As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (24 page)

I’m afraid my curled lip gave me away.

“You see? You need to master the poker face. There might come a time when your life depends upon it.”

“In case someone asks me to marry him, you mean.”

I don’t know where the words came from. There are times when the gods (or devils) choose to amuse themselves by speaking through our mouths, and this was one of them.

I hadn’t even remotely been thinking about marriage—not for myself nor for anyone else of my acquaintance—but out it popped.

“Precisely,” Mrs. Bannerman said. “I’m glad you understand.”

She gave me a smile which I could not decode: a smile in which she narrowed her eyes and raised only the corners of her mouth. What could it possibly mean?

I looked at her for further signals, but she was sending none.

And then it hit me with an almost physical force:
approval
. She had given me a look of approval, and because it was the first I had ever received in my life, I had not recognized it for what it was.

As when a match is applied to a dry log in the fireplace, a slow warmth began seeping through my whole being.

So
this
was what approval felt like! I could easily become an addict.

The thought of a fireplace reminded me of the one in Edith Cavell, and the bundle that had tumbled down it and into the room. And, of course, of the missing Clarissa Brazenose.

Which was why I was here, wasn’t it?

I took a deep breath and hurled myself into the unknown. “Brazenose major,” I said, and waited for a response. In conversation among adults, there is no longer the need to spin out a question to childish lengths. In fact, it wasn’t a question at all, was it? Rather, the mere mention of a missing person’s name.

“What about her?” Mrs. Bannerman asked.

“She won the Saint Michael medal, or medallion, or whatever it’s called—and then she vanished.”

“Did she?”

Mrs. Bannerman’s expression had not changed one iota, or, as we used to say in England, a jot.

She was watching with approval, I realized, as I learned the steps of the dance by placing one slow foot ahead of the other.

I knew, of course, that I was forbidden to ask personal questions of the other girls, but did that same restriction apply to the faculty? The only way to find out had been to ask without really seeming to.

It was all so bloody complicated.

And yet I was enjoying it.

Daffy had bored me stiff one rainy Sunday afternoon by reading aloud from the
Dialogues of Plato
, in which a gaggle of sissified young men—or so it seemed to me—had traipsed
round a sunny courtyard behind their master asking all the right questions: the ones that allowed him to deliver his thunderbolts of logic to their greatest effect.

Like stooges feeding straight lines to a famous comedian, their function was to make him look good.

What a load of old codswallop
, I had thought at the time, and had said as much to Daffy.

But could it be that this was how the world really worked?

The thought floored me—almost literally. I reached out and touched the edge of a table to steady myself.

“Yes,” I said, trying out my new sea legs. “She did. She won the Saint Michael and vanished.”

I took a deep breath, and then I said: “But she was seen last night. She’s still here.”

“Is she indeed?” Mrs. Bannerman said, raising an eyebrow in what might well have been mockery.

“Yes,” I said. “She was seen near the laundry.”

“Indeed? From which you deduce?”

I was thoroughly enjoying this: a match of wits in which questions became answers and answers questions: a topsy-turvy mirror game in which nothing was given away.

Or everything.

Lewis Carroll had been right in
Through the Looking-Glass
. Reality made no sense whatsoever.

“That she was never missing,” I said, taking the plunge. “That she was never dead.

“And nor were—or are—Wentworth or Le Marchand,” I added.

“Hmmm,” Mrs. Bannerman said.

The perfect answer.

She poked a forefinger into the hair above her ear, correcting a single strand that was struggling to escape.

“Now, then,” she said, turning to the hydrogen spectrophotometer, at which she had been working when I came into the room. “Let us discover why the feet of this luna moth,
Actius luna
, should be exhibiting traces of arsenic. It’s a pretty puzzle.”

And I couldn’t have agreed more.

