by Alan Bradley
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.
Now, then: How long had we been traveling?
I thought back to my Girl Guides training in the parish hall when Miss Delaney had taught us to estimate time in stressful situations.
“One never knows when one may be kidnapped by Communists,” she told us, “or worse,” she added. “Be Prepared is more than just a motto.”
And so we had been made to learn how to estimate time
while locked away alone in total darkness in the crypt of St. Tancred’s, as well as while balancing blindfolded on a chair as a gang of girls, singing at the top of their lungs “Ging-gang-goolie-goolie-goolie-goolie watcha, ging-gang-goo, ging-gang-goo!,” hurled tightly balled-up winter socks at our head.
I judged that we had pulled away from Miss Bodycote’s about fifty minutes ago, and had therefore traveled, at a speed of forty miles per hour, approximately thirty-three miles. The calculation was a simple one.
It had become surprisingly warm in the bus and I was just beginning to think I might curl up on the seat for a catnap, when the bus suddenly shifted down through several octaves of grating gears and turned off into a narrow, unpaved lane.
The driver stopped, got out, and wrestled open a rusty metal gate, beside which was a ramshackle hut and a weathered sign that read: Stop. Report to Guard.
We crept through, the driver closed the gate behind us, and again the bus’s infernal gears ground into motion.
Ahead, in the distance, lay the waters of Lake Ontario. I had seen it from the train, of course, but then it had been gray and sullen in the rain. Today, the surface glittered and twinkled in the bright morning sunlight like a vast plain of blue-green jewels, and a fleet of white puffy clouds floated slowly and self-importantly along overhead as if they were posing for a painting.
A number of tall radio masts, painted in alternating red and white sections, rose into the air ahead, seeming to sprout from a cluster of low, white, weather-worn buildings which nestled like chicks around an abandoned farmhouse of painted boards. As we approached them the road narrowed, and then ended—
Abruptly. We had come to a stop.
“Everybody out!” Miss Moate commanded in a loud voice, and I looked round to see her unbuckling her restraints. With remarkable speed she was free of her web and rolling herself toward the front of the bus. She came close to running me over.
I counted bodies as the students disembarked: ten, eleven, twelve …
I was the thirteenth.
“Ramp, Dawson,” Miss Moate snapped, and from an under-floor luggage compartment, the driver dragged out a pair of wooden channels that he manhandled into position at the door. Miss Moate maneuvered her wheels onto them and without a glance to either side went barreling down so rapidly that she was propelled far beyond the bus and into the long grass.
But no matter. In an instant, she had seized the rims of her wheels, swiveled as neat as a pin, and was back at the door, glaring defiantly up at the disembarking students as if to say, “There! That’s the only way to deal with the dragon polio!”
I was proud of her in a complicated sort of way.
“Line up!” she shouted, and there was something more than the sound of a drill sergeant in her voice.
“Single file—”
We shuffled.
“Right turn!”
Our shoes pivoted in the dust.
“Quick … march!”
And away we went in our panama hats, our pleated pinafore dresses, our blazers, our school ties, and our tights, swinging our arms as we trudged off toward a distant embankment of weeping willows, looking, no doubt, for all the world like a dozen or so ugly ducklings on a forced march.
I felt we ought to be whistling some bright but defiant military tune.
• FOURTEEN •
WE WERE DIVIDED INTO two groups. The one into which I was placed—with Trout, Druce, Gremly, Barton, and an alarmingly red-faced girl I didn’t know—was called, for obvious reasons, the Sixes, and the other the Sevens.
“Sixes in the shade!” Miss Moate called out. “Sevens in the sun.”
“Divide and conquer,” Trout grumbled. “They always do that to keep us from overpowering them.”
Although she and Gremly were part of my group, they wandered off and stood under a tall elm, while Druce and her hanger-on, Trout, stood off to the other side, leaving me with the girl whose name I didn’t know, alone between the two camps.
