As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (11 page)

“It’s all right, Matron,” Jumbo called out after what felt like an eternity, putting on a sleepy drawl. “I was having another of those horrid nightmares. I shall be all right in the morning. Good night.”

She was a girl after my own heart.

There was a muttered response, and then footsteps shuffled away in the hall, their sound fading.

“Some story!” Jumbo said when the danger had passed. She laughed lightly, as if she had to; as if it were part of a ritual.

She lighted the candle again, and our faces flared up out of the darkness, the whites of our widened eyes as large as the polar caps.

But something had changed. We were not the same girls we had been just minutes before. In that shared eternity of fright, and in some strange and indefinable way, we had
suddenly all become sisters. Sisters of the candlelight—and sisters of something else, also.

“Fetch the board, Gremly,” Jumbo ordered, as if a sudden decision had been made, and Gremly, scrambling to her feet, vanished into the shadows.

A moment later she was back with a flat red box. She opened it and, with surprising tenderness, placed a wooden playing board on the floor at the very center of our circle.

It was a Ouija board.

I was quite familiar with the game. Daffy and Feely had dug a similar one out of a cupboard at Buckshaw and had terrorized me for a time by raising the ghost of Captain Cut-Throat, a malicious spirit from the days of piracy on the high seas, who had ratted on me at every opportunity. The captain had informed my sisters, by way of the moving tablet, that I had stolen perfume from one of them (true: I had taken it for a chemical experiment involving the essential oils of civet musk) and that it was I who had caused a certain book to vanish from beneath the pillow of the other (also true: I had nicked Daffy’s copy of
Ulysses
because it was the perfect thickness to prop up the broken leg of my bedside table).

Letter by letter, word by word, and interspersed with his beastly “Har! Har! Har!,” the dead captain had caused the planchette to creep across the board on its three little legs, laying bare, one by one, some of my best-kept secrets—including several of which I was not very proud—until I happened to notice that the old sea dog misspelled the word “cemetery” with the ending “a-r-y”—in exactly the same way as Daffy did in her diary!

I couldn’t help smiling now as I recalled how sweet—and how swift!—my revenge had been upon my smug sisters. Daffy, in particular, had been afraid to close her eyes for a month.

“All fingers on!” Jumbo commanded, and we all pressed the first two fingers of each hand onto the heart-shaped wooden pointer. It was a tight fit.

Someone giggled.

“Shhh!” Jumbo said. “Show the spirits some respect.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “O spirits,” she said, “we bid you come among us.”

There was a nervous silence.

“O spirits,” she repeated, her voice a tone higher, “we bid you come among us.”

I remembered from my sisters’ use of the Ouija board that, like the characters in fairy tales, the spirits needed to be told everything three times.

I could easily relate to that.

“O spirits,” Jumbo said again, this time in a whisper, “we bid you come among us.”

Something electric was in the air. The hair at the back of my neck was already standing on end as it did when, in my laboratory, I rubbed an ebonite rod on my woolen jumper and waved it behind my head.

“Is someone here?”

With startling speed, the cursor jerked to life and began to slide. Across the board it flew, without the slightest hesitation, and stopped at “Yes.”

Jumbo had opened her eyes to take a reading. “Who are you?” she asked in a conversational tone.

There was no reply and she repeated her question two more times.

Now the cursor was on the move again, sliding silkily to and fro across the board’s smooth surface, picking out letters, one by one, pausing only briefly at each before moving on to the next.

D—A—R—K—H—E—R—E, it spelled out.

“We understand,” Jumbo said, snapping her fingers. “We light a light for you.”

Snap!

She had obviously done this sort of thing before.

“Is that better?”

The cursor scurried across the board and stopped at the word “YES.”

“Do you have a message for someone here?”

“YES.”

For just an instant, my blood ran cold. Could this be the ghost of my mother, Harriet? She had, after all, once been a student at Miss Bodycote’s. Perhaps a part of her was attached to the place forever.

In truth, I hoped it wasn’t Harriet. I had received from her once before a message from beyond the grave: a message telling me that she was cold and wanted to come home.

