“She lies at the church’s door,” Daffy had said, “because she was a suicide. That’s why she’s not buried with the rest of the Cottlestones in the crypt. By rights, she shouldn’t have been buried in the churchyard at all, but her father was a magistrate, and was able to move heaven and earth, as it were.”
I thought for a moment of poor Mr. Twining, Father’s old schoolmaster, who lay in a plot of common ground on the far side of the riverbank behind St. Tancred’s. His father, evidently, had not been a magistrate.
“Mrs. Cottlestone, though, had arranged for a tunnel to be dug between Cassandra’s tomb and the family crypt, so that her daughter—or at least the soul of her daughter—could visit her parents whenever she wished.”
“You’re making this up, Daffy!”
“No, I’m not. It’s in the third volume of The History and Antiquities of Bishop’s Lacey. You can look it up yourself.”
“A tunnel? Really?”
“So they say. And I’ve heard rumors—”
“Yes? Tell me, Daffy!”
“Perhaps I shouldn’t. You know how cross Father can be when he thinks we’re filling your mind with specters.”
“I won’t tell him. Please, Daffy! I swear!”
“Well …”
“Pleee-ase! Cross my heart with a silver dart!”
“All right, then. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. Mr. Haskins told me that once, when he was digging a new grave next to Cassandra Cottlestone’s tomb, the edge gave way, and his shovel fell in the hole. When he found he couldn’t fish it out with his arm, he had to crawl in headfirst and—you’re quite sure you want to hear this?”
I pretended to be biting off my fingers at the knuckles.
“At the bottom of the grave, beside the shovel, was a mummified human foot.”
“That’s impossible! It couldn’t have lasted for two hundred years!”
“Mr. Haskins said it could—under certain conditions. Something to do with the soil.”
Of course! Adipocere! Grave wax! How could I have forgotten that?
When buried in a damp location, a human body can be wonderfully transmogrified. The ammonia generated by decay, in which the fatty tissues break down into palmitic, oleic, and stearic acids, working hand in hand with sodium and potassium from the grave soil, could turn a corpse into a lump of hard laundry soap. It was a simple matter of chemistry.
Daffy lowered her voice and went on. “He said that not long before this, he had sprinkled red brick dust on the crypt floor to see if rats from the riverbank were finding a way into the church.”
I shuddered. It was less than a year since I’d been locked in the pit shed on the river’s edge, and I knew that the rats were no figment of my sister’s imagination.
Daffy’s eyes widened, her voice now no more than a whisper. “And do you know what?”
“What?”
I couldn’t help it: I was whispering, too.
“The sole of the foot was tinted red, as if it had stepped in—”
“Cassandra Cottlestone!” I almost shouted, the hair at the nape of my neck standing on end as if suddenly blown by a cold, invisible breeze. “She was walking—”
“Exactly,” Daffy said.
“I don’t believe it!”
Daffy shrugged. “Why should I care what you believe? I give you a fact and you give me a headache. Now buzz off.”
I had buzzed off.
While I was lost in recollection, Feely’s sobs had subsided, and she was now staring sullenly out the window.
“Who’s the victim?” I asked, trying to cheer her up.
“Victim?”
“You know, the poor sap you’re going to carry down the aisle.”
“Oh,” she said, tossing her hair and coughing up the answer with surprisingly little urging on my part. “Ned Cropper. I thought you’d have already heard that at the keyhole.”
“Ned? You despise him.”
“Wherever did you get that idea? Ned’s going to own the Thirteen Drakes one day. He’s going to take it over from Tully Stoker and rebuild the whole place: dance bands, darts on the terrace, lawn bowling … blow a breath of fresh air into that coal hole … bring it into the twentieth century. He’s going to be a millionaire. Just you wait and see.”
“You’re warped,” I said.
“Oh, all right, then. If you must know, it’s Carl. He’s begged Father to let me be Mrs. Pendracka and Father has agreed—mostly because he believes Carl to be of the bloodline of King Arthur. Having an heir with those credentials would be a real feather in Father’s cap.”
“Sucks to you,” I said. “You’re pulling my leg.”
“We’re going to live in America,” Feely went on. “In St. Louis, Missouri. Carl’s going to take me to watch Stan Musial knock ’em out of the park for the Cardinals. That’s a baseball team.”
“Actually, I was hoping it was Sergeant Graves,” I said. “I don’t even know his first name.”
“Giles,” Feely said, looking dreamily at her fingernails. “But why ever would I marry a policeman? I couldn’t bear the thought of living with someone who came home every night with murder on his boots.”
Feely seemed to be getting over poor Mr. Collicutt’s death quite nicely. Perhaps there was a drop of de Luce blood in her after all.
“It’s Dieter,” I said. “He’s the one who gave you the friendship ring at Christmas.”
“Dieter? He has nothing to offer but love.”
As she touched the ring, I noticed for the first time that she was wearing it on the third finger of her left hand. At the very mention of his name, she couldn’t keep from smiling.
“It is!” I’m afraid I shrieked. “It is Dieter!”
“We shall make a fresh start,” Feely said, her face more soft than I had ever seen it before. “Dieter is going to train as a schoolmaster. I shall teach piano and the two of us shall be as happy as dormice in cotton.”
I couldn’t help hugging myself. Yaroo! I was thinking.
“Where is Dieter, by the way?” I asked. “I haven’t seen him for a while.”
“He’s gone up to London to sit a special examination. Father arranged it. If you breathe a word I’ll kill you.”
Something in her voice told me that she meant it.
“Your secret’s safe with me,” I told her, and for once I meant it.
“We shall be engaged for a year, until I’m nineteen,” Feely went on, “simply to please Father. After that it’s all cottages and columbines and a place to turn handsprings whenever one feels the urge.”
Feely had never turned a handspring in her life, but I knew what she meant.
“I shall miss you, Feely,” I said slowly, realizing that my heart was in every word.
“How too, too touching,” she said. “You’ll get over it.”