As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (34 page)

“Flavia de Luce,” he said. “… from the academy.”

And there was something in the way he said it that put me on high alert.

A fugitive look flitted between them.

“Here,” Elvina said, taking the flowers from Merton. “Let me put these in a vase. They’re lovely.”

“Flavia brought them,” he said. “For my mother,” he added. “Most considerate.”

I hadn’t, of course, but I didn’t try to correct him. Credit is credit no matter how you slice it.

“Michaelmas daisies mean ‘Farewell,’ ” Elvina said, “and the chrysanthemums ‘Cheerfulness in Spite of Misfortune.’ You must have put a lot of thought into choosing them.”

I hung my head in bashful acknowledgment.

“We were just about to sit down for tea. Would you like to join us?”

I knew that she was fibbing: Merton was washing the car and she had barely begun baking something.

“Yes, please,” I said.

Merton pulled out a chair as if I were a lady, and we all sat—at least Merton and I did until Elvina boiled the kettle and joined us at the kitchen table.

Beginning a conversation is always difficult with three strangers who have nothing in common. The usual method is to start with the weather and hope for the best.

But I hadn’t the time. I would soon enough be missed at Miss Bodycote’s and a hue and cry sent up. I needed to get back to the lab for a crucial test. There was no time to waste.

“You’ve had a great deal of bereavement,” I said. “Your mother, Mr. Merton—and the first Mrs. Rainsmith.”

It was a bold thing to say, but I had to take a chance.

“A great deal,” Merton said. “A very great deal. This household has had its share of sadnesses.”

“It must have been an awful shock to you when
Mrs. Rainsmith drowned,” I said. “I mean, not that it wasn’t to Dr. Rainsmith, but he’s a medical doctor, isn’t he, and trained to cope with death. But poor you …”

I left the thought hanging in air.

Elvina gave me something of a sharp look, but Merton said, “Flavia’s mother died in April.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Elvina said. “Was it unexpected?”

“Yes and no,” I said. “She had been missing for ten years and her body was found in the mountain ice.”

“Oh! You poor lamb!” Elvina said. “You poor, poor lamb.”

And then, as if anxious to change the subject to something less tragic, no matter how little, she said: “It’s not that poor Mrs. Rainsmith’s death was
completely
unexpected, what with her being so ill before the accident.”

“Ill?” I asked, daring to say no more.

“Gastric trouble,” Elvina said. “Very bad. But she was a trouper. Never let it get in the way of her obligations.”

“Gosh!” I said. “You must have felt awful. It’s always the cook that—”

I cut my words off as if I had just realized what I was saying.

“You have no idea,” Elvina said. “Most people don’t appreciate the cook’s position. Gastric trouble is cook trouble. There’s always someone willing to point the finger.”

“So I suppose, in a way, it was a good thing that she drowned. I know that must sound awful, but—”

Elvina gave off a nervous laugh. It was time to get my feet on firmer ground.

“I know what you mean when you say she was a trouper,” I said. “She presented one of the awards at the Beaux Arts Ball the night she was taken ill, didn’t she?”

“Nothing to do with me!” Elvina said. “Bit of bad lobster at the ball. That’s what Dr. Rainsmith said. I never saw her again, so I wouldn’t know.”

“Never saw her again?” I leapt on her words like a hound on a bone.

“No, never. Dr. Rainsmith brought her home and had invalid soup sent over from the nursing home.”

“Did she eat it?” I asked.

“Must have. The bowls came down empty in the morning and she was off to the cruise on the second day.”

My veins were throbbing like plucked harp strings.

“Dr. Rainsmith must have been devastated,” I said. “Even though Miss Fawlthorne says that the second Mrs. Rainsmith was a great comfort.”

“I expect she was,” Elvina said, not looking at me. “Yes, I expect she was.”

There fell a great silence, and we all of us sat thinking our own thoughts, each of us cradling our teacups in our hands as if it were a family trait we shared.

For the first time in many weeks I felt at home. I could have stayed here forever in this cozy kitchen. I could have kissed the table and hugged the chairs, but of course I didn’t. Instead I offered up a little prayer of thanks to the Michaelmas daisies, and to Saint Michael himself who had brought me here.

