Were my ears deceiving me? Chemistry classes, had she said?
I must have looked like a haddock, my mouth opening and closing with nothing coming out but air.
“But—” she went on.
Crikey! There’s always a “but,” isn’t there? As sure as there’s bones in a blowfish breakfast.
“But—your admission will depend on your ability to pass a proficiency test. Miss Fawlthorne tells me that she has already given you a written assignment, the result of which she has not yet evaluated. She has left it to me to administer the oral component.”
I gulped. Coming from someone with Mrs. Bannerman’s history, these were strong—perhaps even deadly—words.
“Are you ready?” she asked brightly.
I nodded, still stricken for words.
“Very well,” she said, “now, then—”
I held my breath. In the great silence that followed, I could hear the wheels of the universe turning.
“Emil Fischer,” she said suddenly. “What can you tell me about him?”
“Professor of chemistry at Erlangen, Würzberg, and Berlin,” I blurted. “He won the Nobel Prize in 1902.”
“And?”
“He was a genius! He demonstrated that the rosaniline dyes were derived from triphenylmethane.”
“Yes?”
“He was the first to work out the formula for caffeine and uric acid. He synthesized fructose and glucose, and demonstrated the way in which the formulae of the stereo-isomeric glucoses could be deduced, which confirmed independently van’t Hoff’s theory of the asymmetric carbon atom, and opened the way to a study of fermentation: decomposition!”
“Go on.”
Go on? I was just getting started.
“He also discovered how the chemical reactions of proteins worked in living organisms, and how caffeine, xanthine, hypoxanthine, guanine, uric acid, and theobromine all shared the same nitrogenous parent substance, purine.”
“Theobromine?”
“C7H8N4O2. Its name means Food of the Gods.”
“Is that all?”
I wanted desperately to mention the fact that Emil Fischer’s father had once said, of his son, “The boy is too dumb to be a businessman; he should go to school,” but I didn’t want to push my luck.
“Well,” I admitted, with a sheepish grin, “I have his signed photograph stuck to my dressing table, back home in England. He was a great friend of my late Uncle Tarquin.”
Mrs. Bannerman smiled as she reached out and touched my hand. “You’ll do, Flavia de Luce,” she said.
? ELEVEN ?
SO THERE IT WAS. From now on, I would be taking regular chemistry classes with the fifth and sixth forms. A tricky schedule had been worked out which would allow me, with a certain amount of sprinting, to get from class to class by the skin of my teeth. It was like embarking upon a long railway journey with changes at every station and only seconds to spare between trains.
“You’ll manage,” Mrs. Bannerman had told me, and she was right.
As the days went on, I found myself actually looking forward to the mad dash between classes. In some vague and inexplicable way, it made me feel wanted.
My presence was required here, now, at this very moment, and then, suddenly, it was required somewhere else, and off I would bolt.
Van Arque had begun referring to me as “Lightning de Luce,” but I did not encourage it. “School nicknames stick like shite to a shoe,” Daffy had once told me. “There are old men being loaded into their coffins even as we speak, whose friends, up until yesterday, still called them ‘Icky’ or ‘Toodles’—or ‘Turnips.’ ”
I remembered that Shakespeare had once written “That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet,” but even the Great Bill himself must have forgotten the cruel and indelible labels that could be attached by fellow students. I couldn’t help wondering what his own schoolmates had called him. “Quilliam”? “Shakey”?
Or even worse.
This is what I was thinking as I stood on my head in bed, my heels against the wall. I had discovered almost by accident that an inverted posture improved my thought processes because of increased blood circulation to my brain.
The few times I had to myself were those precious hours of darkness between awakening and having to get up: the only hours when I could luxuriate in being alone.
I had not forgotten the body in the chimney. It was simply that there had been no time to think about its blackened bones and clutching fingers, at least until now.
Somewhere in the recesses of my brain, a memory was shaken loose and fell with a “clunk!” into my consciousness.
The metal medallion! I had taken it from the corpse’s hand and shoved it into my pocket.
I let my legs fall and flipped out of bed onto the floor. I reached carefully into the right jacket pocket of my school uniform, which I had left hanging—against the rules—on the back of a chair. Thank heavens Miss Fawlthorne was not here to see it.
