As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(42)

“It’s exactly like Bleak House,” Daffy had said on another day when Father had left the table without finishing his breakfast. “They’ll still be jawing about the excise tax long after we all are in our graves with spiders nesting in our skulls.”

And then, of course, had come the day of my banishment: the day upon which I had truly become an exile. With England and Buckshaw now more than three thousand miles somewhere across the sea, I had no way of knowing my family’s fortunes.

I was alone in the wilderness.

And with that thought, I fell asleep.

Someone was chopping trees in the forest. A woodcutter, perhaps. If only I could summon the strength to scream …

But would he hear me? The noise of his ax was surely louder in his ears than any feeble cry that I might make. To make matters worse, a squadron of ships offshore had begun firing their cannon at some invisible enemy.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

I shoved my hands under the pillow to cover my head and banged my knuckles on a hard metal object. I hauled it out and held it up to my face.

It was the alarm clock, and its hands were pointing to twenty past eight. I had slept right through its ringing.

“Flavia! Open up.”

I toad-hopped from the bed to the door, unlocked it, and stuck my head out.

There stood Van Arque, staring at me as if I were an apparition.

“Better get a move on,” she said. “The Black Maria will be here in ten minutes.”

Black Maria? What on earth is she talking about?

“Oh, and incidentally,” she added, “you ought to know that you look like the wreck of the Hesperus.”

I flew about the room, scrubbing the taste of dead horses out of my mouth with toothpaste on my finger, raking the sticky grunge out of my eyes, giving my hair a lick and a promise with the hairbrush I had purloined from Harriet’s boudoir.

At last I was ready. Three minutes down and seven to go.

The bed had to be made upon pain of punishment, and what a mess it was: as if some madwoman in Bedlam had spent the night in it, tossing in a straitjacket.

Another three minutes.

As I stepped into the hall, the building fell suddenly silent, in the way the birds do in a wood that a hunter has entered.

I clattered down the stairs, making enough noise to raise the dead.

Miss Fawlthorne stood at the door, and as I approached, she swiveled and pointed with a long, forbidding finger to the outdoors, as if she were the ticket-taker for the ferryboat on the river Styx.

As if she had never seen me before.

An ominous vehicle stood in the driveway. I thought at first it was a hearse, but quickly realized that the thing was far too large. It was a bus: a matte-black bus with smoked windows and the heavy door standing open. It didn’t have “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” painted above the door, but it might as well have.

I put my foot onto the bottommost of the two steps but, because of the heavily tinted windows, and the fact that I was blinded by sunlight, I could make out no details of the gloomy interior.

“Hurry up, de Luce,” someone growled, from out of the shadows.

I climbed up, the doors hissed at my heels, and we jerked into motion.

I tottered to a seat, going mostly by the sense of feel. The driver shifted through a seemingly endless number of gears, until at last he settled upon one that displeased him the least. By the position of the sun through the windscreen, I judged that we were now traveling east.

As my eyes accustomed themselves to the gloom, I looked round at some of my fellow passengers. Van Arque sat opposite, two rows back, her nose pressed against the window. Behind Van Arque, Jumbo was examining her nails as intently as if they were lost Scripture. And at the back of the bus, in the middle of the aisle, was Miss Moate, the science mistress: the woman who had accosted me in the hall.

Her wheelchair was lashed to the seats on either side by

a network of belts so that she seemed to hang suspended like a spider lurking at the center of its web.

I looked away quickly, flexing my neck in a complex set of side-to-side stretches, as if I were merely working out a morning kink.

Aside from the laboring engine, which sounded to be making much ado about nothing—a characteristic shared, I have come to believe, by all buses everywhere—we rattled along quite briskly.

We had soon broken free of the suburbs and were making our way along a two-lane macadamized motorway which snaked easily between green fields dotted with cows and hay bales. If the truth be told, it wasn’t all that much different from England.

Electrical wires and telephone lines on both sides rose and fell … rose and fell … in long scallops, like the flight path of a determined woodpecker.

How far had we come? I tried to work it out in my head. The roadside speed limit signs allowed a maximum of fifty miles per hour, and a minimum of thirty in the settled areas: an average, say, of forty miles per hour.

Now, then: How long had we been traveling?

I thought back to my Girl Guides training in the parish hall when Miss Delaney had taught us to estimate time in stressful situations.

“One never knows when one may be kidnapped by Communists,” she told us, “or worse,” she added. “Be Prepared is more than just a motto.”

And so we had been made to learn how to estimate time

while locked away alone in total darkness in the crypt of St. Tancred’s, as well as while balancing blindfolded on a chair as a gang of girls, singing at the top of their lungs “Ging-gang-goolie-goolie-goolie-goolie watcha, ging-gang-goo, ging-gang-goo!,” hurled tightly balled-up winter socks at our head.