The Interrupted Tale Read online

  Penelope’s cheeks reddened as if she had been slapped. Had she herself not just asked for money? And was working for money also shameful in Lady Constance’s eyes? She suspected it might be, although she could not imagine why.

  “I am sure you are correct, my lady. Yet some people do give small amounts to charity,” she said haltingly. “Especially for hospitals, and schools, and the poor. Some of the girls at Sun—Swan—at my alma mater . . . are penniless orphans who would have no place to live if not for the school, and no chance to better themselves. Why, they are rather like your tulip bulbs,” she said on impulse. “Grubby at first glance, but if planted properly and given some sunlight and time to grow, they can blossom quite nicely.”

  “Yes, yes, paupers and grubby orphans; it is all quite tragic.” Lady Constance sounded impatient. “Miss Lumley, if I decide to pay you your salary, are you going to squander it on gifts, or hide it in a piggy bank somewhere? Or will you be sensible with it, and spend it on something worthwhile?”

  “No more gifts, my lady. In fact, I intend to buy . . .” Penelope thought hard about what sort of purchase Lady Constance would approve of. “A new dress! And shoes. And a hat. And some train tickets, to take the children on a short and educational trip to Sunburne . . . Swanburne . . . I mean, Heathcote.” She mentioned the trip in order to be truthful, but it did not matter, for Lady Constance had heard all she needed to hear.

  “A new dress! Miss Lumley, that is the first sensible thing I have ever heard you say. For a moment I was afraid you intended to give your money to the Sunburne school.” She slipped the letter back in her reticule. “Well, you do put up with those dreadful children, and so you shall be paid your salary. You must give the steward a note of instruction from me. Write it and sign my name; you know better than anyone what you are owed.”

  Lady Constance leaned back on her elbows and dismissed Penelope with a wave of her tiny foot. “Off you go, then. Oh, it will be a relief to be rid of the wolf children for a time! I can barely sleep at night knowing they are under the same roof, barking and drooling and baying at the moon. As for your new dress, Miss Lumley, try not to look so much like a governess. All that brown worsted pains the eye.”

  Penelope climbed to her feet and brushed the leaves off her skirt. “Thank you, my lady. I will take care of it at once.”

  “But remember your station! Nothing too flashy. I would not have people saying the Ashtons’ governess was pleasant to look upon. It would be most unseemly to draw attention to yourself in that way.”

  “I shall remember, my lady.” Penelope curtsied and backed away as quickly as seemed polite. As if it were possible to forget one’s station around Lady Constance Ashton!

  The Third Chapter

  At last, Penelope makes use of her new fountain pen.

  PENELOPE’S EMBARRASSMENT BLEW HER BACK to the house like a skiff caught in a hurricane. “Now I shall have to waste part of my salary on clothes, which I hardly need,” she fumed, although it was not really true, for the elbows of her sleeves were worn rather thin. “And what objection could any reasonable person make to brown worsted?” Brown was not the sort of festive shade a spoiled lady might wear to a party, perhaps, but it was a cozy color that made Penelope think of pleasant things: antique woodwork, or a chestnut-colored pony, or the chocolate layers of a Black Forest cake.

  She marched to the front parlor, where Lady Constance’s personal stationery was kept in an antique writing desk worth more than a whole fleet of governesses could earn in a year. It was not the first time she had helped with her mistress’s correspondence, for Lady Constance received a great many invitations, all of which had to be accepted or declined in courteous handwritten notes. Lady Constance rarely had the patience to write these herself, and her cursive letters were loopy to the point of being illegible. Fortunately, Penelope had the same excellent penmanship that every Swanburne girl was expected to learn. (As Agatha Swanburne once said, “The most eloquent letter says nothing if it cannot be read.”)

  “If not brown worsted, then what? I suppose I could get a blue worsted instead. Or would she consider blue to be ‘too flashy’? And how am I to look less like a governess when that is precisely what I am?” Penelope’s cheeks warmed again with shame; firmly, she pushed away the feeling. “But never mind that. First, the letter to the steward.”

