As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(10)

“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 Heavensent 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.