As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust

by Alan Bradley

  Druce: School bully. Reads lips.

  Pinkham: Ratted on Collingwood to Miss Fawlthorne for keeping a notebook on the missing girls. She believes Miss F. to be responsible. Must question her.

  Scarlett, Amelia: Claims she saw Brazenose major coming out of the laundry LAST NIGHT (!) And yet Brazenose maj. has been dead or missing since the night of the Beaux Arts Ball of two years ago June (see above).

  Trout: Druce’s toady. Small, blond, and nervous. Spilled the Ouija board. Reason? Must question her.

  FACULTY AND STAFF

  Fawlthorne, Miss: Headmistress. Mentor and tormentor. I hardly know what to make of her.

  Bannerman, Mildred: Chemistry mistress. Acquitted murderess. Wizard chemist and excellent teacher. Assists police from time to time.

  Dupont, Miss: French mistress. La-di-da.

  Fitzgibbon: Matron. Former school nurse. Has access to drugs.

  “K”: the missing key holder. Still need to find out who he—or she—is.

  Marge & Sal: Laundresses.

  Moate, Miss: Science mistress. Medusa in a wheelchair, and like that Gorgon, all head and no body.

  Puddicombe, Miss: Games mistress.

  Rainsmith, Ryerson: Chairman of the board of guardians and despicable milquetoast, at least when it comes to:

  Rainsmith, Dorsey: His wife. Enough said. Reads lurid detective stories, though.

  So there it was: my cast of characters—my dramatis personae—like the heroes, the villains, and the bit players with their exits and their entrances, all listed neatly on the first page of a play by Shakespeare.

  Was there a killer among them?

  Of course my list did not include Inspector Gravenhurst or his assistant, Sergeant LaBelle. It was probably safe enough to discount these two as suspects, but I added them for the sake of completeness. As Uncle Tarquin de Luce once wrote in the margin of one of his many notebooks of chemical experiments: Consider also the container.

  Wise words indeed, and ones I intended never to lose sight of.

  Something was nagging at me as I read and reread the list: something just below the surface; something that remained maddeningly invisible, like the crystal ball I had once found hidden in plain sight in a running stream.

  It was time to make use of a technique I had invented, which I called “word fishing.” I would focus on one key word at a time, letting my mind fly wherever it might in search of associations. Occult … chimney … Ouija board … cigarettes …

  The bell did not clang, the whistle did not blow, the penny did not drop until I got to Scarlett, Amelia … laundry. Scarlett claimed to have seen Clarissa Brazenose—or her ghost—coming out of the laundry just last night.

  Although my mental fingers were tickling the belly of the thought in the same way that the late Brookie Harewood had once tickled the trout he poached on our estate, I could not quite grasp it.

  Scarlett, Amelia … laundry.

  Part of the technique of word fishing was to shift the attention somewhere else when the quarry was elusive: to think of something entirely different and then, when the unsuspecting thought nibbled again, to seize it by the throat.

  And so I forced myself to think of Johann Schobert, the German composer who, with his wife, child, maidservant, and four casual acquaintances, died in agony after eating certain mushrooms which he had insisted were perfectly edible. Schobert had written the failed comic opera Le Garde-Chasse et le Braconnier (The Gamekeeper and the Poacher), from which Aunt Felicity had insisted Feely play selections on the night of my departure.

  Perhaps only Aunt Felicity and I, in all the wide, wide world, knew the reason why.

  And it worked!

  Laundry.

  The word poked its head out of its lair and I seized it. Laundry.

  “Yaroo!” I wanted to shout.

  Laundry. It wasn’t that Scarlett had seen Brazenose major coming out of the laundry. No, that wasn’t it at all. It was that Scarlett had been awarded a prize for washing and ironing: a little silver-plated mangle.

  Had Clarissa Brazenose also been presented with a silver award: a small, tarnished little creature with wings that was, at this very moment, burning a hole in my pocket?

  I reached in and fished it out, shivering a little at the very thought of where it had been and what it had been through.

