The Unseen Guest Page 16

  “Certainly, dear. After we’re done here you can come to the kitchen with me and we’ll ask Cook to make some sticky cinnamon buns, how’s that?” Of course Cassiopeia actually meant synonyms, but it was all lost on Mrs. Clarke. However, the confusion about words prompted its own lesson, for the boys began discussing whether rooks and ravens were different names for the same kind of bird, or easily confused names for two different but similar kinds of birds, and how crows fit into the scheme of things, and whether all three sorts of birds (that is to say, rooks, ravens, and crows) could talk, or if none of them could, in which case Mr. Poe was obviously using his poetic license in having the particular raven in his poem shout “Nevermore!” whenever the rhyme scheme called for it.

  “Eureka, I’ve got it!” Penelope exclaimed as she burst into the room and threw the library books in a heap in the corner.

  “Got what, Miss Lumley? I hope it’s not the chicken pox.” Mrs. Clarke chuckled.

  “No, not the chicken pox,” Penelope cried, although just saying the words made her want to scratch. “When I say, ‘Eureka, I’ve got it,’ I mean, ‘Eureka! I have figured out how to stop the admiral from’—well, from doing several unpleasant things that he ought not to do. And I feel sure I am performing the Widow Ashton a great service as well. But I need help. Quick, children, fetch me some paper suitable for urgent correspondence! Bring fresh ink and a quill. Mrs. Clarke, I am sorry to interrupt your chess game, but could you summon Jasper and have him at the ready to run a letter to the post, posthaste?”

  “Jasper’s got the day off today on account of his sister having a new baby and needing some extra help around the farm.” Mrs. Clarke sprang lightly to her feet. “But don’t you fear, Miss Lumley. If it’s that important, I’ll run the letter into town myself.”

  “It is that important,” Penelope replied, but with the three children gazing up at her, wide-eyed with curiosity, she had no intention of explaining just how mouthwatering the admiral’s plans for Bertha were. Nor did she intend to tell them how he wanted to take possession of the Incorrigibles themselves and make them world famous as the Bloodthirsty Wolf Children of Ashton Place.

  “You will do very well as our fleet-footed messenger, Mrs. Clarke. First, I must write the letter; I shall meet you downstairs in five minutes’ time” was her answer. From the corner of her eye, she saw that the good-hearted housekeeper was only two moves away from being checkmated by Alexander, so it was just as well that she had offered to run to the post herself.

  Penelope sat at the writing desk and smoothed the paper before her. How eagerly she had looked forward to writing Simon Harley-Dickinson about all their adventures in the forest! The storm, the cave, the sandwiches, the wolves, and, of course, the many fascinating varieties of ferns! But there was no time for all that now. She stuck to what was essential.

  Dear Simon,

  I write to you in urgent need of help. Please bring Madame Ionesco here to Ashton Place at once. I enclose money for train tickets and to cover Madame’s fee, for her soothsaying services will be required upon her arrival.

  With deepest thanks, from your friend,

  Miss Penelope Lumley

  Excusing herself briefly from the nursery, she ran to her bedchamber and stuffed the envelope with all the money that she had saved since taking the job as governess. She sealed the envelope with wax, using the seal that had been a graduation gift from Miss Mortimer. It was the Swanburne Academy emblem, a florid capital A entwined with a swirling letter S.

  Downstairs she went to meet Mrs. Clarke, who waited for her at the servants’ entrance on the first floor. The housekeeper had changed out of her usual buckled shoes and voluminous floral-print dress, and into a pair of sturdy boots and a borrowed shirt and trousers from one of the farmhands. Her hair was tied up, and she gave each leg a quick stretch. She was an odd sight, perhaps, but perfectly dressed for the occasion.

  Penelope handed her the sealed letter. “Run quickly, Mrs. Clarke. The sooner this letter reaches its destination, the better.”

  “Will do, Miss Lumley. I’ve been picking up my pace of late. A jaunt like this is just what the doctor ordered.”

  A blink later, Mrs. Clarke was off and running. She was not as fast as an ostrich, or even a Derby-winning Thoroughbred, but still, when it came to being true hearted, Penelope knew she could not have chosen anyone better for the job.

