The Golden Tresses of the Dead by Alan Bradley

Author:Alan Bradley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2019-01-21T16:00:00+00:00

· THIRTEEN ·

A RIDE IN THE fresh country air can do wonders for the brain. I had gone no more than half a mile in the direction of Malden Fenwick when it came to me.

Of course! Why hadn’t I thought of it before? Feely’s reception had been planned and managed by the members of the Altar Guild.

Certainly, Cynthia would have been the organizing force, but the individual duties, such as the drawing-up of seating lists and so on, would actually have been carried out by the many others.

Of course, Clary Truelove came to mind.

Miss Truelove was, to put it nicely, prominent in the Church. If the Church were a pyramid being built, Miss Truelove was the Chief Overseer: the one with the whip. She made things happen.

She was the insinuating voice on the telephone when the coffers of the Church were running empty. In The Canterbury Tales (which Daffy insisted was cribbed from Boccaccio, who had cribbed it in turn from Publius Papinius Statius, a Roman poet of the first century A.D.), Chaucer speaks of “the smyler with the knyfe under the cloke” and, surely, according to Daffy, he had Clary Truelove in mind, or someone very like her. Miss Truelove was the dagger behind the cloak of kindness with which Cynthia Richardson met all comers, and, when occasion demanded, the truncheon of the Church, so to speak.

For some reason or another, most of the inhabitants of Bishop’s Lacey lived in fear of Clary Truelove, but I did not.

It wasn’t because I was extraordinarily brave, but rather that the two of us had so much in common, so to speak:

(a) Neither of us was afraid to say what we thought.

(b) Neither of us could be intimidated.

(c) Neither of us suffered fools gladly—or at all.

(d) Neither of us curried favor—ever.

(e) Both of us were fascinated by certain aspects of the church: she with the altar and I with the graveyard.

We ought to have been friends, I suppose, Miss Truelove and I, but we weren’t. Perhaps, like identical poles of two bar magnets, we naturally repelled each other.

I screwed up my courage and turned Gladys’s head toward Miss Truelove’s cottage.

All that now remained of Gooling Hill was a field with a mound in the middle and a crumbling structure of stone that had once been a forge. Five hundred years ago, the place had been a small settlement bordering on Bishop’s Lacey, which had specialized in the manufacture of iron shoes for horses and oxen, until it was wiped out by plague in the year 1348—a fact drummed into every young head in our village by sermon after sermon on the evils of uncleanliness.

The ancient forge had been added to and subtracted from so often that, after centuries of fiddling, it resembled nothing so much as a huddle of stones. And it was here, with her cats and carnations, that Miss Truelove lived a life of solitary splendor.

No one, as far as I knew, had ever been inside her hovel,

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