As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (16 page)

A crow gave a rude “Caw!” as it landed in one of the trees, and regarded us in its hunchbacked way from the branch. How did we appear to a bird? I wondered. Two small, insignificant figures standing in a field of stones, I expect, and nothing more. I picked up a pebble and tossed it. The bird turned its back.

“Are you not at all curious about my reason for following you?” Miss Fawlthorne asked.

I shrugged again, but then thought better of it and said, “Yes.”

“It is a simple one,” she said. “It is because I wanted to be alone with you.”

Again, a small flame of fear flickered up in my mind.

“But not for any reason you may think. The truth is that today, here and now, in this churchyard, your real training begins in earnest. You must speak of it to no one. You will appear to be, for all intents and purposes, just another schoolgirl—and a rather dull one, at that.”

She paused to let her words sink in, fixing me with the same bright eye as the crow had done.

“Come over here,” she said strolling across the graveyard and beckoning me to follow. She pointed to a rather plain and unremarkable tombstone.

“ ‘Cornelia Corwin, 1907–1944,’ ” she read aloud. “ ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant.’ You’d think she was
some wealthy family’s chambermaid, wouldn’t you—or perhaps a nanny? But she wasn’t. She was one of us. Without Cornelia Corwin there would have been no successful evacuation of Dunkirk. Three hundred thousand men would have perished in vain.”

She bent over and gently brushed away a dead leaf that had settled on the tombstone. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes,” I said, looking her straight in the eye.

“Excellent,” she said. “We must understand each other perfectly. There must be no barrier to communications between us. Now, then—”

As she spoke, she began to stroll among the tombstones and I fell into lockstep beside her.

“Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy is a house divided not by dissent, but by choice. The day girls know nothing of what goes on with the boarders such as yourself.”

“The day girls are a front, you mean,” I said.

“Flavia, you simply amaze me.”

I glanced up at her proudly.

“You will be taught everything you need to know, but you will be taught it discreetly. You will be trained in the arts of genteel mayhem. Oh, don’t look at me like that. The vegetable scraper, the cheese grater, and the corkscrew are often overlooked as effective means of disposing of an adversary, you know—even the pickle fork, in a pinch.”

Was she teasing me?

“But the war has been over for ages,” I said.

“Precisely so. You will discover that certain skills become even more essential in peacetime.”

She saw at once the look of horror on my face.

“At Miss Bodycote’s,” she went on, “we encourage our girls in all aspects.”

“But—” I said.

“In
all
aspects. Do you understand, Flavia?”

“What about poisons?” I asked, hoping against hope.

“Of course you’ll be taught the more traditional skills,” she continued, ignoring my question, “such as ciphers and code breaking, and so forth, as well as the more modern and inventive arts that are not yet dreamed of by even the most sensational of our novelists.”

“My aunt Felicity told me I was to become a member of the Nide—” I began.

The Nide was the name of the hush-hush organization into which I was to be inducted, my reason for being in Canada.

“Shhh!” she said, reaching out and touching my lips. “You must never utter that word again. Never.”

“But how will I know which of the boarders—”

She touched a gentle finger to my lips. “They will make themselves known to you. Until they do, trust no one.”

“What about Jumbo? What about Van Arque?”

“All in due time, Flavia.”

How easy, I supposed, it would have been at that moment to ask Miss Fawlthorne if she had heard anything about the identity of the corpse that had plummeted out of the chimney, and yet it was not.

A conversation between a person of my age and a person of hers is like a map of a maze: There are things that each of us knows, and that each of us knows the other
knows, that can be talked about. But there are things that each of us knows that the other doesn’t know we know, which must not be spoken of, no matter what. Because of our ages, and for reasons of decency, there are what Daffy would refer to as taboos: forbidden topics which we may stroll among like islands of horse dung in the road that, although perfectly evident to both of us, must not be mentioned or kicked at any cost.

It’s a strange world when you come right down to it.

“You must learn not to ask unnecessary questions,” Miss Fawlthorne went on, as if she were reading my mind. “It is a cardinal rule here that no girl may give out any information whatsoever about any other girl, past or present.”

