by Alan Bradley
I heard the rustle of her starched skirt as Jumbo sat down beside me. Whatever was on her mind must be important enough to risk getting grass stains on her outfit. Her mouth brushed my ear as she folded herself into position beside me.
“We need to talk,” she whispered.
Were we being watched? Were unknown eyes staring down at us from the tall, blank windows of Miss Bodycote’s? To them, we would appear to be no more than a couple of tiny, distant sails in a vast sea of grass.
Why was I being so wary? And why, for that matter, was Jumbo?
I let my eyes come open slowly.
“I was thinking about the Michael Award,” I said, which left things suitably up in the air.
“Past or present?”
Jumbo was no fool.
Without answering her question, I allowed myself to go all romantic. “I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to stand up there on the stage in front of all those people, being presented with a silver archangel by … who is it that hands out those things, anyway?”
“Dr. Rainsmith.”
“Him or her?” I tried to keep the excitement out of my voice.
“Him, of course. She just comes along for the champagne tarts.”
Jumbo ought to know, I realized. At the time of Brazenose major’s disappearance, Jumbo would have been in the fifth form. And like Brazenose, she had been here for ages.
“What about two years ago, when Brazenose won it?”
“You need to watch your step,” Jumbo said suddenly, hissing the words.
“Why?” I demanded.
It’s ever so easy to be bold in bright sunlight.
“Things are not what they seem,” she said.
I wanted to tell her that I’d been aware of that fact for as long as I could remember, but I resisted the urge.
“You’re wading into real danger,” Jumbo continued, “without even realizing it. You’re already in over your head. Scarlett has tried to warn you, and so has Gremly.”
I sat quietly, not wanting to break the fragile cobweb of power I had created with my semi-silence. Outwardly, I was no more than a serenely stubborn girl sitting on a sunny lawn with her nose in the air.
But what could Jumbo mean? How could I possibly be wrong in my deductions to date? I couldn’t be—I was sure of it.
Until, that is, a horrific thought sprang into my mind: What if Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy, besides our secret schooling in codes and ciphers and the black arts of science, trained certain of its students in the act of murder? What if each of them—of us!—was required, as some kind of horrific graduation ritual, to kill a human being?
What if Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy, claiming to be a girls’ school so High Anglican that only a kitchen stool was required to scramble up into Heaven, was, in reality, a school for assassins? An Academy for Murder and Mayhem?
Was that what Jumbo was trying to tell me?
• TWENTY-TWO •
FLAVIA DE LUCE, MURDERER.
This was not a thought that came out of nowhere. I suppose it had been simmering away in a covered pot in some subterranean kitchen of my brain for quite some time.
My mind flew back several years to the night Daffy was reading The Private Hangman, a black-jacketed thriller in which Special Agent Jack Cross, alias X9, wreaked vengeance upon the enemies of His Majesty’s Government by such unsubtle means as boiling their blood with high-powered radio waves, binding them eyeball-to-eyeball with a giant squid, extracting a confession from a traitor who was lashed to one of the screws of an about-to-be-launched destroyer whose crew he had betrayed, and, in the last few pages, removing (with the corkscrew attachment of a Boy Scout knife, a handy weapon that he was never without) the eyes of the notorious spy Baron Noël van den Hochstein.
The latter scene had brought Daffy bursting in wide-eyed terror into my bedroom and into my bed at three o’clock in the morning, having turned on the electric light and lit an entire box of candles, all of which she insisted be left burning until well after sunrise.
At the time, I’d have hooted down anyone who suggested that I myself might one day inherit the mantle of Jack Cross, X9—the Private Hangman—but now I wasn’t so sure. In this topsy-turvy world, anything seemed possible.
And yet, until now, it had never occurred to me that I might be required to kill.
My mother, of course, had been a member of the mysterious Nide, of which Aunt Felicity was chief. That much I knew, as well as the fact that there were others around me who might or might not be full-fledged agents. Gremly, for instance, who had given herself away by asking if I enjoyed my pheasant sandwiches. How I longed to quiz her, to learn more not only about her associations, but also about my own.
And yet it was forbidden. It had been made quite clear to me that one must not, under any circumstances, ask questions of any girl at Miss Bodycote’s about herself, or about any other girl: a rule which, when you stopped to think about it, made a great deal of sense. It was the only way in which those of us who were chosen for a life of service could keep our secret doings from the others. Those at the academy who were not involved—the day girls—were really no more than cover for those of us who were.
They, in a way, were the drones, while we were the queens.
That much I had worked out on my own.
It was all part of a Grand Game, in which we were merely players. The rules were unwritten, and needed to be deduced by each of us: an enormous maze through which each of us must make her own way, in total darkness, by trial and error.
How beastly clever it all was!
What if the whole thing was no more than a magnificent piece of theater staged solely to test me? What if everyone but me had been handed their parts?
But, no, the drugged Collingwood was all too real. The fear I had seen in her haunted eyes was impossible to fake.
“You’re very quiet,” Jumbo said. It was so long since either of us had spoken that I’d almost forgotten she was there.
