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

  She crept across the room on tiptoe and threw the switch. I blew out the candle, and we were plunged into darkness.

  Well, almost. After a few seconds I could see that there was still a certain amount of light falling into the room from the street outside.

  “What am I going to do?” she asked me. “We’re not allowed in others’ rooms after lights-out. I’ll be blacked.”

  I looked round the room in the strange dim glow of the electric twilight. Other than the obvious bed and clothes-press, there was nowhere to hide, unless she could squeeze herself behind the wallpaper.

  I’ll give Collingwood this, though—she was quick. With a single bound, she was on the hearth, crouching under the mantel, and somehow clawing her way upward. The last I saw of her was those long lizard-like legs, clad in black, standing tiptoe on the firedogs, then vanishing up the chimney.

  I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.

  Desperation is capable of wonderful things.

  “Open up!” the voice said again. “I know you’re in there.”

  Another knock—more thunderous than the last—shook the door. If the first one hadn’t awakened the entire academy, this one surely must have.

  Dozens of girls must be sitting bolt upright in their beds, sheets pulled up to their chins, their eyes wide in the darkness.

  The dead silence that followed was even more terrifying than the knock.

  “Open this door at once!” Miss Fawlthorne demanded. “Or I shall have Mr. Tugg come up and take the hinges off.”

  I padded across the room, gave the key a twist, and pulled the door open. “What is it?” I asked, blinking and rubbing at my eyes. “Is there a fire? I was asleep.”

  “It’s no use, girl,” Miss Fawlthorne said. “The lights were on in this room. Someone was talking in here.”

  “I was having a nightmare,” I told her. “I expect it’s being away from home, and so forth. I quite often talk in my sleep.”

  “Do you indeed,” Miss Fawlthorne said. “And do you also switch on electric lights in your sleep?”

  “No,” I said. “But I didn’t know where I was when I woke up. I was disorientated.”

  It’s a bold girl who tries out a new word when she’s being grilled, but I was desperate. “Disorientated” was an excuse Daffy had once used when Father had caught her pinching Christmas pudding from the pantry.

  “I was disorientated,” she had claimed, and Father had believed her. Actually believed her!

  I shot a quick glance behind me as I switched on the electric light, and the room was bathed in a harsh glare.

  “No lights!” Miss Fawlthorne said, reaching past my face and switching them off again instantly. “ ‘Lights-out’ means lights out, you stupid girl.”

  That did it. As with Ryerson Rainsmith’s calling me a drowned rat, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. A week away from home and my list of people to poison was already up to two—three if you counted the insipid Dodo.

  From somewhere about her person, Miss Fawlthorne produced a packet of paper matches. She struck one gravely and, without taking her eyes from mine, lit the candle. It was rather a neat trick of eye-hand coordination.

  “Now, then,” she said, her gaze fixing me like a butterfly pinned to a card in a specimen box. “To whom were you talking?”

  I could see that we were going to sit here until the sun came up or until I answered. It was obvious that Miss Fawlthorne was that kind of person.

  “Myself,” I admitted, looking away. “I’m afraid I sometimes talk to myself when I’m upset. It’s one of my greatest faults. I’m trying to train myself not to do it.”

  I was wasting my breath, and I knew it even before the words were out of my mouth.

  Miss Fawlthorne was now looking round the room slowly, her head rotating like an owl’s. I wondered idly if, after a certain number of degrees, it would snap and fall off.

  I rather uncharitably hoped that it did.

  I didn’t dare glance at the fireplace. Doing so would surely give Collingwood away. I kept my eyes humbly on my feet.

  “Look at me!” Miss Fawlthorne commanded, and I slowly lifted my gaze to meet hers.

  I was on the verge of tears; I could feel it.

  The next words out of her mouth shocked me to the core.

  “Poor, dear, lonely, unhappy Flavia de Luce,” she said, lifting my chin with a forefinger and gazing fondly into my eyes with a wry smile.

