As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust
Page 11
Why had I thought I’d ever find a quiet haven here?
Like a dark castle looming over a medieval village in a valley, an enormous boiler at the end of the single large room overshadowed the place, looming above the deep sinks, the scattered mangles and presses, the wringers and the sewing machines alike. The high roof was crisscrossed with steam pipes, all wrapped like mummies in eternal-looking bandages.
The air smelled of steam, soap, washing soda, and starch, their odors floating uneasily upon a faint background reek of scorched bedsheets.
A little woman in a gray uniform, with her grayish-red hair in a net, was busily sorting nightgowns into two piles.
So much for solitude. I needed to change my plans this very instant.
It had been ever so long since I had last made use of my “little girl lost” demeanor, and I must say that it was like pulling on a cozy old cardigan to arrange my face and body: shoulders slightly hunched (check), hands arranged in a wringing position (check), hair tousled (check), eyes rubbed a little to make them red and watery, then widened and set to shifting nervously from side to side (check), voice up half an octave: “Hello?” “Hello?” (check), toes turned in, knees together, a touch of the trembles: check, check, and check.
“Excuse me, please, Miss.” I put on my tiniest voice.
She paid me not the slightest attention.
I crossed the floor and tugged at her sleeve.
She leaped with surprising agility quite high into the air.
“Gaw blazes!” she shouted. “Who the dickens are you, and what the devil do you want?”
“Please, miss, I’m sorry,” I began.
“Spit it out! Who are you? What’s your name?”
“De Luce,” I told her. “Flavia. I’m in the fourth form.”
“I don’t care if you’re in the Forty-eighth Highlanders. You oughtn’t to be in here. You’re not allowed.”
“Please, miss, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve lost my best handkerchief. Miss Fawlthorne is going to kill me if I don’t find it. I think I left it in the pocket of my dressing gown.”
“Ha!” the woman said. “She thinks she left it in the pocket of her dressing gaywn, Sal. Did you hear that? Dressing gaywn, fancy!”
I hadn’t noticed the second woman, who was operating a steam pressing-machine in a brick alcove. Her round red face stared out of a cloud of hissing steam as if she were a bodiless head suspended in midair like the Wizard of Oz.
“Dressing gaywn!” she shrieked in a voice that told me she was the junior of the two. She was trying to impress her superior by laughing too loudly at her jokes.
I knew the type all too well.
“Dressing gaywn!” she shrieked again, gasping for breath, wrapping a wet strand of hair round her forefinger and tugging playfully at it as if it were the pin of a monster hand grenade.
For a fraction of a second, my hopes were up, thinking her head might explode. But no such luck.
“I expect she means ‘bawthrobe,’ Marge. Ask her if she means ‘bawthrobe.’ ”
Marge’s eyes rounded on me.
“Yes, please, miss,” I said. “She’s right: That’s what I meant.”
Marge’s tongue was rolling busily about inside her cheek, rooting out thoughts—or perhaps in search of something to eat.
“What color was it?” she demanded suddenly.
“Yellow and black,” I said. I remembered that some of the girls at Little Commons had been wearing their dressing gowns, all of them in the school colors.
“Yellow and black!” Marge hooted. “Listen to her, Sal! Yellow and black she says!”
Sal slapped her leg and pretended to be on the verge of apoplexy. “The hankie, dimwit, not the dressing gown—oh, I beg your pardon, bawthrobe is what I meant to say.”
“Please, miss, it was blue, miss,” I said. “Periwinkle blue.”
I would play along as if I were a serf in their little kingdom until—
“It’s blue, Sal. Think of it! A periwinkle blue hankie!”
“Well, la-di-da!” Sal said, mincing, and they were both off again in showy laughter.
It was obvious that the girls of Miss Bodycote’s didn’t often come to the laundry. Marge had said as much: We weren’t allowed.
All the better for my purposes.
When she had recovered somewhat from her hysterics, Marge stood staring into my eyes as if she could look clear through them into my very soul—as if she saw something that no other human being could see.
“Well, let’s just have a wee look then,” she said, softening suddenly. “What do you think, Sal, shall we have a wee look?”
“A wee look couldn’t hurt, Marge,” she said, drying her eyes on the corner of a long white tablecloth, “so long as it’s just this once.”
That did it. They were off again instantly into gales of laughter.
Marge tripped off to a large table half hidden by a partition, delicately holding up the hem of her skirt with dainty fingers, like a dairymaid who had not been given enough lines in a stage play. She and Sal began rummaging through a couple of canvas sacks, and although I couldn’t make out their words, I could hear the two of them exchanging low, tittering remarks.
I took advantage of the lull to look round the room.
Overhead, crisscrossed by metal walkways, pipes, tubes, ducts, and hoses ran everywhere in an intestinal tangle of water, steam, and air. From below, it seemed like a whole vast aerial world that simply cried out for exploration.
It was like standing in Captain Nemo’s submarine, or the belly of an iron whale.
Except for a large calendar advertising Maple Leaf soap flakes, and a board with a row of nails, which was partially hidden behind the door, the whitewashed walls were oddly bare. Upon the nails hung three keys, each attached to a wooden disc by a silver ring.
