As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(41)

I hadn’t the foggiest idea what an entomologist was, but I could already feel the look of admiration spreading across my face.

“Bugs,” she said. “Including insects, spiders, centipedes, worms. I specialize in the ways in which their study may be used in criminal investigation. It’s quite a new field, but also a very old one. Shouldn’t you be making notes?”

I had been too entranced to do anything but gape.

“Here’s a notebook,” she said, handing me a red-covered secretary’s dictation pad. “When it’s full, ask for another. You may write as much as you wish, but with one proviso: Your notebooks are never to leave this room. They will be kept here under lock and key, but you may add to them or consult them at any time.”

She didn’t say “Do you understand?” and I blessed her for that.

“Now then: At the top of your first page, write this name: Jean Pierre Mégnin.” She spelled it out for me and made sure I got the accent leaning in the right direction.

“His two greatest works are La Faune des Tombeaux and La Faune des Cadavres. Roughly translated, that means Creatures of the Tomb and The Wildlife of Corpses. Sounds a bit like a double-bill horror movie, doesn’t it? Both are in French. Do you have any inkling of the language?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head sadly.

What had I been missing? How could such treasures exist in a language I was unable to read?

“Perhaps Miss Dupont could give me extra tutoring in French,” I blurted.

I could hardly believe that I was listening to my own mouth speaking!

“Excellent suggestion. I’m sure she would be, how do you say, enchantée?

“Now, then, pencil ready? Mégnin discovered that those creatures which feed and breed upon corpses tend to arrive in waves: In the first stage, when the body is fresh, the blowflies appear. In the second stage, the body bloats as it putrefies, and certain beetles are attracted. As full-blown decay sets in at stage three, and fermentation takes place, butyric and caseic acids are produced, followed by ammoniacal fermentation, at which point entirely different tribes of flies and beetles are attracted. Maggots proliferate. And so, as you will have deduced, it is possible, by studying the presence and life cycles of these various flying and crawling things, to work out with some precision how long the dearly departed has been dead and even, perhaps, where they have been in the meantime.”

Corruption? Putrefaction? Acids? This woman was speaking my language. I may not know French, but I knew the language of the dead, and this conversation was one I had been dreaming of all my life.

I had found a kindred spirit!

My brain was all aswirl—like one of those spiral galaxies you see in the illustrated newsmagazines: sparks, flame, and fire fizzing and flying off in all directions—like a dizzying Catherine wheel on Guy Fawkes Night.

I couldn’t sit still. I had to get up from my chair and pace round and up and down the room like a madwoman simply to keep from exploding.

“Heady stuff, isn’t it?” Mrs. Bannerman asked.

She understood perfectly the tears in my eyes.

“I think we’ll call it quits for tonight,” she said with an elaborate stretch and a yawn to match. “I’m tired. I hope you’ll forgive me. We’ve made an excellent start, but you need your sleep.”

How I was dying to quiz her about Brazenose, Wentworth, and Le Marchand, but something was holding me back. Miss Fawlthorne had forbidden me to ask any of the girls about another, but did the same restriction apply to the teaching staff?

As both Mrs. Mullet and Sir Humphry Davy have said, “Better safe than sorry.”

And as for the little metal figure in my pocket—it would have to wait. I could hardly haul it out and begin heating it without a full confession of how I had come to have it in my possession.

Besides entomology, I was going to have to learn patience.

Back in my room, wrapped up in a blanket, I could not sleep. My head was filled with coffin flies, blowflies, maggots, and cheese skippers. The maggots were nothing new: I had thought of them often while dwelling on the delights of decomposition. Daffy had even read out to me at the breakfast table—“Knowing your proclivities,” she had said, smirking—that wonderful passage from Love’s Labour’s Lost, where one of the characters says, “These summer-flies have blown me full of maggot ostentation.”

It had caused Father to put aside his sausages, get up, and leave the room, but had given me a whole new appreciation of Shakespeare. Anyone who could write a line like that can’t be too much of a stickin-the-mud.

Dear Father. What a sad life he’d had. What a rotten hand Fate had dealt him: a prisoner-of-war camp, the death of a young wife, a decaying pile for a house, three daughters, and no money to speak of.

With Buckshaw now mine—in theory at least—some of the entanglement in which we had lived for as long as I could remember should have begun to be sorted out. But Harriet’s will had raised at least as many questions as it had answered, and Father had been swept into the storm of legalities like a housefly into a tornado.

There had been some hope that a grateful government would intervene, and I had learned—thanks to my acute hearing—that Father had spoken at length with Mr. Churchill on the telephone, and for a day or two, his face had seemed a little less ashen. But nothing seemed to have come of it.