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

  Had Scheele’s Green once been used on wallpaper in Canada, as it had in England? Had the girl in the chimney been poisoned by sleeping in a contaminated room? Had the stuff in which she had been wrapped been Union Jack wallpaper? Surely it would have burned …

  Even as it was thinking these thoughts, my mind realized that it was exhausted—running in senseless circles. I needed sleep and I needed it desperately.

  I jerked awake.

  It was dark in the room and someone was knocking—scratching, actually—at the door.

  “Flavia!”

  I was being called in a hoarse whisper.

  I remembered at once that I had locked the door as a protection against being pummeled again in my sleep by Collingwood.

  I jumped out of bed still tangled in the wreckage of my bedsheets and hopped to the door.

  Van Arque stepped back, startled, when she saw me.

  “Were you asleep?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “I was just resting my liver.”

  “Well, never mind,” she told me. “Get dressed. Quickly. Have you forgotten Little Commons?”

  To be truthful, I had.

  “No,” I said.

  I dashed about trying to make myself decent as Van Arque waited outside the door.

  Still, I felt like a scarecrow as we crept through the darkness toward Florence Nightingale.

  Van Arque produced a slip of paper from somewhere and, slipping it into the crack under the door, began to move it slowly from side to side.

  I saw at once that it was a silent signal, and far superior to knocking.

  In a moment the door was opened slightly and we were beckoned inside.

  Jumbo and a group of about half a dozen girls—one of whom was Gremly, and another the tiny blonde with a round face who had been elbowed in the ribs by Druce at breakfast—were sitting on the floor in a circle round a single candle, which danced and guttered madly as we came into the room.

  “Shift!” Jumbo whispered, and the circle enlarged itself to make room for us.

  “Welcome, Flavia Sabina de Luce,” Jumbo pronounced.

  I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I smiled.

  “It is a tradition at Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy for each new girl, by way of introduction, to tell us a story. You may begin.”

  To say that I was unprepared would be an understatement.

  Tell them a story? I didn’t know any stories—at least not any that I could repeat to a group of girls.

  “What kind of story?” I asked, hoping for a hint.

  “A ghost story,” Jumbo said. “And the bloodier the better.”

  Seven flickering faces leaned in closer, all eyes intent upon mine, except Gremly’s, who kept hers shielded with an upraised hand, as if protecting herself from a hostile sun.

  What a Heaven-sent opportunity! Wallace Scroop, the lubricious newspaper reporter—“lubricious” was a word I had learned from Daffy, but hadn’t, till now, had an opportunity to use—had suggested that Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy was haunted. And now, here was a chance to bring up the topic without seeming to be either childish or gullible.

  But the only ghost story I could think of on the spur of the moment was one that Feely and Daffy had told me when I was quite small: a story that had terrified me so much that I had almost shed my skin.

  It was called “The Old Woman and the Pimple.”

  It went like this—

  • SEVEN •

  “IN THE VILLAGE OF Malden Fenwick, in England,” I began, “not far from Buckshaw, my family’s ancestral home”—it was important, I knew, in order to draw them in, to supply credible details—“stands the ancient church of St. Rumwold. It is dedicated to the infant who, immediately after being born, is said to have cried out three times, ‘Christianus sum! Christianus sum! Christianus sum!’ (‘I am a Christian’), requested baptism, delivered a sermon, and died when he was three days old.”

  A little murmur ran through the group as the girls looked uneasily at one another.

  “In the north transept of the church is a chapel containing the tombs of a crusader and his various wives and children, and, to one side, built into the wall, is a most peculiar stone carving.

  “This is the thirteenth-century effigy of a prosperous local miller named Johannes Hotwell, or Heatwell—the inscription is now much worn and not easily legible. There, on his back, he lies among the crusaders, his eyes open, his stone nose pointing to the overhead vaulting as if scanning the heavens for some signal from the painted stars. In his marble hands he clasps what seems at first to be a sack of flour, but which some insist must be, because of its ornamental nature, a hot-air balloon—although it can’t be, can it? since the hot-air balloon was not yet to be built by the Montgolfier brothers for another five hundred and thirty years.”

  I paused to let this sink in. I was telling the tale in, as best as I could remember, the same words in which my sisters had told it to me.

  I could tell that my listeners were taken in.

  “Johannes, being of an overbearing mind, had, in spite of his father’s warning, married young. ‘Tend your mill,’ the old man had told him time and again, ‘and leave wyves to such as be smytten.’ ” All of this can be found in a little booklet sold near the font by the ladies of the Altar Guild.

  “In spite of his father’s warning, Johannes had, as I say, taken to himself a wife: a shrewish spinster from the next village who knew a good thing when she saw it.

  “It was not long afterwards that Johannes’s pimple appeared.

  “At first, it was no more than a tiny red spot between his shoulder blades, as if he had been bitten by an absent-minded gnat. But as time passed, it grew and grew into a fat, pus-filled pimple: an angry red blemish on his back.

  “Rather like a dormant volcano,” I added, “with a cap of snow, or pus, on its upper peaks.”

  “Ugh!” one of the girls said.

