The Long-Lost Home Page 7

  After a nudge from Mrs. Clarke, Alexander now offered his kaleidoscope, but Lady Constance waved it away without even looking at the glorious display within.

  Cassiopeia had had a harder time thinking of a gift. She herself would not have minded having a rocking horse, but a rocking horse was not a good gift for a baby who could not yet sit up in the saddle. She thought of carving a teething ring out of wood, but the baby would not have teeth for a while, either. Stumped, she had asked the young housemaid, Margaret, for advice about what babies did for fun, but the girl only laughed her squealing, high-pitched laugh and said, “New babies don’t do much of anything, love. They sleep and eat and cry and mess their diapers, and believe me, that’s enough.”

  Cassiopeia found this answer unhelpful. In the end, she had made a hand-stitched pillow. It was a baby-sized pillow, too small for even a pithy nugget of wisdom, so she had settled on a simple greeting.

  “Go ahead, dear.” Mrs. Clarke spoke in that overly sweet, up-and-down singsong tone grown-ups sometimes use to steer children past awkward moments. “Show her ladyship the pretty present you made for the baby! Why, you sewed it all with your own sweet hands, didn’t you, dear?”

  With a distinct lack of enthusiasm, Cassiopeia showed Lady Constance the pillow she had made.

  “‘Hawoo, Baby’?” Lady Constance read. “What on earth does that mean?”

  “Hawoo,” Cassiopeia explained, with infinite patience. “What you say when you meet someone.”

  “Hawoo!” Lady Constance spun ’round to face her husband. If her globe-shaped tummy had been a real globe, she would have gone from sunrise to sunset, just like that. “Did you hear that, Fredrick? Hawoo!” Her voice dropped to a loud whisper, which everyone could hear. “I told you these howling wolf children ought to be sent away! Imagine what sort of influence they might be!”

  Now, Cassiopeia was a bright and hardworking student. She could multiply fractions, turn a cartwheel, and recite entire stanzas of “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” a marvelous poem about a shipwreck by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. However, when it came to spelling, her own name was so difficult to get right that she had given up on the subject altogether. Her hand-stitched Hawoo had not been intended as a howl at all but was merely her own way of writing “hello” so that the word would sound the way she liked to say it. (The professional educators among you will note that Cassiopeia had unwittingly invented what would later be called “phonics,” a boon to teachers and students to this very day.)

  “Not ahwoo,” she protested. “Hawoo.”

  Her brothers understood perfectly, and tried to clarify by alternating a howling “ahwoo” with a friendly “hawoo.” “Ahwoo, hawoo!” they demonstrated. “Ahwoo, hawoo! Ahwoo, hawoo! Ahwoo, hawoo!”

  Lady Constance turned pale and pressed her hands to her ears. “Wild, untamed creatures! Now I cannot hear myself think, not that I much care for thinking.” She moved her hands to her belly, as if trying to cover the baby’s ears. “Do not listen, little future person! Behaving like a wild animal is all very well for your father’s wolfish wards, but it will never do for the heir to this great estate!”

  Lord Fredrick’s good humor seemed to leave him all at once. “All right, you three, that’s quite enough of that,” he said sharply. Like well-trained cadets, the children instantly stopped making noise and pressed their lips shut, in three straight lines.

  Lady Constance looked smug. “Much better! Fredrick, let us go. I wish to finish our walk, have a chocolate, and then lie down, and perhaps have another chocolate while I am lying down. That would settle my nerves perfectly. Dr. Veltschmerz would surely approve.”

  “Mrs. Clarke, have some chocolate brought to my wife’s chambers,” Lord Fredrick commanded. Mrs. Clarke jogged to ring the bell pull, but Lord Fredrick interrupted her by adding, “Do it in person, please.”

  “As you wish, sir,” she said with a worried glance at the children. “I’ll go to the kitchen and see to it myself.” Reluctantly she left.

  The mere promise of chocolate had already done wonders for Lady Constance’s mood. Expectantly, she slipped her arm through her husband’s, but Lord Fredrick turned to the door. “Timothy, are you still there? Don’t pretend otherwise, I know how you like to eavesdrop.”

