As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust: A Flavia De Luce Novel Page 10

  Sitting on the edge of my bed, I thought it through.

  I came to the conclusion, at last, that it was like this: Tickling and learning were much the same thing. When you tickle yourself—ecstasy; but when anyone else tickles you—agony.

  It was a useful insight, worthy of Plato or Confucius or Oscar Wilde, or one of those people who make a living by thinking up clever sayings.

  Could I find a way of squeezing it into my report on William Palmer?

  Had the Rugeley Poisoner tickled his victims?

  I shouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that he had.

  • NINE •

  I HAD BARELY SAT down at my desk with pen and ink and begun to collect my thoughts about William Palmer when the door flew open and a small whirlwind exploded into the room, with hair as red as it is possible to possess without bursting into flame.

  I was not accustomed to constant invasion, and it was beginning to get on my nerves.

  “What’s the matter with you, anyway?” the fiery one demanded, arms spinning round in the air like a runaway windmill. “What do you mean by interfering? What business is it of yours, anyway?”

  “I beg your pardon?” I asked.

  “Oh, come off it! What are you trying to do? Get me killed?”

  Only then did I realize that this furious creature was the same girl who, barely minutes before, had been in danger of writhing to death in the dust.

  “Miss Pinkham, I presume,” I said, taking a wild stab in the dark.

  The windmill came to an abrupt halt. I had caught her off guard.

  “How did you know that?” she asked belligerently.

  “By a series of brilliant deductions with which I will not trouble you,” I told her. “Plus the fact that your name is clearly marked in indelible laundry ink on a tab in the neck of your tunic.”

  This, too, was a shot in the dark. But since the tunic Miss Fawlthorne had issued me was marked in this way, it seemed a reasonable assumption that hers was also.

  “Very clever, Miss Smarty-pants,” she said. “But you’ll be laughing out of the other side of your face when the Hand of Glory gets hold of you.”

  The Hand of Glory?

  I knew that the Hand of Glory was the pickled and mummified hand of a hanged murderer, carried by eighteenth-century housebreakers in the belief that, in addition to paralyzing any hapless householder who might interrupt them in their burgling, it would also unlock all doors and confer invisibility upon them: a sort of primitive version of the do-it-all Boy Scout knife. Dried in a fire of juniper smoke and yew wood, and used to hold a special candle made from the fat of a badger, a bear, and an unbaptized child, the Hand of Glory was the answer to a burglar’s prayer.

  So why would the girls of Miss Bodycote’s choose it as the name of some kind of ridiculous secret sorority?

  Pinkham must have seen my puzzlement.

  “Druce and Trout,” she explained.

  “Those two morons?” I exploded with laughter. I couldn’t help it. “The Hand of Glory? Is that what they call themselves?”

  “Shhh!” she said, finger to lips, her eyes wide. “Keep it down, for cripes sake!”

  The very thought of a secret society at Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy set me off cackling again. I couldn’t help myself.

  “Please,” she said in a pleading whisper. “They’ll kill us both.”

  “Like Le Marchand?” I asked. “Like Wentworth? Like Brazenose?”

  Her face went slack with horror, and I saw at once that it had been the wrong thing to say.

  “Look here,” I said. “You can’t allow them to go on bullying you. It’s not right.”

  “No,” she said. “But it’s how things are.

  “Here,” she added.

  Something touched my heart. This child was genuinely frightened.

  “Don’t you worry about Druce and Trout,” I heard my mouth telling her. “You leave them to me—and let me know if they get up to any more of their tricks.”

  “But—you’re the new girl,” she protested.

  I put a sisterly hand on her shoulder. I did not need to tell her that when it came to revenge, I, Flavia Sabina de Luce, was a force to be reckoned with.

  “Fear not,” I told her. “Simmer down.”

  I think that, even then, I was beginning to formulate a plan.

  Pinkham stood paused in the doorway, and just for an instant she looked like a girl in a painting by Vermeer: as if she were constructed entirely of light.

