 tomorrow afternoon, the time of the funeral.
    It was a typical de Luce solution: logical beyond question, and yet, at the same time, mad as a March hare.
    There was just one problem: In order to carry out the work I intended to do, my watch needed to be in the latest hours of the night and the earliest hours of the morning.
    In short, I needed to switch shifts with