I looked her straight in the eye. “I know we’re not permitted to ask personal questions,” I said. “But what about impersonal questions? Neither of the Rainsmiths is a student. Am I allowed to ask you about them?”
That in itself was a risky question. I was keenly aware that Jumbo, as head girl, must not be compromised; that she must not be asked to break a rule.
The British Empire—even in Canada—had not been built by sneaks.
Like the sun after a rain, a warm smile was already stealing across Jumbo’s face.
“Excellentemento!” she said. “Top marks. Of course you are.”
I felt as if I had just won the Irish Sweepstakes.
By her comment about the champagne tarts I already knew that Jumbo did not care for Dorsey Rainsmith: that in terms of a sympathetic soul, I already had one foot in the door.
“What have they done with Collingwood?” I asked sneakily.
“They” being the Rainsmiths, and therefore fair game for a question.
“Took her away in an ambulance,” Jumbo replied. “Before sunup. I saw it from my window.”
“But where?”
“God only knows,” Jumbo said. “All I can say is that Miss Fawlthorne and Fitzgibbon went with her.”
I felt as if I’d been punched in the solar plexus.
Miss Fawlthorne!
But it made sense, didn’t it? I’d seen her climbing into Ryerson Rainsmith’s car on the Danforth. Nothing could be clearer than the fact that they were hand in glove.
“What are we going to do?”
Squinting, Jumbo raised her eyes slowly to the heavens—to the fat cumulus clouds that drifted lazily along in the painfully blue sky.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Nothing?” My response was as quick as the return of a served tennis ball.
“Nothing. There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
“Meaning?”
“Whatever you take it to mean.”
How infuriating! How utterly—
I was tempted for a moment to give her a defiant glare, but I managed, by looking away, to keep it mostly to myself.
“You remind me of my sister Daffy,” I said.
“Excellent,” Jumbo replied, and with that, she got to her feet, brushed off her skirt, and without a backward glance, strode quickly away toward the rear of the school.
A kind of sadness descended upon me as I watched her walk away: a kind of sadness that was half happy and half not, which is very difficult to describe. I suppose I’d had great hopes that we would, against all odds, become great chums, and that the secrets of the universe, and of Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy, would be unrolled like some great map, at no cost, for my inspection.
But it was not to be. I was me … she was she … and the world was the world—as I had rather sourly suspected all along.
I thought of the words Daffy had once recited in the drawing room as a gift for Father’s birthday:
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.”
I could not entirely agree with dear, dead old John Donne. I had never felt more like an island in my life.
I was the clod washed away by the sea.
I got up from the grass, my lip trembling, and began to walk—anywhere—away from the school.
Quite frankly, I was sick and tired of being held hostage by my emotions. I needed to take a stand with my feet rooted firmly in science, rather than in the dribblings of some lurking, self-important gland. At bottom, when you got right down to it, it was all chemistry, and chemistry should be miraculous, not miserable.
I needed to rededicate myself: to follow my brain instead of my tear ducts, and to stick to cold logic, no matter what. “Come hell or hard water,” as Mrs. Mullet had once said.
I couldn’t help smiling at the thought, and a minute or so later, everything was more or less tickety-boo. It was a kind of magic I didn’t yet fully understand.
By this time I had reached the far boundary of the hockey field which was marked, for the most part, by the walls and fences of adjoining properties. In the middle of a tall hedge, a small wicket gate led to parts unknown. I opened it and squeezed myself through, onto a narrow path which passed between two tall, ragged, and moldy cedar hedges. I turned my body and edged along sideways in crab fashion to avoid being brushed by the dank, unpleasant foliage, which drooped like the ostrich feather wands of the mutes at a Victorian funeral. It smelled like a place in which cats congregated.
At its far end, the path opened out into a paved and boarded area which must, at least in winter, have been flooded and used as an outdoor skating rink. It might once have been a row of tennis courts, but their tarmac was now a cracked wilderness pierced with tufts of wild grass and weeds.
“Watch yourself!”
A metallic roaring behind me caused me to flinch—to leap aside, in fact—just as a compact cannonball appeared: a uniformed figure on roller skates, its eyes hidden behind ancient black sun goggles and a yo-yo shooting wildly out on a string from one hand.
Nevertheless, I recognized her at once. It was Gremly.
“Sorry!” she shouted, barely missing me as she shot past and rocketed into a sharp right-hand turn, her legs crossing over like scissors, as if she had been born on skates.
“Wait!” I shouted, but she didn’t hear me. She roared away, down the length of the old rink, skates and yo-yo flying, across the width, along the far side and into the final turn before passing me again.
“Two hundred and twenty yards!” she shouted as she blazed past without giving me a chance to say a word.
Round she went again, clockwise, a wound-up ball of pure energy completely compressed within her stunted frame.
I waited for the next approach.
“Mrs. Rainsmith?” I called out, trying to put the question mark into my voice as she flew past. Down the long side she raced, across the backstretch, and here she came again.
“Bad medicine!” she shouted back from inside a whirlwind of noise.
On the following lap, I kept quiet and left it to her.
