Cold-Blooded Myrtle Page 5

  She was right. I dug my toes into the hard, cold verge.

  “However,” she said brightly, “just because we don’t want to bother Mrs. Leighton by prying into her husband’s past, that doesn’t mean we can’t go prying into your mother’s.”

  Somehow, she made that sound entirely innocent and appealing, like a lark. My heart lifted, and I couldn’t keep the eagerness from my voice. “Can we go to the college?”

  “Where else?”

  *Miss Judson, devout daughter of missionaries, maintains the event was miraculous and therefore beyond scientific scrutiny.

  † according to Gospel accounts of shepherds watching over their flocks by night, typically a springtime activity

  ‡ per theories that the Star of Bethlehem was a sighting of Halley’s Comet in the fall of 12 B.C. I had given both of these factors sober consideration. The Bible, frustratingly, fails to specify.

  § Apparently most of Swinburne’s Criminal Element had taken time off for the holidays.

  ¶Perhaps she would appreciate a pair of waterproof gaiters.

  6

  Ding Dong Warily on High

  Sir Isaac Newton, England’s greatest scientific mind, was by British reckoning born on Christmas Day 1642—a charming fact until you realize that the rest of the Western world had already adopted the modern Gregorian calendar, according to which Newton’s birthday is, in fact, 4 January 1643. —H. M. Hardcastle, A Modern Yuletide

  We cycled to the college the following afternoon, braving the bracing air. The tram would have been more efficient (not to mention warm), but they frowned on Young Ladies of Quality hauling their bicycles aboard during rush hour. It was too cold for conversation. It was nearly too cold for pedaling. Bloomers might be less apt to get tangled in your bicycle chain, but they aren’t anywhere near as toasty as a good three or four flannel petticoats.

  I had visited Schofield College on occasion, mostly for scientific lectures and to avail myself of their capacious library. Being here had always made me feel intellectually stimulated and closer to Mum. I had often pictured myself dashing across the grounds one day, in my black academic robes, from lecture hall to examination, taking up my own university education.

  Now I looked about with an altogether different (and slightly frozen) eye. The college was a crime scene—the site of an unsolved mystery from decades ago. It sent a thrill through me, much more pleasurable than the frigid December wind. What secrets lurked beneath these venerable grounds?

  We heard the Campanile long before coming within sight of it. As we rode along a paved pathway, oddly clean and dry of snow, haunting chimes shivered through the icy air. They sounded like a child’s toy made gargantuan. Miss Judson braked sharply, planting a foot against the pavement.

  “That’s remarkable!” she said. Yelled. “Those aren’t ordinary church bells.”

  The sound had struck me senseless, and I could scarcely nod my agreement. Church bells in town just went clang or bong. This was a vast, spectral organ reverberating through the sky and deep into our bones, pulling us toward it like a magnet. “Let’s go see.”

  Our route took us among castlelike stone buildings with tall fretwork windows and lead roofs. The Campanile towered over them all, rising over a stand of fir trees and a circle of snowy park. The whole place had a solemn, studious air, but was eerily empty. We hardly saw a soul about—just another young woman in a short blue coat, strolling along the grounds, plaid skirts swishing through the snow. She briefly paused to Observe us, before moving along once more.

  “Where are the other students?” Tracks in the snow suggested that they were not long absent.

  “Yes, why isn’t everyone out enjoying the beautiful weather?” Miss Judson wound her muffler more snugly about her head, leaving a mere slit for visibility. “Here we are.”

  Here we were, indeed. Gazing upward, taking in the imposing height of the brick Campanile, it was alarming to imagine someone falling from the belfry—and downright impossible to conceive of her simply vanishing into the night. The great bells, just visible through the huge open arches near the roof, had stilled at last, leaving the world feeling hollow and desolate.

  “There’s no way anyone could survive such a fall,” I said with certainty. “It must be a hundred feet high.”

