As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(5)

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.