  She perched on the delicate chair and helped herself to a sheet of stationery and a matching lilac-scented envelope. Resignedly, she dipped a quill pen into the inkwell. She had used this same quill many times before without complaint, but the mere thought of the gleaming new fountain pen made it seem hopelessly old-fashioned, like a prop from a play set long ago. Penelope’s imagination was no stranger to leaping, and she decided to rid herself of any leftover bad feelings by pretending, just for a moment, that she was not a drab governess in a plain brown dress who was in need of money, but the well-to-do lady of a grand house all her own.

  “My dear Mr. Harley-Dickinson,” she wrote, addressing a playwright friend of hers who had briefly and memorably visited Ashton Place some weeks before, and who was never very far from her mind. “The great . . . no, the enormous . . . no, the titanic pleasure of your presence is requested at my tea party, to be held Tuesday next.”

  What else ought she say? “Formal attire requested”? “There will be dancing on the terrace”? “Regrets only”? Then she sighed and put down her pen, for the spell of pretending was broken. If she were a real Lady, she would know all about tea-party invitations, and which colors were flashy and which were not, and a host of other things, too. All at once her Swanburne education felt woefully incomplete.

  “It is Lady Constance’s notepaper, in any case, which I ought not to waste on letters not meant for sending. If it were mine, it would have an L for ‘Lumley,’ right here. . . .” She traced a finger over the cursive capital A engraved at the top of the page. The A stood for “Ashton,” of course, but she had seen similar initial As elsewhere: on a mysterious letter received by an acting troupe hired to entertain at Lady Constance’s holiday party last Christmas, to give one example. Or as the signature on a dust-covered painting in the British Museum, to give another.

  “All those As! It is an A-mazing coincidence,” Penelope thought. She crumpled her pretend invitation to Simon and put a fresh sheet of paper on the blotter. “Then again, A is a very common letter. With only twenty-six letters in the alphabet, they are all bound to turn up sooner or later. Although, come to think of it, one hardly ever sees a J. Why, Js are even rarer than Zs.”

  (Many years later, a popular word-making game would be invented that assigned points to letters based on how scarce they were: The scarcer the letter, the more points it was worth. If Miss Lumley’s mind had not already been so thoroughly occupied, she might well have invented such a game herself at this very moment, and thus changed the course of history forevermore. Alas, her attention was fixed on the task at hand, and that invention, like so many others, would have to wait awhile longer.)

  Her quill hovered over the paper as she considered how to begin. Dear Esteemed Steward, Keeper of the Household Accounts and Other Mathematical Necessities, she wrote. The letter need not be long, for it was simply intended to let the steward know how much salary she was owed. But Penelope longed to shore up her spirits after that humiliating conversation with Lady Constance and the failed pretend-letter to Simon, and so she decided to indulge herself.

  “Ta-TUM, ta-TUM, ta-TUM, ta-TUM, ta-TUM,” she murmured, to remind herself how the rhythm of the words ought to sound.

  Miss Lumley labors hard to earn her pay,

  And so you must disburse her funds today.

  “Iambic pentameter, and a rhyming couplet, too,” she said, pleased with her effort. Then she wrote the amount, whimsically added Yours in both sun and shade, and signed Lady Constance’s name with a flourish.

  The steward cocked an eyebrow when he saw the note, but made no remark. Penelope half hoped he would notice and perhaps even admire t
he jaunty, galloping rhythm of the words, but he simply counted out the money and went back to his budgets.

  HER GOOD MOOD RESTORED AND ample money for train tickets in her apron pocket, Penelope climbed the stairs back to the nursery. “How lovely it will be to introduce my three pupils to Swanburne, and show them my own childhood haunts,” she thought, taking the steps two at a time. “We shall have to pay a call on Dr. Westminster, the Swanburne veterinarian. However, I must be careful not to leave the children unsupervised near the chicken coop.” The sight of all those plump, delectable, buck-buck-bucking chickens might be too much for the children to resist, especially if it was getting close to lunchtime.