  The old fellow appeared in the doorway. “I was just waiting until the missus was done with the ladder,” he explained gruffly.

  “Never mind about the ladder. Take Constance to finish her walk, if you please.”

  “Aren’t you coming, Fredrick?” she exclaimed.

  “In a moment, dear.” Gently Lord Fredrick steered her toward the door. “I’d like to have a closer look at this wallpaper. You may be right; the symbolism could be a bit much for a baby. I’ll catch up with you and Old Tim shortly. We’ll have some chocolate together—how’s that, what?”

  Before she could form a reply, her arm had been smoothly transferred to the coachman’s. “This way, my lady,” Old Timothy’s voice took on an irresistible cooing tone. “We’ll have a nice walk, we will. Come along now.”

  Lady Constance was easily persuaded as a rule, but the soothing sound of Old Timothy’s voice could make even the most high-strung horse step calmly into a rushing stream. Obediently she went with him down the hall.

  “What an enigmatic fellow you are, Old Timothy,” she remarked, cheerful once again. “I sometimes wonder about you, you know! I wonder what you must have been like as a child, and whether you have ever been in love, or made and lost a great fortune, or traveled to distant lands.”

  “Distant lands, my, my,” he cooed as they walked.

  She laughed. “Well, there must be more to you than simply being our coachman! But don’t tell me, please. It is ever so much more entertaining not to know. And how tedious it is to listen to stories about other people! Honestly, they put me right to sleep.”

  LORD FREDRICK WAITED UNTIL HIS wife’s prattling voice had turned the corner. Frowning, he gave the antique crib a sharp push. Skaweek, skaweek. “Still squeaks—imagine that,” he remarked. “I’ll have to tell Old Timothy to get it fixed—or I suppose I could find someone to fix it—blast, I’ll just take an oil can to it myself.”

  He turned to the Incorrigibles, who stood in a line as if awaiting inspection. “Now, listen up, you three,” he said. “I know you mean well. But I won’t have you reading books and painting pictures and making clever presents for the baby. That will never do.”

  Shock and disappointment was written on all three faces, for had they not tried their very best to be welcoming to the new baby?

  “But why not?” Alexander mustered the courage to ask.

  “It’s much too civilized.” Lord Fredrick shook his head. “What I need for you to do is to bark and howl as much as you can.”

  The children were flummoxed. “But not around the baby?” Beowulf asked, trying hard to understand.

  Lord Fredrick dropped down to his knees so he could speak to the boy face-to-face. “No! I mean—yes, howl around the baby! Especially around the baby! You must carry on like wild cubs, just as if you were trying to teach the baby to yap and bay at the moon.”

  Cassiopeia tugged on Lord Fredrick’s sleeve. “Lordawoo, wait. You want us to act like woofs around the baby?”

  “Precisely, little girl.” He gave her an awkward pat on the head. “That’s your job, and a very important responsibility it is, too. I need you three to woofy up the baby.” He smiled the rubbery, doggish Ashton smile that all the men in his family shared, wide and toothy, with the canine teeth on full display. “Don’t be shy about it! I know you’ve got it in you.”

  The Incorrigibles batted at their ears in puppyish disbelief, an old habit that only popped up at moments of extreme confusion. “Excuse me, Lordship, sir,” Alexander said, after giving his head a shake. “So you want the baby to woof?”

  “I do indeed! To woof and bark and howl and scratch, like a proper little Ashton should.” Lord Fredrick rubbed his hands together. “This way, when th
e full moon comes, and the baby starts to act like a pup, Constance will think it’s because of you three. She’ll never suspect there’s anything, well, unusual about the baby, and that’s how it’s going to stay.”

  “She will be mad at us,” Cassiopeia declared solemnly.

  “She is already mad at us,” Beowulf corrected. “She will be madder.”

  “Mad, madder, maddest,” Alexander offered. The Incorrigibles had been studying comparatives and superlatives. (This was no thanks to Master Gogolev, who was not only lazy, but lazier than most tutors; in fact, he was the laziest tutor imaginable. If you ponder that for a moment, you will know all you need to know about comparatives and superlatives. This ought to make you quite proud, or at least prouder than your friends, or possibly the proudest member of your entire family.)

