As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(32)

“Yes, Miss Moate,” she said.

“Yes, Miss Moate,” I echoed.

“I asked you what you were up to. Favor me with a reply, if you please.”

“Nothing … Miss Moate,” I said.

“Nonsense! You were tampering with the doorknob of my laboratory. I saw you.”

Her eyes had never left mine for an instant, and now they were crinkling at the corners, as if she had amused herself by catching me up in a particularly clever trap.

“I—I was just looking—”

“You were spying on me! Admit it.”

“No, Miss Moate. I was just looking—at the skulls.”

“You have some specific interest in skulls, do you? Is that it?”

I could have been truthful and said yes, but I didn’t. Actually, I was keen on skulls, but this was hardly the time to say so.

“I’d never seen a moose before,” I said, letting my lower lip tremble a little. “We don’t have them in England, you see, and—”

As if it were a robot appendage, her arm reached for the cozy, lifted it, and poured a cup of steaming tea: valerian, by the cheesy smell of it.

I took the distraction as an opportunity to change the subject.

“I’m Flavia de Luce,” I said, as if that explained everything. Perhaps she had already been briefed on my background, and the mere mention of my name would be all that was required. “I’m a new girl,” I added, almost wishing it were true.

“I know well enough who you are,” she said. “You’re the daughter of Harriet de Luce, and I might as well tell you, that cuts no ice with me whatsoever.”

Oh! The things I could have said to her—the clever retorts I could have made.

But I held my tongue.

Was it fear?

Or could maturity be setting in?

“No, Miss Moate,” I said, and that seemed to be the right reply.

Much in little.

Multum in parvo.

“I taught your mother, you know,” she said, still fixing me with her gimlet eye. “And I shall teach you.”

Was this a promise? Or a threat?

“Yes, Miss Moate,” I said dutifully.

When you’re in the front lines, you have to learn fast, even if it’s only to surrender.

Or appear to.

With an unnerving squeak of tires on hardwood, her hands clawing at the wheels, she spun round on her axis and trundled herself away, growing smaller and smaller as she went in much the same way as the characters do at the end of an animated cartoon, until she disappeared in the distance.

Did I imagine it, or had I heard a little “Pop!” at the end of the hall?





? TEN ?

I THINK IT WAS Aristotle who first said that Nature abhors a vacuum. Others, such as Hobbes, Boyle, and Newton, climbed onto Aristotle’s soapbox at a much later date. But for all their collective brains, these brilliant boys got it only half right. Nature does abhor a vacuum, but she equally abhors pressure. If you stop to think for even a second, it should be obvious, shouldn’t it?

Give Nature a vacuum and she will try to fill it. Give her localized pressure and she will try to disperse it. She is forever seeking a balance she can never achieve, never happy with what she’s got.

I am not only surprised, but proud, to be the first to point this out.

There are times when my personal pressure is mounting that I crave a vacuum to counteract it. One thing was perfectly clear: I was going to get no peace and quiet in Edith Cavell. No privacy, no time to think, no place of my own where I could come and go as I pleased.

In short, I was in dire need of a bolt-hole.

Where, I asked myself, is the one place that the inhabitants of a bustling academy are least likely to go?

And the answer came at once, as if sent down on a mental lightning bolt from Heaven. It wasn’t carved on a stone tablet, but it might as well have been.

The laundry.

Of course!

The laundry was a detached hut of painted brick. A faint humming came from within and a column of steam rose from a tall brick chimney into the autumn air.

I pushed the door open and stepped inside.

The place was like Dante’s Inferno, but with plumbing—a vast steaming cavern. The heat of the gargantuan washing and drying machines swept over me in a wave, almost knocking me off my feet, and the noise was infernal: a hissing, clanking clatter of machinery gone mad.

Why had I thought I’d ever find a quiet haven here?

Like a dark castle looming over a medieval village in a valley, an enormous boiler at the end of the single large room overshadowed the place, looming above the deep sinks, the scattered mangles and presses, the wringers and the sewing machines alike. The high roof was crisscrossed with steam pipes, all wrapped like mummies in eternal-looking bandages.

The air smelled of steam, soap, washing soda, and starch, their odors floating uneasily upon a faint background reek of scorched bedsheets.

A little woman in a gray uniform, with her grayish-red hair in a net, was busily sorting nightgowns into two piles.

So much for solitude. I needed to change my plans this very instant.

It had been ever so long since I had last made use of my “little girl lost” demeanor, and I must say that it was like pulling on a cozy old cardigan to arrange my face and body: shoulders slightly hunched (check), hands arranged in a wringing position (check), hair tousled (check), eyes rubbed a little to make them red and watery, then widened and set to shifting nervously from side to side (check), voice up half an octave: “Hello?” “Hello?” (check), toes turned in, knees together, a touch of the trembles: check, check, and check.