As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(82)

She brought her hand round in a broad sweep to include the glass cases of stuffed creatures.

“They are trapped, also, you see? Birds of a feather! You may laugh, if you wish.”

“It’s not amusing,” I said. “It’s tragic.”

I was thinking how I would feel if I were no longer able to swoop like a swallow through a country lane, my feet on Gladys’s handlebars as we raced down Goodger Hill and swept across the little stone bridge at the Palings. “Yaroo!” I used to shout.

There was a silence in the room, and I turned away from Miss Moate, as if I had become suddenly interested in the displays in their cases.

I took down a browned skull from a shelf, turning it over in my hands.

I could hardly believe my eyes.

Steady on. Keep calm, I thought. Poker face, stiff upper lip … anything to keep from giving away what you’ve just seen.

“Don’t touch that!” Miss Moate snapped. “The specimens are not to be handled.”

“Sorry,” I said before I could stop myself, and returned the grinning head to its place among the others.

“I’ve done it again, haven’t I? But as I said, you mustn’t judge an old woman too harshly.”

“It’s all right, Miss Moate,” I said, focusing on trying to appear normal, which is much more difficult than you might think. “I understand perfectly. I have a very great friend back home in England who is confined to a wheelchair. I know how dreadful it is.”

I thought of dear old Dr. Kissing, parked in his rickety bath chair at Rook’s End, who, in his ancient quilted smoking jacket and tasseled hat, his cigarette ash drooping like an acrobatic gray caterpillar from the leaf of his lower lip, was snug as a bug in a rug. Dr. Kissing had certainly never complained about his lot in life, and I mentally begged his forgiveness for even suggesting that he might have done.

“Very well, then,” Miss Moate said abruptly, clearing her throat as if to wipe the conversational slate clean. “Now, back to this personal matter … you’re frightened, you say?”

“Well, not so much frightened as worried,” I admitted. “It’s about the Rainsmiths.”

I dared not say more.

“What about them? Has one of them done something to you?”

“Not to me,” I said, “but perhaps to someone else.”

“To who?” she demanded ungrammatically.

“I mustn’t say. School rules forbid it.”

Although I kept a sober face, I was smiling inwardly. Defending oneself by hiding behind the rules was a clever trick, like using a mouse to stampede the enemy’s elephants and causing them to trample him to death. Shakespeare had a phrase for it (as he had a phrase for everything): “hoist by his own petard,” which, according to Daffy, meant rousted by the smell of one’s own barn burners.

“Forget the school rules,” she said. “When a child is at risk, the rules must be set aside.”

Who did she think was at risk? I wondered. I had admitted being frightened and worried, but I had said nothing about being at risk—which was actually no more than a weasel word for danger.

“Now, then,” she said in a soothing voice, “tell me about the Rainsmiths.”

“I think they may have murdered someone.”

“Who?” she said instantly. “In particular.”

“Clarissa Brazenose.”

I could have mentioned the names of Le Marchand and Wentworth, but I wanted to keep things simple. I had already suggested to Miss Fawlthorne that this trio may still be alive, but Miss Moate was not aware of that.

Partial disclosure is a sharp knife that can be used again and again as long as you watch what you’re doing.

“That’s a very serious accusation,” Miss Moate said. “Are you sure?”

“No. I only think they may have. But I needed to tell someone.”

“Well, I’m glad you did. I shall certainly see that—”

Somewhere a bell went off, and moments later, the halls were filled with the sound of many feet. A babble of loud voices came closer and closer, and suddenly the horde, like a buffalo herd, was upon us.

“Later,” Miss Moate said, mouthing the words to be heard above the clamor. “We shall talk later.”

Then, her voice suddenly restored, she shouted harshly: “Girls! Girls! Girls! We are not savages!”

I nodded to let her know that I had understood and, like a salmon fighting its way upstream, I muscled my way to the door.

I forced myself to plod doggedly along the halls to my room. No one paid me the slightest attention.

When I reached Edith Cavell, I stepped inside, closed the door, and flattened my back against it. Now that it was safe to do so, my breath began coming in great, ragged gulps. I was becoming light-headed.

The skull in Miss Moate’s science lab—the skull I had held in my hands …

Before I replaced it on the shelf, I could not help spotting that three of its teeth contained amalgam fittings.





? TWENTY-SIX ?

DENTAL SURGERY HAS BEEN around for almost as long as teeth. I had learned this stomach-curdling fact from the pages of a rather sticky journal in the waiting room of a London dentist’s office—a dim and ancient chamber of horrors in Farringdon Street whose prominent painted Victorian signs on every window, PAINLESS DENTISTRY and NO WAITING, had been lying to the public in florid capital letters for more than a century.