The Long-Lost Home Read online

  That the source of his misery seemed bound to follow and torment him wherever he might go plunged Gogolev into a quicksand of despair. Luckily, Julia’s poor posture and lack of intellect proved to be her good qualities. The deceitful girl had no intention of working for the Ashtons, but merely wished to exit Plinkst at their expense. The moment she arrived at Ashton Place, she began plotting her means of escape. Soon enough she found it. She convinced the baker from the village that she was worth wooing, and the two of them ran off together. Rumor had it that they had booked passage on a ship to America, where they planned to open a Russian tea room, perhaps in New York City, and eke out a living that way.

  It is a sad and complicated tale, and would make a fine Russian novel, full of heartbreak and irony and thwarted dreams, but it is a tale we need not say any more about, as the fate of Julia and her baker are no concern of ours. However, it does explain why Lord Fredrick was even now writing an advertisement for a baby nurse, and why the village of Ashton was in desperate need of a baker (a fact you would do well to remember, as it may become important before very long!).

  Above all, the tragedy of Gogolev and Julia explains how the Lumley/Gogolev problem came to be, and there is no answering the question “But what of the Incorrigible children?” without addressing this unfortunate circumstance in their lives. That is the main reason you have had to endure this melancholy, bittersweet, and thoroughly Russian story, much as poor Penelope had to endure the long, uncomfortable journey from England to Plinkst, and all the unhappy days since.

  (Precisely how many Gogolevs it would take to fill the shoes of one Miss Lumley is another excellent question, but one whose solution will have to wait—for Master Gogolev has finally arrived in the nursery, wailing about a spooky supernatural bird. . . .)

  “AN ALBATROSS!” MASTER GOGOLEV CRIED. “That is what Julia has become! An albatross ’round my neck!” (An albatross is a type of large white seabird. It is also a symbol of an unpleasant burden that one cannot seem to escape. This second meaning we owe to the poetic license of Mr. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose famous poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner contained just such a creature. As punishment for killing the bird, the old sailor of the poem’s title was forced to wear its gruesome remains as a necktie. To this day, people who have never heard of Mr. Coleridge will speak of “the albatross ’round their necks,” which only goes to prove that poets often have the last laugh.)

  Master Gogolev ran his hands through his wild hair until it resembled a squirrel’s nest. His three pupils sat in the nursery with straight backs and folded hands, waiting for their lessons to begin. It was already late in the morning, for Master Gogolev was not an early riser, and he insisted on drinking an entire pot of strong coffee and reading three different newspapers—one French, one English, one Russian—before emerging from his bedchamber, still unshaven. That Julia’s departure had scarcely put a dent in his suffering is best explained by the words of Agatha Swanburne, who once looked up from a Russian novel she was reading and ruefully announced, “A teakettle that likes to whistle has no need for a stove.” So it was with our tormented tutor.

  “She is a thorn in my paw, a stone in my shoe, a toothache in my tooth!” Master Gogolev was fond of metaphors. “But why, why, why did it have to be a baker? Now I cannot look at a loaf of bread without thinking of her! I love bread,” he confided to the children. They nodded in sympathy, for they too loved bread, as most people do. “Yet each time I dream of eating it, it is like a thousand . . .” He made a cutting gesture.

  “Bread knives?” Beowulf suggested.

  “Yes, bread knives, spreading pain across my soul. Like butter.” Gogolev wept. He went through pocket handkerchiefs at an alarming rate; the laundry could hardly keep up. When he was done, he made a trip downstairs to wheedle a snack from the kitchen—nothing to spoil his lunch, just a small omelet and an onion tart, and more coffee, and a pastry for dessert but not a sticky one, as he disliked how a sticky sugar glaze felt on his fingertips. Weeping always left him hungry, he explained to the children upon his food-laden return, and in any case it was already the eleventh hour in the morning, a perfect time to pause in one’s labors and enjoy a snack. The children did not mind, for he let them eat all the bread off his plate; in fact he swore up and down he would never touch another slice, despite the telltale crumbs on his jacket.