  Inside the nursery the Incorrigibles marched in circles, waving their feather dusters (as you recall, they had been instructed to dust the bookshelves while their governess was out, but Penelope had been gone for half the morning, and that chore had long since been finished). As they marched, they recited.

  “Tyger, Tyger, burning bright,

  In the forests of the night;

  What immortal hand or eye

  Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”

  Even without the full benefit of Penelope’s lesson on poetic meter, the children had discovered that Mr. Blake’s poem naturally fell into a strong marching beat. “Hup, hup, hup!” Alexander directed his siblings. “Tygers, halt!” They began to tickle one another with the dusters.

  “Trochaic tetrameter, more or less,” Penelope announced brightly, pushing her way past the waving feathers. “Children, I have excellent news. We are going on a trip, to the Swanburne Academy for Poor Bright Females.” Even saying the name made her voice catch with feeling. What a joyful homecoming it would be!

  “Poor Bright Females,” Cassiopeia gloated to her brothers. “No boys. Bye-bye!”

  The boys looked crestfallen, and Penelope rushed to explain. “It is true that the students at Swanburne are all girls, and that the teachers are nearly all women—but there are some men there as well, like my old friend Dr. Westminster, who cares for the animals. And boys are certainly welcome as visitors. In fact, all three of you children have been specially invited by Miss Mortimer. I am sure everyone will make a fuss over you.”

  Penelope pulled a spare suitcase out of the closet and began to plan what to pack for the trip. Meanwhile, the thought of being fussed over by a whole school full of girls had struck fear into Alexander. He ran and stood in front of the mirror with a wet comb and slicked his hair around in different ways, but it always reverted to its natural upright position.

  “Why are we going to Swanburne?” Beowulf asked. His hair was just as unruly as his brother’s, but he felt no similar urge to comb it. This may have been yet another sign of his artistic nature, or perhaps he was just too young to think of it. “Is Cassawoof going to school?”

  Now it was Cassiopeia’s turn to look worried. The question gave Penelope pause as well, for Cassiopeia was about the same age Penelope had been when she was first delivered to Swanburne—had she really been that young? She had no clear memory of the day; it was all in bits and pieces, like many different pockets emptied carelessly into the same drawer.

  She had traveled to Swanburne by train, of that she was certain. If she closed her eyes, she could still hear the clickety-clack of the wheels. She assumed that her parents had brought her, but she could not actually picture them at Swanburne. Instead, she remembered the firm grasp of Miss Charlotte Mortimer’s hand, leading an absurdly tiny version of Penelope to the dormitory to put away her things before supper.

  Had she wept openly to say farewell, or bitten her lip to keep the tears inside? Had she strained to look over her shoulder for one last good-bye? Or did she march bravely into her new home without a backward glance? Penelope had tried to conjure the scene so many times that she no longer could tell what was memory and what was simply her own imagined version of the day. Yet if she concentrated hard, she could still summon the feeling of that warm grown-up hand enveloping hers, the sound of Miss Mortimer’s heels clicking along the wooden floors, and the sight of pillows everywhere—in the chairs and window seats, embroidered with sayings she was not yet old enough to read.

  “Surely a place with so many pillows is bound to be pleasant,” the little girl had chirped bravely to the tall, strange lady at her side.

  “I hope you will find it so,” Miss Mortimer had replied, with a tender and welcoming smile.

  Her reverie was broken by a whimper. Its source was Cassiopeia, whose large, sea-green eyes brimmed with tears at the thought of being shipped off to school, far away from her brothers and her beloved Lumawoo.

  Penelope sat in her armchair; the girl jumped in her lap and curled up in a protective ball, like a startled hedgehog. “Cassiopeia has a private governess and is the ward of one of the richest men in England. She has no need of a school for poor bright females.” Penelope patted her littlest pupil reassuringly. “We are taking a trip to Swanburne because I have been asked to give a speech at the CAKE.”

  At the word “cake,” Cassiopeia stopped whimpering. Her brothers perked to attention.

  “However,” Penelope continued, “please note that CAKE is only an acronym, describing a particular, special day that Miss Mortimer has planned.”

  “Like a holiday?” Alexander asked.

