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.
“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.