by Alan Bradley
“This is our Old Girls’ Gallery,” she said, raising the candlestick so I could better see the long rows of black-framed photographs that lined the gallery on either side.
Tier upon tier they rose up round us, flickering in the candlelight: faces of every size and shape imaginable, and again I thought of the hordes of angels.
Well, I had been told that Miss Bodycote’s had strong ties with the church, hadn’t I?
Even so, it hadn’t prepared me for the sight of all these scores of black-framed souls, each one staring directly down at me—and none of them laughing—as if they were some solemn heavenly jury and I the prisoner at the bar.
“And here, of course,” Miss Fawlthorne said, “is your mother.”
She should have warned me. I was not prepared.
Here was Harriet, in her black frame, gazing levelly out at me with such a look …
In that young face—my face!—was everything that needed to be said, and in her look, all the words that she had never had the chance to speak.
Directly beneath Harriet’s photograph was a small wall sconce, and in it was a spray of heartbreakingly fresh flowers.
Suddenly I was quaking.
Miss Fawlthorne put a hand gently on my shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think. I ought to have prepared you.”
We stood for a moment in silence, as if we were the only two left alive in that catacomb of the dead.
“She is much honored here,” Miss Fawlthorne said.
“She is much honored everywhere,” I said, perhaps a little too sharply. I realized, almost as I said it, that there was a certain resentment in my words. I had caught myself by surprise.
“Are they all dead?” I asked, pointing to the portraits, partly to change the subject and partly to show that there were no hard feelings.
“Good lord, no,” Miss Fawlthorne said. “This one went on to become a swimming medalist … this one, Nancy Severance, a film star. Perhaps you’ve heard of her. This one the wife of a prime minister … and this one … well, she became famous in her own way.”
“That’s what I should like to do,” I said. “To become famous in my own way.”
That was it in a nutshell, and I was pleased that I had finally realized it.
I did not want to be Harriet. I wanted to be myself.
Flavia de Luce. Full stop.
“And who is this?” I asked, pointing to a striking and rather enigmatic-looking girl who gazed out at us with hooded eyes.
“Mrs. Bannerman is still with us at Miss Bodycote’s,” she said. “You shall meet her tomorrow. She is our chemistry mistress.”
Mildred Bannerman! Of course! She had been charged and acquitted—a number of years ago after a sensational trial—of the murder of what the News of the World had called “her wayward husband.”
It was claimed by the prosecution that she had poisoned the blade of the carving knife with which he cut up the Christmas turkey.
It was an old trick but a good one: Parysatis, the wife of Darius II of Persia, in the third century B.C., had murdered her daughter-in-law, Stateira, in precisely the same way.
By applying the poison to only the outer side of the blade, and serving Stateira the first slice, she was able to dispatch her victim and yet eat from the bird herself with little or no risk.
It was called “having your turkey and eating it, too.”
By great good fortune and an even greater defense attorney, Mildred Bannerman had been spared the hangman’s noose, and indeed, had been portrayed to the jury as the real victim of the crime.
And just think: In no more than a few hours I would be meeting her!
We moved on through an endless maze of darkened corridors until, after what seemed like an eternity, Miss Fawlthorne produced a set of keys.
“These are my rooms,” she said, flicking on the lights.
Presumably the rules didn’t apply to her.
“You may sleep on that couch,” she said, pointing to a black leather monstrosity with a pattern of stitched dimples. “I shall bring you a blanket and a pillow.”
And with that, she was gone, leaving me standing in the middle of her sitting room: a room that reeked of cold, silent unhappiness.
Was I picking up vibrations from the Old Girls who had been punished here for switching on a light after curfew? Or worse?
I remembered the words that Daffy had read aloud from Nicholas Nickleby, the words of the schoolmaster, Wackford Squeers: “Let any boy speak a word without leave, and I’ll take the skin off his back.”
But no, girls were not caned, Daffy had told me. They were reserved for the more exquisite tortures.
Miss Fawlthorne was back with a pillow and a tartan motoring blanket. “Sleep now,” she said. “I shall try not to disturb you when I return.”
She switched off the light and the door closed with a chilling click. I listened for a key in the lock. But even with my acute hearing, there was nothing more than the sound of her retreating footsteps.
She was going to her study to call the police: That much seemed certain.
I was straining my brain to think of ways I might contrive to be present in Edith Cavell at the moment the sheet was removed and the body revealed.
Perhaps I could wander in, rubbing my eyes and claiming a history of sleepwalking; or that I was in desperate need—due to some hereditary tropical disorder—of a glass of cold water.
But before I could put either of these plans into action, I fell asleep.
I dreamed, of course, of Buckshaw.
I was riding my bicycle, Gladys, up the long avenue of chestnuts. Even in the dream I was thinking how remarkable it was that I could hear a skylark singing and smell the trampled chamomile of the defunct south lawn. That and the decay of the old house itself.
Dogger was waiting at the front door.
“Welcome home, Miss Flavia,” he said. “We have missed you.”
I rode past him, into the foyer, and up the east staircase—which goes to show how ridiculous dreams can be: Although I had ridden down the stairs, I had never, ever been guilty of riding up them.