“Can I run you home?” Merton asked. “I expect you’ll be wanting to get back, and it’s a long walk.”

How could I tell him that in my heart I was already at home—and that a ride to anywhere else would take me farther from it? That by departing I would be in some way diminished?

“Thank you, Mr. Merton,” I said. “I’d be much obliged.”

The streetlights were coming on as we drove along the Danforth.

“May I ask you a question?” I said.

“Of course, miss,” Merton said.

“What was Francesca Rainsmith wearing the night of the Beaux Arts Ball?”

Merton smiled, and then he laughed aloud. “A Cinderella costume,” he said. “Tattered gingham dress, apron, hair in a bandanna, Charlie Chaplin boots with red socks sticking out. She was ever so proud of the getup. One of the girls helped her make it. No more than a girl herself, Miss Francesca was. We miss her.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish I’d had the chance to meet her.”

We drove in silence for a while.

“How are you finding it?” Merton asked. “Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy, I mean?”

“Frankly, Mr. Merton,” I said. “Just between you and me and the gatepost—it’s a bugger.”

And I think by the look on his face that he knew what I meant.

Miss Fawlthorne was, as I knew she would be, livid.

In its proper sense, the word “livid” is used to describe
someone who is black in the face from strangulation, and I wasn’t far off. Her countenance was ghastly.

“Where have you been?” she demanded, her voice trembling.

“I went for a walk,” I said, which was true, as far as it went.

“The whole academy has been turned out looking for you—do you realize that?”

Of course I didn’t. I had only just come in the door.

“We thought you’d been abducted. We—”

She was suddenly speechless.

Why ever would they think that? Did they know something that I didn’t?

“I left a note on your desk,” I said, but realizing even as I spoke that Miss Fawlthorne was near tears, and that it was no time for childish games.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and left it at that. Of course I wanted to tell her about my worrying about Collingwood—my visit to the nursing home—my interview with Merton and Elvina.

But I didn’t. The time was not yet right. I needed more facts and more time to gather them.

“I’ll go to my room,” I said, saving her the trouble.

I lay on my bed reflecting upon (a) my wickedness and (b) the fact that I hadn’t eaten all day. Thank goodness for the box of biscuits I was buying on the hire-purchase plan from the grocer’s on the Danforth. I had borrowed the down payment from Fabian with the promise to repay, at twenty-five
percent interest, as soon as I received my first allowance from home, even though my hopes in that direction were beginning to fade.

Dogger’s letter was the only communication I had received from Buckshaw since my incarceration.

Dear Dogger.

I bit savagely into a cream cracker, willing myself to summon him up in spirit, if not in fact. I tried to picture the two of us, heads bent together over a bubbling beaker, nodding wisely as the liquid changed color and another neck was in the noose, but it was no use.

Magic doesn’t work when you’re sad.

I realized that I had been putting off a visit to the laboratory for that very reason, which came as something of a shock. I needed to deal with things head-on.

Someone had pinned a handwritten note to the door of the lab: ALL CHEMISTRY CLASSES CANCELED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

Underneath it, someone else had penciled
Praise be to St. Jude for prayers answered
, and someone else had written, in red ink, DOWN WITH CHEMS.

I looked both ways to make sure no one was coming, and slipped inside.

With the green blinds closed, and dusk out of doors, the room was in near darkness, which suited me to perfection. I would not easily be seen through the window in the door, or from the outside.

I turned on a low-powered light in an alcove and got to work.

Excited as I was, it was still necessary to follow the rules. I turned on the fan which would exhaust any fumes from the hood which covered the work area. More than one chemist in days gone by had, while conducting the Marsh test, sniffed at his apparatus and died in agony.

I pulled the silver medallion from my pocket. Fortunately I had remembered to wrap it in a bit of cellophane for protection before tying it back into a knot in my handkerchief.

As I set up the required glassware, I was possessed by the old familiar thrill. Like the vicar in the run-up to the consecration, I was about to witness a transformation at my very fingertips, to be glorified by the gods of chemistry.

