As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(69)

I pulled it out and compared it with the photograph. There could be no doubt about it. In spite of the tarnishing, I could easily see that they had once been identical.

A chill worked its way up my spine and down again. The photograph must have been taken the night of her disappearance—the night, perhaps, of her death.

She had vanished after the ball.

My footsteps slowed as I came closer to Miss Fawlthorne’s study.

Last chance to back out, I thought. Last chance to let sleeping dogs lie.

There are choices in life which you are aware, even as you make them, cannot be undone; choices after which, once made, things will never be the same.

There is that moment when you can still walk away, but if you do, you will never know what might have been. Saint Paul on the road to Damascus might have pleaded sunstroke, for example, and the world would have been a different place. Admiral Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar might have decided he was outnumbered and fled under full sail to fight another day.

I thought for a few moments about these two instances, and then I knocked on Miss Fawlthorne’s door. The hollow sound of knuckles on wood echoed ominously from the uncaring walls.

There was no response and so I knocked again.

I was about to turn away (Saint Paul and Admiral Lord Nelson be damned) when a voice said, “Come.”

I grasped the cold doorknob, gave it a twist, took a deep breath, and stepped into the headmistress’s study.

Miss Fawlthorne was no more than a black silhouette against the brightness of the window. With my gloom-accustomed eyes, she was hard to look at directly because of the dazzle. And yet in spite of that, from her shadowed face there came an unmistakable flash of two moist eyes.

How odd. She had been all right when we walked to the Sunday morning service not two hours ago. Had she caught a sudden chill in the old stone church?

She shoved a bundle of papers into a desk drawer and closed it with a bang.

I stood there awkwardly until at last she said, “Please be seated.”

She shuffled some files and red pencils on her desk and I guessed that she was collecting herself.

But for what?

I waited for her to ask me what was on my mind, but she said nothing as the silence lengthened.

“Well?” she said after a while, and left it at that.

I could hardly believe my ears. It was as if the captain of the Queen Elizabeth had invited you onto the bridge and then asked you to take the wheel. It was unheard of.

In any conversation with an adult, a twelve-year-old girl is at a distinct disadvantage. The dice are loaded against her, and only a fool would believe otherwise.

And yet here was the fearsome Miss Fawlthorne handing over the conversational reins without so much as a wink. As I have said—unheard of.

Well, I wasn’t going to miss an opportunity such as this. It might never come again.

“Mrs. Rainsmith,” I said. “The first one: Francesca.”

Miss Fawlthorne made no effort to hide her surprise. “You have done your homework, haven’t you?” she said in a resigned and tired voice. At the same time, she produced a surprisingly workmanlike handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes as if she were dusting them. But she didn’t fool me.

“Poor Francesca. Tragic. Absolutely tragic.”

I begged with my eyes for her to tell me more.

“She drowned. Fell overboard on a moonlight cruise.”

“Oh, dear!” I said. It was the kind of weak remark I despise in others, and I was disappointed to hear such sappy words coming out of my own mouth. I tried to correct the slipup.

“I was led to believe that she had vanished.”

“Led to believe” was a clever phrase: the move of a chessman. It implied that someone else was to blame for my faulty belief.

“I suppose she did, in a way,” Miss Fawlthorne said. “Her body was never recovered. Absolutely tragic. Ryerson—Dr. Rainsmith, I mean—was devastated.”

Pfaugh! I spat mentally. He apparently hadn’t been too devastated to prance off to the altar with the dread Dorsey before the remains of Wife One had settled safely on the bottom.

She saw the look on my face.

“Grief takes many forms, Flavia,” she said quietly. “I expected that you would have learned that by now.”

She was right, of course, and I accepted the little stab in the heart as having been deserved.

“Dorsey was his medical protégée. She was a pillar of strength in his grief.”

A pillar of strength, Daffy had once remarked, was a nice way of saying someone was terminally bossy, but I managed to keep that thought to myself.

“Tragic,” Miss Fawlthorne said again, and I wondered for the first time what she meant by it.

At the same time, the realization was slowly rising in my mind, like the water rising round a shackled prisoner in a riverside dungeon, that yet another corpse had been added to the equation.

I had believed—at least until recently—that the blackened body was more likely Clarissa Brazenose, or perhaps the missing Le Marchand … or the equally missing Wentworth.

Now, another possibility had presented itself, and an intriguing one at that.

My nerves must have been slightly on edge, as I jumped when a knock came at the door and Fitzgibbon’s head appeared.

“Excuse me, Miss Fawlthorne,” she said, “but the Veneerings are here for Charlotte.”