  I examined it again through my magnifying glass, this time more carefully.

  As I had noticed the first time, it seemed to have wings and a face, but the thing was so tarnished that it was difficult to make out the details. Gruesomely suggestive, though, of a fallen angel that had struck the earth at the blazing speed of an aviator whose parachute had failed to open.

  At the top of the head was a tiny perforation, as if for a string or a ring to pass through.

  It had been worn round the neck! A medallion. A religious charm. An angel. No, an archangel! Saint Michael the Archangel.

  The chain of deductions came as quickly as that.

  Why hadn’t I noticed it sooner? The folded apex of the wings extended well above the top of the head. Only an archangel had wings of such dimensions. I had seen them often enough in the moldering volumes of art with which Buckshaw was littered—a momentary pang here—and in the great stained-glass window at St. Tancred’s given in the Middle Ages by the de Lacey family.

  Ordinary angels, I knew, all the way down to the seraphim and frankly incredible cherubim, had fluffy swans-down wings that sprouted from the shoulders: capable enough for domestic flight but nowhere near as powerful as the eagle wings of their superiors, the archangels.

  This scorched relic, which I held in the palm of my now suddenly shaking hand, had belonged to one of the missing girls: Le Marchand, Wentworth, or Clarissa Brazenose.

  Which of them had worn a Michael round her neck? Which had been presented with a medallion?

  It would be child’s play to find out. I would pry it out of Jumbo, who, as head girl, would be most likely to know. But first I would need to catch her alone.

  Fitzgibbon had not yet noticed I was missing from the infirmary—at least I didn’t think she had. There had been no hue and cry, no alarms, and no search parties. No one had even bothered to come to Edith Cavell in search of poor, sick, fevered Flavia. That, in itself, was annoying, in a way.

  It was not easy trying to cut Jumbo from the herd (I’m quite proud of that little jest) particularly while keeping a low profile myself. I watched for a while from the window, hoping to catch her coming from or going to the hockey field, but no such luck.

  I crept to the top of the stairwell, waiting to hear the sound of her voice. I would call out to her and then dart back into my room. It was not a perfect solution, but it might be the only one.

  After an hour I was growing desperate. “Desperate”—yes, that was the word. And what was the saying? “ ‘Desperate positions require desperate measures,’ as the cardinal said to the chorus girl.” Daffy had once thrown this out casually, adding that it was in Dickens and that it was over my head.

  It wasn’t, of course. It is a fairly well-known fact that most princes of the church have a love of theater, and it was no great stretch of the imagination to see that His Eminence may well have been offering advice from his own experience on the wearing of rich costume.

  At any rate, desperate solutions were called for.

  After listening at the door until there was a momentary lull in the voices outside, I crept from my room and down the narrow back stairs.

  At the far end of the downstairs hall, in the shadows beside the ancient elevator, and almost at the rear of the building, was a black wall-mounted telephone which, I had been told, was to be used only in family emergencies. Like its counterpart at Buckshaw, there was something ominous about the instrument.

  In the gloom, I peered at the grubby yellowed card which was mounted behind a circle of transparent material: GArden 5047.

  I repeated it to myself several times as I slipped out the back door. It was only a jig and a j
og to the laundry, and behind it, to the goldfish pool. At this hour, there were no smokers making use of the seclusion, so that I had the place to myself.

  I sat on the stone rim as I had done before, but my reach was not long enough. I took off my shoes, peeled off my stockings, and waded in.

  The water was cold—colder than I should have expected—but it was, after all, October. A couple of sluggish fish shimmied away to shelter in a cluster of stones and plants.

  I plunged my arm elbow-deep into the slimy-feeling water, shivering at the thought of its chemical constituency. Due to refraction, it was not easy to judge the exact position of objects on the bottom, but with a bit of fishing I came up with a dripping coin which had a beaver on the back and the head of the king on the front. Five cents.

  I dipped again … and again … resulting in a small silver coin with a sailing ship, and a larger one with a creature that I took to be a moose. Ten cents and twenty-five cents, respectively. I gathered a couple more for safety’s sake, put on my stockings and shoes, and made my way furtively round the laundry and through the passageway to the street.