“De Luce,” I said out of the corner of my mouth. “Flavia. I’m the new girl.”
“I know,” she whispered. “I’ve been dying for a chance to talk to you.”
She took off her hat and slowly fanned her face to cover our conversation.
Who was she worried about: the lip-reading Druce, or someone else?
“It’s about Brazenose—” she began.
“Which one?” I said quietly behind my hand, pretending to pick my nose. “Mary Jane, or—”
“Clarissa. Brazenose major. The one that disappeared.”
Her face was becoming redder than ever.
“Are you all right?” I whispered.
“Of course. I’ve been holding my breath to make myself flush. That’s why Moatey sent our group into the shade.”
Here it was barely mid-morning and I’d already added a new weapon to my arsenal.
“What’s your name?” I asked, even though it may have been forbidden.
She gave me a strange smile, as if to reprimand me, then said, “Scarlett. Amelia Scarlett.”
You are a girl after my own heart, Amelia Scarlett, I thought. Without even suspecting it, the whole world is putty in your hands.
“Water!” Miss Moate called out loudly, clapping her hands, and we all turned our attention toward her. “Water is life. Remember that, girls, and remember it well. You can live without food and sunlight for a remarkably long while, but you cannot live without water. You must know at all times and in all places how to acquire water. You will be taught, therefore how to locate it, how to collect it, and how to purify it. Now, then …”
She glared at us, one at a time, as if daring us to contradict her, her eyes like little black searchlights. “Let us say that we require water here and now. Let us say that one of us has sustained an injury, and that boiling water is required at once for emergency surgery. Where shall we find it?”
Gremly’s hand shot up. “In the radiator of the bus!” she shouted, grinning at us, pleased as punch to have guessed the answer straightaway.
Miss Moate nodded her head slowly, as if to say, “I might have known some idiot would suggest that.”
“And what, pray tell, if the radiator is full of antifreeze?” she asked in a voice dripping with sarcasm. “Remember, Gremly, we live in a harsh northern climate, and not, as you seem to suppose, in the land of the bandaged pharaohs.”
Some of us laughed dutifully. But others didn’t. A dark image flashed on a screen in a back room of my mind—then quickly flickered out.
“The lake,” Scarlett suggested. “We could bring water from the lake in buckets and boil it.”
“It’s seawater,” Gremly interrupted. “The salt would make us sick!”
“It’s not salt water,” Scarlett shot back, fanning her face furiously, even more alarmingly red. “Any fool knows that the Great Lakes—”
“Girls! Girls! Girls!” Miss Moate shouted, wheeling her chair round with surprising speed, charging into the middle of our little group—like a Roman chariot, I thought—and almost running us over.
I noticed now for the first time that the Sevens were standing in silence. It occurred to me that several of its members—Jumbo for certain, because she was head girl—had been through this exercise before, and knew perfectly well the expected answers.
Why, then, was she here? Why was she keeping quiet? Ha
d she been ordered to? Was this whole stupid beanfest being staged for my benefit? Or for the handful of us who were the latest arrivals?
Which of us, then, were the players—and which of us the audience in this charade?
I decided to dig in my oar.
“Water may be obtained,” I said, “by finding the lowest point of the terrain, constructing a condensation trap—”
My Girl Guide days hadn’t been entirely wasted.
“Correct,” Miss Moate snapped. “Bowles will demonstrate the correct technique.”
Bowles? I didn’t connect until Jumbo marched off down a slight slope to the west. Of course—Bowles was Jumbo’s surname.
Miss Moate did not follow as the lot of us straggled off in Jumbo’s footsteps.
At the bottom of a gully, Jumbo dragged a rusty garden spade from behind a tree.
“First thing to know: Be prepared,” she said, and began digging. It was obvious—at least to me—that she had done this before, and at this very spot. The soil was unusually loose.
“Give us your mackintosh, Druce,” she ordered, and Druce reluctantly handed over a tightly bundled waterproof packet.
