Ephemia Rimaldi, page 1
Copyright © 2023 Linda DeMeulemeester
Published in Canada by Red Deer Press,
209 Wicksteed Avenue, Unit 51, Toronto, ON M4G 0B1.
Published in the United States by Red Deer Press,
60 Leo M Birmingham Pkwy, Ste 107, Brighton, MA 02135.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews and articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Red Deer Press, 209 Wicksteed Avenue, Unit 51, East York, ON M4G 0B1
Red Deer Press acknowledges with thanks the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Ephemia Rimaldi : circus performer extraordinaire / written by Linda Demeulemeester.
Names: DeMeulemeester, Linda, 1956- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana 20230228364 | ISBN 9780889957299 (softcover) | ISBN 9780889957527 (epub) | 9780889957534 (pdf)
Publisher Cataloging-in-Publication Data (U.S.)
Names: DeMeulemeester, Linda, 1956-, author.
Title: Ephemia Rimaldi: Circus Performer Extraordinaire / Linda DeMeulemeester.
Description: Toronto, Ontario : Red Deer Press, 2023. | Summary: “Set on the eve of the 20th century, when female performers were one of the earliest groups to demand equal pay for equal work, this historical adventure offers important themes for today’s readers. The suffragist movement and early circus life serve as a backdrop for a feisty heroine who champions equality for all. Themes include social justice, agency, forgiveness and respect for diversity”--- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: ISBN 978-0-88995-729-9 (paperback) | ISBN 978-0-88995-752-7 (epub) | ISBN 978-0-88995-753-4 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH Circus performers — Juvenile fiction. | Women -- Suffrage -- Juvenile fiction. | Social justice — Juvenile fiction. | Historical fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Girls & Women. | JUVENILE FICTION / Social Themes / Activism & Social Justice.
Classification: LCC PZ7.D468Ep | DDC 813.6 — dc23
Edited for the Press by Beverley Brenna
Text and cover design by Tanya Montini
Copyedit by Penny Hozy
Ebook by Ken Geniza
Printed in Canada by Copywell
www.reddeerpress.com
For Mitch, Emily, Amanda, Mikel, and Maddy!
Chapter 1: Daughters of Freedom
Effy ducked as a cabbage sailed past her head. An egg flew over her shoulder and smashed against the brick building behind her. Egg splattered on the sleeve of her first fitted dress, which was the colour of a spring meadow. She had begged Aunt Ada for this dress, and now egg glistened like a slug trail along her silk sleeve. Effy’s blood boiled.
“Only bad women want to vote!” shouted the man in a bowler hat. This time he threw a tomato, and it landed by Effy’s boot.
“Go home to your dollies, little girl.”
Effy put down her protest sign. Scooping up the dripping tomato from the cobbled street, she chucked it back into the crowd, aiming for that hat. The red muck landed successfully on the man’s forehead, and tomato juice dripped down his plump cheeks. He shook his fist at her as his face turned crimson then purple. His cigar slid out of his mouth and plunked onto the ground.
Effy decided in a snap that she wouldn’t avoid the truth of it. While it was disgraceful behaviour-hitting the man with a tomato-it was one of her most satisfying moments. She didn’t give a fig about her tomato-slimed glove, either. She grabbed her sign and scurried away to join her great-aunt at the front of the protest march on Bloor Street.
“Ephemia Rimaldi, where did you get to?” said Aunt Ada in huffs and puffs. Despite her advanced age, her great-aunt was a boundless bundle of energy in matters of changing the world.
Effy didn’t say. Instead, she raised her sign and kept marching.
“Do you hear what some people in the crowd are shouting?” asked Letitia Nettles, when she’d pushed through the marching women and taken her place beside Effy’s aunt. “They’re saying one of our protesters assaulted a man with a tomato.”
Effy’s cheeks burned. She stopped and turned around, hoping she looked only curious and not a smidge guilty.
“Ephemia, hold your placard up high and proud,” Aunt Ada scolded her.
