As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (26 page)

As my eyes swept across the 6th of July, a familiar name caught my eye: Brazenose, C.

Clarissa Brazenose.

But wait! Hadn’t she vanished weeks earlier? The night of the Beaux Arts Ball? And reappeared two years later—at least, according to Scarlett—the night before our trip to the training camp … the same day, coincidentally, as my walk in the churchyard with Miss Fawlthorne … and on the eve of my first class in the chemistry lab with Mrs. Bannerman?

Could there be a connection?

Where had she been for the past six hundred and some-odd days? For that matter, where was she now?

Assuming that Clarissa Brazenose was still alive and not a specter, it could hardly have been
her
body that had tumbled down the chimney.

Whose was it, then?

My mind was writhing with ideas like so many snakes in a pit.

For instance, I had not so far come across any entries for the teaching staff. Perhaps they were expected to see to their own laundry expenses, but was that likely? Any institution with such a great roaring steam laundry as Miss Bodycote’s would surely not deny its services to the faculty.

Another reach to the top shelf brought down an unmarked volume.

Aha! This was more like it: Fawlthorne, Puddicombe, Moate, Bannerman, Fitzgibbon—here they were, the faculty bigwigs, in all their laundered glory.

I was exalted for about six and a half seconds, and then I saw that there were no informative details given, as there had been for the students. The items cleaned were simply listed, which made sense, of course, since the owners were not being charged for the service.

But what had I expected? Cyanide stains on the frock of Mrs. Bannerman close to the date of her husband’s demise? It was too much to hope. Life didn’t work that way—nor did death.

The only item of interest was a recurring entry for “Overalls” under the name Kelly.

At last! Here was my missing “K”: that so-far invisible person who stoked the boilers—or whatever it was he or
she did to require access to the laundry—whose key I had just used to gain entry to the place.

I saw at once that Kelly was subject to rips and grass stains, and once each to “tar” and “lock oil.”

I was standing there with the book in my hand when, from the corner of my eye, I caught a sudden movement.

I whipped round and found myself face-to-face with a cliff of hulking flesh. Where on earth had he come from? I had locked the door behind me when I came in, and the only other access to the laundry was by way of a pair of steel doors at the back which, as I could plainly see, were locked and barred.

He must have been here all along! The very thought of it made my toes curl.

“What are you up to?” he demanded in a wood-rasp voice.

The smell of alcohol almost bowled me over.

It didn’t take the brains of a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that this bruiser had been drinking behind the boilers. His red and crusted eyes told the rest of the tale: Here was a man who made the most of a quiet Sunday to have a nip and a nap. There were probably hundreds like him the world over.

“I found the door unlocked,” I said, with just a trace of recrimination in my voice, a trick I had learned from Feely. I waved the laundry book at him.

“I was just looking to see if Miss Fawlthorne’s number is listed. I intended to ring her up and then stand guard until she can come and secure the place. What I mean is that I’ve just
rung
her up, and I’m waiting for her to arrive.”

The fact that it was Sunday and that Miss Fawlthorne and her entire scurvy crew and officers were away at church hardly mattered to this boozy specimen—or at least I hoped it didn’t.

Alcohol is impervious to logic
, my late Uncle Tarquin had written in one of his laboratory notebooks, though whether this insight was from personal experience, a specific chemical observation, or simply a bit of stray philosophy I had never been able to decide.

“No, don’t do that!” the man snarled, wrenching the book from my hands. “I’m in charge here. If the dooorss’s open—” He fumbled as if he couldn’t think of the next word. “S’because
I
opened it, see?”

His vaporous breath trembled in the air, making the laundry seem more than ever like Dante’s
Inferno
. I found myself waiting for lava to come bubbling from his mouth.

Here you are, Flavia, locked in a soundproof stone building with an angry, inebriated stranger who’s three times your size and weight: a bruiser who, with one fist, could reduce you to a splatter of jam on the floorboards. There’s no one nearby to rescue you. You’re on your own
—
it’s brains against brawn
.

“You must be Mr. Kelly,” I said, sticking out a hand.

