As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (3 page)

I crossed my eyes very slightly, but if she noticed, it went over her head.

“Where have you been?” she demanded.

“On deck,” I said.

“Why?”

“Fresh air.”

“You might have fallen overboard. Did you never think of that?”

“No,” I said truthfully. I might also have been hit on the noggin and killed by a falling albatross, but I didn’t say so.

What was it about this woman that grated so violently on my nerves? I’m generally a very tolerant sort of person, but there was something about Dorsey Rainsmith that rubbed me in the wrong direction.

I think it was the way in which she reduced her husband to less than a comma.

There is a word my sister Daffy uses whenever she wishes to be particularly cutting: “obsequious.” It might have been coined expressly to describe the behavior of Ryerson Rainsmith whenever he was in the presence of his wife: fawning and cringing to the point of nausea.

I looked at him standing at the door of the stateroom as if in fear of her, almost afraid to come in. He had delivered me up to her in the way a cat presents a dead bird to its owner. He was waiting for a pat on the head—or perhaps a bowl of cream.

But he didn’t get one.

“What are we going to do with you?” Dorsey sighed, as if the weight of the entire British Empire were upon her shoulders.

I did what I was expected to do: I shrugged.

“Dr. Rainsmith is very disappointed with you,” she said,
as if he weren’t in the room. “And Dr. Rainsmith cannot tolerate being disappointed.”

Dr
. Rainsmith? He had introduced himself as
Mr
. As chairman of the board of guardians at Miss Bodycote’s, he must be a doctor of education, or maybe of theology. Well, I certainly wasn’t going to address him by any fancy titles.

“Go to your cabin and change into dry clothing. And stay there until you are sent for.”

Go to your room
. The classic response of someone who is fresh out of ideas.

Checkmate! Hallelujah! Game, set, and match!

I had won.

Next morning, I was standing on the railings at the starboard bow, waving my hat into the wind and singing “A Life On the Ocean Wave” to cheer myself up, when, from the corner of my eye, I noticed Ryerson Rainsmith. The instant he spotted me, he sheared off and went astern.

Which pretty well set the tone for the rest of the voyage.

A couple of days later, as we approached the harbor at Halifax, Dorsey told me to wipe my nose. That was my first glimpse of the New World.

At Quebec City, we disembarked. A Canadian customs officer in black suit and cap asked me the purpose of my visit.

“Penal colony,” I told him. He raised his eyebrows, gave the Rainsmiths a sympathetic shake of his head, and stamped my passport.

Only then—at that very instant—did I realize how far from home I was. Alone in a foreign country.

Unaccountably, I burst into tears.

“There, there,” said Ryerson Rainsmith, looking not at me, but rather at the customs officer. The words came out as “They-ahh, they-ahh,” and I realized, in spite of my tears, that the farther west we traveled, the more pronounced his fake English accent was becoming.

“The little English girl is homesick,” the customs officer said, kneeling down and dabbing at my eyes with an enormous white handkerchief.

No great detective work there: He had already examined our passports and knew that I was not their child.

What was he up to, then? Was this close-up inspection part of his routine search for contraband?

For just an instant I flirted with the idea of faking a faint, then calling aloud for a restorative shot from one of the six bottles of Gordon’s Gin that—among other things—were hidden under the false bottom of the Rainsmiths’ steamer trunk.

Don’t ask me how I know that: There are a few things in my life of which I am still not proud.

“Chin up!” the customs officer said, lifting my face with a folded finger and looking into my eyes. He smiled at the Rainsmiths. “I have one just like her at home.”

Somehow I doubted it, but I forced a weak grin.

But what an inane remark! Even if he had a hundred daughters at home crying into a hundred silken handkerchiefs, what did I care? How could it possibly matter?

One of the things I dread about becoming an adult is that sooner or later you begin letting sentimentality get in the way of simple logic. False feelings are allowed to clog the works like raw honey poured into the tiny wheels of a fine timepiece.

I have observed this again and again in adults with whom I am acquainted. When all else failed, a good old cry was guaranteed to get them off the hook. It was not just instinct: No, it was more than that. It was something to do with the oleaginous chemical essences given off by a crying human: some supersensor in the nose designed to detect the altered hormone and protein levels in the emotional weeping of humans—and of the human female, in particular.