  “You’re a brick, Flavia,” she said, and then she was gone.

  I sat there for a long while, staring at the door, my mind churning.

  What had I got myself into?

  Then I closed my notebook and put away my pen. Justice was calling.

  Palmer the Poisoner would have to wait.

  The corridors of Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy were, as I have said, a maze: a series of labyrinths, of twists, of turns, of offshoots. The floors went abruptly and without warning from broad planks to tiny tiles and back again, the walls from plaster to marble, and the ceilings from great galleries and soaring vaults to small, dark tunnels of ancient boards through which you needed to duck your head in order to pass.

  There were no directional maps to help the newcomer. One was expected to know the layout of the place with the same efficiency as a London cabbie knows his city: the Knowledge, they call it—the names and locations of 25,000 streets, courts, closes, yards, circuses, squares, lanes, and avenues, and the best and quickest ways of getting from every single one of them to the others.

  Why do my thoughts keep harking back to home and England? I wondered, as I caught my mind adrift for what must have been the hundredth time.

  Here I was in Canada—the New World—with all that that implied. I was young, healthy, intelligent, curious, and chock-full of energy, and yet my mind, whenever I took my eye off it, flew instantly back like a homing pigeon to the land of my birth: to England and to Buckshaw.

  It was inexplicable. It was annoying. It was entirely uncalled for.

  Now I found myself at the top of a steep, narrow staircase that led up from a narrow L-shaped cubbyhole on the ground floor to an unsuspected niche behind a linen cupboard on the second, and, to be perfectly honest, I hadn’t the faintest idea where I was or how I had got there.

  Get a grip, Flavia, I thought, for the umpty-umpth time. It was becoming my theme song, my national anthem.

  The science lab and the chemistry lab, I knew, were located in one of the wings: far enough away that the stinks wouldn’t pollute the holy atmosphere. I had had a glimpse of test tubes and beakers from the hockey field, and I knew from a casual remark Van Arque had made that the science department and its attendant natural history museum were immediately adjacent.

  “Science?” I said to a girl who ducked round me and went clattering down the stairs, a cardigan tied over her shoulders and a squash racket gripped in her hands.

  She paused just long enough to give her head a sharp jerk to the left, her hair coming unfastened and flying into her face, and then she was gone.

  Left I went, and there it was, stenciled on the green wall at eye level in official-looking black capital letters: SCIENCE & CHEMISTRY.

  The two departments seemed to occupy the entire wing. A series of doors, each with its own small window, receded into the distance in a rather odd effect that made it seem like an optical illusion. I cupped my hands and peered through the glass into the first room.

  This must be the natural history museum. Not large, but remarkably complete for its size. Glass cases round all the visible walls seemed to house a cross section of all creation: birds—I recognized a stuffed specimen of the extinct passenger pigeon, of which I had seen a photograph in one of Arthur Mee’s endlessly fascinating encyclopedias—butterflies, bees, moths, and other insects, all pinned neatly to cards and labeled: everything from small mammals to minerals, and from fossils to fish.

  I tried the door, but it was locked.r />
  By craning my neck, I could see hanging in a corner, on a wrought-iron stand, an articulated human skeleton. The very sight of it brought a momentary lump to my throat as I thought of Yorick, my own dear skeleton, hanging patiently back home in my laboratory at Buckshaw. Yorick had been given as a gift to Uncle Tar by the great naturalist Frank Buckland, who had not only autographed the skull but had also neatly printed on the frontal bone the playful inscription Multum in parvo—“much in little”: a great deal in a small space—which might have been meant as something of a joke.

  Beside the skeleton was a glass case in which animal skulls were displayed in neat rows, all boiled and bleached, ordered by size, and containing everything from what I guessed to be a mouse all the way up the scale to a human skull, which ended the series.

  Above the case, mounted on the wall, was the enormous skull, complete with antlers, of a moose—what we call back home an elk. This, too, seemed to be meant as a joke for those in the know: “From mouse to moose.” Or vice versa.

