As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(29)

Father—the very thought of him shot a bolt through my heart—had often lectured us on the pleasures of learning.

And—up until this moment—he had been right.

There had been no happier hours of my life than those spent alone in my chemical laboratory at Buckshaw, bundled against the cold in the ancient gray cardigan of Father’s I had rescued from the salvage bin, rummaging through the dusty notebooks in Uncle Tar’s library, teaching myself, little by little, atom by atom, the mysteries of organic chemistry.

The doors of Creation had been flung open to me, and I had been allowed to walk among its mysteries as if I were strolling in a summer garden. The universe had rolled over and let me rub its tummy.

But now—!

Pain.

With an abrupt shock, I realized I was slamming the back of my head monotonously against the wall. Bang!… bang!… bang!

I leapt off the bed and found myself marching, like an automaton, to the window.

Ever since the days of Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin, scientists have puzzled over inherited characteristics in everything from people to pea plants. It has been suggested that cell particles called “genes” or “gemmules” carry down, from one generation to the next, a set of maps or instructions, which determine, among other things, how we might behave in any given situation.

In that clockwork walk to the window, I realized even as I went that what I was doing was precisely what Father always did in times of trouble. And, now that I came to think of it, so did Feely. And Daffy.

The Code of the de Luces. It was a simple equation of action and reaction: Worry = window.

Just like that.

Simple as it was, it meant that in some complicated, and not entirely happy, chemical way—and far deeper than any other considerations—we de Luces were one.

Bound by blood and window glass.

As I stood there, and my eyes focused gradually on the outside world, I became aware that, down behind the stone gate, a small red-haired girl was thrashing wildly on the gravel. Two older girls were tickling her to the point of insanity. I recognized them at once as the pair I had seen at breakfast: the lip-reader, Druce, and her thrall, Trout.

Something clicked inside me. I could not stand idly by and watch. It was an all-too-familiar scene.

I unlocked the window and pushed up the sash.

The victim’s shrieks were now unbearable.

“Stop that!” I shouted, in the sternest voice I could manufacture. “Leave her alone!”

And, wonder of wonders, the two torturers stopped, staring up at me with open mouths. The sufferer, freed from their attentions, scrambled to her feet and bolted.

I slammed down the window before her tormentors could reply.

I would probably pay for it later in one way or another, but I didn’t care.

But try as I might, I could not get that little girl out of my mind.

How could tickling, even though it causes laughter, be at the same time such a vicious form of torture?

Sitting on the edge of my bed, I thought it through.

I came to the conclusion, at last, that it was like this: Tickling and learning were much the same thing. When you tickle yourself—ecstasy; but when anyone else tickles you—agony.

It was a useful insight, worthy of Plato or Confucius or Oscar Wilde, or one of those people who make a living by thinking up clever sayings.

Could I find a way of squeezing it into my report on William Palmer?

Had the Rugeley Poisoner tickled his victims?

I shouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that he had.





? NINE ?

I HAD BARELY SAT down at my desk with pen and ink and begun to collect my thoughts about William Palmer when the door flew open and a small whirlwind exploded into the room, with hair as red as it is possible to possess without bursting into flame.

I was not accustomed to constant invasion, and it was beginning to get on my nerves.

“What’s the matter with you, anyway?” the fiery one demanded, arms spinning round in the air like a runaway windmill. “What do you mean by interfering? What business is it of yours, anyway?”

“I beg your pardon?” I asked.

“Oh, come off it! What are you trying to do? Get me killed?”

Only then did I realize that this furious creature was the same girl who, barely minutes before, had been in danger of writhing to death in the dust.

“Miss Pinkham, I presume,” I said, taking a wild stab in the dark.

The windmill came to an abrupt halt. I had caught her off guard.

“How did you know that?” she asked belligerently.

“By a series of brilliant deductions with which I will not trouble you,” I told her. “Plus the fact that your name is clearly marked in indelible laundry ink on a tab in the neck of your tunic.”

This, too, was a shot in the dark. But since the tunic Miss Fawlthorne had issued me was marked in this way, it seemed a reasonable assumption that hers was also.

“Very clever, Miss Smarty-pants,” she said. “But you’ll be laughing out of the other side of your face when the Hand of Glory gets hold of you.”

The Hand of Glory?

I knew that the Hand of Glory was the pickled and mummified hand of a hanged murderer, carried by eighteenth-century housebreakers in the belief that, in addition to paralyzing any hapless householder who might interrupt them in their burgling, it would also unlock all doors and confer invisibility upon them: a sort of primitive version of the do-it-all Boy Scout knife. Dried in a fire of juniper smoke and yew wood, and used to hold a special candle made from the fat of a badger, a bear, and an unbaptized child, the Hand of Glory was the answer to a burglar’s prayer.