The Flavia De Luce Series 1-4 (24 page)

It had been a long day, and my eyelids felt as if they’d been used for oyster rakes.

“I think I’ll go to bed,” I said. “G’night, Feely. G’night, Daffy.”

My attempt at sociability was greeted with silence and a grunt. As I was making my way up the stairs, Dogger materialized suddenly above me on the landing with a candleholder that might have been snapped up at an estate sale at Manderley.

“Colonel de Luce?” he whispered.

“He is well, Dogger,” I said.

Dogger nodded a troubled nod, and we each of us trudged off to our respective quarters.

eighteen

Greyminster School lay dozing in the sun, as if it were dreaming of past glories. The place was precisely as I had imagined it: magnificent old stone buildings, tidy green lawns running down to the lazy river, and vast, empty playing fields that seemed to give off silent echoes of cricket matches whose players were long dead.

I leaned Gladys against a tree in the side lane by which I had entered the grounds. Behind a hedgerow, a tractor stood ticking idly, its driver nowhere in sight.

The voices of choirboys came floating across the lawns from the chapel. In spite of the bright morning sunshine, they were singing:

“Softly now the light of day
Fades upon my sight away—”

I stood listening for a moment until suddenly they broke off. Then, after a pause, the organ started up again, peevishly, and the singers went back to the beginning.

As I walked slowly across the grass of what I’m sure Father would have called “the Quad,” the tall blank windows of the school stared down at me coldly and I had the sudden queer feeling an insect must have when it’s placed under a microscope—the feeling of an invisible lens hovering, and something strange, perhaps, about the light.

Except for a single schoolboy dashing along and two black-gowned masters walking and talking with their heads together, the broad lawns and winding walkways of Greyminster were empty beneath a sky of deepest blue. The whole place seemed slightly unreal, like a grossly enlarged Agfacolor print: something you might see in one of those books with a name such as
Picturesque Britain
.

That limestone pile on the east side of the Quad—the one with the clock tower—must be Anson House, I thought: Father’s old digs.

As I approached it, I raised my hand to shield my eyes against the glare of the sky. It was from somewhere up there among the battlements and tiles that Mr. Twining had plummeted to his death on the cobbles below; those ancient cobbles which now lay no more than a hundred feet from where I was standing.

I strolled across the grass to have a look.

Disappointingly, there were no bloodstains. Of course there wouldn’t be, not after all these years. Those would have been washed away as soon as was decently possible—quite likely even before Mr. Twining’s broken body had been laid to whatever passed for rest.

Other than of their constant wearing down by two hundred years of privileged feet, these cobbles told no tales. Tucked tightly in along the stone walls of Anson House, the walk was scarcely six feet wide.

I threw back my head and gazed straight up at the tower. Viewed from this angle, it rose dizzily in a sheer wall of stone that ended far, far above me in a filigree of airy ornamental stonework where fat white clouds, drifting lazily past the parapets, created the peculiar sensation that the whole structure was leaning … falling … toppling towards me. The illusion made my stomach go all queasy, and I had to look away.

Worn stone steps led enticingly from the cobbled walk, through an arched entrance, to a double door. To my left was the porter’s lodge, its occupant huddled over a telephone. He did not even look up as I slipped inside.

A cool, dim corridor stretched away in front of me, to infinity it seemed, and I set out along it, lifting my feet carefully to keep from making scuffing noises on the slate floor.

On either side, a long gallery of smiling faces—some of them schoolboys and some masters—receded into the darkness, each one a Greyminsterian who had given his life for his country, and each in his own black-lacquered frame: “That Others Might Live,” it said on a gilded scroll. At the end of the corridor, set apart from the others, were photographs of three boys, their names engraved in red on little brass rectangles. Under each name were the words
Missing in Action.

“Missing in Action?” Why wasn’t Father’s photo hanging there? I wondered.

Father was generally as absent as these young men whose bones were somewhere in France. I felt a little guilty at the thought, but it was true.