  Would Madame Ionesco prove as true? Would Simon? As Agatha Swanburne once said, “Sometimes there’s nothing more to be done but have a cup of tea and sit and wait for the post.” Which—after providing the children with a brief introduction to cave geology and making sure to hide the slim volume about cannibals between the covers of one of her Giddy-Yap, Rainbow! books, so she could locate it again later, privately, when the children were not looking—is precisely what Penelope did.

  THE TWELFTH CHAPTER

  A reunion is held, in secret.

  “A SÉANCE! HOW PERFECTLY ENTERTAINING! Why, they are all the rage. Just last month Lady Furbisher hosted a spiritualist at one of her notorious dinner parties—or do I mean legendary? I always get those two mixed up. In any case, it was a sensation! Everyone’s fortune was told in secret. They say one of Lady Furbisher’s daughters fainted when she heard what the fortune-teller had to say. Hmm, I think I like this one.” Lady Constance tipped her head from one side to the other in front of her dressing-room mirror, the better to admire the elaborate chapeau that she had just placed upon her upswept curls. It was pale green silk, with an arrangement of peacock feathers extending upward from the brim. “But green is such a sickly shade. It makes my eyes look the color of seawater. Never mind, it is awful! Hand me another, please, Margaret.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of ghosts, my lady?” Patient as ever, Margaret stood with an armload of hats for her mistress to try on and find fault with, one after another after another. “I surely am. I don’t much like being around a dead animal, never mind a dead person. Just thinking about it makes my skin feel creepy-crawly all over.”

  “Creepy-crawly—wherever do you learn these expressions, Margaret? At least dead animals stay where you put them. They don’t go skittering around beneath your chair and frightening you half to death!” Lady Constance peered into the mirror. “This one casts strange shadows across my nose. Most unattractive. Next, please.”

  “The butlers searched all over the house, ma’am. They swore they didn’t see any mice.”

  “Just because one does not see something, that does not mean it isn’t there,” the lady replied, in an accidental moment of insight. “Why, for all we know there are unseen ghosts hovering about us in this very room, eavesdropping on every word we say. Halloo, ghosties! Look, Margaret, I think I see one waving back at us, there, in the mirror!”

  This remark made Margaret squeak in terror. Lady Constance laughed at the poor girl’s fright, which was really not a very nice thing to do. “Silly Margaret, I am only teasing you. Would you like to be mesmerized? I would! They say that once the mesmerist has you in a trance, you can be made to do anything, and you don’t remember a scrap about it afterward. It sounds like wonderful fun. Look, there in the mirror! Another ghost! Boo! Oh, how ridiculous you sound when you shriek!” It went on that way for some time, with Lady Constance trying on one outlandish hat after another and making poor Margaret scream by pretending to see ghosts. Finally, Mrs. Clarke put an end to it by taking over the hat-holding duty herself and sending Margaret down to the kitchen to recover.

  Clearly, Lady Constance was in high spirits. That the possible marriage of the Widow Ashton and Admiral Faucet had provided an excuse to shop for new outfits was one reason for her merry mood. The other was her belief (which was really more of a wish) that, once remarried, her mother-in-law would take a long honeymoon and then set up her household somewhere far away with her new husband. “After all, Admiral Faucet is a fearless explorer of Parts Unknown,” Lady Constance gaily confided to Mrs. Clarke, after poor Margaret had been sent away. “They migh
t decide to live anywhere. The North Pole, for instance; explorers seem drawn to it for some reason. Or even Canada.”

  “I hope they don’t move that far away, my lady,” said Mrs. Clarke. “It’s a great comfort to have family close by, and Lord Ashton has hardly seen his mother for many years as it is.”

  Lady Constance was done with the hats and had now moved on to gloves, which she tugged on and off in rapid succession. “Let us be frank, Mrs. Clarke. The woman makes Fredrick anxious. Personally I find her conversation unwholesome. All those horrible tales of death and tar pits! It is enough to curl anyone’s hair, even in dry weather. Why some people persist in talking about unpleasant topics I shall never know. Thank goodness Fredrick is not like that. He hardly says a word, and when he does I rarely understand what he means. But at least he does not bore me into a stupor with talk of strange moonsicknesses and ‘nothing left but his precious hat.’” She lowered her voice to the sort of loud, gossipy whisper that fairly begs to be overheard. “I know the Widow Ashton is Fredrick’s mother, but truthfully, I am not sure what the admiral sees in her. Except her fortune, of course! Ha ha!”

