Читать книгу The Resurrection of Mary Mabel McTavish - Allan Stratton - Страница 10

Miss Bentwhistle Girds Her Loins

Miss Horatia Alice Bentwhistle, founder and headmistress of the Bentwhistle Academy for Young Ladies, president of the Middlesex county chapter of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire, and guiding light of the St. James Ladies’ Auxiliary, clutched her covers to her ears and prayed for the private telephone on her bedside table to stop ringing.

What time was it? She squinted at the grandfather clock to her left, in the hope that its hands might swim into focus. Oh, never mind. Whatever the hour, it was too damn early. Yesterday, her handyman, Mr. McTavish, had inspected her pipes. As usual, he’d been very thorough with his plunger, clearing the full range of her ductwork. The drainpipe in her basement was a particular revelation, in memory of which she’d toasted herself with champagne till the middle of the night. Now her entire body throbbed; she ached for rest.

The telephone fell silent. Thank you, Jesus. It rang again. Christ Almighty.

Miss Bentwhistle eased herself up, placing a brace of goose-down pillows between her back and headboard. She lifted the receiver gingerly to her ear. “Miss Horatia Alice Bentwhistle. I trust this is an emergency?”

“It’s more than an emergency,” declared the Reverend Brice Harvey Mandible, rector of St. James. “It’s a scandal.” According to the rector, the London Free Press had reported that an American tyke was electrocuted the previous night at the Tent of the Holy Redemption.

“A tragedy, surely,” Miss Bentwhistle allowed. “But a scandal, why?”

“They say he was resurrected.”

“Resurrected?”

“Resurrected!” The rector’s stout tenor pitched two octaves north. “Miracles are well and good in their proper place. But their proper place is in the Bible. They don’t belong now. And they don’t belong in London, Ontario. And even if they do, they most certainly don’t at a Pentecostal freak show.”

Miss Bentwhistle’s bum hurt. She rolled to her side. “Harvey, dear, what time is it?”

“Miss Bentwhistle, I don’t think you appreciate the seriousness of the situation. If this miracle is believed, what temptations lie in store for followers of the true Cross? Who may be led into prophecy? Or tongue-speaking? Good Lord, tent evangelists are next to pagan! Rumours of this so-called ‘resurrection’ must be discredited! Squashed!”

“I see. And you have called upon me to set the record straight?”

“Well naturally I’ve called you. Who else would I call? After all, you —”

Miss Bentwhistle placed the receiver on her bedside table and sucked a lozenge. She had no need to listen to the rector of St. James prattle on about her importance to the community. As he had pointed out, who else could be called on a matter of such importance? She was, after all, the last of the Bentwhistles, a family of United Empire Loyalist stock that traced its lineage to a barony in the north of England — in commemoration of which the Academy dining hall boasted a Bentwhistle Coat of Arms and Family Tree as certified by the Heralds’ College of Westminster, inscribed on parchment in gilt with the royal seal, thank you very much — and that had established and maintained the social parameters of local society since the end of the eighteenth century.

Without question, Miss Horatia Alice Bentwhistle knew that she was the one to be called. The voice on the end of the line appeared to have petered out. Miss Bentwhistle retrieved the receiver. “Never fear, Harvey,” the dowager sighed grandly. “I shall address the situation as is my duty. I am, after all, a Bentwhistle.”

“Yes, and the girl’s employer.”

The lozenge stuck in Miss Bentwhistle’s throat. “Beg pardon?” she choked.

“The miracle worker. It’s Mary Mabel McTavish. She’s yours!”

Miss Bentwhistle reached for the smelling salts.

Ten minutes later, she stood naked before her bedroom mirror, considering the weight of responsibility under which she laboured as she girded her loins for the confrontation at hand.

She had already rung the porter, instructing him to summon Mary Mabel and her father to the office. They’d be there this very moment, sweating. Let them sweat. An hour more and she’d descend to tell that brat, in no uncertain terms, that in the laying-on of hands she had exhibited inappropriate behaviour, and in so doing had threatened the hard-earned reputation for sobriety and moral rectitude of the Bentwhistle Academy, indeed of the Bentwhistle family itself. Let the trumpet sound. There would be hell to pay, with Miss Horatia Alice Bentwhistle, B.A., the instrument of God’s will.

Hmm. There seemed to be more of her today than there was yesterday, an observation Miss Bentwhistle had been making with frightening regularity. “I look like a teapot!” she exclaimed, surveying her Rubenesque charms.

She hoisted her corset: “Deny and contain!” The motto of her late father, Horatio Algernon Bentwhistle V. If he had overcome scandal, Miss Bentwhistle determined, so could she. Wrestling with laces and clasps, she drew strength from the great man’s battle with the clutch of elderly widows who’d sought his ruin. East-enders, Miss Bentwhistle sniffed. What right had they to do business with a Bentwhistle in the first place?

The vixens had asked her father to put their money in government bonds. More wisely, he’d invested the funds in stocks, depositing profits equal to bond interest in their accounts while pocketing the balance in his own. These transactions went unnoticed during the run-up to the Great Crash; but when the market collapsed, taking the widows’ money with it, they’d had the effrontery to charge him with fraud.

Lesser mortals might have crumbled. But not the Bentwhistle paterfamilias! “Deny and contain!” Horatio had bellowed and headed to the court house. He claimed — and who could doubt it? — that the widows had insisted he speculate wildly. “They were thrill seekers; desperadoes, the lot of them.” And why had he withheld profits in excess of interest? “It was for their good that I sequestered the dividends. Otherwise those insatiable grannies would have run hog-wild, squandering the treasure of their declining years on trifles.”

Oh, how the little people howled for his blood. But as their betters well knew: wealth is the backbone of virtue; the wealthy, models of probity. Judge Benjamin T. Vanderdander, a fellow Tory and one-time school chum, found for the defence: “In the absence of written instructions, the charges are without merit or foundation.”

Horatio promptly sued the widows for libel. Unable to afford a competent lawyer, they were found guilty and sent to the slammer.

Miss Bentwhistle indulged a smile remembering her father’s boozy victory party, following which he’d died “happily in his sleep,” as the Free Press put it, when the car he was driving crashed into a telephone pole. His venerable remains, eulogized by the premier and local dignitaries, were trundled to the family mausoleum in a horse-drawn carriage led by the Royal London Regimental Pipe Band whose members, in addition to comforting the bereaved with “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes, intercepted pensioners throwing rotten eggs concealed beneath their hankies. The poor can be so spiteful.

Winched into her corset, Miss Bentwhistle waddled to the vanity table to complete her transformation to Dowager Empress. The only problem was sitting down, next to which breathing was a positive snap. She consoled herself that a wince of discomfort from corsets or gas can pass for displeasure and may actually be of assistance when dealing with the help.

A heavy application of alabaster pancake to fill the crevasses, followed by a blush of rouge, a streak of mascara, a tease of lipstick, a dusting of lavender powder, and Miss Bentwhistle had made her face. It was a monument to authority, precisely the sort of countenance to squash a bug like Mary Mabel McTavish. There remained but the hair, a Brillo pad of light brown curls that suggested a chubby Harpo Marx. It vexed the headmistress to see new strands of grey around the temples. While too numerous to pluck, these could still be concealed with an artful application of shoe polish administered by means of a deft wrist and her favourite old toothbrush.

But before the Merlin of makeup could work her magic, she was overcome. Eyebrows twitched, jowls shook, and tears poured down her cheeks, smudging, eroding, and generally playing havoc with her carefully constructed mask. Quite naturally, the waterworks flowed from the remembrance of her father. Not of his death, mind, but of the terrible secret she’d discovered in its wake. A secret that this Mary Mabel scandal threatened to expose:

Miss Horatia Alice Bentwhistle was bankrupt.

The Crash — more smelling salts — had destroyed not only the widows’ mites, but the Bentwhistle family fortune, as well. Horatio had concealed the ruin (“Deny and contain!”), the power of his reputation sufficient to mesmerize creditors. But with his death, Miss Bentwhistle had found herself alone, faced with a mountain of debt against which she had but her name and her Academy. Both were in immediate jeopardy.

Privileges conferred by her name would disappear if she were known to be insolvent. Therefore, the Bentwhistle Academy had to be milked to pay down debt. At the same time, the Academy’s pedigree, the Bentwhistle name, had to be maintained, lest wealthy clients send their heirs to more reputable havens. Maintaining her name, in turn, meant maintaining a facade of wealth, which in turn meant increasing the flow of the very red ink she was desperate to staunch.

The poor have no understanding of true financial need, Miss Bentwhistle thought, weeping. They require tens and twenties, while I require thousands. Life is so unfair.

To forestall talk, she dropped references to foreign accounts, and hosted a dizzying array of occasions. She also embarked on a recruitment drive to enroll more students to generate more funds to pay for more parties to polish a name designed to attract more students to generate more funds and so forth. It was a vicious circle, all the more desperate as Hard Times had wiped out much of her potential clientele. Like Scarlett O’Hara, Miss Bentwhistle resolved to think about that tomorrow.

London was too small a pond in which to fish for additional students, so Miss Bentwhistle poached in the exclusive waterways of Toronto. It was a daring long shot. The nation’s navel had an ample supply of private schools, capable of conferring social status without the financial drain obliged by boarding.

Despite this drawback, Miss Bentwhistle pressed ahead. She knew from personal experience that the rich were habitually bored, and that bored rich adolescents had even more opportunity to get into trouble than their downtrodden counterparts. Consequently, she used her Toronto contacts to ferret out the names of well-heeled families with delinquent daughters. To these, she sent an illustrated brochure touting the Academy’s high moral tone and academic standards, as well as its commitment to Christian redemption and reasonable rates.

Toronto’s troubled bloodlines took the bait. At the very least, ensconced a good three hours drive from the city, their adolescents would no longer embarrass the family by rolling in drunk at 4:00 a.m., sans panties, to throw up on the shrubbery. Here was a chance to ditch their headaches while keeping their heads held high.

The Academy prospered financially. Its academic standards, however, sustained significant collateral damage. This could have been stickhandled without tears if only Miss Bentwhistle’s teachers had been as clever with their mark books as she was with her bank books. Unhappily, they were a linear lot who failed to grasp that while standards are all well and good, it’s the appearance of standards that counts.

Miss Budgie, the long-suffering English teacher, was the first to be summoned to her office. A nervous sort given to rashes, she blamed her doomed love life on Miss Bentwhistle’s edict that single female staff could only socialize with the opposite sex on Sunday afternoons, chaperoned. This had something to do with “setting an example,” though what sort of example Miss Bentwhistle refused to say. (“If it’s something I have to explain, it’s something you wouldn’t understand.”)

The moment Miss Budgie entered the office, the headmistress pounced. “The average English mark has dropped twenty percent this term. Our parents don’t pay good money to get these results.”

“Miss Bentwhistle, the students didn’t do their work.”

“Don’t make excuses. You were hired to inspire. If you’d done your job, the young ladies would have done theirs.”

“Not this lot. They’re juvenile delinquents.”

“Are you questioning the admission standards at the Bentwhistle Academy? Our young ladies come from the best Toronto homes. Homes where names such as Budgie are unknown.”

“Nonetheless, they don’t want to be here.”

“And do you want to be here?”

Miss Budgie gasped.

“These marks will be raised by this afternoon.”

Parents were thrilled to see improvements in their children’s test scores. “It’s a miracle,” they raved to friends with similarly troubled teens; enrollment rose as quickly as the marks on incomplete assignments. Nor did provincial examinations threaten Miss Bentwhistle’s shell game; teachers collared cheaters at their peril.

Thus, four years after her father’s death, the Academy appeared to flourish and Miss Bentwhistle to reign supreme, monarch of all she surveyed. “I am the Virgin Queen,” she joked with staff. Too frightened to bell the cat, they stroked in public and mocked in private, a sad packet of neutered mice.

Miss Bentwhistle didn’t care. She had no need for friends, as she commanded the company of an extensive stock of wine bottles. Ostensibly on hand for parent events, crate after crate found its way to her boudoir. They proved good friends, providing sympathy during late-night tipples, and courage on those occasions when she called upon the services of her odd-jobs man, Brewster McTavish.

Brewster McTavish. A man with the sort of essence encountered in the novels of that wicked Mr. Lawrence. Thin as a pipe cleaner and covered in boils, his face was set in a permanent leer that Miss Bentwhistle liked to pretend was facial paralysis brought on by a childhood bout of diphtheria. When he’d arrived on her doorstep, Mary Mabel in tow, she’d been looking for someone to cut her grass. McTavish swore he was aces at yard work, and would swab the floors, bully the boiler, and deal with infestations of rodents — all for room, board, and pocket money. Delighted at the bargain, the headmistress snapped him up.

He was soon her darling, not for his janitorial services, but because of his grasp of theatrical lighting, a hobby he’d picked up from a Milwaukee matron devoted to little theatre. To Miss Bentwhistle’s elation, Mr. McTavish introduced coloured gels to the auditorium’s incandescent lamps. In the past, she’d suffered through assemblies under the ruthless glare of white light. Now she was radiant, her charms enhanced thanks to the glow of a soft pink front and an amber behind.

Oh, Mr. McTavish! Oh, oh, oh! Was ever a man such as this? A hard worker devoted to his child! An artist devoted to her interests! A common man worthy of her compassion!

Soon she was looking for reasons to call Mr. McTavish to her office and to see him after hours about one project or another. She professed to be astonished at the number of things that needed to be screwed in and out, and at the surprising array of nooks and crannies needing his manly attention. How she’d managed to live without him was quite beyond her.

Londoners noticed a change in the headmistress, but refused to contemplate the obvious. The image of Mr. McTavish and Miss Bentwhistle engaged in animal husbandry was simply too grotesque. Moreover, Miss Bentwhistle wisely included Mary Mabel in their outings. “How our Horatia dotes upon that little gumdrop,” remarked Mrs. Herbert C. Wallace, secretary-treasurer of the St. James Ladies Auxiliary Bridge Club. “She’s an example to us all.”

One Sunday, inspired by the Reverend Mandible’s homily on charity, Miss Bentwhistle visited the McTavishes bearing an orange. “This orange is especially for you, my dear,” she beamed at the girl, breasts swelling with the special joy that comes from giving. “From now on, you may be pleased to call me your ‘Auntie’ Horatia.” Mary Mabel looked up sweetly. “Thank you very much,” she said, “but I have more aunties than I can remember. If it’s okay, I’d like for you to just be a grownup.” Miss Bentwhistle chewed her dentures. Determined to teach the child some manners, she set her to work in the laundry and kitchen.

Meanwhile, female teachers were not so delighted with the new janitor. The third schoolmarm to lodge a complaint was that well-known rabble-rouser Miss Budgie, she with the fetish for “standards.”

“I don’t know quite how to put this,” Miss Budgie began, “but whenever I pass Mr. McTavish he starts to play with his fly. And he leers at me.”

Miss Bentwhistle was understandably appalled. “How dare you attack a poor victim of diphtheria!”

“Miss Bentwhistle, he stares at my breasts!”

“And what do you do to provoke him?”

“Nothing! And I’m not the only one to complain. Miss Lundy has spoken to you already. Miss Brown too. He pressed them up against the broom closet and invited them down to the boiler room to see his toolbox.”

“That is their point of view,” Miss Bentwhistle acknowledged with a thin smile. “Mr. McTavish has quite another.”

“Are you saying our word can’t be trusted?”

“I’m saying that Miss Lundy is a hypochondriac, and Miss Brown a known hysteric. Everyone has an agenda, Miss Budgie. Everyone. I, however, am the headmistress. It is my duty to rise above agendas.”

For once, Miss Budgie was not to be cowed. “I have witnesses!”

“What need have I for ‘witnesses’? Are you suggesting I’m afraid to deal with Mr. McTavish.”

“No. Just that you haven’t.”

“Tell me, my dear,” Miss Bentwhistle asked, as sweet as jam tarts, “are you in any position to make waves?”

Miss Budgie trembled. “Are you threatening me?”

“No. I believe I’m asking a question.”

Miss Budgie hesitated. “I’m not trying to make waves. It’s just that Mr. McTavish … well … he makes it hard for me to do my work.”

“Well you make it hard for me to do my work. I have a school to run, Miss Budgie. I haven’t time for tattletales. If you are unable to do your job without vilifying your colleagues, I shall find someone who can. I expect a letter of apology on my desk by this afternoon.”

Miss Bentwhistle’s decision to betray her staff for Mr. McTavish was not the result of romantic infatuation. Rather, the charges implied that she had employed a lecher, a lapse in judgment that threw into question her moral discernment. In light of this, the headmistress saw the accusations for what they were — an attack against her person.

There was also every chance that the little backstabbers were delusional. Mr. McTavish’s essence was undeniable, and it would not in the least surprise her if Miss Budgie and her conspirators had picked up the scent and were indulging themselves in lurid sexual fantasies. Was she to sacrifice Mr. McTavish to satisfy a coven of sexually obsessed deviants?

In any case, even if the Academy janitor had been indiscreet, what of it? Men are well-known to be slaves to their dangly bits, especially men of common breeding. As members of the fairer sex, it was up to his detractors to comport themselves so as to discourage propositions. Why, if anyone was to blame, it was they! The trollops must be punished! And they were — Miss Budgie was humiliated in front of her students for allegedly stealing chalk from the office supply cabinet.

Still, Miss Bentwhistle fretted about the charges. At last, she confided them to her handyman. He denied them outright, allowing that at most he may have given his accusers a well-intentioned smile, which they no doubt misunderstood on account of his facial paralysis. Miss Bentwhistle stroked his sweet, beleaguered brow. Poor Mr. McTavish. How she would comfort him tonight.

It occurred to her that, having saved his skin, she had him in her debt.

A remembrance of this debt was at the forefront of Miss Bentwhistle’s mind as she completed the reconstruction of her face. At this morning’s confrontation, she’d call upon Mr. McTavish to force his daughter to recant the miracle. Miss Bentwhistle knew that nothing short of a denial would keep this scandal from her door.

After all, what kind of headmistress employs a publicity hound who claims to raise the dead? How could she discipline her students if she couldn’t control her staff? Toss in a Pentecostal freak show and Miss Bentwhistle’s head reeled with nightmares of a convoy of limousines emptying the Academy of its young ladies. Then what? The Academy collapsed, her debts unpaid, and her family name disgraced, it would be a mere hop, skip, and a jump to the poorhouse.

It was the vision of that grim future that had caused Miss Bentwhistle’s explosion of tears. She’d seen herself shacked up in the hobo jungle at the outskirts of town, a sad old derelict with nary a penny to wash her drawers. Imagined herself shuffling up for a ladle of broth at the St. James soup kitchen, cowering before Mrs. Herbert C. Wallace, Reverend Mandible, and the rest.

Well, it wasn’t going to happen. As God was her witness, by the time she’d finished with the McTavishes, Mary Mabel would be on her knees. She’d issue a public proclamation that the Beeford boy was never dead, but merely stunned; she’d seen him move and helped him to his feet. She was a young woman wronged by fabrications of the press, an innocent whose life within the halls of the Bentwhistle Academy had taught her to place integrity, honour, and dignity before all else.

There was, of course, the awkward detail of the death certificate, but that was small potatoes. Dr. Hammond wouldn’t admit to signing death certificates for the living; it would scare away his clientele. Besides, it wasn’t in London’s interest to have its hospital seen as a happy-go-lucky loony bin shipping healthy out-of-towners to the morgue; that would be bad for tourism. In the end, the death certificate was just a piece of paper waiting to be misplaced by an underpaid clerk.

She made her way to the wardrobe. Selecting a frock was easy; she’d been wearing black since her father’s death. The decision, a sly cost-cutting measure, had proven good for business, a constant allusion to the Horatio Algernon Bentwhistle Memorial Fund. “Funerals provide such a dignified excuse to pass the hat,” she observed.

All that was left was to steady her nerves. Miss Bentwhistle took two tablespoons of laudanum, a homebrew she concocted from the lifetime supply of opium she’d found in her father’s effects. (He’d acquired it during his tenure as chairman of the Middlesex County Hospital Association. When the drug was outlawed, he’d generously overseen its disposal from the county’s repositories.)

Miss Bentwhistle washed the laudanum down with a glug of brandy, the smell of alcohol contained by a peppermint drop, and glanced at her watch. Nine o’clock. Battle stations. She stood in front of the mirror and repeated the mantra “I am a Bentwhistle, I am a Bentwhistle, I am a Bentwhistle.” With that, the regal barge navigated to the door and floated forth to rendezvous with destiny.