? THIRTEEN ?
THE ALARM WENT OFF with a muted clatter. I reached under my pillow and silenced the thing, then hauled it out and looked blearily at the time: It was three A.M.
Miss Fawlthorne had planted the clock in my bed while I was in class, just as she had promised she would. The thing was a large, self-important alarm clock with radium hands that glowed greenly in the dark, and a bell loud enough to be heard through the feathers of the pillow but not outside my room.
I stretched, climbed out onto the cold floor, and hurriedly dressed, taking great care to be mouse-quiet.
There had been several good reasons to assign me to Edith Cavell, Miss Fawlthorne had explained, not the least of which was to make possible my “Starlight Studies,” as she jokingly called them; she had asked Mr. Tugg to oil the hinges, so that I was able to come and go in perfect silence.
Some of the girls had grumbled, of course, about a scabby fourth-former having her own room, but the story had been put about that for certain reasons I was not a fit roommate: flatulence, I believe, although I can’t prove it.
For a time I was the butt of their jokes, but after a while they tired of it and moved on to fresher cruelties and easier victims.
Mrs. Bannerman was awaiting me in the chemistry lab. She had already drawn the heavy blackout curtains that had been installed to allow demonstration of certain experiments with light (but I must say no more), and to permit the showing of instructional ciné films in perfect darkness.
For three o’clock in the morning, Mrs. Bannerman looked remarkably fresh. Perhaps “vivacious” is more the word. Her hair was perfection, as if she had just stepped out of the salon, and she smelled of lilies of the valley. She reminded me a great deal of the young chorus girl Audrey Hepburn whom Aunt Felicity had pointed out when she took us as a rare treat to a West End theater.
“I knew her in an earlier life,” my aunt had whispered.
“I didn’t know you believed in reincarnation, Auntie Fee,” Feely had said.
“I don’t,” she had replied. “Shhh.”
“Good morning, Flavia,” Mrs. Bannerman said brightly. “Welcome to my little kitchen. Would you like a cup of tea?”
“Yes, please,” I said, somewhat flustered. The only other person who had ever invited me to tea was Antigone Hewitt, the inspector’s wife, who was now, perhaps, through my own fault, lost to me forever. She had not even turned up to bid me farewell, as I had so desperately hoped she would.
Perhaps she hadn’t known that I was leaving. Had her husband not told her? But he himself might not have known that I was being banished. I might die an old woman without ever learning the truth.
All this was going through my mind as the tea steeped in the lengthening silence.
“You’re looking very thoughtful,” Mrs. Bannerman said.
“Yes,” I told her. “I was just thinking of home.”
“I do, sometimes, too,” she said. “It’s not always as pleasant as one expects, is it? Now, then, shall we get started?”
I was a bit shy of the electron microscope at first—reluctant even to touch it—but when Mrs. Bannerman brought up on the cathode ray screen the hairs of a louse, magnified nearly sixty thousand times, my reverent fingers were everywhere, caressing the thing as if it were a favorite pet. Wild horses couldn’t have dragged me away.
“The first electron microscope in North America was built by a couple of students not far from here at the University of Toronto,” she told me. “Before you were born.
“What we are now observing is the leg of a species of louse called Columbicola extinctus, or passenger-pigeon-chewing louse, which lived exclusively upon the body of that particular bird, which has been extinct since 1914. Why it should have been found a month ago, in the hair of a murdered clergyman in the Klondike, makes for a pretty little puzzle. Ah! I see that I now have your undivided attention.”
“Murdered?” I asked.
What a peculiar feeling it was to be sitting in a locked room in the middle of the night, sharing a microscope with a woman who had herself been tried for murder. I wouldn’t have thought the subject would come up so easily.
“Yes, murdered,” she said. “I provide assistance to the police from time to time as a way of keeping my hand in. Although I earn my bread and butter by teaching chemistry, my professional qualifications are actually as an entomologist.”
I hadn’t the foggiest idea what an entomologist was, but I could already feel the look of admiration spreading across my face.
“Bugs,” she said. “Including insects, spiders, centipedes, worms. I specialize in the ways in which their study may be used in criminal investigation. It’s quite a new field, but also a very old one. Shouldn’t you be making notes?”
I had been too entranced to do anything but gape.
“Here’s a notebook,” she said, handing me a red-covered secretary’s dictation pad. “When it’s full, ask for another. You may write as much as you wish, but with one proviso: Your notebooks are never to leave this room. They will be kept here under lock and key, but you may add to them or consult them at any time.”
She didn’t say “Do you understand?” and I blessed her for that.
“Now then: At the top of your first page, write this name: Jean Pierre Mégnin.” She spelled it out for me and made sure I got the accent leaning in the right direction.
“His two greatest works are La Faune des Tombeaux and La Faune des Cadavres. Roughly translated, that means Creatures of the Tomb and The Wildlife of Corpses. Sounds a bit like a double-bill horror movie, doesn’t it? Both are in French. Do you have any inkling of the language?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head sadly.
What had I been missing? How could such treasures exist in a language I was unable to read?
“Perhaps Miss Dupont could give me extra tutoring in French,” I blurted.
I could hardly believe that I was listening to my own mouth speaking!
“Excellent suggestion. I’m sure she would be, how do you say, enchantée?
“Now, then, pencil ready? Mégnin discovered that those creatures which feed and breed upon corpses tend to arrive in waves: In the first stage, when the body is fresh, the blowflies appear. In the second stage, the body bloats as it putrefies, and certain beetles are attracted. As full-blown decay sets in at stage three, and fermentation takes place, butyric and caseic acids are produced, followed by ammoniacal fermentation, at which point entirely different tribes of flies and beetles are attracted. Maggots proliferate. And so, as you will have deduced, it is possible, by studying the presence and life cycles of these various flying and crawling things, to work out with some precision how long the dearly departed has been dead and even, perhaps, where they have been in the meantime.”
Corruption? Putrefaction? Acids? This woman was speaking my language. I may not know French, but I knew the language of the dead, and this conversation was one I had been dreaming of all my life.
I had found a kindred spirit!
My brain was all aswirl—like one of those spiral galaxies you see in the illustrated newsmagazines: sparks, flame, and fire fizzing and flying off in all directions—like a dizzying Catherine wheel on Guy Fawkes Night.
I couldn’t sit still. I had to get up from my chair and pace round and up and down the room like a madwoman simply to keep from exploding.
“Heady stuff, isn’t it?” Mrs. Bannerman asked.
She understood perfectly the tears in my eyes.
“I think we’ll call it quits for tonight,” she said with an elaborate stretch and a yawn to match. “I’m tired. I hope you’ll forgive me. We’ve made an excellent start, but you need your sleep.”
How I was dying to quiz her about Brazenose, Wentworth, and Le Marchand, but something was holding me back. Miss Fawlthorne had forbidden me to ask any of the girls about another, but did the same restriction apply to the teaching staff?
As both Mrs. Mullet and Sir Humphry Davy have said, “Better safe than sorry.”
And as for the little metal figure in my pocket—it would have to wait. I could hardly haul it out and begin heating it without a full confession of how I had come to have it in my possession.
Besides entomology, I was going to have to learn patience.