As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(67)

The latter scene had brought Daffy bursting in wide-eyed terror into my bedroom and into my bed at three o’clock in the morning, having turned on the electric light and lit an entire box of candles, all of which she insisted be left burning until well after sunrise.

At the time, I’d have hooted down anyone who suggested that I myself might one day inherit the mantle of Jack Cross, X9—the Private Hangman—but now I wasn’t so sure. In this topsy-turvy world, anything seemed possible.

And yet, until now, it had never occurred to me that I might be required to kill.

My mother, of course, had been a member of the mysterious Nide, of which Aunt Felicity was chief. That much I knew, as well as the fact that there were others around me who might or might not be full-fledged agents. Gremly, for instance, who had given herself away by asking if I enjoyed my pheasant sandwiches. How I longed to quiz her, to learn more not only about her associations, but also about my own.

And yet it was forbidden. It had been made quite clear to me that one must not, under any circumstances, ask questions of any girl at Miss Bodycote’s about herself, or about any other girl: a rule which, when you stopped to think about it, made a great deal of sense. It was the only way in which those of us who were chosen for a life of service could keep our secret doings from the others. Those at the academy who were not involved—the day girls—were really no more than cover for those of us who were.

They, in a way, were the drones, while we were the queens.

That much I had worked out on my own.

It was all part of a Grand Game, in which we were merely players. The rules were unwritten, and needed to be deduced by each of us: an enormous maze through which each of us must make her own way, in total darkness, by trial and error.

How beastly clever it all was!

What if the whole thing was no more than a magnificent piece of theater staged solely to test me? What if everyone but me had been handed their parts?

But, no, the drugged Collingwood was all too real. The fear I had seen in her haunted eyes was impossible to fake.

“You’re very quiet,” Jumbo said. It was so long since either of us had spoken that I’d almost forgotten she was there.

I looked her straight in the eye. “I know we’re not permitted to ask personal questions,” I said. “But what about impersonal questions? Neither of the Rainsmiths is a student. Am I allowed to ask you about them?”

That in itself was a risky question. I was keenly aware that Jumbo, as head girl, must not be compromised; that she must not be asked to break a rule.

The British Empire—even in Canada—had not been built by sneaks.

Like the sun after a rain, a warm smile was already stealing across Jumbo’s face.

“Excellentemento!” she said. “Top marks. Of course you are.”

I felt as if I had just won the Irish Sweepstakes.

By her comment about the champagne tarts I already knew that Jumbo did not care for Dorsey Rainsmith: that in terms of a sympathetic soul, I already had one foot in the door.

“What have they done with Collingwood?” I asked sneakily.

“They” being the Rainsmiths, and therefore fair game for a question.

“Took her away in an ambulance,” Jumbo replied. “Before sunup. I saw it from my window.”

“But where?”

“God only knows,” Jumbo said. “All I can say is that Miss Fawlthorne and Fitzgibbon went with her.”

I felt as if I’d been punched in the solar plexus.

Miss Fawlthorne!

But it made sense, didn’t it? I’d seen her climbing into Ryerson Rainsmith’s car on the Danforth. Nothing could be clearer than the fact that they were hand in glove.

“What are we going to do?”

Squinting, Jumbo raised her eyes slowly to the heavens—to the fat cumulus clouds that drifted lazily along in the painfully blue sky.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Nothing?” My response was as quick as the return of a served tennis ball.

“Nothing. There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

“Meaning?”

“Whatever you take it to mean.”

How infuriating! How utterly—

I was tempted for a moment to give her a defiant glare, but I managed, by looking away, to keep it mostly to myself.

“You remind me of my sister Daffy,” I said.

“Excellent,” Jumbo replied, and with that, she got to her feet, brushed off her skirt, and without a backward glance, strode quickly away toward the rear of the school.

A kind of sadness descended upon me as I watched her walk away: a kind of sadness that was half happy and half not, which is very difficult to describe. I suppose I’d had great hopes that we would, against all odds, become great chums, and that the secrets of the universe, and of Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy, would be unrolled like some great map, at no cost, for my inspection.

But it was not to be. I was me … she was she … and the world was the world—as I had rather sourly suspected all along.

I thought of the words Daffy had once recited in the drawing room as a gift for Father’s birthday:

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.”