by Alan Bradley
In truth, I hoped it wasn’t Harriet. I had received from her once before a message from beyond the grave: a message telling me that she was cold and wanted to come home.
I didn’t think that I could bear another.
Please don’t let it be Harriet!
As uncharitable as that might seem.
Get a grip, Flavia! I thought, and not for the first time.
“Who are you?” Jumbo asked, three times and slowly. “What is your name?”
It came in a rush. The pointer scuttled back and forth across the board like a panicked lobster.
L—E—M—A—R—C—H—A—N—D
Gremly, who had been writing down the results with the stub of a lead pencil, gasped. “Le Marchand!” she cried.
It was the name of one of the girls who, according to Collingwood, had gone missing from Miss Bodycote’s.
I looked round the circle of blanched faces. It was obvious from their haunted eyes that each one of them had already made the connection.
“Oh, my God!” someone whispered.
I have to give Jumbo credit. She was on to it like a terrier on a rat.
“We are prepared for your message.”
I noticed that even at a moment so tense as this, Jumbo spoke to the spirit in a grammatically correct manner. Again, she repeated her words three times.
The pointer fairly flew across the board.
O—N—E—O—F—Y—O—U—K—N—O—W—S—M—Y—K—I—L—L—E—R
“One of you knows my killer!” Gremly gasped, reading aloud the words she had just scribbled down.
With a sweep of her hand, the tiny blonde across from me sent the planchette flying to the far corner of the room.
“Enough!” she said. “This is stupid.”
“Steady on, Trout,” Jumbo said. “If you’ve busted the thing, it’s coming out of your pocket money.”
Trout. So that was her name.
I looked round the circle.
One of the girls—on my left—had made a puddle.
• EIGHT •
ANYONE WHO HAS EVER played with a Ouija board has pushed.
I can practically guarantee it.
Let’s admit it: You’ve pushed, I’ve pushed—everyone has pushed.
The opportunity is simply too good to pass up.
Initially, someone else in the circle had been doing the pushing, and for a few minutes, even I had wavered. Wavered? No, more than that: I’ll admit that the first message shook me. But then rational thought had returned, and I realized that I’d just been handed a rare gift from the gods.
From that point on, it had been yours truly, Flavia de Luce, guiding the planchette.
One of you knows my killer.
Sheer inspiration on my part!
The results had been even more gratifying than I’d hoped. Trout had been shocked into scattering the board and its runner, and the girl to my left had lost control of her bladder.
I needed to make her acquaintance at the earliest possible moment.
“Oh, dear!” I said, going all solicitous and helping her to her feet. I noticed that no one else made a move. I would have her all to myself.
I led her along the hall to the WC called Cartimandua, which would be a safe haven for an interview, I thought. Although it was forbidden for any girl to be in another’s room after lights-out, there was no law against two of us answering the call of nature at the same time.
“My name is de Luce,” I said, as the tiny creature retired into one of the cubicles. “Flavia.”
“I know who you are, well enough,” she said, her voice echoing oddly from the room’s glazed surfaces.
“But I don’t believe I know yours,” I said.
There was a hollow silence. And then her name came, almost in a whisper.
“Brazenose. Mary Jane.”
Brazenose? It couldn’t be! That was the name of one of the missing girls.
Le Marchand, Wentworth, and Brazenose—or so Collingwood had told me.
Surely there couldn’t be more than one Brazenose in such a small establishment as Miss Bodycote’s?
Or could there?
“Was she your sister?” I asked gently.
A torrent of sobs from the cubicle provided the answer.
“Come out of there,” I said, and surprisingly, she obeyed. The cubicle door clicked open and a moment later, this poor, pale, damp little chick was enfolded in my arms, weeping woefully into my shoulder as if her heart would break.
“I’m sorry,” I told her, honestly meaning it, and for now that had to be enough.
The possibility that the body in the chimney might be her sister must not—at least for now—be put into words. I hardly dared even think the thought for fear that she would somehow read my mind.
But perhaps she had realized it already.
Brazenose was hanging on to me as if she were a shipwreck victim, and I a floating log. And who knows? Perhaps she was.
Perhaps I was, too.
What remarkable bonds we form, I thought, as she clung to me. And what very odd ones.
She seemed reluctant to break away—reluctant to have to look me in the eyes.
“Better wash your face,” I said at last. “In case they call a snap Holy Communion service.”
That fetched the ghost of a smile.
“You are a very peculiar person, Flavia de Luce,” she said in a dampish voice.
I made a deep bow, heel to instep, sweeping an imaginary cavalier’s feathered hat toward the floor with one hand.
As Brazenose was scrubbing her face at the sink, the door opened and Fitzgibbon came into the room.
Was she surprised to see us? I couldn’t tell.
“You’re up late, girls,” she said. “Is everything all right?”
“Yes, Matron,” Brazenose said in a surprisingly strong voice, and I, as a newcomer not expected to know any better, merely nodded.
“Well, then, off to bed with the both of you,” Fitzgibbon said. “No lights, mind.”
We whispered to each other as we went along the hall.
