by Alan Bradley
“Did she eat it?” I asked.
“Must have. The bowls came down empty in the morning and she was off to the cruise on the second day.”
My veins were throbbing like plucked harp strings.
“Dr. Rainsmith must have been devastated,” I said. “Even though Miss Fawlthorne says that the second Mrs. Rainsmith was a great comfort.”
“I expect she was,” Elvina said, not looking at me. “Yes, I expect she was.”
There fell a great silence, and we all of us sat thinking our own thoughts, each of us cradling our teacups in our hands as if it were a family trait we shared.
For the first time in many weeks I felt at home. I could have stayed here forever in this cozy kitchen. I could have kissed the table and hugged the chairs, but of course I didn’t. Instead I offered up a little prayer of thanks to the Michaelmas daisies, and to Saint Michael himself who had brought me here.
“Can I run you home?” Merton asked. “I expect you’ll be wanting to get back, and it’s a long walk.”
How could I tell him that in my heart I was already at home—and that a ride to anywhere else would take me farther from it? That by departing I would be in some way diminished?
“Thank you, Mr. Merton,” I said. “I’d be much obliged.”
The streetlights were coming on as we drove along the Danforth.
“May I ask you a question?” I said.
“Of course, miss,” Merton said.
“What was Francesca Rainsmith wearing the night of the Beaux Arts Ball?”
Merton smiled, and then he laughed aloud. “A Cinderella costume,” he said. “Tattered gingham dress, apron, hair in a bandanna, Charlie Chaplin boots with red socks sticking out. She was ever so proud of the getup. One of the girls helped her make it. No more than a girl herself, Miss Francesca was. We miss her.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish I’d had the chance to meet her.”
We drove in silence for a while.
“How are you finding it?” Merton asked. “Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy, I mean?”
“Frankly, Mr. Merton,” I said. “Just between you and me and the gatepost—it’s a bugger.”
And I think by the look on his face that he knew what I meant.
Miss Fawlthorne was, as I knew she would be, livid.
In its proper sense, the word “livid” is used to describe someone who is black in the face from strangulation, and I wasn’t far off. Her countenance was ghastly.
“Where have you been?” she demanded, her voice trembling.
“I went for a walk,” I said, which was true, as far as it went.
“The whole academy has been turned out looking for you—do you realize that?”
Of course I didn’t. I had only just come in the door.
“We thought you’d been abducted. We—”
She was suddenly speechless.
Why ever would they think that? Did they know something that I didn’t?
“I left a note on your desk,” I said, but realizing even as I spoke that Miss Fawlthorne was near tears, and that it was no time for childish games.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and left it at that. Of course I wanted to tell her about my worrying about Collingwood—my visit to the nursing home—my interview with Merton and Elvina.
But I didn’t. The time was not yet right. I needed more facts and more time to gather them.
“I’ll go to my room,” I said, saving her the trouble.
I lay on my bed reflecting upon (a) my wickedness and (b) the fact that I hadn’t eaten all day. Thank goodness for the box of biscuits I was buying on the hire-purchase plan from the grocer’s on the Danforth. I had borrowed the down payment from Fabian with the promise to repay, at twenty-five percent interest, as soon as I received my first allowance from home, even though my hopes in that direction were beginning to fade.
Dogger’s letter was the only communication I had received from Buckshaw since my incarceration.
Dear Dogger.
I bit savagely into a cream cracker, willing myself to summon him up in spirit, if not in fact. I tried to picture the two of us, heads bent together over a bubbling beaker, nodding wisely as the liquid changed color and another neck was in the noose, but it was no use.
Magic doesn’t work when you’re sad.
I realized that I had been putting off a visit to the laboratory for that very reason, which came as something of a shock. I needed to deal with things head-on.
Someone had pinned a handwritten note to the door of the lab: ALL CHEMISTRY CLASSES CANCELED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
Underneath it, someone else had penciled Praise be to St. Jude for prayers answered, and someone else had written, in red ink, DOWN WITH CHEMS.
