by Alan Bradley
“Hold on,” Jumbo said. “It isn’t all medals, you know.”
“No,” I said, “but it’s a start. Solid academic work—science and so on—and a bag of medals ought to give me a chance. Scarlett told me she won one for washing and ironing.”
“Do you want to spend your days like she did, hanging around with a ticket of leave for the laundry pinned to your blazer?”
“Well, no,” I said, meaning yes. “But I thought you might give me some ideas on what prizes are available. I’m afraid I’m not much good at sports, but I’m rather keen on chemistry and religion.”
Religion was a bald-faced lie, but it paid off.
“Ha!” Jumbo exclaimed. “Well, if it’s theology you fancy, you’ve come to the right place. Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy is so High Church that—”
“Only a kitchen stool is required to scramble up into Heaven,” I finished. “Yes, I heard that somewhere.”
“There’s the Bishop’s Medal for New Testament studies, the Tanner Award for a paper on the Old Testament prophets, the Saint Michael for church history, the Daughters of Mary for proficiency in elementary Greek and Latin, and the Hooker for hermeneutics.”
“Good lord!” I said, and we both laughed.
“No one goes in for them much anymore. The Hooker hasn’t been handed out since Miss Bodycote’s day. But if theology’s your game, washing and ironing won’t give you much of a leg up.”
“No, I suppose not. Have you won any of those?”
Jumbo snorted. “Not on your Nellie. Hockey’s more my line. I want to win something you can drink champagne out of.
“Or at least beer,” she added.
“No silver cup for the Saint Michael?” I asked, with just a hint of jollity.
“Fat chance,” she said. “An inscribed Bible for most of them, and for the Saint Michael, a lump of silver on a string.”
“When was that one last handed out?”
Her face went deliberately blank. Oh! for the power to read minds.
“Two years ago,” she said. “Listen, I have to dash. I promised Kingsbury I’d help restring the nets. Don’t want to keep her waiting too long—it’s a filthy job.”
“Right, then, cheerio,” I said. “Oh, by the way,” I added, “who won it? The Saint Michael, I mean. I thought I might ask her for a few pointers—a bit of coaching.”
Jumbo’s face was suddenly shadowed as if by scudding clouds: a dozen shades in as many agonizing seconds.
“No use,” she said at last. “She’s gone.”
“Was her name Clarissa Brazenose, by any chance?” I wanted to ask, but I somehow managed to keep from blurting it out.
“Have to dash,” Jumbo said, cutting short the interview.
When she had left the room I took a deep breath. Had I given myself away? Had I been too anxious? Had my little act been credible?
I drifted toward the window, meaning to watch Jumbo emerge onto the hockey field. As I did so, something on the table caught my eye.
A letter. A letter with a British stamp—addressed to me.
The handwriting was unmistakable.
I tore it open and yanked the folded sheets from the envelope.
But something stopped my hand.
This was not a letter to be read in an airless room. It needed to be taken into the open air and read under an open sky. It needed to be savored, its every word read again and again, committed to memory, and tucked away somewhere close to my heart.
I went slowly down the back stairs, probably in Jumbo’s very footsteps. She must have brought the letter to my room and forgotten to mention it.
The mail at Miss Bodycote’s was tucked into an array of little pigeonholes in a cubicle near the telephone. At mail call, Fitzgibbon, having put on a pair of flannel over-sleeves and a green visor, would take up her position as postmistress and, from behind her makeshift wicket, hand out to each girl any letters or parcels that had been received.
There was generally no shortage of mail. The girls of Miss Bodycote’s seemed well supplied with parents who showered them with newsy notes, postcards from exotic lands, and fat hampers full of vaguely forbidden fruits, sweets, jams, and crackers.
I, to date, had received nothing. After queuing day after day at the wicket, and being turned away each time letter-less, I had simply given up waiting. It was painfully obvious, not just to me but to the population of the entire school, that no one on this particular planet gave a rat’s whisker for Flavia de Luce.
