by Alan Bradley
Which was why I was here, wasn’t it?
I took a deep breath and hurled myself into the unknown. “Brazenose major,” I said, and waited for a response. In conversation among adults, there is no longer the need to spin out a question to childish lengths. In fact, it wasn’t a question at all, was it? Rather, the mere mention of a missing person’s name.
“What about her?” Mrs. Bannerman asked.
“She won the Saint Michael medal, or medallion, or whatever it’s called—and then she vanished.”
“Did she?”
Mrs. Bannerman’s expression had not changed one iota, or, as we used to say in England, a jot.
She was watching with approval, I realized, as I learned the steps of the dance by placing one slow foot ahead of the other.
I knew, of course, that I was forbidden to ask personal questions of the other girls, but did that same restriction apply to the faculty? The only way to find out had been to ask without really seeming to.
It was all so bloody complicated.
And yet I was enjoying it.
Daffy had bored me stiff one rainy Sunday afternoon by reading aloud from the Dialogues of Plato, in which a gaggle of sissified young men—or so it seemed to me—had traipsed round a sunny courtyard behind their master asking all the right questions: the ones that allowed him to deliver his thunderbolts of logic to their greatest effect.
Like stooges feeding straight lines to a famous comedian, their function was to make him look good.
What a load of old codswallop, I had thought at the time, and had said as much to Daffy.
But could it be that this was how the world really worked?
The thought floored me—almost literally. I reached out and touched the edge of a table to steady myself.
“Yes,” I said, trying out my new sea legs. “She did. She won the Saint Michael and vanished.”
I took a deep breath, and then I said: “But she was seen last night. She’s still here.”
“Is she indeed?” Mrs. Bannerman said, raising an eyebrow in what might well have been mockery.
“Yes,” I said. “She was seen near the laundry.”
“Indeed? From which you deduce?”
I was thoroughly enjoying this: a match of wits in which questions became answers and answers questions: a topsy-turvy mirror game in which nothing was given away.
Or everything.
Lewis Carroll had been right in Through the Looking-Glass. Reality made no sense whatsoever.
“That she was never missing,” I said, taking the plunge. “That she was never dead.
“And nor were—or are—Wentworth or Le Marchand,” I added.
“Hmmm,” Mrs. Bannerman said.
The perfect answer.
She poked a forefinger into the hair above her ear, correcting a single strand that was struggling to escape.
“Now, then,” she said, turning to the hydrogen spectrophotometer, at which she had been working when I came into the room. “Let us discover why the feet of this luna moth, Actius luna, should be exhibiting traces of arsenic. It’s a pretty puzzle.”
And I couldn’t have agreed more.
• TWENTY •
I HAVE SAID NOTHING so far about church or chapel, hoping perhaps that they would go away. Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy, being hand in glove with the Church of England, or “Anglican” as it was called here in the colonies (and “Episcopal” just south of the border in the United States of America), was subject to all the ritual that one would expect: chapel every morning on the premises, conducted in what had once been the chapel of the original convent, and a church parade on Sunday mornings to the nearby cathedral for the full-strength dose of Scripture and dire warnings.
Church parade? I should have said “church straggle.” It is probably easier to train a pack of hunting hounds to sing an oratorio by Bach than it is to get a gaggle of girls to go in orderly fashion along a broad avenue in full view of the public without some mischief making a mockery of the day.
The usual order of march was this: Miss Fawlthorne and the faculty in the lead, followed by the girls in order of form, the youngest first all the way up to the sixth, with Jumbo, as head girl, bringing up the rear.
Clustered round Jumbo were the usual culprits who enjoyed a jolly good smoke in the open air: Fabian, Van Arque, and a couple of other younger scofflaws who were just learning how to inhale.
Because of that, there was a great deal of coughing at the back of the column, accompanied by an unusual and dramatic amount of hawking and spitting.
Occasionally we would meet Sunday strollers, or overtake older churchgoers who were headed on foot in the same direction, who would sometimes look in horror upon what must have seemed like an outing from the Toronto Free Hospital for Consumptive Poor.
“It’s the food!” Van Arque would choke, pounding her chest as we passed. “Nothing but tongue and beans.” Which didn’t explain the smoke leaking from the corners of her mouth as she spoke.
Although I was marching with the fourth form, I was able to fall gradually back in line by the simple technique of stopping twice to tie my shoelaces. I rejoined the column just as Scarlett came along.
“Dit-dit-dit-dit, dit-dit,” I said. “Hi.”
“Dit-dit-dit, dit-dit-dit-dit, dit-dit-dit-dit, dit-dit-dit-dit,” she replied. “Shhh.”
We shambled along in silence for a minute, and then I whispered, “What do you think happened to her? Brazenose, I mean.”
Her eyes were huge as they swiveled toward me. “I can’t tell you,” she said. “So please stop asking me.”
This made no sense whatsoever. Scarlett had been happy enough to prattle on at the camp about her recent nighttime sighting of a girl who had supposedly vanished two years ago, but was now unwilling to hazard a guess as to why.
What—or whom—could she be afraid of?
I had no choice but to lay all my cards on the table. It was risky, but there was no other way. It was my duty.
