Were the bottles of arsenic actually pictured on the wallpaper, or had each roll been soaked in the stuff? Arsenical wallpaper, I remembered, colored with the poisonous pigment Scheele’s Green, had killed Napoleon, among others, and was sadly no longer manufactured.
Had Scheele’s Green once been used on wallpaper in Canada, as it had in England? Had the girl in the chimney been poisoned by sleeping in a contaminated room? Had the stuff in which she had been wrapped been Union Jack wallpaper? Surely it would have burned …
Even as it was thinking these thoughts, my mind realized that it was exhausted—running in senseless circles. I needed sleep and I needed it desperately.
I jerked awake.
It was dark in the room and someone was knocking—scratching, actually—at the door.
“Flavia!”
I was being called in a hoarse whisper.
I remembered at once that I had locked the door as a protection against being pummeled again in my sleep by Collingwood.
I jumped out of bed still tangled in the wreckage of my bedsheets and hopped to the door.
Van Arque stepped back, startled, when she saw me.
“Were you asleep?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I was just resting my liver.”
“Well, never mind,” she told me. “Get dressed. Quickly. Have you forgotten Little Commons?”
To be truthful, I had.
“No,” I said.
I dashed about trying to make myself decent as Van Arque waited outside the door.
Still, I felt like a scarecrow as we crept through the darkness toward Florence Nightingale.
Van Arque produced a slip of paper from somewhere and, slipping it into the crack under the door, began to move it slowly from side to side.
I saw at once that it was a silent signal, and far superior to knocking.
In a moment the door was opened slightly and we were beckoned inside.
Jumbo and a group of about half a dozen girls—one of whom was Gremly, and another the tiny blonde with a round face who had been elbowed in the ribs by Druce at breakfast—were sitting on the floor in a circle round a single candle, which danced and guttered madly as we came into the room.
“Shift!” Jumbo whispered, and the circle enlarged itself to make room for us.
“Welcome, Flavia Sabina de Luce,” Jumbo pronounced.
I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I smiled.
“It is a tradition at Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy for each new girl, by way of introduction, to tell us a story. You may begin.”
To say that I was unprepared would be an understatement.
Tell them a story? I didn’t know any stories—at least not any that I could repeat to a group of girls.
“What kind of story?” I asked, hoping for a hint.
“A ghost story,” Jumbo said. “And the bloodier the better.”
Seven flickering faces leaned in closer, all eyes intent upon mine, except Gremly’s, who kept hers shielded with an upraised hand, as if protecting herself from a hostile sun.
What a Heaven-sent opportunity! Wallace Scroop, the lubricious newspaper reporter—“lubricious” was a word I had learned from Daffy, but hadn’t, till now, had an opportunity to use—had suggested that Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy was haunted. And now, here was a chance to bring up the topic without seeming to be either childish or gullible.
But the only ghost story I could think of on the spur of the moment was one that Feely and Daffy had told me when I was quite small: a story that had terrified me so much that I had almost shed my skin.
It was called “The Old Woman and the Pimple.”
It went like this—