The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches Read Online Free PDF

constant rotation, and my hands smelled as if they had been—well, never mind.
    No need for a fixer: The bleach and clearing solutions would have already removed the reduced silver from the first developer, and whatever silver halide remained had been reduced to elemental silver by the second developer and was now forming the black parts of the image.
    Easy as Cottleston pie.
    I let the film rest for a few minutes in a tray of water to which I had added alum for hardening purposes, in order to make it scratch-resistant.
    After a time, I pulled up a length of the film and peered at it through a magnifying glass.
    My heart skipped a beat.
    The images were heartbreakingly plain: In frame after frame, Harriet and Father were seated on a picnic blanketin front of the Folly on the island in Buckshaw’s ornamental lake.
    I turned off the room light and let the film sink into the water, leaving the dim red safelight as the only illumination, not because it was necessary, but because it seemed somehow more respectful.
    As I have said, I traced their initials in the water:

    Harriet and Haviland de Luce. I was not able, at least for now, to look at their faces in anything other than light the color of blood.
    It was too much like spying on them.
    Finally, reverently, almost reluctantly, I removed the film from the water and wiped it clean with a bath sponge. I carried it out into the laboratory and hung it up to dry, draping it in great drooping festoons from the framed table of the elements on the west wall to the signed photograph of Winston Churchill on the east.
    In my bedroom, waiting for the film to dry, I dug out from the pile under my bed the disc I wanted: Rachmaninoff’s
Eighteenth Variation on a Theme by Paganini
, the best piece of music I could think of to accompany the recalling of a great love story.
    I wound up my gramophone and dropped the needle into the spinning shellac groove. As the melody began, I seated myself, knees drawn up under my chin, in one of thewindow seats overlooking the Visto, the long-overgrown lawn upon which Harriet had once tied down her de Havilland Gipsy Moth,
Blithe Spirit
.
    I fancied I could hear the clatter of her engine as Harriet lifted off among the swirling morning mists, rising up above the chimney pots of Buckshaw, up above the ornamental lake with its Georgian Folly, and vanishing into a future from which she would not return.
    It had been more than ten years since Harriet had disappeared, killed, we were told, in a climbing accident in Tibet: ten long, hard years, nearly half of which Father had spent in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. He had made his way home at last, only to find himself wifeless, penniless, and in grave danger of losing Buckshaw.
    The estate had belonged to Harriet, who had inherited it from Uncle Tar, but because she had died without leaving a will, “the Forces of Darkness” (as Father had once referred to the gray men of His Majesty’s Board of Inland Revenue Department) had been hounding him as if, rather than a returning war hero, he were an escapee from Broadmoor.
    And now Buckshaw was crumbling. Ten years of neglect, sadness, and shortage of funds had taken its toll. The family silver had been sent up to London for auction, budgets had been trimmed and belts tightened. But it was no use, and at Easter, our home had finally been put up for sale.
    Father had, for ages, been warning us that we might have to leave Buckshaw at a moment’s notice.
    And then, just days ago, having received a mysterioustelephone message, he had at last summoned the three of us—Feely, Daffy, and me—to the drawing room.
    He had looked slowly from one of us to the other before breaking the news.
    “Your mother,” he said at last, “has been found.”
    More than that: She was coming home.

FOUR
    I REALIZED THAT, EVER since Father’s shocking announcement, I had been shutting myself off from reality: shoving the facts into some kit-bag corner of my mind and pulling tight