Her words had an eerily familiar ring. “Certain questions must not be asked,” Aunt Felicity had told me, as we walked together on the Visto at Buckshaw. Now here it was again.

“You mean I need to deduce those facts myself,” I declared flatly, taking care to make it a statement, rather than a direct query.

“Gold star,” she said quietly, almost as if to herself, as she looked off, almost idly, into the distance.

A gentle wind stirred the leaves, and in it was a touch of coldness. It was, after all, autumn.

“There will be field trips,” Miss Fawlthorne went on suddenly, “which will require a great deal of courage on your part. I trust that you will not let us down.”

“Did Harriet undergo this training?” I asked.

Her silence was an answer in itself.

“I have arranged with Mrs. Bannerman to tutor you in
advanced chemistry. She assures me that your level of comprehension is far beyond expectations. You will begin work with both the electron microscope and the hydrogen spectrophotometer almost at once.”

Yaroo!
I couldn’t believe my ears. This, truly, was Heaven with knobs on!

“And I don’t mind telling you that it is entirely due to the influence, in high places, of the elder Miss de Luce that our humble establishment has been presented with the funds necessary to acquire such advanced apparatuses.”

The elder Miss de Luce? Aunt Felicity! Of course!

Aunt Felicity had not taken credit for herself when she mentioned the latest scientific equipment with which Miss Bodycote’s had been endowed, but now everything was suddenly, remarkably, brilliantly clear.

Miss Fawlthorne smiled, as if she were reading my mind. “So you see,” she said, “in a way, if there had been no Flavia de Luce, there also may not have been, for much longer, a Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy.”

I’m afraid I could do no more than gape as the meaning of her words took root.

“We have a great deal riding upon you, Flavia … a
very
great deal.”

What could I do? What could I say? The whole world had suddenly, and without warning, revealed itself to be far larger a place than ever I could have dreamed of. I was standing at the edge of a very great abyss whose further lip was so far beyond imagination that only faith could bridge the gap. It was, I suppose, the bridge connecting childhood with whatever vast unknown might lie beyond.

I know now that there is a very precise instant when one stands at that threshold at which the choice must be made: whether to remain, even if only for a while, a child, or whether to step boldly across into another world.

I did the only thing I could think of.

I seized Miss Fawlthorne’s hand and gave it a jolly good shake.

“Excellent,” she said. “I’m glad that we understand each other. Now, then—”

Was I imagining it, or was she now speaking to me in an entirely different tone? An entirely different voice?

“Your work with Mrs. Bannerman must, necessarily, take place in the small hours. You must not be seen to be spending an unusual amount of time in her company, although you may, of course, at your own discretion, occasionally feign stupidity as an excuse to return to her classroom for explanation or clarification after your regular chemistry class.”

Feigning stupidity was one of my specialties. If stupidity were theoretical physics, then I would be Albert Einstein.

“But for now,” Miss Fawlthorne went on, making a broad sweep of her arm which took in all of our immediate surroundings, “this will be your classroom. No one pays the slightest bit of attention to a woman and a girl in a graveyard. What else can they be but mourners? What else can they be doing but grieving?”

We walked for a long time, among the tombstones, Miss Fawlthorne and I, stopping occasionally to sit on a bench in the sunshine, or to rearrange the flowers on a random grave.

At last she looked at her wristwatch. “We’d better be getting back,” she said. “We shall split up and take different routes when we’re four blocks from home.”

Home. What a strange-feeling word
.

It had been a long time since I had had one.

Home
. I repeated the word in my mind. It was good.

And so we set off on the long walk … home.

Much of what we talked about I am forbidden to commit to paper.

T
HE ALARM WENT OFF
with a muted clatter. I reached under my pillow and silenced the thing, then hauled it out and looked blearily at the time: It was three
A.M.

Miss Fawlthorne had planted the clock in my bed while I was in class, just as she had promised she would. The thing was a large, self-important alarm clock with radium hands that glowed greenly in the dark, and a bell loud enough to be heard through the feathers of the pillow but not outside my room.

