by Alan Bradley
“I have arranged with Mrs. Bannerman to tutor you in advanced chemistry. She assures me that your level of comprehension is far beyond expectations. You will begin work with both the electron microscope and the hydrogen spectrophotometer almost at once.”
Yaroo! I couldn’t believe my ears. This, truly, was Heaven with knobs on!
“And I don’t mind telling you that it is entirely due to the influence, in high places, of the elder Miss de Luce that our humble establishment has been presented with the funds necessary to acquire such advanced apparatuses.”
The elder Miss de Luce? Aunt Felicity! Of course!
Aunt Felicity had not taken credit for herself when she mentioned the latest scientific equipment with which Miss Bodycote’s had been endowed, but now everything was suddenly, remarkably, brilliantly clear.
Miss Fawlthorne smiled, as if she were reading my mind. “So you see,” she said, “in a way, if there had been no Flavia de Luce, there also may not have been, for much longer, a Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy.”
I’m afraid I could do no more than gape as the meaning of her words took root.
“We have a great deal riding upon you, Flavia … a very great deal.”
What could I do? What could I say? The whole world had suddenly, and without warning, revealed itself to be far larger a place than ever I could have dreamed of. I was standing at the edge of a very great abyss whose further lip was so far beyond imagination that only faith could bridge the gap. It was, I suppose, the bridge connecting childhood with whatever vast unknown might lie beyond.
I know now that there is a very precise instant when one stands at that threshold at which the choice must be made: whether to remain, even if only for a while, a child, or whether to step boldly across into another world.
I did the only thing I could think of.
I seized Miss Fawlthorne’s hand and gave it a jolly good shake.
“Excellent,” she said. “I’m glad that we understand each other. Now, then—”
Was I imagining it, or was she now speaking to me in an entirely different tone? An entirely different voice?
“Your work with Mrs. Bannerman must, necessarily, take place in the small hours. You must not be seen to be spending an unusual amount of time in her company, although you may, of course, at your own discretion, occasionally feign stupidity as an excuse to return to her classroom for explanation or clarification after your regular chemistry class.”
Feigning stupidity was one of my specialties. If stupidity were theoretical physics, then I would be Albert Einstein.
“But for now,” Miss Fawlthorne went on, making a broad sweep of her arm which took in all of our immediate surroundings, “this will be your classroom. No one pays the slightest bit of attention to a woman and a girl in a graveyard. What else can they be but mourners? What else can they be doing but grieving?”
We walked for a long time, among the tombstones, Miss Fawlthorne and I, stopping occasionally to sit on a bench in the sunshine, or to rearrange the flowers on a random grave.
At last she looked at her wristwatch. “We’d better be getting back,” she said. “We shall split up and take different routes when we’re four blocks from home.”
Home. What a strange-feeling word.
It had been a long time since I had had one.
Home. I repeated the word in my mind. It was good.
And so we set off on the long walk … home.
Much of what we talked about I am forbidden to commit to paper.
• THIRTEEN •
THE ALARM WENT OFF with a muted clatter. I reached under my pillow and silenced the thing, then hauled it out and looked blearily at the time: It was three A.M.
Miss Fawlthorne had planted the clock in my bed while I was in class, just as she had promised she would. The thing was a large, self-important alarm clock with radium hands that glowed greenly in the dark, and a bell loud enough to be heard through the feathers of the pillow but not outside my room.
I stretched, climbed out onto the cold floor, and hurriedly dressed, taking great care to be mouse-quiet.
There had been several good reasons to assign me to Edith Cavell, Miss Fawlthorne had explained, not the least of which was to make possible my “Starlight Studies,” as she jokingly called them; she had asked Mr. Tugg to oil the hinges, so that I was able to come and go in perfect silence.
Some of the girls had grumbled, of course, about a scabby fourth-former having her own room, but the story had been put about that for certain reasons I was not a fit roommate: flatulence, I believe, although I can’t prove it.