As I rounded the corner of the laundry, I could see Jumbo in the distance, strolling toward the nets. Kingsbury’s welcoming voice came booming jovially across the grass.
I changed direction at once and made my way back to the little courtyard where illicit smoking was, if not permitted, at least overlooked.
It was blessedly empty.
I sat down on a wooden bench and pulled the letter from its place beside my heart, and with trembling hands unfolded the pages.
Buckshaw
October 7, 1951
Dear Miss Flavia,
I trust this missive finds you well, and that Canada is living up to your expectations. One seldom thinks of that vast Dominion without thinking of Crippen, the notorious poisoner and homeopathic doctor, who made his home there briefly; or of Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, that poor, doomed graduate of McGill College who dispatched his victims on both sides of the Atlantic with chloroform. Not forgetting, of course, Dr. William King (another homeopath, one must note), who was dropped through the trap not many miles from where I expect you shall be reading this letter.
But enough pleasantries.
Dear old Dogger! I could picture him seated in the fading light at the desk in the window of his little room at the top of the back stairs, bent over his paper, his fountain pen forming those neat characters, each of which, in its simple but elegant shape, put my own crabbed scribblings to shame. I vowed to begin a course of regular exercises in penmanship before the sun went down. So help me.
Dogger went on:
Gladys, you will be happy to hear, is basking in her new coating of winter oil. I have taken the liberty of applying graphite to her gears and giving her lamp a brisk buffing. With her seat covered by an old silk scarf, she looks remarkably like our own dear Queen Elizabeth.
My time in these dwindling days is much devoted to sowing sweet peas and dividing rhubarb crowns: the bitter and the sweet, so to speak. The garden in autumn, although somewhat somber, is full of hope for the year to come.
Mrs. Mullet asks to be remembered, and wishes me to convey to you the fact that Esmeralda has adapted admirably to her new home in the kitchen garden, and has become a wonderful “layer-on-of-eggs” as Mrs. M expresses it.
We remember you often, and trust you do the same of us.
Yours faithfully,
Arthur Dogger
Postscript: Miss Undine has insisted I enclose a short note, which I am not permitted to read. I do so, but with little real joy.
AD
I turned to the second sheet. Different paper … different handwriting. The mad, electric scrawl of a junior Genghis Khan.
Ha! I hope youre happy, Flavia. I expect you dont miss us as much as we dont miss you. Aunt Felicity says youre being finished off in Canada, and I hope shes right. That was a joke.
Your sister Ophelia pretends to like me but I know she doesnt. I can tell by the way she cant look me in the eye. Daphne is all right except for her books. I shouldnt be a bit surprised if her eyes fell out and rolled across the page fell onto the floor rolled across the room and down the hall and out the door and over the hills and far away. I wouldnt even fetch them back for her.
Yesterday I identified a Great Spotted Cuckoo (Clamator glandarius) near an old starlings nest in the little wood east of the Visto. Although it is rare in these parts it made me think of you and I said as much to Dogger. That was a joke.
I have worked out from the atlas that you are exactly three thousand five hundred and five miles from B
uckshaw. Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!
Love from your blighted cousin
Undine de Luce
I didn’t realize how much her words affected me until a tear plopped onto the page and made the indelible pencil run purple.
The nerve! The bloody nerve!
Since Undine had been left by her lethal and recently deceased mother, Lena, to be brought up at Buckshaw—“the kindness of strangers” as Daffy remarked—I suppose I should have felt more charitable toward her.
But I did not.
The very thought of the despicable Undine sucking up to Dogger made my heart peel. The thought of her racing through my hallways, poking into my rooms, and breathing the dusty air that was rightfully mine was unbearable.
It was agony.
Still, she had at least taken the time to write, hadn’t she? Whereas Feely and Daffy hadn’t.
Nor had Aunt Felicity.
Nor Father.
It was quite clear, as I had known from the outset, that I was an outcast.
