As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(72)

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.

Whichever one of the Desert Fathers it was who originally came up with those words certainly knew his onions.

I felt like tossing my toast.

“I’ve spoken to the Rainsmiths,” Miss Fawlthorne began. “They tell me you had a bit of a … contretemps.”

There it was again: “a bit of a—”

That did it. I was fed up.

“If you call attempted murder a contre-whatever-it-was,” I shot back angrily. I didn’t even know the meaning of the word.

“There is a tendency in some girls,” Miss Fawlthorne said, putting her fingertips together as a sign that she was about to say something important, “to overdramatize the commonplace.”

I unleashed one of my famous glares. I couldn’t help myself.

“Quod erat demonstrandum,” Miss Fawlthorne said, almost to herself, thinking, I suppose, that I didn’t know the meaning of the phrase, when in fact I’d probably written it in my laboratory notebook more times than she’d been kissed.

Q.E.D. As if my glare had proved her point.

Well, she could jolly well suck my salmon sandwiches. I am a calm, cool, and composed person by nature, but when my temper is up, I am a sight to behold.

I leapt to my feet.

“They’re drugging Collingwood!” I shouted, and I didn’t care who heard me. “They’ve been giving her chloral hydrate. Now she’s gone—like the others. They’ve probably killed her.”

“Flavia, listen to me—”

“No!”

I knew what she was thinking: that I was a petulant brat who ought to be turned over her knee and given a good thrashing. But I didn’t care. Collingwood was in trouble and there was no one to rescue her but me.

“Flavia—”

“No!”

“They’re on our side.”

It took quite a long while for her words to trickle from my ears into my brain, and when they finally did arrive, I didn’t believe them.

I think my mouth fell open.

“What?”

It was like watching the moment in some ghastly silent film in which the booby realizes that the shoe he has set on fire is his own. Not just disbelief, but horror, shock, dismay, and yet in spite of it all, the urge to let out a filthy great donkey laugh.

“They’re on our side,” she repeated, her words still seeping like slow honey into my understanding.

“But Collingwood—she’s gone. They—”

“Collingwood experienced a very bad shock. She was given chloral hydrate to help her sleep, to help her cope. Unfortunately, she has since somehow come down with rheumatic fever. She needs better and more intensive medical care than we’re equipped to offer. Dr. Rainsmith has arranged—at his own expense—to have her moved into quarantine at his own private nursing home. Miss Bodycote’s can ill afford an outbreak. It’s a dreadful time, Flavia, and the Rainsmiths are doing their best.”

The words “rheumatic fever” struck fear into my heart. I would never forget Phyllis Higginson—“Laughing Phyllis,” they called her—in far-off Bishop’s Lacey, who was struck down so suddenly. There had been panic in the village until Dr. Darby had called a meeting at the parish hall to explain that the disease was not, in itself, contagious, although the streptococcal throat that preceded it was. Phyllis had died on a heartbreakingly glorious day in June and I had attended her funeral in the churchyard of St. Tancred’s.

I could still remember refusing to believe she was dead. It was all a dream … a joke … a fantasy that had spilled over into real life.

Poor dead Phyllis. Poor Collingwood.

Had I been exposed to her contagion? Had anyone else at Miss Bodycote’s?

“I’m sorry,” I said to Miss Fawlthorne, not sure if I really meant it, or whether I was apologizing under the pressure of fear.

“Do you mean that the Rainsmiths are members of the Nide?” I asked. I couldn’t put it more bluntly than that. Enough of this *footing about with word games, I thought. Miss Fawlthorne and I were both adults—or as near as dammit—together in a closed room, and it was time to say some things that needed to be said.

Did she go a little white? I couldn’t tell.

It was, after all, she who had brought up rheumatic fever. Would she have done so if she thought we were overheard?

I knew at once that I had overstepped. This wasn’t the way the game was played.

If my own aunt Felicity, the Gamekeeper, refused to tell me whether certain persons—including my own father!—were members of the Nide, what chance did I have of wheedling such information from a relatively low-ranking sub-officer in this far-flung corner of the Empire?

Precious little, I realized. None, in fact.

My thoughts flew back to the dismal day the Rainsmiths had come to Buckshaw. Had there been the slightest indication that they were part of any Inner Circle? That Father had ever laid eyes upon them before?

“Please come in” were the only words I could remember him speaking. I had, in fact, admired the quiet, not-quite-openly-bristling way with which he had met their coarse gushings. That the Rainsmiths could be members of the Nide simply beggared belief, and my expression must have shown it.

“You must learn to trust, Flavia,” Miss Fawlthorne said, and I noticed that she hadn’t answered my question.