The Interrupted Tale Read online

  As for her parents, whom she had not seen for many a year and whom she had come to think of as the Long-Lost Lumleys, “Not a card, not a letter, not even a picture postcard,” Penelope whispered to herself. A tear might have begun to roll down her cheek, but if it did, she brushed it aside so quickly that no one was the wiser.

  PENELOPE’S RESOLVE TO THROW A party for the Incorrigibles was now twice as keen as before, even if it meant she would have to bake the cake herself. She marched with purpose to the nursery. Outside the door all seemed quiet, but the moment she entered, each of the children assumed a pose of distraught misery, accompanied by moans and feverish gibbering. Penelope shooed them into the night nursery and ordered them to nap or read in their beds until Margaret arrived with the hot-water bottle. (Even in her unhappy state, Penelope was much too kind to mention the castor oil and large spoon that Mrs. Clarke had threatened. If the children did not already know that castor oil was the most vile-tasting substance ever invented, they would find out soon enough.)

  Finally alone, she collapsed into her usual armchair and stared at the clock. Eleven o’clock in the morning! The whole long, partyless, presentless, friendless, cardless birthday loomed before her. Was it possible that time had actually stopped? She knew the Latin phrase “tempus fugit,” which means “time flies,” like a bird—but there were flightless birds, after all: ostriches and emus and dodos and so on. Could some days be made of flightless time?

  Her thoughts were interrupted by a dreadful scuffling noise from the back nursery, followed by a cry.

  “Lumawoo, come quickly! Beowulf’s leg is worse.” It was Alexander, calling in a highly dramatic voice. “Alas, it is much worse, woe is he!”

  Penelope hurried to look. Beowulf writhed on the bed while his brother and sister stood by. “Legawoooo!” he howled in pain.

  “How about a peg leg instead?” Alexander suggested, offering a wooden pointer that seemed about the right length. “Will be good for playing pirates.” But Beowulf only whimpered and moaned.

  “Poor Beowoo.” Cassiopeia took Alexander’s hand. “He was nice. But at least we will still have each other.”

  Penelope did her best to examine the miserable child, but he would not stop thrashing. “Beowulf, I can see nothing wrong with your leg. Why are you making such a fuss?”

  Bang!

  Bang bang!

  Bang bang bang!

  Someone was pounding on the nursery door, which was odd, as Penelope could not recall locking it. “Who is there?” she cried, at her wit’s end. “Margaret, is that you?”

  “Open the door, Miss Lumley. It’s Mrs. Clarke! I’ve fetched the doctor.”

  “The doctor, thank goodness!” Penelope ran to the door and flung it open. “You are not a moment too soon. Beowulf is worse, and I cannot tell why . . . what?”

  Just outside the door was a serving cart, upon which rested a large covered tray. Behind the cart stood Mrs. Clarke, Margaret, and nearly a dozen other members of the household staff.

  “Surprise!” they yelled as one.

  “Surprise?” Penelope did not know where to look.

  Mrs. Clarke lifted the cover off the tray to reveal a decorated cake, edged with marzipan flowers and iced with the words Happy 16th Birthday Miss P. Lumley.

  “Surprisahwoooooo!” the three perfectly healthy children cried as they raced to their governess and threw their arms around her.

  AND A SURPRISE IT SURELY was. It took Penelope a full minute to recover the power of speech, and when she did, all she could blurt was, “How did you know?”

  “It was the cards that tipped us off. ‘Something must be up with Miss Lumley,’ I said to Cook, ‘to get so many cards all at the same time.’ So we did a bit of investigating.” Mrs. Clarke rubbed her hands together and laughed. “Oh, I do love a good mystery!”

  Cook shrugged apologetically (doubtless she had a name, but everyone called her Cook, and therefore so shall we). “I tried, but I couldn’t fit ‘Penelope’ on the cake. Sorry ’bout that!”

  Under normal circumstances, Penelope might have offered some educational remarks on the topic of abbreviations (for an abbreviation is what Cook had made by putting “P.” instead of “Penelope”), but the birthday girl was still reeling from the shock of her unexpected party. “The cards?” she repeated in a daze. “What cards?”