I didn’t think that I could bear another.

Please don’t let it be Harriet!

As uncharitable as that might seem.

Get a grip, Flavia!
I thought, and not for the first time.

“Who are you?” Jumbo asked, three times and slowly. “What is your name?”

It came in a rush. The pointer scuttled back and forth across the board like a panicked lobster.

L—E—M—A—R—C—H—A—N—D

Gremly, who had been writing down the results with the stub of a lead pencil, gasped. “Le Marchand!” she cried.

It was the name of one of the girls who, according to Collingwood, had gone missing from Miss Bodycote’s.

I looked round the circle of blanched faces. It was obvious from their haunted eyes that each one of them had already made the connection.

“Oh, my God!” someone whispered.

I have to give Jumbo credit. She was on to it like a terrier on a rat.

“We are prepared for your message.”

I noticed that even at a moment so tense as this, Jumbo spoke to the spirit in a grammatically correct manner. Again, she repeated her words three times.

The pointer fairly flew across the board.

O—N—E—O—F—Y—O—U—K—N—O—W—S—M—Y—K—I—L—L—E—R

“One of you knows my killer!” Gremly gasped, reading aloud the words she had just scribbled down.

With a sweep of her hand, the tiny blonde across from me sent the planchette flying to the far corner of the room.

“Enough!” she said. “This is stupid.”

“Steady on, Trout,” Jumbo said. “If you’ve busted the thing, it’s coming out of your pocket money.”

Trout. So that was her name.

I looked round the circle.

One of the girls—on my left—had made a puddle.

A
NYONE WHO HAS EVER
played with a Ouija board has pushed.

I can practically guarantee it.

Let’s admit it: You’ve pushed, I’ve pushed—everyone has pushed.

The opportunity is simply too good to pass up.

Initially, someone else in the circle had been doing the pushing, and for a few minutes, even I had wavered. Wavered? No, more than that: I’ll admit that the first message shook me. But then rational thought had returned, and I realized that I’d just been handed a rare gift from the gods.

From that point on, it had been yours truly, Flavia de Luce, guiding the planchette.

One of you knows my killer
.

Sheer inspiration on my part!

The results had been even more gratifying than I’d
hoped. Trout had been shocked into scattering the board and its runner, and the girl to my left had lost control of her bladder.

I needed to make her acquaintance at the earliest possible moment.

“Oh, dear!” I said, going all solicitous and helping her to her feet. I noticed that no one else made a move. I would have her all to myself.

I led her along the hall to the WC called Cartimandua, which would be a safe haven for an interview, I thought. Although it was forbidden for any girl to be in another’s room after lights-out, there was no law against two of us answering the call of nature at the same time.

“My name is de Luce,” I said, as the tiny creature retired into one of the cubicles. “Flavia.”

“I know who you are, well enough,” she said, her voice echoing oddly from the room’s glazed surfaces.

“But I don’t believe I know yours,” I said.

There was a hollow silence. And then her name came, almost in a whisper.

“Brazenose. Mary Jane.”

Brazenose? It couldn’t be! That was the name of one of the missing girls.

Le Marchand, Wentworth, and Brazenose—or so Collingwood had told me.

Surely there couldn’t be more than one Brazenose in such a small establishment as Miss Bodycote’s?

Or could there?

“Was she your sister?” I asked gently.

A torrent of sobs from the cubicle provided the answer.

“Come out of there,” I said, and surprisingly, she obeyed. The cubicle door clicked open and a moment later, this poor, pale, damp little chick was enfolded in my arms, weeping woefully into my shoulder as if her heart would break.

“I’m sorry,” I told her, honestly meaning it, and for now that had to be enough.

The possibility that the body in the chimney might be her sister must not—at least for now—be put into words. I hardly dared even think the thought for fear that she would somehow read my mind.

But perhaps she had realized it already.

Brazenose was hanging on to me as if she were a shipwreck victim, and I a floating log. And who knows? Perhaps she was.

Perhaps I was, too.

What remarkable bonds we form
, I thought, as she clung to me.
And what very odd ones
.

