The Mysterious Howling Read online

  But really, how much was too much? It was a party, after all, and parties were meant to be enjoyed. Yet Lord Fredrick had said his friends were “itching” to meet the children; the very idea made Penelope feel as if she might break out in a rash. If the children failed to meet expectations, what then? Every fact and figure Penelope had ever learned seemed to swirl before her eyes. Which skill or scrap of knowledge would be called for? There was no way to tell! She began to panic.

  “Remember, children,” she said frantically. “Copenhagen is the capital of Denmark! Helsinki is the capital of Finland!”

  By this point the children were giddy with fatigue. Alexander nodded gravely and offered a chess piece to his brother.

  “Finland?” His voice was comically deep.

  “Capital!” Beowulf replied, sounding uncannily like Lord Fredrick.

  “Cassawoof poem!” Cassiopeia announced, mischief in her eye. “Title: ‘Helsinki’:

  “Sinki,

  blinki,

  stinki,

  Helsinki!”

  She curtsied, and her brothers dissolved into giggles.

  At the sight of the three of them nipping and rolling on the carpet, exhorting each other with socially useful phrases such as “Pass the salt, please!” and “May I take your umbrella?” Penelope realized she had gone too far. They were children; it was Christmas. The party was only a party. They would eat, dance, play, enjoy themselves, and the chips, as they say nowadays, would simply have to fall as they may.

  “All right, never mind about Finland.” Penelope extended both hands to help the children up from the floor. “As Agatha Swanburne used to say, ‘Doing your best is the best you can do,’ and we have certainly done our best. Let us take a walk and play outdoors. We have been working too hard for too long, and I believe it has started to snow.”

  THEIR ROMP OUTDOORS WAS wonderfully invigorating. The children were quite skilled at identifying animal tracks in the snow, although Penelope had to discourage them from actually sniffing their way along the ground. Instead, she taught them to make angels by lying on their backs and waving their arms and legs. They returned to the house in high spirits, with tingling red cheeks and snow-frosted eyelashes. Mrs. Clarke intercepted them at the door.

  The children were quite skilled at identifying animal tracks in the snow . . .

  “There you are! Look at you, all covered with ice like three wild things. By which I mean no offense, of course!” she added quickly.

  “No boots in the house!” Alexander said proudly, kicking off his snow-encrusted galoshes. His siblings quickly followed suit.

  Penelope flushed with pride at their courteous behavior. What had she been so worried about? The children were charming and well mannered; whatever minor quirks lingered from their unusual upbringing, the howling and drooling and so forth—these would soon fade. She had let herself become fretful for no good reason, and was reminded of how she had foolishly imagined bandits might board the train on the day she arrived at Ashton Place. How easy it was to imagine the worst when one was nervous! And how long ago that fateful day seemed!

  She smiled warmly at the housekeeper, whom she now considered a friend. “Never fear, Mrs. Clarke, we shall be very careful not to track snow indoors. I know how hard the staff has worked to make the house sparkle for the party tomorrow.”

  Mrs. Clarke rolled her eyes. “Oh, the party, the party, it’ll be the death of me! It’s an awful thing to say of Christmas Day, but the sooner it’s over, the better I’ll feel. Heavens to Betsy, I almost forgot why I’ve been standing here waiting for you lot! Lady Constance has come out of hiding, and she’s asking for you. I told her you’d gone out-of-doors, and she said very well, but I must tell her the minute you and the children are returned. She wants you to meet with her in the drawing room as soon as you’re ready.”

  Penelope felt the healthy glow she had acquired during their snowy adventure drain from her cheeks. But before she could ask why they had been called, Mrs. Clarke provided the answer.

  “My lady says tomorrow she will simply be too busy, what with the guests arriving and having to get dressed and so forth—so she wishes to give the Incorrigibles their Christmas presents tonight and have it done with.”

  The children squealed happily at this news. Penelope was relieved and thanked Mrs. Clarke for the information. But privately she thought it was a very questionable practice to give Christmas gifts early; in fact, the idea of it caused her a little pang. Any gift ought to be appreciated, of course, and thank-you notes promptly written, but still—early presents meant there would be that much less to open under the tree on Christmas morning.