  “The birthday cards! We hid them as part of the surprise.” Margaret held out a thick packet of correspondence, tied in a ribbon. There was a card from Miss Mortimer right on top, and another from Cecily in Witherslack. At least two dozen cards had a return address of the Swanburne Academy for Poor Bright Females in Heathcote—but Penelope had no time to look further, for her party guests had already lit the candles. Now they sang.

  “For she’s a credit to Ashton Place,

  For she’s a credit to Ashton Place,

  For she’s a credit to Ashton Place!

  And so say all of us!”

  The cake was cut into slices and gobbled up without delay. Everyone agreed that Cook had outdone herself with the marzipan flowers, which were both lifelike and delicious. Even Mrs. Clarke treated herself to a slice, although she had been watching her figure in recent months. After her last forkful, she announced, “And now your present.”

  “A present!” Penelope could hardly believe it. But it was true. Even on their modest incomes, the servants had managed to pool together enough money to buy Penelope an absolutely spectacular gift. It was a new type of pen called a “fountain pen,” which could write line after line without having to be dipped into the inkwell. Penelope could not stop marveling at it and thanked them all repeatedly.

  “Aw, Miss Lumley! We all know how much you like to write letters,” Margaret squeaked, and the rest of the servants smiled, because it was clearly a well-chosen gift.

  The Incorrigible children each had presents of their own to give, not as fancy as the pen, perhaps, but they had been handmade for the occasion, and that made them all the nicer, everyone was quick to note.

  Alexander had drawn a map of the nursery, tinted with watercolors and oriented according to the compass, with all the furniture drawn to scale, down to the last footstool.

  Beowulf had gnawed a perfectly usable letter opener out of a piece of wood. That the wood looked suspiciously like the remains of a ruler Penelope had searched for in vain just the other day was a fact she chose to ignore.

  As for Cassiopeia: “Here, Lumawoo.” The girl sounded uncharacteristically bashful as she offered her gift. It was a small, hand-sewn pillow, with one word embroidered crookedly on its front.

  Loveawoo, it said.

  The stitching was far from expert, and the pillow was uneven in shape. The fabric, Penelope recognized at once, was cut from an old blanket that had been retired from use in the nursery after Beowulf had chewed off the corners, but still—who would have thought little Cassiopeia could manage such a thing?

  “Fluffy,” Cassiopeia said, and gave the lumpy pillow a squeeze to demonstrate. “Bertha made the feathers.” (Bertha, as you may already know, was a sweet but dim-witted ostrich who had been left at Ashton Place by a recent visitor, and who was being cared for by Penelope and the children until a qualified person could be found to accompany the large bird back to Africa, where she rightly belonged.)

  “Lumawoo likes pillow?” she nudged, for Penelope was still staring wordlessly at her gift.

  “I do.” Penelope thought of the window seats at the Swanburne Academy, which were so full of embroidered pillows that one could scarcely find a place to sit and read. “It is the fluffiest and loveliest pillow I have ever seen.”

  The girl lifted her hands and revealed tiny bandages of gauze tied about three of her fingers. “Sewing is hard,” she said. The sight of those dear pricked fingers made Penelope’s eyes fill with tears, and the children jumped over one another to reassure her that Cassiopeia was not seriously injured. Cassiopeia proved it by using her fingers to do sums on her abacus, and flicked the beads up and d
own with nary a wince.

  But Penelope’s heart remained full to bursting. “Thank you all, so very much,” she said, and gazed with affection on each of her three pupils, and on all of her guests as well. “This is the nicest birthday I could possibly imagine.”

  THE SERVANTS SOON HAD TO get back to work, but Penelope was used to quick parties, so she did not mind. It was only after Mrs. Clarke, Cook, Margaret, and the others had made their farewells that Beowulf suddenly remembered.

  “One more present!” he cried, running to the windows. “Almost forgot Nutsawoo.”