  I’m beginning to suspect that, everywhere on earth, professionals in the life sciences must share with Sherlock Holmes’s Dr. Watson that same vein of pawky humor. Fun, perhaps, but childish, when you come to think of it. You certainly don’t catch chemists behaving like that.

  Well, hardly ever.

  Still, I must admit that I trifled with the idea of sneaking down to the kitchen in the wee hours of the morning, pinching some eggs, and whipping up a dish of chocolate mousse. I would sneak it into the glass display case to be discovered in the morning.

  Anyone clever enough would make an immediate connection: moose … mouse … mousse.

  If they didn’t, so much the better. All the more mysterious.

  The school newsletter would have a field day.

  “Midnight Marauder Monkeys with Museum!”

  But, as with so many of my best ideas, I kept it to myself, and moved on.

  At the end of the hall was the entrance to the chemistry lab. I felt my breath quickening with excitement as I approached. I was now entering the domain of Mildred Bannerman: chemistry mistress … acquitted murderess … Faerie Queene.

  I could see at once through the window that Mrs. Bannerman was busy with the fifth form.

  How I would have loved to join them, shoulder to shoulder, peering through safety spectacles at the lovely liquids, jotting down penciled observations, and inhaling the vapors of boiling and deliriously happy distillations.

  But it was not to be: As a lowly fourth-former I would be stuck with general science, and would probably end up dissecting maple leaves—or snails. And with my luck, they wouldn’t even be my favorite cone snails, those denizens of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the effects of whose venom are so disgusting that they can only be fully described in medical texts with plain brown wrappers.

  I lingered, longingly, reluctant to tear myself away from this glimpse of Paradise.

  My eyes scanned the room, drinking it in, memorizing every detail.

  But wait!

  What was that object on a side bench—just there, to the left?—so strange, and yet so familiar: a black box the length of a yardstick, no more than eight or ten inches deep.

  A hydrogen spectrophotometer! Could it possibly be?

  My heart gave a joyful leap in its cage of ribs.

  Not just any hydrogen spectrophotometer, but by all that was sacred, a Beckman model DU if I was not mistaken! I had seen a photograph of one in the pages of Chemical Abstracts & Transactions. This baby, I knew, could see and analyze blood and poisons well into the ultraviolet portion of the spectrum.

  And look—just there in an alcove!

  That large vertical tube, so like a silver stovepipe, and connected by a black umbilical cable to a squat desk swarming with meters and gauges—was it not an electron microscope?

  Good lord! There were barely a handful of these things in the world!

  Aunt Felicity had told me outright that Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy was well-endowed financially, and she had been right.

  Holy Halifax, had she been right!

  I realized with a start I was licking my lips, perhaps even drooling a little, and quickly wiped my mouth dry on my sleeve.

  How I envied these girls on the other side of the windowed door. I’d have given half my heart—no, the whole of it—to be among them.

  But I didn’t dare intrude. A chemistry class was a sacred session and … well, you don’t barge in on prayers, do you?

  I was about to steal away when a voice behind me said, “What are you up to, girl?”

  I spun round and nearly tripped over her. I hadn’t heard her coming, and the reason for this was easy enough to spot: The hard rubber tires of her wheelchair had allowed her to float along the floor in utter silence.

  I gaped, not knowing what to say. In fact, I’m afraid I stared openly at this sinister apparition.

  For a moment, I thought I had bumped into Edward G. Robinson: the unnervingly froggish face and the thick lips turned down at the corners like blankets, the head too big for the squat body, the black menacing eyes under black, arched brows, fixing me with their relentless gaze through thick spectacles … almost as if—

  “Well, girl? What do you have to say for yourself?”

  I couldn’t find words. I could only stand goggling at this curious wheeled creature and her fittings. Polio, I guessed, but I couldn’t be sure. How I wished Dogger was here to suggest a diagnosis.

