By the time I rolled over, he was already dragging me towards the edge of the roof. My hands clutched uselessly at the air, but there was nothing to hang on to—no possible way of saving myself.
I tried to scramble to my feet but could not get a grip. He was using the pole to keep clear of my hands, my feet, and my teeth, dragging me along through the snow like a gaffed cod.
Now he had hauled me to the very edge of the battlements, and his plan was perfectly clear. He was going to shove me over.
His feet were sliding on the slippery roof as he tried to plant them firmly for that final bit of deadly pole work.
How unfairly things had turned out, it seemed to me. It was downright rotten when you came to think of it. No one deserved to die like this.
And yet Harriet had, hadn’t she?
What had been her last thoughts on that wintery mountain in Tibet? Did her life flash before her eyes, as it is said to do?
Did she have time to think of me?
“Stop it, Flavia!” a voice said inside my head, suddenly and quite distinctly.
“Stop it at once!”
I was so surprised that I obeyed.
But what was I supposed to do?
“Take stock,” the voice said, rather crabbily.
Yes! That was it—take stock.
It was ridiculously easy to do. I had nothing left to lose.
Somehow, in that moment, I managed to twist round enough to free my collar and grab on to the end of the pole. Unexpectedly, it gave me the support I needed to lurch clumsily up onto my feet.
Now we were at the very edge of the precipice, Val Lampman and I, like two tightrope walkers, each of us hanging on for dear life to opposite ends of the same bamboo pole.
He gave the thing a sudden jerk, trying to topple me, but as he did so, his foot slipped on the icy stone gutter. He let go his grip on the pole and his arms flailed wildly at the air as he fought to keep his footing.
But it wasn’t enough to save him.
In utter silence, he fell backwards and was swallowed by the night. The pole tumbled lazily after him, end over end.
From somewhere below came a sickening thump.
I was left teetering on the sloped edge, fighting desperately to keep my balance, but my feet were slipping slowly towards the edge of the battlement, now just inches away.
Desperately, I threw myself down onto my face, trying to dig my fingers into the icy stones.
It was no use.
As my feet shot out into empty space, I made one last frantic grab at a section of weather-worn lead gutter, trying to hook my fingertips onto its lip, but the stuff twisted, crumbled—almost disintegrating in my fingers—and I felt my body sliding … like a limp mannequin … over the precipice.
And then I was falling … endlessly … interminably … seemingly forever … down into darkness.
TWENTY-ONE
WHEN I OPENED MY eyes at last, I found myself staring straight up into the falling snow. A kaleidoscope of red and white flakes spun past, growing larger until they landed in horrid, slushy silence on the frozen mask that must have been my face.
Above me, the shadowy blur of the battlements lurched at a crazy angle, towering up into the low, scudding clouds.
There was a diffused flash, followed by a deep rumbling, as if mischievous clerks were rolling empty wine barrels in a warehouse.
Another flash—a flash that flared and faded with every pulsing beat of my heart—followed by an earsplitting Crack!
A silence followed—so intense that it hurt my ears. Only gradually did I become aware of the sizzle of the falling snow. And then …
Foom!
Something like a red candle lit up the night with a pallid and unearthly glow.
Foom! Foompf!
Now a green light and a blue joined with the red, as a comet the color of sunflowers climbed the sky and burst high overhead in a dazzling shower amid the falling snow.
The night had suddenly become an inferno of icy fire, its colors blazing with such fierce splendor that it brought hard, glassy tears to my eyes.
Foom! Foom! Faroom!
It seemed to go on forever. I was becoming too weary to watch.
Somewhere, someone was beckoning me—a summons I couldn’t resist.
“Who are you?” I wanted to shout. “Who are you?”
But I had no voice. Nothing seemed to matter anymore.
I closed my eyes upon the starry brilliance, then opened them again almost at once as a great coppery-green comet lifted itself on a tail of glittering yellow sparks and, like some celestial dragon, climbed into the sky and exploded directly overhead with an earth-shattering boom.
Rocket of Honor, I remember thinking, mentally ticking off ingredients on my imagined fingers: antimony … iron filings … potassium chlorate.
I thought for an instant of Phyllis Wyvern, the recipient of my tribute, and how sad it was that nothing of her remained alive but a series of shadowy images on coils of black film.
I thought, too, of Harriet.
