As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(40)

“But for now,” Miss Fawlthorne went on, making a broad sweep of her arm which took in all of our immediate surroundings, “this will be your classroom. No one pays the slightest bit of attention to a woman and a girl in a graveyard. What else can they be but mourners? What else can they be doing but grieving?”

We walked for a long time, among the tombstones, Miss Fawlthorne and I, stopping occasionally to sit on a bench in the sunshine, or to rearrange the flowers on a random grave.

At last she looked at her wristwatch. “We’d better be getting back,” she said. “We shall split up and take different routes when we’re four blocks from home.”

Home. What a strange-feeling word.

It had been a long time since I had had one.

Home. I repeated the word in my mind. It was good.

And so we set off on the long walk … home.

Much of what we talked about I am forbidden to commit to paper.





? THIRTEEN ?

THE ALARM WENT OFF with a muted clatter. I reached under my pillow and silenced the thing, then hauled it out and looked blearily at the time: It was three A.M.

Miss Fawlthorne had planted the clock in my bed while I was in class, just as she had promised she would. The thing was a large, self-important alarm clock with radium hands that glowed greenly in the dark, and a bell loud enough to be heard through the feathers of the pillow but not outside my room.

I stretched, climbed out onto the cold floor, and hurriedly dressed, taking great care to be mouse-quiet.

There had been several good reasons to assign me to Edith Cavell, Miss Fawlthorne had explained, not the least of which was to make possible my “Starlight Studies,” as she jokingly called them; she had asked Mr. Tugg to oil the hinges, so that I was able to come and go in perfect silence.

Some of the girls had grumbled, of course, about a scabby fourth-former having her own room, but the story had been put about that for certain reasons I was not a fit roommate: flatulence, I believe, although I can’t prove it.

For a time I was the butt of their jokes, but after a while they tired of it and moved on to fresher cruelties and easier victims.

Mrs. Bannerman was awaiting me in the chemistry lab. She had already drawn the heavy blackout curtains that had been installed to allow demonstration of certain experiments with light (but I must say no more), and to permit the showing of instructional ciné films in perfect darkness.

For three o’clock in the morning, Mrs. Bannerman looked remarkably fresh. Perhaps “vivacious” is more the word. Her hair was perfection, as if she had just stepped out of the salon, and she smelled of lilies of the valley. She reminded me a great deal of the young chorus girl Audrey Hepburn whom Aunt Felicity had pointed out when she took us as a rare treat to a West End theater.

“I knew her in an earlier life,” my aunt had whispered.

“I didn’t know you believed in reincarnation, Auntie Fee,” Feely had said.

“I don’t,” she had replied. “Shhh.”

“Good morning, Flavia,” Mrs. Bannerman said brightly. “Welcome to my little kitchen. Would you like a cup of tea?”

“Yes, please,” I said, somewhat flustered. The only other person who had ever invited me to tea was Antigone Hewitt, the inspector’s wife, who was now, perhaps, through my own fault, lost to me forever. She had not even turned up to bid me farewell, as I had so desperately hoped she would.

Perhaps she hadn’t known that I was leaving. Had her husband not told her? But he himself might not have known that I was being banished. I might die an old woman without ever learning the truth.

All this was going through my mind as the tea steeped in the lengthening silence.

“You’re looking very thoughtful,” Mrs. Bannerman said.

“Yes,” I told her. “I was just thinking of home.”

“I do, sometimes, too,” she said. “It’s not always as pleasant as one expects, is it? Now, then, shall we get started?”

I was a bit shy of the electron microscope at first—reluctant even to touch it—but when Mrs. Bannerman brought up on the cathode ray screen the hairs of a louse, magnified nearly sixty thousand times, my reverent fingers were everywhere, caressing the thing as if it were a favorite pet. Wild horses couldn’t have dragged me away.

“The first electron microscope in North America was built by a couple of students not far from here at the University of Toronto,” she told me. “Before you were born.

“What we are now observing is the leg of a species of louse called Columbicola extinctus, or passenger-pigeon-chewing louse, which lived exclusively upon the body of that particular bird, which has been extinct since 1914. Why it should have been found a month ago, in the hair of a murdered clergyman in the Klondike, makes for a pretty little puzzle. Ah! I see that I now have your undivided attention.”

“Murdered?” I asked.

What a peculiar feeling it was to be sitting in a locked room in the middle of the night, sharing a microscope with a woman who had herself been tried for murder. I wouldn’t have thought the subject would come up so easily.

“Yes, murdered,” she said. “I provide assistance to the police from time to time as a way of keeping my hand in. Although I earn my bread and butter by teaching chemistry, my professional qualifications are actually as an entomologist.”