In my chemical laboratory, an experiment was in busy progress. Beakers bubbled, flasks simmered, and various colored liquids flowed importantly to and fro in twists and coils of glass tubing.
Although I couldn’t remember the purpose of the experiment, I was full of excitement at the outcome.
I would write it up in my laboratory notebook: from Hypothesis to Conclusion, all neatly presented so that even an idiot could follow each step of my brilliant thinking.
The chemical journals would come to fisticuffs over the rights to publish my work.
And yet there was an indescribable sadness about this dream: the kind of sadness that comes when the heart and the brain do not agree.
Half of me was filled with joy. Half of me wanted to weep.
When I awoke, a bell was ringing somewhere.
• FOUR •
MY EYES REFUSED TO open. It was as if, as I slept, someone had glued them shut.
“Hurry up,” Miss Fawlthorne’s voice was saying. “The bell has already gone.”
I looked up at her from bleary sockets.
“Your uniform is on the chair,” she said. “Put it on and come down for breakfast. There’s a ewer on the table. Wash your face. Brush your teeth. Try to look presentable.”
And then she was gone.
How could anyone be so changeable? I wondered.
The woman’s moods appeared to be connected to some inner weathercock that swung wildly round with every wind. One moment she was almost tender, and the next a harridan.
Even the mercurial Daffy—from whom I had learned both words—was no match for these cyclonic changes of character.
The cold horsehair stuffing gave out a groan as I sat up and levered myself to my feet. My back was sore, my knees were numb, and I had a crick in my neck.
I already had the feeling that this was not going to be a red-letter
day.
I forced myself to crawl into the school uniform Miss Fawlthorne had laid out for me: a sort of navy blue wool pinafore dress with a pleated skirt, black tights, white blouse, and necktie—the latter striped diagonally in the school colors, yellow and black. A navy blazer completed the horror.
I winced as I examined my reflection in a silver tea service that stood on a side table. Hideous! I looked like someone in one of those baggy bathing costumes that you see on Victorian postcards.
I pinched a sugar cube and washed it down with a swig of slightly soured milk from the creamer.
Curse this life! I thought.
And then I remembered the dead body upstairs and I cheered up at once.
Had the police come in the night? Surely they must have, by now.
I was hardly in a position to ask, but there is no law against keeping your eyes peeled and your ears open, is there?
* * *
I had been worried that I would be stared at, but no one gave me so much as a second glance as I came tentatively down the staircase and paused on the landing. From some far corner of the house came the sound of a distant regiment of girls, all talking and laughing at the same time.
I won’t say that my blood ran cold, but it distinctly cooled. I was not at my best with hordes: a fact that I had not entirely realized until the day I was sacked (unfairly) from the Girl Guides.
My case had been debated from the vicarage kitchen all the way up to the solemnly paneled council chamber of the Girl Guide Imperial Headquarters in London.
But it was no use. The die, as someone or another had said, was cast.
I recalled with bitterness the moment that Miss Delaney ripped my badges from my sleeves as the troop was made to chant in unison: “Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!… Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!”
I knew suddenly how the children of Israel must have felt when they were cast out by the Lord.
Farewell to the Scarlet Pimpernel Patrol! And farewell to their motto, “Do good by stealth.” I had done my best to fulfill that commandment, but it was hardly my fault that things had gone so badly wrong.
Fate loves slight miscalculations, the vicar had told me later, and it was true. I would not likely ever live it down.
“Better hustle your bustle,” someone said, touching my arm—a short, stocky girl with black-framed spectacles.
I almost jumped out of my skin. My nerves were edgy.
“Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t mean to startle you, but at Bod’s, punctuality is paramount. Translated into English, that means if you’re late for breakfast, they’ll nail your hide to the barn door.”
I nodded acknowledgment and followed her down the stairs.
At the bottom, I stuck out a hand. “De Luce, F. S.,” I said, sticking to the formula Collingwood had used.
“I know,” the girl said. “You’re quite notorious.”
I followed her into the Great Hall, a vast raftered expanse of dark hanging timber; a medieval cowshed with trestle tables. The hubbub was deafening.
A couple of harried-looking servers in white were ladling great gouts of porridge into bowls.
I took a seat at the end of one of the long tables and tucked in.
As I ate, I looked discreetly round the room, pretending not to. As a new girl, it would be impolite to stare. Not that I really cared.
It was important, though, not to draw attention to myself.
There was a possibility that whoever had killed the cadaver in the chimney was in this very room at this very moment.
I would need to begin my investigations from scratch.
I looked round the hall for Collingwood, but she was nowhere in sight. Perhaps she had been excused to recover from last night’s ordeal.
Because most of the girls had their heads in the feed troughs, it was not easy to examine their faces. I noticed though that even as they ate, they were still talking rapidly to one another from the corners of their mouths, which made it difficult to read their lips as I had trained myself to do. Besides, I didn’t want to stare.
It wasn’t too much of a chore to guess the sensational topic. The buzz and thrill of bad news was heavy in the air.