  Yet, she told herself, the children would be unlikely to mind. To get presents at all must be a novelty to them, and of course they had lived under trees all their lives. It was Penelope herself who liked getting presents on Christmas morning, or if not presents, then at least a present. Back at Swanburne, at Christmas, each girl was given the task of being a “Secret Swanburne Santa” whose job it was to make something for one of her classmates (all presents had to be handmade, that was the rule). Countless knitted hats, monogrammed handkerchiefs, and needlepoint pillows featuring the sayings of Agatha Swanburne were exchanged annually, but one year Penelope had the good fortune of getting Miss Charlotte Mortimer as her Secret Swanburne Santa, and that was the year she had been given her poetry book.

  “But, Miss Mortimer, I thought the gifts had to be handmade,” a much younger Penelope had asked, while experiencing a shiver of delight at how completely and thrillingly store-bought the book appeared to be.

  “Indeed—and what could be more handmade than a poem?” Miss Mortimer had replied, with a warm and mysterious smile. “That it gets printed in a book after the poet makes it is quite beside the point.” This memory was both happy and sad: happy because it was so pleasant, and sad because it made Penelope think about how much she missed Swanburne—the girls, the teachers, Miss Mortimer. Or perhaps it was her own much younger self, that pint-sized person whom she could never be again, whom she missed. It was hard to say.

  Then she looked at the three upturned faces of the Incorrigibles, now bright-eyed with eagerness: proud Alexander, dreamy, drooly Beowulf, and clever little Cassiopeia, who was finding it difficult not to pant with excitement for her present. Penelope thought how dear to her they had already become and how much they needed her, and she felt a new source of happiness bubbling up from within, warm and slightly gooey, like the heated chocolate syrup one might pour over an ice cream sundae.

  In this way Penelope’s happy and sad feelings got all mixed up together, until they were not unlike one of those delicious cookies they have nowadays, the ones with a flat circle of sugary cream sandwiched between two chocolate-flavored wafers. In her heart she felt a soft, hidden core of sweet melancholy nestled inside crisp outer layers of joy, and if that is not the very sensation most people feel at some point or other during the holidays, then one would be hard pressed to say what is.

  PLAYING IN THE SNOW even for a short while makes most children ravenously hungry. Judging from the way the Incorrigibles were starting to chew on their mittens, they too were ready for a snack. So, despite the enticement of the presents that awaited them, Penelope first took the children up to the nursery to change into dry clothes and eat a quick supper. Then, after a thorough check to see that their shoes were tied, their hair was combed, and their fingernails were perfectly clean, Penelope sent word that she would now bring the children down to the drawing room, where they would remain until it was convenient for Lady Constance to receive them.

  The drawing room was so warm! There was a fire blazing in the hearth; the flames leaped up in long orange tongues, and the logs crackled and sputtered. Each of the hundreds of shiny baubles that hung on the tall Christmas tree caught the flickering light of the fire and reflected it in miniature, until the tree itself seemed to shimmer and glow. The children stared in awe. Penelope wondered what, if anything, in the mysterious wood
s they once inhabited could have prepared them for this sight. A meteor shower, perhaps? A forest fire?

  “Don’t you think the tree is pretty? Really, is there anything as pretty as a Christmas tree? I think it is the prettiest, prettiest thing in the world!”

  Lady Constance swept into the room as giddy and foolish as ever; to look at her, you would think nothing unpleasant had ever happened in the whole history of England. She clasped her hands together and spoke with the kind of false, high-pitched cheerfulness adults sometimes feel compelled to use when talking to children. “When I was a little girl, I used to insist on sleeping under the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve! I wanted to catch Father Christmas in the act. Wasn’t that ever so naughty of me?”

  To the Incorrigibles, sleeping under a tree was not, as they say nowadays, a big deal. But they smiled and agreed with what Lady Constance had said.

  “You are very kind to think of gifts for the children,” Penelope remarked. She did not expect any gift for herself, of course, but the book about stately homes she had selected for Lady Constance was tucked in her apron pocket, wrapped in colorful paper, and sealed with a red ribbon bow. She hoped the perfect opportunity to present it would naturally arise at some point during the conversation.