For a time I was the butt of their jokes, but after a while they tired of it and moved on to fresher cruelties and easier victims.
Mrs. Bannerman was awaiting me in the chemistry lab. She had already drawn the heavy blackout curtains that had been installed to allow demonstration of certain experiments with light (but I must say no more), and to permit the showing of instructional ciné films in perfect darkness.
For three o’clock in the morning, Mrs. Bannerman looked remarkably fresh. Perhaps “vivacious” is more the word. Her hair was perfection, as if she had just stepped out of the salon, and she smelled of lilies of the valley. She reminded me a great deal of the young chorus girl Audrey Hepburn whom Aunt Felicity had pointed out when she took us as a rare treat to a West End theater.
“I knew her in an earlier life,” my aunt had whispered.
“I didn’t know you believed in reincarnation, Auntie Fee,” Feely had said.
“I don’t,” she had replied. “Shhh.”
“Good morning, Flavia,” Mrs. Bannerman said brightly. “Welcome to my little kitchen. Would you like a cup of tea?”
“Yes, please,” I said, somewhat flustered. The only other person who had ever invited me to tea was Antigone Hewitt, the inspector’s wife, who was now, perhaps, through my own fault, lost to me forever. She had not even turned up to bid me farewell, as I had so desperately hoped she would.
Perhaps she hadn’t known that I was leaving. Had her husband not told her? But he himself might not have known that I was being banished. I might die an old woman without ever learning the truth.
All this was going through my mind as the tea steeped in the lengthening silence.
“You’re looking very thoughtful,” Mrs. Bannerman said.
“Yes,” I told her. “I was just thinking of home.”
“I do, sometimes, too,” she said. “It’s not always as pleasant as one expects, is it? Now, then, shall we get started?”
I was a bit shy of the electron microscope at first—reluctant even to touch it—but when Mrs. Bannerman brought up on the cathode ray screen the hairs of a louse, magnified nearly sixty thousand times, my reverent fingers were everywhere, caressing the thing as if it were a favorite pet. Wild horses couldn’t have dragged me away.
“The first electron microscope in North America was built by a couple of students not far from here at the University of Toronto,” she told me. “Before you were born.
“What we are now observing is the leg of a species of louse called Columbicola extinctus, or passenger-pigeon-chewing louse, which lived exclusively upon the body of that particular bird, which has been extinct since 1914. Why it should have been found a month ago, in the hair of a murdered clergyman in the Klondike, makes for a pretty little puzzle. Ah! I see that I now have your undivided attention.”
“Murdered?” I asked.
What a peculiar feeling it was to be sitting in a locked room in the middle of the night, sharing a microscope with a woman who had herself been tried for murder. I wouldn’t have thought the subject would come up so easily.
“Yes, murdered,” she said. “I provide assistance to the police from time to time as a way of keeping my hand in. Although I earn my bread and butter by teaching chemistry, my professional qualifications are actually as an entomologist.”
I hadn’t the foggiest idea what an entomologist was, but I could already feel th
e look of admiration spreading across my face.
“Bugs,” she said. “Including insects, spiders, centipedes, worms. I specialize in the ways in which their study may be used in criminal investigation. It’s quite a new field, but also a very old one. Shouldn’t you be making notes?”
I had been too entranced to do anything but gape.
“Here’s a notebook,” she said, handing me a red-covered secretary’s dictation pad. “When it’s full, ask for another. You may write as much as you wish, but with one proviso: Your notebooks are never to leave this room. They will be kept here under lock and key, but you may add to them or consult them at any time.”
She didn’t say “Do you understand?” and I blessed her for that.
“Now then: At the top of your first page, write this name: Jean Pierre Mégnin.” She spelled it out for me and made sure I got the accent leaning in the right direction.
“His two greatest works are La Faune des Tombeaux and La Faune des Cadavres. Roughly translated, that means Creatures of the Tomb and The Wildlife of Corpses. Sounds a bit like a double-bill horror movie, doesn’t it? Both are in French. Do you have any inkling of the language?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head sadly.