I had been thinking of producing a paper on this fascinating subject
—Tears and the Test Tube
—but had been forced to shelve the idea when I was flung, without ceremony, out of my ancestral home. The very thought of being cut off from my late uncle Tarquin’s splendid chemical laboratory, with its gleaming glassware, its lovely old Leitz microscope, its rows upon rows of bottled chemicals and pretty poisons, was enough to reduce me to tears again, so that I was right back where I started.

It had been in that quiet room, by the light of its tall casement windows, that, with the assistance of Uncle Tar’s notebooks and library, I had taught myself chemistry, and by so doing had set myself apart forever from the rest of the human race.

No matter that I had been a mere child when I began. I
was now twelve, and remarkably proficient in juggling what Uncle Tar had once called “the crumbs of the universe.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was overcome. Forgive me.”

The trance was broken. The moment had passed and we were back again in the cold, cold world.

The customs officer got to his feet, and looked hastily round to see that no one had observed his momentary weakness.

“Next!” he shouted as he scratched his chalk mark on our luggage.

As Ryerson Rainsmith queued for tickets in the railway booking office, I helped myself to a map and timetable from a handy rack. The distance from Quebec City to Toronto, I saw, was five hundred miles: more than half the distance from Land’s End to John o’Groats.

It was going to take about nine hours, and we would not arrive in Toronto until late—eleven o’clock in the evening.

Dorsey Rainsmith had fortified herself with a paperback novel from the news agent’s kiosk:
Vengeance Is Mine
, by Mickey Spillane. She tried to conceal it in a folded copy of the
Montreal Gazette
, but not before I had a chance to see the cover illustration: a man in trench coat and floppy hat lugging in his arms what appeared to be a dead blonde, whose white silk dress was rucked up to somewhere in the neighborhood of her tonsils.

I recognized the title as a quotation from the Bible: a
quotation I had several times mulled over myself as I planned various schemes to teach my sisters a lesson. Slashed across the book’s cover were adverts for other volumes by the same author, such as
I, the Jury
and
My Gun Is Quick
.

There was something vaguely but deeply satisfying about these titles, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

“All aboard!” the conductor shouted.

I was learning quickly. Back home in England, trains had guards while buses and trams had conductors. Here in Canada, the guard was a conductor, and the carriages, called cars, were built with seats on both sides of a center aisle, rather than having compartments, each of which opened directly onto the platform.

It was like falling asleep and awakening as Alice in
Through the Looking-Glass
. Everything was larger than life and everyone drove on the wrong side of the road.

One could easily see why they called it the “New World.”

At last, the train jolted into motion and we were on our way. I was made to sit facing the Rainsmiths, as if I were in the dock at the Old Bailey facing a pair of sour old magistrates.

After about fifty miles of blessed silence, Ryerson Rainsmith decided to become instructive. He unfolded a railway map and began reading aloud the names of each town through which we should next be passing. “Val-Alain, Villeroy … Parisville … St. Wenceslas …”

I stifled a yawn.

But on and on he droned, all the way from St. Léonard
de Nicolet, St. Perpétue, St. Cyrille, St. Germain, St. Eugene, St. Edward, St. Rosalie, St. Hyacinthe, St. Madeleine, St. Hilaire, and St. Hubert to St. Lambert until I could have screamed. I tried for a while to fake sleep, but it was no use. He would lean across and shake my arm as if he were a terrier and I a rabbit.

“Geography ought to be fun, Flavia,” he said. “Why can’t you engage yourself?”

Dorsey hardly removed her nose from the pocket bloodshed. She looked up only once to ask, “What does ‘the Dutch act’ mean, Ryerson?”

He went white. His face looked as if his brain were wrestling his tonsils. “Little pitchers,” he said after extracting a handkerchief from his vest pocket and wiping his face.

Dorsey went back to her book as if she hadn’t heard or cared.

I could have told her that it meant suicide, but I didn’t feel like it.