  “One hundred ten,” Miss Judson read, from the bronze plaque. Clad in rosy brickwork, with tiny arrow-slit windows, the rectangular tower soared up to a pointed roof amid a nest of stone spires. It had a fanciful, romantic air, as if it had escaped from a story book and was doing a poor job hiding in Swinburne.

  “It’s just like the Display.” Miss Judson’s sketchbook was out, although I had no idea how she thought she might draw with frozen fingers. “Look, there’s the belfry, and the clock . . .”

  “How does somebody fall from there?” I had to bend far backward to see all the way up into the blinding sun; I imagined the view down would be even more dizzying.

  “Did she jump? Was she pushed?”

  “What was she even doing up there? At night? In December?” Was Mum there?

  “Was she alone?” My eyes darted to Miss Judson, but she wasn’t looking at me. Surely she hadn’t read my mind. “Very curious.”

  Miss Judson studied the surrounding landscape. A thick hedge of holly encircled the tower’s base (or, rather, ensquared it). “Could she have landed here? Maybe the bushes broke her fall.”

  Glistening with red berries, they were taller than I, and thick enough to hide in. “They’d have been shorter all those years ago, though,” I reasoned. “Were there any bushes in the Display?”

  Her gloved fingers fumbled to the sketch she’d made at the shop. A neat series of small round plants—not the vast fairytale thicket before us—represented the younger shrubbery.

  “They wouldn’t have provided much cushion.” Certainly not enough to save someone from grievous injury.

  “Nor concealment for a body. One might assume that even all those years ago the constables would have thought to search the bushes.” Miss Judson’s estimation of Historical Constables was not especially great.

  “If I dropped my pocket watch from up there, it’s the first place I’d look,” I agreed. I looked up from the hedge to the belfry arches high above, another thought dawning. “But if I threw my watch . . .” Digging my notebook from my satchel, I strode purposefully away from the tower, trying to work out the correct Newtonian calculations. Inertia, trajectory, mass and acceleration . . .

  Miss Judson followed, crunching deftly through the snow in her tall boots and bloomers. She glanced at my notes with approval. “Physics. Excellent.”

  “There are too many variables, however.” I tapped my pencil against the notebook. “If she fell, she’d have probably gone straight down.”

  “But if somebody pushed her, she’d have landed much farther out.” Miss Judson faced away from the Campanile, out into the snowy field. “What do you think? Let’s assume she was about my size.”

  “Nine or ten stone, then?” I jotted that down. “A hundred and ten feet . . . thirty-two feet per second per second . . .”*

  “And was she thrown, or merely pushed?” At my frown of revulsion, she elaborated. “If she was unconscious when she fell, she’d have been a dead weight, going straight down. But if she was pushed while standing—or fleeing—there would have been a greater arc to her trajectory. She could have made it—maybe fifty feet at the outside?” She headed into the field, counting out paces as she went.

  “And people call me morbid,” I muttered, on her heels.

  Of course, twenty years on, there was nothing to see and no way to know if our estimations were correct. If it even mattered, since by all accounts Miss Blackwell had never landed at all. It was as if some great hand had reached out and simply plucked her from the sky.

  In the fading day, the Campanile’s shadow was long and
wide and gloomy, and I shivered with more than cold. “I want to get up there.”

  “Naturally.” If Miss Judson sighed, I was too far ahead to hear.

  The base of the Campanile was a spacious open portico framed by pointed Gothic arches and miniature guard towers (decorative only, no room for a lurking attacker or a hidden victim). An arched wooden door in the same medieval style was set into one corner. Disappointingly, however, it was locked.

  “A sensible precaution,” Miss Judson remarked. “Considering.” A notice board hung inside the brick walls, protected from the elements, and she strode over for a look. “Christmas Carillon Recital,” she read aloud, as I was still tugging fruitlessly at the door and gazing upward into the depths of the buttressed ceiling. “Saturday, ninth of December, featuring the music—” She started to lift the edge of the notice covering that one, when a sweet voice piped up behind us.

  “Are you coming to my concert?”