Aunt Felicity had more than once lectured me on my inherited duty.
“Your duty will become as clear to you as if it were a white line painted down the middle of the road,” she had said. “You must follow it, Flavia.”
The words of my aged aunt echoed as clearly in my ears as if she were walking along beside me.
“Even when it leads to murder?” I had asked her.
“Even when it leads to murder.”
Well, it had led to murder, hadn’t it? That charred, decapitated wretch, whoever she might have been, who had plummeted down the chimney and rolled across the floor of Edith Cavell, was certainly not a suicide.
I took a deep breath, leaned toward Scarlett, and whispered into her ear. “And have you, also, acquired a taste for pheasant sandwiches?”
The effect upon Amelia Scarlett was shocking. The color drained from her face as if a tap had been opened somewhere. She stopped dead in her tracks—so suddenly that Fabian, who had been walking directly behind, smashed into her, fell to her knees, and, seeing that she had ripped one of her stockings, let loose a word that is not supposed to be known to the girls of Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy.
I knew at once that it was a mistake.
“Smarten up, you clowns,” Jumbo said. “You’ll get all of us blacked. Fall in at the rear.”
And so it was that Scarlett and I found ourselves at the very fag end of the march, walking stiffly along in silence, shoulder to shoulder, but not knowing what to say to each other.
After a hundred yards of misery, she broke into a sprint and charged ahead until she was lost from view among the other girls of the fourth.
The rector was a frail old lamb with an enormous mop of white hair, who peered down at us from his pulpit like a lookout in the crow’s nest of a ship in a stormy sea. Each of us, he was insisting, was no more than a section of scaffolding being used to help erect the greater glory of God.
I could well picture him, swaying slowly from side to side in his lofty perc
h, as a bit of scaffolding, but as for me …?
No, thank you!
The very idea made me balk at the proceedings: so much so that when he finally gave the benediction and came creeping down to rejoin us other skeletons of steel, and the hymn was sung, I made a great point of setting myself apart from the proceedings by singing: “Braise my soul the King of Heaven …”
Not that anyone noticed. They never do.
Except Feely, of course. From her perch on the organ bench at St. Tancred’s, my older sister was always able to hear even the slightest improvisation on my part, and would swing round her burning-glass gaze to put me in my place.
I was struck by a sudden pang.
Dear God! I thought. How I miss her!
As if she were here, I fell back into line with the other singers:
“Angels, help us to adore him; ye behold him face to face;
Sun and moon, bow down before him, dwellers all in time and space.”
That was just it, wasn’t it? That’s what we were: dwellers all in time and space. Not old scraps of iron lashed together like a Meccano set by some invisible builder—not on your bloody life!
I looked over at Mrs. Bannerman. What did she think, I wondered, of being labeled a section of scaffolding? She had come within an ace of meeting her end on the most dreaded bit of scaffolding in the whole wide world. A date with the public hangman, I expect, is not one that can be easily forgotten.
And yet, here she was, head held high, caroling away, bright-eyed, and with a slight, mystical smile on her lips, as if science were her Savior.
… As if she knew something that none of the rest of us knew.
Perhaps she did. Perhaps—
In that instant, I understood what I must do. Of course I did: I had planned it all along.
There is a standing and unwritten order in most churches that a worshipper taken ill is not to be interfered with. One minute it’s “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.” And the next it’s “Action stations!” as we flee, hand over mouth, to the nearest exit.
It is a good rule, and one that I had taken advantage of in the past.
Even before the last notes of the organ had died up among the rafters, I gave Mrs. Bannerman a tight, gulping smile.
“Excuse me,” I managed, edging my way to the end of the pew, and then I fled.
The entire academy was here at church, and would be for at least the next hour. I turned my face toward the east and ran like a scalded rabbit.
I needed to question Collingwood without interference, and this was the time to do it. After the purging I had given her, and a good night’s sleep, she should have recovered sufficiently from the chloral hydrate to be subjected to a jolly good grilling.
As I knew it would be, Miss Bodycote’s was in perfect silence.
There is always something vaguely unsettling about being alone in an empty building that is not your own. It is as if, whenever present inhabitants are away, the phantoms of former owners come shimmering out of the woodwork to protect their territory. Although you cannot see these ghosts, you can certainly feel their unwelcoming presence, and sometimes even smell them: a sort of shivering in the air that tells you that you’re not alone and not wanted.
Like layers of ancient paint, the older ones underlie the newer: fainter, paler perhaps, and yet, for all that, far more ominous.
What sights have been witnessed by these arching ceilings? I wondered. What tragedies have played out in these ancient halls?
My back sprouted goose bumps.
Up the cold, dim stairs I flew and into the infirmary, as if all the demons of hell were gnashing their teeth at my heels.
The gaunt drapes were drawn round Collingwood’s bed.
“Quickly,” I said in a hoarse whisper. “Get up. Get dressed. We’re getting you out of here.”
The curtain rings shrieked on their metal rods as I yanked back the hanging curtain.
Collingwood’s bed was not only empty: It was as neatly and as freshly made as if it had been arranged for a magazine photograph.