  “I will be frank. I really had no idea what to get you three, but then I thought back to when I was a girl, and the sorts of things my brothers and I would be given as presents, and there you have it.” She handed a package to Alexander. “Here, this is for you two boys to share.” She produced another package and held it out to Cassiopeia. “And this is for you.”

  The packages were wrapped perfectly—too perfectly, the way packages are done up when they have been wrapped by a nameless clerk in a store. Possibly because there were two of them tearing away at the paper, the boys managed to get their present opened first.

  “What is it? Let me see!” Penelope was excited in spite herself. But the boys looked ashen. With shaking hands, Alexander held up a disturbingly lifelike toy rifle.

  “How my brothers loved their guns!” Lady Constance chirped. “That one is only a toy, of course. But perhaps someday you will want real ones.”

  All Penelope could think of was what it must have been like that day in the forest: three terrified children staring down the muzzle of Lord Fredrick’s hunting rifle—the trigger pulled back with a click—Old Timothy intervening at the last minute—

  Beowulf gnawed anxiously on his knuckles. Alexander held the toy between two fingers, as if it burned his skin to touch it.

  Quickly, Penelope turned to Cassiopeia, who had just succeeded in tearing the ribbon off her present with her teeth. “And what is your present, dear?” she said, trying to inject some light-heartedness back into the proceedings. “It looks like a book, how wonderful!”

  Cassiopeia held the book forward. With a sinking heart, Penelope read, “It is called The Girls’ Guide to Obedience and Quietness.”

  “Ironic?” Cassiopeia sounded hopeful.

  Penelope sneaked a glance at the giver of these strangely off-putting gifts. In the changeable light of the fire Lady Constance’s face seemed an inscrutable, doll-like mask, with half-smiling lips painted on and expressionless glass eyes—all at once Penelope thought the lady bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the animals in Lord Fredrick’s study.

  The image of Lady Constance’s stuffed head mounted on the wall was disturbing and difficult to shake off. “I am not entirely sure about that, Cassiopeia,” Penelope finally answered. This was another example of selective truth telling, for although what Penelope said was technically true—she could not be entirely sure what the author’s intentions were in terms of irony; the answers to literary questions of this sort are rarely cut and dried, as authors themselves are often at a loss to explain their own intentions—it was also true that she did not like these presents one bit. Lady Constance’s weirdly taxidermic facial expression was getting on her nerves, and all her previously laid-to-rest fears about the party had been brought back to life and now lurched terrifyingly around her mind, like Frankenstein’s monster.

  “There you have it, children,” Lady Constance said, with a frozen smile. “Those are your presents. Now I do hope you are going to say thank you!”

  Quite without warning, Cassiopeia snarled and bared her teeth.

  “Why, whatever is the matter with her? Is she about to attack?” Shielding her face with her hands, Lady Constance shrank back in fear.

  Penelope seized Cassiopeia by the arm. “Now, stop that, Cassiopeia! Stop it at once.”

  Slowly Cassiopeia let her lips unfurl to their usual position, but there was a hard and unrepentant look in her eye. She stared at Lady Constance without blinking.

  “These children—are they really savage beasts at heart?” Lady Constance gasped and hid behind an armchair. “Are they dangerous?”

  “Hardly! Lady Constance, I am deeply sorry for Cassiopeia’s outburst. I am sure she is as well.” Unseen, she gave the girl’s wrist a sharp squeeze.

  “Ow! Sorry,” Cassiopeia mumbled. “Cassawoof no teeth, no bite, sorry, sorry, sorry.”

  The boys looked contrite as well, although they had done nothing wrong. “You will excuse me,” Beowulf intoned. It was one of the socially useful phrases Penelope had made the children practice. Evidently he was trying to do his part to smooth things over.

  “Apologies all around,” Alexander said, and then for good measure he added, “I extend my deepest condolences.” It was not quite the right occasion for the remark, but Penelope thought the children’s sincerity was clear. However, Lady Constance still looked terrified.