“Druce is always prepared, aren’t you, Druce?”
“Yes, Jumbo,” Druce said meekly. “But be careful. My mother said she’d beat my brains out if I ruined it.”
“No danger of that,” Jumbo said, and everyone, even Druce, smiled as she began digging. Scarlett and I stood off to one side to watch.
“About Brazenose—” I prompted her quietly, keeping my eyes on the growing hole in the ground.
Scarlett’s eyes went as wide as the dog’s in the fairy tale. “I saw her last night,” she whispered.
“What?”
The word flew out of my mouth before I could turn down the volume.
“Come on, you two,” Jumbo said. “Stop horsing around and pay attention. This is serious. I’m not having black marks against my name because of you slackers.”
Caught in the act. Think fast, Flavia.
I threw my hand over my mouth and turned quickly away. With my back to Jumbo, I rammed my middle finger down my throat and gave my uvula a jolly good prod.
The uvula is that little fleshy stalactite that hangs down from the back of one’s throat, and its sole purpose, as far as I can tell, is to trigger a quick vomit when one is required on short notice, as it was now.
I spun round, took a couple of reeling steps, and threw up into Jumbo’s condensation trap.
And Druce’s mackintosh.
Just enough to be convincing.
“Sorry, Druce,” I said, trying to look repentant. “It must have been the bus. Motion sickness, and so forth.”
“Oh, you poor kid!” Jumbo said. “I’m sorry. I thought you were just clowning around. Honestly.”
This was even better than I’d expected. Sympathy and an apology to boot.
I waved off her words gracefully and set off on unsteady legs for the closest tree trunk.
“Go with her, Scarlett. Fetch her a cold drink. There’s a canteen in the bus.”
And so it came to pass that Scarlett and I found ourselves propped comfortably under an elm watching the others clean up the contaminated condensation trap.
Which goes to show that the old saying is true: that just when things seem blackest, things often turn out for the best: the darkness before the dawn, et cetera.
“Now, then,” I said, “tell me about Brazenose.”
Scarlett was still gaping a little. “You’re astonishing,” she said.
“No more so than you, Amelia,” I told her, realizing even as I spoke that, since my arrival at Miss Bodycote’s, she was the only person I had dared address by her given name.
“It was you and your apoplexy that suggested it to me,” I said. “No! Don’t laugh—they’ll be on to us.”
Scarlett replied by moistening her handkerchief and dabbing with great concern at my supposedly overheated brow.
“You fraud!” she said in a low but scandalized whisper as she added a sheen of counterfeit sweat to my forehead.
“About Brazenose—” I reminded her. “Feed me the facts.”
“I saw her last night.”
She paused to let the effect of her words sink in.
“Saw her? I thought she disappeared? I thought Miss Fawlthorne—or someone—murdered her. I thought she was dead.”
“So did I,” Scarlett said. “And so did everyone else.”
For a few seconds, my mind felt like one of those fence posts you see in the news photos: posts impaled by flying straws in a tornado as easily as if they were pincushions—the sheer power of the impossible.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Of course I’m sure,” Scarlett said, giving me the ghost of a dirty look. “I’d know her anywhere.” She said this with such certainty that I knew she was speaking the truth.
“Where was this?” I asked. “And when?”
“Last night. Just after study. She was coming out of the laundry.”
Good lord! This was like something out of one of Daffy’s Victorian chillers, The Lady in White or something—the specter briefly glimpsed which then promptly vanishes.
I seized Scarlett’s wrist and stopped her dabbing at my forehead, an action which had now become so mechanical that it seemed more likely to attract attention than to deflect it.
“Tell me,” I said. “From the beginning. Don’t leave anything out.”
Fifty yards away, the two groups of girls had combined into one, and having filled in the corrupted condensation pit, were now, under Jumbo’s supervision, rather lethargically digging another.
At the top of the embankment, Miss Moate had vanished from sight.