  What was I to think? She might as well have slapped my face. If she had, I’d have known how to handle it.

  But this unexpected compassion caught me completely off guard. “Scuppered,” I believe is the nautical word. I didn’t know how to respond.

  As I was raising my eyes to hers, my supernaturally acute hearing—a trait I had inherited from Harriet, my mother—detected a scraping noise in the chimney. Even without looking round, I knew that soot was falling into the hearth. To a trained ear, the sound is unmistakable.

  Miss Fawlthorne—praised be all the saints!—had not noticed it. Her hearing apparatus was considerably older than mine and blunted by time.

  I was offering up a silent prayer of thanks for my deliverance when there was a sudden rush of sound and cold air. Something came rocketing down the chimney and exploded into the room with a sickening thump.

  The candle blew out and we were plunged instantly into darkness.

  Miss Fawlthorne—and I must give her credit for this—had the candle burning again in seconds. She must still have had the matchbook in her hands.

  Collingwood lay sprawled on the carpet, her face and hands as black as any Welsh coal miner’s, her open red mouth and white eyes giving her the appearance of some fiend who had just been vomited up out of the pit.

  Beside her, what appeared at first to be a charred log was still rolling slowly toward us, unfurling as it came, like a roll of dropped lavatory paper, the sooty and discolored Union Jack in which it was wrapped.

  I must state here that I have no fear whatsoever of being in a room in the dark with a corpse. In fact, quite the contrary. The little shiver I experience is one of excitement, not of fear.

  As the bundle rolled, the skull became detached and tumbled to a stop at my feet.

  At the core of the bundle was a blackened and desiccated human body, and I knew, even before it came to rest, that it had been dead for some time.

  Quite some time.

  • THREE •

  THERE WE WERE, THE four of us: me, Miss Fawlthorne, Collingwood, and the corpse, all equally motionless.

  It was one of those moments our Victorian ancestors called a tableau: a frozen pose with none of us moving so much as a muscle; a moment when time stood still; a moment when eternity stopped to take a deep breath before rushing on and sweeping us with it into a future that could never be undone.

  Then Collingwood began to cry: a long, low, drawn-out sobbing that threatened to become a howl.

  Miss Fawlthorne went white in the candlelight. Of the four of us, only the corpse and I were calm.

  I could hardly wait to have the electric lights switched on so that I could have a good gander.

  I have seen numerous dead bodies in my lifetime, each more interesting than the last, and each more instructive. This corpse, if I was counting correctly, was number seven.

  Even by the sparse light of the guttering candle, I had already decided, because of the slight frame and thin wrists, that this one was almost certainly female. The sooty skull and the horribly grinning jaws gave her the look of a freshly unwrapped mummy.

  Tarred by time and the chimney into a smoked kipper.

  Although that might not seem like an appropriate thought, I must be truthful: It was what I was thinking at the moment.

  First reactions are not always ones we can later be proud of, but I knew from personal experience that there would always be time, before I was questioned, to concoct a more charitable version to make myself look good. That’s the way
the human mind works.

  At least, mine does.

  Time had resumed, but still crawled as it tends to do in such circumstances. Miss Fawlthorne seemed to be moving across the room as slowly as a stick insect on a twig in a nature film. After an eternity, she switched on the lights.

  “Collingwood!” she demanded, in a voice that was far too quiet to be comforting. “What have you done?”—while Collingwood, black as Old Frizzle, her arms wrapped round her knees, had begun rocking herself back and forth on the hardwood floor, giving out a wail which I believe is called “keening”: a hair-raising howl that arises from some ancient banshee part of our brain.

  It was hardly human.

  If this were the cinema, someone would slap her face and reduce her to civilized sobbing, but I hadn’t the heart.

  I dropped to my knees and cradled her in my arms.

  “Fetch some water,” I heard my mouth ordering Miss Fawlthorne. “And brandy. Quickly! She’s going into shock.”

  Miss Fawlthorne began to say something, but thought better of it and strode out of the room.