The Human Mountain struggled to focus, edging his feet farther apart for better balance, his stale eyes staring.

“Miss Fawlthorne has often spoken so well of you,” I added, “that I feel as if we’ve already met.”

And then, incredibly, a great oily ham of a hand came forward and seized mine. “How do you do, miss. Edward Kelly is my name.”

A wave of something swept over me, and I had a sudden
vision of this pathetic human being as a boy, standing defenseless before some schoolmaster or schoolmistress, now long dead.

“Say ‘How do you do,’ Edward.”

He shuffled his feet, then and now, and I knew for a fact that those words had never, ever, since that long-ago day, escaped from his lips.

“How do you do?” he asked again, as if I hadn’t heard, the words stilted and awkward—not at home in his slack mouth.

“Very well, thank you, Mr. Kelly,” I said, retrieving my hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Was I pushing my luck? Perhaps, but his reaction told me I had chosen precisely the right words.

“Likewise,” he said, reverting to some ancient remembered formula. “Likewise indeed.”

Was he sobering a little, or was I imagining it?

“Well, then,” I said, taking charge, “I can see there’s no need for Miss Fawlthorne to be bothered. I expect she’s already on her way, so I’ll just run along and head her off at the pass. She’ll be relieved to hear everything’s under control.”

“Head off at the pass” was a phrase I had heard in the cinema films, often used by Hopalong Cassidy or Randolph Scott or Roy Rogers, which seemed somehow more appropriate here in North America than it did back home in Merrie England, where cowboy chitchat was as scarce as hens’ dentures.

I stepped to the door, Kelly tracking me with his sad eyes.

“A very
great
pleasure,” I added, partly for his sake and partly for my own.

My exit was as serene and duchesslike as I could manage, and it occurred to me that this leaving people standing was becoming a habit: first the Rainsmiths and now Edward Kelly. If I kept it up, the whole planet would soon be peopled with people frozen stiff on the spot by my departures.

A shout in the distance and the sound of girls laughing told me that the academy had returned from church. The aged rector had either run out of energy or ideas, or passed away in the pulpit.

I drifted toward the hockey field, wanting more than anything to be alone. It was a lovely autumn day, the sun was warm, and I still needed somewhere to think without being interrupted.

I sank down onto my knees in the soft grass, planted my hands behind me, and fell back on them, turning my face upward toward the sky like a sunflower. No one would disturb me in such a posture, which clearly indicated someone communing privately with Nature.

I knew that hunched shoulders, hanging hair, and eyes on the ground were fairly reliable signs of a girl dejected, a girl who needed to be approached and jollied into a nice talk or a nice cup of tea; whereas a back-flung head, with eyes closed and a secret smile on the upturned face, was the signal of someone who needed to be left alone with her thoughts.

It was clever of me to have worked out such a useful tactic.

“Hello,” said a voice. “May I join you?”

I kept my eyes closed and my mouth shut, hoping she would go away.

It was too late to form my thumbs and forefingers into little circles and begin loudly chanting “
OM MANE PADME HUM
” like a Tibetan lama, or the pilgrims in
Lost Horizon
.

“De Luce …”

I ignored her.

“Flavia? Are you feeling better?”

I allowed one eye to crack slightly open like an iguana.

It was Jumbo.

“Yes, thank you,” I said, and left it at that. Most people would have felt obliged to tack on some kind of explanation, but not I.

There is a mystery in silence that can never be matched by mere words. Silence is power—at least until they grab you by the neck.

“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure, thank you.”

I find there is always an electric thrill in such conversations: invisible fingers of excitement in the air, like lightning behind the hills.

“We were worried about you. Miss Fawlthorne asked me to see if you were all right.”

I let my eye drift slowly shut. “Yes, I’m quite all right, thank you.”

It was incredible! How long could I keep this up? Five minutes? Ten minutes?

An hour?

I heard the rustle of her starched skirt as Jumbo sat down beside me. Whatever was on her mind must be important enough to risk getting grass stains on her outfit. Her mouth brushed my ear as she folded herself into position beside me.

“We need to talk,” she whispered.

