As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (7 page)

“I know,” the girl said. “You’re quite notorious.”

I followed her into the Great Hall, a vast raftered expanse of dark hanging timber; a medieval cowshed with trestle tables. The hubbub was deafening.

A couple of harried-looking servers in white were ladling great gouts of porridge into bowls.

I took a seat at the end of one of the long tables and tucked in.

As I ate, I looked discreetly round the room, pretending not to. As a new girl, it would be impolite to stare. Not that I really cared.

It was important, though, not to draw attention to myself.

There was a possibility that whoever had killed the cadaver in the chimney was in this very room at this very moment.

I would need to begin my investigations from scratch.

I looked round the hall for Collingwood, but she was nowhere in sight. Perhaps she had been excused to recover from last night’s ordeal.

Because most of the girls had their heads in the feed troughs, it was not easy to examine their faces. I noticed
though that even as they ate, they were still talking rapidly to one another from the corners of their mouths, which made it difficult to read their lips as I had trained myself to do. Besides, I didn’t want to stare.

It wasn’t too much of a chore to guess the sensational topic. The buzz and thrill of bad news was heavy in the air.

An older girl, two tables away, elbowed her neighbor in the ribs and pointed at me with her chin. When they saw that I had noticed, they both looked away quickly.

The faculty, all of them women, sat on a raised dais at one end of the hall, overlooking the grazing girls.

At the center of the high table sat Miss Fawlthorne, her head inclined, talking with pinched brows to a youngish-looking woman whose short black hair was as tight as a bathing cap.

There are rare and precious moments, when one is a stranger in a room, that one can examine its inhabitants with little or no prejudice. Without knowing so much as their names, it is possible to form an assessment based purely upon observation and instinct.

Even at a glance I could tell that the faculty of Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy had one thing in common: They were all dead serious. There was no frivolity: no laughter and no lipstick.

Even as they ate, they spoke quietly to one another as if they were a panel of grave judges with all the weight of justice on their shoulders.

Could one of them be a murderess?

As a simple exercise, I set myself to deduce their teaching specialties.

The woman at the far right, with short steel-gray hair, was almost certainly the French mistress. She had that Cupid’s-bow mouth with the raised corner and peculiar but slight twist of the outer nostril that can come only from speaking French from the cradle. No Englishwoman could ever possibly form those shapes with her mouth while talking. I knew that from my own close observation of Mrs. Lennox—Chantelle Lennox—who lived next door to the vicarage in Bishop’s Lacey, and who had been brought back to England as a sort of war trophy by her husband, Norman.

She was from Montmartre, pronounced through the nose.

Next at the table was a hatchet-faced individual with high cheekbones and an air of solitude about her, who seemed to exist in her own aura, almost as if she were surrounded by an invisible bell jar.

Sad
, I thought.
Lonely and unpopular
.

My first thought was that, judging by her face alone, this should be Mildred Bannerman, the acquitted mariticide. (A useful word meaning “husband killer” that Daffy had taught me: a word unknown, it would appear, not only to the shrillest of the tabloid newspapers, but even to
The Times
.)

But no—just yesterday I had seen a schoolgirl photo of Miss Bannerman in the Old Girls’ Gallery. She could not possibly have aged into such a hard-looking creature.

My eyes moved on along the table, and there, on Miss Fawlthorne’s right, sat a sweet-faced pixie: the youngest
teacher of the lot—was this the girl from the photograph? She appeared still not much more than my sister Feely’s age, which was eighteen.

She must be older than she looks
, I thought.

Not wanting to stare, I watched her from the corner of my eye, reveling in the very thought of breakfasting with a killer. Mildred Bannerman—at last!

The others were unremarkable: a mere assortment of noses and chins, eyes and ears plucked from a sack and tossed together at random.

“Welcome to Bods,” said a voice at my ear.

It was the girl whose hand I had shaken on the stair.

“Van Arque,” she said. “We’ve already met. I’ve been more or less put in charge of you until you’re on the rolls. I’m a monitress, by the way.”

She looked slowly round the room as if she were keeping an eye out for predators. Satisfied for the moment that we were safe, she turned her attention back to me. “Say, you don’t have a cigarette on you by any chance?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t smoke. Are you allowed to? In here?”