Effy hoisted her “Votes for Women” sign, even though the wood handle kept sliding through her tomato-slimed glove. She quickly pulled off her glove and let its guilty evidence drop among their marching feet.
As the other protesters chanted—”Simple Equality” and “From Prison to Citizenship”—Effy made sure she shouted above all the others. Almost thirteen, Ephemia Rimaldi needed to show her great-aunt that she was ready to join her first public protest.
Effy had spent the last year assisting her aunt with the printing press in the cellar. She folded and handed out women’s suffrage leaflets. Effy also served tea and plates of bis cuits at her aunt’s important ladies’ meetings, where they discussed how they would win the vote.
Finding her place in Aunt Ada’s household had been no easy journey. Effy’s father, a scoundrel, a flimflammer, and worse, circus riffraff, had abandoned her at birth. She’d been passed amongst her mother’s farming relatives, only to be called, “too stubborn,” or “too difficult,” or worst of all, “too sassy.” At the age of eleven, she was finally deposited with Aunt Ada in Toronto.
Great-aunt Ada, the sternest, most intimidating Rimaldi, was getting on in years and could use some assistance. No one in the Rimaldi family actually wanted to tell her that. Instead, Aunt Ada was told that Effy had her poppa’s bad blood, and she’d come to no good unless a firm hand was taken.
Aunt Ada had grand plans to educate her unmanageable niece. Effy declared it was as if she’d been a parched traveller, stumbling in the desert, who’d been led to an oasis of books. Effy and Aunt Ada quickly realized they were a perfect match.
Effy and the protesters marched past a billboard advertising a circus at Toronto’s exhibition grounds. Effy slowed and stared at the picture of a man on a swinging trapeze.
“Ephemia, keep up the pace,” said Aunt Ada.
Perhaps other girls her age were eagerly waiting to see acrobats and tigers, but Effy kept her mind on important business. On the edge of the great new century, women needed the vote and to win more rights. Aunt Ada had told her that women needed simple equality.
Effy was fine with that notion. She wanted to go to college, something boys were allowed to do, but only a few privileged women. Society didn’t approve of higher education for girls. But Effy knew her great-Aunt Ada would help her succeed.
Aunt Ada encouraged Effy. She’d enrolled Effy in an academy and set aside a trust fund for all future tuition.
That left no time for watching circuses or playing with dollies.
Close behind Effy, a woman screamed. The crowd broke into a roar. Effy turned and saw police constables astride tall brown horses, ploughing through the protestors. A brute of a man knocked over one of the marchers; her straw hat flopped sideways and slipped off her head. Effy’s heart thudded against her rib cage. The poor woman scrambled to her feet, thankfully, but she did not get away. One of the constables arrested her.
“Aunt Ada.” Effy kept looking over her shoulder. “I think we should get out of here.”
“There is no rebirth without pain, Ephemia,” said Aunt Ada.
“There is no accomplishment without sacrifice,” chirped Miss Letitia.
“And we must never fail in our nerve, but always show our grit and determination.” Effy croaked this as her throat closed in. “But can’t we be determined not to get arrested?”
Effy tugged her aunt’s arm and forced her to turn around. Aunt Ada’s eyes widened in alarm as she saw protestors being pushed and shoved, struggling as they were dragged to the ground by constables. Some men in the crowd were jeering, and other men and women were shouting at the police to leave the protesters alone. Fistfights broke out.
“Perhaps it is best we’re able to protest another day,” mused Aunt Ada.
The front lines of women broke up quickly, but the brigade of mounted police charged toward them. Effy dropped her protest sign and pushed Aunt Ada into a narrow cobbled lane. Miss Letitia followed them.
There were more shouts and fighting, and Effy, who had never seen violence up close, felt her eyes blur. She could barely make out the shape of Aunt Ada pressed up against a doorway, breathing heavily.
Aunt Ada straightened her straw boater’s hat and stiffened her spine. “No time for tears, Ephemia. We must make haste while the wind is at our backs.”
