? FOUR ?
MY EYES REFUSED TO open. It was as if, as I slept, someone had glued them shut.
“Hurry up,” Miss Fawlthorne’s voice was saying. “The bell has already gone.”
I looked up at her from bleary sockets.
“Your uniform is on the chair,” she said. “Put it on and come down for breakfast. There’s a ewer on the table. Wash your face. Brush your teeth. Try to look presentable.”
And then she was gone.
How could anyone be so changeable? I wondered.
The woman’s moods appeared to be connected to some inner weathercock that swung wildly round with every wind. One moment she was almost tender, and the next a harridan.
Even the mercurial Daffy—from whom I had learned both words—was no match for these cyclonic changes of character.
The cold horsehair stuffing gave out a groan as I sat up and levered myself to my feet. My back was sore, my knees were numb, and I had a crick in my neck.
I already had the feeling that this was not going to be a red-letter day.
I forced myself to crawl into the school uniform Miss Fawlthorne had laid out for me: a sort of navy blue wool pinafore dress with a pleated skirt, black tights, white blouse, and necktie—the latter striped diagonally in the school colors, yellow and black. A navy blazer completed the horror.
I winced as I examined my reflection in a silver tea service that stood on a side table. Hideous! I looked like someone in one of those baggy bathing costumes that you see on Victorian postcards.
I pinched a sugar cube and washed it down with a swig of slightly soured milk from the creamer.
Curse this life! I thought.
And then I remembered the dead body upstairs and I cheered up at once.
Had the police come in the night? Surely they must have, by now.
I was hardly in a position to ask, but there is no law against keeping your eyes peeled and your ears open, is there?
*
I had been worried that I would be stared at, but no one gave me so much as a second glance as I came tentatively down the staircase and paused on the landing. From some far corner of the house came the sound of a distant regiment of girls, all talking and laughing at the same time.
I won’t say that my blood ran cold, but it distinctly cooled. I was not at my best with hordes: a fact that I had not entirely realized until the day I was sacked (unfairly) from the Girl Guides.
My case had been debated from the vicarage kitchen all the way up to the solemnly paneled council chamber of the Girl Guide Imperial Headquarters in London.
But it was no use. The die, as someone or another had said, was cast.
I recalled with bitterness the moment that Miss Delaney ripped my badges from my sleeves as the troop was made to chant in unison: “Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!… Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!”
I knew suddenly how the children of Israel must have felt when they were cast out by the Lord.
Farewell to the Scarlet Pimpernel Patrol! And farewell to their motto, “Do good by stealth.” I had done my best to fulfill that commandment, but it was hardly my fault that things had gone so badly wrong.
Fate loves slight miscalculations, the vicar had told me later, and it was true. I would not likely ever live it down.
“Better hustle your bustle,” someone said, touching my arm—a short, stocky girl with black-framed spectacles.
I almost jumped out of my skin. My nerves were edgy.
“Sorry,” she said. “Didn’t mean to startle you, but at Bod’s, punctuality is paramount. Translated into English, that means if you’re late for breakfast, they’ll nail your hide to the barn door.”
I nodded acknowledgment and followed her down the stairs.
At the bottom, I stuck out a hand. “De Luce, F. S.,” I said, sticking to the formula Collingwood had used.
“I know,” the girl said. “You’re quite notorious.”
I followed her into the Great Hall, a vast raftered expanse of dark hanging timber; a medieval cowshed with trestle tables. The hubbub was deafening.
A couple of harried-looking servers in white were ladling great gouts of porridge into bowls.
I took a seat at the end of one of the long tables and tucked in.
As I ate, I looked discreetly round the room, pretending not to. As a new girl, it would be impolite to stare. Not that I really cared.
It was important, though, not to draw attention to myself.
There was a possibility that whoever had killed the cadaver in the chimney was in this very room at this very moment.
I would need to begin my investigations from scratch.
I looked round the hall for Collingwood, but she was nowhere in sight. Perhaps she had been excused to recover from last night’s ordeal.
Because most of the girls had their heads in the feed troughs, it was not easy to examine their faces. I noticed though that even as they ate, they were still talking rapidly to one another from the corners of their mouths, which made it difficult to read their lips as I had trained myself to do. Besides, I didn’t want to stare.
It wasn’t too much of a chore to guess the sensational topic. The buzz and thrill of bad news was heavy in the air.
An older girl, two tables away, elbowed her neighbor in the ribs and pointed at me with her chin. When they saw that I had noticed, they both looked away quickly.
The faculty, all of them women, sat on a raised dais at one end of the hall, overlooking the grazing girls.
At the center of the high table sat Miss Fawlthorne, her head inclined, talking with pinched brows to a youngish-looking woman whose short black hair was as tight as a bathing cap.
There are rare and precious moments, when one is a stranger in a room, that one can examine its inhabitants with little or no prejudice. Without knowing so much as their names, it is possible to form an assessment based purely upon observation and instinct.