  I whirled about to see a slight young woman about Miss Judson’s age in the archway, with pale hair whipped free of its knot, wearing a voluminous dolman that matched her blue eyes. It was made for a much taller woman, and its wooly fringe brushed the snow. “I’m the carillonist,” she said, joining us. “Are you coming to my recital? It’s free and open to the public.”

  Miss Judson replied smoothly, “It sounds lovely. Was that you just now, ringing the clock?”

  The young woman smiled shyly. “No, that’s automated. But I was just about to go up and practice. Would you like to come? Visitors are welcome to see the bells. They’re even more impressive up close.”

  “If it’s not too much trouble,” I put in eagerly, before Miss Judson could decline the offer.

  She led us into a dark closet of a space, tiny arrow-loop windows casting faint illumination over an iron staircase. “It gets easier after this first bit.” The first narrow flight spiraled through the tower’s cramped stone footing, but then the stairs widened to fill the entire square tower, where light poured down from the belfry arches. It was gloriously warm inside, and Miss Judson unwrapped her muffler.

  “There’s the motor that runs the bells unless I’m playing.” The carillonist indicated an intricate mass of machinery mounted on a platform, hammers and pipes and gears waiting for their cue.

  “What powers it?” I asked.

  “Steam. We’re atop a network of steam tunnels that heat and supply power to the whole college. It’s very modern.”

  That explained the surprisingly cozy atmosphere. I pictured a great pipe organ inside the tower. “Like a calliope?”

  Her smile grew. “Not quite. In that case, the steam actually makes the music. Here it just powers that motor you saw. The system was devised by quite brilliant architects and engineers. Here we are!” We had reached a landing a little more than halfway up, and the carillonist shook out a ring of keys. “The clavier is in here. That’s the keyboard.”

  I had not thought through the logistics of the instrument, but it made sense that the bell-ringer must be some distance away from the great bells, if she wished to preserve her hearing. The carillonist admitted us into a small room that housed what looked, at first, like a huge weaving loom—or, I realized, the insides of a vast piano: a spare wooden frame hung with dozens of weighted wires, attached to a series of plain wooden handles, jutting out like teeth. It was quite impossible to make out what any of them would do—but somehow this device produced the oversized chiming of those monstrous bells. For a moment I stood there, mesmerized by the mechanics of it all. It was so beautifully precise and systematic, and yet something other­worldly came out of it.

  “Do you want to try?” The carillonist had Observed my awestruck gawking and slid over, making room on the bench. “Here, I’ll teach you ‘Westminster Quarters.’ ”†

  Dear Reader, for the next few minutes, I forgot all about Olive Blackwell and Mr. Leighton, about Mum and secrets and mysterious deaths. The carillonist—“You must call me Leah”—was a splendid teacher, almost as enthusiastic as Miss Judson. She showed me how to depress the huge foot pedals that rang some of the bells, and thwack my fists against the large wooden handles—the keys—that rang the others. It was done with great energy, not to mention noise—not at all the sort of delicate activity typically expected of Young Ladies of Quality.

  Leah was tiny, scarcely bigger than I, and we had to constantly shift up and down along the bench to reach all the keys we needed. The long blue fringe on her sleeves swung and danced as her hands flew along the keyboard. I was flushed and breathless when we finished.

  When the final reverberations had died away, Miss Judson broke into spirited applause. “Brava!” she cried. “That’s marvelous. You’ll be giving up Investigation for bell-ringing now.”

  I gave that the response it deserved, but I offered my thanks to Leah, who seemed pleased as well.

  “You must come up to the belfry,” she said. “The tour’s not complete until you’ve seen the bells themselves.”

  Whereupon Miss Judson and I recalled the purpose of our errand. Leah did not appear to notice our awkward silence, but led us from the clavier chamber back to the stairwell.

