As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(58)

A sudden and unexpectedly cool wind caught several dead leaves and made them scuttle across the walkway with the chill grating sound of old bones stirring in their moldy coffins in some forgotten underworld.

What use to them was the Archangel Michael, when a thousand times ten thousand archangels couldn’t keep a single one of them from turning into rancid green moss?

More to the point: What use was he to me?

Or anyone else.

It was at that moment that I began to question my faith.

“I hope I’m not intruding.”

I looked up to find Mrs. Bannerman staring at me in rather an odd way, her head cocked to one side, as if she were examining my soul.

Sitting there among the scuttering autumn leaves with a tear-stained letter in my lap, I must have looked to her like Roxanne in the last act of Cyrano de Bergerac.

I crumpled the page and crammed it into my blazer pocket.

“News from home?” she asked.

I put on a grim smile and shrugged.

“It sometimes happens,” she said, “that a letter from home can seem to be from another world … as if it had come from Jupiter.”

I nodded.

“Is there anything in particular troubling you? Anything I can do to help?”

I thought long and hard before answering.

“Yes,” I said. “You can tell me what happened to Clarissa Brazenose.”





? NINETEEN ?

HAD THE AIR BECOME suddenly too thick to breathe, or was it just my imagination?

Mrs. Bannerman and I stared at each other, our eyes locked, each of us unwilling—or unable—to be the first to look away.

Had I been too bold and overstepped? I knew from experience that was most likely to happen when you were most unsure of yourself.

How incredibly young Mrs. Bannerman looked in that long moment! With her hair coiled in neat, businesslike ropes, and her tastefully applied lipstick (practically invisible, as lipstick ought to be, especially when worn in defiance of regulations), she seemed, as I had noted that first day at breakfast, no older than my sister Feely. Hard to believe that this cool and composed young woman had been tried and acquitted for murder.

Then suddenly she spoke. The spell was broken. “Tomorrow morning,” she said. “Early. The usual time and place.”

And with that, she was gone.

I couldn’t sleep. The hours passed like semiliquid sludge, oozing blackly by in my darkened room. My mind, by contrast, was a racing blur of question marks: Why had we heard no news about the body in the chimney? Why had there been no reaction from the outside world?

Had the whole thing been swept under Miss Fawlthorne’s carpet? Had she somehow managed to derail Inspector Gravenhurst’s investigation?

Did it go, perhaps, even … higher?

Or was it all a waiting game? A cunning game of cat and mouse played out on some gigantic Canadian gaming board too vast for my comprehension?

Why had Miss Fawlthorne got into Ryerson Rainsmith’s car in the middle of the busy Danforth? Surely, if a board meeting had been planned away from the academy, he would have picked her up at the door of Miss Bodycote’s. Could it be that they hadn’t wanted to be seen? Was it possible they were having what Feely referred to as an “affaire d’amour,” and Daffy called “a fling”?

It seemed unlikely. I couldn’t imagine Dorsey Rainsmith allowing her trained-flea husband off his invisible gold-hair harness long enough to get up to any hanky-panky.

I must admit that I didn’t know in any great detail how a dalliance was conducted, but I had heard enough by keeping my ears open to build up a fairly good—and actually quite startling—idea.

Worse yet was the thought that the two of them might be bound, not by love or icky passion, but by conspiracy.

Knee-deep, I waded on through this dark tide of ideas until I staggered up onto a rocky beach and found myself standing on the west lawn of Buckshaw.

It was night, and a chill wind whickered through the bare branches like phantom horses champing upon phantom hay. Except for a single light at the window of Father’s study, the house was in darkness.

I crept a little closer, taking care, for some peculiar reason, to keep out of sight.

Father sat hunched over his desk, his eyes blinkered by his two raised hands. Across from him sat a figure in black whose face I could not see. Between them, on the desktop, was a chessboard.

As I looked on from the shadows, my heart began to accelerate slowly, as if somewhere in the engine room of my intestines, some huge and unseen hand had taken hold of a large brass lever marked Speed, and was with great deliberation shoving it firmly forward.

The figure in black reached out and repositioned one of the pieces on the board. It seemed to be a girl in a dark costume and a panama hat.

His eyes dripping pain, Father glanced up at his adversary. After what felt like a very long time, but was in actuality only a few seconds, because of the way time is stretched like putty in dreams, his hand went out—each heartbreaking, vulnerable hair on the back of it clearly visible—and seized upon a silver figure which he slid shakily forward.

And I saw that the silver figure in Father’s hand was the Archangel Michael and the pale girl in the dark school uniform was me.

I wanted to cry out but I was unable.

As if he had heard my silent scream, Father turned his face toward the window and fixed his sunken eyes upon mine.