? TWENTY ?
I HAVE SAID NOTHING so far about church or chapel, hoping perhaps that they would go away. Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy, being hand in glove with the Church of England, or “Anglican” as it was called here in the colonies (and “Episcopal” just south of the border in the United States of America), was subject to all the ritual that one would expect: chapel every morning on the premises, conducted in what had once been the chapel of the original convent, and a church parade on Sunday mornings to the nearby cathedral for the full-strength dose of Scripture and dire warnings.
Church parade? I should have said “church straggle.” It is probably easier to train a pack of hunting hounds to sing an oratorio by Bach than it is to get a gaggle of girls to go in orderly fashion along a broad avenue in full view of the public without some mischief making a mockery of the day.
The usual order of march was this: Miss Fawlthorne and the faculty in the lead, followed by the girls in order of form, the youngest first all the way up to the sixth, with Jumbo, as head girl, bringing up the rear.
Clustered round Jumbo were the usual culprits who enjoyed a jolly good smoke in the open air: Fabian, Van Arque, and a couple of other younger scofflaws who were just learning how to inhale.
Because of that, there was a great deal of coughing at the back of the column, accompanied by an unusual and dramatic amount of hawking and spitting.
Occasionally we would meet Sunday strollers, or overtake older churchgoers who were headed on foot in the same direction, who would sometimes look in horror upon what must have seemed like an outing from the Toronto Free Hospital for Consumptive Poor.
“It’s the food!” Van Arque would choke, pounding her chest as we passed. “Nothing but tongue and beans.” Which didn’t explain the smoke leaking from the corners of her mouth as she spoke.
Although I was marching with the fourth form, I was able to fall gradually back in line by the simple technique of stopping twice to tie my shoelaces. I rejoined the column just as Scarlett came along.
“Dit-dit-dit-dit, dit-dit,” I said. “Hi.”
“Dit-dit-dit, dit-dit-dit-dit, dit-dit-dit-dit, dit-dit-dit-dit,” she replied. “Shhh.”
We shambled along in silence for a minute, and then I whispered, “What do you think happened to her? Brazenose, I mean.”
Her eyes were huge as they swiveled toward me. “I can’t tell you,” she said. “So please stop asking me.”
This made no sense whatsoever. Scarlett had been happy enough to prattle on at the camp about her recent nighttime sighting of a girl who had supposedly vanished two years ago, but was now unwilling to hazard a guess as to why.
What—or whom—could she be afraid of?
I had no choice but to lay all my cards on the table. It was risky, but there was no other way. It was my duty.
Aunt Felicity had more than once lectured me on my inherited duty.
“Your duty will become as clear to you as if it were a white line painted down the middle of the road,” she had said. “You must follow it, Flavia.”
The words of my aged aunt echoed as clearly in my ears as if she were walking along beside me.
“Even when it leads to murder?” I had asked her.
“Even when it leads to murder.”
Well, it had led to murder, hadn’t it? That charred, decapitated wretch, whoever she might have been, who had plummeted down the chimney and rolled across the floor of Edith Cavell, was certainly not a suicide.
I took a deep breath, leaned toward Scarlett, and whispered into her ear. “And have you, also, acquired a taste for pheasant sandwiches?”
The effect upon Amelia Scarlett was shocking. The color drained from her face as if a tap had been opened somewhere. She stopped dead in her tracks—so suddenly that Fabian, who had been walking directly behind, smashed into her, fell to her knees, and, seeing that she had ripped one of her stockings, let loose a word that is not supposed to be known to the girls of Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy.
I knew at once that it was a mistake.
“Smarten up, you clowns,” Jumbo said. “You’ll get all of us blacked. Fall in at the rear.”
And so it was that Scarlett and I found ourselves at the very fag end of the march, walking stiffly along in silence, shoulder to shoulder, but not knowing what to say to each other.
After a hundred yards of misery, she broke into a sprint and charged ahead until she was lost from view among the other girls of the fourth.
The rector was a frail old lamb with an enormous mop of white hair, who peered down at us from his pulpit like a lookout in the crow’s nest of a ship in a stormy sea. Each of us, he was insisting, was no more than a section of scaffolding being used to help erect the greater glory of God.
I could well picture him, swaying slowly from side to side in his lofty perch, as a bit of scaffolding, but as for me …?
No, thank you!
The very idea made me balk at the proceedings: so much so that when he finally gave the benediction and came creeping down to rejoin us other skeletons of steel, and the hymn was sung, I made a great point of setting myself apart from the proceedings by singing: “Braise my soul the King of Heaven …”
Not that anyone noticed. They never do.
Except Feely, of course. From her perch on the organ bench at St. Tancred’s, my older sister was always able to hear even the slightest improvisation on my part, and would swing round her burning-glass gaze to put me in my place.
I was struck by a sudden pang.
Dear God! I thought. How I miss her!
As if she were here, I fell back into line with the other singers:
“Angels, help us to adore him; ye behold him face to face;
Sun and moon, bow down before him, dwellers all in time and space.”