Ryerson resumed reading aloud names of the places we would pass through later in the day, but this time he added the mileage and times from the printed schedule.

By the time we reached Central Station in Montreal, I was a gibbering jelly.

Fortunately, we had to change not just trains but stations, and my self-appointed tutor was kept so busy for the next four hours condescending to taxi drivers and bullying railway booking clerks and porters that my ears were able to take a rest.

Then, all too soon, we were off again.

“Westward ho!” I wanted to shout.

I could scarcely wait to arrive in Toronto—not so much to reach my destination as to be rid of this man I had come to think of as the Marquess of Mouth.

We swept along in comfort—except for Ryerson—beside the broad St. Lawrence River, which was studded with as many islands as there are stars in the sky, some with stone cottages perched in solitary and splendid isolation.

I would leap off the train at the next stop, I decided. I would swim to one of the hidden islands where I would become a modern Robinson Crusoe. Canada was a wilderness of wildernesses. They could never find me.

“Look there, Flavia!” Ryerson said, pointing to a castle of what looked like gray limestone. “That’s the Kingston Penitentiary.”

“Where
you’ll
wind up if you don’t behave yourself,” Dorsey said, glancing up from her bloody thriller.

I hadn’t the foggiest idea what a penitentiary was, but it sounded as if it described my present situation to perfection, and for a few precious moments, I imagined myself sheltered within the high walls of that bleak and stony stronghold, safe from the Rainsmiths.

The hours trudged by with chains on their ankles.

Outside the train’s windows, Canada rushed past, as if on a rotating turntable. It seemed to me to be composed of a remarkable amount of water.

And then it was dark, and all I could see in the window was the reflection of the Rainsmiths. Dorsey had fallen asleep, her neck twisted awkwardly, as if from the end of a rope, her mouth hanging open in a most unpleasant but satisfying manner.

I pretended she was the murderess Edith Thompson, whose violent drop was said to have caused John Ellis, the public hangman, to commit suicide.

A filament of drool appeared at the corner of Dorsey’s mouth, swinging with the motion of the train like an acrobatic spider on a thread. I was trying to decide whether this spoiled or enhanced the hanged-woman effect when Ryerson touched my arm.

I nearly leaped out of my skin.

“Toronto soon,” he whispered, so as not to disturb his sleeping wife.

He didn’t want her awake any more than I did.

I turned to watch the lighted windows that were now sliding by outside in the darkness: windows in which dozens of mothers cooked in dozens of kitchens, dozens of fathers read newspapers in dozens of cozy chairs, dozens of children wrote or drew at dozens of tables, and here and there, like a candle in the wilderness, the lonely blue-gray glow of a little television screen.

It was all so unbearably sad.

Could things be any worse?

I
T WAS RAINING IN
Toronto.

Low clouds, reddened to the shade of inflamed intestines by neon advertising signs, glowered above the towering hotels. The wet pavements were a soggy crazy-quilt of swimming colors and running waters. Trams sparked in the damp darkness, and the night air was sharp with the acrid smell of their ozone.

Dorsey Rainsmith was not yet fully conscious, and she stood blinking on the curb beneath the umbrella her husband was holding, as if she had just awakened to find herself on an alien and most unpleasant planet.

“Taxis are busy tonight,” her husband said, looking up the street and down. “There’s bound to be another soon.” He wigwagged his arms frantically at a lone taxicab passing on the wrong side of the street, but it splashed on, oblivious.

“I don’t see why Merton couldn’t have met us,” Dorsey said.

“His mother died, Dodo,” Ryerson said, forgetting I was there. “Don’t you remember? He sent us a telegram.”

“No,” she said, going into one of her Grand Pouts.

Ryerson was gnawing fiercely at his lower lip. If a taxicab didn’t come along in the next two minutes he was going to need stitches.

“I shall order flowers tomorrow,” he said, “for
both
of you.”

Galloping Galatians! Was that an insult? Or had my ears deceived me?

Dorsey turned a slow, cold, reptilian eye upon him, but just at that moment, a taxicab splashed to a stop at the curb.

“Ah! Here we are,” Ryerson said brightly, rubbing his hands together—or wringing them, I’m not sure which.