As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(3)

“Oh, Ryerson,” she cooed, gazing at our ancestral home. “It’s all so quaint—so tumble-de-dump. Just as you said it would be.”

Ryerson Rainsmith, in a summer suit the color of cold coffee and curdled cream, stood looking round in a self-satisfied manner with his thumbs tucked into his yellow waistcoat, drumming his fingers on his ample stomach. I was reminded of a partridge.

Father, who had gone to the front door to greet him, stepped out onto the gravel sweep and shook hands.

“Colonel de Luce, I presume,” Rainsmith said, as if he had just solved some great mystery. “I’d like you to say hello to my wife, Dorsey. Come and shake hands with the squire, my dear. It’s not every day you’ll get such an opportunity.

“Ha ha ha,” he added mirthlessly. “And this must be our little Flavia!”

On paper, the man was already dead.

“Mr. Rainsmith,” he said, shoving a damp hand into my face.

Dogger had once warned me to be wary of any man who introduced himself as “Mr.” It was an honorific, he said, a mark of respect to be bestowed by others, but never, ever, under any circumstances, upon oneself.

I ignored the extended hand.

“Howdy,” I said.

Father stiffened. His eyes narrowed. I knew what was going on in his head.

My father was from an era when gentlemen were taught that politeness was everything, that the only sure way to lose out to the Philistines was to lose your temper and admit that they had wounded you. His years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp had perfected his ability to remain, in the face of insult, as silent as a standing stone.

“Please come in,” he said, gesturing to the open door. I wanted to give him a swift kick in the trousers and at the same time I wanted to hug him. Pride in a parent often takes strange forms.

“What a quaint old hall!” Dorsey Rainsmith said. Her voice was as sharp as elderly cheese and her words echoed back unpleasantly from the dark paneling of the foyer. “We have the same trouble with cracking varnish in our salon back home in Toronto, don’t we, Ryerson? Smithers, our handyman, says it’s from either excessive heat or excessive cold.”

“Or age,” I suggested.

Father pierced me with a transparent look, but I knew what he meant.

In the drawing room, without being asked, the Rainsmiths subsided into the coziest seats, while Father and I perched on the edge of the remaining chairs.

After an interval timed to perfection, Dogger appeared and offered tea. I could see that the Rainsmiths were impressed.

“Thank you, Dogger,” I said. “And please convey our thanks to Mrs. Mullet.”

It was a game Dogger and I played: a game with rules so subtle that no one outside our immediate family could ever hope to grasp them.

“Not at all, Miss Flavia,” Dogger said. “It is our very great pleasure to be of service.”

“Yes, thank you, Dogger,” Ryerson Rainsmith said, out of his depth but paddling madly to keep his head above water.

“And also your Mrs. Mullet,” his wife added.

Dogger gave them a three-percent smile and vanished in the way he does.

After a while, Daffy and Feely came into the room, pretended to be bereft at the thought of losing me, chatted in a maddeningly polite fashion with the Rainsmiths, then drifted off to their respective books and looking glass.

But there’s no sense in raking through the ashes of that dismal afternoon.

It was decreed that the Rainsmiths would be my chaperones on the voyage to Canada, where they would deliver me up safely to the doorstep of Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy.

“Chaperones?” Daffy said when they were gone. “ ‘Cicerones,’ you mean. That’s the proper word for it. Flavia on the Grand Tour—just think! I hope you appreciate it, you lucky chump. I’d give anything to be in your plimsolls.”

I threw a handy tennis racket at her, but I missed.

*

I missed Daffy in a very different way as I trudged up the sloping deck in the footsteps of Ryerson Rainsmith. Daffy, at least, was my own flesh and blood and could be defied without permanent damage. Ryerson Rainsmith, by contrast, would remember this moment for as long as he lived. He would still be telling his putrid grandchildren about it when he was no more than a shriveled pudding in a wheelchair.

“And there she was—there I found her,” he would tell them in a cracked, quavering voice, “standing on the first six inches of the ship’s bow with the waves breaking over her head.”

He spoke not a word until we were belowdecks, tottering like walking toys along the heaving passageway toward the Rainsmiths’ stateroom. He had obviously forgotten ordering me to change into dry clothing. Or perhaps he had decided to deliver me up damp to his wife.

“Take my advice,” he said in a conspiratorial whisper, as if we were suddenly old pals. “Don’t rile her.”

He rapped at the door with his knuckles before opening it and motioning me to go ahead of him.

By the way Dorsey Rainsmith looked at me, I might have been a cobra shoved into her face.

“Look at you!” she said. “Just look at you!”

It is an order often given to girls of my age with little thought given to how difficult it is to carry out, actually.

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