The Grave's a Fine and Private Place (Flavia de Luce, #9)

by Alan Bradley

The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace. —Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress (1681)

And what of me? What of Flavia de Luce? I would perish, I decided. Rather than submit to a lifetime locked in some dismal pigeon-infested London square with an aunt who valued the Union Jack more than her own blood, I would simply do away with myself. And as an authority on poisons, I knew precisely how to accomplish it.

Off to a good start

Perhaps I could conjure up some great insight into the peculiar electron bonding of diborane (B2H6), for instance, or the as yet unsolved atomic valences of Zeise’s salt. Yes, that was it! Paradise would welcome me. “Well done, de Luce,” the vast crystal angels would say, flickering with frozen fire as I set foot upon their doorstep.

He knew I wouldn’t want to miss it: St.-Mildred’s-in-the-Marsh, where Canon Whitbread, the notorious “Poisoning Parson,” had just two years ago dispatched several of his female parishioners by lacing their Communion wine with cyanide.

It seemed unlikely, but anything was better than staying at Buckshaw, which now seemed likely to remain in mourning until the last day of the last month of the end of time.

“For the death of a parent, a heavy mourning period of six months is laid on,” Aunt Felicity said, betraying her military attachments, no matter how top secret they were supposed to have been. “And not a day less. And all your shrieking cuts no ice with me.”

“For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,” the Bible tells us. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” says The Book of Common Prayer. But both of these books, having been written mostly in good taste, fail to mention either the stinking jelly or the oozing liquids and the gaseous phases through which each of us must pass on our way to the Great Beyond. The average churchyard is a first-rate meat tenderizer.

Although Daffy and Feely were pretending to be disinterested, both had turned toward me.

wrong

Although the object was upside down, it was now easily recognizable. It was a human head—and attached to it was a human body. My fingers were inserted firmly in the corpse’s open mouth, locked behind its upper teeth. “We’d best make for the pier, Dogger,” I said.

a work by a much less well-known artist named Henry Wallis. The Death of Chatterton, it was called, and it depicted the body of that sad young poet who had poisoned himself in 1770 at the age of seventeen, having been exposed as a literary forger.

Even if taste and decency are chucked out the window, there is one rule that remains: keeping a long face in the presence of death.

As she got to her feet, I took her forefinger and led her toward the door. It was the first time I had willingly touched my sister’s hand since I was nine months old and learning to walk.

“What shall I wear when Dieter takes me to the cinema on Saturday night?” she had asked, but when the Bible had replied: “My flesh is clothed with worms and clods” (Job 7:5), she had let out an unearthly shriek and canceled her date.

Her princes within her are roaring lions; her judges are evening wolves; they gnaw not the bones till the morrow. Zephaniah, chapter 3, verse 3.

“Shake. I’m Poppy Mandrill. And who, pray tell, are you?” “Titania Bottom,” I replied, as I sometimes do when I’m annoyed. The woman threw back her head and laughed—a surprisingly rich, warm, throaty laugh that flew up and joined the flitting notes of the organ. “Come off it,” she said. “I’ve directed enough Shakespeare in my time to know when my leg’s being pulled.”

When the cards were down, Daffy was always the first to fold. Anything truly gruesome, such as an arm or a leg broken in a tumble from a tree, or a toad speared on the tines of a garden fork, would reduce Daffy to a quivering, helpless jelly. The sight—or even the smell—of blood caused her to drop her dinner on the spot: as

Books served Daffy as an insulation between the real world and her tender heart.

It’s not often that Fate deals you a winning hand, but I’d just been given four aces and a joker up my sleeve.

Oh, for the good old days, I thought, when Death was an everyday equal and not to be padlocked away like some dim-witted relative whom nobody wanted to see or spend time with.

“Musick has charms to sooth a savage breast,” William Congreve had once written, in his play The Mourning Bride. “ ‘Musick and chicken sandwiches,’ he ought to have said,” Daffy once remarked

Gorging on sweets together creates as strong a bond between two people as being in love.

And yet, walking along with Hob, both of us inhaling spun sucrose like a pair of jet engines, we became, almost instantly, old pals.

Actually, naming the date was a brilliant bit of deduction on my part. I knew by bitter experience that the Palm Sunday morning service was the longest in The Book of Common Prayer. The Gospel was taken from Matthew, chapter 27. Which, as I recalled, ran more than a thousand words. I knew this because I had counted them, one by one, following with my index finger,

“Sherlock Holmes,” Daffy said, her eyes popping open. “ ‘His Last Bow.’ ‘There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast.’ ”

Meaning Dickens, of course, to whom she had constructed a small shrine in her bedroom at Buckshaw. Before coming away on our holiday, I had suggested she have the whole setup mounted on an oxcart as they did with their portable altars in the Middle Ages. “We can tow it behind the Rolls,” I told her. “Think how handy it would be to have the whole lot of it: portrait of the Divine Charles, candles, snuffers, incense, first editions of Bleak House and The Pickwick Papers all right there at your fingertips in case you suffer withdrawal symptoms.”

I had brought only the bare necessities: a toothbrush, and Taylor’s Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence.

“Sustained muscular action often is,” Dogger said. “Without prior training, that is. Such fatigue is due largely to a surplus of chloride, potassium, lactic acid, and magnesium, caused by muscular contraction, and a simultaneous insufficiency of creatine phosphate, glycogen, and adenosine triphosphate.” Why had no one ever put it so plainly? It suddenly made such perfect sense.

Feely gave me one of her ten-ton looks.

was desperate. She was cribbing from Shakespeare: the scene in which Hamlet’s wicked uncle, Claudius, pours hebenon into the ear of the sleeping king. Hebenon, in my opinion, was simply a mangled form of henbane, misremembered by one of Shakespeare’s acting pals when it came time to write down the plays. Either that, or the error was caused by a daydreaming typesetter.