  Minutes later, coins in hand, I was marching along the Danforth, headed toward the grocer’s shop, where I had spotted a coin-operated telephone on our walk to the graveyard.

  “Back again, dear?” the shopkeeper said. “Come to sing me another song, have you?”

  I smiled a pale smile, picked up the handset, and dropped a coin into the slot. It fell through with an odd ching sound.

  In a flash, the woman was at my elbow.

  “Wrong coin,” she said, prying open my fingers and selecting another, which she dropped into the slot.

  A raw buzzing noise came from the earpiece.

  “That’s it, dear,” she said. “Dial the number. Local call, I hope?”

  I grinned, nodded, and stuck my forefinger into the round holes of the dial. It was the first time I had used a do-it-yourself telephone. At home, we had lifted the receiver, tapped the cradle to get the operator’s attention, and given her our instructions.

  With my tongue protruding from my lips, I dialed the number, GArden 5047, and after a maddening series of clicks and clacks, a robotic burr-ing began. It must have been the sound of the phone ringing at Miss Bodycote’s.

  The shopkeeper was still at my elbow, looking at me with bright, birdlike eyes.

  “Could I have a bottle of Orange Crush?” I pleaded, running my spare forefinger round my collar. “I’m feeling rather faint.”

  I could imagine the telephone ringing in the hall at the academy, unheard, perhaps, in the noise and bustle of the place.

  Burrr … Burrr … Burrr … Burrr: single, long-spaced rings, quite unlike the brisk, demanding double ring at home.

  Come on! I wanted to shout. Pick up the blasted thing!

  “Here you are, dear,” the woman said, at my elbow again. She had removed the bottle cap, and tiny tendrils of carbon dioxide gas drifted lazily up into the air.

  I took an enormous swig, smiled, handed her a coin, and turned my back to her.

  “Hello?” a voice said at the other end of the line. “Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy. Whom were you calling, please?”

  It was Fitzgibbon: There was no doubt about it.

  I almost choked on my drink. Gases were forcing themselves up through my vocal cords as I spoke, giving my voice an eerie sound, as if the Grim Reaper himself were belching out the name of his intended victim.

  “June Bowles,” I gargled in my best gaga grandmother voice. “Miss June Bowles.”

  There was an unnerving silence, and then Fitzgibbon said, “Please stay on the line while we locate her.”

  “Thank you,” I gurgled.

  Jumbo must have been up the Zambezi, judging by the amount of time it took to fetch her, but in reality, it was probably no more than two or three minutes.

  The shopkeeper had retreated behind her counter and picked up an enormous clod of knitting at which she dug away like a woman possessed. Every couple of stitches she would look up at me with a reassuring smile and I would grin soppily back.

  “Hello?” Jumbo’s voice said, and I pressed the receiver tightly against my ear and turned away.

  “It’s de Luce,” I whispered. “Flavia. I need your advice.”

  I had cannily concocted my message as I walked from Miss Bodycote’s, and chosen my words carefully. There is no one, anywhere, on the planet who can refuse a request for advice, and I had meant to take full advantage of that fact.

  “Of course,” she said instantly, as I knew she would. “You’re calling from the grocer’s on the Danforth, right? Where shall I meet you?”

  “In my room—in Edith Cavell. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  “Roger Wilco,” Jumbo said brightly. “It’s simply too, too tantalizing. I can hardly wait.”

  I gently replaced the receiver.

  “You’re a long way from home by the sound of you,” the woman said. “England, isn’t it?”

  I nodded, feeling somehow guilty and idiotic at the same time.

  “One of Miss Bodycote’s, I’m guessing,” she said. “We get a few of you in from time to time wanting this and that. What’s your name, dear? It’s always nice to know your regular customers.”

  “Flavia,” I said.

  “Is that it, then? Just the Flavia? Couldn’t afford a surname?”

  “De Luce,” I muttered. “Flavia de Luce.”