The pocket was empty. I checked the other.
Nothing.
But wait! When the body had come tumbling out of the chimney, I was wearing the outfit in which I arrived in Canada: skirt, blouse, and jumper.
It was hanging in the cupboard.
I held my breath as I dipped my hand into the folds of my former clothing.
Thank heavens!
In an instant the little object was resting tightly in the palm of my hand.
Almost without thinking, I switched on the forbidden light. When I realized what I had done, I listened intently, putting my near-supernatural hearing to the utmost test. But the house was quiet as a country crypt. Not a creature was stirring, and so forth.
Except me.
In my hand was an object no bigger than the first joint of my thumb.
A magnifying lens would have been a godsend, but alas, alas!, I was lensless. Perhaps I could improvise with a pinhole punched in a piece of paper …
But wait! I’d almost forgotten. Hadn’t Aunt Felicity given me that utility crucifix? A veritable Swiss Army knife of prayer? The very tool I needed—and it was hanging round my neck!
As I reached for it, I offered up a prayer of thanks to Saint Jerome, the patron saint of spectacles.
I flicked out the pivoted glass and examined the object I was now holding gingerly between thumb and forefinger. I knew at once from its tarnished surface that it would require special handling. It would have to wait until I was alone in the chemistry lab and able to analyze it at my leisure.
The thing had a face, though—that much I could tell. And wings!
Yes—it looked very much like a wrapped body. It brought to mind the famous statue we had seen at St. Paul’s, of John Donne, its onetime dean, who was believed to have posed for it in his shroud on his deathbed. It was also said to be the only one of the cathedral’s statues that had survived the Great Fire of 1666. Even now, after nearly three hundred years, some of the soot smudges were still visible.
And like poor Donne’s effigy, this little winged figure had been subjected to heat.
Coincidence?
I surely hoped not.
I was so intent upon peering through the magnifying glass that I did not hear the door open. I had forgotten to lock the blasted thing.
I did not know Miss Fawlthorne was there until she spoke.
“What is the meaning of this?”
She said it in the same, slow, cold, slippery, sinister tones that the snake must have used when speaking to Eve in the Garden of Eden.
With lightning reflexes, I slid the medallion into the pocket of my dressing gown and wrapped it in the depths of my handkerchief.
“What have you got there?”
“Nothing, Miss Fawlthorne.”
“Nonsense! What is it? Hand it over.”
It was an all or nothing moment: the moment of truth, as bullfighters call it.
Or, in my case, the moment of untruth.
“Please, miss, phlegm,” I said, pulling the handkerchief from my pocket and holding it out for her inspection. I arranged my features into a look of embarrassment. “I think I’ve caught rather a bad chill.”
As added insurance I brought up from the very depths of my gizzard a convincing cough, and spat an imaginary substance into the crumpled handkerchief.
Again I offered it.
It requires a certain nerve to play at this kind of game: a kind of steely bluff combined with the innocence of a baby lily, and I must say that I was rather good at it.
“Put that filthy thing away,” Miss Fawlthorne said with a look of disgust, before abruptly changing the subject. “Why are these lights turned on?”
I almost said, “I thought I was coughing up blood, and wanted to have a look,” but something told me to quit while I was ahead.
“I got up early to write my report on William Palmer,” I said, giving my mouth a final wipe and gesturing to my notebook and pen, which were—praise be!—lying on my desktop.
What a perfect title that would make for one of the volumes of my autobiography when it comes time to write it: Lying on My Desktop. I must remember to make a note of it.
Miss Fawlthorne said nothing, but stared at me steadily, the ruby pin at her throat rising and falling in slow, regular hypnotic waves. One breath after another.
“I cannot allow this to pass, Flavia,” she said at last, as if she had come to a sudden decision. “Do you understand?”
I nodded—suddenly Miss Humility herself.
“We shall have a talk,” she said. “But not here, and not now. Immediately after your gymnasium class this morning, I want you to go out for a long walk—alone—and reflect upon your disobedience. When you have done so to my satisfaction—well, we shall see.”