“Am I?” she asked, her eyes huge and damp. “Then what about Le Marchand? What about Wentworth? What about Brazenose?”
“Surely they can’t all have vanished without a trace,” I said. “Someone would have noticed.”
“That’s just the thing!” Collingwood said. “No one did. I’ve been making notes. Pinkham caught me at it. She ripped the book out of my hands and took it to Miss Fawlthorne.”
“When was this?” I asked.
“Last night. Do you think they’re going to kill me?”
“Of course not,” I said. “People don’t do things like that. Not in real life, at any rate.”
Although I knew perfectly well that people did. And, in my own experience, more often than you’d think.
“Are you sure?” Collingwood asked.
“Positive,” I lied.
“Promise you won’t tell,” she whispered.
“I swear,” I said, for some unfathomable reason making the sign of the cross in the air.
Collingwood’s brow wrinkled. “Are you an RC?” she asked.
“Why?” I said, to stall for time more than anything. As a matter of fact, she had hit the nail on the head. Even though we appeared outwardly to be practicing Anglicans, we de Luces had been Roman Catholics since Rome was little more than seven picturesque hills in the Italian wilderness. The soul, Daffy says, is not necessarily where the heart is.
“As a matter of fact, yes,” I said.
Collingwood whistled through her teeth. “I thought so! We have next-door neighbors back home in Niagara-on-the-Lake—the Connollys?—they’re RCs, too. They make those same fiddles with their fingers that you just did. It’s the sign of the cross, isn’t it? That’s what Mary Grace Connolly told me. It’s a kind of magic. She made me promise not to tell. But listen! What are you doing here? Miss Bodycote’s is—”
“I know,” I interrupted. “So high Anglican that only a kitchen stool is required to scramble up into Heaven.”
Where had I heard that? I couldn’t for the life of me remember. Had Aunt Felicity told me? Surely it wasn’t Father.
“You mustn’t let on, though,” Collingwood said. “They’ll skin you alive.”
“We Catholics have been martyrs since the invention of the flame,” I said. “We’re quite accustomed to it.”
It was a snotty thing to say, but I said it anyway.
“Your secret’s safe with me,” Collingwood said, sewing her lips shut with an invisible needle and thread. “Wild horses couldn’t drag it out of me.”
The last sentence came out sounding like “Wye-oh oh-ffef goodem agim ow momee.”
“It’s not a secret,” I told her. “Actually, we’re quite proud of it.”
At that instant there was a terrific pounding at the door: a wood-splintering banging so loud that I almost kissed a kidney good-bye.
“Open up!” a voice demanded—a voice I had first heard only too recently, but one I knew too well.
It was Miss Fawlthorne.
“Turn out the lights!” Collingwood whispered.
“It’s no use,” I whispered back. “The door’s unlocked anyway.”
“No, it’s not. I locked it when I snuck in.”
She crept across the room on tiptoe and threw the switch. I blew out the candle, and we were plunged into darkness.
Well, almost. After a few seconds I could see that there was still a certain amount of light falling into the room from the street outside.
“What am I going to do?” she asked me. “We’re not allowed in others’ rooms after lights-out. I’ll be blacked.”
I looked round the room in the strange dim glow of the electric twilight. Other than the obvious bed and clothes-press, there was nowhere to hide, unless she could squeeze herself behind the wallpaper.
I’ll give Collingwood this, though—she was quick. With a single bound, she was on the hearth, crouching under the mantel, and somehow clawing her way upward. The last I saw of her was those long lizard-like legs, clad in black, standing tiptoe on the firedogs, then vanishing up the chimney.
I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.
Desperation is capable of wonderful things.
“Open up!” the voice said again. “I know you’re in there.”
Another knock—more thunderous than the last—shook the door. If the first one hadn’t awakened the entire academy, this one surely must have.
Dozens of girls must be sitting bolt upright in their beds, sheets pulled up to their chins, their eyes wide in the darkness.
The dead silence that followed was even more terrifying than the knock.
“Open this door at once!” Miss Fawlthorne demanded. “Or I shall have Mr. Tugg come up and take the hinges off.”
