• SIXTEEN •
WE WERE STANDING ON the riverbank at the end of Cater Street, well away from Miss Tanty’s ears. We had walked there in total silence.
Now, the only sound was that of the running river, and the muted muttering of a few ducks that paddled round in circles on the current.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “Old habits die hard.”
“Is that part of your cover?” I asked. “Being an ass?”
I had heard the term “cover” used in one of the Philip Odell mysteries on the BBC wireless. “The Case of the Curious Queen,” if I remembered correctly. It meant pretending to be someone else. Someone that one wasn’t.
I had only occasionally had the opportunity to try the technique myself, since nearly everybody in Bishop’s Lacey was as well acquainted with Flavia de Luce as they were their own mothers. It was only when I was a safe distance from home that I was able to take on another character.
“I suppose it is,” Adam said, giving his nose a twist with his fingers. “There. I have switched it off. I am quite myself again.”
His grin was gone and I took him at his word.
“Miss Tanty thinks we should join forces,” I told him. “Form some sort of detection club.”
“Share information?” Adam asked.
“Well, yes, I suppose that’s what she was getting at.”
“I wasn’t aware of her detective aspirations,” he said. “Perhaps I should have been. Which means, of course, that that ghastly performance in the church yesterday was all a sham. As was her well-advertised breakdown this morning. Very clever of you to have spotted it.”
“I didn’t spot it,” I said. “She confessed before I was halfway in the door.”
“But why? It makes no sense. Why go to all that trouble and then blow the gaff with no provocation whatsoever?”
Now he was talking to me as if I were a grown-up and I have to say I loved it.
“There can be only one reason,” I told him, returning the favor. “She needs to make an ally of me.”
Adam’s eyes went hooded for a moment, and then he said, “I think you may be right. Are you prepared to play along?”
Up until that moment, my usual response would have been to nod, but I did not.
“Yes,” I told him.
“Good,” he said. “And so shall I.”
He stuck out a hand and I shook it to avoid making a scene.
“Now that we’re partners, so to speak, there’s something you ought to know, but before letting you in on it, I must have your most solemn pledge that you won’t breathe a word.”
“I so pledge,” I said. I had heard the expression somewhere and thought that it suited the occasion admirably. We were not partners, but I wasn’t about to tell him that.
“I also want you to promise me that you will not go prowling about the church—at least not alone. If you feel that you need to go there for any reason, let me know and I shall come with you.”
“But why?”
I was hardly going to saddle myself with someone old enough to be my father.
“Have you ever heard of the Heart of Lucifer?”
“Of course I have,” I said. “We were taught it in Sunday School. It’s a legend.”
“How much of it do you remember?”
“Following the Crucifixion of Our Lord,” I began, parroting almost word for word Miss Lavinia Puddock’s account to our childish ears, “it is said that Joseph of Arimathea brought to Britain the Holy Grail, the vessel which had contained the Blood of Christ. When Joseph laid down his staff at Glastonbury Abbey, it took root and there sprang forth a bush whose like had never before been seen. This was the famous Glastonbury Thorn, and from its branches was carved the crosier, or shepherd’s staff, of our own dear Saint Tancred, into which was set a precious stone called ‘the Heart of Lucifer,’ which was said to have fallen from the sky and thought by some to be the Holy Grail itself.
“It all seems rather a muddle,” I added.
“Well done,” Adam said. “You can see the crook of his crosier beside his face in the carving.”
“The one that’s leaking blood,” I said enthusiastically.
“Have you confirmed that in your laboratory?” Adam asked.
“I was about to, but I was interrupted. I saw you taste the stuff in the church. What did you think?”
“I shall wait upon your chemical analysis. Then we shall see if your test tubes agree with my taste buds.”
“What were you going to tell me?” I asked. “The thing that you said I ought to know?”
Adam’s face was suddenly serious. “In the latter years of the war, a person named Jeremy Pole, whom I had known slightly at university, was doing research at the Public Record Office when he made rather a startling discovery. While sifting through bales of quite boring charters from the Middle Ages he came upon a small book which had once been in the library, or scriptorium, of Glastonbury Abbey, which had been sacked—there’s no other way of putting it—by Henry the Eighth in 1539, in spite of the fact that the Benedictine monks were said to be at ease among royalty. I suppose that proves, if nothing else, that royalty was not at ease among the Benedictines. Westminster Abbey, as you will remember, began life as a Benedictine monastery.
“Their libraries were known to have been a treasure trove of rare and unique documents; that of Glastonbury, specifically, contained a number of early and original histories of England.”
As a matter of fact, I didn’t remember. It was a bit of history that I had never known, but I loved it that Adam pretended I did. He was definitely improving.
“Here was the odd thing about Pole’s discovery: Although this ancient little leather-bound book was sandwiched between many packets of moldy cowhide court rolls, there were no corresponding marks either above it or below.”
“It had been put there recently,” I said.
“Excellent. That, also, was Pole’s conclusion.”
“Someone had hidden it there.”
“Full marks, Flavia,” Adam said. “Well done.”
I resisted brushing off my shoulders.
“When he leafed through it, he found that it was a household book, written in Latin and kept by the Cellarer at Glastonbury, a certain Ralph: expenses, and so on, and so on. Nothing very exciting. A few notes here and there on what was happening at the abbey: great storms, deaths, and droughts. Not a chronicle, as such, but more a notebook kept by a busy man who was more concerned with the stillroom, the bees, and the state of the herb garden—which is why Pole brought it to my attention.
“As with many monastic documents, it was filled with scribbling round the edges—marginalia, we call it nowadays—little notes jotted in the margins about this and that: such things as ‘don’t forget the eggs,’ ‘metheglin for Father Abbot’s stomach’—metheglin was a kind of spiced mead, a fermented honey offshoot of beekeeping—all the craze in the monasteries—the Guinness stout of its day.
“At any rate, Pole was leafing idly through these notes—they weren’t really his field, you know—when the word adamas caught his eye: Latin for ‘diamond.’ A most uncommon word to find among monkish writings.
“The text noted, in surprisingly few matter-of-fact words, the death of the bishop: Tancred de Luci.”
For a few moments, my mind did not register what my ears had heard.
“De Luci?” I said at last, slowly. “Could it be—?”