I think it was at that moment, there in the shadowy hall at Greyminster, that I began to realize the full extent of Father’s distant nature. Yesterday I had been all too ready to throw my arms around him and hug him to jelly, but now I understood that yesterday’s cozy prison scene had not been a dialogue, but a troubled monologue. It had not been me, but Harriet to whom he was speaking. And, as with the dying Horace Bonepenny, I had been no more than an unwitting confessor.

Now, just being here at Greyminster where Father’s troubles had begun, it seemed all the more cold and remote and inhospitable a place.

In the gloom beyond the photos, a staircase led up to the first floor, and I climbed up it to a hallway which, like the one I had left below, also ran the length of the building. Although the doors on either side were closed, each one was fitted with a small pane of glass, which allowed me a peek into the room. They were classrooms, and all alike.

At the end of the corridor, a large corner room promised something more: A sign on its door read Chemistry Lab.

I tried the door and it opened at once. The curse was broken!

I don’t know what I was expecting, but I wasn’t expecting this: stained wooden tables, boring flasks, cloudy retorts, chipped test tubes, inferior Bunsen burners, and a colored wall chart of the elements containing a laughable printing error in which the positions of arsenic and selenium were interchanged. I spotted this at once and—with a nub of blue chalk from the ledge beneath the blackboard—took the liberty of correcting the mistake by drawing in a two-headed arrow. “WRONG!” I wrote beneath it, and underlined the word twice.

This so-called lab was nothing compared with my own at Buckshaw, and at the thought, my chest swelled with pride. I wanted nothing more than to bolt for home at once, just to be there, to touch my own gleaming glassware; to concoct the perfect poison just for the thrill of it.

But that pleasure would have to wait. There was work to be done.

Back outside in the corridor, I retraced my steps to the center of the building. If I had guessed accurately, I should now be directly under the tower, and the entrance to it could not be far away.

A small door in the paneling, which I had taken at first to be a broom closet, swung open to reveal a steep stone staircase. My heart skipped a beat.

And then I saw the sign. A few steps up from the bottom, a length of chain was draped across the steps, with a handprinted card:
Tower Off Limits—Strictly Enforced
.

I was up them like a shot.

It was like being inside a nautilus shell. The stairs twisted round and round, winding their narrow way upwards in echoing sameness. There was no possible way of seeing what lay ahead or, for that matter, what lay behind. Only the few steps immediately above and below me were visible.

For a while, I counted them in a whisper as I climbed, but after a time I found that I needed my breath to fuel my legs. It was a steep ascent and I was getting a stitch in my side. I stopped for a moment to rest.

What little light there was appeared to be coming from tiny slit windows, one positioned at each complete turn of the staircase. On that side of the tower, I guessed, lay the Quad. Still short of breath, I resumed my ascent.

Then suddenly and unexpectedly the staircase ended—just like that—at a little timbered door.

It was a door such as a dwarf might pop into in the side of a forest oak: a half-rounded hatch with an iron opening for a skeleton key. And, needless to say, the stupid thing was locked.

I let out a hiss of frustration and sat down on the top step, breathing heavily.

“Damnation!” I said, and the word echoed back with startling volume from the walls.

“Hallo up there!” came a hollow, stony voice, followed by the scraping of footsteps far below.

“Damnation!” I said again, this time under my breath. I had been spotted.

“Who’s up there?” the voice demanded. I put my hand over my mouth to stifle the urge to reply.

As my fingers touched my teeth, I had an idea. Father had once said there would come a time when I was grateful for the braces I had been made to wear, and he had been right. This was it.

Using my thumbs and forefingers as a dual pair of pincers, I yanked down on the braces with all the strength I could muster, and with a satisfying “click” the things popped out of my mouth and into my hand.

As the footsteps came closer and closer, climbing relentlessly up to where I was trapped against the locked door, I twisted the wire into an “L” with a loop on the end and jammed the ruined braces into the keyhole.

Father would have me horsewhipped, but I had no other choice.

The lock was old and unsophisticated, and I knew I could crack it—if only I had enough time.