One of these was crudely marked in ink with the initial “M,” another with the letter “S.”
The third key’s disc, worn smooth and oil-stained, bore an almost illegible “K.”
I pocketed it without a moment’s hesitation, reasoning that those marked “M” and “S” belonged to Marge and Sal. The third key obviously belonged to a person with dirty hands: not someone who worked all day with their hands in soap.
A caretaker, probably: a jack-of-all-trades whose name began with “K”—“Keith,” possibly.
No, not Keith: A caretaker would never be addressed as an equal, and certainly not by the likes of Miss Fawlthorne. The “K” must be a surname.
So it couldn’t be Mr. Tugg, the handyman, for obvious reasons.
Kennedy, perhaps, or Kronk … or Kopplestone.
But it was useless to speculate.
At any rate, I knew that if I pinched Marge’s key, or Sal’s, it would be missed before the end of the day, while with any luck, the third one might just belong to someone who took it only when needed, and even then, only occasionally.
It was a risk I would have to run.
“No hankies,” Marge said suddenly at my elbow, startling me. “Periwinkle blue or otherwise. So buzz off.”
Buzz off?
It was obvious that whatever milk of human kindness had flowed briefly in the woman’s veins had evaporated as quickly as it had appeared.
The more I dealt with adults, the less I wanted to be one.
“Thank you anyway,” I said. “I’m sorry to have bothered you. And now, I mustn’t keep you from your nightshirts and knickers.”
And I marched out the door with my head held high.
“Yoo-hoo! Flavia,” a voice called. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
It was Van Arque, of course. She was sitting like Humpty Dumpty on the short stone wall that shielded the wash yard from the hockey field, kicking her heels.
“Ah!” I said. “The ubiquitous Van Arque.”
“Ubiquitous” was another word I had picked up from my sister Daffy, and it meant someone who was always everywhere, and not in a nice way, either.
By the time I reached the chemistry laboratory, my heart was pounding like a pile driver. What could the notorious Mrs. Bannerman want with me?
“Come in, Flavia,” she called as I hesitated at the door, trying to catch my breath.
Did she possess some kind of supernatural antennae with which she had detected my presence?
I shuffled into the lab, doing my darnedest not to gape at the wonderful equipment with which the room was filled. The electron microscope and the hydrogen spectrophotometer lurked in my peripheral vision like great dark gods that must not, on any account, be looked at—not even glanced at—directly.
“Come in, Flavia,” she repeated, patting the seat of a tall lab stool.
I climbed up onto it and tried to settle myself. Mrs. Bannerman remained standing.
“Well, what do you make of us so far?” she asked.
I couldn’t think of an answer, so I shrugged.
“It’s like that, is it?” She laughed.
In the presence of this poisoner—yes, I’m afraid that’s the way I thought of her, acquitted or not—I had been struck dumb. Words died in my throat as if they had been steeped in belladonna and perished in my craw.
It was mortifying. I had never in my life, so far as I could remember, been stuck for words. It was as unlikely as if the Atlantic was stuck for water. And yet—
Mrs. Bannerman threw out a lifeline. “I’ve had a little talk with Miss Fawlthorne,” she said, “and we have come to the conclusion that it would be beneficial to admit you to chemistry classes.”
What!
“In spite of the fact that you are, technically, only a fourth-former.”
Were my ears deceiving me? Chemistry classes, had she said?
I must have looked like a haddock, my mouth opening and closing with nothing coming out but air.
“But—” she went on.
Crikey! There’s always a “but,” isn’t there? As sure as there’s bones in a blowfish breakfast.
“But—your admission will depend on your ability to pass a proficiency test. Miss Fawlthorne tells me that she has already given you a written assignment, the result of which she has not yet evaluated. She has left it to me to administer the oral component.”
I gulped. Coming from someone with Mrs. Bannerman’s history, these were strong—perhaps even deadly—words.
“Are you ready?” she asked brightly.
I nodded, still stricken for words.
“Very well,” she said, “now, then—”
I held my breath. In the great silence that followed, I could hear the wheels of the universe turning.
“Emil Fischer,” she said suddenly. “What can you tell me about him?”
“Professor of chemistry at Erlangen, Würzberg, and Berlin,” I blurted. “He won the Nobel Prize in 1902.”
“And?”
“He was a genius! He demonstrated that the rosaniline dyes were derived from triphenylmethane.”
“Yes?”
“He was the first to work out the formula for caffeine and uric acid. He synthesized fructose and glucose, and demonstrated the way in which the formulae of the stereo-isomeric glucoses could be deduced, which confirmed independently van’t Hoff’s theory of the asymmetric carbon atom, and opened the way to a study of fermentation: decomposition!”
“Go on.”
Go on? I was just getting started.
“He also discovered how the chemical reactions of proteins worked in living organisms, and how caffeine, xanthine, hypoxanthine, guanine, uric acid, and theobromine all shared the same nitrogenous parent substance, purine.”
“Theobromine?”
“C7H8N4O2. Its name means Food of the Gods.”
“Is that all?”
I wanted desperately to mention the fact that Emil Fischer’s father had once said, of his son, “The boy is too dumb to be a businessman; he should go to school,” but I didn’t want to push my luck.