  “It’s up this way, past the clock.” She said this gravely, as if there were anywhere else they might have stashed thirty tons of bronze bells. After the ringing of the bells, the silence was crushing, pressing in all around us, but thin fresh air rushed in from every direction, including below. We Ladies of Quality instinctively held our hands to our skirts to keep them from inflating and carrying us off.

  “Are you a student here?” Miss Judson inquired as we climbed, but Leah shook her head.

  “No, I just play the bells. My father was a lecturer—Divinity—and we still live on the grounds. You can see our building from the tower.”

  “How long have you been playing?” asked Miss Judson.

  “It feels like all my life,” she confessed. “But really just the past few months. My mother was the carillonist before me.”

  “What a lovely legacy,” Miss Judson said.

  “There hadn’t been a carillonist for years since Mother retired after—well, for several years, anyway.”

  “Since what happened to Olive Blackwell?” I said that unintentionally. My excuse, Dear Reader, is that I was dizzy and breathless from the climb, and not nearly enough oxygen was feeding my brain cells for things like etiquette.

  Leah—clearly accustomed to the exertion—tilted her head and regarded me with those unsettlingly pale eyes. “Exactly. That’s why you came, isn’t it?”

  I flushed, and Miss Judson looked chagrined. “We didn’t mean to pry,” she lied politely.

  “It’s why everyone comes.” Leah’s voice was kind. “If I’m honest, it might even be why I come. You can’t help but be curious. It happened up here.” Voice hushed, she indicated the space right above us. There was no doorway, just the abrupt end to the stairs as they reached the belfry. She held out an inviting arm. “Watch where you step.”

  If the irony was intended, Dear Reader, it was impossible to say.

  The belfry was like being atop a huge chimney. The icy wind whooshed through the stone arches to buffet us, but merely whistled among the forest of bells, not strong enough to budge them. They hung in marshaled rows, largest to smallest at the top. Miss Judson and I could have fit together inside one of the largest bells, suspended in the emptiness below our feet; those nearest the ceiling were no bigger than my head. And in between, dozens more of every graduated size.

  “There’s hardly anywhere to step,” I said. Only a precarious wooden catwalk hugged the perimeter to permit maintenance of the bells. But it was all too easy to see how one misstep could cause catastrophe.

  One thing was certain: this was not a place anyone would bother to carry an unconscious or dead victim. It was too cumbersome, too inaccessible, when there were perfectly good ditches and sewers available.
Whatever had brought Olive Blackwell to this belltower that frigid winter night, she had come of her own volition.

  “What was she doing up here?” I hadn’t—really—meant to ask that aloud.

  I wasn’t expecting Leah to answer. “There was some sort of ritual,” she said, voice soft as a whisper.

  I jerked my head around, to see Miss Judson staring at her as well.

  “A group of students gathered here for a secret ceremony.” She laid a pensive hand upon a curve of bronze. “And it all went horribly wrong.”

  *Acceleration due to gravity is a most convenient mathematical constant.

  †

  7

  Sharp as Any Thorn

  The common holly, Ilex aquifolium, one of England’s few native evergreens, is the source of several toxic chemical compounds, including alkaloids, caffeine, theobromine, and saponins. —H. M. Hardcastle, A Modern Yuletide

  The wake of the carillonist’s words was as heavy and resonant as the silence after the bells. I could do no more than stare at her, and from what I could tell, Miss Judson felt the same. She’d braced a steadying hand against the wall, and another upon my arm, as if to hold me here in case I suddenly took it into my head to dash for the edge.

  Leah’s serene smile never wavered, as she squeezed onto the catwalk, strolling between bricks and bells. Her footfalls on the narrow planks were creaky and echoing, and I felt an anxious jolt with every step she took. Her cape rustled and swung, and I was convinced it would snag on a bell or tangle in the ropes and send Leah plunging to her death as well. But she was seemingly unafraid.

  “Olive Blackwell was a member of a secret society here at the college. Look, you can still see where they left their mark.” She pointed out a shadowy shape on the wall—remnants of old graffiti scrawled on the bricks: the profile of a Roman soldier in a brushed helmet.