  “His wife begged him to let her burst the thing. ‘It may be thought a wytch’s sign,’ she told him.

  “But he would have none of it.

  “ ‘Leave it, wife,’ he had told her, ‘for though it be but a pymple, it be myn own,’ and she knew her place well enough to leave the thing alone.

  “At least, while he was awake.

  “But one night, she couldn’t sleep for worrying about what might become of them. Surely when her husband stripped off his jerkin to take the first ceremonial May Day dive into the millpond, someone would spot the pimple. They would be aghast!

  “Word would get round. Gossip would see to it that the villagers would stop bringing him their custom. They would begin carting their grain to Bishop’s Lacey, instead. She and Johannes would come to ruin, while others prospered.

  “All of this and more ran through her mind as she lay awake, the moonbeams streaming in through the casement window as if it were broad daylight, illuminating her sleeping husband’s back—and its lurking purple pimple.

  “She reached over and took the thing between thumb and forefinger—”

  Jaws dropped round the circle of girls.

  “It was almost too easy. With an audible pop!”—I made the sound with my finger in my cheek—“the thing broke, and the pus came out. She urged it along a little, coaxing it until there was nothing left in it but blood.

  “Her husband stirred, gave a long sigh, rolled over, and began to snore.

  “Next morning, he complained of a scratched back. ‘You must have rolled against the wattle,’ she told him, and he said no more about it.

  “But as time went on, the pimple began to fill again, even more red and angry, if that were possible, than before.

  “As she had done the first time, the miller’s wife waited until a Saturday night when he was sleeping off a second (or perhaps third) pot of ale, and then she broke it again, this time with more confidence—almost joyously.

  “It surprised her that, rather than being fearful, she now actually enjoyed popping the pimple.
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br />   “As the years went by, the purple pimple bloomed, each time bigger and more livid than the time before. It was, she thought, as if Hell itself were filling the thing with foul and sulfurous matter thrown up from deep down in the inferno that was her husband, Johannes.

  “The miller’s wife found herself looking forward—almost impatiently—to the next swelling of the infernal bag, which had now become a cyst. She could hardly wait, each time, for its slow and weary filling.

  “And then one night the miller died. Between the beefsteak and the beer. Just like that!

  “He keeled over at the table and was dead before his face hit the floor.

  “The old woman was filled with mortal fear! Had she killed him with her incessant and secret tampering? Would he still be alive, eating roast beef and parsnips, if she had left well enough alone?

  “Would she be taken by the high sheriff and hanged for her crime?

  “And so she kept her silence and told no one about the pimple, or what she had done, and a few days later, the miller was laid to rest in the transept of St. Rumwold, under the lid of a massive slab tomb, with his name and dates carved upon the lid.

  “Time passed, and the village began to forget him, as villages do with things that are always under their noses.

  “But Johannes’s wife did not forget him. Oh, no—quite the contrary!

  “She lay awake nights, thinking not of her husband, but of the excrescence which was quite possibly still growing between his shoulder blades—even in the grave. With no one to empty it, she thought, the thing would go on filling. She thought of it there in the darkness of his coffin, growing and growing and growing—untended. Neglected.

  “She thought of it as hers.

  “And to be truthful, she missed it. Missed squeezing the thing. Missed hearing it pop.

  “She could hardly bear thinking about it. It was quite clear what she should do.

  “And so on a moonless night, the old woman crept quietly through the sleeping village and made her way by a roundabout route along the riverbank to the church.

  “Inside, she blessed herself, said a dozen Our Fathers and two-dozen Hail Marys, and, with a stout iron poker she had brought from her own hearth concealed in her shawl, pried open the lid of the tomb.”

  I paused in my tale to look round me. The candle flame was perfectly smooth and still. No one was breathing.

  Even Jumbo’s mouth was agape. “And …?” she whispered in a husky voice, the word rising in wisps at the end like smoke from a wooden match.

  “There in his stone box lay the miller, just as she had last seen him. In fact, he appeared to have changed hardly at all. Had he been miraculously preserved, as some saints were said to remain, forever incorrupt?

  “Or—and the hair on her head rose as she thought of it—was he still alive?”

  Again I paused for my words to have their effect. One of the girls on the far side of the circle had quietly begun to sob.

  “It was not easy, but she … rolled … him … over,” I said slowly, “and hauled up the hem of the shroud … in which all but his head had been wrapped.”

  The silence was by now unbearable. I let it lengthen, watching the reaction of each of them.

  “And there … there was the gigantic pimple, swollen by now to the size of a pomegranate—and much the same livid color, as if it were full of blood!

  “The wife’s hands shook as she reached for the thing …

  “And as she reached there came a sudden hollow groan!

  “ ‘No-o-o-o-o-o-o!’

  “—as if the miller’s corpse were protesting, as if he wanted to keep this treasure for himself, to take away into eternity. A ruby made of skin.

  “In spite of her fear, the old woman leaned even closer. It would take only a moment and then she would be gone, her duty done. I shall leave it to the Lord, she thought, to say if I be right or wrong.”

  The seven faces around me had now gone as white as socks. They had ceased breathing. Save for the flickering candle, time was suspended.