“Well,” I admitted, with a sheepish grin, “I have his signed photograph stuck to my dressing table, back home in England. He was a great friend of my late Uncle Tarquin.”
Mrs. Bannerman smiled as she reached out and touched my hand. “You’ll do, Flavia de Luce,” she said.
• ELEVEN •
SO THERE IT WAS. From now on, I would be taking regular chemistry classes with the fifth and sixth forms. A tricky schedule had been worked out which would allow me, with a certain amount of sprinting, to get from class to class by the skin of my teeth. It was like embarking upon a long railway journey with changes at every station and only seconds to spare between trains.
“You’ll manage,” Mrs. Bannerman had told me, and she was right.
As the days went on, I found myself actually looking forward to the mad dash between classes. In some vague and inexplicable way, it made me feel wanted.
My presence was required here, now, at this very moment, and then, suddenly, it was required somewhere else, and off I would bolt.
Van Arque had begun referring to me as “Lightning de Luce,” but I did not encourage it. “School nicknames stick like shite to a shoe,” Daffy had once told me. “There are old men being loaded into their coffins even as we speak, whose friends, up until yesterday, still called them ‘Icky’ or ‘Toodles’—or ‘Turnips.’ ”
I remembered that Shakespeare had once written “That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet,” but even the Great Bill himself must have forgotten the cruel and indelible labels that could be attached by fellow students. I couldn’t help wondering what his own schoolmates had called him. “Quilliam”? “Shakey”?
Or even worse.
This is what I was thinking as I stood on my head in bed, my heels against the wall. I had discovered almost by accident that an inverted posture improved my thought processes because of increased blood circulation to my brain.
The few times I had to myself were those precious hours of darkness between awakening and having to get up: the only hours when I could luxuriate in being alone.
I had not forgotten the body in the chimney. It was simply that there had been no time to think about its blackened bones and clutching fingers, at least until now.
Somewhere in the recesses of my brain, a memory was shaken loose and fell with a “clunk!” into my consciousness.
The metal medallion! I had taken it from the corpse’s hand and shoved it into my pocket.
I let my legs fall and flipped out of bed onto the floor. I reached carefully into the right jacket pocket of my school uniform, which I had left hanging—against the rules—on the back of a chair. Thank heavens Miss Fawlthorne was not here to see it.
The pocket was empty. I checked the other.
Nothing.
But wait! When the body had come tumbling out of the chimney, I was wearing the outfit in which I arrived in Canada: skirt, blouse, and jumper.
It was hanging in the cupboard.
I held my breath as I dipped my hand into the folds of my former clothing.
Thank heavens!
In an instant the little object was resting tightly in the palm of my hand.
Almost without thinking, I switched on the forbidden light. When I realized what I had done, I listened intently, putting my near-supernatural hearing to the utmost test. But the house was quiet as a country crypt. Not a creature was stirring, and so forth.
Except me.
In my hand was an object no bigger than the first joint of my thumb.
A magnifying lens would have been a godsend, but alas, alas!, I was lensless. Perhaps I could improvise with a pinhole punched in a piece of paper …
But wait! I’d almost forgotten. Hadn’t Aunt Felicity given me that utility crucifix? A veritable Swiss Army knife of prayer? The very tool I needed—and it was hanging round my neck!
As I reached for it,
I offered up a prayer of thanks to Saint Jerome, the patron saint of spectacles.
I flicked out the pivoted glass and examined the object I was now holding gingerly between thumb and forefinger. I knew at once from its tarnished surface that it would require special handling. It would have to wait until I was alone in the chemistry lab and able to analyze it at my leisure.
The thing had a face, though—that much I could tell. And wings!
Yes—it looked very much like a wrapped body. It brought to mind the famous statue we had seen at St. Paul’s, of John Donne, its onetime dean, who was believed to have posed for it in his shroud on his deathbed. It was also said to be the only one of the cathedral’s statues that had survived the Great Fire of 1666. Even now, after nearly three hundred years, some of the soot smudges were still visible.
And like poor Donne’s effigy, this little winged figure had been subjected to heat.
Coincidence?
I surely hoped not.
I was so intent upon peering through the magnifying glass that I did not hear the door open. I had forgotten to lock the blasted thing.
I did not know Miss Fawlthorne was there until she spoke.
“What is the meaning of this?”
She said it in the same, slow, cold, slippery, sinister tones that the snake must have used when speaking to Eve in the Garden of Eden.
With lightning reflexes, I slid the medallion into the pocket of my dressing gown and wrapped it in the depths of my handkerchief.
“What have you got there?”
“Nothing, Miss Fawlthorne.”
“Nonsense! What is it? Hand it over.”
It was an all or nothing moment: the moment of truth, as bullfighters call it.
Or, in my case, the moment of untruth.
“Please, miss, phlegm,” I said, pulling the handkerchief from my pocket and holding it out for her inspection. I arranged my features into a look of embarrassment. “I think I’ve caught rather a bad chill.”
As added insurance I brought up from the very depths of my gizzard a convincing cough, and spat an imaginary substance into the crumpled handkerchief.