  The truth was that Gogolev did not spend much time teaching. From dawn to dusk he suffered like an animal in a trap, drank coffee, smoked, begged meals from the kitchen, and napped. This left little in the way of time or energy to examine the Poetics of Aristotle, the poems of Mr. William Wordsworth, the techniques of watercolor painting, or any of the other topics that the children would have been only too glad to study.

  As far as the Incorrigibles were concerned, then, their tutor’s late arrival, bleak mood, and greedy appetite were all signs of a perfectly ordinary morning. Yet it was that very same morning that Miss Penelope Lumley had posed and then tearfully solved the Russia/England problem in faraway Plinkst, and that “Judge Quinzy” had paid an unexpected call on Lord Fredrick Ashton. Even now, as Master Gogolev gorged himself on food and self-pity, son and father sat in Lord Fredrick’s taxidermy-filled study only one floor below, speaking of Switzerland, wallpaper, and baby names.

  The laws of time and space prevented the children from knowing any of this, of course. Innocent as the spring lambs Edward Ashton imagined them to be, they gnawed on the dense, flavorless bread that was the best the kitchen could obtain (there was no longer a proper baker in town, do not forget!), and waited for their tutor’s laziness and disinterest to come to the fore.

  They did not have to wait long. After his meal, Gogolev belched, yawned, excused himself for a few hours of “personal reflection,” and left them to their own devices.

  “Educashawoo!” Cassiopeia crowed when he was gone. Her brothers ran to fetch their notebooks and pencils. Now their school day would truly begin, for what could be more educashawoo—that is to say, educational—than free time and a lack of supervision? The Incorrigibles had become expert at spending their days wisely, all thanks to an invention they called “the to-doawoo list.” (The Incorrigibles were not the first to think of the “to-do list,” as it is commonly known. The use of such lists goes back to the days of antiquity; for all we know there were well-organized Neanderthals jotting their daily schedules on the walls of caves. If you have never written a to-do list, you are missing out on one of civilization’s greatest achievements. To make one is nearly as soothing as cup of tea, but to tick items off the list when completed is a feeling so delicious one might easily confuse it with actual cake. Consider putting “make a to-do list” on your to-do list for tomorrow.)

  The first item on the children’s daily to-doawoo list never changed: letter to Lumawoo. These were no ordinary letters. Alexander drew clever maps that showed Plinkst and Ashton Place as neighboring towns connected by many short bridges. Beowulf contributed original poetry, written in all his favorite poetic meters. At the moment, he was attempting a villanelle, a poetic form more complex than even the most complicated dance step. Cassiopeia expressed her feelings through the use of math problems: Four Minus One Equals SO SAD, for example, or Three Plus One Equals HOORAY.

  Each day’s letter was addressed to “Miss P. Lumley, care of the Failing Beet Plantation of the Horrible Babushkawoos, Plinkst, Russia, Across the Sea So Far Away.” Solemnly the children would bring the envelope to Mrs. Clarke, who would pat each of them on the cheek and murmur, “Ah, Miss Lumley! I hope she’s getting on all right, poor thing!”

  However, on this particular, ordinary-seeming morning, they could not find the good lady in any of her usual spots. She was not in the kitchen, fretting with Cook about the difficulty of finding a qualified baker. Nor was she supervising the housemaids as they dusted knickknacks in the parlor. The children wondered if she might have snuck up to her room on the fourth floor, to read for a bit while nibbling on a piece of licorice. Mrs. Cl
arke loved licorice and had grown quite fond of the Giddy-Yap, Rainbow! stories, ever since Penelope had introduced these fine books to the household.

  With their day’s letter to Lumawoo still clutched in Alexander’s hand, the Incorrigibles marched upstairs to knock on the good housekeeper’s door. But there was no answer, for by this time Mrs. Clarke was in Lord Fredrick’s study, nervously answering questions about what sort of wallpapers babies liked, whether a silk or wool carpet would be nicer for a little child to crawl upon, and which room she intended to make ready for Judge Quinzy to move into during his recuperative visit to the household. (“I don’t like that Judge Quinzy, and that’s a fact! One look at those dark eyes of his and I feel like someone’s walking on my grave,” she would later confide to Cook over a restorative glass of blackberry cordial. It should be noted that Mrs. Clarke was no ghost and had no grave. She was merely using an expression that means to get a sudden and unpleasantly spooky feeling. Whether ghosts are spooky to other ghosts is a haunting question, but one best answered by those who peek Beyond the Veil.)

