Beside me in the pew, Lena, under cover of pretending to wipe away a tear, had produced a small silver compact and was now secretly examining herself in close-up.
Now the vicar had passed on to “I know that my redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. And though after my skin worms destroy this body; yet in my flesh shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself and mine eyes shall behold.”
As he spoke, a wonderful idea popped into my mind!
Why don’t they embed the dead in blocks of plate glass and bury them in crypts beneath transparent floors? In that way, the deceased would easily be able to see God for themselves, and He to see them, to say nothing of the fact that the descendants would be able to keep an eye on their ancestors’ return to dust during a quiet Sunday stroll.
It seemed like a perfect solution, and I wondered why no one had ever thought of it before. I would make a note to mention it to the vicar at a more appropriate time.
“I said, I will take heed to my ways: that I offend not in my tongue. I will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle: while the ungodly is in my sight.”
He was already into the Thirty-ninth Psalm and we had barely begun.
I knew that the Thirty-ninth was not the longest of the psalms—not by a long chalk—but it would be followed by the Ninetieth: “Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations,” and so forth. After that would come the Lesson: part of one of Saint Paul’s rather lengthy letters to the Corinthians, the one which ended with “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”
I let my attention wander.
Across the church in the opposite semitransept, the stained-glass windows gave off a glorious glow. I remembered with pleasure the catalog of chemicals that had been used in their manufacture hundreds of years ago: manganese dioxide for the purples, iron or gold for the reds, salts of ferric iron for the brown skins, and silver chloride for the yellows.
In one of the panels, a brawny man dressed in lion skins like a circus strongman lay sleeping with his head in the lap of a woman in a red dress who was cutting his hair with what appeared to be sheep shears. From behind a hanging drape in the corner of the room, half a dozen men were craning their necks for a view of the operation.
When I was smaller, I had believed—because Daffy had told me so—that the woman, whose name was Brenda, was a barber apprentice and that the men hiding behind the curtain were the examiners who either would or would not grant her a barber’s license.
The characters were, of course, Samson and Delilah, and the onlookers were the lords of the Philistines at Gaza, who were paying her to betray him.
Below the scene was a beautifully lettered yellow scroll with the words in black:
In the next panel, Samson was toppling the two pillars between which he had been chained, as the spectators, with comical looks of astonishment on their faces, tumbled headfirst from the roof like so many ninepins.
The sound of organ music dragged my mind back from Gaza. We were standing to sing a hymn. I had returned just in time to join in the first line.
“Who would true valor see,
Let him come hither;
One here will constant be,
Come wind, come weather
There’s no discouragement
Shall make him once relent
His first avowed intent
To be a pilgrim.…”
It was that grand old hymn from Pilgrim’s Progress, which John Bunyan had written while in prison. Rather than the watered-down version which had been allowed to creep in about fifty years ago, Feely had chosen to use the original words, which, in the book, Mr. Valiant-for-truth had spoken to Mr. Greatheart. The melody was called “Monks Gate,” she had told me, and it was a ripsnorter! I could hardly wait for the last verse.
“Whoso beset him round
With dismal stories
Do but themselves confound;
His strength the more is.
No lion can him fright,
He’ll with a giant fight,
But he will have a right
To be a pilgrim.”
Dame Agatha Dundurn, her old military face upturned to the light, was putting her whole heart into it, as if she had written this mighty battle song herself and had finished leading, just moments ago, the overthrow of all the forces of evil.
Daffy, too, was singing her heart out, and what a lovely voice she had! Why had I never noticed it before? How could I have missed it?
I suddenly realized that there’s something about singing hymns with a large group of people that sharpens the senses remarkably. I stored this observation away for later use; it was a jolly good thing to know for anyone practicing the art of detection. Perhaps that was why Inspector Hewitt so often came to church.
I shot a glance in his direction just in time to see Antigone give his arm what she probably thought was a secret squeeze.
Now the organ and the congregation were taking a great breath before launching into the final verse—and my favorite part:
“Hobgoblin nor foul fiend—”
Oh, how I adored the hobgoblin and the foul fiend! They were the making of this particular hymn, and if I had my way, more songs of praise would be required to include such interesting creatures.
“—Can daunt his spirit,
He knows he at the end
Shall life inherit.
