As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(30)

So why would the girls of Miss Bodycote’s choose it as the name of some kind of ridiculous secret sorority?

Pinkham must have seen my puzzlement.

“Druce and Trout,” she explained.

“Those two morons?” I exploded with laughter. I couldn’t help it. “The Hand of Glory? Is that what they call themselves?”

“Shhh!” she said, finger to lips, her eyes wide. “Keep it down, for cripes sake!”

The very thought of a secret society at Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy set me off cackling again. I couldn’t help myself.

“Please,” she said in a pleading whisper. “They’ll kill us both.”

“Like Le Marchand?” I asked. “Like Wentworth? Like Brazenose?”

Her face went slack with horror, and I saw at once that it had been the wrong thing to say.

“Look here,” I said. “You can’t allow them to go on bullying you. It’s not right.”

“No,” she said. “But it’s how things are.

“Here,” she added.

Something touched my heart. This child was genuinely frightened.

“Don’t you worry about Druce and Trout,” I heard my mouth telling her. “You leave them to me—and let me know if they get up to any more of their tricks.”

“But—you’re the new girl,” she protested.

I put a sisterly hand on her shoulder. I did not need to tell her that when it came to revenge, I, Flavia Sabina de Luce, was a force to be reckoned with.

“Fear not,” I told her. “Simmer down.”

I think that, even then, I was beginning to formulate a plan.

Pinkham stood paused in the doorway, and just for an instant she looked like a girl in a painting by Vermeer: as if she were constructed entirely of light.

“You’re a brick, Flavia,” she said, and then she was gone.

I sat there for a long while, staring at the door, my mind churning.

What had I got myself into?

Then I closed my notebook and put away my pen. Justice was calling.

Palmer the Poisoner would have to wait.

The corridors of Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy were, as I have said, a maze: a series of labyrinths, of twists, of turns, of offshoots. The floors went abruptly and without warning from broad planks to tiny tiles and back again, the walls from plaster to marble, and the ceilings from great galleries and soaring vaults to small, dark tunnels of ancient boards through which you needed to duck your head in order to pass.

There were no directional maps to help the newcomer. One was expected to know the layout of the place with the same efficiency as a London cabbie knows his city: the Knowledge, they call it—the names and locations of 25,000 streets, courts, closes, yards, circuses, squares, lanes, and avenues, and the best and quickest ways of getting from every single one of them to the others.

Why do my thoughts keep harking back to home and England? I wondered, as I caught my mind adrift for what must have been the hundredth time.

Here I was in Canada—the New World—with all that that implied. I was young, healthy, intelligent, curious, and chock-full of energy, and yet my mind, whenever I took my eye off it, flew instantly back like a homing pigeon to the land of my birth: to England and to Buckshaw.

It was inexplicable. It was annoying. It was entirely uncalled for.

Now I found myself at the top of a steep, narrow staircase that led up from a narrow L-shaped cubbyhole on the ground floor to an unsuspected niche behind a linen cupboard on the second, and, to be perfectly honest, I hadn’t the faintest idea where I was or how I had got there.

Get a grip, Flavia, I thought, for the umpty-umpth time. It was becoming my theme song, my national anthem.

The science lab and the chemistry lab, I knew, were located in one of the wings: far enough away that the stinks wouldn’t pollute the holy atmosphere. I had had a glimpse of test tubes and beakers from the hockey field, and I knew from a casual remark Van Arque had made that the science department and its attendant natural history museum were immediately adjacent.

“Science?” I said to a girl who ducked round me and went clattering down the stairs, a cardigan tied over her shoulders and a squash racket gripped in her hands.

She paused just long enough to give her head a sharp jerk to the left, her hair coming unfastened and flying into her face, and then she was gone.

Left I went, and there it was, stenciled on the green wall at eye level in official-looking black capital letters: SCIENCE & CHEMISTRY.

The two departments seemed to occupy the entire wing. A series of doors, each with its own small window, receded into the distance in a rather odd effect that made it seem like an optical illusion. I cupped my hands and peered through the glass into the first room.

This must be the natural history museum. Not large, but remarkably complete for its size. Glass cases round all the visible walls seemed to house a cross section of all creation: birds—I recognized a stuffed specimen of the extinct passenger pigeon, of which I had seen a photograph in one of Arthur Mee’s endlessly fascinating encyclopedias—butterflies, bees, moths, and other insects, all pinned neatly to cards and labeled: everything from small mammals to minerals, and from fossils to fish.

I tried the door, but it was locked.

By craning my neck, I could see hanging in a corner, on a wrought-iron stand, an articulated human skeleton. The very sight of it brought a momentary lump to my throat as I thought of Yorick, my own dear skeleton, hanging patiently back home in my laboratory at Buckshaw. Yorick had been given as a gift to Uncle Tar by the great naturalist Frank Buckland, who had not only autographed the skull but had also neatly printed on the frontal bone the playful inscription Multum in parvo—“much in little”: a great deal in a small space—which might have been meant as something of a joke.