As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust by Alan Bradley Read Free Book Online

had been quite obvious that the blackened skull didn’t have a long curving beak. But then neither had the mummified birds I had seen in the Natural History Museum. Their beaks had been bandaged to their breasts both for neatness and to make things easy for their long-dead embalmers.
    “How would a stork get trapped in the chimney?”
    “Happens all the time,” I said. “During deliveries. They just don’t report it because it’s too depressing. Some sort of unwritten agreement with the newspapers.”
    Collingwood’s mouth fell open, but I will never know what she was about to say, since at that very instant Miss Fawlthorne returned with a glass of water and a decanter of what I assumed was brandy.
    “Drink this,” she ordered, and Collingwood obeyed at once with remarkably little fuss, finishing off all of the former and a good slug of the latter.
    “I fear she’s awakened the house,” Miss Fawlthorne said, glancing first at her wristwatch and then at me. “No matter, I suppose. The police shall have to be called anyway. Not that—”
    There was a knock at the door.
    “Who is it?” Miss Fawlthorne demanded.
    “Fitzgibbon, miss.”
    Miss Fawlthorne sprang to the electrical switch like asudden gazelle. “We mustn’t set a bad example,” she whispered. “Lights-out means what it says.”
    Again we were wrapped in darkness.
    But for no more than a few moments. Then a match flared and Miss Fawlthorne touched it to the candle’s wick.
    “Come,” she called out, and the door opened.
    At first, I saw only the round reflections of Fitzgibbon’s spectacles, floating as if weightless in the air. She took a single step forward into the room—then froze—and all at once, miraculously, she was surrounded by a sea of pale, disembodied female faces peering over her shoulder.
    Oddly enough, the thought that sprang to my mind at that instant was the famous passage in which Saint Luke is describing the Nativity. As best I can recall, it goes something like this: “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.’ ”
    (Although the Bible, of course, at least in the
King James Version
, for some reason known only to its translators and to the king himself, has no quotation marks.)
    Even now, I can still see the white faces of those cherubim and seraphim, suspended eerily in the shadows behind the frozen Fitzgibbon: the students of Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy.
    My classmates.
    This was my first glimpse of them—and theirs of me.
    “Begone, girls!” Miss Fawlthorne commanded, clapping her hands several times, smartly.
    And like puppets being jerked offstage in a rather sinister Punch and Judy, they vanished.
    “Take Collingwood to her bed,” Miss Fawlthorne instructed Fitzgibbon. “She’s had a bad shock.”
    Did she think
I
hadn’t?
    Like a reluctant robot, Fitzgibbon hauled Collingwood to her feet and led her to the door, quilt and all.
    “It was quick of you to have thought of the sheet,” Miss Fawlthorne said when they were gone, shooting me a piercing look above the candle’s flame. “You have made an excellent start, Flavia.
    “Except for allowing Collingwood in your room,” she added. “Both of you must be punished, of course.”
    I might have pointed out, I suppose, that Collingwood had come into the room uninvited and that since I was asleep at the time, I could scarcely have prevented it. To say nothing of the fact that, being newly arrived, I had not been informed of the stupid rule.
    But I kept my bun trap shut.
    It is decisions like this, for better or for worse, which make you who you are.
    Instead, I stooped to lift the corner of the sheet.
    “No! Don’t! Please!” Miss Fawlthorne snapped, and I let it fall.
    What harm could there possibly be in having another squint? But I knew in that moment that there would never be another chance.
    Generally, when you