I looked both ways to make sure no one was coming, and slipped inside.
With the green blinds closed, and dusk out of doors, the room was in near darkness, which suited me to perfection. I would not easily be seen through the window in the door, or from the outside.
I turned on a low-powered light in an alcove and got to work.
Excited as I was, it was still necessary to follow the rules. I turned on the fan which would exhaust any fumes from the hood which covered the work area. More than one chemist in days gone by had, while conducting the Marsh test, sniffed at his apparatus and died in agony.
I pulled the silver medallion from my pocket. Fortunately I had remembered to wrap it in a bit of cellophane for protection before tying it back into a knot in my handkerchief.
As I set up the required glassware, I was possessed by the old familiar thrill. Like the vicar in the run-up to the consecration, I was about to witness a transformation at my very fingertips, to be glorified by the gods of chemistry.
The Marsh test is not only simple and elegant, but also the most theatrical of the chemical procedures. How many sleuths in fact and fiction have hunched tensely over that telltale flame?
It is that hushed moment just before the final curtain when all the world seems to hold its breath: the moment when nothing more than a tiny, flickering, and nearly invisible flame will either send the accused to the gallows or set him free.
It was James Marsh, the ordnance chemist of the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, who recognized that nascent (meaning newly generated) hydrogen, whenever brought into contact with any compound of arsenic and oxygen, will produce water and arseniuretted hydrogen, otherwise known as arsine, an extremely poisonous gas with the chemical formula ASH3 and the odor of garden-fresh garlic.
His test is so sensitive that it is able to detect as little as two parts in a million of arsenic.
These days, of course, the idea of newborn hydrogen having superior powers is generally pooh-poohed, and it is now believed that age does not wither its ability to finger a felon.
Oxygen is oxygen is oxygen they say, although Dogger, being old-fashioned, doubts this.
I dropped a bit of zinc into the bottom of the U-shaped tube, then filled it somewhat more than half full with sulfuric acid.
With a small twist of surgical cotton, I wiped off about a quarter of the shiny black tarnish from the medallion and dropped the swab into the left side of the tube, sealing it with a glass stopper. The swab began to char and turn black as it was carbonized by the sulfuric acid.
The zinc at once began to bubble in the acid. Hydrogen was being born!
And, if my hunch was right, arsine.
The stoppered right side of my U-shaped container led off through a slender glass tube which ended in an upturned tip.
I waited for about thirty seconds … lit a match … held it to the tip of the exhaust tube and …
Poof!
A flame … burning red, burning orange, burning blue …
I reached for an unglazed pottery dish, flipped it over, and held its underside to the flame, much as a freezing schoolboy home for the holidays holds his bottom to the family fireplace.
A circular dark patch began to form around the outer edges of the flame,
brownish at first, but quickly turning black and shiny.
An arsenic mirror, in which, if I were any judge, the image of a murderer would soon be reflected.
This wasn’t the end of it by any means. First, I needed to place a few drops of sodium hypochlorite in solution on part of the newly formed mirror. If the sooty deposit was soluble, and vanished, it was arsenic; if it remained, it was arsenic’s cousin, antimony.
And then, of course, I needed to repeat the experiment with clean, uncontaminated glassware and a fresh and untreated swab. This would be my control, or reference, and should result in no formation of an arsenic mirror.
I leaned back from the little pool of light to think about what I had discovered: about what it would mean for me—and for several others. Once I made my findings known, Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy would never be the same again.
It was at that moment that a voice from out of the darkness behind me said: “Very clever.”
• TWENTY-EIGHT •
I SPUN ROUND, MY eyes only slowly adjusting to the darkened room.
From out of the shadows, a figure was moving slowly toward me.
It was Fabian.
“Very clever,” she said again as she came half into the light, and I could see the tight-lipped smirk on her pale face.
“How long have you been there?” I asked, trying to inject a touch of outrage into my voice.
