As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(73)

What kind of muddle was this woman’s mind? Did she not realize that her words directly contradicted the advice she had given me earlier?

“What about Le Marchand and Wentworth?” I demanded. “What about Clarissa Brazenose? Did they learn to trust?”

These were questions that cut to the bone, and I meant them to.

My whole life had been lived in doubt—doubt about my mother, doubt even about my own identity. I had been brought up not knowing sometimes if I were foundling or changeling, taunted by sisters who were capable of being as exquisitely cruel as those in any fairy tale.

Where identity was concerned, I was a raw sore—an open wound.

I was quickly learning that I couldn’t exist in a world of shifting shadows and whispered half-truths.

I needed facts the way a tree needs sunshine. If ever I had met a kindred spirit, it was the hard-hearted Mr. Gradgrind, in Dickens’s Hard Times: “Stick to Facts, sir!… In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!”

His words seemed to echo in my head, just as they had that winter’s night at Buckshaw, with snow falling so beautifully outside the drawing-room windows, as Daffy read aloud to us: “Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: Nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children.”

How I envied those little Gradgrinds, with their little conchological cabinet, their little metallurgical cabinet, and their little mineralogical cabinet! How lucky they were to have such a hardheaded father.

What I needed, in order to survive, was science—not shadows.

Chemistry—not conspiracy.

“I want to go home,” I said.

The silence was long and agonizing.

It wasn’t as if Miss Fawlthorne had never before dealt with a girl who wished not to remain at Miss Bodycote’s. Hadn’t she, just now, seen off Charlotte Veneering, that jellyfish life-form from the third, who had failed to flourish?

Why couldn’t I be an FF, too? Why couldn’t I be rushed in the night, weeping, bent over and covered with an old mackintosh, to a waiting taxicab? It might even be fun.

I could negotiate my freedom as if I were both kidnapper and kidnapped. I was already planning how I would do so, when Miss Fawlthorne said: “I can’t allow you to leave.”

Just as flatly and matter-of-fact as that. As if I were a captive.

“Why not?” I asked. “Veneering left.”

“Charlotte Veneering is to be pitied,” she said. “You are not.”

It was a cruel cut. Like one involved in a duel with razor blades, I had to look to see if I had sustained a wound. I was almost surprised to find myself intact.

“If I let you go, I shall have failed,” Miss Fawlthorne said. “And so shall you. But we will not. We are both better than that.”

I saw at once that she was appealing to that same tired old court of last resort: my pride—and I hated her for it.

But I let it pass. Why? Because, in a way, I pitied her.

And yet, to my horror, I saw that my left hand, as if it had a life of its own, was slowly creeping across the desktop toward her. Appalled, I jerked it back and held it tightly in my lap with the other—which made things even worse, because it was now perfectly plain that I was restraining these rogue fingers as I might a trained tarantula.

I could feel my color rising.

Miss Fawlthorne said nothing, but sat staring at me as if I were a cyst. The air in the room was so thick that you would have needed a chisel to cut it.

She was not going to make things easy for me, I knew. She was going to wait until I spoke, a tactic I recognized as one from my own toolbox.

We would sit here, then, she and I, glaring at each other in stubborn silence until the cows came home from the pastures of Heaven.

I have to hand it to her: Miss Fawlthorne was good at this game.

But not nearly as good as I.

I waited until it seemed that one of us must surely scream, and then I said suddenly: “Clarissa Brazenose is still alive, isn’t she?”

No more and no less. I left it at that.

Miss Fawlthorne blinked but she said nothing.

“And so are Le Marchand and Wentworth. They’re all still alive, but they’ve gone undercover.”

I think I was as surprised as Miss Fawlthorne. Actually, the idea had been forming in some back room of my brain for quite a long time, I realized, but had not revealed itself until it was needed.

“If that were true,” Miss Fawlthorne said, “—and I’m not for a moment saying that it is—it would be very dangerous knowledge.”

I nodded, biting my lip wisely, as if I knew far more than I did. I did not enjoy being on the outs with this woman. She had, as I had noticed from the beginning, an unexpected gentle side that was not just at odds, but perhaps even at war with her role as headmistress.

Hadn’t she, after all, doled out to me the so-called punishment of writing a paper on William Palmer? And now, just today, she had sentenced Gremly to skate a hundred laps round the old rink. Gremly! Who loved roller skating as Dante loved Beatrice—as Romeo loved Juliet—and as Winnie-the-Pooh loved honey!