“Was her name Clarissa Brazenose, by any chance?” I wanted to ask, but I somehow managed to keep from blurting it out.
“Have to dash,” Jumbo said, cutting short the interview.
When she had left the room I took a deep breath. Had I given myself away? Had I been too anxious? Had my little act been credible?
I drifted toward the window, meaning to watch Jumbo emerge onto the hockey field. As I did so, something on the table caught my eye.
A letter. A letter with a British stamp—addressed to me.
The handwriting was unmistakable.
I tore it open and yanked the folded sheets from the envelope.
But something stopped my hand.
This was not a letter to be read in an airless room. It needed to be taken into the open air and read under an open sky. It needed to be savored, its every word read again and again, committed to memory, and tucked away somewhere close to my heart.
I went slowly down the back stairs, probably in Jumbo’s very footsteps. She must have brought the letter to my room and forgotten to mention it.
The mail at Miss Bodycote’s was tucked into an array of little pigeonholes in a cubicle near the telephone. At mail call, Fitzgibbon, having put on a pair of flannel over-sleeves and a green visor, would take up her position as postmistress and, from behind her makeshift wicket, hand out to each girl any letters or parcels that had been received.
There was generally no shortage of mail. The girls of Miss Bodycote’s seemed well supplied with parents who showered them with newsy notes, postcards from exotic lands, and fat hampers full of vaguely forbidden fruits, sweets, jams, and crackers.
I, to date, had received nothing. After queuing day after day at the wicket, and being turned away each time letter-less, I had simply given up waiting. It was painfully obvious, not just to me but to the population of the entire school, that no one on this particular planet gave a rat’s whisker for Flavia de Luce.
As I rounded the corner of the laundry, I could see Jumbo in the distance, strolling toward the nets. Kingsbury’s welcoming voice came booming jovially across the grass.
I changed direction at once and made my way back to the little courtyard where illicit smoking was, if not permitted, at least overlooked.
It was blessedly empty.
I sat down on a wooden bench and pulled the letter from its place beside my heart, and with trembling hands unfolded the pages.
Buckshaw
October 7, 1951
Dear Miss Flavia,
I trust this missive finds you well, and that Canada is living up to your expectations. One seldom thinks of that vast Dominion without thinking of Crippen, the notorious poisoner and homeopathic doctor, who made his home there briefly; or of Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, that poor, doomed graduate of McGill College who dispatched his victims on both sides of the Atlantic with chloroform. Not forgetting, of course, Dr. William King (another homeopath, one must note), who was dropped through the trap not many miles from where I expect you shall be reading this letter.
But enough pleasantries.
Dear old Dogger! I could picture him seated in the fading light at the desk in the window of his little room at the top of the back stairs, bent over his paper, his fountain pen forming those neat characters, each of which, in its simple but elegant shape, put my own crabbed scribblings to shame. I vowed to begin a course of regular exercises in penmanship before the sun went down. So help me.
Dogger went on:
Gladys, you will be happy to hear, is basking in her new coating of winter oil. I have taken the liberty of applying graphite to her gears and giving her lamp a brisk buffing. With her seat covered by an old silk scarf, she looks remarkably like our own dear Queen Elizabeth.
My time in these dwindling days is much devoted to sowing sweet peas and dividing rhubarb crowns: the bitter and the sweet, so to speak. The garden in autumn, although somewhat somber, is full of hope for the year to come.
Mrs. Mullet asks to be remembered, and wishes me to convey to you the fact that Esmeralda has adapted admirably to her new home in the kitchen garden, and has become a wonderful “layer-on-of-eggs” as Mrs. M expresses it.
We remember you often, and trust you do the same of us.
Yours faithfully,
Arthur Dogger
Postscript: Miss Undine has insisted I enclose a short note, which I am not permitted to read. I do so, but with little real joy.
AD
I turned to the second sheet. Different paper … different handwriting. The mad, electric scrawl of a junior Genghis Khan.
Ha! I hope youre happy, Flavia. I expect you dont miss us as much as we dont miss you. Aunt Felicity says youre being finished off in Canada, and I hope shes right. That was a joke.
Your sister Ophelia pretends to like me but I know she doesnt. I can tell by the way she cant look me in the eye. Daphne is all right except for her books. I shouldnt be a bit surprised if her eyes fell out and rolled across the page fell onto the floor rolled across the room and down the hall and out the door and over the hills and far away. I wouldnt even fetch them back for her.
Yesterday I identified a Great Spotted Cuckoo (Clamator glandarius) near an old starlings nest in the little wood east of the Visto. Although it is rare in these parts it made me think of you and I said as much to Dogger. That was a joke.
I have worked out from the atlas that you are exactly three thousand five hundred and five miles from Buckshaw. Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!
Love from your blighted cousin
Undine de Luce
I didn’t realize how much her words affected me until a tear plopped onto the page and made the indelible pencil run purple.
The nerve! The bloody nerve!
Since Undine had been left by her lethal and recently deceased mother, Lena, to be brought up at Buckshaw—“the kindness of strangers” as Daffy remarked—I suppose I should have felt more charitable toward her.
But I did not.
The very thought of the despicable Undine sucking up to Dogger made my heart peel. The thought of her racing through my hallways, poking into my rooms, and breathing the dusty air that was rightfully mine was unbearable.
It was agony.
Still, she had at least taken the time to write, hadn’t she? Whereas Feely and Daffy hadn’t.
Nor had Aunt Felicity.
Nor Father.
It was quite clear, as I had known from the outset, that I was an outcast.
A sudden and unexpectedly cool wind caught several dead leaves and made them scuttle across the walkway with the chill grating sound of old bones stirring in their moldy coffins in some forgotten underworld.
What use to them was the Archangel Michael, when a thousand times ten thousand archangels couldn’t keep a single one of them from turning into rancid green moss?
More to the point: What use was he to me?
Or anyone else.
It was at that moment that I began to question my faith.
“I hope I’m not intruding.”
I looked up to find Mrs. Bannerman staring at me in rather an odd way, her head cocked to one side, as if she were examining my soul.
Sitting there among the scuttering autumn leaves with a tear-stained letter in my lap, I must have looked to her like Roxanne in the last act of Cyrano de Bergerac.
I crumpled the page and crammed it into my blazer pocket.
“News from home?” she asked.
I put on a grim smile and shrugged.
“It sometimes happens,” she said, “that a letter from home can seem to be from another world … as if it had come from Jupiter.”
I nodded.
“Is there anything in particular troubling you? Anything I can do to help?”
I thought long and hard before answering.
“Yes,” I said. “You can tell me what happened to Clarissa Brazenose.”