“Longer than you,” she said, fishing a packet of cigarettes from her pocket and putting a match to one, then tossing her hair like French women in the cinema.
“You were expecting me, then,” I said, but other than blowing out a dismissive stream of smoke, she did not bother to reply.
“What made you think of the Marsh test?” she asked. “What made you think of arsenic?”
I shrugged. “Just a guess,” I lied.
“I’ll bet it was,” she said.
We could have stood there all night, I suppose, fencing with words, until one or the other of us decided to use something more deadly.
I saw my chance and I went for it. “But you already knew that, didn’t you—that it was arsenic.”
“Of course I did.” She smiled, taking a satisfied puff. “I was there when she swallowed it.”
“What?”
“The night of the Beaux Arts Ball, two years ago. I was there.”
I must have looked like a gaping loony.
“Some of us were asked to serve at table: Jumbo, Druce, Forrester, myself. A few of the faculty, as well: Miss Fawlthorne, Miss Moate, Mrs. Bannerman, Miss Dupont.
“It’s something of a tradition,” Fabian went on. “Meant to show up the democratic principles of the old hall—even if it’s only once a year.”
“Jolly good of Miss Moate to pitch in,” I said. “It mustn’t be easy for her.”
“Moatey’s a good sort,” Fabian said, flicking ashes on the floor. “Her bark is worse than her bite.”
I nodded, even though I didn’t agree. I was still trying to sort out where Fabian and I stood, which side we were on, and what was behind this duel in a shadowed room. Which one of us, for instance, was darkness, and which of us was light?
“She’s had a hard row to hoe,” Fabian said. “Since the accident, that is. Ditched by her best friend.”
Ditched? I was missing something here.
Fabian saw my look of dismay. “Run off the road and into the ditch. Car flipped. Moatey flung out through the windshield. Broken spine, broken neck. They practically had to pick up her bits in a basket.”
I felt my gorge rising. Those injuries would account for that awful froggish expression into which her face had fallen. The poor woman must have undergone eons of surgery.
“It was positively eerie,” Fabian said, echoing my thoughts, “to see her at high table, serving lobster to the very person who put her in the wheelchair.”
I blinked, blankly.
“Francesca Rainsmith,” she said. “Her onetime best friend.”
My throat was suddenly dry. I was finding it hard to swallow. I thought of all those long-gone chemists who had accidentally inhaled a fatal dose of arsine and died with their legs in knots behind their necks. Or had I, without paying attention, taken a drink of water from a contaminated glass?
But no—other than the shock of hearing about Miss Moate, I had exhibited no symptoms.
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked. We were still circling each other as warily as two roosters in a ring, and I had already made up my mind not to be the first to mention pheasant sandwiches. If she was a member of the Nide, she could jolly well bring it up herself.
“Because you need to know,” she said. “I’ve had my eye on you for some time.”
I shrugged. What else could I do?
“You say you were actually there when the arsenic was administered?”
“I think so,” she said. “I was sitting across from Francesca when Moatey brought her a plate of lobster.”
“From the sideboard?”
“Can’t say. I had my back to it. Oddly enough, I remember Moatey lifting her beloved tea cozy from the plate.”
“She brought Francesca’s lobster under her tea cozy?”
“Doesn’t make sense, does it? I didn’t think much about it at the time, although I do remember thinking that our beloved chairman might have salted her plate with something nasty. He made such a show of breaking up the lobster for her, the claws, the abdomen—she squealed and closed her eyes at the sight of the antennae. Made her feel sick, just looking at them, she said. Funny, isn’t it.”
“Strange” was more the word that came to mind, but then Miss Moate’s oversize tea cozy was big enough to conceal almost anything you might wish to put under it.
Which raised a whole new set of possibilities.
“Which one of them was it, then? Ryerson Rainsmith or Miss Moate?”
“I don’t know,” Fabian said with a sigh. “I really don’t.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” I asked. “The police, for instance.”
Fabian regarded me with a distant eye, and then she said: “I have my reasons.”