“Pity. First one was nicer.”
And she was gone again.
“First what?” I called out into the ferocious roar of racing skates.
I had to wait another complete round for her reply.
“First wife. Francesca. Vanished.”
Vanished? Like Brazenose? Like Le Marchand? Like Wentworth?
It seemed scarcely credible. Was Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy the last stop on the road to oblivion?
I held up my arm, bent at the elbow, as a signal to stop. But Gremly ignored it.
“Can’t,” she panted as she came round again. “Hundred penalty laps before lunch.”
Again I waited patiently until she came round once more.
“Belching during the sermon,” she bellowed as she skated by, her words followed by a whinnying horse-laugh that trailed behind her in the air like a long, flapping scarf.
The sheer defiance of it.
And it was that, I think, more than anything, which made me decide on the spot to confront Miss Fawlthorne.
After all, what could they do to me?
Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy was, on a Sunday afternoon, like one of those vast Victorian boneyards such as Highgate Cemetery in London, minus, of course, the tombstones. An unnatural hush hung over the place like a black pall, as if the slightest sound would be a mortal sin. Even the walls and floors appeared forbidding, as if they, too, wanted to be left alone—as if I were an intruder.
I walked slowly along the Old Girls’ Gallery, giving no more than a glance to most of the black-edged portraits from the corner of my eye. A more frank stare seemed sacrilege.
But here was Harriet in her funereal frame. I stopped for a moment, then slowly touched my fingers to my lips and transferred them to hers.
Was she pleased?
I couldn’t tell. That was the trouble with being the daughter of a dead woman.
I tore my eyes away and moved on.
A little farther along, toward the end of the gallery—and I hadn’t noticed this before—was Brazenose major: Clarissa. I knew this only because her name was engraved, as were all the others, on a small silver plate at the bottom of the frame.
She bore only a passing resemblance to her younger sister. You might have missed it if you weren’t looking for it.
I sucked in my breath.
Clarissa was wearing the Michael Award round her neck: that same silver archangel with its upraised wings which was snuggled at this very moment in my pocket.
I pulled it out and compared it with the photograph. There could be no doubt about it. In spite of the tarnishing, I could easily see that they had once been identical.
A chill worked its way up my spine and down again. The photograph must have been taken the night of her disappearance—the night, perhaps, of her death.
She had vanished after the ball.
My footsteps slowed as I came closer to Miss Fawlthorne’s study.
Last chance to back out, I thought. Last chance to let sleeping dogs lie.
There are choices in life which you are aware, even as you make them, cannot be undone; choices after which, once made, things will never be the same.
There is that moment when you can still walk away, but if you do, you will never know what might have been. Saint Paul on the road to Damascus might have pleaded sunstroke, for example, and the world would have been a different place. Admiral Lord Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar might have decided he was outnumbered and fled under full sail to fight another day.
I thought for a few moments about these two instances, and then I knocked on Miss Fawlthorne’s door. The hollow sound of knuckles on wood echoed ominously from the uncaring walls.
There was no response and so I knocked again.
I was about to turn away (Saint P
aul and Admiral Lord Nelson be damned) when a voice said, “Come.”
I grasped the cold doorknob, gave it a twist, took a deep breath, and stepped into the headmistress’s study.
Miss Fawlthorne was no more than a black silhouette against the brightness of the window. With my gloom-accustomed eyes, she was hard to look at directly because of the dazzle. And yet in spite of that, from her shadowed face there came an unmistakable flash of two moist eyes.
How odd. She had been all right when we walked to the Sunday morning service not two hours ago. Had she caught a sudden chill in the old stone church?
She shoved a bundle of papers into a desk drawer and closed it with a bang.
I stood there awkwardly until at last she said, “Please be seated.”
She shuffled some files and red pencils on her desk and I guessed that she was collecting herself.
But for what?
I waited for her to ask me what was on my mind, but she said nothing as the silence lengthened.
“Well?” she said after a while, and left it at that.
I could hardly believe my ears. It was as if the captain of the Queen Elizabeth had invited you onto the bridge and then asked you to take the wheel. It was unheard of.
In any conversation with an adult, a twelve-year-old girl is at a distinct disadvantage. The dice are loaded against her, and only a fool would believe otherwise.
And yet here was the fearsome Miss Fawlthorne handing over the conversational reins without so much as a wink. As I have said—unheard of.
Well, I wasn’t going to miss an opportunity such as this. It might never come again.
“Mrs. Rainsmith,” I said. “The first one: Francesca.”
Miss Fawlthorne made no effort to hide her surprise. “You have done your homework, haven’t you?” she said in a resigned and tired voice. At the same time, she produced a surprisingly workmanlike handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes as if she were dusting them. But she didn’t fool me.
“Poor Francesca. Tragic. Absolutely tragic.”
I begged with my eyes for her to tell me more.
“She drowned. Fell overboard on a moonlight cruise.”
“Oh, dear!” I said. It was the kind of weak remark I despise in others, and I was disappointed to hear such sappy words coming out of my own mouth. I tried to correct the slipup.