The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches by Alan Bradley

did you know?”
    “Your mother,” he said gently. “You are her very image.”
    Suddenly, and without an instant’s warning, hot globs of water had sprung from my eyes and were streaming down my cheeks. I had, for days, intentionally been trying to keep my brain so busy with details, so full of this and that, that there was no farthest nook or cranny left to think about the fact that my mother was dead.
    And now, in a single unguarded instant, a word from a stranger had reduced me to a sodden pulp.
    Fortunately, Mr. Tallis was enough of a gentleman to pretend he hadn’t noticed. “I say, pity about Oxford, isn’t it?”
    “Oxford?” He had caught me completely off guard.
    “The University Boat Race. Easter weekend. At Henley. Oxford sank. Hadn’t you heard?”
    Of course I’d heard, and so had everyone else in England—in the whole world, for that matter. By now it had likely been shown in cinema newsreels from London to Bombay.
    But that had been several days ago. Only an Englishman of a certain type could still have the incident running foremost in his brain.
    Or was he joking?
    I peered carefully at his face, but he gave away nothing.
    I couldn’t stop the smile from creeping up my cheeks.
    “I
had
heard, as a matter of fact,” I said. “Bugger Cambridge.”
    I’ll admit I was taking a chance. I had no idea, rather than the slightest hint in his accent, to which of our great universities he might belong. But since he had said “pity about Oxford,” I was going to take a chance that he was not being sarcastic.
    His ready smile told me that I had judged correctly.
    “RAW-ther!” he said, laying it on a bit thick.
    The crisis had passed. We had managed a delicate moment quite nicely, the two of us, in the most civilized way of all: deflection.
    Father would be proud of me—I know
I
was.
    I laid an affectionate hand on
Blithe Spirit
’s taut fabric, which gave off in the warm sunlight a slight but comforting reek of nitrocellulose lacquer. How perfect, in a way, I thought, that an aircraft’s skin should be painted with explosive guncotton in its liquid form.
    I sniffed my fingers surreptitiously, and in that instant added to my store of memories a smell that would fromnow and forever, until the end of time, never fail to remind me of Harriet.
    I glanced up—guiltily, for some odd reason—at the laboratory windows to see if Lena was watching, but the old glass, like the clouded eyes of some village ancient, showed no more than the reflected sky.

ELEVEN
    “B EAUTY , ISN ’ T SHE ?”
    Tristram Tallis brushed away an imaginary particle of dust from one of
Blithe Spirit
’s wings. “I bought her from your mother just before the War. We’ve had some grand times together, the old girl and I.”
    And he suddenly went the color of pickled beetroot. “
Blithe Spirit
and I, I mean. Not your mother.”
    I looked at him blankly.
    “I must make a clean breast of it, though: I renamed her years ago.
She’s
now a he:
Typhon
.”
    It seemed a sacrilege but I didn’t say so.
    “I trust you’ve spent many pleasant hours flying her—him.”
    “Not so many as I’d like.
Typhon—
”
    He saw the pained look on my face.
    “All right, then,
Blithe Spirit
, if you like, has been hangared for years.”
    “So you haven’t done much flying.”
    “I shouldn’t say that,” he said quietly. “No, I shouldn’t say that at all. I’ve had my innings.”
    “You were in the RAF!” I said as the light came on in my brain.
    “Biggin Hill.” He nodded modestly. “Mostly Spitfires.”
    Crikes! Here I was condescending to one of the young men Mr. Churchill had called “The Few”: one of those youthful warriors who had climbed high into the sky above England’s green and pleasant land to take on the German Luftwaffe.
    I had seen their photos in the back issues of
Picture Post
that littered the library of Buckshaw like drifts of fallen autumn leaves: those boyish pilots who, in their life vests and sheepskin