The Chatham School Affair Read Online Free PDF

suppressed. I felt my hand toy with the button at my throat.
    “Well, is there anything else you need?” I asked, still mindful of my father’s instructions, but eager now to get away. “I mean, between now and Monday, when school starts?”
    “No, I don’t think so.”
    “All right, then,” I said. “I guess I’ll see you at school on Monday.”
    With that, I nodded good-bye and started back towardthe road, ambling slowly, not wanting to give an impression of flight.
    I was halfway down the path that led from her door to the road when I heard her call to me.
    “Are you walking back to the village, Henry?”
    I stopped and turned toward her. “Yes,” I said.
    “Would you mind if I came along with you? I haven’t really seen it yet.”
    I didn’t relish the idea of being seen with a teacher outside a classroom setting. “It’s a long way into town, Miss Channing,” I said, hoping to dissuade her.
    She was undeterred. “I’m used to long walks.”
    Clearly, there was no way out. “All right,” I said with an unenthusiastic shrug.
    She came forward, quickening her pace slightly until she reached my side.
    Sometime later, after I’d read her father’s book and realized all the exotic places he’d taken her during the years they’d traveled together, it would strike me as very strange mat she’d wanted to go into the village at all that morning. Certainly, given the breadth of her experience, Chatham could only have seemed quaint. And yet her curiosity seemed real, her need to explore our small streets and shops not in the least diminished by the fact that she’d strolled the narrow alleyways of Naples and the plazas of Madrid, her father at her side relating gruesome stories of Torquemada’s Inquisition and the visions of Juana the Mad in that same tone of ominousness and impending death that later fathers would use as they led their children along the banks of Black Pond, grimly spinning out a tale whose dreadful course they thought had ended there.

CHAPTER 4
    I have always wondered if, during that first walk down Plymouth Road with Miss Channing, I should have noticed some hint of that interior darkness Mr. Parsons later claimed to have unearthed in her. Often, I’ve tried to see what he saw in his first interrogation of her, the “eeriness” he described in his memoir, the sense that she had “delved in black arts.”
    She carefully kept pace with me that morning, a breeze playing lightly in her hair, her conversation generally related to the plant life we saw around us. She asked the names of the trees and flowers that bordered the road, often very common ones like beach plum or Queen Anne’s lace.
    “I guess you had different plants in Africa,” I said.
    “Yes, very different,” she said. “Of course, it wasn’t at all the sort of place people think of when they think of Africa. It wasn’t a jungle, or anything like that. It was a plain, mostly grasslands. With a river running through it, and animals everywhere.” She smiled. “It was like living in the middle of an enormous zoo.”
    “Did you like living there?”
    “I suppose,” she answered. “But I really didn’t live there long. Only a few months after my father died.With my uncle and his family.” She stopped and peered out into the surrounding forest. “It must have looked like this when the first explorers came.”
    I could hardly have cared less about anything so distant. “Why did you leave Africa?” I asked.
    She drew her attention back to me. “I needed a job. My uncle went to school with your father. He wrote to him, hoping he might know of a position. Your father offered me one at Chatham School.”
    “What do you teach?”
    “Art.”
    “We’ve never had an art teacher,” I told her. “You’ll be the first one.”
    She started to speak, then glanced toward the ground at the white dust that had begun to settle on her feet and shoes.
    “It comes from the oyster shells,” I told her, merely as a point