Van Arque made a honking noise through her nose. “Of course not. We use the third-floor kybo.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The kybo. The bog house. The four-flusher. The holy tabernacle—”

“The crapper, you mean,” I said.

“The crapper! Ha! That’s a good one!” she hooted, choking on her porridge.

She was seized with a spasm of coughing and her face grew red. Her hands flew to her throat. Her breathing had become a loud, wheezing gurgle.

I knew instantly that some mass of the glutinous stuff had lodged in Van Arque’s windpipe—and that she was in real danger.

Her face was already darkening.

I leapt to my feet and began pounding her furiously on the back—with the flat of my hand, at first, and then with both fists.

I couldn’t help noticing that everyone round us—even the faculty—seemed stuck to their chairs. No one, besides me, had moved a muscle. The room had gone silent.

Suddenly—and unexpectedly—Van Arque coughed up a disgusting clot of porridge and spat it noisily out onto the floor.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

She was now sucking in great, grateful breaths of fresh air, her shoulders heaving. Her color was improving by the second.

She grimaced.

“No,” she croaked, “but I must go on … It’s trad. Monitresses are not allowed to be ill.”

I looked at her in disbelief. Was she joking?

“If we catch so much as a sniffle, they put us to death.”

She could see I didn’t believe her.

“It’s true,” she whispered. “They have an abattoir. There’s a secret door behind a cupboard in the infirmary.”

“With bloody meat hooks hanging from the ceiling,” I said, catching on.

Practical jokers can recognize one another as easily as bees from the same hive. Van Arque and I had far more in common than I had realized.

“Exactly!” she said. “Meat hooks and racks of butcher’s knives. And they feed the mulch to the chickens.”

“Or what’s left of it after making the porridge,” I said, shoving a large spoonful of the stuff into my mouth and chewing it with relish.

Van Arque sucked in a breath and her eyes went as big as saucers. “Oohhh!” she said. “How disgusting!” and I knew that I had made an impression.

Van Arque picked up a table napkin and gave my mouth a couple of dabs, as if I were dribbling porridge.

“Shhh!” she said, covering her own mouth as she faked a small additional cough. “Druce is watching us. She reads lips.”

Much as I wanted to brag about my own achievements in that department, I made a quick decision to keep a few tricks up my sleeve. It is sometimes better to let science be thought magic.

Two tables away, the large girl who had elbowed her neighbor in the ribs—this must be Druce—was staring openly.

She was the only person in the hall looking at us. Everyone else was studiously looking away, as Anglicans invariably do when faced with group embarrassment. It was a trait I had noticed even as a child, which, as nearly as I could puzzle out, was somehow connected with the famous ostrich-and-sand reaction. Roman Catholics, by contrast, would have been clambering over one another for a front-row seat.

“Let’s get out of here,” Van Arque said. “I need some fresh air. Come on. We’ve got a few minutes before the next bell.”

As we pushed back our chairs, I turned deliberately toward Druce and, as if I were talking to Van Arque, clearly pronounced the word “flap-dragon.”

It was my favorite word from Shakespeare: not as long as “Honorificabilitudinitatibus,” which preceded it in
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, but enough of a workout to let Druce know that when it came to lip-reading, she was not dealing with someone who was wet behind the ears.

“You’re sure you haven’t got a cigarette?”

We were leaning against the stone rim of a neglected goldfish pool in a small courtyard behind the laundry.

“No,” I said. “I told you. I don’t smoke. It’s a filthy habit.”

“Sez who?” Van Arque demanded, squinting like Popeye and taking up a boxer’s stance—squeezing her biceps to make them bulge. I knew she was joking.

“Never mind,” she said. “Here comes Fabian. She’s always good for a fag. Fabian! Over here!”

Fabian was a tall blonde who looked as if she came from Finland: a pale, cool Nordic type, who wore rather too much face powder, as if she had a lot of spots to hide. I wondered if she, like me, was exiled from her homeland.

“How much?” Fabian asked, holding out a single cigarette. She didn’t even need to be asked.

“A nickel for two,” Van Arque said.

