As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(66)

I knew that hunched shoulders, hanging hair, and eyes on the ground were fairly reliable signs of a girl dejected, a girl who needed to be approached and jollied into a nice talk or a nice cup of tea; whereas a back-flung head, with eyes closed and a secret smile on the upturned face, was the signal of someone who needed to be left alone with her thoughts.

It was clever of me to have worked out such a useful tactic.

“Hello,” said a voice. “May I join you?”

I kept my eyes closed and my mouth shut, hoping she would go away.

It was too late to form my thumbs and forefingers into little circles and begin loudly chanting “OM MANE PADME HUM” like a Tibetan lama, or the pilgrims in Lost Horizon.

“De Luce …”

I ignored her.

“Flavia? Are you feeling better?”

I allowed one eye to crack slightly open like an iguana.

It was Jumbo.

“Yes, thank you,” I said, and left it at that. Most people would have felt obliged to tack on some kind of explanation, but not I.

There is a mystery in silence that can never be matched by mere words. Silence is power—at least until they grab you by the neck.

“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure, thank you.”

I find there is always an electric thrill in such conversations: invisible fingers of excitement in the air, like lightning behind the hills.

“We were worried about you. Miss Fawlthorne asked me to see if you were all right.”

I let my eye drift slowly shut. “Yes, I’m quite all right, thank you.”

It was incredible! How long could I keep this up? Five minutes? Ten minutes?

An hour?

I heard the rustle of her starched skirt as Jumbo sat down beside me. Whatever was on her mind must be important enough to risk getting grass stains on her outfit. Her mouth brushed my ear as she folded herself into position beside me.

“We need to talk,” she whispered.

Were we being watched? Were unknown eyes staring down at us from the tall, blank windows of Miss Bodycote’s? To them, we would appear to be no more than a couple of tiny, distant sails in a vast sea of grass.

Why was I being so wary? And why, for that matter, was Jumbo?

I let my eyes come open slowly.

“I was thinking about the Michael Award,” I said, which left things suitably up in the air.

“Past or present?”

Jumbo was no fool.

Without answering her question, I allowed myself to go all romantic. “I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to stand up there on the stage in front of all those people, being presented with a silver archangel by … who is it that hands out those things, anyway?”

“Dr. Rainsmith.”

“Him or her?” I tried to keep the excitement out of my voice.

“Him, of course. She just comes along for the champagne tarts.”

Jumbo ought to know, I realized. At the time of Brazenose major’s disappearance, Jumbo would have been in the fifth form. And like Brazenose, she had been here for ages.

“What about two years ago, when Brazenose won it?”

“You need to watch your step,” Jumbo said suddenly, hissing the words.

“Why?” I demanded.

It’s ever so easy to be bold in bright sunlight.

“Things are not what they seem,” she said.

I wanted to tell her that I’d been aware of that fact for as long as I could remember, but I resisted the urge.

“You’re wading into real danger,” Jumbo continued, “without even realizing it. You’re already in over your head. Scarlett has tried to warn you, and so has Gremly.”

I sat quietly, not wanting to break the fragile cobweb of power I had created with my semi-silence. Outwardly, I was no more than a serenely stubborn girl sitting on a sunny lawn with her nose in the air.

But what could Jumbo mean? How could I possibly be wrong in my deductions to date? I couldn’t be—I was sure of it.

Until, that is, a horrific thought sprang into my mind: What if Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy, besides our secret schooling in codes and ciphers and the black arts of science, trained certain of its students in the act of murder? What if each of them—of us!—was required, as some kind of horrific graduation ritual, to kill a human being?

What if Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy, claiming to be a girls’ school so High Anglican that only a kitchen stool was required to scramble up into Heaven, was, in reality, a school for assassins? An Academy for Murder and Mayhem?

Was that what Jumbo was trying to tell me?





? TWENTY-TWO ?

FLAVIA DE LUCE, MURDERER.

This was not a thought that came out of nowhere. I suppose it had been simmering away in a covered pot in some subterranean kitchen of my brain for quite some time.

My mind flew back several years to the night Daffy was reading The Private Hangman, a black-jacketed thriller in which Special Agent Jack Cross, alias X9, wreaked vengeance upon the enemies of His Majesty’s Government by such unsubtle means as boiling their blood with high-powered radio waves, binding them eyeball-to-eyeball with a giant squid, extracting a confession from a traitor who was lashed to one of the screws of an about-to-be-launched destroyer whose crew he had betrayed, and, in the last few pages, removing (with the corkscrew attachment of a Boy Scout knife, a handy weapon that he was never without) the eyes of the notorious spy Baron No?l van den Hochstein.