  “Yes, I suppose so. But it has nothing to do with—”

  “Cake Day! Cake Day! The best day of the year!” The boys interrupted before she could explain further. Cassiopeia uncurled, grabbed her feather duster, and joined the celebratory parade around the nursery as the children chanted the names of every kind of cake they could think of: “White cake, yellow cake, angel cake, Gypsy cake, Black Forest cake . . .”

  Penelope did not bother to correct them. Their impromptu Cake Day parade was enough to distract the Incorrigibles from asking more questions, and this suited her perfectly, for she would rather keep her concerns about Judge Quinzy and Miss Mortimer’s strange letter to herself for now. Besides, their excitement about cake had reminded her of an important task that she would have done at once, except that the urgency of Miss Mortimer’s summons had knocked it out of her mind: She needed to write a thank-you note to Mrs. Clarke for organizing that wonderful surprise birthday party.

  At last she could try out her new fountain pen! Truly, it was a marvelous invention. Penelope could scarcely believe that it did not run out of ink after a few words, as a quill pen always did. Simply holding this fine pen made her feel poetically inspired, and she wrote:

  Dear Mrs. Clarke,

  I thank you for the party yesterday.

  It made my birthday full of joy and cake.

  Hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray!

  Three cheers for Cook as well, for she can bake!

  “More iambic pentameter, ta-TUM, ta-TUM, hooRAY, hooRAY,” she said to herself as she signed her name at the bottom. “And two rhymes this time! Penny old girl, you have outdone yourself.” She was well aware that the “hoorays” made five cheers, not three, but there was no need to split hairs. After all, with thank-you notes, as with so many other things in life, it was the thought that counted.

  Gently, she blew on the ink, but it hardly needed any time to dry. She folded the letter crisply, slipped it inside an envelope, and sealed it with a drip of wax from a candle. Feeling playful, she used the edge of her thumbnail to press an L for “Lumley” into the soft wax, just as if she had her own personal seal.

  “Who is ripe for an adventure?” she called out gaily. The Incorrigibles jumped up and down, waving their dusters so vigorously that the loose feathers wafted down like snow. She held up the sealed envelope. “I have a letter here addressed to Mrs. Clarke, and it must be delivered.”

  “Post office! Post office!” the children cried.

  Penelope smiled at their eagerness to go to town; she hoped they would be as cheerful about traveling all the way to Heathcote, a far longer and more exhausting trip. “Under normal circumstances, the post office is exactly th
e right place to bring a letter to be sent,” she replied. “However, as Mrs. Clarke’s bedchamber is just upstairs, I see no need to put this particular letter in the post. Shall we deliver it ourselves?”

  HOW GLORIOUS IT WAS INDEED to be a postal employee! After a brief recess for luncheon (Penelope had long ago learned her lesson about skipping meals; a hungry Incorrigible was prone to mayhem, and must be avoided at all costs), the children quickly fashioned costumes for themselves out of their dress-up trunk. They turned their pillowcases into mailbags full of letters. They even carried slingshots loaded with very hard acorns, in case they met up with dangerous mail bandits along their postal route. This was unlikely, as they only needed to go up a flight of stairs. But they were not ready to stop being tygers yet, or to end their Cake Day parade, so they quickly dubbed themselves the Cake-Eating Postal Tygers of Ashton Place, complete with marching song:

  Our tyger feet

  Are quieter than most.

  We can’t be beat

  Delivering the post.

  We eat our peas,

  But cake we like the best.

  We say, “More, please!”

  And gobble up the rest.

  The tune for this ditty was suspiciously like a tune from Pirates on Holiday, the nautical operetta whose first act Penelope and the children had witnessed while visiting London some months earlier. (Sadly, they had been forced to flee halfway through the performance with the entire cast and even some of the audience in hot pursuit, amid many cries of “Harrr!” and “Avast, ye hearties!” and other piratical turns of phrase. The experience had left all three Incorrigibles, and especially Cassiopeia, with a strong dislike of pirates, although, luckily, not of operetta, which is rarely dangerous unless a piece of heavy scenery falls upon the singers during a performance.)