As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(22)

“Little Commons?”

“In her room. After lights-out. Just a few of her chums.”

I should have known.

It is difficult to look interested when you’re asleep, but I had developed a useful technique at St. Tancred’s, during some of the vicar’s excessively long sermons on Saving Faith, which I was now able to put into practice.

First, I would lock eyes with the teacher, nodding now and then in agreement with whatever she was saying. I might even pretend to be taking voluminous notes.

I would next plant my elbows firmly on the desktop and rest my forehead on my cupped hands, as if I were meditating on the profound wisdom of her words.

In that way, I could catch forty winks undetected, twenty at a time, trusting in faith (there it is: faith again!) to wake me up if I were spoken to directly. But in fact, it never happened. In all of recorded history, a teacher has never been known to question a thoughtful pupil.

Was it deceitful? Well, yes, I suppose it was, but to my mind, all’s fair in love and education.

Although I hadn’t learned a thing by the end of the day, I had at least slept a little, so that when the last class ended (mathematics, incidentally) I was feeling surprisingly refreshed.

By suppertime, the novelty of my presence was beginning to wear off among the girls. Nearly all of them had exchanged a word or two—almost always touching my arm as if I were some sort of talisman to be rubbed—and those who didn’t had at least stopped staring.

In spite of the jolly companionship, I could hardly wait to be alone. Bedtime couldn’t come soon enough.

“Are you all right?” Van Arque asked. It was becoming a ritual.

“Yes,” I told her.

I made my excuses: fatigue, travel, irregular meals, lack of sleep, and so forth.

I did not mention my real reason for wanting to be alone, which was that I desperately needed solitude for my mind to be at its best: to come to grips with the sudden and gruesome (but fascinating) appearance of the body in Edith Cavell.

Like Mr. Gradgrind in Hard Times, I wanted Facts—nothing but Facts. Even though that schoolmaster was a fictional character invented by Charles Dickens, I fancied I could hear his dry voice droning in my head: “In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!”

The facts I wanted were these: (a) Who was the deceased? (b) Why was she stuffed up the chimney? (c) Who had put her there? (d) Had she been murdered? (e) If so, how? And, of course, (f) By whom?

Hadn’t Collingwood mentioned a number of girls who had gone missing?

I needed room and solitude to think.

“If you’ll excuse me,” I said, “I think I’ll get to bed early.”

“But it’s only six o’clock!” Van Arque protested.

“I know,” I said, “but my brain thinks it’s midnight. It’s still on Greenwich Mean Time, you see. I expect I’ll catch up in a day or two.”

It was the best excuse I could come up with on the spur of the moment, but Van Arque accepted it without question.

“Run along, then,” she said. “I’ll call you in time for Little Commons.”

I nodded eagerly, as if I could hardly wait, and made my escape.

*

But I could not sleep. Even though the body had been removed and the room swept, swabbed, and dusted, I found myself tossing and turning, wrestling with my sheets and pillow as if they were crocodiles and I had been plucked from the burning sands of Egypt and flung into the Nile.

I tried to imagine what the police were doing, but theorizing without any real information was agony.

I tried counting sheep, but it was no use. Sheep bored me.

Then I tried counting bottles of poison:

Ninety-nine bottles of arsenic on the wall (paper), Ninety-nine bottles of arsenic,

If one of the bottles should happen to fall (paper), There’d be ninety-eight bottles of arsenic on the wall (paper).

Ninety-eight bottles of arsenic on the wall (paper)…

Were the bottles of arsenic actually pictured on the wallpaper, or had each roll been soaked in the stuff? Arsenical wallpaper, I remembered, colored with the poisonous pigment Scheele’s Green, had killed Napoleon, among others, and was sadly no longer manufactured.

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.