What had I been missing? How could such treasures exist in a language I was unable to read?
“Perhaps Miss Dupont could give me extra tutoring in French,” I blurted.
I could hardly believe that I was listening to my own mouth speaking!
“Excellent suggestion. I’m sure she would be, how do you say, enchantée?
“Now, then, pencil ready? Mégnin discovered that those creatures which feed and breed upon corpses tend to arrive in waves: In the first stage, when the body is fresh, the blowflies appear. In the second stage, the body bloats as it putrefies, and certain beetles are attracted. As full-blown decay sets in at stage three, and fermentation takes place, butyric and caseic acids are produced, followed by ammoniacal fermentation, at which point entirely different tribes of flies and beetles are attracted. Maggots proliferate. And so, as you will have deduced, it is possible, by studying the presence and life cycles of these various flying and crawling things, to work out with some precision how long the dearly departed has been dead and even, perhaps, where they have been in the meantime.”
Corruption? Putrefaction? Acids? This woman was speaking my language. I may not know French, but I knew the language of the dead, and this conversation was one I had been dreaming of all my life.
I had found a kindred spirit!
My brain was all aswirl—like one of those spiral galaxies you see in the illustrated newsmagazines: sparks, flame, and fire fizzing and flying off in all directions—like a dizzying Catherine wheel on Guy Fawkes Night.
I couldn’t sit still. I had to get up from my chair and pace round and up and down the room like a madwoman simply to keep from exploding.
“Heady stuff, isn’t it?” Mrs. Bannerman asked.
She understood perfectly the tears in my eyes.
“I think we’ll call it quits for tonight,” she said with an elaborate stretch and a yawn to match. “I’m tired. I hope you’ll forgive me. We’ve made an excellent start, but you need your sleep.”
How I was dying to quiz her about Brazenose, Wentworth, and Le Marchand, but something was holding me back. Miss Fawlthorne had forbidden me to ask any of the girls about another, but did the same restriction apply to the teaching staff?
As both Mrs. Mullet and Sir Humphry Davy have said, “Better safe than sorry.”
And as for the little metal figure in my pocket—it would have to wait. I could hardly haul it out and begin heating it without a full confession of how I had come to have it in my possession.
Besides entomology, I was going to have to learn patience.
Back in my room, wrapped up in a blanket, I could not sleep. My head was filled with coffin flies, blowflies, maggots, and cheese skippers. The maggots were nothing new: I had thought of them often while dwelling on the delights of decomposition. Daffy had even read out to me at the breakfast table—“Knowing your proclivities,” she had said, smirking—that wonderful passage from Love’s Labour’s Lost, where one of the characters says, “These summer-flies have blown me full of maggot ostentation.”
It had caused Father to put aside his sausages, get up, and leave the room, but had given me a whole new appreciation of Shakespeare. Anyone who could write a line like that can’t be too much of a stick-in-the-mud.
Dear Father. What a sad life he’d had. What a rotten hand Fate had dealt him: a prisoner-of-war camp, the death of a young wife, a decaying pile for a house, three daughters, and no money to speak of.
With Buckshaw now mine—in theory at least—some of the entanglement in which we had lived for as long as I could remember should have begun to be sorted out. But Harriet’s will had raised at least as many questions as it had answered, and Father had been swept into the storm of legalities like a housefly into a tornado.
There had been some hope that a grateful government would intervene, and I had learned—thanks to my acute hearing—that Father had spoken at length with Mr. Churchill on the telephone, and for a day or two, his face had seemed a little less ashen. But nothing seemed to have come of it.
“It’s exactly like Bleak House,” Daffy had said on another day when Father had left the table without finishing his breakfast. “They’ll still be jawing about the excise tax long after we all are in our graves with spiders nesting in our skulls.”