I stretched, climbed out onto the cold floor, and hurriedly dressed, taking great care to be mouse-quiet.

There had been several good reasons to assign me to Edith Cavell, Miss Fawlthorne had explained, not the least of which was to make possible my “Starlight Studies,” as she jokingly called them; she had asked Mr. Tugg to oil the hinges, so that I was able to come and go in perfect silence.

Some of the girls had grumbled, of course, about a scabby fourth-former having her own room, but the story had been put about that for certain reasons I was not a fit roommate: flatulence, I believe, although I can’t prove it.

For a time I was the butt of their jokes, but after a while they tired of it and moved on to fresher cruelties and easier victims.

Mrs. Bannerman was awaiting me in the chemistry lab. She had already drawn the heavy blackout curtains that had been installed to allow demonstration of certain experiments with light (but I must say no more), and to permit the showing of instructional ciné films in perfect darkness.

For three o’clock in the morning, Mrs. Bannerman looked remarkably fresh. Perhaps “vivacious” is more the word. Her hair was perfection, as if she had just stepped out of the salon, and she smelled of lilies of the valley. She reminded me a great deal of the young chorus girl Audrey Hepburn whom Aunt Felicity had pointed out when she took us as a rare treat to a West End theater.

“I knew her in an earlier life,” my aunt had whispered.

“I didn’t know you believed in reincarnation, Auntie Fee,” Feely had said.

“I don’t,” she had replied. “Shhh.”

“Good morning, Flavia,” Mrs. Bannerman said brightly. “Welcome to my little kitchen. Would you like a cup of tea?”

“Yes, please,” I said, somewhat flustered. The only other person who had ever invited me to tea was Antigone
Hewitt, the inspector’s wife, who was now, perhaps, through my own fault, lost to me forever. She had not even turned up to bid me farewell, as I had so desperately hoped she would.

Perhaps she hadn’t known that I was leaving. Had her husband not told her? But he himself might not have known that I was being banished. I might die an old woman without ever learning the truth.

All this was going through my mind as the tea steeped in the lengthening silence.

“You’re looking very thoughtful,” Mrs. Bannerman said.

“Yes,” I told her. “I was just thinking of home.”

“I do, sometimes, too,” she said. “It’s not always as pleasant as one expects, is it? Now, then, shall we get started?”

I was a bit shy of the electron microscope at first—reluctant even to touch it—but when Mrs. Bannerman brought up on the cathode ray screen the hairs of a louse, magnified nearly sixty thousand times, my reverent fingers were everywhere, caressing the thing as if it were a favorite pet. Wild horses couldn’t have dragged me away.

“The first electron microscope in North America was built by a couple of students not far from here at the University of Toronto,” she told me. “Before you were born.

“What we are now observing is the leg of a species of louse called
Columbicola extinctus
, or passenger-pigeon-chewing louse, which lived exclusively upon the body of that particular bird, which has been extinct since 1914. Why it should have been found a month ago, in the hair of a murdered clergyman in the Klondike, makes for a pretty
little puzzle. Ah! I see that I now have your undivided attention.”

“Murdered?” I asked.

What a peculiar feeling it was to be sitting in a locked room in the middle of the night, sharing a microscope with a woman who had herself been tried for murder. I wouldn’t have thought the subject would come up so easily.

“Yes, murdered,” she said. “I provide assistance to the police from time to time as a way of keeping my hand in. Although I earn my bread and butter by teaching chemistry, my professional qualifications are actually as an entomologist.”

I hadn’t the foggiest idea what an entomologist was, but I could already feel the look of admiration spreading across my face.

“Bugs,” she said. “Including insects, spiders, centipedes, worms. I specialize in the ways in which their study may be used in criminal investigation. It’s quite a new field, but also a very old one. Shouldn’t you be making notes?”

I had been too entranced to do anything but gape.

“Here’s a notebook,” she said, handing me a red-covered secretary’s dictation pad. “When it’s full, ask for another. You may write as much as you wish, but with one proviso: Your notebooks are never to leave this room. They will be kept here under lock and key, but you may add to them or consult them at any time.”