  The children were disappointed not to have completed their mission, but not tragically so. They simply returned to the nursery and took out their to-doawoo list. Find Mrs. Clarke was moved to later in the afternoon, which was all right, as the letter would still go out in the day’s post.

  Now they could decide what to do next. There was no shortage of pleasant tasks to choose from, for it was all written down on the list.

  Visit Bertha was Cassiopeia’s first pick. Bertha was the speedy but dimwitted ostrich who had been left at Ashton Place by a fascinating but dishonest explorer named Admiral Faucet, a friend of Lord Fredrick’s mother. He pronounced his name Faw-say, but he was not French; very likely he was no admiral, either. Bertha lived in a POE—a Permanent Ostrich Enclosure—on the grounds of the estate. She could not fly, for ostriches are flightless birds, but she could run like the wind, and gave the children ostrich rides that were thrillingly fast.

  Alexander frowned.

  “Paint each other’s portraits,” Beowulf suggested. As a poet he was not half bad, but painting was his passion.

  Alexander shook his head. It was their rule that two out of three had to agree. Clearly the eldest Incorrigible was not yet convinced.

  “Latin verbs?” Cassiopeia offered, for it was a school day, after all.

  Alexander looked down at the floor and sniffed. (The children had very keen senses of smell, but there was no magic about it. They had simply been raised to use their noses the way wolves do. It was a matter of paying close attention, combined with a great deal of practice. Of course, to focus one’s attention and practice is the secret behind most of what people think of as extraordinary talents, like playing stormy Russian music on the piano, or twirling a dozen whip-fast pirouettes in a row without getting dizzy, or shooting an arrow from a hundred paces at a target no bigger than an apple. As Agatha Swanburne said, “To make something look hard is easy; to make something look easy is the hardest work of all.”)

  “Something smells funny downstairs,” Alexander announced, wrinkling his nose. His siblings sniffed, too.

  “I smell cigars. And high, cold places,” Cassiopeia said.

  “I smell snow,” Beowulf agreed. “And chocolate. And taxidermy.”

  “It must be the smell of Switzerland, coming from Lordawoo’s study,” Alexander concluded, for he knew his geography from the North Pole all the way to the South. “But there is something else, too. Something bad.” He sniffed once more, then snorted and shook his head, as if he had gotten a noseful of rotten-egg smell. “Hate and fear, mixed. It smells like . . . hunting.”

  Cassiopeia started to whimper, and Beowulf turned pale. “Never mind.” Alexander playfully cuffed his siblings on the head to cheer them. “Probably it is the smell of a bad dream someone is having. Let’s play with Nutsawoo.”

  “Play with Nutsawoo!” the other two quickly agreed. The unanimous Incorrigibles ran to the nursery window, where the long branch of the elm reached out to them, just on the other side of the glass.

  “Nutsawoo!” they called. “Nutsawoo!”

  But the little scamp was nowhere to be found.

  Cassiopeia gazed longingly out the window. “I miss Nutsawoo,” she murmured. Nutsawoo was their pet squirrel, and the children spoiled him with treats and head scratches as often as the furry rascal would let them. But Nutsawoo had been unusually skittish of late, and came by the nursery rarely. It seemed as if the little rodent was preoccupied.

  So it was for all the animals of Ashton Place: the warblers and nuthatches and the wee mousies in the fields. They knew that springtime was coming, just as the tulips knew. The wild creatures were bright of eye and bushy of tail, and many were in a romantic frame of mind. All over the estate, nests were being feathered and cozy family-sized burrows dug.

  In fact, if Nutsawoo had been able to speak or draw a map, write a poem, devise a math problem, or even perform a tableau vivant to express what was on his (or her) mind, the fuzzy-eared scamp might have proudly announced that arrangements for a squirrel-sized nursery in the treetops were already under way.

  “THAT NUTSAWOO IS GOING TO be a mother—or a father, for it is hard to tell with squirrels—is all very well,” you are no doubt thinking. “And Edward Ashton becoming a houseguest at Ashton Place is worrisome, true! But what happened to all the letters?”