She seemed reluctant to break away—reluctant to have to look me in the eyes.

“Better wash your face,” I said at last. “In case they call a snap Holy Communion service.”

That fetched the ghost of a smile.

“You are a very peculiar person, Flavia de Luce,” she said in a dampish voice.

I made a deep bow, heel to instep, sweeping an imaginary cavalier’s feathered hat toward the floor with one hand.

As Brazenose was scrubbing her face at the sink, the door opened and Fitzgibbon came into the room.

Was she surprised to see us? I couldn’t tell.

“You’re up late, girls,” she said. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes, Matron,” Brazenose said in a surprisingly strong voice, and I, as a newcomer not expected to know any better, merely nodded.

“Well, then, off to bed with the both of you,” Fitzgibbon said. “No lights, mind.”

We whispered to each other as we went along the hall.

“Don’t believe the Ouija board,” I told her. “It’s a gyp. Someone in Jumbo’s room was spelling out the words.”

Brazenose’s eyes were like lanterns in the darkness. “Are you sure?” she breathed.

“Yes,” I told her. “It was me.”

Half an hour later, as I lay in bed, unable to sleep, I wondered about what I had said.

Were points given out in Heaven for a half-truth?

I remembered from long-ago sermons at St. Tancred’s that lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, but that those who act faithfully are his delight. But how did God feel about those who merely fiddled the facts?

It was true that I had been in control of the board toward the end of the séance, but not at the beginning. It was not I who had spelled out that spine-chilling name, Le Marchand.

Who, then, had been the culprit?

The only possibilities were those other girls, besides myself, who had placed their fingers on the Ouija board’s planchette. These were Jumbo herself, Gremly, Van Arque,
Brazenose, Trout, and the other two whose names I had not learned.

Druce, of course, had not been present. That let her out.

It was clear that I needed to find out at once the identities of those other two girls.

Whom should I ask? It seemed obvious: the girl who was presently most obligated to me.

Dear little Brazenose.

Had I been wrong to confide in her? Had I put myself at risk by taking a chance?

Well, for better or for worse, I had done so. And now I needed to grill this girl at length.

It had been too late to begin tonight, and I had already risked—not once but twice!—being abroad after lights-out.

It would have to wait until morning.

With that decided, I rolled over and slept like the log in the proverb.

I don’t think that I shall ever forget, as long as I live, the sounds of Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy coming to life in the morning.

First would come the clanking of the pipes and steam radiators, sounding for all the world like armored knights having a practice joust with playful young dragons, who gurgled and hissed more to show off than anything else.

Then the distant tobacco-coughing of the mistresses and—I’m sorry to say—some of the more forward girls, which seemed to me were most of them.

Next was the synchronized flushing of the WCs. Somewhere a gramophone would start up as one of the sixth-form girls exercised her senior’s rights: The sounds of Mantovani’s “Charmaine” would come slithering down the staircases like liquid honey, pooling stickily on each floor before oozing on down to the next. This would be followed by “Shrimp Boats Are A’Comin,” “Mockin’ Bird Hill,” “On Top of Old Smokey,” and “Aba Daba Honeymoon.”

To ears such as mine, brought up on the BBC Home Service, it was like living in a grass hut among savages on a desert island.

Voices would call to one another and sudden laughter would ring out, followed by the scuffing of shoe leather on floors and stairs and, drifting in through an open window from the street outside, the clopping of the elderly automaton horses that drew the various bread and milk wagons from door to door.

In the distance, on the Danforth, the streetcars would clang their impatient
ding-ding!
at foolhardy motorists and pedestrians.

How very different it all was from the seclusion of Buckshaw.

It was then, in the mornings, that homesickness would rise in my throat, threatening to choke the very life out of me.

Hold on, Flavia, it shall pass
, I would tell myself.

I was doing that this morning, hanging on to the mantelpiece for dear life when suddenly, and with no warning, my door flew open.

It was Miss Fawlthorne.

“Report to me after gymnastics,” she said abruptly, scanning the room with a professional eye, and then she was gone.