“Three for a dime,” Fabian countered, and the deal was done.

“It’s highway robbery, that’s what it is,” Van Arque said, lighting up when Fabian was gone. “She’s only been here a year and she’s already as rich as Croesus. She pays seventeen cents for a pack and makes three hundred percent profit. It isn’t fair.”

Nickels? Dimes? I knew that cents were roughly equivalent to pence, but beyond that, Canadian currency was a veiled mystery.

Why had I ever been sent away from the land of the sixpence—the land of half-crowns, ha’pennies, florins, farthings, and shillings, the land of decent coinage, where everything made sense?

How could I possibly learn to survive in such a pagan place, where trams were streetcars, vans and lorries were trucks, pavements were sidewalks, jumpers were sweaters, petrol was gasoline, aluminium was aluminum, sweets were candy, a full stop was a period, and cheerio was good-bye?

A towering wave of homesickness broke over me: a wave even greater than the Atlantic gales through which I had safely sailed; greater than anything I could ever have possibly imagined.

I put a hand against the stone wall to steady myself.

“Are you all right?” Van Arque asked anxiously.

“Yes,” I said weakly. And then again, more strongly, “Yes.”

It was only the thought of this curious creature who
stood so casually beside me, smoking, that gave me strength. If Van Arque could go from choking to joking and smoking in the wink of an eye, then surely so could I.

“Morning, ladies,” said a voice behind me, making me jump. I whirled round to find what I took at first to be a weasel in a shabby trench coat: a thin young man with an alarmingly pale, pinched face and an unconvincing mustache.

“Students, I take it?” he asked. “A couple of Miss Bodycote’s beauties?”

“Go away,” Van Arque said, pulling a nickel-plated whistle from her pocket, “before I call the police.”

“Hey, take it easy. Don’t do that,” he said, dredging a damp leather wallet from the depths of the wreckage that was his raincoat. He flipped it open and held out what appeared to be some kind of official identity card.

“Wallace Scroop,” he said, offering it. “The
Morning Star
. Mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“We’re not allowed to speak to reporters,” Van Arque said.

“Listen,” he went on, ignoring her. “I’ve heard this place is haunted. It’s an old convent, you know … ghostly footsteps in the night—all that sort of thing. I thought it would make an interesting story. You might even get your pictures in the paper.”

“There are no such things as ghosts—or haven’t you heard, Mr. Scroop? Any footsteps in the night at Miss Bodycote’s are caused by too much lemonade at the school carnival—not by phantoms. Now please go away.”

“If I did,” Scroop said, “my editor would wring me out
like a dishcloth. Come on, girls, have a heart. Let’s be honest. What do you know about the body that was carted off to the morgue last night? Someone you know, maybe? Listen, I could make it worth your while.”

I glanced at Van Arque, but she didn’t seem surprised at the news. Without further warning, she jammed the whistle between her lips and blew a long, ear-piercing blast. For a fraction of a second, Wallace Scroop looked as stunned as if she had slapped his face. And then, with a couple of surprisingly coarse words, he was gone.

“Creep,” Van Arque shot after him, but he was already too far away to have heard her.

Somewhere indoors, a bell began to ring.

“Curses!” Van Arque muttered. “Wouldn’t you just know it?”

She tossed the cigarette down and ground it out beneath her heel. “Come on,” she said. “We’ve got to go. They’ve put you in the fourth form—at least for the time being. As I said, Miss Fawlthorne told me to oversee you until she gets round to the formalities. She’s got rather a lot on her plate at the moment—or so she says.”

“I should say she has!” I volunteered, wondering if Van Arque’s had been one of the cherub faces floating in the darkness. “Did
you
see what happened in Edith Cavell last night?”

I hated myself as soon as I had said it. I am not ordinarily a gossip, but some inside force was suddenly making me spit out information like a clockwork ticket dispenser.

Was I automatically sucking up to Van Arque because of my inferior position as a new girl? I surely hoped not.

“No,” she said. “But I heard about it. That’s for darn sure!”

I said nothing. I have learned to use silence as a jimmy to pry information free. Or did I keep my mouth buttoned because I was still nauseated from that tidal wave of homesickness? I shall never know.