And then I slept.
They were all of them gathered round my bed, their faces looming over me as if seen through a fish-eye lens. Carl Pendracka was offering me a stick of Sweet Sixteen chewing gum, while the Misses Puddock held out identical cups of steaming tea. Inspector Hewitt stood with his arm around the shoulders of his wife, Antigone, who wept silently into a dainty piece of lace. At the foot of the bed, Father stood motionless, flanked by my white-faced sisters, Ophelia and Daphne, all three of them looking as if they had just been vomited up from hell.
Dr. Darby was speaking in a low voice to Dogger, who shook his head and looked away. In the corner, her face buried in her husband Alf’s shoulder, Mrs. Mullet trembled like an autumn leaf. Behind them, Aunt Felicity was fussing with some clinking object or another in the depths of her alligator handbag.
The vicar stepped back from my bedside and whispered something that sounded like “flowers” into the ear of his wife, Cynthia.
There were others lurking in the shadows, but I could not see them clearly. The room was hot and musty. Someone must have opened up the old fireplace and set a blaze going. The smell of soot and charcoal—and something else—was on the overheated air.
What was it? Gunpowder? Saltpeter?
Or was I back in the stifling cupboard under the stairs, inhaling the fumes of the burning paper?
I coughed painfully, and began to shiver.
Nasturtiums, I thought, after a very long time. Someone has brought me nasturtiums.
Daffy had once told me, in a rather condescending tone, that the name of those smelly flowers meant “nose-twister.” But while I could easily have shot back that the stink was due entirely to the fact that their volatile oil consisted largely of sulfocyanide of allyl (C4H6NS), or mustard oil, I did not.
There are times when I am humble.
We had been looking through one of Harriet’s watercolor sketchbooks that day, and had come across a grouping of the pretty flowers, their papery petals a warm rainbow of orange, yellow, red, and pink.
At the bottom of the page was lightly printed in pencil, Nasturtiums, Toronto, 1930 Harriet de Luce.
At the top, obliterating one of the petals, was a heavy black rubber stamp: Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy. And in red pencil, B–.
My heart wanted to leap out of my chest and punch someone in the nose. What barbarian of a teacher had dared to award my dear dead mother a Bath bun—a beta minus?
I drew in a deep, offended breath and choked on the knot in my throat.
“Easy, dear,” said a hollow, echoing voice. “It’s all right now.”
I opened my eyes, squinting against the fierce white light, to find Mrs. Mullet beside me. She stepped quickly to the window and lowered the blind until the sun was no longer shining directly into my eyes.
It took me a couple of moments to locate myself. I was not in my bedroom, but rather on the drawing room divan. I struggled to pull myself up.
“Lie still, dear,” she said. “Dr. Darby’s give you a nice mustard police.”
“What?”
“A plaster, like. You ’ave to keep still.”
“What time is it?” I asked, still dislocated.
“Why, it’s past Christmas, ducks,” she said. “You’ve gone and missed it.”
I wrinkled my nose at the mess of clotted mustard on my chest.
“Don’t touch it, dear. You’ve gone all chesty. Dr. Darby said to leave it on for ’alf an ’our.”
“But why? I’m not sick.”
“You’ve fell off the roof. It’s the same thing. Good job they’d shoveled them drifts into such a bloomin’ great ’eap, else you’d’ve gone straight through to China.”
Roof?
It all came surging back in a tidal wave.
“Val Lampman!” I said. “Marion Trodd! They tried to—”
“Now, then,” Mrs. Mullet said. “You’re not to think of anythin’ but gettin’ better. Dr. Darby thinks you might ’ave cracked a rib, an’ ’e doesn’t want you squirmin’ about.”
She fluffed up my pillow and brushed a strand of damp hair out of my eyes.
“But I can tell you this much,” she added, with a sniff. “They’ve took ’er away with the darbies on ’er wrists. They ’ad to cut ’er loose with tin-snips. You should of seen ’er. Reg’lar pouter, she is. Kept stickin’ to everythin’ she touched—even Constable Linnet, and ’im in ’is clean uniform—and after ’is wife ’ad just washed and ironed it, ’e told me. They’ll more’n likely ’ang ’er by the neck until she’s dead, but you mustn’t let on I told you. You’re not supposed to be gettin’ all worked up.”
“But what about Val Lampman?”