I could have named one of them on the spot, but I didn’t. I decided to steer the conversation into less personal channels—at least for now.
“We have to be very cautious with seafood poisoning,” I said. “Mussels, clams, scallops, and oysters contain organic forms of arsenic. So do crabs and lobsters.”
I never thought I’d find myself in the position of defending Ryerson Rainsmith, but it’s a funny old world, and when it comes to poisons, it’s always best to watch your step.
A hanged man can’t be unhanged, and besides, I didn’t think I could stand being made a fool of.
“The Marsh test can’t distinguish between the various forms of arsenic,” I said. “But since no one else died at the Beaux Arts Ball, I think that we can assume, at least for the moment, that Francesca Rainsmith’s poison came from somewhere other than the lobster’s natural toxicity.”
“The lobster was just a cover? Is that what you’re saying?”
“It might have been,” I said. “And then again, it might not.”
Fabian fixed me with a long stare, then shook her head. “You’re a strange one, de Luce. I can’t figure you out.”
“Neither can I,” I said. “So tell me more about the night of the ball.”
“It was as it always was. Long tables, alternate seating: faculty, student, faculty, student—democratic principles, remember. No hierarchy—everyone equal, that sort of thing.”
“Hold on,” I said. “How was it that the chairman was seated next to his wife? You did say that, didn’t you?”
“Hmmm,” Fabian said. “I hadn’t thought of that. Unless it just worked out that way because of the number of chairs.”
“So,” I said, changing the subject. “Miss Moate produces Francesca’s plate of lobster from under her tea cozy, the chairman breaks it up for her, and she tucks into a hearty meal. Is that it?”
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br /> “Pretty well,” Fabian said. “I was busy dismembering my own lobster, mind you, and it was a chore. One hates to splatter one’s neighbors with melted butter and intestinal juices. One tries to be ladylike.”
“And Francesca?”
“Oh, she seemed to be getting on quite well, chatting up the girls, for a while, anyway. She was the center of attention in her Cinderella getup.”
“What about the chairman? Was he in costume, too?”
Fabian snorted. “I should say not. He’s above that sort of thing.”
“What about the prizes?” I asked. “Didn’t Francesca present one of them?”
“Yes,” Fabian said. “I think so. Oh, yes, of course she did.”
“The Saint Michael Award,” I said. “For church history.”
“Yes.”
“To Clarissa Brazenose.”
“Yes.”
“Who vanished later that same night.”
“So they say,” Fabian said.
“And what do you say?”
Fabian lit another cigarette with the same mannerisms as before. “You mustn’t put too much stock in what the younger kids say,” she said, blowing out the match with as much force as if it were a forest of candles on the birthday cake of a hundred-year-old. “Their minds are full of nonsense. Ghost stories, fairy tales. They’re easily spooked.”
“I’m not asking what the younger girls say, I’m asking what you say.”
“I say, ‘Who knows?’ People come and go all the time. It’s the nature of schools. She might have been sent down. Gated. Failed to Flourish.”
“Yes,” I said. “She might have.”
This whole game of to and fro, this whole game of put and take, this whole game of cat and mouse with Fabian was getting me down, and yet it was somehow strangely familiar. I realized with an almost physical start that it was the same rigmarole I had often fallen into with Feely: a parlor game where persistence paid and only the bold survived.
“About Francesca,” I said, with a cucumber-cool expression on my face. “She gave out the Saint Michael Award, and then what?”
“I don’t know,” Fabian said. “I suppose I noticed she had become more quiet—withdrawn, you might say. Touching her napkin to her lips a lot. She seemed to be growing paler by the minute. Wiped her brow a lot, too. Although it was hot, you know: June, crowded room, stuffy, too many bodies. Not that she wasn’t trying to remain on the rails. She asked Clarissa if she could have a better look at the medallion she had just presented—stared at it as if she were trying to remember where she was and what she was doing. Then she whispered to her husband. He helped her to her feet, said something to Miss Fawlthorne and Miss Dawes—”