As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(51)

She groaned.

“Collingwood! Wake up! It’s me, Flavia!”

One bloodshot eye came slowly open and stared out at me blearily.

“Wha …” she managed, and the smell of her breath made my blood curdle.

I recognized it at once: that acrid stab of chlorine embedded in an exotic aromatic odor—like a diamond in a dung heap.

Chloral hydrate. I’d know it anywhere. C2H3Cl3O2. Unmistakable.

I had once happened upon a box of the jellied red capsules in the bedside table of the vicar’s wife, broken one open for a sniff, and added it to my store of chemical memories.

The stuff was, I knew, a powerful hypnotic.

If I were myself, I should have spotted at once how troubling Fitzgibbon’s statement was: that Collingwood was sleeping the clock away. I could understand her being badly shocked by the body tumbling out of the chimney, but that was ages ago. How could she still be sleeping so much after all this time?

I should have thought of it sooner, but living in this Alice in Wonderland world had obviously blunted my usually razor-keen perceptions.

“Everything’s fine,” I told her, even though it wasn’t.

Except for beds, curtains and windows, and a sink, the room was bare.

But wait! My eyes and my brain lighted upon the cupboard in the alcove.

In less than half a flash I was peering through the glass at the school’s medical supplies. Band-Aids and cod-liver oil, Fitzgibbon had said. But there was quite a bit more than that, actually: gauze bandages, surgical cotton, tape and scissors, iodine, Mercurochrome, aspirin, mustard (for making plasters and poultices, I supposed), a folded sling, a white enamel kidney bowl, tweezers, rubber gloves, tongue depressors … all of it, unfortunately, behind glass.

I tried the door but it was locked. I let slip a quiet curse.

I could, in a pinch, break the glass, but that seemed a bit extreme, and besides, the noise would more than likely attract attention.

I had foolishly left my crucifix lock picks on the washstand when I scrubbed my face and neck: another proof that cleanliness, besides being next to godliness, could also be foolhardy.

A quick glance round the room showed that there was nothing from which I could quickly improvise a suitable tool. A bedspring might have served in a pinch, but there wasn’t time.

My eye fell upon the glass cupboard from which Fitzgibbon had taken my nightgown. It was identical! Both white, both glass-plated. They had been bought as a pair.

I must have looked like a harpy in a tent as I flapped quickly toward the windows.

Let there be … let there be … let there be …

And yes … there was a key in the keyhole! My prayers had been answered.

Identical cupboards—identical keys … or so I hoped.

The key was cold in my hand as I flew back across the infirmary and, to my ears, anyway, the resulting click! was as welcome as a lost symphony of Beethoven.

In all these years it had never occurred to anyone that the key for the linen cupboard would also open the dispensary.

With not a moment to waste, I took the tin of mustard to the sink, turned on the tap, and waited for the water to run hot. I took the glass of water Fitzgibbon had poured for Collingwood, dumped it down the drain, and refilled it with warmish water.

Into this I added what I judged to be six teaspoons of the powdered mustard, which I stirred with the surgical scissors.

“Collingwood!” I whispered urgently, hauling her up with an arm behind her shoulders. “Drink this!”

Her eyes came open—both of them this time—dreadful upon mine.

“Drink,” I told her. “You must!”

Somehow her lips attached themselves to the rim of the glass: like a bivalve trying to climb out of a swimming pool. She choked—gagged twice—and wrenched her head away.

All things considered, she was remarkably strong, but I was stronger.

I wedged her head back with the rim of the glass and dumped the liquid down her throat, struggling all the while.

It was not a pleasant task—something like trying to force-feed a bedridden grampus—but I persisted. In the end, I managed to get about half the stuff into her stomach, with the other half splattered equally upon myself, the bed, and the floor.

She was coughing and choking and sobbing, and through it all, her eyes blazed at me as if they were weapons.

I stood by with the kidney dish: a pillar of strength dressed in a Bedouin’s tent. For just a moment I had a horrid flashback to being Balthazar in the Christmas pageant at St. Tancred’s and being made to sing:

“Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume,

Breathes a life of gathering gloom;

Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying,

Sealed in a stone-cold tomb.”

At first it seemed as if nothing was going to happen: the darkness before dawn, the calm before the storm.

But it didn’t take long. Collingwood gave a couple of surprised hiccups, followed by a long sigh. Her face was almost placid, and then, suddenly, she gave a great gulp, her lips dragged themselves down at the corners, and up it all came.

I held her head as great gouts of the reeking stuff came gushing out of her and into the waiting kidney dish.

It was my own spur-of-the-moment vomiting at the camp that had given me the idea: that and the knowledge that a mustard-induced tossing of the cookies was the best—and perhaps only—antidote to poisoning by chloral hydrate.