The Marsh test is not only simple and elegant, but also the most theatrical of the chemical procedures. How many sleuths in fact and fiction have hunched tensely over that telltale flame?

It is that hushed moment just before the final curtain when all the world seems to hold its breath: the moment when nothing more than a tiny, flickering, and nearly invisible flame will either send the accused to the gallows or set him free.

It was James Marsh, the ordnance chemist of the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, who recognized that nascent (meaning newly generated) hydrogen, whenever brought into contact with any compound of arsenic and oxygen, will produce water and arseniuretted hydrogen, otherwise
known as arsine, an extremely poisonous gas with the chemical formula A
_S
H
₃
and the odor of garden-fresh garlic.

His test is so sensitive that it is able to detect as little as two parts in a million of arsenic.

These days, of course, the idea of newborn hydrogen having superior powers is generally pooh-poohed, and it is now believed that age does not wither its ability to finger a felon.

Oxygen is oxygen is oxygen they say, although Dogger, being old-fashioned, doubts this.

I dropped a bit of zinc into the bottom of the U-shaped tube, then filled it somewhat more than half full with sulfuric acid.

With a small twist of surgical cotton, I wiped off about a quarter of the shiny black tarnish from the medallion and dropped the swab into the left side of the tube, sealing it with a glass stopper. The swab began to char and turn black as it was carbonized by the sulfuric acid.

The zinc at once began to bubble in the acid. Hydrogen was being born!

And, if my hunch was right, arsine.

The stoppered right side of my U-shaped container led off through a slender glass tube which ended in an upturned tip.

I waited for about thirty seconds … lit a match … held it to the tip of the exhaust tube and …

Poof!

A flame … burning red, burning orange, burning blue …

I reached for an unglazed pottery dish, flipped it over, and held its underside to the flame, much as a freezing schoolboy home for the holidays holds his bottom to the family fireplace.

A circular dark patch began to form around the outer edges of the flame, brownish at first, but quickly turning black and shiny.

An arsenic mirror, in which, if I were any judge, the image of a murderer would soon be reflected.

This wasn’t the end of it by any means. First, I needed to place a few drops of sodium hypochlorite in solution on part of the newly formed mirror. If the sooty deposit was soluble, and vanished, it was arsenic; if it remained, it was arsenic’s cousin, antimony.

And then, of course, I needed to repeat the experiment with clean, uncontaminated glassware and a fresh and untreated swab. This would be my control, or reference, and should result in no formation of an arsenic mirror.

I leaned back from the little pool of light to think about what I had discovered: about what it would mean for me—and for several others. Once I made my findings known, Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy would never be the same again.

It was at that moment that a voice from out of the darkness behind me said: “Very clever.”

I
SPUN ROUND
,
MY
eyes only slowly adjusting to the darkened room.

From out of the shadows, a figure was moving slowly toward me.

It was Fabian.

“Very clever,” she said again as she came half into the light, and I could see the tight-lipped smirk on her pale face.

“How long have
you
been there?” I asked, trying to inject a touch of outrage into my voice.

“Longer than you,” she said, fishing a packet of cigarettes from her pocket and putting a match to one, then tossing her hair like French women in the cinema.

“You were expecting me, then,” I said, but other than blowing out a dismissive stream of smoke, she did not bother to reply.

“What made you think of the Marsh test?” she asked. “What made you think of arsenic?”

I shrugged. “Just a guess,” I lied.

“I’ll bet it was,” she said.

We could have stood there all night, I suppose, fencing with words, until one or the other of us decided to use something more deadly.

I saw my chance and I went for it. “But you already knew that, didn’t you—that it was arsenic.”

“Of course I did.” She smiled, taking a satisfied puff. “I was there when she swallowed it.”

“What?”

“The night of the Beaux Arts Ball, two years ago. I was there.”

I must have looked like a gaping loony.

“Some of us were asked to serve at table: Jumbo, Druce, Forrester, myself. A few of the faculty, as well: Miss Fawlthorne, Miss Moate, Mrs. Bannerman, Miss Dupont.

“It’s something of a tradition,” Fabian went on. “Meant to show up the democratic principles of the old hall—even if it’s only once a year.”