As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(23)
“No,” I said.
I dashed about trying to make myself decent as Van Arque waited outside the door.
Still, I felt like a scarecrow as we crept through the darkness toward Florence Nightingale.
Van Arque produced a slip of paper from somewhere and, slipping it into the crack under the door, began to move it slowly from side to side.
I saw at once that it was a silent signal, and far superior to knocking.
In a moment the door was opened slightly and we were beckoned inside.
Jumbo and a group of about half a dozen girls—one of whom was Gremly, and another the tiny blonde with a round face who had been elbowed in the ribs by Druce at breakfast—were sitting on the floor in a circle round a single candle, which danced and guttered madly as we came into the room.
“Shift!” Jumbo whispered, and the circle enlarged itself to make room for us.
“Welcome, Flavia Sabina de Luce,” Jumbo pronounced.
I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I smiled.
“It is a tradition at Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy for each new girl, by way of introduction, to tell us a story. You may begin.”
To say that I was unprepared would be an understatement.
Tell them a story? I didn’t know any stories—at least not any that I could repeat to a group of girls.
“What kind of story?” I asked, hoping for a hint.
“A ghost story,” Jumbo said. “And the bloodier the better.”
Seven flickering faces leaned in closer, all eyes intent upon mine, except Gremly’s, who kept hers shielded with an upraised hand, as if protecting herself from a hostile sun.
What a Heavensent opportunity! Wallace Scroop, the lubricious newspaper reporter—“lubricious” was a word I had learned from Daffy, but hadn’t, till now, had an opportunity to use—had suggested that Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy was haunted. And now, here was a chance to bring up the topic without seeming to be either childish or gullible.
But the only ghost story I could think of on the spur of the moment was one that Feely and Daffy had told me when I was quite small: a story that had terrified me so much that I had almost shed my skin.
It was called “The Old Woman and the Pimple.”
It went like this—
? SEVEN ?
“IN THE VILLAGE OF Malden Fenwick, in England,” I began, “not far from Buckshaw, my family’s ancestral home”—it was important, I knew, in order to draw them in, to supply credible details—“stands the ancient church of St. Rumwold. It is dedicated to the infant who, immediately after being born, is said to have cried out three times, ‘Christianus sum! Christianus sum! Christianus sum!’ (‘I am a Christian’), requested baptism, delivered a sermon, and died when he was three days old.”
A little murmur ran through the group as the girls looked uneasily at one another.
“In the north transept of the church is a chapel containing the tombs of a crusader and his various wives and children, and, to one side, built into the wall, is a most peculiar stone carving.
“This is the thirteenth-century effigy of a prosperous local miller named Johannes Hotwell, or Heatwell—the inscription is now much worn and not easily legible. There, on his back, he lies among the crusaders, his eyes open, his stone nose pointing to the overhead vaulting as if scanning the heavens for some signal from the painted stars. In his marble hands he clasps what seems at first to be a sack of flour, but which some insist must be, because of its ornamental nature, a hot-air balloon—although it can’t be, can it? since the hot-air balloon was not yet to be built by the Montgolfier brothers for another five hundred and thirty years.”
I paused to let this sink in. I was telling the tale in, as best as I could remember, the same words in which my sisters had told it to me.
I could tell that my listeners were taken in.
“Johannes, being of an overbearing mind, had, in spite of his father’s warning, married young. ‘Tend your mill,’ the old man had told him time and again, ‘and leave wyves to such as be smytten.’ ” All of this can be found in a little booklet sold near the font by the ladies of the Altar Guild.
“In spite of his father’s warning, Johannes had, as I say, taken to himself a wife: a shrewish spinster from the next village who knew a good thing when she saw it.
“It was not long afterwards that Johannes’s pimple appeared.
“At first, it was no more than a tiny red spot between his shoulder blades, as if he had been bitten by an absent-minded gnat. But as time passed, it grew and grew into a fat, pus-filled pimple: an angry red blemish on his back.
“Rather like a dormant volcano,” I added, “with a cap of snow, or pus, on its upper peaks.”
“Ugh!” one of the girls said.
“His wife begged him to let her burst the thing. ‘It may be thought a wytch’s sign,’ she told him.
“But he would have none of it.
“ ‘Leave it, wife,’ he had told her, ‘for though it be but a pymple, it be myn own,’ and she knew her place well enough to leave the thing alone.
“At least, while he was awake.
“But one night, she couldn’t sleep for worrying about what might become of them. Surely when her husband stripped off his jerkin to take the first ceremonial May Day dive into the millpond, someone would spot the pimple. They would be aghast!