  “And then, slowly … carefully … she placed her fingers upon the swollen thing … gave it a squeeze, and—

  “BLAZOOEY!”

  I shrieked the word as loudly as I could, grabbing the arms of the girls each side of me.

  Jumbo screamed gratifyingly.

  Girls clung to one another in fright.

  Gremly fell on her face and pulled her dressing gown over her head, moaning.

  “What happened?” someone cried.

  I waited for a long moment before I replied. “The damned thing burst,” I said matter-of-factly.

  “And the hot-air balloon?” Jumbo asked, making a remarkably quick recovery. “What about the hot-air balloon?”

  “Oh, that,” I said. “That was added to his effigy later by the miller’s wife as a sort of allegory.”

  “Allegory?” Gremly croaked.

  “As a civilized way of indicating to posterity that the stomach gases of the deceased had exploded, as sometimes happened in those days. It was the best excuse his wife could come up with on short notice.”

  There was a scraping sound outside in the hall, and something banged.

  “Shhh!” Jumbo said. “Someone’s coming! Lights out.”

  She blew out the candle and we all sat stock-still in the dark.

  There was a knock at the door.

  “What’s going on in there?” a voice demanded. It was Fitzgibbon.

  We held our collective breath, some of us with hands clapped over our mouths and noses.

  We huddled there together in the dark, paralyzed at the thought of what would happen when light was restored and time resumed.

  “It’s all right, Matron,” Jumbo called out after what felt like an eternity, putting on a sleepy drawl. “I was having another of those horrid nightmares. I shall be all right in the morning. Good night.”

  She was a girl after my own heart.

  There was a muttered response, and then footsteps shuffled away in the hall, their sound fading.

  “Some story!” Jumbo said when the danger had passed. She laughed lightly, as if she had to; as if it were part of a ritual.

  She lighted the candle again, and our faces flared up out of the darkness, the whites of our widened eyes as large as the polar caps.

  But something had changed. We were not the same girls we had been just minutes before. In that shared eternity of fright, and in some strange and indefinable way, we had suddenly all become sisters. Sisters of the candlelight—and sisters of something else, also.

  “Fetch the board, Gremly,” Jumbo ordered, as if a sudden decision had been made, and Gremly, scrambling to her feet, vanished into the shadows.

  A moment later she was back with a flat red box. She opened it and, with surprising tenderness, placed a wooden playing board on the floor at the very center of our circle.

  It was a Ouija board.

  I was quite familiar with the game. Daffy and Feely had dug a similar one out of a cupboard at Buckshaw and had terrorized me for a time by raising the ghost of Captain Cut-Throat, a malicious spirit from the days of piracy on the high seas, who had ratted on me at every opportunity. The captain had informed my sisters, by way of the moving tablet, that I had stolen perfume from one of them (true: I had taken it for a chemical experiment involving the essential oils of civet musk) and that it was I who had caused a certain book to vanish from beneath the pillow of the other (also true: I had nicked Daffy’s copy of Ulysses because it was the perfect thickness to prop up the broken leg of my bedside table).

  Letter by letter, word by word, and interspersed with his beastly “Har! Har! Har!,” the dead captain had caused the planchette to creep across the board on its three little legs, laying bare, one by one, some of my best-kept secrets—including several of which I was not very proud—until I happened to notice that the old sea dog misspelled the word “cemetery” with the ending “a-r-y”—in exactly the same way as Daffy did in her diary!

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bsp; I couldn’t help smiling now as I recalled how sweet—and how swift!—my revenge had been upon my smug sisters. Daffy, in particular, had been afraid to close her eyes for a month.

  “All fingers on!” Jumbo commanded, and we all pressed the first two fingers of each hand onto the heart-shaped wooden pointer. It was a tight fit.

  Someone giggled.

  “Shhh!” Jumbo said. “Show the spirits some respect.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “O spirits,” she said, “we bid you come among us.”

  There was a nervous silence.

  “O spirits,” she repeated, her voice a tone higher, “we bid you come among us.”

  I remembered from my sisters’ use of the Ouija board that, like the characters in fairy tales, the spirits needed to be told everything three times.

  I could easily relate to that.

  “O spirits,” Jumbo said again, this time in a whisper, “we bid you come among us.”

  Something electric was in the air. The hair at the back of my neck was already standing on end as it did when, in my laboratory, I rubbed an ebonite rod on my woolen jumper and waved it behind my head.

  “Is someone here?”

  With startling speed, the cursor jerked to life and began to slide. Across the board it flew, without the slightest hesitation, and stopped at “Yes.”

  Jumbo had opened her eyes to take a reading. “Who are you?” she asked in a conversational tone.

  There was no reply and she repeated her question two more times.

  Now the cursor was on the move again, sliding silkily to and fro across the board’s smooth surface, picking out letters, one by one, pausing only briefly at each before moving on to the next.

  D—A—R—K—H—E—R—E, it spelled out.

  “We understand,” Jumbo said, snapping her fingers. “We light a light for you.”

  Snap!

  She had obviously done this sort of thing before.

  “Is that better?”

  The cursor scurried across the board and stopped at the word “YES.”

  “Do you have a message for someone here?”