As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (12 page)

Damnation! I’d been hoping she’d forgotten about my promised punishment, but it was obvious she had not. Collingwood would be there, too. We would go to the stake together like a yoke of Christian martyrs.

Would I have time to question her—even as we burned?

Gymnastics was humiliating. The class was being held out of doors today, on the hockey field, and we were made to dress in plimsolls and bloomers that would have been laughed off the beach even in Victorian Blackpool.

We exercised to shouted commands:

“Heels: Raise! Sink!

“Right knee upward: Bend!

“Right knee backward: Stretch!

“Knee: Flexion! One! Two! Three! Four!”

The games mistress was the hatchet-faced individual with the short gray hair, the one I had spotted at breakfast. She stood off to one side, commanding us with a shrill whistle.

Phweeep-phweeep-phweeep!
“Cheerfully now!”

“Cheerfully!” Gremly grumbled through gritted teeth. “Yes, Miss Puddicombe. No, Miss Puddicombe. Three bags full, Miss Puddicombe.”

From this I gathered that the games mistress’s name was Miss Puddicombe.

Puddicombe by name, Puddicombe by nature
, I thought, even though I knew it didn’t make any sense.

But in times of torture, even a defiant thought can serve as a soothing salve.

I had just finished changing from bloomers to tunic when Jumbo stuck her head in at the door.

“Headmistress wants to see you,” she said. “Better shift your carcass.

“And, oh,” she added, smiling sweetly, “you’ll keep mum—if you know what’s good for you.”

Miss Bodycote’s was like that, I was to learn: the slap in the face with a velvet glove, the sting in the smile, the razor blade in the butter.

Just as in real life.

“Come in, Flavia,” Miss Fawlthorne said in reply to my knock.

I squeezed through the barely opened door.

“Sit down,” she commanded, and I obeyed, perching myself on the edge of a leather divan.

“First things first,” she said. “You will recall, no doubt, that I promised you punishment?”

“Yes, Miss Fawlthorne,” I said. “I’m sorry, I—”

“Tut!” she said, holding up a restraining hand. “Excuses are not legal tender at Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy. Do you understand?”

I didn’t, but I nodded anyway, imagining a red-faced
magistrate in a horsehair wig glaring down at me from his elevated bench.

“Rules are rules. They are meant to be obeyed.”

“Yes, Miss Fawlthorne. I’m sorry.”

The old, old formula. It had to be played out, step by meticulous step, according to some ancient ritual.

Perhaps I should have business cards printed to hand out, each embossed with my name and the words “I’m sorry, Miss Fawlthorne.” Every time I offended I would pluck one from my pocket and hand it—

“For your punishment, I want you to write out five hundred words on William Palmer. He led, I believe, an interesting life.”

It took a moment for the light to come on, but when it did, my brain was dazzled by the sheer brilliance of it.

William Palmer? The Rugeley Poisoner? Why, I could write five hundred—a thousand—ten thousand!—words on dear old, jolly old Bill Palmer with my fingers frostbitten, my wrists handcuffed, my ankles bound, and my tongue tied behind my back.

I struggled to keep from squirming.
Remember, Flavia
—
play the game
.

“Yes, Miss Fawlthorne,” I said, putting on a hangdog look.

I could hardly wait to lay hands on my pencil and notebook.

But why?
I thought later. Why would Miss Fawlthorne, as punishment, assign me such a happy task?

It was as if a sinner in the confession box, having admitted murder to the priest, were given the penance of devouring a chocolate cake. It simply made no sense.

Unless, of course, the priest was secretly a baker—or the son of a baker—who stood to profit from the transaction.

It may have been an uncharitable thought, or perhaps even a blasphemous one, but that’s the way my mind worked.

You can’t be hanged for thoughts, can you?
I wondered.

Miss Fawlthorne was writing something in a black ledger, and I was turning to go, when she spoke again.

“You will also report to me here, personally, at this same hour, every Monday, from now on. Beginning next week.”

The air went out of my lungs as if I had been run over and crushed by a cartwheel.

Permanent punishment for such a small infraction? What kind of hellhole had I been tossed into? One minute the woman was a guardian angel soothing my fevered brow, and the next a slavering executioner measuring my neck. What was one to think? What was one to do?

“Yes, Miss Fawlthorne,” I said.

I flew up the stairs to Edith Cavell. I needed to be alone.

I needed room to think.

I sat huddled on my bed, knees under my chin and my back against the wall.

School was not turning out to be at all what I thought it would be.

Father—the very thought of him shot a bolt through my heart—had often lectured us on the pleasures of learning.

And—up until this moment—he had been right.

There had been no happier hours of my life than those spent alone in my chemical laboratory at Buckshaw, bundled against the cold in the ancient gray cardigan of Father’s I had rescued from the salvage bin, rummaging through the dusty notebooks in Uncle Tar’s library, teaching myself, little by little, atom by atom, the mysteries of organic chemistry.

The doors of Creation had been flung open to me, and I had been allowed to walk among its mysteries as if I were strolling in a summer garden. The universe had rolled over and let me rub its tummy.

But now—!

Pain.

With an abrupt shock, I realized I was slamming the back of my head monotonously against the wall.
Bang!… bang!… bang!

I leapt off the bed and found myself marching, like an automaton, to the window.

Ever since the days of Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin, scientists have puzzled over inherited characteristics in everything from people to pea plants. It has been suggested that cell particles called “genes” or “gemmules” carry down, from one generation to the next, a set of maps or instructions, which determine, among other things, how we might behave in any given situation.

In that clockwork walk to the window, I realized even as
I went that what I was doing was precisely what Father always did in times of trouble. And, now that I came to think of it, so did Feely. And Daffy.

The Code of the de Luces. It was a simple equation of action and reaction:

Worry = window.

Just like that.

Simple as it was, it meant that in some complicated, and not entirely happy, chemical way—and far deeper than any other considerations—we de Luces were one.

Bound by blood and window glass.

As I stood there, and my eyes focused gradually on the outside world, I became aware that, down behind the stone gate, a small red-haired girl was thrashing wildly on the gravel. Two older girls were tickling her to the point of insanity. I recognized them at once as the pair I had seen at breakfast: the lip-reader, Druce, and her thrall, Trout.

Something clicked inside me. I could not stand idly by and watch. It was an all-too-familiar scene.

I unlocked the window and pushed up the sash.

The victim’s shrieks were now unbearable.

“Stop that!” I shouted, in the sternest voice I could manufacture. “Leave her alone!”

And, wonder of wonders, the two torturers stopped, staring up at me with open mouths. The sufferer, freed from their attentions, scrambled to her feet and bolted.

I slammed down the window before her tormentors could reply.

I would probably pay for it later in one way or another, but I didn’t care.

But try as I might, I could not get that little girl out of my mind.

How could tickling, even though it causes laughter, be at the same time such a vicious form of torture?

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.

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.