As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust

by Alan Bradley

  “Hmm,” I said, my mind milling the possibilities. One would not ordinarily go to a laundry after dark. If one did, it would almost certainly be to pick up some piece of clothing that had been forgotten: an item that had not been retrieved during normal working hours; one that had been suddenly, and perhaps unexpectedly, required. Perhaps something had happened that made Brazenose want to run away.

  But would a girl of sixteen, who had been at the school for ages, be likely to do that? Not unless something unthinkable had happened.

  Perhaps she had gone to the laundry, not to pick something up, but to drop something off. But what could be so urgent that she couldn’t leave it in her room until the next day?

  “What day of the week was the ball held?” I asked.

  “Saturday. It’s always on a Saturday.”

  The laundry would almost certainly have been locked up for the weekend, which made it even more strange. Could it be that Brazenose had crept off from the Beaux Arts Ball to meet someone?

  And why the laundry? Why not the common room—or the great hall, or any of the dozens of other places where two could talk without fear of interruption?

  “Did Brazenose have any particular friends?” I asked.

  “No,” Scarlett said. “She was rotten popular. She played badminton, squash, and tennis. She bicycled, knitted, sewed, sketched, and painted with watercolors. She was a member of the drama club and the debating society, and she was the editor of The New Broom—that’s our school newspaper.”

  Was I detecting a note of resentment in Scarlett’s words? And I couldn’t help but notice her repeated use of the past tense. But perhaps that was unavoidable when referring to someone who hadn’t been seen for more than two years.

  “How did you feel about her?” I asked. Daffy would have been proud of me. It was the kind of bear-trap question that her beloved Sigmund Freud would have asked.

  “She was all right, I suppose,” Scarlett said. “She made the rest of us look bad, though.”

  And then she added, “In much the same way, I expect, that—”

  But she cut herself off short.

  “Yes?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  I licked the tip of my mental pencil and made a note: Query: Brazenose resented for brains in general? Harriet and Flavia ditto?

  “And what do you believe happened to her?” I asked. A sudden probe without warning.

  Again I thought how remarkably time can sometimes slow to a crawl: the wings of a bird in midair slowed to the speed of breakers on a beach; an arrow suspended in flight, halfway to the bull’s-eye.

  My mind flew back to the night of my arrival; to the flag-wrapped body tumbling out of the fireplace. To the skull detaching itself and rolling to a grisly halt at my feet.

  Had Collingwood recognized what was left of the face? It seemed unlikely, given the condition of the corpse. But if she had … let’s just say she had …

  Had she told anyone?

  We had still not heard, either from Inspector Gravenhurst or from the news reports, that the body had been identified. With all the radios that blared in dormitories in the early morning we could scarcely have missed it. Which meant either that the police were withholding the information because they were having difficulty getting in touch with next-of-kin, or that they didn’t know.

  And, come to think of it, I hadn’t laid eyes on Collingwood since that horrific—but utterly fascinating—night.

  All of this raced through my mind as I waited for Scarlett to answer.

  She seemed to be having difficulty making her mouth move.

  “I believe …” she said at last, her eyes as large and damp as peeled grapes, “I believe she—”

  THWEE! THWEE! THWEE!

  Three sharp blasts on a pea whistle came from the top of the embankment. Miss Moate, in her wheelchair, was making impatient “Come-here-at-once” motions with her arm.

  Sixes and Sevens were dissolved as the two groups swarmed together and went scrambling up the slope. Under the elm, Scarlett and I got slowly to our feet. She put a solicitous arm round my shoulder, supporting poor, sick Flavia’s weight, and we crept as clumsily as a conjoined crustacean up the embankment.

  Halfway to the top, pretending to lose her footing and floundering for traction, she contrived to bring her mouth so close to my face that I could feel her breath hot upon my cheek.

  “Questions,” she rasped into my ear. “She asked too many questions.”

  • FIFTEEN •

  LUNCH HAD BEEN BROUGHT in the bus and we picnicked upon pink bricks of tinned pork, boiled eggs, and Brazil nuts that looked like devil’s toenails, those fossilized bivalves from the Jurassic period, all of it washed down with milk from a galvanized carrier that had stood in the sun for too long.

