People were still smiling at their neighbors, shaking their heads, whispering to one another, and everywhere except in the de Luce pew, a lingering glow hung in the air.
I turned round and looked at Dogger, but his face was, as they say in the thrillers on the wireless, inscrutable.
Daffy and Feely cooked this up together, I thought. Behind closed doors they had plotted it note by note. I wished they’d let me in on their plan. I might have advised against it.
But now the vicar was coming forward.
“Now is Christ risen from the dead,” he said, without batting an eye, “and become the first-fruits of them that slept.”
As if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth; as if something wonderful hadn’t just happened in his church—a miracle, perhaps; as if “Ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay” hadn’t been the last words upon his lips, and upon everyone else’s to boot.
“For since by man came death,” he was now telling us, “by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive,” and on and on from there, wading through all those lovely words about the glories of the sun and the moon and the stars, until at last, as I knew he must, he came to that inevitable passage:
“O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”
Just like that. We had been torn from a jolly good singsong and plunged back into grief. I was struggling with my feelings, staring at the stained glass as if help could possibly come from there, as if hope could possibly spring from the colorful chemicals of the glass.
The yellow scrolls had most likely been achieved with sulfur and calcium, the black letters enameled with a paint compounded in the Middle Ages from a closely guarded formula containing precisely measured amounts of powdered iron or copper oxide, adhesive, and the glassmaker’s own urine.
I read the words again.
At first glance, it seemed as if the artist had made a stained-glass misprint. Sawson – Defifak, the letters appeared to spell out. The M looked like a W, the H like a K. It was only when your eye and brain locked in to the intricate curlicues of the Gothic lettering that you saw that “Sawson – Defifak” was actually “Samson – Delilah.”
It was easy once you got the hang of it.
Like so many other things.
It was in that fraction of an instant—in that finest sliver of time—that the penny dropped.
In my mind, the words “Lens Palace” took form: those urgent words that Harriet had scribbled in her own urine.
Of course! How clear it all was, once you saw!
The S was an A. The P was a D, and by all that was holy, the As were Es.
Except for the second one, of course, which couldn’t possibly be anything but a U!
When I had begun to thaw Harriet’s oilcloth wallet, the letters of her message had immediately begun to diffuse into the old fabric, becoming more spidery and fantastic with every passing moment.
Her message had not been “Lens Palace.” It had, rather, spelled out the name of the woman who was now sitting next to me buffing her fingernails on the hem of her skirt.
Lena de Luce.
It was Lena who had followed Harriet from Singapore to India, and from India to that final confrontation in Tibet. Who else could it have been? For what other reason would Harriet have scribbled Lena’s name in invisible fluid on the outside of the packet containing her last will and testament?
My blood ran cold—then hot.
I was sitting next to a killer!
This creature beside me, preening herself like the cat that ate the canary, had murdered my mother. Her own flesh and blood!
Get a grip on yourself, Flavia. You mustn’t let her know.
At this particular moment, I thought, on the face of this vast globe which is spinning in its gravitationally appointed place among all the other planets, you are the only one of its two and a half billion inhabitants—other than Lena, of course—who knows the truth.
What was it Aunt Felicity had shouted through the rubber tube during our flight in Blithe Spirit?
“We de Luces have been entrusted … for more than three hundred years … with some of the greatest secrets of the realm. Some of us have been on the side of good … while others have not.”
It was as plain as the nose on your face: Lena was one of those who had not.
Why hadn’t I listened to my instincts the first time I laid eyes on the woman? How could I have allowed her to sleep—she and her abominable daughter—under the roofs of Buckshaw? Even now, the very thought of it made my marrow itch.
The question was this: Why had Lena come to Bishop’s Lacey?
The full horror came crashing down upon me like the stones of the house that Samson wrecked.
The man at the station—the man beneath the wheels of the train, the man in the long coat: “The one who was talking to Ibu,” Undine had told me.
He had being trying to warn me—or at least to warn Father.
“The Gamekeeper is in jeopardy. The Nide is under—”
“Attack” was the word he was almost certainly going to say.
But Lena had been there on the station platform!
The man in the long coat had been talking to her. Undine had blurted that out during our playing of Kim’s Game.
I had, in fact, confronted Lena with this fact in my laboratory, but we had been interrupted by the sudden arrival, outside the window, of Tristram Tallis in Blithe Spirit.
And then, as if that weren’t enough, there had been that word: “pushed.”
“Someone pushed him,” a woman’s voice had said on the platform.
“Push over,” Lena had ordered, less than an hour ago as she wedged her way into the pew beside me. There had been something familiar about the voice, but I hadn’t had time to think about it.
At the station she had cried out those words herself in order to distract attention.
Of course! How fiendishly clever of her—and how cold-blooded.
In the same calculating way, she had arranged to lure me to the Jack O’Lantern.
“After the funeral,” she had said.
Within the hour!
But now, I realized, this much was certain: If Lena found out I was on to her, I was no better than a dead duck.
The next funeral at St. Tancred’s would be mine.