  Lord Fredrick nodded. “She’ll complain, no question, but never mind about that. I’ll handle Constance. She has a good heart, really. You three just keep doing your job.”

  “But we already learned not to be woofy,” Cassiopeia insisted, for she had worked particularly hard at this and had not quite mastered it yet, either. “From Lumawoo.”

  “Lumawoo, yes! Talk like that! Put your little awoos everywhere. Woofy it up, that’s the spirit! It’ll be our secret game, and I expect the baby will be extra clever and catch on right away, no doubt by the very first full moon.” He stood up again with a grunt. One might almost say he looked cheerful, or at least relieved. “That’s all. I’m relying on you three, remember that.”

  LORD FREDRICK’S INSTRUCTION TO “WOOFY up the baby” puzzled the Incorrigibles at first, for of course Lumawoo had gone to great pains to teach them to be less woofy, not more. There had been much practice, a Squirrel Desensitization Program, and many tasty treats employed to this end, and it seemed a giant step backward to give it all up now, after so much time and hard work. But then they remembered that Penelope had also taught them the meaning of irony, and that made the situation perfectly clear.

  (If you have forgotten, irony is when what happens is the opposite of what one has been led to expect will happen. When people say the opposite of what they truly mean, that too is irony. And there is a special kind of irony called “dramatic irony,” which is when the audience of a play knows more than the characters onstage do. For example, you know far more than Lord Fredrick does about the curse upon the Ashtons, for he thinks it is merely going to make his baby embarrassingly wolfish during the full moon. Alas, the truth was much more dire, a fact that had been concealed from him his whole life by that imposter of a houseguest who was even now sleeping the sleep of the dead in the Egyptian Room, a lavish guestroom on the far side of the house.)

  As soon as Lord Fredrick left, the Incorrigibles made a beeline back to the nursery. Woofy up the baby, Alexander wrote on the to-doawoo list. All three children gazed thoughtfully out the window, past the branches of the elm to the dark forest beyond.

  Alexander turned to his siblings. “Do you remember how to act woofish?”

  “I think so,” Beowulf said uncertainly.

  “I do! I can give lessons.” Cassiopeia growled fiercely and showed her teeth, to prove her point. Truth be told, she had always been the wildest of the three. Now she seemed ready to plunge wholeheartedly into her former ways.

  Her brothers did not feel lessons would be necessary but thanked her sincerely for the offer.

  She dropped to all fours and scampered along the floor, just as she used to. She stopped and sat up on her haunches, her head cocked to the side. “How woofish should we be?” she wondered aloud. “Maximum mayhem? Or just barky?”

  Alexander considered the question. “Medium barky to start,” he decided. “We can always adjust.”

  Beowulf gnawed anxiously on the back of his chair. “Can I still make paintings?” he asked. It was a reasonable question, as even highly unusual wolves did not typically paint. Yet Beowulf was dedicated to his art and would be heartbroken to give it up, even temporarily.

  Alexander gave his brother a reassuring swipe of his paw—that is to say, hand. “You may paint, but woofishly,” he said. In that instant, the Woofish School of painting was born. (Critics still marvel at this brief but dramatic swerve in the history of portraiture. Why a few painters in a remote part of England would suddenly decide to depict their subjects with long noses, rough whiskers around the muzzle, tapered ears, and long pointed canine teeth, all rendered in a confident but childlike hand, has been a mystery that art historians have long tried to solve.)

  The children continued to discuss how to best go about returning to their old habits, and pondered the ethical dilemmas that might pop up. On one point they were in firm agreement: they would happily howl at the moon, chew on expensive leather shoes, climb the furniture, and wreak havoc in any number of wolfish ways, but under no circumstances would they go back to hunting squirrels.

  Nutsawoo was a twitchy little scamp and a bushy-tailed menace (and, unbeknownst to the children, a soon-to-be-parent—another fine example of dramatic irony!), but the dim-witted rodent was simply not a potential meal.

  THE FIFTH CHAPTER

  The capital of Russia is Saint Petersburg!

  SAINT PETERSBURG, SAINT PETERSBURG! BACK in Plinkst, the packing was nearly finished. The trip to Saint Petersburg was happening, would happen, must happen. The sheer unlikeliness of receiving such an unexpected invitation was mentioned by no one. Even Veronika had the sense not to repeat her plaintive question, “I wonder how they heard of me.”

