As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust: A Flavia De Luce Novel Read online

  Reviewers and readers love FLAVIA!

  The DEAD in THEIR VAULTED ARCHES

  #1 Library Journal pick

  #6 New York Times bestseller

  #3 Indie bestseller

  #3 NPR bestseller

  #10 Publishers Weekly bestseller

  “Bradley’s award-winning Flavia de Luce series … has enchanted readers with the outrageous sleuthing career of its precocious leading lady.… This latest adventure contains all the winning elements of the previous books while skillfully establishing a new and intriguing story line to explore in future novels.… Fans will be more than pleased.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Bradley’s latest Flavia de Luce novel reaches a new level of perfection.… These are astounding, magical books not to be missed.”

  —RT Book Reviews (Top Pick)

  “It’s hard to resist either the genre’s pre-eminent preteen sleuth or the hushed revelations about her family.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Excellent … Flavia retains her droll wit.… The solution to the murder is typically neat, and the conclusion sets up future books nicely.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “There is period detail, as well as deft portraiture of the entire de Luce family and friends, in this character-driven series.… The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches moves the series in an exciting new direction. Flavia will surely remain as brilliant and stubbornly contrary as ever.”

  —Library Journal

  “Young chemist and aspiring detective Flavia de Luce [uses] her knowledge of poisons, and her indefatigable spirit, to solve a dastardly crime in the English countryside while learning new clues about her mother’s disappearance.”

  —National Public Radio

  SPEAKING FROM AMONG the BONES

  “The precocious and irrepressible Flavia continues to delight. Portraying an eleven-year-old as a plausible sleuth and expert in poisons is no mean feat, but Bradley makes it look easy.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Bradley’s Flavia cozies, set in the English countryside, have been a hit from the start, and this fifth in the series continues to charm and entertain.”

  —Booklist

  “An excellent reminder that crime fiction can sparkle with wit, crackle with spirit and verge on the surreal … Flavia, once more, entertains and delights as she exposes the inner workings of her investigative mind to the reader.”

  —National Post (Canada)

  I AM HALF-SICK of SHADOWS

  “Every Flavia de Luce novel is a reason to celebrate, but Christmas with Flavia is a holiday wish come true for her fans.”

  —USA Today (four stars)

  “This is a classic country house mystery in the tradition of Agatha Christie, and Poirot himself would approve of Flavia’s skills in snooping and deduction. Flavia is everything a reader wants in a detective—she’s smart, logical, intrepid and curious.… This is a refreshingly engaging read.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “This is a delightful read through and through. We find in Flavia an incorrigible and wholly lovable detective; from her chemical experiments in her sanctum sanctorum to her outrage at the idiocy of the adult world, she is unequaled. Charming as a stand-alone novel and a guaranteed smash with series followers.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Bradley masterfully weaves a ghoulish Yuletide tale.… The story breathes characters full of charisma, colour and nuance.… Bradley gives a thrilling ride.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  A RED HERRING Without MUSTARD

  “Bradley’s third book about tween sleuth Flavia de Luce will make readers forget Nancy Drew.”

  —People

  “Outstanding … In this marvelous blend of whimsy and mystery, Flavia manages to operate successfully in the adult world of crimes and passions while dodging the childhood pitfalls set by her sisters.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Oh, to be eleven again and pal around with irresistible wunderkind Flavia de Luce.… A splendid romp through 1950s England led by the world’s smartest and most incorrigible preteen.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Think preteen Nancy Drew, only savvier and a lot richer, and you have Flavia de Luce.… Don’t be fooled by Flavia’s age or the 1950s setting: A Red Herring isn’t a dainty tea-and-crumpets sort of mystery. It’s shot through with real grit.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Whether battling with her odious sisters or verbally sparring with the long-suffering Inspector Hewitt, our cheeky heroine is a delight. Full of pithy dialog and colorful characters, this series would appeal strongly to fans of Dorothy Sayers, Gladys Mitchell, and Leo Bruce as well as readers who like clever humor mixed in with their mysteries.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “[Flavia] remains irresistibly appealing as a little girl lost.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Delightful … The book’s forthright and eerily mature narrator is a treasure.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “Bradley’s characters, wonderful dialogue and plot twists are a most winning combination.”

  —USA Today

  The WEED That STRINGS the HANGMAN’S BAG

  “Flavia is incisive, cutting and hilarious … one of the most remarkable creations in recent literature.”

  —USA Today

  “Bradley takes everything you expect and subverts it, delivering a smart, irreverent, unsappy mystery.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “The real delight here is her droll voice and the eccentric cast.… Utterly beguiling.”