  Druce and Trout had plopped down on either side of me without invitation. In future, I decided, I would make it a rule not to be the first to sit. If Aunt Felicity were here, she would likely be pointing out that patience, to a point, provides choice. She probably had an elaborate mathematical formula to work out the optimum time to sit when in a group of thirteen.

  How I missed the dear old girl.

  I was wondering how Miss Moate, being wheelchair-bound, would fit into the equation, when I realized that Druce was speaking to me.

  “I said, how does it feel to be a dog?” she repeated.

  “I beg your pardon?” I asked, bristling.

  “Don’t make me chew my cabbage twice,” she said. “How does it feel to be a dog? You know, D.O.G. Daughter of a Goddess.”

  Trout collapsed into the grass, cackling helplessly at the wit of her mistress.

  “Ah!” I laughed, airily, I hoped. “About the same, I expect, as it does to be a D.O.B.”

  I left her to work it out.

  Druce’s face clouded, then brightened suddenly as she forced a smile. “Listen,” she said, as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mandibles, “I’ve been wanting to ask—are you one of us?”

  “Us?” I summoned up and assumed Utility Mask #7: the Village Idiot.

  “Yes, you know … us.”

  Was it my imagination, or did the word have a hiss in it?

  I was aware, of course, that this might be an official test of my ability to keep a zipped lip when it came to the exchange of personal information.

  “Come on,” Trout blurted, “you’re a boarder, aren’t you? Just like us. You have to know.”

  Druce shot her a poisonous look, and Trout began furiously digging an unconscious hole for herself in the dirt with the end of a twig.

  “Well?” Druce insisted.

  “Well, what?” I asked. Village Idiots are not thrown out of character as easily as all that.

  “Don’t play the fool with me,” she snapped.

  If only she knew how close to the mark she was.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, throwing my open hands upward in puzzlement and hauling my shoulders up round my ears. “If you mean am I a pupil at Miss Bodycote’s, or am I in the fourth form, then the answer, obviously, is yes. Otherwise I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re talking about.”

  I should have left out the “obviously.”

  “Right, then,” she said. “Just so we know where we stand.”

  And she matched her actions to her words by getting to her feet.

  “Come on, Trout,” she said. “Let’s sit somewhere else. Something here stinks.”

  They walked with stiff necks, like a pair of Old Testament princesses, to the shade of another tree, where they sat down again with their backs to me.

  “Argh,” said a voice behind me. “Ignore those chumps.”

  It was Gremly, the gnomish girl I had seen at the Ouija séance in Jumbo’s room.

  She squatted beside me, plucked a blade of grass, and began to chew on it reflectively.

  “I’ve been watching you,” she said. “You’re okay.”

  “Thank you,” I told her, because I didn’t know what else to say.

&nbs
p; We sat in silence for a long moment, not looking at each other, and then Gremly spoke: “I can tell you’re a person who enjoys her pheasant sandwiches.”

  The world stopped. My heart stopped.

  Pheasant sandwiches! The very words Winston Churchill had spoken to me five months ago on the railway platform at Buckshaw Halt. The exact words my mother, Harriet, had mouthed toward the camera in the ancient ciné film I had found in the attic at Buckshaw.

  Pheasant sandwiches: the secret words that identified the speaker as a member of the Nide.

  “The phrase was chosen carefully,” Aunt Felicity had told me. “Innocuous to the casual observer, but a clear warning of danger to an initiate.”

  Gremly had spoken it very matter-of-factly—almost too casually. Was she giving me a warning, or was she simply making herself known?

  I tried not to appear panic-stricken as I looked round at the small groups of girls seated here and there in the grass. Had anyone noticed?

  No one seemed to be paying us the slightest attention.

  “I know I do,” she prattled on, as if nothing had happened. “Quite a welcome break from your usual cucumber and soggy lettuce. Still, peanut butter and banana is my own favorite. Rather exotic so far north, don’t you think?”