  Not that it would have mattered. The Babushnikovs were in the grip of a kind of faulty logic that psychologists nowadays call “confirmation bias,” but that the rest of us might simply think of as being Babushkinov, through and through: when new facts threatened to upend their opinions, they simply chose to believe what they wished was true, and ignored all evidence to the contrary.

  For, really, what were the odds of finding a letter from the tsar’s own ballet company lying on the doorstep? Such an obvious trick would not have worked on most people, but as Edward Ashton himself observed, to know one’s prey was essential, and Penelope knew the Babushkinovs. She had gambled on the family’s foolishness and self-delusion, and she had won by a length, as they say at the Derby.

  Or so she believed. There were two members of the household who had their doubts about the letter. One was the Princess Popkinova. The evening before the family’s departure, the ancient woman sat in her wheelchair in a dim corner of the drawing room, watching through half-closed eyes as the family quarreled. A blanket of exquisitely soft fur, an ink-black sable, was wrapped around her shoulders, and another just like it was tucked around her legs. In the shadows she looked like a disembodied head.

  “Saint Petersburg!” the old woman said. She drew the word out with profound sarcasm, a tone that requires no translation. “Saint Petersburg!” One crooked finger emerged from the sable folds and waggled from side to side, as if it were too much trouble for the princess to actually shake her head in disbelief.

  No one paid attention. They were too busy arguing about whose possessions would go in which trunk, whether it was necessary to tip the driver, who would sit in the front of the troika and who in the back, and so on. There was a great to-do about leaving Baby Max, for the captain flatly refused to hire a nurse to come along on such a long and expensive trip, and Svetlana had far too much work to do at the house. Madame pretended to be heartbroken, but she had no interest in caring for the child either, and so the boy would have to stay home. He screamed till he was red in his little round face, though he could hardly have understood what the fuss was about.

  The princess waggled her finger. “Saint Petersburg, Saint Petersburg!” With each exclamation it was if she was saying, “Are you all complete idiots? What fool would believe that my simpering granddaughter would attract the attention of the greatest ballet company in the world? She is an overdressed country bumpkin, a spoiled child, and a mediocre dancer at best. If she dares put one smelly toe shoe in Sai
nt Petersburg, she will end up a laughingstock, nothing more!”

  But all the old woman said, or needed to say, was “Saint Petersburg!”

  The other person, interestingly, was Svetlana. Shortly after dawn the next morning, on the day of the family’s departure, Svetlana appeared in the doorway of the nursery and stood there, blank faced and still as a post.

  Penelope was surprised to see her. It was unusual for her to be out of her room herself at that hour. But she had awoken in the dark and could not get back to sleep, and so had decided to tidy that sorry little nursery, one last time.

  “Alas, poor spud!” she had just done intoning, Hamlet-like, to the withered potato, which was now furry with mold. “Into the waste bin with you! For you will soon begin to stink, and I would not leave such an unsavory item behind for someone else to get rid of. No doubt the task would fall to Svetlana, and surely that poor woman has enough to do as it is.”

  It was at that moment Penelope turned and saw the woman herself, as if her very words had summoned her. She had to blink a few times to make sure the sight was real, much as Hamlet might have done at the sight of his father’s ghost appearing on the ramparts of the castle.

  “Svetlana! My goodness, you startled me! That is to say . . . good morning.” She was not sure if Svetlana understood, and she gestured for her to come in.

  Svetlana did so and closed the nursery door behind her.

  “Spasiba,” she said grimly.

  It meant “thank you”—that much Penelope knew, from her failed attempts to get the children to say it—but what could Svetlana be thanking her for? She followed the woman’s gaze to the rotten potato in her own hand.

  “Ah! I understand. You are thanking me for throwing Planet Spud into the dustbin,” she said. “Well, it is no trouble. Dear, moldy old spud! It was not a very good globe, but it was all the globe we had.”

  Svetlana stepped closer. “Spasiba,” she repeated with feeling. Apparently this had nothing to do with the potato. She glanced furtively at the closed door and lowered her voice. “Duraki!”