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

The place was a vast, echoing mausoleum, the walls pitted everywhere with pointed, painted nooks and alcoves, some in the shape of seashells, which looked as if they had once housed religious statuary, but the pale saints and virgins, having been evicted, had been replaced with brass castings of sour-faced, whiskered old men in beaver hats with their hands jammed into the breasts of their frock coats.

Apart from that, I had only time enough to register a quick impression of scrubbed floorboards and institutional varnish disappearing in all directions before the flame blew out and we were left standing in darkness. The place smelled like a piano warehouse: wood, varnish, and an acrid metallic tang that suggested tight strings and old lemons.

“Damnation,” someone whispered, close to my ear.

We were in what I presumed was an entrance hall when the electric lights were suddenly switched on, leaving the three of us blinking in the glare.

A tall woman stood at the top of a broad staircase, her hand on the switch. “Who is it, Fitzgibbon?” she asked, in a voice that suggested she fed on peaches and steel.

“It’s the chairman, miss. He’s brought the new girl.”

I could feel my temper rising. I was not going to stand there and be discussed as if I were a mop in a shop.

“Good evening, Miss Fawlthorne,” I said, stepping forward. “I’m Flavia de Luce. I believe you have been expecting me.”

I had seen the headmistress’s name on the prospectus the academy had sent to Father. I could only hope that this woman on the stair was actually the headmistress, and not just some lackey.

Slowly, she descended the stairs, the startling white of her hair standing out round her head in a snowy nimbus. She was dressed in a black suit and a white blouse. A large ruby pin glowed at her throat like a bead of fresh blood. Her hawk nose and dark complexion gave her the look of a pirate who had given up the sea for a career in education.

She inspected me up and down, from top to toe.

She must have been satisfied, because she said, finally, “Fetch her things.”

Fitzgibbon opened the door and signaled the taxi driver, and a minute later, my luggage, soggy from the rain, was piled in the foyer.

“Thank you, Dr. Rainsmith,” she said, dismissing the chairman. “Most kind of you.”

It seemed short shrift for someone who had lugged me across the Atlantic and halfway across Canada, but perhaps it was the lateness of the hour.

With no more than a nod, Ryerson Rainsmith was gone and I was alone with my captors.

Miss Fawlthorne—I was quite sure now that it was she, because she hadn’t contradicted me—walked round me in a slow circle. “Do you have any cigarettes or alcohol either on your person or in your baggage?”

I shook my head.

“Well?”

“No, Miss Fawlthorne,” I said.

“Firearms?” she asked, watching me closely.

“No, Miss Fawlthorne.”

“Very well, then. Welcome to Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy. In the morning I shall sign you in properly. Take her to her room, Fitzgibbon.”

With that, she switched off the electric light and became part of the darkness.

Fitzgibbon had relighted her candle, and amid flickering shadows, up the staircase we climbed.

“They’ve put you in Edith Cavell,” she croaked at the top, fishing a set of keys from some unspeakable crevice in her nightgown and opening the door.

I recognized the name at once. The room was dedicated to the memory of the World War I heroine Edith Cavell, the British nurse who had been shot by a German firing squad for helping prisoners escape. I thought of those famous words, which were among her last and which I had seen inscribed upon her statue near Trafalgar Square in London: “Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness toward anyone.”

I decided at that instant to adopt those words, from now on, as my personal motto. Nothing could have been more appropriate.

At least for now.

Fitzgibbon placed the candlestick on a small wooden desk. “Blow it out when you’re ready for bed. No electrics—it’s past lights-out.”

“May I light a fire?” I asked. “I’m actually quite cold.”

“Fires are not permitted until the fifth of November,” she said. “It’s a tradition. Besides, coal and wood are money.”

And with no more than that, she left me.

Alone.

I will not describe that night, other than to say that the mattress had apparently been stuffed with crushed stones, and that I slept the sleep of the damned.

I left the candle burning. It was the only heat in the room.

I would like to be able to say that I dreamed of Buckshaw, and of Father, and of Feely and Daffy, but I cannot. Instead, my weary brain was filled with images of roaring seas, of blowing spray, and of Dorsey Rainsmith, who had taken upon herself the form of an albatross, which, perched at the masthead of a storm-tossed ship, screamed down at me wild cries of bird abuse.

I fought my way up out of this troubled sleep to find someone sitting on my chest, pummeling me about the head and shoulders with angry fists.

“Traitor!” a voice was sobbing. “You filthy dirty rotten traitor! Traitor! Traitor! Traitor!”

It was still well before sunrise, and the faint light that leaked into the room from the streetlamp was too dim to make out clearly the features of my attacker.