As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(11)

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.