  Nutsawoo was the twitchy and half-tame squirrel who spent his (or her) days in the branches of the elm tree just outside the nursery, performing amusing antics and begging for treats. At Beowulf’s chirruping call, the little rodent scampered into the nursery and offered Penelope a great prize indeed: a single perfect acorn, carried with pride in those tiny, monkeylike paws. She (or he, for it is hard to tell with squirrels) dropped the acorn neatly into Penelope’s hand before skittering back outside. The creature’s bushy gray tail flicked to and fro with satisfaction.

  Now, for a squirrel to sacrifice even a single acorn in autumn is a profound act of generosity, as Penelope well knew. For some reason this was what pushed her “over the edge,” as they say nowadays, and she began to cry in earnest. The children were alarmed by her outburst and offered to cheer her by staging a tableau vivant of either “The Wreck of the Hesperus” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow or “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe, or another poem they had recently begun reading, called “The Tyger,” by Mr. William Blake, which began like this:

  Tyger, Tyger, burning bright,

  In the forests of the night;

  What immortal hand or eye

  Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

  But Penelope shook her head, blew her nose (luckily, she was well stocked with handkerchiefs), ate a second piece of cake, and quickly regained her composure.

  “Time to get back to our lessons,” she said, clapping her hands briskly three times, just the way Miss Mortimer used to do to signal an end to a birthday party.

  The children scurried to obey, and Penelope could not help thinking that the eagerness and good cheer of her students was the very best present of all. For whether she was six, sixteen, or (unimaginable as it might now seem) even sixty, Penelope would always be a Swanburne girl, through and through.

  The Second Chapter

  Lady Constance takes a leap of the imagination.

  PERHAPS IT WAS THE EXCITEMENT of the party, or the several slices of cake topped with sugary marzipan flowers that each of the Incorrigibles had eaten for breakfast—whatever the cause, that afternoon the children were even friskier than usual. They could not settle down for lessons and kept popping up from their chairs for various reasons: to fetch an unneeded book from the shelf, or to switch one dull pencil for another that was no sharper, or to call Nutsawoo in from the elm tree for a scratch behind the ears. This was particularly time-consuming, for no matter how long the children scratched, the greedy squirrel always demanded more.

  Needless to say, little was getting done in the way of schoolwork. But Penelope could hardly be cross with the children, after all their kindness and generosity. Too, she still felt the tiniest bit guilty about having a sixteenth birthday when her three pupils had yet to have one—and oughtn’t she have some time off on her special day as well?

  “Lessons will resume tomorrow; outside we go,” she announced, to the children’s delight. Under the changing leaves of the trees near the house, she entertained them with some vigorous skipping and dancing games that she had recently invented. The games were meant to show the various types of poetic meter: iambic pentameter, for example, which William Shakespeare used to marvelous effect in many of his poems and plays. (Scholars have written lengthy books on the subject of iambic pentameter, a topic of great complexity that can only be mastered by experts, geniuses, college professors, and the like. Fortunately, Penelope did not know this; she thought iambic pentameter sounded like five strides of a gallop—ta-TUM, ta-TUM, ta-TUM, ta-TUM, ta-TUM—and could easily be learned by pretending to have a pony race, after which anyone might read the works of Shakespeare with far greater enjoyment than before.)

  But Shakespeare would keep for another day. For now, her plan was to tire out the children with all the poetic meters she could think of and then set them to work on some quiet activity. In this way she hoped to gain herself a few peaceful moments to sit and examine her precious stack of birthday cards. She taught them the five ta-TUMs of the iambic gallop, followed by the anapestic skip (biddle-BUM, biddle-BUM), and even the dactylic waltz (OOM-pa-pa, OOM-pa-pa). At last the exhausted Incorrigibles were ready to stumble back to the nursery and be still. Beowulf and Alexander stretched out on the rug next to each other, with paper, pencils, and watercolor paints nearby. Beowulf drew fanciful tygers that were inspired by Mr. Blake’s poem, while Alexander made a map of places where such creatures might be found (so far he had come up with Tygerland, Tyger Island, Tyger Mountain, and the Spooky Grotto of Tygers).

  Cassiopeia, the youngest, had taken a Giddy-Yap, Rainbow! book from the shelf to look at the pictures and had promptly fallen asleep in the rocking chair. Now she was sweetly snoring, the book nestled beneath her chin.