A sudden and unexpectedly cool wind caught several dead leaves and made them scuttle across the walkway with the chill grating sound of old bones stirring in their moldy coffins in some forgotten underworld.
What use to them was the Archangel Michael, when a thousand times ten thousand archangels couldn’t keep a single one of them from turning into rancid green moss?
More to the point: What use was he to me?
Or anyone else.
It was at that moment that I began to question my faith.
“I hope I’m not intruding.”
I looked up to find Mrs. Bannerman staring at me in rather an odd way, her head cocked to one side, as if she were examining my soul.
Sitting there among the scuttering autumn leaves with a tear-stained letter in my lap, I must have looked to her like Roxanne in the last act of Cyrano de Bergerac.
I crumpled the page and crammed it into my blazer pocket.
“News from home?” she asked.
I put on a grim smile and shrugged.
“It sometimes happens,” she said, “that a letter from home can seem to be from another world … as if it had come from Jupiter.”
I nodded.
“Is there anything in particular troubling you? Anything I can do to help?”
I thought long and hard before answering.
“Yes,” I said. “You can tell me what happened to Clarissa Brazenose.”
• NINETEEN •
HAD THE AIR BECOME suddenly too thick to breathe, or was it just my imagination?
Mrs. Bannerman and I stared at each other, our eyes locked, each of us unwilling—or unable—to be the first to look away.
Had I been too bold and overstepped? I knew from experience that was most likely to happen when you were most unsure of yourself.
How incredibly young Mrs. Bannerman looked in that long moment! With her hair coiled in neat, businesslike ropes, and her tastefully applied lipstick (practically invisible, as lipstick ought to be, especially when worn in defiance of regulations), she seemed, as I had noted that first day at breakfast, no older than my sister Feely. Hard to believe that this cool and composed young woman had been tried and acquitted for murder.
Then suddenly she spoke. The spell was broken. “Tomorrow morning,” she said. “Early. The usual time and place.”
And with that, she was gone.
I couldn’t sleep. The hours passed like semiliquid sludge, oozing blackly by in my darkened room. My mind, by contrast, was a racing blur of question marks: Why had we heard no news about the body in the chimney? Why had there been no reaction from the outside world?
Had the whole thing been swept under Miss Fawlthorne’s carpet? Had she somehow managed to derail Inspector Gravenhurst’s investigation?
Did it go, perhaps, even … higher?
Or was it all a waiting game? A cunning game of cat and mouse played out on some gigantic Canadian gaming board too vast for my comprehension?
Why had Miss Fawlthorne got into Ryerson Rainsmith’s car in the middle of the busy Danforth? Surely, if a board meeting had been planned away from the academy, he would have picked her up at the door of Miss Bodycote’s. Could it be that they hadn’t wanted to be seen? Was it possible they were having what Feely referred to as an “affaire d’amour,” and Daffy called “a fling”?
It seemed unlikely. I couldn’t imagine Dorsey Rainsmith allowing her trained-flea husband off his invisible gold-hair harness long enough to get up to any hanky-panky.
I must admit that I didn’t know in any great detail how a dalliance was conducted, but I had heard enough by keeping my ears open to build up a fairly good—and actually quite startling—idea.
Worse yet was the thought that the two of them might be bound, not by love or icky passion, but by conspiracy.
Knee-deep, I waded on through this dark tide of ideas until I staggered up onto a rocky beach and found myself standing on the west lawn of Buckshaw.
It was night, and a chill wind whickered through the bare branches like phantom horses champing upon phantom hay. Except for a single light at the window of Father’s study, the house was in darkness.
I crept a little closer, taking care, for some peculiar reason, to keep out of sight.
Father sat hunched over his desk, his eyes blinkered by his two raised hands. Across from him sat a figure in black whose face I could not see. Between them, on the desktop, was a chessboard.