  I yanked a quilt from the bed and threw it round Collingwood’s shoulders.

  I covered the cadaver and the skull with a sheet—but not before having a jolly good gander at the grisly remains.

  With Miss Fawlthorne gone, here was a Heaven-sent opportunity. I knew that I would have no second chance.

  The body was, as I have said, smoke-blackened. The flag in which it had been wrapped had acted as a container in the same way—or so it is said—that banana leaves are used by natives of some of the far-flung outposts of the Empire (such as India) to bake fish.

  The detached skull was as black as a bowling ball, bizarrely bare of hair and skin. The curled fingers of both hands were pulled up to where the chin should have been, as if Death had caught its victim sleeping. Clutched loosely in one of them was what appeared to be a small, tarnished medallion.

  I nestled it in my handkerchief and pocketed the thing immediately—before Miss Fawlthorne could return. All hail to the gods who had sent me to bed fully clothed!

  The garments in which the body was clad were too tangled and smoky to identify. They might once have been a pauper’s rags—or the robes of a fairy-tale princess.

  Death by cooking is not beautiful.

  Or had she met her end by some other means? Or perhaps in some other place?

  Like a police photographer, my mind began taking an efficient and methodical series of mental snapshots: close-ups of the skull, the blackened teeth, the hands, the feet (which were bare except for a single scorched woolen sock, half off).

  I peeled it back an inch or two from the shrunken ebony ankle, and saw by the inner surface that it had originally been red.

  This examination was not made any easier by the fact that Collingwood had now begun howling like an air raid siren, her voice rising and falling unnervingly.

  “It’s all right,” I kept telling her, all the while keeping my eyes on the dead body. “Everything is all right. Miss Fawlthorne will be back in a jiffy.”

  Did I imagine it, or did Collingwood now begin to ululate—as Daffy would put it—all the louder?

  Quite frankly, she was getting on my nerves.

  “Put a cork in it!” I said. “You’re drooling.”

  As anyone with older sisters will tell you, there’s no quicker way to make a female dry up, no matter her age, than to point out that she has slobber on her face.

  So I was not surprised, then, when Collingwood hiccupped to an abrupt halt.

  “What … is … that … thing?” she asked, hauling herself on her bottom as quickly as she could across the floor and away from the sheet-draped body.

  “It’s a bird. Rather a large one. A stork, I believe. Or perhaps an ibis.”

  I’ll admit this was a bit of a stretch—even for me. It had been quite obvious that the blackened skull didn’t have a long curving beak. But then neither had the mummified birds I had seen in the Natural History Museum. Their beaks had been bandaged to their breasts both for neatness and to make things easy for their long-dead embalmers.

  “How would a stork get trapped in the chimney?”

  “Happens all the time,” I said. “During deliveries. They just don’t report it because it’s too depressing. Some sort of unwritten agreement with the newspapers.”

  Collingwood’s mouth fell open, but I will never know what she was about to say, since at that very instant Miss Fawlthorne returned with a glass of water and a decanter of what I assumed was brandy.

  “Drink this,” she ordered, and Collingwood obeyed at once with remarkably little fuss, finishing off all of the former and a good slug of the latter.

  “I fear she’s awakened the house,” Miss Fawlthorne said, glancing first at her wristwatch and then at me. “No matter, I suppose. The police shall have to be called anyway. Not that—”

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Who is it?” Miss Fawlthorne demanded.

  “Fitzgibbon, miss.”

  Miss Fawlthorne sprang to the electrical switch like a sudden gazelle. “We mustn’t set a bad example,” she whispered. “Lights-out means what it says.”

  Again we were wrapped in darkness.

  But for no more than a few moments. Then a match flared and Miss Fawlthorne touched it to the candle’s wick.

  “Come,” she called out, and the door opened.

  At first, I saw only the round reflections of Fitzgibbon’s spectacles, floating as if weightless in the air. She took a single step forward into the room—then froze—and all at once, miraculously, she was surrounded by a sea of pale, disembodied female faces peering over her shoulder.

