As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (17 page)

She didn’t say “Do you understand?” and I blessed her for that.

“Now then: At the top of your first page, write this name: Jean Pierre Mégnin.” She spelled it out for me
and made sure I got the accent leaning in the right direction.

“His two greatest works are
La Faune des Tombeaux
and
La Faune des Cadavres
. Roughly translated, that means
Creatures of the Tomb
and
The Wildlife of Corpses
. Sounds a bit like a double-bill horror movie, doesn’t it? Both are in French. Do you have any inkling of the language?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head sadly.

What had I been missing? How could such treasures exist in a language I was unable to read?

“Perhaps Miss Dupont could give me extra tutoring in French,” I blurted.

I could hardly believe that I was listening to my own mouth speaking!

“Excellent suggestion. I’m sure she would be, how do you say,
enchantée
?

“Now, then, pencil ready? Mégnin discovered that those creatures which feed and breed upon corpses tend to arrive in waves: In the first stage, when the body is fresh, the blowflies appear. In the second stage, the body bloats as it putrefies, and certain beetles are attracted. As full-blown decay sets in at stage three, and fermentation takes place, butyric and caseic acids are produced, followed by ammoniacal fermentation, at which point entirely different tribes of flies and beetles are attracted. Maggots proliferate. And so, as you will have deduced, it is possible, by studying the presence and life cycles of these various flying and crawling things, to work out with some precision how long the dearly departed has been dead and even, perhaps, where they have been in the meantime.”

Corruption? Putrefaction? Acids?
This woman was speaking my language. I may not know French, but I knew the language of the dead, and this conversation was one I had been dreaming of all my life.

I had found a kindred spirit!

My brain was all aswirl—like one of those spiral galaxies you see in the illustrated newsmagazines: sparks, flame, and fire fizzing and flying off in all directions—like a dizzying Catherine wheel on Guy Fawkes Night.

I couldn’t sit still. I had to get up from my chair and pace round and up and down the room like a madwoman simply to keep from exploding.

“Heady stuff, isn’t it?” Mrs. Bannerman asked.

She understood perfectly the tears in my eyes.

“I think we’ll call it quits for tonight,” she said with an elaborate stretch and a yawn to match. “I’m tired. I hope you’ll forgive me. We’ve made an excellent start, but you need your sleep.”

How I was dying to quiz her about Brazenose, Wentworth, and Le Marchand, but something was holding me back. Miss Fawlthorne had forbidden me to ask any of the girls about another, but did the same restriction apply to the teaching staff?

As both Mrs. Mullet and Sir Humphry Davy have said, “Better safe than sorry.”

And as for the little metal figure in my pocket—it would have to wait. I could hardly haul it out and begin heating it without a full confession of how I had come to have it in my possession.

Besides entomology, I was going to have to learn patience.

Back in my room, wrapped up in a blanket, I could not sleep. My head was filled with coffin flies, blowflies, maggots, and cheese skippers. The maggots were nothing new: I had thought of them often while dwelling on the delights of decomposition. Daffy had even read out to me at the breakfast table—“Knowing
your
proclivities,” she had said, smirking—that wonderful passage from
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, where one of the characters says, “These summer-flies have blown me full of maggot ostentation.”

It had caused Father to put aside his sausages, get up, and leave the room, but had given me a whole new appreciation of Shakespeare. Anyone who could write a line like that can’t be too much of a stick-in-the-mud.

Dear Father. What a sad life he’d had. What a rotten hand Fate had dealt him: a prisoner-of-war camp, the death of a young wife, a decaying pile for a house, three daughters, and no money to speak of.

With Buckshaw now mine—in theory at least—some of the entanglement in which we had lived for as long as I could remember should have begun to be sorted out. But Harriet’s will had raised at least as many questions as it had answered, and Father had been swept into the storm of legalities like a housefly into a tornado.

There had been some hope that a grateful government would intervene, and I had learned—thanks to my acute
hearing—that Father had spoken at length with Mr. Churchill on the telephone, and for a day or two, his face had seemed a little less ashen. But nothing seemed to have come of it.