An older girl, two tables away, elbowed her neighbor in the ribs and pointed at me with her chin. When they saw that I had noticed, they both looked away quickly.
The faculty, all of them women, sat on a raised dais at one end of the hall, overlooking the grazing girls.
At the center of the high table sat Miss Fawlthorne, her head inclined, talking with pinched brows to a youngish-looking woman whose short black hair was as tight as a bathing cap.
There are rare and precious moments, when one is a stranger in a room, that one can examine its inhabitants with little or no prejudice. Without knowing so much as their names, it is possible to form an assessment based purely upon observation and instinct.
Even at a glance I could tell that the faculty of Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy had one thing in common: They were all dead serious. There was no frivolity: no laughter and no lipstick.
Even as they ate, they spoke quietly to one another as if they were a panel of grave judges with all the weight of justice on their shoulders.
Could one of them be a murderess?
As a simple exercise, I set myself to deduce their teaching specialties.
The woman at the far right, with short steel-gray hair, was almost certainly the French mistress. She had that Cupid’s-bow mouth with the raised corner and peculiar but slight twist of the outer nostril that can come only from speaking French from the cradle. No Englishwoman could ever possibly form those shapes with her mouth while talking. I knew that from my own close observation of Mrs. Lennox—Chantelle Lennox—who lived next door to the vicarage in Bishop’s Lacey, and who had been brought back to England as a sort of war trophy by her husband, Norman.
She was from Montmartre, pronounced through the nose.
Next at the table was a hatchet-faced individual with high cheekbones and an air of solitude about her, who seemed to exist in her own aura, almost as if she were surrounded by an invisible bell jar.
Sad, I thought. Lonely and unpopular.
My first thought was that, judging by her face alone, this should be Mildred Bannerman, the acquitted mariticide. (A useful word meaning “husband killer” that Daffy had taught me: a word unknown, it would appear, not only to the shrillest of the tabloid newspapers, but even to The Times.)
But no—just yesterday I had seen a schoolgirl photo of Miss Bannerman in the Old Girls’ Gallery. She could not possibly have aged into such a hard-looking creature.
My eyes moved on along the table, and there, on Miss Fawlthorne’s right, sat a sweet-faced pixie: the youngest teacher of the lot—was this the girl from the photograph? She appeared still not much more than my sister Feely’s age, which was eighteen.
She must be older than she looks, I thought.
Not wanting to stare, I watched her from the corner of my eye, reveling in the very thought of breakfasting with a killer. Mildred Bannerman—at last!
The others were unremarkable: a mere assortment of noses and chins, eyes and ears plucked from a sack and tossed together at random.
“Welcome to Bods,” said a voice at my ear.
It was the girl whose hand I had shaken on the stair.
“Van Arque,” she said. “We’ve already met. I’ve been more or less put in charge of you until you’re on the rolls. I’m a monitress, by the way.”
She looked slowly round the room as if she were keeping an eye out for predators. Satisfied for the moment that we were safe, she turned her attention back to me. “Say, you don’t have a cigarette on you by any chance?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t smoke. Are you allowed to? In here?”
Van Arque made a honking noise through her nose. “Of course not. We use the third-floor kybo.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The kybo. The bog house. The four-flusher. The holy tabernacle—”
“The crapper, you mean,” I said.
“The crapper! Ha! That’s a good one!” she hooted, choking on her porridge.
She was seized with a spasm of coughing and her face grew red. Her hands flew to her throat. Her breathing had become a loud, wheezing gurgle.
I knew instantly that some mass of the glutinous stuff had lodged in Van Arque’s windpipe—and that she was in real danger.
Her face was already darkening.
I leapt to my feet and began pounding her furiously on the back—with the flat of my hand, at first, and then with both fists.
I couldn’t help noticing that everyone round us—even the faculty—seemed stuck to their chairs. No one, besides me, had moved a muscle. The room had gone silent.
Suddenly—and unexpectedly—Van Arque coughed up a disgusting clot of porridge and spat it noisily out onto the floor.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
She was now sucking in great, grateful breaths of fresh air, her shoulders heaving. Her color was improving by the second.
She grimaced.
“No,” she croaked, “but I must go on … It’s trad. Monitresses are not allowed to be ill.”
I looked at her in disbelief. Was she joking?
“If we catch so much as a sniffle, they put us to death.”
She could see I didn’t believe her.
“It’s true,” she whispered. “They have an abattoir. There’s a secret door behind a cupboard in the infirmary.”
“With bloody meat hooks hanging from the ceiling,” I said, catching on.
Practical jokers can recognize one another as easily as bees from the same hive. Van Arque and I had far more in common than I had realized.
“Exactly!” she said. “Meat hooks and racks of butcher’s knives. And they feed the mulch to the chickens.”
“Or what’s left of it after making the porridge,” I said, shoving a large spoonful of the stuff into my mouth and chewing it with relish.
Van Arque sucked in a breath and her eyes went as big as saucers. “Oohhh!” she said. “How disgusting!” and I knew that I had made an impression.
Van Arque picked up a table napkin and gave my mouth a couple of dabs, as if I were dribbling porridge.