  Oddly enough, the thought that sprang to my mind at that instant was the famous passage in which Saint Luke is describing the Nativity. As best I can recall, it goes something like this: “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.’ ”

  (Although the Bible, of course, at least in the King James Version, for some reason known only to its translators and to the king himself, has no quotation marks.)

  Even now, I can still see the white faces of those cherubim and seraphim, suspended eerily in the shadows behind the frozen Fitzgibbon: the students of Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy.

  My classmates.

  This was my first glimpse of them—and theirs of me.

  “Begone, girls!” Miss Fawlthorne commanded, clapping her hands several times, smartly.

  And like puppets being jerked offstage in a rather sinister Punch and Judy, they vanished.

  “Take Collingwood to her bed,” Miss Fawlthorne instructed Fitzgibbon. “She’s had a bad shock.”

  Did she think I hadn’t?

  Like a reluctant robot, Fitzgibbon hauled Collingwood to her feet and led her to the door, quilt and all.

  “It was quick of you to have thought of the sheet,” Miss Fawlthorne said when they were gone, shooting me a piercing look above the candle’s flame. “You have made an excellent start, Flavia.

  “Except for allowing Collingwood in your room,” she added. “Both of you must be punished, of course.”

  I might have pointed out, I suppose, that Collingwood had come into the room uninvited and that since I was asleep at the time, I could scarcely have prevented it. To say nothing of the fact that, being newly arrived, I had not been informed of the stupid rule.

  But I kept my bun trap shut.

  It is decisions like this, for better or for worse, which make you who you are.

  Instead, I stooped to lift the corner of the sheet.

  “No! Don’t! Please!” Miss Fawlthorne snapped, and I let it fall.

  What harm could there possibly be in having another squint? But I knew in that moment that there would never be another chance.

  Generally, when you discover a body, you have the luxury of close examination before the police are called
in to trample the scene like cows at a picnic. But not always—and this was going to be one of those times. I had seen all that I was going to see. Whatever the physical evidence, it was already in my head.

  Besides, I should have thought Miss Fawlthorne might want to learn as much as she could about the cadaver that had, until recently, inhabited her chimney.

  Or did she know already?

  I stood primly by, allowing her to regain control.

  “I suppose I shall have to report it,” she said for the second time, almost as if thinking aloud—as if she were being forced into it. Perhaps she was thinking of the academy’s reputation. I could already see the headlines:

  Carcass Cooked in Chimney

  Body at Miss Bodycote’s

  Girls’ School Aghast!

  If the newspapers here in Canada were anything like the ones back home, we could be in for a jolly couple of days.

  “But you must be absolutely exhausted!” she said, and until that moment I hadn’t thought about it. Six days at sea and another on the train—to say nothing of the fact that it was now the middle of the night …

  Miss Fawlthorne’s words were hypnotic. I was suddenly yawning like the Cheddar Gorge, my eyes full of grit.

  “You can’t sleep here, obviously,” she said, waving a hand at the sheet-covered form on the floor. “I shall put you up in my sitting room.”

  I had a fleeting vision of Miss Fawlthorne nailing my severed head to the wall as if I were a mounted trophy: some wild animal that she had shot in Africa, or in the Arctic wastes.

  “Come along, then,” she said, leading the way by candlelight.

  The electric lamps remained switched off.

  At Miss Bodycote’s, a rule, I could see, was a rule was a rule.

  Daffy would have been delighted with my insight.

  I would never have thought it possible, but I missed my sister. She had been the lemon on my fish, the vinegar on my chips, I realized with a sudden pang, and that without her, life from now on was going to be less tasty. It was an odd thought to have at that particular moment, but then, life itself was odd. At least mine was.

  Get a grip, Flavia, I remember thinking. Steady on.

  We were now walking along a paneled corridor, Miss Fawlthorne leading the way.