And then, of course, had come the day of my banishment: the day upon which I had truly become an exile. With England and Buckshaw now more than three thousand miles somewhere across the sea, I had no way of knowing my family’s fortunes.
I was alone in the wilderness.
And with that thought, I fell asleep.
Someone was chopping trees in the forest. A woodcutter, perhaps. If only I could summon the strength to scream …
But would he hear me? The noise of his ax was surely louder in his ears than any feeble cry that I might make. To make matters worse, a squadron of ships offshore had begun firing their cannon at some invisible enemy.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
I shoved my hands under the pillow to cover my head and banged my knuckles on a hard metal object. I hauled it out and held it up to my face.
It was the alarm clock, and its hands were pointing to twenty past eight. I had slept right through its ringing.
“Flavia! Open up.”
I toad-hopped from the bed to the door, unlocked it, and stuck my head out.
There stood Van Arque, staring at me as if I were an apparition.
“Better get a move on,” she said. “The Black Maria will be here in ten minutes.”
Black Maria? What on earth is she talking about?
“Oh, and incidentally,” she added, “you ought to know that you look like the wreck of the Hesperus.”
I flew about the room, scrubbing the taste of dead horses out of my mouth with toothpaste on my finger, raking the sticky grunge out of my eyes, giving my hair a lick and a promise with the hairbrush I had purloined from Harriet’s boudoir.
At last I was ready. Three minutes down and seven to go.
The bed had to be made upon pain of punishment, and what a mess it was: as if some madwoman in Bedlam had spent the night in it, tossing in a straitjacket.
Another three minutes.
As I stepped into the hall, the building fell suddenly silent, in the way the birds do in a wood that a hunter has entered.
I clattered down the stairs, making enough noise to raise the dead.
Miss Fawlthorne stood at the door, and as I approached, she swiveled and pointed with a long, forbidding finger to the outdoors, as if she were the ticket-taker for the ferryboat on the river Styx.
As if she had never seen me before.
An ominous vehicle stood in the driveway. I thought at first it was a hearse, but quickly realized that the thing was far too large. It was a
bus: a matte-black bus with smoked windows and the heavy door standing open. It didn’t have “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” painted above the door, but it might as well have.
I put my foot onto the bottommost of the two steps but, because of the heavily tinted windows, and the fact that I was blinded by sunlight, I could make out no details of the gloomy interior.
“Hurry up, de Luce,” someone growled, from out of the shadows.
I climbed up, the doors hissed at my heels, and we jerked into motion.
I tottered to a seat, going mostly by the sense of feel. The driver shifted through a seemingly endless number of gears, until at last he settled upon one that displeased him the least. By the position of the sun through the windscreen, I judged that we were now traveling east.
As my eyes accustomed themselves to the gloom, I looked round at some of my fellow passengers. Van Arque sat opposite, two rows back, her nose pressed against the window. Behind Van Arque, Jumbo was examining her nails as intently as if they were lost Scripture. And at the back of the bus, in the middle of the aisle, was Miss Moate, the science mistress: the woman who had accosted me in the hall.
Her wheelchair was lashed to the seats on either side by
a network of belts so that she seemed to hang suspended like a spider lurking at the center of its web.
I looked away quickly, flexing my neck in a complex set of side-to-side stretches, as if I were merely working out a morning kink.
Aside from the laboring engine, which sounded to be making much ado about nothing—a characteristic shared, I have come to believe, by all buses everywhere—we rattled along quite briskly.
We had soon broken free of the suburbs and were making our way along a two-lane macadamized motorway which snaked easily between green fields dotted with cows and hay bales. If the truth be told, it wasn’t all that much different from England.
Electrical wires and telephone lines on both sides rose and fell … rose and fell … in long scallops, like the flight path of a determined woodpecker.
How far had we come? I tried to work it out in my head. The roadside speed limit signs allowed a maximum of fifty miles per hour, and a minimum of thirty in the settled areas: an average, say, of forty miles per hour.