? TWO ?
IT WAS RAINING IN Toronto.
Low clouds, reddened to the shade of inflamed intestines by neon advertising signs, glowered above the towering hotels. The wet pavements were a soggy crazy-quilt of swimming colors and running waters. Trams sparked in the damp darkness, and the night air was sharp with the acrid smell of their ozone.
Dorsey Rainsmith was not yet fully conscious, and she stood blinking on the curb beneath the umbrella her husband was holding, as if she had just awakened to find herself on an alien and most unpleasant planet.
“Taxis are busy tonight,” her husband said, looking up the street and down. “There’s bound to be another soon.” He wigwagged his arms frantically at a lone taxicab passing on the wrong side of the street, but it splashed on, oblivious.
“I don’t see why Merton couldn’t have met us,” Dorsey said.
“His mother died, Dodo,” Ryerson said, forgetting I was there. “Don’t you remember? He sent us a telegram.”
“No,” she said, going into one of her Grand Pouts.
Ryerson was gnawing fiercely at his lower lip. If a taxicab didn’t come along in the next two minutes he was going to need stitches.
“I shall order flowers tomorrow,” he said, “for both of you.”
Galloping Galatians! Was that an insult? Or had my ears deceived me?
Dorsey turned a slow, cold, reptilian eye upon him, but just at that moment, a taxicab splashed to a stop at the curb.
“Ah! Here we are,” Ryerson said brightly, rubbing his hands together—or wringing them, I’m not sure which.
The Rainsmiths climbed into the backseat and I was left to sit up front with the driver.
Ryerson gave their home address.
“We’ll put you up for the night, Flavia,” he said. “It’s too late now for Miss Bodycote’s. Well past their ‘lights-out.’ ”
“We’ll do no such thing,” his wife said. “We haven’t a room made up, and with Merton indisposed, I can’t possibly cope. Take us directly to Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy, driver. We’ll wake them up.”
And that was that.
In the driver’s rearview mirror, I could see Dorsey Rainsmith mouthing silent but angry words at her husband. The streetlights, seeping in through the taxi’s watery windows, made Ryerson’s face look as if it were melting.
Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy was on a cul-de-sac just off the Danforth.
It was not at all what I had expected.
Tall houses loomed up on both sides of the street, crowded cheek-to-cheek, their windows alight and welcoming. Standing in darkness among them in its own grounds, Miss Bodycote’s was a vast shadow in their midst: taller, larger—a couple of acres of stony darkness in the rain.
I was to learn later that the place had once been a convent, but I didn’t know that as Ryerson yanked angrily at the bell of what appeared to be a porter’s lodge, a sort of Gothic wicket set into one side of the arched front doorway.
Down a long flight of stone steps on the street, Dorsey waited in the taxi as I stood beside her husband on the step. Ryerson pounded on the heavy front door with his fist.
“Open up,” he shouted at the blank, curtainless windows. “This is the chairman.
“That ought to fetch them,” he muttered, almost to himself.
Somewhere inside, a dim glow appeared, as if someone had lighted a candle.
He shot me a triumphant look, and I thought of applauding.
After what seemed like an eternity, but which was probably in reality no more than half a minute, the door was edged open by an apparition in nightgown, thick spectacles, and curlers.
“Well?” demanded a creaky voice, and a candle in a tin holder was raised to light and examine our faces. And then a gasp. “Oh! I’m sorry, sir.”
“It’s all right, Fitzgibbon. I’ve brought the new girl.”
“Ah,” said the apparition, sweeping the candle in a broad arc to indicate that we were to step inside.
The place was a vast, echoing mausoleum, the walls pitted everywhere with pointed, painted nooks and alcoves, some in the shape of seashells, which looked as if they had once housed religious statuary, but the pale saints and virgins, having been evicted, had been replaced with brass castings of sour-faced, whiskered old men in beaver hats with their hands jammed into the breasts of their frock coats.
Apart from that, I had only time enough to register a quick impression of scrubbed floorboards and institutional varnish disappearing in all directions before the flame blew out and we were left standing in darkness. The place smelled like a piano warehouse: wood, varnish, and an acrid metallic tang that suggested tight strings and old lemons.
“Damnation,” someone whispered, close to my ear.
We were in what I presumed was an entrance hall when the electric lights were suddenly switched on, leaving the three of us blinking in the glare.
A tall woman stood at the top of a broad staircase, her hand on the switch. “Who is it, Fitzgibbon?” she asked, in a voice that suggested she fed on peaches and steel.
“It’s the chairman, miss. He’s brought the new girl.”
I could feel my temper rising. I was not going to stand there and be discussed as if I were a mop in a shop.
“Good evening, Miss Fawlthorne,” I said, stepping forward. “I’m Flavia de Luce. I believe you have been expecting me.”
I had seen the headmistress’s name on the prospectus the academy had sent to Father. I could only hope that this woman on the stair was actually the headmistress, and not just some lackey.
Slowly, she descended the stairs, the startling white of her hair standing out round her head in a snowy nimbus. She was dressed in a black suit and a white blouse. A large ruby pin glowed at her throat like a bead of fresh blood. Her hawk nose and dark complexion gave her the look of a pirate who had given up the sea for a career in education.
She inspected me up and down, from top to toe.
She must have been satisfied, because she said, finally, “Fetch her things.”
Fitzgibbon opened the door and signaled the taxi driver, and a minute later, my luggage, soggy from the rain, was piled in the foyer.
“Thank you, Dr. Rainsmith,” she said, dismissing the chairman. “Most kind of you.”
It seemed short shrift for someone who had lugged me across the Atlantic and halfway across Canada, but perhaps it was the lateness of the hour.
With no more than a nod, Ryerson Rainsmith was gone and I was alone with my captors.
Miss Fawlthorne—I was quite sure now that it was she, because she hadn’t contradicted me—walked round me in a slow circle. “Do you have any cigarettes or alcohol either on your person or in your baggage?”
I shook my head.
“Well?”