“It’s true,” Adam said. “Although bishops are not generally known for their flexibility, this one, it seems, has gone into reverse on the matter. He has withdrawn the withdrawn faculty.”
“But why? Why would he do such a thing?”
“ ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’ ” Adam said with a cinema-star grin.
Why were people always quoting this tired old line to me? The last time I’d heard it was from Dr. Darby, and before that, my sister Daffy.
Why do people always quote Hamlet when they want to seem clever?
Altogether too much Shakespeare, methinks!
“Meaning?” I’m afraid I snapped, without really intending to.
“Perhaps he was made to do so,” Adam said.
“Ha!” I told him. “Nobody orders a bishop about.”
I was no expert in theology, but even I knew that.
“Do they not?” Adam asked, a little smugly, I thought.
“You know something you’re not telling me,” I said.
“Perhaps,” he said, looking more like the Cheshire cat with every passing second.
What a maddening man he was!
“You know who’s bossing the bishop and you won’t tell me?” I asked him.
“Can’t tell you,” he said. “There’s a difference.”
We were now approaching the marshy land which surrounded the church. Adam applied the brakes and stopped for a mallard that was waddling across the road.
I jumped out and slammed the door.
With eyes fixed straight ahead, I marched off toward the church, leaving Adam Tradescant Sowerby, MA., FRHortS, etc., to stew in his own clever juices.
“Ah, Flavia,” the vicar said as I picked my way over the rubble into the crypt. “We’ve been expecting you.”
“It’s awfully good of you to let me know,” I said, craning my neck to see over his shoulder. George Battle and his workers had drilled eyebolts into the bottom stone of the chamber—the slab upon which Mr. Collicutt’s corpse had been lying.
“It’s actually the lid of the sarcophagus,” the vicar explained in a hushed voice, as if he were a BBC commentator covering some particularly solemn ceremony on the Home Service.
A compact winch had been set up to lift the stone, and the ropes were already straining under its weight.
“You’re just in the nick of time. Dear me, to think that in just a few moments we shall be looking into the face of—of course, given your proclivities, I knew you wouldn’t want to miss a moment of what promises to be—”
“Heave!” said George Battle.
With a hollow groan, the stone rose half an inch.
“It is said that when certain Royal tombs were opened, the workers found the occupant unchanged by time, clothed in armor, crowned with gold, their faces as fresh as if they had just fallen asleep. And then suddenly, within a minute or so of being exposed to the air, they crumbled away to dust. The Royal personages, that is—not the workers.”
“Heave!”
The stone came up another grating inch.
“You may be interested to hear, George,” the vicar said, “that the stonemason who opened the tombs of the regicides Cromwell and Ireton was paid seventeen shillings for his trouble.”
George Battle said nothing, but hauled grimly again on his rope.
“Heave!”
Now a dark crack was showing round the edges of the slab.
“Good heavens,” the vicar said. “I’m as excited as a schoolboy. Here, let me give a hand.”
“Watch your fingers, Vicar!” George Battle shouted. “You’ll lose ’em if this bugger drops.”
The vicar sprang back.
The stone was now free of its channel, swinging slowly and heavily from side to side, like a two-ton marble pendulum.
I felt the draft at once and smelled the tomb’s cold stink.
“Swing now, Norman. Grab that bar, Tommy. Easy! Easy!”
The stone swung out of its setting, revealing a black and gaping pit. I leaned forward but could see only a few of the bricks that lined its side. The vicar put his hand on my shoulder and smiled at me. Was he imagining that I was his daughter, Hannah, returned from the grave to be at his side for this wonderful but terrifying moment?
He squeezed, and I put my hand on his. We neither of us spoke a word.
“And down … down … down—that’s it … down … down.”
With an unnerving grinding noise, the stone settled onto the floor.
“Well done,” Norman said, to nobody in particular.
“Let’s have that torch,” Tommy said, and George Battle handed it over.
Tommy scrambled up onto the ledge, straddling the pit, and shone the beam down into the abyss.
“Blimey,” he murmured.
The vicar was next. He stepped slowly forward, leaned in, and, dodging Tommy’s legs, stared for a long moment downward.
Without a word, he crooked his forefinger and beckoned me to come.
Although only a couple of days had passed, it seemed as if I had been looking forward to this moment forever. Now that the moment had arrived, I found myself wavering.
What was I about to see? A fresh-faced Saint Tancred? A diamond as big as a turkey’s egg—the Heart of Lucifer?
I eased my face slowly over the edge of the pit and looked down.
At the bottom, in the torch’s beam, perhaps ten feet deep in the earth, covered with dust and reeking slightly, was a heap of moldy fabric and old green bones.
They lay in a lead sarcophagus whose lid had been ripped off and stood on end in a corner.
A shriveled stick of carved black wood, shaped vaguely like a shepherd’s crook, had been tossed carelessly atop the pile, like a withered and badly weathered tree branch thrown onto the remains of a dead fire.
Saint Tancred’s crosier, carved from the Glastonbury Thorn, fashioned, it was said, from the Holy Grail itself.
At its thicker end, a gaping oval hole with twisted metal clasps showed clearly where something had been wrenched away. The Heart of Lucifer was gone.
Someone had been here before us.