“Well, well,” said a voice behind me, and I spun round. Ryerson Rainsmith was closing the clasps of a black leather doctor’s bag.
Of course! Flavia, you idiot!
Doctor Rainsmith, his wife had called him on the ship, and I had not heard because I had not wanted to hear.
It was Rainsmith who had been dosing Collingwood with chloral hydrate. And it was Rainsmith whom Fitzgibbon had been referring to when she said she’d have the doctor look in later. How could I have been such a fool not to see it?
“Where’s Collingwood?” I demanded. “What have you done with her?”
“Confidentiality between doctor and patient forbids me from answering,” Ryerson Rainsmith said quietly. “Besides, I’m in charge here. This is my infirmary. It is I who should be asking the questions.”
“He’s right, you know,” said another voice behind me, and I spun round.
Dorsey Rainsmith had come up silently behind me.
I might have known.
Her dress was a sand-colored tent, its billows held in by a broad belt. Who knew what weapons were concealed beneath? There seemed room enough in it for racks of axes.
“You have no business being here,” she said. “Why aren’t you in church with the others?”
“Where’s Collingwood?” I asked again. “What have you done with her?”
“She’s had a very bad shock,” Rainsmith said. “She requires peace and quiet if she’s to make a full recovery.”
I was not going to be shaken off so easily. “Where is she? What have you done with her?”
“Dorsey—” he said, giving his wife a brisk nod.
I did not wait to be seized and clapped into a straitjacket. I did what any intelligent girl would do in the circumstances: I took to my heels.
I clattered out of the room and down the stairs with the sound of falling tiles.
“Stop her, Ryerson!” Dorsey shouted, but it was no use. I was younger, faster, and had a head start.
At the bottom, I looked up and caught a glimpse of their white faces, like twin moons, staring down at me from above.
I shot them an insolent grin like the runaway pancake in the fairy tale, swiveled on my heel, and ran straight into the chest of Inspector Gravenhurst.
I nearly knocked him over.
The inspector looked even more surprised to see me than I was to see him.
How long had he been standing there? How much had he seen and heard?
It seemed obvious—at least to me—that he had come to Miss Bodycote’s for a quiet Sunday morning snoop. After all, the doors were always left unlocked from dawn to dusk, and besides, who in their right mind would want to enter such a forbidding-looking fortress?
The question was this: Which of us was more embarrassed?
I was faced with a sudden choice and left with only an instant to make up my mind: Should I blow the whistle on the Rainsmiths for what they had done to Collingwood, or should I keep my trap shut and take my chances on gaining the upper hand?
Well, if you know Flavia de Luce as well as I do, you’ll know that it’s a mug’s question.
“Oh, Inspector,” I said, and I’m ashamed to admit that I allowed my eyelids and eyelashes to flutter almost imperceptibly. “I was hoping to see you again. Have you had any luck identifying the body in the chimney?”
Oh, Flavia! You puncturer of other people’s importance! What a saucy thing to say to the poor man. “Luck?” As if the Toronto Police were only capable of solving crimes by a toss of the dice—or by pulling lots from some plump constable’s hat.
“As a matter of fact we have, Miss de Luce,” he said. “It was front-page news in all the papers. But I don’t suppose you see them at Miss Bodycote’s, do you?”
So. Wallace Scroop must have got his story after all.
Not knowing what
to say, I glanced up at the two faces that were still staring blankly down from the landing like a masked chorus waiting to make their entrance.
The inspector, following my gaze, spotted the Rainsmiths.
“Ah, Dr. Rainsmith,” he said. “Good morning. Perhaps, as the pathologist of record, you’re in a much better position than I am to answer this young lady’s question?”
Pathologist? Ryerson Rainsmith the pathologist? Besides being the academy’s appointed medical doctor and chairman of the board of guardians?
How improbably bizarre. How downright dangerous!
But it was not Ryerson Rainsmith who responded to the inspector’s words. In fact, quite the contrary: It was Dorsey Rainsmith, his wife, who began her slow descent of the stairs toward me.
“I shall be happy to, Inspector,” she said. “You may leave it to me.”
• TWENTY-ONE •
I SUPPOSE I SHOULD have screamed, but I didn’t. Instead, as if in a trance, I watched as the inspector, with no more than a quick nod, vanished out the door.
Caught red-handed in an unauthorized Sunday invasion of the empty premises, he couldn’t get away quickly enough.
Which left me alone with the Rainsmiths.
I didn’t have many options. Since recent circumstances had resulted in my becoming a backslider in the fingernail-biting department, I had nothing to count upon for self-defense but my fists and my feet.
How I wished I had taken the time to pump Dogger for more details about the Kano system of jujitsu, which he once admitted he had studied for a time. One or two of the Deadly Blows would have come in handy just about now: a quick chop here and a clever thrust there, and it would be “nighty-night” to the abominable Rainsmiths.
But the sad truth is that I was so poleaxed at the thought of Dorsey Rainsmith—Dorsey Rainsmith!—being not only a doctor, but also the pathologist who had examined the body in the chimney, that my brain went into the kind of deep freeze that must have been experienced at the end by Captain Scott of the Antarctic.
“Huh?” was all I could manage.