  It is a fine question, for, as you know, Penelope had not received a single one of those heartfelt and educational letters from the Incorrigible children, even though Mrs. Clarke dropped the envelopes in the post every day without fail, and paid for the stamps out of her own wages, too.

  Nor had the children received so much as a picture postcard from Penelope, though she too wrote to them daily. She wrote her letters in the evening, after she had wrestled the horrible Babushkawoos into their nightclothes and read them a bedtime story. At least, she tried to. The Babushkawoos never listened, but whispered cruel remarks as Penelope grimly plowed ahead. Eventually they grew too exhausted to continue insulting each other and dropped miserably off to sleep.

  Then she would return to her tiny room. Letter paper was scarce in Plinkst, but she had found a stack of yellowed sheets in the nursery that still bore the faded trace of Master Gogolev’s handwriting. It was all in Russian, but she guessed they were lines of terrible love poetry about Julia. (As it happens, she was correct. However, Gogolev’s bad poetry is no concern of ours, not even the stanzas in which he compared the darting, nervous glance of his beloved to the path of a mosquito, or her hunched posture to the caved-in shape of a rotted wine barrel: “The staves are warped, the joints are loose/Yet still perfume’d by former use. . . .” Staves and joints, honestly! Please banish Gogolev’s appalling verses from your mind at once. Even the worst poems about shipwrecks and gloomy supernatural birds are a thousand times better—no! a thousand times a thousand times better!—than this.)

  Once the candle was lit, Penelope would take out a sheet of this paper, a quill pen with a bent but usable nib, and some ink. The wooden inkpot was carved in the shape of a troika, which is a kind of Russian sleigh pulled by three horses harnessed abreast. (Interestingly, troika is also the name of a Russian folk dance in which one man dances with two women, and can be used to describe any group of three. Troika thus has a troika of meanings, which simply proves that words are slippery creatures in every language. Poets find this useful, but poets are a slippery lot to begin with. Hence their need to be properly licensed, for their own safety and that of the general public, too.)

  In England the tulip buds were swelling, but in Plinkst the Russian winter was not yet done. A thin layer of snow had fallen during the early evening, and the sky had since cleared. Now the frosted landscape glittered in the light of a moon that was only one night short of being full.

  Penelope had grown used to being cold. She wrapped a thin blanket around her shoulders, dipped her pen in the ink, tapped off the excess, and began. “To my troika of I
ncorrigibles, the three cleverest pupils any governess could wish for. How go the multiplication tables?” She wrote on, bravely and cheerfully, as was her habit. Not once did she mention how unhappy she was, how much she missed her former pupils, and how truly afraid she was, for all of them—for surely Edward Ashton could read a calendar as well as the next man.

  Where was that murderous scoundrel, with his mad plan to save one side of the family tree by doing away with the other? Was he lurking about Ashton Place, plotting against the children? Or had he made good on his threat to seek out her own long-lost parents, wherever they might be?

  Or might he even be in Plinkst? The back of her neck prickled at the thought. It was the terrible wolf curse that had set Edward Ashton on his deadly mission, and it was her side of the family tree he was hunting now:

  As the wolf has four paws, four generations must pass under this curse. In the fourth generation, the hunt begins—and ends.

  As the wolf has one tail, only one line of your descendants can remain.

  When that comes to pass, the curse is finished.

  Otherwise, the house of Ashton, all it has been and all it might ever be, shall be destroyed, forever.

  Poor Incorrigibles! Poor Long-Lost Lumleys! They had no idea of the danger they were in, and here she was, useless, half a world away!

  The risen moon was framed snugly in the high, small window of Penelope’s room, like one of Mrs. Clarke’s fresh-baked gooseberry pies tucked inside a pie box. Moonlight cut a cool blue shaft through the air and landed squarely on the face of the mantel clock, which glowed like an answering moon.

  Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock . . .

  Restless, she put down her pen and walked the length of her room, no bigger than a cell. As she neared the window, she combed her fingers through the cool blue light and watched her hand turn into a ghostly puppet. If only she might climb that moonlight like a ladder and make a run for it! But it was much too far to run.