? TEN ?
I THINK IT WAS Aristotle who first said that Nature abhors a vacuum. Others, such as Hobbes, Boyle, and Newton, climbed onto Aristotle’s soapbox at a much later date. But for all their collective brains, these brilliant boys got it only half right. Nature does abhor a vacuum, but she equally abhors pressure. If you stop to think for even a second, it should be obvious, shouldn’t it?
Give Nature a vacuum and she will try to fill it. Give her localized pressure and she will try to disperse it. She is forever seeking a balance she can never achieve, never happy with what she’s got.
I am not only surprised, but proud, to be the first to point this out.
There are times when my personal pressure is mounting that I crave a vacuum to counteract it. One thing was perfectly clear: I was going to get no peace and quiet in Edith Cavell. No privacy, no time to think, no place of my own where I could come and go as I pleased.
In short, I was in dire need of a bolt-hole.
Where, I asked myself, is the one place that the inhabitants of a bustling academy are least likely to go?
And the answer came at once, as if sent down on a mental lightning bolt from Heaven. It wasn’t carved on a stone tablet, but it might as well have been.
The laundry.
Of course!
The laundry was a detached hut of painted brick. A faint humming came from within and a column of steam rose from a tall brick chimney into the autumn air.
I pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The place was like Dante’s Inferno, but with plumbing—a vast steaming cavern. The heat of the gargantuan washing and drying machines swept over me in a wave, almost knocking me off my feet, and the noise was infernal: a hissing, clanking clatter of machinery gone mad.
Why had I thought I’d ever find a quiet haven here?
Like a dark castle looming over a medieval village in a valley, an enormous boiler at the end of the single large room overshadowed the place, looming above the deep sinks, the scattered mangles and presses, the wringers and the sewing machines alike. The high roof was crisscrossed with steam pipes, all wrapped like mummies in eternal-looking bandages.
The air smelled of steam, soap, washing soda, and starch, their odors floating uneasily upon a faint background reek of scorched bedsheets.
A little woman in a gray uniform, with her grayish-red hair in a net, was busily sorting nightgowns into two piles.
So much for solitude. I needed to change my plans this very instant.
It had been ever so long since I had last made use of my “little girl lost” demeanor, and I must say that it was like pulling on a cozy old cardigan to arrange my face and body: shoulders slightly hunched (check), hands arranged in a wringing position (check), hair tousled (check), eyes rubbed a little to make them red and watery, then widened and set to shifting nervously from side to side (check), voice up half an octave: “Hello?” “Hello?” (check), toes turned in, knees together, a touch of the trembles: check, check, and check.
“Excuse me, please, Miss.” I put on my tiniest voice.
She paid me not the slightest attention.
I crossed the floor and tugged at her sleeve.
She leaped with surprising agility quite high into the air.
“Gaw blazes!” she shouted. “Who the dickens are you, and what the devil do you want?”
“Please, miss, I’m sorry,” I began.
“Spit it out! Who are you? What’s your name?”
“De Luce,” I told her. “Flavia. I’m in the fourth form.”
“I don’t care if you’re in the Forty-eighth Highlanders. You oughtn’t to be in here. You’re not allowed.”
“Please, miss, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve lost my best handkerchief. Miss Fawlthorne is going to kill me if I don’t find it. I think I left it in the pocket of my dressing gown.”
“Ha!” the woman said. “She thinks she left it in the pocket of her dressing gaywn, Sal. Did you hear that? Dressing gaywn, fancy!”
I hadn’t noticed the second woman, who was operating a steam pressing-machine in a brick alcove. Her round red face stared out of a cloud of hissing steam as if she were a bodiless head suspended in midair like the Wizard of Oz.
“Dressing gaywn!” she shrieked in a voice that told me she was the junior of the two. She was trying to impress her superior by laughing too loudly at her jokes.
I knew the type all too well.
“Dressing gaywn!” she shrieked again, gasping for breath, wrapping a wet strand of hair round her forefinger and tugging playfully at it as if it were the pin of a monster hand grenade.
For a fraction of a second, my hopes were up, thinking her head might explode. But no such luck.
“I expect she means ‘bawthrobe,’ Marge. Ask her if she means ‘bawthrobe.’ ”
Marge’s eyes rounded on me.
“Yes, please, miss,” I said. “She’s right: That’s what I meant.”
Marge’s tongue was rolling busily about inside her cheek, rooting out thoughts—or perhaps in search of something to eat.
“What color was it?” she demanded suddenly.
“Yellow and black,” I said. I remembered that some of the girls at Little Commons had been wearing their dressing gowns, all of them in the school colors.
“Yellow and black!” Marge hooted. “Listen to her, Sal! Yellow and black she says!”
Sal slapped her leg and pretended to be on the verge of apoplexy. “The hankie, dimwit, not the dressing gown—oh, I beg your pardon, bawthrobe is what I meant to say.”
“Please, miss, it was blue, miss,” I said. “Periwinkle blue.”
I would play along as if I were a serf in their little kingdom until—
“It’s blue, Sal. Think of it! A periwinkle blue hankie!”
“Well, la-di-da!” Sal said, mincing, and they were both off again in showy laughter.
It was obvious that the girls of Miss Bodycote’s didn’t often come to the laundry. Marge had said as much: We weren’t allowed.
All the better for my purposes.
When she had recovered somewhat from her hysterics, Marge stood staring into my eyes as if she could look clear through them into my very soul—as if she saw something that no other human being could see.
“Well, let’s just have a wee look then,” she said, softening suddenly. “What do you think, Sal, shall we have a wee look?”
“A wee look couldn’t hurt, Marge,” she said, drying her eyes on the corner of a long white tablecloth, “so long as it’s just this once.”