As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(4)

“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.