“It was just getting dark,” Scarlett said. “I remembered I had left my hockey stick in the grass behind the net. Miss Puddicombe would be furious if I let it warp.”
The very thought of the hatchet-faced games mistress made me shiver, in spite of the sunshine, which was now creeping under the tree as if to be with us.
“I had just come back across the field and was going round that bit of wall that sticks out beside the laundry, when the door opened. It was just dark enough that I saw the light thrown out onto the gravel path—and someone’s shadow. I ducked back before she could see me. But it was Clarissa Brazenose—I’m sure of it.”
“How could you tell, if she was no more than a silhouette?”
“I’d know her anywhere,” Scarlett said. “Besides, she turned toward the light as she turned to switch it off, and I had a good look at her face. Honest.”
Scarlett scratched a cross-my-heart promise on her blouse, and I believed her.
“And then?”
“She hurried round the laundry and into that little stone passageway beside the kitchen. It goes clear through to the street.”
“Yes, I know,” I said. “Did you follow her?”
“Of course I didn’t!” Scarlett scoffed. “I didn’t want to be caught, remember? Besides, I was petrified. I thought I’d seen a ghost.”
Here it was: ghosts again. The haunted convent.
“Do ghosts switch off lights behind themselves?” I asked. “Do they even need to turn them on?”
“Ha ha! Very clever, Miss Flavia de Luce. I told you this because your mother was supposedly such a brain. I thought you might be, too, but I can see that I was wrong. I wasn’t expecting you to poke fun at me.”
“I’m not poking fun,” I reassured her. “I was merely thinking aloud. Don’t be so touchy—I’m trying to help.”
We were silent for a moment, each of us licking her invisible wounds. On the one hand, I did not like having Harriet slighted—not even obliquely—but on the other, I could sympathize with Scarlett, who, like me, had probably been bundled up and shipped off to school without so much as a “Fare-thee-well-and-mind-the-flypaper.”
We were a couple of tender souls tossed together into a cement mixer.
“Look,” I said, taking a chanc
e and hoping I wouldn’t regret it later. “We’re a team, you and I.”
I thought, just for an instant, of my other so-called partner, Adam Sowerby, even though I had never actually agreed verbally to a partnership with him. Adam was too secretive and, let’s face it, too old to be trusted fully. At
this very moment, he would be poking round some moldy, ivied ruin of an English castle pretending to be searching for seeds, yet all the while prying into Lord Somebody-or-another’s activities during the war, and all for some dark master whose identity he refused to reveal, even though it could well be, in fact, my own aunt Felicity.
Complicated?
I should say so. Just the thought of it drove me crazy.
Scarlett did not reply. But what she did was this: She reached for my hand and gave it a coded squeeze: one … two … (pause) … three … just like that.
And so the deal was sealed.
“Now, then,” I said. “About Clarissa Brazenose—when did you see her last? Apart from last night, I mean.”
“It was the night of the Beaux Arts Ball, so it must have been June, the year before last. I’m quite sure of that because I was wearing my Cinderella dress with short sleeves and long gloves. I remember thinking how odd I must look creeping round the hockey pitch in that getup. Not that many people would see me, of course—not with the ball going on, and not with it being after dark. It must have been well after nine: twenty past, perhaps.”
“The Beaux Arts Ball?” I asked.
“It’s a tradition. Everyone comes to it. Faculty, staff, students, the board of guardians. Even some of the parents come as chaperones. They hand out prizes for deportment and stuff like that. I got one for washing and ironing.”
“You’re joking.”
“No, I’m not. I’ll show it to you some time if you don’t believe me. It’s a little silver-plated mangle.”
“Thank you, but no,” I said. “I’ll take your word for it. Do you mean you saw Brazenose at the same spot last night as you did two years ago, just before she vanished?”
Scarlett nodded, biting her lower lip.
“But listen—why would Brazenose be in the laundry after dark? Two years ago, I mean. Why wasn’t she at the ball?”
