As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(49)

She must have seen my puzzlement.

“No one,” she sent again. “Keep away from—”

“Well?” Miss Moate said suddenly, slapping the surface of our table for attention. “How are you getting on?”

I nearly sprang out of my skin. Neither of us had heard her coming.

I tore off the headset.

“Gremly’s just telegraphed my name, F—L—A—V—I—A,” I said. “What jolly good fun!”

For an instant I considered bursting into Gilbert and Sullivan:

“Three little maids who, all unwary

Come from a ladies’ seminary

Freed from its genius tutelary

Three little maids from school …”

But I didn’t.

Miss Moate looked from one of us to the other, and without another word, moved on to lurk somewhere else.

“My turn,” I said loudly. “Let me try,” and we swapped sending key and headset.

“Where’s Collingwood?” I tapped out slowly, picking the letters from the chart.

Gremly removed the headphones and placed them over my ears. It was an awkward way of carrying on a conversation, but it would have to do.

“Infirmary,” she sent. “Gone mad.”





? SIXTEEN ?

THE SPATTER OF RAIN, which had begun as we left the huts, had now become a downpour. A pair of sluggish wipers swept sheets of water from the windshield, and it had become suddenly cold. My short sleeves were no protection and I hugged my arms against my body.

Gremly did not sit with me on the bus. Quite the contrary: She had gone far to the rear to sit in the shadow of Miss Moate, leaving me up front behind the driver, pretending to appreciate the beauty of the landscape, which was made up principally of tall elms in rainswept fields, glimpses of the lake, and the occasional wrecker’s yard in which the rusting hulks of once-loved automobiles were piled like so many colossal steel ant hills.

Again the word “disorientated” flashed into my mind. It meant, essentially, having lost one’s compass bearings, which is what had happened to me.

Cast out from my childhood home, banished to a strange land, and now isolated even from the low, gooselike gabble of my classmates, I was alone in the world, at the mercy of even the slightest gust of wind.

I needed to focus my mind on something outside myself—to regain the scientific view and so to resettle my soul.

But where to begin?

“Trust no one,” Miss Fawlthorne and Gremly had each told me, and when you stopped to think about it rationally, that included even them.

I needed to seem to the faculty of Miss Bodycote’s an apt pupil; to the other girls, an invisible bore.

There was only one way I could think of to achieve this with a minimum of fuss.

“Slowly, slowly,” Fitzgibbon said, helping me up the stairs. I made my hand tremble on her arm as I tottered my way upward.

I had managed a small but convincing vomit at the curbside, which I was inordinately proud of. Miss Moate had insisted I report to the nurse—exactly as I had intended she should. A few more dry heaves on the stairs for insurance and I had won the toss, so to speak.

“Thank you, Matron,” I managed.

“Don’t try to talk,” she said. “You didn’t drink any of the groundwater at the camp, did you?”

The camp: That’s what it was called.

I shook my head. “Milk only,” I managed.

“Good,” she said. “You’ve got at least half a chance, then.”

Was she being what Daffy called “ironical”? Irony, she had explained, was a special class of sarcasm in which the meaning was the opposite of what it seemed. It was an art at which I had not yet become as adept as I should have liked, although it was high on my list of things to do.

Even recognizing it, though, was a major accomplishment, and I was quite proud to have possibly done so.

“The infirmary’s in here,” she said, leading me through a dark narrow passage that joined the front of the house to one of the more obscure wings.

At a white-painted door she jangled her keys noisily, as if she were warning someone inside that we were about to enter.

“Will the nurse be long?” I asked.

“The nurse is standing before you,” she said. Spotting my bewilderment, she added, “I’m the nurse—or at least I was before the budget cuts. Nowadays I’m plain old Matron with three pairs of perfectly good white Oxfords lying unused in my portmanteau.”

I nodded as if I understood.

“Now in your mother’s time—ah, those were the days—we had a fully kitted-out dispensary and the authority to use it. Nowadays it’s all Band-Aids and iodine and cod-liver oil. Shocking, but there you are. The War did something to the world, and we haven’t seen the worst of it yet.”

The door came open suddenly and she beckoned me inside.

The infirmary overlooked the hockey field, and would have been a pleasant enough place if it hadn’t been for the rain. Curtains of green-looking water shimmered down the panes, giving the infirmary a weird glow, as if it were lit by phosphorus, which, oddly enough, made me feel more at home than I had since my arrival at the academy.

Fitzgibbon put a finger to her lips and pointed to a hanging curtain on the far side of the room. I could see, below its gatherings, the legs of a white iron bed.