Were we being watched? Were unknown eyes staring down at us from the tall, blank windows of Miss Bodycote’s? To them, we would appear to be no more than a couple of tiny, distant sails in a vast sea of grass.

Why was I being so wary? And why, for that matter, was Jumbo?

I let my eyes come open slowly.

“I was thinking about the Michael Award,” I said, which left things suitably up in the air.

“Past or present?”

Jumbo was no fool.

Without answering her question, I allowed myself to go all romantic. “I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to stand up there on the stage in front of all those people, being presented with a silver archangel by … who is it that hands out those things, anyway?”

“Dr. Rainsmith.”

“Him or her?” I tried to keep the excitement out of my voice.

“Him, of course. She just comes along for the champagne tarts.”

Jumbo ought to know, I realized. At the time of Brazenose major’s disappearance, Jumbo would have been in the fifth form. And like Brazenose, she had been here for ages.

“What about two years ago, when Brazenose won it?”

“You need to watch your step,” Jumbo said suddenly, hissing the words.

“Why?” I demanded.

It’s ever so easy to be bold in bright sunlight.

“Things are not what they seem,” she said.

I wanted to tell her that I’d been aware of that fact for as long as I could remember, but I resisted the urge.

“You’re wading into real danger,” Jumbo continued, “without even realizing it. You’re already in over your head. Scarlett has tried to warn you, and so has Gremly.”

I sat quietly, not wanting to break the fragile cobweb of power I had created with my semi-silence. Outwardly, I was no more than a serenely stubborn girl sitting on a sunny lawn with her nose in the air.

But what could Jumbo mean? How could I possibly be wrong in my deductions to date? I couldn’t be—I was sure of it.

Until, that is, a horrific thought sprang into my mind: What if Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy, besides our secret schooling in codes and ciphers and the black arts of science, trained certain of its students in the act of murder? What if each of them—of us!—was required, as some kind of horrific graduation ritual, to kill a human being?

What if Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy, claiming to be a girls’ school so High Anglican that only a kitchen stool was required to scramble up into Heaven, was, in reality, a school for assassins? An Academy for Murder and Mayhem?

Was that what Jumbo was trying to tell me?

F
LAVIA DE
L
UCE, MURDERER
.

This was not a thought that came out of nowhere. I suppose it had been simmering away in a covered pot in some subterranean kitchen of my brain for quite some time.

My mind flew back several years to the night Daffy was reading
The Private Hangman
, a black-jacketed thriller in which Special Agent Jack Cross, alias X9, wreaked vengeance upon the enemies of His Majesty’s Government by such unsubtle means as boiling their blood with high-powered radio waves, binding them eyeball-to-eyeball with a giant squid, extracting a confession from a traitor who was lashed to one of the screws of an about-to-be-launched destroyer whose crew he had betrayed, and, in the last few pages, removing (with the corkscrew attachment of a Boy Scout knife, a handy weapon that he was
never without) the eyes of the notorious spy Baron Noël van den Hochstein.

The latter scene had brought Daffy bursting in wide-eyed terror into my bedroom and into my bed at three o’clock in the morning, having turned on the electric light and lit an entire box of candles, all of which she insisted be left burning until well after sunrise.

At the time, I’d have hooted down anyone who suggested that I myself might one day inherit the mantle of Jack Cross, X9—the Private Hangman—but now I wasn’t so sure. In this topsy-turvy world, anything seemed possible.

And yet, until now, it had never occurred to me that I might be required to kill.

My mother, of course, had been a member of the mysterious Nide, of which Aunt Felicity was chief. That much I knew, as well as the fact that there were others around me who might or might not be full-fledged agents. Gremly, for instance, who had given herself away by asking if I enjoyed my pheasant sandwiches. How I longed to quiz her, to learn more not only about her associations, but also about my own.

And yet it was forbidden. It had been made quite clear to me that one must not, under any circumstances, ask questions of any girl at Miss Bodycote’s about herself, or about any other girl: a rule which, when you stopped to think about it, made a great deal of sense. It was the only way in which those of us who were chosen for a life of service could keep our secret doings from the others. Those at the academy who were not involved—the day girls—were really no more than cover for those of us who were.