“Don’t believe the Ouija board,” I told her. “It’s a gyp. Someone in Jumbo’s room was spelling out the words.”
Brazenose’s eyes were like lanterns in the darkness. “Are you sure?” she breathed.
“Yes,” I told her. “It was me.”
Half an hour later, as I lay in bed, unable to sleep, I wondered about what I had said.
Were points given out in Heaven for a half-truth?
I remembered from long-ago sermons at St. Tancred’s that lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, but that those who act faithfully are his delight. But how did God feel about those who merely fiddled the facts?
It was true that I had been in control of the board toward the end of the séance, but not at the beginning. It was not I who had spelled out that spine-chilling name, Le Marchand.
Who, then, had been the culprit?
The only possibilities were those other girls, besides myself, who had placed their fingers on the Ouija board’s planchette. These were Jumbo herself, Gremly, Van Arque, Brazenose, Trout, and the other two whose names I had not learned.
Druce, of course, had not been present. That let her out.
It was clear that I needed to find out at once the identities of those other two girls.
Whom should I ask? It seemed obvious: the girl who was presently most obligated to me.
Dear little Brazenose.
Had I been wrong to confide in her? Had I put myself at risk by taking a chance?
Well, for better or for worse, I had done so. And now I needed to grill this girl at length.
It had been too late to begin tonight, and I had already risked—not once but twice!—being abroad after lights-out.
It would have to wait until morning.
With that decided, I rolled over and slept like the log in the proverb.
I don’t think that I shall ever forget, as long as I live, the sounds o
f Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy coming to life in the morning.
First would come the clanking of the pipes and steam radiators, sounding for all the world like armored knights having a practice joust with playful young dragons, who gurgled and hissed more to show off than anything else.
Then the distant tobacco-coughing of the mistresses and—I’m sorry to say—some of the more forward girls, which seemed to me were most of them.
Next was the synchronized flushing of the WCs. Somewhere a gramophone would start up as one of the sixth-form girls exercised her senior’s rights: The sounds of Mantovani’s “Charmaine” would come slithering down the staircases like liquid honey, pooling stickily on each floor before oozing on down to the next. This would be followed by “Shrimp Boats Are A’Comin,” “Mockin’ Bird Hill,” “On Top of Old Smokey,” and “Aba Daba Honeymoon.”
To ears such as mine, brought up on the BBC Home Service, it was like living in a grass hut among savages on a desert island.
Voices would call to one another and sudden laughter would ring out, followed by the scuffing of shoe leather on floors and stairs and, drifting in through an open window from the street outside, the clopping of the elderly automaton horses that drew the various bread and milk wagons from door to door.
In the distance, on the Danforth, the streetcars would clang their impatient ding-ding! at foolhardy motorists and pedestrians.
How very different it all was from the seclusion of Buckshaw.
It was then, in the mornings, that homesickness would rise in my throat, threatening to choke the very life out of me.
Hold on, Flavia, it shall pass, I would tell myself.
I was doing that this morning, hanging on to the mantelpiece for dear life when suddenly, and with no warning, my door flew open.
It was Miss Fawlthorne.
“Report to me after gymnastics,” she said abruptly, scanning the room with a professional eye, and then she was gone.
Damnation! I’d been hoping she’d forgotten about my promised punishment, but it was obvious she had not. Collingwood would be there, too. We would go to the stake together like a yoke of Christian martyrs.
Would I have time to question her—even as we burned?
Gymnastics was humiliating. The class was being held out of doors today, on the hockey field, and we were made to dress in plimsolls and bloomers that would have been laughed off the beach even in Victorian Blackpool.
We exercised to shouted commands:
“Heels: Raise! Sink!
“Right knee upward: Bend!
“Right knee backward: Stretch!
“Knee: Flexion! One! Two! Three! Four!”
The games mistress was the hatchet-faced individual with the short gray hair, the one I had spotted at breakfast. She stood off to one side, commanding us with a shrill whistle.
Phweeep-phweeep-phweeep! “Cheerfully now!”
“Cheerfully!” Gremly grumbled through gritted teeth. “Yes, Miss Puddicombe. No, Miss Puddicombe. Three bags full, Miss Puddicombe.”
From this I gathered that the games mistress’s name was Miss Puddicombe.
Puddicombe by name, Puddicombe by nature, I thought, even though I knew it didn’t make any sense.
But in times of torture, even a defiant thought can serve as a soothing salve.
I had just finished changing from bloomers to tunic when Jumbo stuck her head in at the door.
“Headmistress wants to see you,” she said. “Better shift your carcass.
“And, oh,” she added, smiling sweetly, “you’ll keep mum—if you know what’s good for you.”
Miss Bodycote’s was like that, I was to learn: the slap in the face with a velvet glove, the sting in the smile, the razor blade in the butter.
Just as in real life.
“Come in, Flavia,” Miss Fawlthorne said in reply to my knock.
I squeezed through the barely opened door.
“Sit down,” she commanded, and I obeyed, perching myself on the edge of a leather divan.