Together, Effy and Miss Letitia assisted Aunt Ada as they ran through the laneways.
“Dear, oh, dear,” cried Miss Letitia as she stepped in a pile of rubbish. “What if there are rats?”
“They’d be smaller than the rats that are chasing us,” Effy said through her teeth. She let go of her aunt’s hand and ducked under a ladder set against a brick wall. Aunt Ada let out a shriek. Effy froze, thinking a police constable was about to smack her with a billy club, or run her over with his horse.
Effy drew in a calming breath and said, “It would only be unlucky if the ladder fell on me.” She could hear the clip-clop of horses in the street behind. “And if we don’t hurry, worse luck is on the way.”
Effy, Miss Letitia, and Aunt Ada crossed Queen’s Park and wound their way through twisting streets, until they finally reached their own respectable neighbourhood. Only then did Aunt Ada stop and catch her breath in gasps and wheezes. Mopping her head with her handkerchief, she straightened her hat. At Effy’s suggestion, they slipped off their gold suffragist sashes and tucked them away. When they strolled under the elm trees and past the stately Victorian houses, it was as if they were returning from a church picnic.
Safely inside her home, Aunt Ada flopped heavily onto her wingback chair in the parlour. “Ephemia, my nitroglycerine, please,” she said weakly.
Effy fumbled in Aunt Ada’s drawstring bag and produced a tiny white tablet. Aunt Ada placed it on her tongue. Miss Letitia took out her handkerchief and flapped it uselessly in front of Aunt Ada’s face. Aunt Ada brushed it away as if it were an annoying mosquito.
Some colour returned to Aunt Ada’s cheeks. “Good grief, that was rather unexpected. Imagine us being chased like common criminals.” She woefully shook her head. “Why, we now have telegraph machines that send messages across the world in seconds, and streetcars rushing along city streets at dangerous speeds of fifteen miles per hour. But politicians can’t get it through their thick skulls that women should win the vote?”
Miss Letitia nodded. “Women need to get into politics and make sure morals don’t slide in these fast times. It is our duty to steer society in the right direction.”
“What direction would that be?” Effy wondered out loud. “We want to make our own choices. Surely not so we can then tell others what they can or can’t do.”
“Quite the contrary,” Miss Letitia sniffed. “We are moral guardians who must stamp out demon rum and fight social ills.”
“I thought we were marching so I could go to college?” Effy’s face flushed, realizing how selfish that sounded. “I mean . . . ”
“I know perfectly well what you mean, Ephemia.” Aunt Ada still sounded quite out of breath. “Don’t forget, we each must serve a greater calling than just worrying about ourselves. Only when we open up the university doors to more women than those of refined society can all women advance.”
Effy had printed flyers for the suffragists. Local papers complained that demanding equal rights only stirred women up. Knowing her aunt’s friends, Effy believed women were already stirred.
Aunt Ada leaned forward, held Effy’s gaze, and furrowed her brow. “You’ll soon need to settle on your one true purpose.”
Effy was about to tell her aunt that she had no idea what that purpose might be. So, until then, couldn’t she focus on her education? Only her aunt said, “Ephemia, would you please make me a pot of tea. I am in great need of libation to ease my dry throat.”
“Of course.” Effy hurried to the kitchen as Miss Letitia bid her farewell.
“She is willful and selfish,” Effy overheard Miss Letitia say.
“She is determined and focused,” contradicted Aunt Ada. “And she has a sharp mind. She’ll need all that to blaze a trail to success. I believe it is my true purpose to make sure my niece goes to college.”
The door banged shut after Miss Letitia bid goodbye.
Effy promised under her breath that she’d never let Aunt Ada down. Still, she snorted as she pumped water into the kettle and lit a flame for the stove. Selfish and willful . . . but at least Aunt Ada understood. All Effy wanted was to choose her own direction. She certainly hadn’t got far when others had been in charge.