I
HAVE SAID NOTHING
so far about church or chapel, hoping perhaps that they would go away. Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy, being hand in glove with the Church of England, or “Anglican” as it was called here in the colonies (and “Episcopal” just south of the border in the United States of America), was subject to all the ritual that one would expect: chapel every morning on the premises, conducted in what had once been the chapel of the original convent, and a church parade on Sunday mornings to the nearby cathedral for the full-strength dose of Scripture and dire warnings.

Church parade?
I should have said “church straggle.” It is probably easier to train a pack of hunting hounds to sing an oratorio by Bach than it is to get a gaggle of girls to go in orderly fashion along a broad avenue in full view of the
public without some mischief making a mockery of the day.

The usual order of march was this: Miss Fawlthorne and the faculty in the lead, followed by the girls in order of form, the youngest first all the way up to the sixth, with Jumbo, as head girl, bringing up the rear.

Clustered round Jumbo were the usual culprits who enjoyed a jolly good smoke in the open air: Fabian, Van Arque, and a couple of other younger scofflaws who were just learning how to inhale.

Because of that, there was a great deal of coughing at the back of the column, accompanied by an unusual and dramatic amount of hawking and spitting.

Occasionally we would meet Sunday strollers, or overtake older churchgoers who were headed on foot in the same direction, who would sometimes look in horror upon what must have seemed like an outing from the Toronto Free Hospital for Consumptive Poor.

“It’s the
food
!” Van Arque would choke, pounding her chest as we passed. “Nothing but tongue and beans.” Which didn’t explain the smoke leaking from the corners of her mouth as she spoke.

Although I was marching with the fourth form, I was able to fall gradually back in line by the simple technique of stopping twice to tie my shoelaces. I rejoined the column just as Scarlett came along.

“Dit-dit-dit-dit, dit-dit,”
I said.
“Hi.”

“Dit-dit-dit, dit-dit-dit-dit, dit-dit-dit-dit, dit-dit-dit-dit,”
she replied.
“Shhh.”

We shambled along in silence for a minute, and then I whispered, “What do you think happened to her? Brazenose, I mean.”

Her eyes were huge as they swiveled toward me. “I can’t tell you,” she said. “So please stop asking me.”

This made no sense whatsoever. Scarlett had been happy enough to prattle on at the camp about her recent nighttime sighting of a girl who had supposedly vanished two years ago, but was now unwilling to hazard a guess as to why.

What—or
whom
—could she be afraid of?

I had no choice but to lay all my cards on the table. It was risky, but there was no other way. It was my duty.

Aunt Felicity had more than once lectured me on my inherited duty.

“Your duty will become as clear to you as if it were a white line painted down the middle of the road,” she had said. “You must follow it, Flavia.”

The words of my aged aunt echoed as clearly in my ears as if she were walking along beside me.

“Even when it leads to murder?” I had asked her.

“Even when it leads to murder.”

Well, it
had
led to murder, hadn’t it? That charred, decapitated wretch, whoever she might have been, who had plummeted down the chimney and rolled across the floor of Edith Cavell, was certainly not a suicide.

I took a deep breath, leaned toward Scarlett, and whispered into her ear. “And have you, also, acquired a taste for pheasant sandwiches?”

The effect upon Amelia Scarlett was shocking. The color drained from her face as if a tap had been opened somewhere. She stopped dead in her tracks—so suddenly that Fabian, who had been walking directly behind, smashed into her, fell to her knees, and, seeing that she had ripped one of her stockings, let loose a word that is not supposed to be known to the girls of Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy.

I knew at once that it was a mistake.

“Smarten up, you clowns,” Jumbo said. “You’ll get
all
of us blacked. Fall in at the rear.”

And so it was that Scarlett and I found ourselves at the very fag end of the march, walking stiffly along in silence, shoulder to shoulder, but not knowing what to say to each other.

After a hundred yards of misery, she broke into a sprint and charged ahead until she was lost from view among the other girls of the fourth.

The rector was a frail old lamb with an enormous mop of white hair, who peered down at us from his pulpit like a lookout in the crow’s nest of a ship in a stormy sea. Each of us, he was insisting, was no more than a section of scaffolding being used to help erect the greater glory of God.

