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.
Outside the train’s windows, Canada rushed past, as if on a rotating turntable. It seemed to me to be composed of a remarkable amount of water.
And then it was dark, and all I could see in the window was the reflection of the Rainsmiths. Dorsey had fallen asleep, her neck twisted awkwardly, as if from the end of a rope, her mouth hanging open in a most unpleasant but satisfying manner.
I pretended she was the murderess Edith Thompson, whose violent drop was said to have caused John Ellis, the public hangman, to commit suicide.
A filament of drool appeared at the corner of Dorsey’s mouth, swinging with the motion of the train like an acrobatic spider on a thread. I was trying to decide whether this spoiled or enhanced the hanged-woman effect when Ryerson touched my arm.
I nearly leaped out of my skin.
“Toronto soon,” he whispered, so as not to disturb his sleeping wife.
He didn’t want her awake any more than I did.
I turned to watch the lighted windows that were now sliding by outside in the darkness: windows in which dozens of mothers cooked in dozens of kitchens, dozens of fathers read newspapers in dozens of cozy chairs, dozens of children wrote or drew at dozens of tables, and here and there, like a candle in the wilderness, the lonely blue-gray glow of a little television screen.
It was all so unbearably sad.
Could things be any worse?