As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(47)

Three sharp blasts on a pea whistle came from the top of the embankment. Miss Moate, in her wheelchair, was making impatient “Come-here-at-once” motions with her arm.

Sixes and Sevens were dissolved as the two groups swarmed together and went scrambling up the slope. Under the elm, Scarlett and I got slowly to our feet. She put a solicitous arm round my shoulder, supporting poor, sick Flavia’s weight, and we crept as clumsily as a conjoined crustacean up the embankment.

Halfway to the top, pretending to lose her footing and floundering for traction, she contrived to bring her mouth so close to my face that I could feel her breath hot upon my cheek.

“Questions,” she rasped into my ear. “She asked too many questions.”





? FIFTEEN ?

LUNCH HAD BEEN BROUGHT in the bus and we picnicked upon pink bricks of tinned pork, boiled eggs, and Brazil nuts that looked like devil’s toenails, those fossilized bivalves from the Jurassic period, all of it washed down with milk from a galvanized carrier that had stood in the sun for too long.

Druce and Trout had plopped down on either side of me without invitation. In future, I decided, I would make it a rule not to be the first to sit. If Aunt Felicity were here, she would likely be pointing out that patience, to a point, provides choice. She probably had an elaborate mathematical formula to work out the optimum time to sit when in a group of thirteen.

How I missed the dear old girl.

I was wondering how Miss Moate, being wheelchair-bound, would fit into the equation, when I realized that Druce was speaking to me.

“I said, how does it feel to be a dog?” she repeated.

“I beg your pardon?” I asked, bristling.

“Don’t make me chew my cabbage twice,” she said. “How does it feel to be a dog? You know, D.O.G. Daughter of a Goddess.”

Trout collapsed into the grass, cackling helplessly at the wit of her mistress.

“Ah!” I laughed, airily, I hoped. “About the same, I expect, as it does to be a D.O.B.”

I left her to work it out.

Druce’s face clouded, then brightened suddenly as she forced a smile. “Listen,” she said, as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mandibles, “I’ve been wanting to ask—are you one of us?”

“Us?” I summoned up and assumed Utility Mask #7: the Village Idiot.

“Yes, you know … us.”

Was it my imagination, or did the word have a hiss in it?

I was aware, of course, that this might be an official test of my ability to keep a zipped lip when it came to the exchange of personal information.

“Come on,” Trout blurted, “you’re a boarder, aren’t you? Just like us. You have to know.”

Druce shot her a poisonous look, and Trout began furiously digging an unconscious hole for herself in the dirt with the end of a twig.

“Well?” Druce insisted.

“Well, what?” I asked. Village Idiots are not thrown out of character as easily as all that.

“Don’t play the fool with me,” she snapped.

If only she knew how close to the mark she was.

“I’m sorry,” I said, throwing my open hands upward in puzzlement and hauling my shoulders up round my ears. “If you mean am I a pupil at Miss Bodycote’s, or am I in the fourth form, then the answer, obviously, is yes. Otherwise I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re talking about.”

I should have left out the “obviously.”

“Right, then,” she said. “Just so we know where we stand.”

And she matched her actions to her words by getting to her feet.

“Come on, Trout,” she said. “Let’s sit somewhere else. Something here stinks.”

They walked with stiff necks, like a pair of Old Testament princesses, to the shade of another tree, where they sat down again with their backs to me.

“Argh,” said a voice behind me. “Ignore those chumps.”

It was Gremly, the gnomish girl I had seen at the Ouija séance in Jumbo’s room.

She squatted beside me, plucked a blade of grass, and began to chew on it reflectively.

“I’ve been watching you,” she said. “You’re okay.”

“Thank you,” I told her, because I didn’t know what else to say.

We sat in silence for a long moment, not looking at each other, and then Gremly spoke: “I can tell you’re a person who enjoys her pheasant sandwiches.”

The world stopped. My heart stopped.

Pheasant sandwiches! The very words Winston Churchill had spoken to me five months ago on the railway platform at Buckshaw Halt. The exact words my mother, Harriet, had mouthed toward the camera in the ancient ciné film I had found in the attic at Buckshaw.

Pheasant sandwiches: the secret words that identified the speaker as a member of the Nide.

“The phrase was chosen carefully,” Aunt Felicity had told me. “Innocuous to the casual observer, but a clear warning of danger to an initiate.”

Gremly had spoken it very matter-of-factly—almost too casually. Was she giving me a warning, or was she simply making herself known?

I tried not to appear panic-stricken as I looked round at the small groups of girls seated here and there in the grass. Had anyone noticed?

No one seemed to be paying us the slightest attention.