How far had we come? I tried to work it out in my head. The roadside speed limit signs allowed a maximum of fifty miles per hour, and a minimum of thirty in the settled areas: an average, say, of forty miles per hour.
Now, then: How long had we been traveling?
I thought back to my Girl Guides training in the parish hall when Miss Delaney had taught us to estimate time in stressful situations.
“One never knows when one may be kidnapped by Communists,” she told us, “or worse,” she added. “Be Prepared is more than just a motto.”
And so we had been made to learn how to estimate time
while locked away alone in total darkness in the crypt of St. Tancred’s, as well as while balancing blindfolded on a chair as a gang of girls, singing at the top of their lungs “Ging-gang-goolie-goolie-goolie-goolie watcha, ging-gang-goo, ging-gang-goo!,” hurled tightly balled-up winter socks at our head.
I judged that we had pulled away from Miss Bodycote’s about fifty minutes ago, and had therefore traveled, at a speed of forty miles per hour, approximately thirty-three miles. The calculation was a simple one.
It had become surprisingly warm in the bus and I was just beginning to think I might curl up on the seat for a catnap, when the bus suddenly shifted down through several octaves of grating gears and turned off into a narrow, unpaved lane.
The driver stopped, got out, and wrestled open a rusty metal gate, beside which was a ramshackle hut and a weathered sign that read: Stop. Report to Guard.
We crept through, the driver closed the gate behind us, and again the bus’s infernal gears ground into motion.
Ahead, in the distance, lay the waters of Lake Ontario. I had seen it from the train, of course, but then it had been gray and sullen in the rain. Today, the surface glittered and twinkled in the bright morning sunlight like a vast plain of blue-green jewels, and a fleet of white puffy clouds floated slowly and self-importantly along overhead as if they were posing for a painting.
A number of tall radio masts, painted in alternating red and white sections, rose into the air ahead, seeming to sprout from a cluster of low, white, weather-worn buildings which nestled like chicks around an abandoned farmhouse of painted boards. As we approached them the road narrowed, and then ended—
Abruptly. We had come to a stop.
“Everybody out!” Miss Moate commanded in a loud voice, and I looked round to see her unbuckling her restraints. With remarkable speed she was free of her web and rolling herself toward the front of the bus. She came close to running me over.
I counted bodies as the students disembarked: ten, eleven, twelve …
I was the thirteenth.
“Ramp, Dawson,” Miss Moate snapped, and from an under-floor luggage compartment, the driver dragged out a pair of wooden channels that he manhandled into position at the door. Miss Moate maneuvered her wheels onto them and without a glance to either side went barreling down so rapidly that she was propelled far beyond the bus and into the long grass.
But no matter. In an instant, she had seized the rims of her wheels, swiveled as neat as a pin, and was back at the door, glaring defiantly up at the disembarking students as if to say, “There! That’s the only way to deal with the dragon polio!”
I was proud of her in a complicated sort of way.
“Line up!” she shouted, and there was something more than the sound of a drill sergeant in her voice.
“Single file—”
We shuffled.
“Right turn!”
Our shoes pivoted in the dust.
“Quick … march!”
And away we went in our panama hats, our pleated pinafore dresses, our blazers, our school ties, and our tights, swinging our arms as we trudged off toward a distant embankment of weeping willows, looking, no doubt, for all the world like a dozen or so ugly ducklings on a forced march.
I felt we ought to be whistling some bright but defiant military tune.
? FOURTEEN ?
WE WERE DIVIDED INTO two groups. The one into which I was placed—with Trout, Druce, Gremly, Barton, and an alarmingly red-faced girl I didn’t know—was called, for obvious reasons, the Sixes, and the other the Sevens.
“Sixes in the shade!” Miss Moate called out. “Sevens in the sun.”
“Divide and conquer,” Trout grumbled. “They always do that to keep us from overpowering them.”
Although she and Gremly were part of my group, they wandered off and stood under a tall elm, while Druce and her hanger-on, Trout, stood off to the other side, leaving me with the girl whose name I didn’t know, alone between the two camps.
“De Luce,” I said out of the corner of my mouth. “Flavia. I’m the new girl.”
“I know,” she whispered. “I’ve been dying for a chance to talk to you.”
She took off her hat and slowly fanned her face to cover our conversation.
Who was she worried about: the lip-reading Druce, or someone else?
“It’s about Brazenose—” she began.
“Which one?” I said quietly behind my hand, pretending to pick my nose. “Mary Jane, or—”
“Clarissa. Brazenose major. The one that disappeared.”
Her face was becoming redder than ever.
“Are you all right?” I whispered.
“Of course. I’ve been holding my breath to make myself flush. That’s why Moatey sent our group into the shade.”
Here it was barely mid-morning and I’d already added a new weapon to my arsenal.
“What’s your name?” I asked, even though it may have been forbidden.
She gave me a strange smile, as if to reprimand me, then said, “Scarlett. Amelia Scarlett.”
You are a girl after my own heart, Amelia Scarlett, I thought. Without even suspecting it, the whole world is putty in your hands.
“Water!” Miss Moate called out loudly, clapping her hands, and we all turned our attention toward her. “Water is life. Remember that, girls, and remember it well. You can live without food and sunlight for a remarkably long while, but you cannot live without water. You must know at all times and in all places how to acquire water. You will be taught, therefore how to locate it, how to collect it, and how to purify it. Now, then …”
She glared at us, one at a time, as if daring us to contradict her, her eyes like little black searchlights. “Let us say that we require water here and now. Let us say that one of us has sustained an injury, and that boiling water is required at once for emergency surgery. Where shall we find it?”
Gremly’s hand shot up. “In the radiator of the bus!” she shouted, grinning at us, pleased as punch to have guessed the answer straightaway.
Miss Moate nodded her head slowly, as if to say, “I might have known some idiot would suggest that.”
“And what, pray tell, if the radiator is full of antifreeze?” she asked in a voice dripping with sarcasm. “Remember, Gremly, we live in a harsh northern climate, and not, as you seem to suppose, in the land of the bandaged pharaohs.”