“First things first,” she said. “You will recall, no doubt, that I promised you punishment?”
“Yes, Miss Fawlthorne,” I said. “I’m sorry, I—”
“Tut!” she said, holding up a restraining hand. “Excuses are not legal tender at Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy. Do you understand?”
I didn’t, but I nodded anyway, imagining a red-faced magistrate in a horsehair wig glaring down at me from his elevated bench.
“Rules are rules. They are meant to be obeyed.”
“Yes, Miss Fawlthorne. I’m sorry.”
The old, old formula. It had to be played out, step by meticulous step, according to some ancient ritual.
Perhaps I should have business cards printed to hand out, each embossed with my name and the words “I’m sorry, Miss Fawlthorne.” Every time I offended I would pluck one from my pocket and hand it—
“For your punishment, I want you to write out five hundred words on William Palmer. He led, I believe, an interesting life.”
It took a moment for the light to come on, but when it did, my brain was dazzled by the sheer brilliance of it.
William Palmer? The Rugeley Poisoner? Why, I could write five hundred—a thousand—ten thousand!—words on dear old, jolly old Bill Palmer with my fingers frostbitten, my wrists handcuffed, my ankles bound, and my tongue tied behind my back.
I struggled to keep from squirming. Remember, Flavia—play the game.
“Yes, Miss Fawlthorne,” I said, putting on a hangdog look.
I could hardly wait to lay hands on my pencil and notebook.
But why? I thought later. Why would Miss Fawlthorne, as punishment, assign me such a happy task?
It was as if a sinner in the confession box, having admitted murder to the priest, were given the penance of devouring a chocolate cake. It simply made no sense.
Unless, of course, the priest was secretly a baker—or the son of a baker—who stood to profit from the transaction.
It may have been an uncharitable thought, or perhaps even a blasphemous one, but that’s the way my mind worked.
You can’t be hanged for thoughts, can you? I wondered.
Miss Fawlthorne was writing something in a black ledger, and I was turning to go, when she spoke again.
“You will also report to me here, personally, at this same hour, every Monday, from now on. Beginning next week.”
The air went out of my lungs as if I had been run over and crushed by a cartwheel.
Permanent punishment for such a small infraction? What kind of hellhole had I been tossed into? One minute the woman was a guardian angel soothing my fevered brow, and the next a slavering executioner measuring my neck. What was one to think? What was one to do?
“Yes, Miss Fawlthorne,” I said.
I flew up the stairs to Edith Cavell. I needed to be alone.
I needed room to think.
I sat huddled on my bed, knees under my chin and my back against the wall.
School was not turning out to be at all what I thought it would be.
Father—the very thought of him shot a bolt through my heart—had often lectured us on the pleasures of learning.
And—up until this moment—he had been right.
There had been no happier hours of my life than those spent alone in my chemical laboratory at Buckshaw, bundled against the cold in the ancient gray cardigan of Father’s I had rescued from the salvage bin, rummaging through the dusty notebooks in Uncle Tar’s library, teaching myself, little by little, atom by atom, the mysteries of organic chemistry.
The doors of Creation had been flung open to me, and I had been allowed to walk among its mysteries as if I were strolling in a summer garden. The universe had rolled over and let me rub its tummy.
But now—!
Pain.
With an abrupt shock, I realized I was slamming the back of my head monotonously against the wall. Bang!… bang!… bang!
I leapt off the bed and found my
self marching, like an automaton, to the window.
Ever since the days of Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin, scientists have puzzled over inherited characteristics in everything from people to pea plants. It has been suggested that cell particles called “genes” or “gemmules” carry down, from one generation to the next, a set of maps or instructions, which determine, among other things, how we might behave in any given situation.
In that clockwork walk to the window, I realized even as I went that what I was doing was precisely what Father always did in times of trouble. And, now that I came to think of it, so did Feely. And Daffy.
The Code of the de Luces. It was a simple equation of action and reaction:
Worry = window.
Just like that.
Simple as it was, it meant that in some complicated, and not entirely happy, chemical way—and far deeper than any other considerations—we de Luces were one.
Bound by blood and window glass.
As I stood there, and my eyes focused gradually on the outside world, I became aware that, down behind the stone gate, a small red-haired girl was thrashing wildly on the gravel. Two older girls were tickling her to the point of insanity. I recognized them at once as the pair I had seen at breakfast: the lip-reader, Druce, and her thrall, Trout.
Something clicked inside me. I could not stand idly by and watch. It was an all-too-familiar scene.
I unlocked the window and pushed up the sash.
The victim’s shrieks were now unbearable.
“Stop that!” I shouted, in the sternest voice I could manufacture. “Leave her alone!”
And, wonder of wonders, the two torturers stopped, staring up at me with open mouths. The sufferer, freed from their attentions, scrambled to her feet and bolted.
I slammed down the window before her tormentors could reply.
I would probably pay for it later in one way or another, but I didn’t care.
But try as I might, I could not get that little girl out of my mind.
How could tickling, even though it causes laughter, be at the same time such a vicious form of torture?
Sitting on the edge of my bed, I thought it through.