  At last—the birthday cards! Penelope scooped them up and retired to her comfortable chair near the hearth. “Oh, how glorious to be a postal worker!” she thought as she spread her treasures across the ottoman, so as to have the satisfaction of seeing them all at once. “To be the bearer of such joyfully anticipated correspondence! To bring warm greetings from distant friends and deliver long-awaited news of family . . . long-awaited . . . news . . . family . . .” But after going through the stack twice, it was clear that there was nothing from the Long-Lost Lumleys, and Penelope had to swallow hard to make the lump in her throat go away.

  Luckily, the card from Cecily cheered her a great deal. It contained comical descriptions of life in Witherslack, as well as a tasty-sounding recipe for Hungarian goulash that called for vast amounts of paprika. Dear, funny Cecily! Her ear for languages made her a brilliant mimic of all types of sounds. Her animal calls could fool even Dr. Westminster, and her creaky-door noise would set anyone running for an oilcan. The younger Swanburne girls had lived in terror of her bloodcurdling scream, which was put to good use every autumn at Heathcote’s annual Haunted Hay Maze festival.

  Penelope tucked the goulash recipe in her pocket, so she might show it to Cook next time she passed by the kitchen. She hugged Cecily’s letter before putting it back in its envelope and felt a pang of regret. What with all her responsibilities as governess, not to mention the endless parade of mysterious events that seemed to crop up willy-nilly at Ashton Place, she had not written to her friend nearly as often as she should. Why on earth not? It was an oversight she resolved she would soon remedy, and with her new fountain pen, too.

  Next she opened the many cards from the girls at Swanburne. They were friendly enough, and the penmanship was, of course, superb, but there was something odd about them. For one thing, not one of these cards mentioned Penelope’s birthday. “We are inspired by your success!” one girl enthused. “You do the name of Swanburne proud,” wrote another.

  “It is flattering, to be sure, but a simple ‘Happy birthday!’ would have done just as well,” she thought. Carefully, she put these cards aside. “Still, it was kind of the girls to write. I shall send each one a lengthy thank-you note, perhaps in iambic pentameter, if the mood strikes.” Once again she felt excited at the prospect of using her new pen.

  She had saved Miss Mortimer’s card for last, precisely because it was the one she was most eager to read. “As Agatha Swanburne once observed, ‘Peas first, biscuits last, makes for a happy meal,’” she said to herself as she used the letter opener from Beowulf to slit the envelope. She unfolded the letter within (for it was a letter, not a card, and a rather long one at that, running many pages), and leaned back i
n her cozy armchair to discover what loving words and pearls of wisdom her former headmistress might offer on this never-to-be-repeated event, the very special occasion of Penelope’s one and only sixteenth birthday!

  My dear Penny,

  Greetings! How are the children faring? Please send an update on their progress, particularly regarding their grasp of multiplication. The ones are no great challenge, and counting by twos is easily mastered, but I do hope they have figured out those tricky sevens and eights. . . .

  The letter went on to discuss the finer points of the multiplication tables, in precise and painfully dull detail.

  Penelope raced through the next few paragraphs, and then turned to the next page, and the one after that, but it was simply more of the same. “‘Twelve times three is thirty-six, and so is half of twelve times two times three’ . . . all quite true,” she thought, puzzled. “And sixteen is two times eight as well as four times four, but that is hardly the same thing as saying ‘Happy sixteenth birthday!’” Flummoxed, she dropped the letter into her lap. “I wonder if Miss Mortimer received my most recent correspondence? In it, I told her of my disturbing suspicions regarding Judge Quinzy, yet she does not mention it here at all.”

  Indeed, Penelope suspected that Quinzy might actually be Lord Fredrick Ashton’s father, Edward Ashton, who had long been presumed dead after meeting a gruesome end in a medicinal tar pit during an otherwise pleasant spa vacation. Many unanswered questions remained. Could Quinzy be the real, live Edward Ashton? If so, why would he fake his own death and assume a false identity? And why had he recently maneuvered his way onto the board of trustees of the Swanburne Academy?