  But this was no joke, as Penelope well knew: It was the Widow Ashton’s fortune that the admiral craved. The widow apologized to the admiral for the delay, but her position was clear: She would neither accept nor decline his offer of marriage until after the séance. “It will be better for both of us if I can entertain your proposal knowing that I have Edward’s blessing,” she explained. “For a half-hearted marriage is no marriage at all. Surely you agree, Fawsy dear?”

  According to Mrs. Clarke, who reported on the whole situation to Penelope, the admiral grumbled and said, “I’ll wait if I must, but time is money, dear. I need to have more ostriches shipped from Africa as soon as possible, before the bad weather sets in. Wouldn’t want our future champions to be shipwrecked on some unmapped island somewhere and get eaten by cannibals!”

  Of course, if the residents of this hypothetical island ate ostriches, they would not, strictly speaking, be cannibals (unless they themselves were ostriches, that is). But Penelope was too distracted by her own concerns to point this out to Mrs. Clarke. The fleet-footed housekeeper had made the previous day’s post with time to spare, but still, it would take a day for Penelope’s letter to get to London, and a day for Simon’s reply to come back, assuming he answered her at once. Had she been foolish to promise something to the widow that she could not yet guarantee would happen? Perhaps, but she had faith in Simon. At the very least, her suggestion that Madame Ionesco conduct a séance to speak to the spirit of Edward Ashton had bought Bertha and the Incorrigible children some time.

  As for Lord Fredrick, who had miraculously recovered from his brief spell of barking and scratching (which happened to coincide exactly with the full moon)—well, it all seemed a bit too much for him to take in, according to Mrs. Clarke. “Mother getting married? Some quack fortune-teller raising the dead, in my own home? Not sure how I feel about any of it, frankly. If anyone is looking for me, I’ll be at my club.”

  SIMON’S REPLY CAME IN THE evening post on the second day. “Will do,” it read in his own dear, sweet, familiar cursive, with its poetic loops and flourishes. “Expect us on the morning train. Don’t trouble yourself to meet us; sounds like your hands are full enough with plot twists already. We’ll hire a carriage at the station. Yours, SHD.”

  Penelope was giddy with gratitude. That night, after the children were tucked in and she was near bedtime herself, she could not concentrate on her own book, but instead found herself conjuring up an assortment of flattering definitions for the acronym SHD, which, of course, stood for Simon Harley-Dickinson, “but in Simon’s case might just as easily mean Steadfast, Humane, and Dependable,” she thought. “Or Sensible, High-minded, and Decent. Or Stalwart, Handsome, and Deserving.” She felt a twinge of embarrassment about the “handsome,” but she had run out of H’s and, frankly, she did find Simon pleasing to look at. “It must be the neoclassical symmetry of his eyebrows,” she murmured, and pretended to sketch those very eyebrows in the margin of her book with a fingertip. “They are perfectly arranged, see: One over each eye—and, oh my!—he will be here, at Ashton Place, tomorrow!”

  She placed the book on her bedside table. It was the cannibal adventure she had found in Lord Fredrick’s library. Despite her vow to avoid this disturbing tale before bedtime, she had been unable to resist taking a peek. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), she found the text difficult to understand, as it was all handwritten in blotchy ink that looked as if it had weathered many a storm at sea. Not only that, but the whole gruesome tale was set in rhyming verse of a most eccentric nature. Penelope enjoyed poetry as a rule, but this volume was too peculiar to easily make sense of. If she were not already in her nightgown and under the covers, she would have gladly traded it in for lighter fare, such as All the Pretty Ponies, in which Edith-Anne decides to get a second pony to keep Rainbow company (but who could have known that Rainbow would be so jealous?), or even the plodding and preachy Rainbow Goes to Work, in which Rainbow spends an unhappy summer as a pony for hire, while Edith-Anne is sent off to stay with her sick aunt in Norfolk.