  —People (four stars)

  “Endlessly entertaining … The author deftly evokes the period, but Flavia’s sparkling narration is the mystery’s chief delight. Comic and irreverent, this entry is sure to build further momentum for the series.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  The SWEETNESS at the BOTTOM of the PIE

  THE MOST AWARD-WINNING BOOK OF ANY YEAR!

  WINNER:

  Macavity Award for Best First Mystery Novel

  Barry Award for Best First Novel

  Agatha Award for Best First Novel

  Dilys Award

  Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel

  Spotted Owl Award for Best Novel

  CWA Debut Dagger Award

  “Impressive as a sleuth and enchanting as a mad scientist … Flavia is most endearing as a little girl who has learned how to amuse herself in a big lonely house.”

  —Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review

  “Sophisticated, series-launching … It’s a rare pleasure to follow Flavia as she investigates her limited but boundless-feeling world.”

  —Entertainment Weekly (A–)

  “A delightful new sleuth. A combination of Eloise and Sherlock Holmes … fearless, cheeky, wildly precocious.”

  —The Boston Globe

  As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Alan Bradley

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  DELACORTE PRESS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trad
emarks of Random House LLC.

  ISBN 978-0-345-53993-9

  eBook ISBN 978-0-345-53995-3

  www.bantamdell.com

  Cover design: Joe Montgomery

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,

  Nor the furious winter’s rages;

  Thou thy worldly task hast done,

  Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:

  Golden lads and girls all must,

  As chimney sweepers, come to dust.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

  Cymbeline (IV.ii)

  PROLOGUE

  IF YOU’RE ANYTHING LIKE me, you adore rot. It is pleasant to reflect upon the fact that decay and decomposition are what make the world go round.

  For instance, when an ancient oak falls somewhere in the forest, it begins almost at once to be consumed by invisible predators. These highly specialized hordes of bacteria lay siege to their target as methodically as an army of barbarians attacking an enemy fortress. The mission of the first wave is to break down the protein forms of the stricken timber into ammonia, which can then be easily handled by the second team, which converts the smelly ammonia to nitrites. These last and final invaders, by oxidation, convert the nitrites into the nitrates that are required to fertilize the soil, and thus to grow new seedling oaks.

  Through the miracle of chemistry, a colossus has been reduced to its essentials by microscopic life forms. Forests are born and die, come and go, like a spinning penny flipped into the air: heads … tails … life … death … life … death … and so on from Creation to the farthest ends of time.

  It’s bloody marvelous, if you ask me.

  Left to the mercies of the soil, dead human bodies undergo the same basic 1—2—3 process: meat—ammonia—nitrates.

  But when a corpse is swaddled tightly in a soiled flag, stuffed up a brick chimney, and left there for a donkey’s age to char and mummify in the heat and the smoke—well, that’s an entirely different story.

  • ONE •

  “BANISHED!” THE WILD WIND shrieked as it tore at my face.

  “Banished!” the savage waves roared as they drenched me with freezing water.

  “Banished!” they howled. “Banished!”

  There is no sadder word in the English language. The very sound of it—like echoing iron gates crashing closed behind you; like steel bolts being shot shut—makes your hair stand on end, doesn’t it?

  “Banished!”

  I shouted the word into the tearing wind, and the wind spat it back into my face.

  “Banished!”

  I was standing at the heaving prow of the R.M.S. Scythia, my jaws wide open to the gale, hoping that the salt spray would wash the bad taste out of my mouth: the taste that was my life so far.

  Somewhere, a thousand miles behind us over the eastern horizon, lay the village of Bishop’s Lacey and Buckshaw, my former home, where my father, Colonel Haviland de Luce, and my sisters, Ophelia and Daphne, were most likely, at this very moment, getting on nicely with their lives as if I had never existed.

  They had already forgotten me. I was sure of it.

  Only the faithful family retainers, Dogger and Mrs. Mullet, would have shed a furtive tear at my departure, but even so, they, too, in time, would have only foggy memories of Flavia.

  Out here on the wild Atlantic, the Scythia’s bow was hauling itself up … and up … and up out of the sea, climbing sickeningly toward the sky, then crashing down with a horrendous hollow booming, throwing out great white wings of water to port and starboard. It was like riding bareback on an enormous steel angel doing the breaststroke.

  Although it was still early September, the sea was madness. We had encountered the remnants of a tropical hurricane, and now, for more than two days, had been tossed about like a cast-off cork.