“Who is it?” the voice demanded. “I know you’re up there. I can hear you. The tower is off limits. Come down at once, boy.”

Boy? I thought. So he hadn’t actually seen me.

I eased in and out on the wire and twisted it to the left. As if it had been oiled this morning, the bolt slid smoothly back. I opened the door and stepped through, pulling it silently closed behind me. There was no time to try locking it from the inside. Besides, whoever was coming up the stairs would likely have a key.

I was in a space as dark as a coal cellar. The slit windows had ended at the top of the stairs.

The footsteps stopped outside the door. I stepped soundlessly to one side and flattened myself against the stone wall.

“Who’s up here?” the voice asked. “Who is it?” And then a key was inserted, the latch clicked, the door opened, and a man stuck his head in through the opening.

The beam from his torch shot here and there, illuminating a crazy maze of ladders that twisted up into the darkness. He shone the light on each ladder, allowing his beam to climb it, rung by rung, until it vanished in the blackness far above.

I didn’t move a muscle: not even my eyes. In my peripheral vision I had an impression of the man silhouetted against the open door: white hair and a fearsome mustache. He was so close I could have reached out and touched him.

There was a pause that seemed an eternity.

“Bloody rats again,” he said to himself at last, and the door slammed shut, leaving me in darkness. There was the jingle of a ring of keys and then the bolt shot home.

I was locked in.

I suppose I should have let out a shout, but I didn’t. I was nowhere near my wits’ end. In fact, I was rather beginning to enjoy myself.

I knew that I could try picking the lock again, and creep back down the stairs, but quite possibly I’d creep straight into the porter’s clutches.

Since I couldn’t stay where I was forever, the only other option was up. Sticking my arms out like a sleepwalker, I slid my feet slowly one in front of the other, until my fingers touched the closest of the ladders I had seen illuminated by his torch—and up I went.

There’s no real trick to climbing a ladder in the dark. In many ways, it’s preferable to seeing the abyss that’s always there below you. But as I climbed, my eyes became more and more accustomed to the darkness—or near-darkness. Tiny chinks in the stone and timbers were letting in pinpricks of light here and there, and I soon found I was able to make out the general outline of the ladder, black on black in the tower’s gray light.

The rungs ended suddenly, and I found myself on a small wooden platform, like a sailor in the rigging. To my left, another ladder led up into the gloom.

I gave it a good shaking, and although it creaked fearsomely, it seemed solid enough. I took a deep breath, stepped onto the bottom rung, and up I went.

A minute later I had reached the top, and a smaller, shakier platform. Still another ladder, this one more narrow and spindly than the others, trembled alarmingly as I set foot upon it and began my slow, creeping ascent. Halfway up I began counting the rungs:

“Ten (approximately) … eleven … twelve … thirteen—”

My head smashed against something and for a moment I could see nothing but spinning stars. I hung on to the rungs for dear life, my head aching like a burst melon and the matchstick ladder vibrating in my hands like a plucked bowstring. I felt as if someone had scalped me.

As I reached up with one hand and felt above my broken head, my fingers closed around a wooden handle. I pushed up on it with all my remaining strength, and the trapdoor lifted.

In a flash I had scrambled out onto the roof of the tower, blinking like an owl in the sudden sunshine. From a square platform in its center, slate tiles sloped gently outwards to each of the four points of the compass.

The view was nothing short of magnificent. Across the Quad, beyond the slates of the chapel, vistas of different greens folded away into the hazy distance.

Still squinting, I stepped a little closer to the parapet, and I almost lost my life.

There was a sudden yawning hole at my feet, and I had to windmill my arms to keep from falling into it. As I teetered on the edge, I had a sickening glimpse of the cobbles far below shining blackly in the sun.

The gap was perhaps eighteen inches wide, with a half-inch raised lip around it, bridged every ten feet or so by a narrow finger of stone that joined the jutting parapet to the roof. This opening had evidently been designed to provide emergency drainage in case of unusually heavy rainfall.

I jumped carefully across the opening and looked over the waist-high battlements. Far below, the grass of the Quad spread off in three directions.