Why do so many poets apologize before reading their work aloud? I wondered. How many readings had we attended at St. Tancred’s parish hall where the poet felt obliged to kill his own young before they ever drew breath? “Get on with it!” you always wanted to shout—but you never did. Poets—other than the dreaded Millbank Morrison, of course, who had a hide as thick as a rhinoceros’s in chain mail—were notoriously sensitive about their creations, whereas scientists never were. Did Joseph Priestley apologize for discovering oxygen? Or Henry Cavendish for hydrogen? Of course not! They fairly crowed about it.

It was masks off. Very seldom did I ever show the real Flavia de Luce to anyone, especially to strangers. But now? Well, she had asked for it. “As Professor Cooke pointed out more than sixty years ago,” I said, taking a deep breath, “you cannot unite the chemical elements in any proportion you please. Twenty-three ounces of sodium will unite precisely with thirty-five and a half ounces of chlorine to produce table salt. But if you have carelessly added an extra half ounce of either substance, Nature will set aside the surplus. All the wishing in the world cannot force the extra to mix.” Mrs. Palmer looked rather stunned.

Then she tucked the book into the folds of her woolen cardigan. She had for the past six months or so begun complaining of the cold, even when the summer temperatures were tending toward the tropical, and never went anywhere without an old brown baggy knitted jumper which I realized only now, with a sudden shock, had belonged to Father. I wanted to hug her but I didn’t.

men who were being forced to walk the plank. Was it my imagination, or did one of them look uncannily like Orlando Whitbread? I had only seen him dead, of course, so it was difficult to tell. “The seven martyrs of Dyrrachium,” I said, ticking them off on my fingers. “Germanus, Hesychius, Lucian, Papius, Peregrinus, Pompeius, and Saturninus—alphabetically, that

I had got their names off by heart by making a mnemonic of the first letters of the martyrs’ names: Give Him Large Portions of Potted Plums and Strychnine. G, H, L, P, P, P, S. Germanus, Hesychius, Lucian, Papius, Peregrinus, Pompeius, and Saturninus.

feel that I can trust you, Mrs. Dandyman, but you must give me your word that you won’t share with a soul what I’m about to confide in you.” Who, in the entire history of the world since Adam and Eve, has ever been able to resist so downright juicy an offer? “I give you my word,” she said, already licking her lips in anticipation.

I took a deep breath, counted to three, looked Mrs. Dandyman in the eye, and asked: “How many murders have you forgiven?” “None,” she answered. “Nor will I—ever.” I was flabbergasted by her words. Here was a woman after my own heart! How I rejoiced in meeting her!

The greatest thing about being twelve is that you can turn it on and off as the situation requires.

An older sister in love is an unexploded bomb (UXB) at the best of times,

“Bags it me,” he said, settling the matter beyond dispute. It is a fact of life that, among civilized people anywhere in the world, a basic “bags it” trumps everything, including, I suspect, even Judgment Day. Pretending to be bored, I gazed off

To those of us who truly love one another, the occasional flaming fib serves only to strengthen the ties.

“He was a clergyman’s son, the son of a canon,” Claire replied, “which ought to explain everything, but doesn’t. That he enjoyed telling people he was a son of a gun is perhaps more revealing.”

Daffy had once told me that all actors and all murderers are attention seekers.

It was no wonder that so many of the ancient philosophers had spent so much time and ink chewing over—digesting and redigesting—moral issues. Philosophy had always seemed to me like the four stomachs of a cow, but now I might have to rethink my position.

“Of course,” I said. “You’re Australian! You were in the Australian Army Nursing prisoner-of-war camp!” Daffy had once scared me silly—beneath the blankets and well after lights-out—by telling me how Japanese soldiers had machine-gunned the brave Australian nurses at Bangka Island, off the coast of Sumatra. It was a topic never again to be spoken of aloud: not then, not ever.

“What is it Housman said about such beautiful summer weather? “ ‘June suns, you cannot store them / To warm the winter’s cold…’ I forget the rest.” “ ‘The lad that hopes for heaven,’ ” Dogger said, “ ‘Shall fill his mouth with mould.’

How very odd it will seem to have a Queen Elizabeth on the throne again after three hundred and fifty years! It’s going to take some getting used to, I expect.”

with it—to get to the poisonings.” This woman knew me like the inside of her eyelids. I shrugged. “If you wish,” I said, the best I could do on the spur of the moment. She laughed: not a laugh as of silvery bells, as you might expect, but a wholehearted guffaw that grew from the gut and exploded into the room. Dogger smiled. Life had never been sweeter.

“So the Crown Prosecutor suggested at his trial. But the defense suggested—quite brilliantly, at least in this instance—that the older clergy had been taught to carry on ‘come hell or high water,’ as he put it (begging M’lud’s pardon) and citing the instance of the Vicar of Chittleford who, despite a direct hit on the nave of his church during the Blitz, had gone on to the completion of Holy Communion though not a single member of the congregation remained alive.

After that first taste, there would have been a couple of blissful moments which would, alas, be their last; and then the sudden onrush of sensations: the taste of bitterness, the burning in the throat and bowels, the tightening of the jaw, the foaming at the lips, the perspiration, the inability to move any of the muscles—not even time, probably, for a final “Uh-oh.”

and botany of the Bible (from which I was delighted to learn that the Vine of Sodom in Deuteronomy is in fact a kind of giant milkweed with poisonous juice which, in spite of its tasty appearance, dissolves, upon being bitten, into smoke and ashes):