  Everyone except the captain and I—or so it seemed—had dragged themselves off to their bunks, so that the only sounds to be heard as one reeled along the pitching, rolling corridors to dinner were the groan of stressed steel and, behind closed doors on either side, the evacuation of scores of stomachs. With nearly nine hundred passengers on board, it was a sobering sound.

  As for me, I seem to be blessed with a natural immunity to the tossing seas: the result, I supposed, of seafaring ancestors such as Thaddeus de Luce, who, although only a lad at the Battle of Trafalgar, was said to have brought lemonade to the dying Admiral Nelson, and to have held his cold and clammy hand.

  Nelson’s last words, actually, were not the widely reported “Kiss me, Hardy,” addressed to Captain Thomas Hardy of the Victory, but rather, “Drink, drink … fan, fan … rub, rub,” whispered feverishly to the wide-eyed young Thaddeus, who, although reduced to tears at the sight of his mortally wounded hero, was doing his best to keep the great man’s circulation from crystallizing.

  The wind ripped at my hair and tore at my thin autumn coat. I inhaled the salt air as deeply as I dared, the sea spray running in torrents down my face.

  A hand seized my arm roughly.

  “What the devil do you think you’re doing?”

  I spun round, startled, trying to wriggle free.

  It was, of course, Ryerson Rainsmith.

  “What the devil do you think you’re doing?” he repeated. He was one of those people who thought that the secret of gaining the upper hand was to ask every question twice.

  The best way of dealing with them is not to answer.

  “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Dorsey is beside herself with worry.”

  “Does that mean there are now two of her to put up with?” I wanted to ask, but I didn’t.

  With a name like Dorsey it was no wonder he called her “Dodo”—or at least he did whenever he thought they were alone.

  “We were afraid you’d fallen overboard. Now come below at once. Go to your cabin and put on some dry clothing. You look like a drowned rat.”

  That did it. It was the last straw.

  Ryerson Rainsmith, I thought, your days—your very hours—are numbered.

  I would go to the young and handsome ship’s doctor, whom I had met at supper the night before last. On the pretext of an upset tummy I would beg a bottle of sodium bicarbonate. A healthy dose of the stuff—I smiled at the word “healthy”—slipped into Rainsmith’s invariable bottle of champagne would do the trick.

  Taken on a full stomach—no worries about that where Ryerson Rainsmith was concerned!—sodium bicarbonate combined with effervescent alcohol could be deadly: first, the headache, which seemed to grow by the minute, followed by mental confusion and severe stomach pain; then the muscle weakness, the thin stools like coffee grounds, the tremors, the twitching: all the classic symptoms of alkalosis. I would insist on taking him out on deck for a healthy walk.
Forcing him to hyperventilate in all this fresh, invigorating air would speed up the process—like sloshing petrol onto a fire.

  If I could manage to raise the pH of his arterial blood to 7.65, he wouldn’t stand the chance of a snowman in Hades. He would die in agony.

  “I’m coming,” I said sullenly, and followed him at the speed of a sleepy snail, aft across the rolling, pitching foredeck.

  Hard to imagine, I thought, that I had actually been handed over to this rancid slab of humanity. Hard to forget, though, how it had come about.

  It had all begun with that awful business about my mother, Harriet. After ten years of being missing in the mountains of Tibet, Harriet had returned to Buckshaw in circumstances so painful that my brain was still forbidding me to think about them for more than a few seconds at a time; any longer than that, and my internal censor snipped my thread of memory as easily as Atropos, that dreaded third sister of the Fates, is said to snip the thread of life with her scissors when our time has come to die.

  The upshot of it all was that I was to be packed off to Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy, Harriet’s old school in Canada, where I was to be trained to assume some ancient and hereditary role of which I was still kept mostly in ignorance.

  “You shall simply have to learn your way into it,” Aunt Felicity had told me. “But in time you shall come to realize that Duty is the best and wisest of all teachers.”

  I wasn’t quite sure what she meant by that, but since my aunt was rather high up in this mysterious whatever-it-was, she was not to be argued with.

  “It’s something like ‘The Firm,’ isn’t it?” I asked. “The nickname that the Royal Family call themselves.”

  “Somewhat,” Aunt Felicity said, “but with this difference: Royalty is permitted to abdicate. We are not.”

  It had been at Aunt Felicity’s insistence that I was packed up like a bundle of old rags and tossed onto a ship to Canada.

  There had been protests, of course, at my going alone, notably from the vicar and his wife. Then there had been some talk about having Feely and her fiancé, Dieter Schrantz, accompany me on my transatlantic journey, but that idea was scotched on the grounds not only that it would be improper, but also that Feely’s position as organist at St. Tancred’s was classified as an essential service.