I could well picture
him
, swaying slowly from side to side in his lofty perch, as a bit of scaffolding, but as for me …?

No, thank you!

The very idea made me balk at the proceedings: so much
so that when he finally gave the benediction and came creeping down to rejoin us other skeletons of steel, and the hymn was sung, I made a great point of setting myself apart from the proceedings by singing: “Braise my soul the King of Heaven …”

Not that anyone noticed. They never do.

Except Feely, of course. From her perch on the organ bench at St. Tancred’s, my older sister was always able to hear even the slightest improvisation on my part, and would swing round her burning-glass gaze to put me in my place.

I was struck by a sudden pang.

Dear God!
I thought.
How I miss her!

As if she were here, I fell back into line with the other singers:

That was just it, wasn’t it?
That’s
what we were: dwellers all in time and space. Not old scraps of iron lashed together like a Meccano set by some invisible builder—not on your bloody life!

I looked over at Mrs. Bannerman. What did
she
think, I wondered, of being labeled a section of scaffolding? She had come within an ace of meeting her end on the most dreaded bit of scaffolding in the whole wide world. A date
with the public hangman, I expect, is not one that can be easily forgotten.

And yet, here she was, head held high, caroling away, bright-eyed, and with a slight, mystical smile on her lips, as if science were her Savior.

… As if she knew something that none of the rest of us knew.

Perhaps she did. Perhaps—

In that instant, I understood what I must do. Of course I did: I had planned it all along.

There is a standing and unwritten order in most churches that a worshipper taken ill is not to be interfered with. One minute it’s “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.” And the next it’s “Action stations!” as we flee, hand over mouth, to the nearest exit.

It is a good rule, and one that I had taken advantage of in the past.

Even before the last notes of the organ had died up among the rafters, I gave Mrs. Bannerman a tight, gulping smile.

“Excuse me,” I managed, edging my way to the end of the pew, and then I fled.

The entire academy was here at church, and would be for at least the next hour. I turned my face toward the east and ran like a scalded rabbit.

I needed to question Collingwood without interference, and this was the time to do it. After the purging I had
given her, and a good night’s sleep, she should have recovered sufficiently from the chloral hydrate to be subjected to a jolly good grilling.

As I knew it would be, Miss Bodycote’s was in perfect silence.

There is always something vaguely unsettling about being alone in an empty building that is not your own. It is as if, whenever present inhabitants are away, the phantoms of former owners come shimmering out of the woodwork to protect their territory. Although you cannot see these ghosts, you can certainly feel their unwelcoming presence, and sometimes even smell them: a sort of shivering in the air that tells you that you’re not alone and not wanted.

Like layers of ancient paint, the older ones underlie the newer: fainter, paler perhaps, and yet, for all that, far more ominous.

What sights have been witnessed by these arching ceilings?
I wondered.
What tragedies have played out in these ancient halls?

My back sprouted goose bumps.

Up the cold, dim stairs I flew and into the infirmary, as if all the demons of hell were gnashing their teeth at my heels.

The gaunt drapes were drawn round Collingwood’s bed.

“Quickly,” I said in a hoarse whisper. “Get up. Get dressed. We’re getting you out of here.”

The curtain rings shrieked on their metal rods as I yanked back the hanging curtain.

Collingwood’s bed was not only empty: It was as neatly and as freshly made as if it had been arranged for a magazine photograph.

“Well, well,” said a voice behind me, and I spun round. Ryerson Rainsmith was closing the clasps of a black leather doctor’s bag.

Of course! Flavia, you idiot!

Doctor
Rainsmith, his wife had called him on the ship, and I had not heard because I had not wanted to hear.

It was Rainsmith who had been dosing Collingwood with chloral hydrate. And it was Rainsmith whom Fitzgibbon had been referring to when she said she’d have the doctor look in later. How could I have been such a fool not to see it?