  “But who can concentrate on books at a time like this?” the perplexed young governess thought, which just goes to show what an unusual state of mind she was in. “Simon will be here tomorrow morning—and he says ‘Expect us,’ which must mean he has persuaded Madame Ionesco to come as well. I shall have to intercept them before they arrive at the house, so I can fill them in on the details of our scheme…but however shall I manage it?”

  With that, she put her book down and blew out the bedside candle. She was tired, to be sure, but there was still a great deal of plotting and planning to do regarding this séance, and scant time in which to do it. She even had a fleeting worry about what she ought to wear for Simon’s arrival.

  “Unimportant,” she thought, yawning. “Immaterial. Doesn’t matter. Perhaps my brown worsted…”

  “WHEN IN DOUBT, SLEEP ON it.” So said Agatha Swanburne, according to a great many hand-stitched pillows at Penelope’s alma mater. As usual, the wise lady was correct. Within minutes of waking, the tangle of problems that had flummoxed Penelope so thoroughly the previous evening had somehow sorted themselves into neat skeins of wool, as it were.

  Armed with a clear head, fresh purpose, and a quick but nourishing breakfast, Penelope flew out of the house an hour past dawn, found Old Timothy polishing the doors of the brougham, and asked the enigmatic coachman if he could take her halfway to the train station and then wait on the road so she might flag down a carriage. To his credit, he did not ask any questions but simply nodded and put a horse in harness.

  Penelope sat in the backseat and chewed her lip the whole way. It was not only that she half wished she had chosen the navy-blue dress rather than the brown, although that did cross her mind. It was because her plan about the séance, which had seemed so simple and foolproof when she first thought of it, now appeared to have more holes in it than a mole-infested garden. “Truly,” she thought, “it is not easy to make plans that involve the supernatural, for who can predict the behavior of the dearly departed?”

  The very thought made her shiver, for as much as Penelope liked to think of herself as scientifically minded, with finely honed powers of deduction and a sensible Swanburne-trained head on her shoulders, in fact she was just as superstitious as the next person. This should come as no surprise, for in Miss Lumley’s day, séances, Ouija boards, hypnotic healings, and the like were very much in fashion. In fact, they were nearly as popular as ferns (and ferns were wildly popular in Miss Lumley’s day, and may well be ripe for a comeback, as they are both attractive and easy to grow). It was only now, on her way to explain her plan to the soothsayer herself, that Penelope began to consider just what kind of haunted bucket of worms she might be opening up by proposing that Madame Ionesco attempt to communicate with the dead.

  “Penny for your thoughts, miss?”

/>   There, he had said it again. Just hearing the word “penny” made her think of Miss Mortimer, who no doubt would be full of excellent and pithy advice right now. With no reason to lie, she answered, “I am thinking about the séance that the Widow Ashton plans to have.”

  “A dangerous business, that. Some holes are better left undug. Unless you already know what’s buried, a’ course.”

  Something about his remark made Penelope sit up straight. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean, some presents are better left unopened. Unless you already know what’s in ’em, a’ course.”

  Penelope felt certain he was trying to make a point, and one that might prove useful to her, but what was it? “I am sorry, Timothy, but I still cannot quite understand what you mean. Perhaps if you say it slowly?”

  The old coachman grunted in annoyance and spoke at a snail’s pace. “What I mean is, some questions are best left unasked. Unless you already know the answer—”

  “A’ course!” Penelope exclaimed, for the answer she was seeking had just come to her. “And eureka,” she added, but softly, for now she had that much more to think about.

  They rode in silence for the better part of an hour, until Timothy brought the brougham to a stop just before the crest of a hill, near the forest’s edge. From there they would see any oncoming travelers long before they could be seen themselves. Soon the rhythmic thud of hoofbeats on earth alerted them that another carriage approached.

  “That’s them, I’ll wager,” said Old Timothy, peering into the distance. “I recognize the coach; that driver often takes fares from the station.” With a few clucks and some skillful handling of the reins, he urged the horse to pull their carriage sideways, blocking the way.

  With a fluttering heart, Penelope climbed out and stood in the middle of the road, waving her arms. The oncoming carriage came closer and closer still. Finally it stopped, and the driver began to scold.