As I looked on from the shadows, my heart began to accelerate slowly, as if somewhere in the engine room of my intestines, some huge and unseen hand had taken hold of a large brass lever marked Speed, and was with great deliberation shoving it firmly forward.
The figure in black reached out and repositioned one of the pieces on the board. It seemed to be a girl in a dark costume and a panama hat.
His eyes dripping pain, Father glanced up at his adversary. After what felt like a very long time, but was in actuality only a few seconds, because of the way time is stretched like putty in dreams, his hand went out—each heartbreaking, vulnerable hair on the back of it clearly visible—and seized upon a silver figure which he slid shakily forward.
And I saw that the silver figure in Father’s hand was the Archangel Michael and the pale girl in the dark school uniform was me.
I wanted to cry out but I was unable.
As if he had heard my silent scream, Father turned his face toward the window and fixed his sunken eyes upon mine.
This time I did scream, and I awoke clinging desperately to the pillow as if it were a life preserver, my heart pounding away like some infernal machine.
Had anyone heard me?
I strained my ears, listening for the sound of creaking floorboards or approaching footsteps.
But Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy lay in silence and in darkness.
At that instant, the alarm went off, nearly causing a regrettable accident, but I seized it and thumbed the little lever to the Off position. The glowing face told me that it was three A.M.
Time to meet Mrs. Bannerman in the chemistry lab.
I groped my way to the basin where I picked the crusty crumbs from the corners of my eyes and gave my face a good scrubbing with the corner of a wetted towel.
There’s nothing like friction to bring on rosy cheeks at short notice. I didn’t want to look like death warmed up, as Mrs. Mullet is so fond of saying.
That done, I dressed and made my way silently down the stairs.
“Good morning,” Mrs. Bannerman said. She already had the tea steeping. “I heard your alarm.”
Had she? Or was there a hidden message in her words—a small rap on the knuckles, perhaps. I didn’t know, so I shrugged.
“I was awake before it rang,” I said. “But I couldn’t shut it off in time.”
“Didn’t shut it off in time.” She smiled.
It was going to be one of those days. I could already tell.
Once people have you in their power, it’s remarkable how quickl
y their grip extends to all things. At first, they are merely teaching you a bit of harmless geography, and the next thing you know they’re criticizing your posture or finding fault with your breath. I had noticed this about Miss Fawlthorne, and now here it was happening again with Mrs. Bannerman.
My automatic response to someone who has gone too far is to wrap myself in a cloak of coolness. Throughout history the cold blue de Luce eye has stopped many an overstep and many a runaway horse.
Mrs. Bannerman laughed. “It’s no use, Flavia,” she said. “It’s simply no use. You look like someone whose crypt has been invaded by grave robbers. I’m sorry, but you do.”
I felt my face hardening into an icy and involuntary smile.
“Your success here will depend greatly upon your ability to control your personal kinesics: what the experts are now beginning to call body language.”
I’m afraid my curled lip gave me away.
“You see? You need to master the poker face. There might come a time when your life depends upon it.”
“In case someone asks me to marry him, you mean.”
I don’t know where the words came from. There are times when the gods (or devils) choose to amuse themselves by speaking through our mouths, and this was one of them.
I hadn’t even remotely been thinking about marriage—not for myself nor for anyone else of my acquaintance—but out it popped.
“Precisely,” Mrs. Bannerman said. “I’m glad you understand.”
She gave me a smile which I could not decode: a smile in which she narrowed her eyes and raised only the corners of her mouth. What could it possibly mean?
I looked at her for further signals, but she was sending none.
And then it hit me with an almost physical force: approval. She had given me a look of approval, and because it was the first I had ever received in my life, I had not recognized it for what it was.
As when a match is applied to a dry log in the fireplace, a slow warmth began seeping through my whole being.
So this was what approval felt like! I could easily become an addict.
The thought of a fireplace reminded me of the one in Edith Cavell, and the bundle that had tumbled down it and into the room. And, of course, of the missing Clarissa Brazenose.
