Speaking From Among The Bones by Alan Bradley

Author:Alan Bradley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780345538680
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2013-01-28T23:00:00+00:00

• FIFTEEN •

“THEY SAY ’E’S BLEEDIN’ cause ’is bones ’as been bothered!”

Mrs. Mullet ladled another dollop of her lavalike porridge into my bowl. Thoughts of being an Oliver Twist in reverse crossed my mind: “Please, ma’am, I don’t want any more.”

“Eat it up, dear, while it’s ’ot. There’s a good girl. Remember:

“Margaret Mullet tells no fibs

“ ’Ot porridge sticks to the ribs.

“ ’Ere! I’m a poet and I don’t know it.”

She giggled at her own wit.

The very thought of this gray guck sticking to my ribs—or anything else—was enough to make my stomach go into hibernation.

“Thank you, Mrs. M,” I said groggily, adding a generous slosh of milk to the oatmeal. Perhaps I could sip away at the liquid and leave the quivering horror hidden beneath the surface like the Loch Ness Monster.

I’d barely slept and wasn’t at my best. The cleaning of my coat had been more chemically complicated than I had supposed and had, in the end, required me to duplicate Michael Faraday’s famous 1821 experiment in which he had synthesized tetrachloroethylene by extracting it, by thermal decomposition, from hexachloroe-thane.

Consequently, I had been up all night.

“Actually, his bones haven’t been disturbed,” I told her. “They haven’t dug that deep yet.”

“Well, ’e bloomin’ well knows they’re on the way,” Mrs. Mullet said. “Mark my words. Saints aren’t like your ordinary people. They knows things. They can see and ’ear things at a distance just like the television. They ’ear when Mrs. Frampton is prayin’ to ’ave ’er Elsie’s Bert win the pools so’s she can send ’er mother to Blackpool on ’oliday come June and get ’er out of ’er ’air for a fortnight so’s she can scrub the floors and beat the rugs. Mind you, I’ve said nothin’.”

I was eating breakfast in the kitchen because, by the time I dragged myself out of bed, Mrs. Mullet had already cleared the table in the dining room.

“I ’eard all about it from my friend, Mrs. Waller. She says there was blood all over the place like a abbotory.”

“There wasn’t all that much,” I said. “I saw it myself.”

Mrs. Mullet’s eyes widened.

“No more than a couple of teaspoonsful if you collected it all together. Blood always seems greater in volume than it actually is.”

If it was blood, in fact. I could hardly wait to get upstairs to my laboratory and analyze the residue of the stuff into which I had dipped my white ribbon.

“Still an’ all,” she said. “Miss Tanty ’ad to be put to bed and the doctor called. A real fright, she ’ad, babblin’ on about Mr. Collicutt and the four ’orsemen of the pocket lips. Made no sense at all. Shock, if you ask me.”

“I think you’re quite right, Mrs. M,” I said, my plans changing even as I spoke. “I’ll take her some flowers. I’ll tell her they’re from all of us here at Buckshaw.”

“That would be nice, dear,” Mrs. Mullet said. “You’re always such a thoughtful child.”

Of course I was a thoughtful child. If Miss Tanty’s lips had been loosened by laudanum, I wanted to be among the first to hear what came spilling out.

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