As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(33)

“Excuse me, please, Miss.” I put on my tiniest voice.

She paid me not the slightest attention.

I crossed the floor and tugged at her sleeve.

She leaped with surprising agility quite high into the air.

“Gaw blazes!” she shouted. “Who the dickens are you, and what the devil do you want?”

“Please, miss, I’m sorry,” I began.

“Spit it out! Who are you? What’s your name?”

“De Luce,” I told her. “Flavia. I’m in the fourth form.”

“I don’t care if you’re in the Forty-eighth Highlanders. You oughtn’t to be in here. You’re not allowed.”

“Please, miss, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve lost my best handkerchief. Miss Fawlthorne is going to kill me if I don’t find it. I think I left it in the pocket of my dressing gown.”

“Ha!” the woman said. “She thinks she left it in the pocket of her dressing gaywn, Sal. Did you hear that? Dressing gaywn, fancy!”

I hadn’t noticed the second woman, who was operating a steam pressing-machine in a brick alcove. Her round red face stared out of a cloud of hissing steam as if she were a bodiless head suspended in midair like the Wizard of Oz.

“Dressing gaywn!” she shrieked in a voice that told me she was the junior of the two. She was trying to impress her superior by laughing too loudly at her jokes.

I knew the type all too well.

“Dressing gaywn!” she shrieked again, gasping for breath, wrapping a wet strand of hair round her forefinger and tugging playfully at it as if it were the pin of a monster hand grenade.

For a fraction of a second, my hopes were up, thinking her head might explode. But no such luck.

“I expect she means ‘bawthrobe,’ Marge. Ask her if she means ‘bawthrobe.’ ”

Marge’s eyes rounded on me.

“Yes, please, miss,” I said. “She’s right: That’s what I meant.”

Marge’s tongue was rolling busily about inside her cheek, rooting out thoughts—or perhaps in search of something to eat.

“What color was it?” she demanded suddenly.

“Yellow and black,” I said. I remembered that some of the girls at Little Commons had been wearing their dressing gowns, all of them in the school colors.

“Yellow and black!” Marge hooted. “Listen to her, Sal! Yellow and black she says!”

Sal slapped her leg and pretended to be on the verge of apoplexy. “The hankie, dimwit, not the dressing gown—oh, I beg your pardon, bawthrobe is what I meant to say.”

“Please, miss, it was blue, miss,” I said. “Periwinkle blue.”

I would play along as if I were a serf in their little kingdom until—

“It’s blue, Sal. Think of it! A periwinkle blue hankie!”

“Well, la-di-da!” Sal said, mincing, and they were both off again in showy laughter.

It was obvious that the girls of Miss Bodycote’s didn’t often come to the laundry. Marge had said as much: We weren’t allowed.

All the better for my purposes.

When she had recovered somewhat from her hysterics, Marge stood staring into my eyes as if she could look clear through them into my very soul—as if she saw something that no other human being could see.

“Well, let’s just have a wee look then,” she said, softening suddenly. “What do you think, Sal, shall we have a wee look?”

“A wee look couldn’t hurt, Marge,” she said, drying her eyes on the corner of a long white tablecloth, “so long as it’s just this once.”

That did it. They were off again instantly into gales of laughter.

Marge tripped off to a large table half hidden by a partition, delicately holding up the hem of her skirt with dainty fingers, like a dairymaid who had not been given enough lines in a stage play. She and Sal began rummaging through a couple of canvas sacks, and although I couldn’t make out their words, I could hear the two of them exchanging low, tittering remarks.

I took advantage of the lull to look round the room.

Overhead, crisscrossed by metal walkways, pipes, tubes, ducts, and hoses ran everywhere in an intestinal tangle of water, steam, and air. From below, it seemed like a whole vast aerial world that simply cried out for exploration.

It was like standing in Captain Nemo’s submarine, or the belly of an iron whale.

Except for a large calendar advertising Maple Leaf soap flakes, and a board with a row of nails, which was partially hidden behind the door, the whitewashed walls were oddly bare. Upon the nails hung three keys, each attached to a wooden disc by a silver ring.

One of these was crudely marked in ink with the initial “M,” another with the letter “S.”

The third key’s disc, worn smooth and oil-stained, bore an almost illegible “K.”

I pocketed it without a moment’s hesitation, reasoning that those marked “M” and “S” belonged to Marge and Sal. The third key obviously belonged to a person with dirty hands: not someone who worked all day with their hands in soap.

A caretaker, probably: a jack-of-all-trades whose name began with “K”—“Keith,” possibly.

No, not Keith: A caretaker would never be addressed as an equal, and certainly not by the likes of Miss Fawlthorne. The “K” must be a surname.