As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(74)

In spite of whatever her grim connections to the Nide might be, the woman was at heart a softie.

And I couldn’t help loving her for it in a complicated way.

“All right,” I said, getting to my feet. “I understand. I am forbidden to ask and you are forbidden to tell. Neither of us much cares for it, but that’s the way things are.”

With that, I got to my feet and walked out of the room, and she didn’t so much as lift a finger to stop me.

The interesting thing was this: Even before I reached the door, her eyes were dampening.

Back in Edith Cavell, I stood on my head in the bed, my heels against the wall. I needed to think.

I had wondered this before: What if this whole business were a sham, a put-up job? What if my being banished to Canada and the sudden appearance of the body in the chimney were merely part of some gigantic war game—some vast exercise in which all of us were pawns in a game staged by inconceivably remote manipulators for their own veiled purposes?

If so, Miss Fawlthorne might be as much at the mercy of these shadowy masters as I was, both of us in the grip of powers beyond our understanding.

Or—and I shuddered at the thought—was this simply the way life was?

Maybe God was master, Fate the hand that moved us on the playing board, and Chance the finger that flicked us bum-over-boiler into the ditch at the slightest misstep.

Whatever the truth, it was all too much for me, and I fell asleep standing on my head.

I awoke with a fierce headache and a crick in my neck. The room was in darkness. I closed my eyes again and allowed myself to come slowly awake.

There is genuine joy in being alone in the dark inside your own head with no outside distractions, where you can scramble from ledge to rocky ledge, hallooing happily in a vast, echoing cave; climbing hand over hand from ledge to ledge of facts and memories, picking up old gems and new: examining, comparing, putting them down again and reaching for the next.

The first thought that came to mind was that the Rainsmiths were on our side—at least according to Miss Fawlthorne. The second was that Le Marchand, Wentworth, and Clarissa Brazenose were possibly still alive.

If that were true, then obviously the body in the chimney could be none of them.

Or was it from a far earlier date? Because Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy had once been a convent, was there the possibility that some poor nun in the distant past had been murdered (it was fun to wonder why) and stuffed up the chimney? Fitzgibbon had said that use of the fireplaces was forbidden until November, but that in itself didn’t mean that the body hadn’t been baking away during the winter months since time out of mind. Arguing against that theory was the fact of the substitute skull, and the fact that the corpse had been clutching a fairly recent Saint Michael Award. It seemed unlikely, too, that a chimney had remained blocked for fifty or so cold Canadian winters without anyone noticing.

I shivered and dropped out of my headstand.

What I needed now was information from the past: information about the first Mrs. Rainsmith—plain facts from someone who had known her personally.

It was obvious that that someone would have to be a member of faculty, and I knew almost instinctively that there was none better than Mrs. Bannerman, who had not only been here for years, but was blessed with an analytical mind much like my own.

I carried the clock to the window and saw that it was half ten: well after lights-out.

Mrs. Bannerman wouldn’t be in the lab for hours, and yet I was now too wide awake to go back to sleep. I wrapped myself in a blanket and settled in a chair at the window.

Only then did I remember that I had announced to Miss Fawlthorne my determination to drop out of Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy and go home: a resolution that I meant to keep, come Hades or high water.

Mrs. Mullet is quite fond of saying that “Well begun is half done,” but I think there’s more to it than that. Half done is only fifty percent, but there is a satisfaction in making a firm decision which is surely closer to ninety or ninety-five percent.

Making up your mind brings a relief, which “well begun” can’t even come close to.

So, by hook or by crook I was going home, but it was still a long way from “Case Closed” at Miss Bodycote’s. There were more ghosts here than the ones that fiddled with Ouija boards, or those that walked these haunted halls.

With hours to wait until Mrs. Bannerman would open the laboratory, there was no longer any excuse to delay my report on William Palmer, I thought, so I might as well get on with it.

It made no difference whatsoever that I had no reference materials at hand. Every detail of the Rugeley Poisoner’s lurid life, having been burned happily and permanently into my memory, is forever at my fingertips. (Don’t lick them, a gnomish little voice teases. They’re covered with arsenic.)

I opened my notebook in my lap and picked up my pen.

Doctor William Palmer, I wrote, was particularly proud of his soft white hands, which he was perpetually washing …

Time flew by like butter, as Mrs. Mullet once said, as I outlined the life, the crimes, the trial, and the death of that saucy strychnine artist who had the nerve to ask Throttler Smith, the public hangman, as he spotted the trapdoor, “Are you sure it’s safe?”

I ended my assignment with that lighthearted tidbit, thinking it would do no harm to provide Miss Fawlthorne with a smile.

How wrong I was.

I was rubbing my tired eyes when a flash of headlights outside in the street caught my attention. A car had pulled up and stopped at the curb.