Then fancies fly away,
He’ll fear not what men say,
He’ll labor night and day
To be a pilgrim.…”
As we sat down, the vicar gave Daffy an almost imperceptible nod. She picked up her bundle of papers and walked briskly to the lectern, where she shuffled them until I thought I’d go mad.
She produced her spectacles from somewhere and put them on, which gave her the appearance of a grieving owl.
“I barely remember my mother,” she said at last, her voice quavering only a little but suddenly small in the vastness of the church. “I was not quite three years old when she went away, so that I have only memories of a bright shadow who fluttered on the peripheries of my little world. I don’t remember what she looked like, nor can I recall the sound of her voice, but what I do remember is how she made me feel—which was that I was loved. Until she went away.
“After she was gone, I stopped feeling loved and began believing that my sisters and I must have done something horrid to drive her away, although I could not for the life of me think what that might have been. We have never been given, you see, any reason for her leaving. Even now—now that she has been returned to us—we still don’t know the reason why she left.
“I hope you won’t mind my speaking so frankly, but the vicar told me that I must say what I felt and be honest about it.”
Could this possibly be true? Could it be that Feely and Daffy hadn’t the faintest inkling of Harriet’s activities? Was it possible that Aunt Felicity, who had been, and presumably remained, the Gamekeeper, intended to withhold the truth from them forever?
I looked over at Father, and he was just standing there—so cleanly shaven, so still, and so upright that I could have wept.
Daffy had paused and was looking from one member of the congregation to another. There was dead silence, and then a nervous shuffling of feet.
“By what we have observed yesterday and today,” she went on, “one can only presume that my mother’s body has been returned to us for burial by a grateful government, and for that, at least, I must express our thanks.”
The church had again in an instant gone so quiet you could hear the breathing of the saints in the stained-glass windows.
“But it is not enough,” Daffy continued, her voice now louder and accusing. “It is not enough for my father—nor is it enough for my sisters, Ophelia and Flavia. And it is not nearly enough for me.”
Somewhere behind me Mrs. Mullet let out a sob.
Daffy went on. “I can only hope that one day we shall be entrusted with the truth. We the bereaved deserve nothing less.
“The word ‘bereaved’ comes down to us from the Old English word beréafian, meaning ‘to be deprived of’—to be stripped, to be robbed, to be dispossessed—and it describes accurately what has happened to what is left of our family. We have been robbed of a wife and mother, stripped of our pride, and are soon to be dispossessed of our home.
“And therefore, I beg of you your prayers. As you pray today for the repose of the soul of our mother, Harriet de Luce, pray also for those of us who have been left behind, bereaved.
“We shall now join in singing another of my mother’s favorite hymns.”
I wanted to applaud, but I didn’t dare. “Bravo!” I wanted to shout.
A vast and ominous silence hung in the church. The multitude were staring at the roof, at their shoes, at the windows, at the marble memorial tablets on the walls, and at their own fingernails. No one seemed to know where to look.
“Play, Feely!” I begged her mentally. But Feely let the silence lengthen until several people began coughing to break the tension.
And then the music came. Those six stunning notes sprang from the throats of the organ pipes!
Dah-dah-dah-DAH-dah-dah.
They were unmistakable.
People looked at one another as they recognized the tune, first in astonishment and disbelief, but then with growing smiles at the sheer audacity of it.
Daffy began to sing in her fine, loud voice: “Ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay, ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay …”
And then someone else—I think it was, incredibly, Cynthia, the vicar’s wife—took up the words. Others joined in, somewhat uncertainly at first but growing in confidence with every beat: “Ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay, ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay …”
And now even more, until practically everyone in the church was singing: “Ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay, ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay …”
The booming bass of Mr. Haskins, the verger, came echoing from somewhere back behind the font.
The vicar was singing, Inspector Hewitt and Antigone were singing, Dame Agatha Dundurn was singing—even I was singing: “Ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay, ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay!”
Feely finished off with a flourish of trumpet stops, and then the organ fell silent, as if suddenly embarrassed at what it had done.
As the music faded and died up among the beams and king posts of the ancient roof, Daffy folded her papers and walked placidly back to her seat beside Father in the transept.
Father’s eyes were closed. Tears were trickling down his face. I placed my hand on top of his on the rail but he seemed not to notice.