I padded across the room, gave the key a twist, and pulled the door open. “What is it?” I asked, blinking and rubbing at my eyes. “Is there a fire? I was asleep.”
“It’s no use, girl,” Miss Fawlthorne said. “The lights were on in this room. Someone was talking in here.”
“I was having a nightmare,” I told her. “I expect it’s being away from home, and so forth. I quite often talk in my sleep.”
“Do you indeed,” Miss Fawlthorne said. “And do you also switch on electric lights in your sleep?”
“No,” I said. “But I didn’t know where I was when I woke up. I was disorientated.”
It’s a bold girl who tries out a new word when she’s being grilled, but I was desperate. “Disorientated” was an excuse Daffy had once used when Father had caught her pinching Christmas pudding from the pantry.
“I was disorientated,” she had claimed, and Father had believed her. Actually believed her!
I shot a quick glance behind me as I switched on the electric light, and the room was bathed in a harsh glare.
“No lights!” Miss Fawlthorne said, reaching past my face and switching them off again instantly. “ ‘Lights-out’ means lights out, you stupid girl.”
That did it. As with Ryerson Rainsmith’s calling me a drowned rat, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. A week away from home and my list of people to poison was already up to two—three if you counted the insipid Dodo.
From somewhere about her person, Miss Fawlthorne produced a packet of paper matches. She struck one gravely and, without taking her eyes from mine, lit the candle. It was rather a neat trick of eye-hand coordination.
“Now, then,” she said, her gaze fixing me like a butterfly pinned to a card in a specimen box. “To whom were you talking?”
I could see that we were going to sit here until the sun came up or until I answered. It was obvious that Miss Fawlthorne was that kind of person.
“Myself,” I admitted, looking away. “I’m afraid I sometimes talk to myself when I’m upset. It’s one of my greatest faults. I’m trying to train myself not to do it.”
I was wasting my breath, and I knew it even before the words were out of my mouth.
Miss Fawlthorne was now looking round the room slowly, her head rotating like an owl’s. I wondered idly if, after a certain number of degrees, it would snap and fall off.
I rather uncharitably hoped that it did.
I didn’t dare glance at the fireplace. Doing so would surely give Collingwood away. I kept my eyes humbly on my feet.
“Look at me!” Miss Fawlthorne commanded, and I slowly lifted my gaze to meet hers.
I was on the verge of tears; I could feel it.
The next words out of her mouth shocked me to the core.
“Poor, dear, lonely, unhappy Flavia de Luce,” she said, lifting my chin with a forefinger and gazing fondly into my eyes with a wry smile.
What was I to think? She might as well have slapped my face. If she had, I’d have known how to handle it.
But this unexpected compassion caught me completely off guard. “Scuppered,” I believe is the nautical word. I didn’t know how to respond.
As I was raising my eyes to hers, my supernaturally acute hearing—a trait I had inherited from Harriet, my mother—detected a scraping noise in the chimney. Even without looking round, I knew that soot was falling into the hearth. To a trained ear, the sound is unmistakable.
Miss Fawlthorne—praised be all the saints!—had not noticed it. Her hearing apparatus was considerably older than mine and blunted by time.
I was offering up a silent prayer of thanks for my deliverance when there was a sudden rush of sound and cold air. Something came rocketing down the chimney and exploded into the room with a sickening thump.
The candle blew out and we were plunged instantly into darkness.
Miss Fawlthorne—and I must give her credit for this—had the candle burning again in seconds. She must still have had the matchbook in her hands.
Collingwood lay sprawled on the carpet, her face and hands as black as any Welsh coal miner’s, her open red mouth and white eyes giving her the appearance of some fiend who had just been vomited up out of the pit.
Beside her, what appeared at first to be a charred log was still rolling slowly toward us, unfurling as it came, like a roll of dropped lavatory paper, the sooty and discolored Union Jack in which it was wrapped.
I must state here that I have no fear whatsoever of being in a room in the dark with a corpse. In fact, quite the contrary. The little shiver I experience is one of excitement, not of fear.
As the bundle rolled, the skull became detached and tumbled to a stop at my feet.
At the core of the bundle was a blackened and desiccated human body, and I knew, even before it came to rest, that it had been dead for some time.
Quite some time.