  Could this possibly be the same creature who had crouched, mumbling over her words, at the Ouija session? If so, she was an absolute wizard of camouflage, and I was filled with admiration.

  “Yes,” I said with a smile, “pheasant is pleasant,” and then we both tittered. Just two little girls picnicking in the sunshine, relishing all the millions of words that remained unspoken between us.

  Again came the shriek of Miss Moate’s infuriating whistle.

  THWEE! THWEE! THWEE!

  “Girls! Girls! Girls!”

  Did the blasted woman do everything in threes? My mind boggled at the thought.

  “Form a column—off you go. No straggling.”

  Her extended finger was pointing us toward the cluster of wooden huts that lay slightly to the south.

  “Dah-dit-dah-dit,” Gremly said, making the high-pitched sound of a ship-to-shore telegraph with her mouth. “Dit-dah-dit … dit-dah … dit-dah-dah-dit.”

  Even though I couldn’t decipher the code, I understood the meaning by the tone of her voice and the rebellious look on her face.

  Miss Moate shot us a sour glare, but said nothing.

  At the huts, there was trouble with the keys, and the bus driver had to be sent for to open the door. As we stood waiting in the sun, Gremly raised an eyebrow almost imperceptibly and I couldn’t help but grin. There are times when eyebrows speak louder than words. I knew as well as she did that either one of us could have had it open in a quarter of a trice blindfolded with both arms in plaster casts.

  Two of the older and larger girls lifted Miss Moate’s wheelchair across the threshold in a bizarre reenactment of the honeymoon rituals I had seen in the cinema. This time, however, there was no waiting bottle of champagne and no discreet fade-out: The inside of the hut contained not much more than half a dozen rickety trestle tables with folding chairs, a potbellied iron stove with a twisted pipe, and a bird’s nest that had fallen out of the rafters.

  The place smelled of ancient dust, of plaster, and of rising damp.

  A strange uneasiness shimmered in the air.

  For some peculiar reason I felt as Jack must have felt when, having climbed the beanstalk, he was forced to hide out, barely breathing, in the giant’s kitchen cupboard. I know it sounds strange, but that’s as close as I can come to describing the tense atmosphere of the place: as if something unseen were coiled … waiting.

  Miss Moate opened several drawers of a painted counter and dragged out an enormous octopus of tangled cables, telegraph keys, and headsets, which she distributed as if they were the riches of King Solomon.

  “Dit-dit-dit-DAH!” Gremly said triumphantly. “Didn’t I tell you?”

  I knew perfectly well that she was forming the letter V for Victory, the same pattern of four notes that Beethoven had used for the opening of his Fifth Symphony.

  Without warning, a tidal wave of homesickness broke over me. My mind was suddenly aswim with images of Father, Feely, Daffy, and me (aged six) sitting among the hanging ferns in the study at Buckshaw, listening to those opening chords of doom on the wireless. I should have known that, as Daffy would say, they did not bode well.

  But it was now too late for tears. I could never remember, in my entire life, feeling so alone. I thought I was going to vomit, and this time it would be the real thing.

  I pretended to wipe a speck of rogue grit from my eye. I sat, shaken, at the table, unable to speak, and the taste of ashes in my mouth.

  “In twos,” Miss Moate said, and I grabbed at Gremly’s hand before anyone else could do so.

  We sat across from each other at a trestle table upon which someone with a penknife had carved “KILROY WAS HERE” and other things which I will not take the trouble to repeat. Jumbo handed out pencils and papers from a canvas knapsack that looked as if it had seen service during the Trojan War.

  “I’ll send, you receive,” Gremly told me. “I’ve done it before. It will be easier this way.” She handed me a card upon which were printed the letters of the alphabet and the numerals from one to zero:

  A.—

  B—…

  C—.—.

  And so forth.

  I clapped the headphones over my ears, plugged them into a chipped enamel terminal box, and Gremly gave the key a couple of presses: Dit-dit-dah-dit.

  I looked it up on the card and found that it was an F.