  “Listen to that! They do everything together, don’t they?” Lady Constance said under her breath. “They are not like siblings at all—they are more like a pack!”

  “Cassiopeia is tired from being kept too long out-of-doors in the cold weather. That is my fault.” Penelope knew she needed to make an exit, as quickly as possible. “With your permission we shall take our leave, and I will tuck the children straight into bed.”

  “I’m sure you know best how to manage these creatures,” Lady Constance said coolly. “But I warn you, Miss Lumley! If they behave like wild animals at my party tomorrow, I will implore my husband to set them loose in the woods again, where they belong!”

  Penelope curtsied and quickly herded the children to the door. In her pocket the wrapped Stately Homes of England suddenly felt as if it weighed as much as the houses it depicted, but in her pocket it would have to remain. She knew there was no chance of it receiving a suitable welcome now.

  THE TWELFTH CHAPTER

  After an anxious wait, the festivities begin.

  PENELOPE DREAMED OF PRESENTS and awoke thinking how a nice hand-monogrammed handkerchief always makes a welcome and appropriate gift. Then she opened her eyes and remembered what day it was.

  “Oh! Christmas!” she exclaimed aloud, and not in the festive manner one might expect. Today was the party. If it were a catastrophe, it would be her fault—and then what would become of them all?

  She washed and dressed at twice her customary speed. By the time she arrived at the nursery, Penelope felt weak in the knees, and her hands were shaky. It was no way to begin the day, and certainly no way for a Swanburne girl to react under pressure, but no matter how many deep breaths she took or how many times she repeated to herself, “No hopeless case is truly without hope,” she could not get her heartbeat to slow its anxious flutter.

  In the nursery the children seemed subdued and distracted, as if waiting for something bad to happen. Cassiopeia sat by the window, idly flicking the beads on the abacus up and down. She looked contrite, but Penelope noticed that she had tossed her new book in a corner and had not bothered to pick it up. The boys hovered nearby, shuffling their feet; the toy rifle was nowhere to be seen. Breakfast had been brought in and placed on the table in an elegant silver chafing dish. Penelope lifted the lid and peeked underneath: oatmeal, same as always. Even at Swanburne the girls would
get cinnamon toast and sausage on holidays.

  “I see that breakfast has not yet been touched,” Penelope commented.

  “Tummy ache,” Beowulf said in a whimper. The other two nodded. There was a sense of anxiety in the air. Penelope knew she had to do something, or the day would be ruined before it had even begun.

  “If you please,” she said, summoning her calmest tone, “would someone bring me my copy of Edith-Anne Gets a Pony? It is on the bookshelf, in its usual place.” She could think of no better antidote for the dark mood of the children; besides, turning her mind to the adventures of that lovable pony was likely to settle her nerves as well.

  The children must have been of a similar opinion, for they raced one another to fetch the book. Penelope read aloud while the children squatted on their haunches and listened (normally she would have reminded them to sit in chairs, but she was trying to comfort them after all). After a while they acted out their favorite scenes from the story. It was all very soothing, and as soon as the fog of worry dissipated, everyone’s normal hearty breakfast appetites returned, including Penelope’s.

  It was only when they were done eating that Penelope remembered: Her presents for the children were still waiting, carefully stacked under the small Christmas tree of the nursery!

  “Why, children!” she exclaimed, wiping her lips on one of the pressed linen napkins. “Did you neglect to look under the tree this morning? There are more presents for you!”

  At the word presents they flinched, but Penelope gently guided them to the tree and pointed underneath. “They are from me,” she added softly, and then the children smiled.

  How different this moment of gift giving was from that of the previous evening! These presents were chosen with the children’s own likes and dislikes in mind, by someone who had their best interests at heart and who had lovingly (although imperfectly) wrapped them herself. The children opened the packages with the appropriate sense of wonder and spent the morning happily leafing through their new treasures, which of course Penelope promised to read to them at her earliest opportunity. When Alexander understood that his Latin book was a primer, he straightaway pretended to be “Miss Lumawoo” teaching Latin to his siblings, and there was much laughter.