“It’s exactly like
Bleak House
,” Daffy had said on another day when Father had left the table without finishing his breakfast. “They’ll still be jawing about the excise tax long after we all are in our graves with spiders nesting in our skulls.”

And then, of course, had come the day of my banishment: the day upon which I had truly become an exile. With England and Buckshaw now more than three thousand miles somewhere across the sea, I had no way of knowing my family’s fortunes.

I was alone in the wilderness.

And with that thought, I fell asleep.

Someone was chopping trees in the forest. A woodcutter, perhaps. If only I could summon the strength to scream …

But would he hear me? The noise of his ax was surely louder in his ears than any feeble cry that I might make. To make matters worse, a squadron of ships offshore had begun firing their cannon at some invisible enemy.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

I shoved my hands under the pillow to cover my head and banged my knuckles on a hard metal object. I hauled it out and held it up to my face.

It was the alarm clock, and its hands were pointing to twenty past eight. I had slept right through its ringing.

“Flavia! Open up.”

I toad-hopped from the bed to the door, unlocked it, and stuck my head out.

There stood Van Arque, staring at me as if I were an apparition.

“Better get a move on,” she said. “The Black Maria will be here in ten minutes.”

Black Maria? What on earth is she talking about?

“Oh, and incidentally,” she added, “you ought to know that you look like the wreck of the Hesperus.”

I flew about the room, scrubbing the taste of dead horses out of my mouth with toothpaste on my finger, raking the sticky grunge out of my eyes, giving my hair a lick and a promise with the hairbrush I had purloined from Harriet’s boudoir.

At last I was ready. Three minutes down and seven to go.

The bed had to be made upon pain of punishment, and what a mess it was: as if some madwoman in Bedlam had spent the night in it, tossing in a straitjacket.

Another three minutes.

As I stepped into the hall, the building fell suddenly silent, in the way the birds do in a wood that a hunter has entered.

I clattered down the stairs, making enough noise to raise the dead.

Miss Fawlthorne stood at the door, and as I approached, she swiveled and pointed with a long, forbidding finger to the outdoors, as if she were the ticket-taker for the ferryboat on the river Styx.

As if she had never seen me before.

An ominous vehicle stood in the driveway. I thought at first it was a hearse, but quickly realized that the thing was far too large. It was a bus: a matte-black bus with smoked windows and the heavy door standing open. It didn’t have “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” painted above the door, but it might as well have.

I put my foot onto the bottommost of the two steps but, because of the heavily tinted windows, and the fact that I was blinded by sunlight, I could make out no details of the gloomy interior.

“Hurry up, de Luce,” someone growled, from out of the shadows.

I climbed up, the doors hissed at my heels, and we jerked into motion.

I tottered to a seat, going mostly by the sense of feel. The driver shifted through a seemingly endless number of gears, until at last he settled upon one that displeased him the least. By the position of the sun through the windscreen, I judged that we were now traveling east.

As my eyes accustomed themselves to the gloom, I looked round at some of my fellow passengers. Van Arque sat opposite, two rows back, her nose pressed against the window. Behind Van Arque, Jumbo was examining her nails as intently as if they were lost Scripture. And at the back of the bus, in the middle of the aisle, was Miss Moate, the science mistress: the woman who had accosted me in the hall.

Her wheelchair was lashed to the seats on either side by

a network of belts so that she seemed to hang suspended like a spider lurking at the center of its web.

I looked away quickly, flexing my neck in a complex set of side-to-side stretches, as if I were merely working out a morning kink.

Aside from the laboring engine, which sounded to be making much ado about nothing—a characteristic shared, I have come to believe, by all buses everywhere—we rattled along quite briskly.

We had soon broken free of the suburbs and were making our way along a two-lane macadamized motorway which snaked easily between green fields dotted with cows and hay bales. If the truth be told, it wasn’t all that much different from England.

Electrical wires and telephone lines on both sides rose and fell … rose and fell … in long scallops, like the flight path of a determined woodpecker.

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.

W
E 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.