A girl needs a say in her own destiny. But good luck, getting anyone to listen. Even Aunt Ada hadn’t consulted Effy, but it worked out because they were of like minds regarding Effy’s going to school. Why, if it was up to the rest of her family, she’d still be washing laundry, sweeping, and scrubbing floors. Not to mention, instead of attending the academy this fall, she’d be at her other auntie’s farm, digging carrots and potatoes out of the dirt all the livelong day.
Aunt Ada had been scandalized by Effy’s spotty education and had arranged a tutor. In turn, Effy had worked hard and was ready for the academy.
Wasn’t that what the suffragist movement was all about—freedom? What did she care what others chose for themselves?
When the kettle whistled, Effy spooned tea leaves into a pot and poured steaming water, all the while figuring out how to remove the egg mess from the delicate material of her dress. Frowning, she pumped a trickle of cold water onto her sleeve and began scraping the silk cloth with her fingernail.
A bang, a tinkle of glass, and then another crash startled her. Black feathers splattered the windowpane. Her first thought was poor little bird. Her second thought was oh, goodness, I can’t let Aunt Ada see this. Grabbing the whisk broom and a dustpan, she flew out the kitchen door and hurried down the wooden steps.
Rimaldis were superstitious, all right. “No point taking any chances,” Aunt Ada would say.
A bird flying into a window could be, according to Aunt Ada, the worst of luck. A dead bird meant there’d be a death in the house. Effy shook her head as she looked for the unfortunate bird in the shrubbery.
Effy wasn’t superstitious. Wishing on falling stars had never delivered her a loving mother and father and sisters and brothers. So she relied only on reason. Reason such as: what her aunt couldn’t see wouldn’t upset her.
Effy carefully whisked the bird onto her dustpan. Lifting the dustpan and leaning her ear to the bird’s feather-ruffled chest, she made sure the poor little fellow had truly departed to the Great Beyond. Then she buried him in the compost that smelled of grass cuttings and flower petals. She wiped her hands.
Hurrying back into the kitchen, she poured tea into Aunt Ada’s favourite china cup. She poured in an extra dollop of milk, as the tea had brewed quite strong. Balancing a saucer to catch the drops of sloshing tea, Effy headed into the parlour and stopped in her tracks.
Rather strangely, what Effy thought of first was that she hadn’t found any broken glass in the kitchen or in the yard. She stared at the parlour rug and said, “Oh, that’s the crash I heard, a broken lamp.”
It was another long second before she realized dear Aunt Ada had also departed to the Great Beyond.
Chapter 2: Wolves At The Door
Aunt Ada had been quite clear what was to happen in the event of her death. With her usual bluntness, she’d say, “After all, Ephemia, I am an old lady.”
Effy’s aunt believed there should be a proper mourning period. “Because I am also a rich old lady, and relatives will be pawing on the porch like wolves at the door.”
Only the wolves couldn’t wait . . .
Uncle Edgar, the eldest brother, declared himself an important and busy man, and decided it was best to dispatch the funeral and the will on the same day. While there was a small turnout at the grave, all the Rimaldis swooped in for the will reading. They perched on their chairs like a murder of crows, the older ones smelling of camphor and mutton.
A bird-like lawyer strutted into the parlour and made himself comfortable at Aunt Ada’s desk.
“Do you suppose we might honeymoon in Europe with some of my inheritance?” cousin Hattie asked her fiancé, Reverend Mason. He straightened his clerical collar and said, “I will decide those things now.” Then the reverend patted Hattie’s head, like she’s a pet cat, thought Effy.
Effy chewed on her lip as she sat stiffly in the cane chair. Good posture wasn’t difficult, because her jet black dress was so starched, she could barely bend. As the Rimaldis quibbled about windfalls of inheritance money, steam gathered inside Effy like a tea kettle.
Before she exploded, Effy stood and clasped her hands in front of her. Bowing her head, she said, “Perhaps we should take a moment and reflect upon what Great-aunt Ada meant to all of us.”
“Your great-aunt squandered our inheritance on trying to win the vote for women and other such nonsense,” grumbled Uncle Edgar.