  The chair was equipped with a sort of hinged shelf or desk in the front, like a baby’s high chair, which was cluttered with all the necessities of a life on wheels: paper, ink, pen, letter opener, stamps, a box of paper tissues, another of throat lozenges, matches, a package of cigarettes (Sweet Caporal: the same brand that Fabian smoked), a china cup and saucer, and, incredibly, what I guessed to be a large teapot under a quilted cozy: a Brown Betty, by the size of it.

  “Well? Haven’t you a tongue?”

  “Yes,” I managed.

  “Yes, Miss Moate,” she said.

  “Yes, Miss Moate,” I echoed.

  “I asked you what you were up to. Favor me with a reply, if you please.”

  “Nothing … Miss Moate,” I said.

  “Nonsense! You were tampering with the doorknob of my laboratory. I saw you.”

  Her eyes had never left mine for an instant, and now they were crinkling at the corners, as if she had amused herself by catching me up in a particularly clever trap.

  “I—I was just looking—”

  “You were spying on me! Admit it.”

  “No, Miss Moate. I was just looking—at the skulls.”

  “You have some specific interest in skulls, do you? Is that it?”

  I could have been truthful and said yes, but I didn’t. Actually, I was keen on skulls, but this was hardly the time to say so.

  “I’d never seen a moose before,” I said, letting my lower lip tremble a little. “We don’t have them in England, you see, and—”

  As if it were a robot appendage, her arm reached for the cozy, lifted it, and poured a cup of steaming tea: valerian, by the cheesy smell of it.

  I took the distraction as an opportunity to change the subject.

  “I’m Flavia de Luce,” I said, as if that explained everything. Perhaps she had already been briefed on my background, and the mere mention of my name would be all that was required. “I’m a new girl,” I added, almost wishing it were true.

  “I know well enough who you are,” she said. “You’re the daughter of Harriet de Luce, and I might as well tell you, that cuts no ice with me whatsoever.”

  Oh! The things I could have said to her—the clever retorts I could have made.

  But I held my tongue.

  Was it fear?

  Or could maturity be setting in?

  “No, Miss Moate,” I said, and that seemed to be the right reply.

  Much in little.

  Multum in parvo.

  “I taught your mother, you know,” she
said, still fixing me with her gimlet eye. “And I shall teach you.”

  Was this a promise? Or a threat?

  “Yes, Miss Moate,” I said dutifully.

  When you’re in the front lines, you have to learn fast, even if it’s only to surrender.

  Or appear to.

  With an unnerving squeak of tires on hardwood, her hands clawing at the wheels, she spun round on her axis and trundled herself away, growing smaller and smaller as she went in much the same way as the characters do at the end of an animated cartoon, until she disappeared in the distance.

  Did I imagine it, or had I heard a little “Pop!” at the end of the hall?

  • TEN •

  I THINK IT WAS Aristotle who first said that Nature abhors a vacuum. Others, such as Hobbes, Boyle, and Newton, climbed onto Aristotle’s soapbox at a much later date. But for all their collective brains, these brilliant boys got it only half right. Nature does abhor a vacuum, but she equally abhors pressure. If you stop to think for even a second, it should be obvious, shouldn’t it?

  Give Nature a vacuum and she will try to fill it. Give her localized pressure and she will try to disperse it. She is forever seeking a balance she can never achieve, never happy with what she’s got.

  I am not only surprised, but proud, to be the first to point this out.

  There are times when my personal pressure is mounting that I crave a vacuum to counteract it. One thing was perfectly clear: I was going to get no peace and quiet in Edith Cavell. No privacy, no time to think, no place of my own where I could come and go as I pleased.

  In short, I was in dire need of a bolt-hole.

  Where, I asked myself, is the one place that the inhabitants of a bustling academy are least likely to go?

  And the answer came at once, as if sent down on a mental lightning bolt from Heaven. It wasn’t carved on a stone tablet, but it might as well have been.

  The laundry.

  Of course!

  The laundry was a detached hut of painted brick. A faint humming came from within and a column of steam rose from a tall brick chimney into the autumn air.

  I pushed the door open and stepped inside.