As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(60)

The thought floored me—almost literally. I reached out and touched the edge of a table to steady myself.

“Yes,” I said, trying out my new sea legs. “She did. She won the Saint Michael and vanished.”

I took a deep breath, and then I said: “But she was seen last night. She’s still here.”

“Is she indeed?” Mrs. Bannerman said, raising an eyebrow in what might well have been mockery.

“Yes,” I said. “She was seen near the laundry.”

“Indeed? From which you deduce?”

I was thoroughly enjoying this: a match of wits in which questions became answers and answers questions: a topsy-turvy mirror game in which nothing was given away.

Or everything.

Lewis Carroll had been right in Through the Looking-Glass. Reality made no sense whatsoever.

“That she was never missing,” I said, taking the plunge. “That she was never dead.

“And nor were—or are—Wentworth or Le Marchand,” I added.

“Hmmm,” Mrs. Bannerman said.

The perfect answer.

She poked a forefinger into the hair above her ear, correcting a single strand that was struggling to escape.

“Now, then,” she said, turning to the hydrogen spectrophotometer, at which she had been working when I came into the room. “Let us discover why the feet of this luna moth, Actius luna, should be exhibiting traces of arsenic. It’s a pretty puzzle.”

And I couldn’t have agreed more.





? TWENTY ?

I HAVE SAID NOTHING so far about church or chapel, hoping perhaps that they would go away. Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy, being hand in glove with the Church of England, or “Anglican” as it was called here in the colonies (and “Episcopal” just south of the border in the United States of America), was subject to all the ritual that one would expect: chapel every morning on the premises, conducted in what had once been the chapel of the original convent, and a church parade on Sunday mornings to the nearby cathedral for the full-strength dose of Scripture and dire warnings.

Church parade? I should have said “church straggle.” It is probably easier to train a pack of hunting hounds to sing an oratorio by Bach than it is to get a gaggle of girls to go in orderly fashion along a broad avenue in full view of the public without some mischief making a mockery of the day.

The usual order of march was this: Miss Fawlthorne and the faculty in the lead, followed by the girls in order of form, the youngest first all the way up to the sixth, with Jumbo, as head girl, bringing up the rear.

Clustered round Jumbo were the usual culprits who enjoyed a jolly good smoke in the open air: Fabian, Van Arque, and a couple of other younger scofflaws who were just learning how to inhale.

Because of that, there was a great deal of coughing at the back of the column, accompanied by an unusual and dramatic amount of hawking and spitting.

Occasionally we would meet Sunday strollers, or overtake older churchgoers who were headed on foot in the same direction, who would sometimes look in horror upon what must have seemed like an outing from the Toronto Free Hospital for Consumptive Poor.

“It’s the food!” Van Arque would choke, pounding her chest as we passed. “Nothing but tongue and beans.” Which didn’t explain the smoke leaking from the corners of her mouth as she spoke.

Although I was marching with the fourth form, I was able to fall gradually back in line by the simple technique of stopping twice to tie my shoelaces. I rejoined the column just as Scarlett came along.

“Dit-dit-dit-dit, dit-dit,” I said. “Hi.”

“Dit-dit-dit, dit-dit-dit-dit, dit-dit-dit-dit, dit-dit-dit-dit,” she replied. “Shhh.”

We shambled along in silence for a minute, and then I whispered, “What do you think happened to her? Brazenose, I mean.”

Her eyes were huge as they swiveled toward me. “I can’t tell you,” she said. “So please stop asking me.”

This made no sense whatsoever. Scarlett had been happy enough to prattle on at the camp about her recent nighttime sighting of a girl who had supposedly vanished two years ago, but was now unwilling to hazard a guess as to why.

What—or whom—could she be afraid of?

I had no choice but to lay all my cards on the table. It was risky, but there was no other way. It was my duty.

Aunt Felicity had more than once lectured me on my inherited duty.

“Your duty will become as clear to you as if it were a white line painted down the middle of the road,” she had said. “You must follow it, Flavia.”

The words of my aged aunt echoed as clearly in my ears as if she were walking along beside me.

“Even when it leads to murder?” I had asked her.

“Even when it leads to murder.”

Well, it had led to murder, hadn’t it? That charred, decapitated wretch, whoever she might have been, who had plummeted down the chimney and rolled across the floor of Edith Cavell, was certainly not a suicide.

I took a deep breath, leaned toward Scarlett, and whispered into her ear. “And have you, also, acquired a taste for pheasant sandwiches?”

The effect upon Amelia Scarlett was shocking. The color drained from her face as if a tap had been opened somewhere. She stopped dead in her tracks—so suddenly that Fabian, who had been walking directly behind, smashed into her, fell to her knees, and, seeing that she had ripped one of her stockings, let loose a word that is not supposed to be known to the girls of Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy.