The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict(3)

The train’s caboose had not yet cleared the station when the redheaded man rose, stretched, rearranged his newspaper, and exited the station house. Mr. Collum, meanwhile, had finished adjusting his watch and tucked it away. He went to the open door and paused. Glancing at Mrs. Ferrier, he touched his hat in what appeared to be a courteous farewell—though he might simply have been lowering its brim against the weather—and stepped outside with his umbrella. All of this had occurred as if in pantomime, with the train’s rumbling, screeching, and clattering crowding out all other sound. When at last something like silence returned to the station house, Mrs. Ferrier laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“Nicholas, you know what you must do,” she said.

“Oh yes, Mrs. Ferrier! I’m to carry my suitcase out to that Studebaker, and never mind the drizzle. I imagine I’ll sit in the back while Mr. Collum rides in front with the driver.”

Mrs. Ferrier blinked. “The driver?”

“Why, sure,” said Nicholas with a shrug. “That red-haired man with the new hat.”

“The red-haired man…” Straightening, Mrs. Ferrier looked out the window behind him. Her eyebrows rose in surprise. “Well, yes, you’re correct, though it isn’t at all what I was going to say. I was going to say…” She noticed the boy staring at her expectantly, the corners of his lips twitching as if he was suppressing a smile, and she sighed. “Oh, very well, Nicholas. Tell me how you knew all that. This will be my last opportunity to hear one of your exhausting explanations.”

Nicholas grinned, raised his chin like a songbird preparing to sing, and throwing his arms out for emphasis, burst forth with an astonishing flurry of words: “Well, the hat must be new, don’t you think? Otherwise he wouldn’t have left it in the Studebaker to spare it getting wet. Which is a funny thing, in my opinion, since hats are meant to protect their owners and not the other way around. But I’ve known quite a lot of people who go to amazing trouble on behalf of their hats, haven’t you, Mrs. Ferrier? I wonder what happened to his umbrella, though? Perhaps he lost it. Anyway, I do wish he’d left a section of the newspaper for me—to cover my head with, you know, as he did, to keep it dry.”

“I’m sure he meant to,” said the old woman after a confused pause, “but only forgot.” (This was the sort of thing Mrs. Ferrier always said in such cases, as part of her effort to be positive.) “But how did you know he was Mr. Collum’s driver?”

Nicholas laughed. It was a squeaky, stuttering laugh, rather like the nickering of a pony. “I certainly doubt he’s a passenger! The next train doesn’t arrive for two hours, so it’s not likely he was waiting for that, is it? Besides, he left when Mr. Collum did, and where else would he be going in this weather if not to that old Studebaker at the curb? It obviously just got here from somewhere out in the country—its engine is still hot and there’s mud on the tires—and Mr. Collum said it’s a long ride to the Manor. He did say ride rather than drive, you know, so I got the feeling he didn’t intend to sit behind the wheel himself. Now, if there had been horses outside, especially a horse with an umbrella stand attached to it”—here Nicholas nickered again—I might have come to a different…”

Mrs. Ferrier was shaking her head, a common enough response to everything Nicholas said that he would have continued his speech unabated had she not held up a hand to check him. He’d been about to explain half a dozen other reasons he’d come to this conclusion about the red-haired man, as well as several he hadn’t consciously thought of yet but which were sure to occur to him as he spoke. But Nicholas was used to being shushed by Mrs. Ferrier, and at any rate he knew that delaying Mr. Collum would not serve him well. So he let the explanations go with a shrug, and waited for Mrs. Ferrier to proceed.

“Thank you, Nicholas. That will be more than enough to make my poor head ache for the next two hours.” Mrs. Ferrier cleared her throat. “And now this is goodbye. When I said that you know what you must do, I only meant to remind you to hold your tongue in check, and to make yourself useful. There, that’s the last I’ll say.” She lifted his chin with her finger and looked once more into his eyes—a little wonderingly at first, as if she saw some mystery there she could never hope to fathom, and then with a different sort of expression Nicholas hadn’t seen in her eyes before, something between sadness and exhaustion. She said, “I wish you better luck, child. Better luck than you’ve had. Now go on. Don’t keep Mr. Collum waiting.”