  The woman looked at me as if I were a phantom.

  “De Luce, did you say?” Her eyes widened, then narrowed, the way they do when people are putting two and two together. It was obvious that she had known Harriet, but I didn’t want to hear it. I was still too raw and unprepared to be constantly compared with my late mother—besides the fact that I might have compromised myself by giving away personal information to a complete stranger.

  I’m afraid I did something incredibly rude: I put down the bottle of Orange Crush and bolted.

  I had taken no more than two or three steps when I saw Miss Fawlthorne walking briskly toward me. Because her attention was taken by a streetcar driver who was using a long pole to reconnect the car to the overhead electrical lines, she had not yet spotted me.

  I dodged into the dim depths of an ironmonger’s next door, and watched from among the ladders and hanging hoses as the head came closer.

  “Miss! Oh, miss!” It was the shopkeeper from next door.

  “You’ve walked off without your change!”

  She had followed me into the ironmonger’s and was beside me in an instant, prying my hand open and pressing into it two coins.

  Miss Fawlthorne, thinking at first it was she who was being hailed, came to an abrupt stop in the street. After glancing quickly round in all directions, she had let her gaze follow the grocer and then fall, alas! upon me.

  She paced slowly and sarcastically toward me.

  “Well?” she asked, her voice hanging as coldly in the air as the Northern Lights.

  “Oh, Miss Fawlthorne!” I said. “I’m so happy to see you. I’m feeling ever so much better now, and I thought that perhaps we could continue our discussions. Actually, I had just set out to see if I could find you walking in the cemetery. I’m sorry if I disappointed Miss Fitzgibbon, but fresh air was what I needed more than anything.”

  I had said too much. I knew perfectly well that the most effective lies are the briefest.

  Miss Fawlthorne looked down at me as if through a microscope, and the longer she looked, the smaller I felt.

  “I’m afraid I have an appointment,” she said, glancing suddenly and nervously about.

  I let my eyes flicker to where hers had been. A line of cars had stopped behind the stricken streetcar and behind the wheel of one of them was a familiar face.

  It was Ryerson Rainsmith. I restrained myself from waving.

  “All right,” I said, as if I hadn’t seen him. “I shan’t keep you. I’d better get back. William Palmer and all that.”

  And off I
marched, pausing to kick a couple of tin bottle caps off the curb and into the road with elaborate nonchalance, as if I hadn’t a care in the world.

  Just as well she hadn’t called my bluff, I thought. Jumbo would be waiting.

  At the corner, I paused and, pretending to read the street sign, sneaked a look back.

  Miss Fawlthorne was sliding into the offside front seat of Rainsmith’s sedan.

  • EIGHTEEN •

  I OPENED THE DOOR and my heart gave a sickening leap.

  Jumbo was sitting on my bed leafing through my notebook. How long had she been here? How much had she read?

  I had stopped at the goldfish pool just long enough to toss in the unused coins. I have one or two faults, but thievery from wishing wells is not one of them. I would return the ones I had spent at the first opportunity.

  “Very interesting,” she said, turning a page. “Very informative.”

  “Interesting?” I asked, angling to get a look over her shoulder. If she’d been reading my notes, I was scuppered.

  “This stuff about William Palmer … a bit morbid, though, isn’t it?”

  “Miss Fawlthorne assigned it,” I said. “Quite boring, actually.”

  “Remarkable research, though. How did you manage to dig up all that information?”

  “Oh, I just happened to read a library book about the man not long ago. Quite informative. Some of it stuck in my mind.”

  She’d be horrified if she knew the truth.

  “Hmmm,” she said, handing back the book. “Now, what did you want to talk about? You said you needed my advice.”

  “Yes,” I told her. “Quite frankly, I’m after your job. Not until you graduate, of course, but I have to admit that I’ve set my sights on being head girl at Miss Bodycote’s. I need all the advice I can get.”

  Jumbo seemed rather taken aback.

  “I think that the best way to go about it is to win as many medals and awards as possible. I’ve got plenty of time, of course, but if I begin early—”