As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(59)

This time I did scream, and I awoke clinging desperately to the pillow as if it were a life preserver, my heart pounding away like some infernal machine.

Had anyone heard me?

I strained my ears, listening for the sound of creaking floorboards or approaching footsteps.

But Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy lay in silence and in darkness.

At that instant, the alarm went off, nearly causing a regrettable accident, but I seized it and thumbed the little lever to the Off position. The glowing face told me that it was three A.M.

Time to meet Mrs. Bannerman in the chemistry lab.

I groped my way to the basin where I picked the crusty crumbs from the corners of my eyes and gave my face a good scrubbing with the corner of a wetted towel.

There’s nothing like friction to bring on rosy cheeks at short notice. I didn’t want to look like death warmed up, as Mrs. Mullet is so fond of saying.

That done, I dressed and made my way silently down the stairs.

“Good morning,” Mrs. Bannerman said. She already had the tea steeping. “I heard your alarm.”

Had she? Or was there a hidden message in her words—a small rap on the knuckles, perhaps. I didn’t know, so I shrugged.

“I was awake before it rang,” I said. “But I couldn’t shut it off in time.”

“Didn’t shut it off in time.” She smiled.

It was going to be one of those days. I could already tell.

Once people have you in their power, it’s remarkable how quickly their grip extends to all things. At first, they are merely teaching you a bit of harmless geography, and the next thing you know they’re criticizing your posture or finding fault with your breath. I had noticed this about Miss Fawlthorne, and now here it was happening again with Mrs. Bannerman.

My automatic response to someone who has gone too far is to wrap myself in a cloak of coolness. Throughout history the cold blue de Luce eye has stopped many an overstep and many a runaway horse.

Mrs. Bannerman laughed. “It’s no use, Flavia,” she said. “It’s simply no use. You look like someone whose crypt has been invaded by grave robbers. I’m sorry, but you do.”

I felt my face hardening into an icy and involuntary smile.

“Your success here will depend greatly upon your ability to control your personal kinesics: what the experts are now beginning to call body language.”

I’m afraid my curled lip gave me away.

“You see? You need to master the poker face. There might come a time when your life depends upon it.”

“In case someone asks me to marry him, you mean.”

I don’t know where the words came from. There are times when the gods (or devils) choose to amuse themselves by speaking through our mouths, and this was one of them.

I hadn’t even remotely been thinking about marriage—not for myself nor for anyone else of my acquaintance—but out it popped.

“Precisely,” Mrs. Bannerman said. “I’m glad you understand.”

She gave me a smile which I could not decode: a smile in which she narrowed her eyes and raised only the corners of her mouth. What could it possibly mean?

I looked at her for further signals, but she was sending none.

And then it hit me with an almost physical force: approval. She had given me a look of approval, and because it was the first I had ever received in my life, I had not recognized it for what it was.

As when a match is applied to a dry log in the fireplace, a slow warmth began seeping through my whole being.

So this was what approval felt like! I could easily become an addict.

The thought of a fireplace reminded me of the one in Edith Cavell, and the bundle that had tumbled down it and into the room. And, of course, of the missing Clarissa Brazenose.

Which was why I was here, wasn’t it?

I took a deep breath and hurled myself into the unknown. “Brazenose major,” I said, and waited for a response. In conversation among adults, there is no longer the need to spin out a question to childish lengths. In fact, it wasn’t a question at all, was it? Rather, the mere mention of a missing person’s name.

“What about her?” Mrs. Bannerman asked.

“She won the Saint Michael medal, or medallion, or whatever it’s called—and then she vanished.”

“Did she?”

Mrs. Bannerman’s expression had not changed one iota, or, as we used to say in England, a jot.

She was watching with approval, I realized, as I learned the steps of the dance by placing one slow foot ahead of the other.

I knew, of course, that I was forbidden to ask personal questions of the other girls, but did that same restriction apply to the faculty? The only way to find out had been to ask without really seeming to.

It was all so bloody complicated.

And yet I was enjoying it.

Daffy had bored me stiff one rainy Sunday afternoon by reading aloud from the Dialogues of Plato, in which a gaggle of sissified young men—or so it seemed to me—had traipsed round a sunny courtyard behind their master asking all the right questions: the ones that allowed him to deliver his thunderbolts of logic to their greatest effect.

Like stooges feeding straight lines to a famous comedian, their function was to make him look good.

What a load of old codswallop, I had thought at the time, and had said as much to Daffy.

But could it be that this was how the world really worked?