  Dit-dah-dit-dit. L.

  Dit-dah. A.

  She was tapping out my name. This was easy.

  I already knew what was coming next: the familiar dit-dit-dit-DAH … V.

  I smiled to let her know I was getting the hang of it, and picked up a pencil. Gremly gave her head an almost imperceptible shake.

  Dah-dit … dah-dah-dah, she sent.

  No. I was not to write it down.

  I pressed the cold cups of the headset to my ears. No one else could hear the dots and dashes. At least I hoped they couldn’t. But with six girls tapping away at the same time, it seemed impossible that anyone in the room would be able to pick out the sounds of a single key.

  T—R—U—S—T … N—O … O—N—E, Gremly tapped out.

  I read it at first as “Trust noon,” but quickly realized my error.

  She must have seen my puzzlement.

  “No one,” she sent again. “Keep away from—”

  “Well?” Miss Moate said suddenly, slapping the surface of our table for attention. “How are you getting on?”

  I nearly sprang out of my skin. Neither of us had heard her coming.

  I tore off the headset.

  “Gremly’s just telegraphed my name, F—L—A—V—I—A,” I said. “What jolly good fun!”

  For an instant I considered bursting into Gilbert and Sullivan:

  “Three little maids who, all unwary

  Come from a ladies’ seminary

  Freed from its genius tutelary

  Three little maids from school …”

  But I didn’t.

  Miss Moate looked from one of us to the other, and without another word, moved on to lurk somewhere else.

  “My turn,” I said loudly. “Let me try,” and we swapped sending key and headset.

  “Where’s Collingwood?” I tapped out slowly, picking the letters from the chart.

  Gremly removed the headphones and placed them over my ears. It was an awkward way of carrying on a conversation, but it would have to do.

  “Infirmary,” she sent. “Gone mad.”

  • SIXTEEN •

  THE SPATTER OF RAIN, which had begun as we left the huts, had now become a downpour. A pair of sluggish wipers swept sheets of water from the windshield, and it had become suddenly cold. My short sleeves were no protection and I hugged my arms against my body.

>   Gremly did not sit with me on the bus. Quite the contrary: She had gone far to the rear to sit in the shadow of Miss Moate, leaving me up front behind the driver, pretending to appreciate the beauty of the landscape, which was made up principally of tall elms in rainswept fields, glimpses of the lake, and the occasional wrecker’s yard in which the rusting hulks of once-loved automobiles were piled like so many colossal steel ant hills.

  Again the word “disorientated” flashed into my mind. It meant, essentially, having lost one’s compass bearings, which is what had happened to me.

  Cast out from my childhood home, banished to a strange land, and now isolated even from the low, gooselike gabble of my classmates, I was alone in the world, at the mercy of even the slightest gust of wind.

  I needed to focus my mind on something outside myself—to regain the scientific view and so to resettle my soul.

  But where to begin?

  “Trust no one,” Miss Fawlthorne and Gremly had each told me, and when you stopped to think about it rationally, that included even them.

  I needed to seem to the faculty of Miss Bodycote’s an apt pupil; to the other girls, an invisible bore.

  There was only one way I could think of to achieve this with a minimum of fuss.

  “Slowly, slowly,” Fitzgibbon said, helping me up the stairs. I made my hand tremble on her arm as I tottered my way upward.

  I had managed a small but convincing vomit at the curbside, which I was inordinately proud of. Miss Moate had insisted I report to the nurse—exactly as I had intended she should. A few more dry heaves on the stairs for insurance and I had won the toss, so to speak.

  “Thank you, Matron,” I managed.

  “Don’t try to talk,” she said. “You didn’t drink any of the groundwater at the camp, did you?”

  The camp: That’s what it was called.

  I shook my head. “Milk only,” I managed.

  “Good,” she said. “You’ve got at least half a chance, then.”

  Was she being what Daffy called “ironical”? Irony, she had explained, was a special class of sarcasm in which the meaning was the opposite of what it seemed. It was an art at which I had not yet become as adept as I should have liked, although it was high on my list of things to do.