The Long-Lost Home Page 8

  “Duraki?” Penelope repeated, intrigued. “There is a card game called durak I have sometimes played with the princess. Do you mean that you want to play cards?” She put down the potato and mimed shuffling and dealing a hand of cards.

  Svetlana shook her head. “Duraki!” she repeated. She sprang into motion, and danced comically around the nursery like a broken puppet. It was a surprising show of animation. Whatever she was trying to say must be important.

  “Yes,” Penelope replied, nodding. “Yes, I remember. Durak means fool. Duraki must mean fools.” Penelope did an even sillier puppet dance to show she understood.

  “Duraki, da!” Now Svetlana pretended to write a letter. With great theatricality, she dropped the imaginary correspondence on the ground. She shivered with pretend cold and wiggled her fingers downward through the air to indicate snow falling.

  Fully in character, she grabbed Planet Spud from Penelope and held it by its twig. “Babushkinovs,” she said, and tapped the top of the wrinkled, shrunken potato. “Svetlana,” she said, tapping the bottom. Slowly she rotated the potato, so that what had been on top was underneath, and what was on the bottom was now on top.

  “Babushkinovs, ha ha!” she concluded. She flicked the bottom of the potato with her index finger, a gesture of clear contempt. “Duraki. Da?”

  “Da.” Penelope nodded. “Da, da, da.” Yes, now she gathered Svetlana’s meaning quite well. Someday, those on the top of the potato—the selfish land owners, like the Babushkinovs—would be on the bottom, and those currently stuck on the bottom, meaning Svetlana and her fellow serfs, would be on top. That day had not yet come, but in the meanwhile Penelope had made duraki—that is to say, fools—of their employers by tricking them with that absurd invitation to the capital, and now Svetlana’s heart was filled with the bitter joy that only a serf in Plinkst could feel, mixed as it was with misery and resentment, rage and gloom and an abiding hatred of beets.

  It was a lot to glean from a round of charades. Then again, Penelope had always excelled at the game. She wanted to show she understood. She rose on tiptoe and performed a single, wobbly pirouette. Then she bowed to Svetlana, reverent and low, as if she were bowing to the tsarina herself.

  Like a ray of sunlight breaking through dense fog, Svetlana smiled broadly—her teeth were excellent, for she had never eaten a piece of candy in her life—and she took Penelope by the shoulders and kissed her on each cheek.

  Svetlana’s face was transformed by the smile, and Penelope realized she was quite a young woman, scarcely older than Penelope herself. It was her grimness that made her seem older. But then the smile faded. Wordlessly, Svetlana left the nursery. She took the Planet Spud with her, to toss in the kitchen scraps that were fed to the pigs. Or perhaps she would trim away the rot and make a secret, thin soup out of it, one that she would not have to share with anyone.

  Penelope felt somber after Svetlana was gone. She would have liked to sit for a while, to wonder what might become of the girl, and to wish her well, but there was no time. The sun had risen; the troika would be leaving soon, and she had to pack with care, for she would not be coming back.

  BEFORE LONG THE FAMILY WAS up and fighting. When it finally came time to leave, Madame Babushkinov swirled her fur cape to and fro like a matador to coax her three older children to the door. The captain carried the weighty, unhappy Baby Max tucked under one arm, like a squalling bedroll.

  “Kiss your grandmother good-bye, my dears!” Madame said brightly. “After all, she might be dead by the time we get back.”

  “Dead? Ha!” The princess had asked to be wheeled out of her room to see the travelers off. Now she endured the indifferent kisses of her grandchildren as if she was being pestered by mosquitoes. “I do not fear death. But I am in no rush, either. Maybe I will live forever. For spite, ha, ha! Wait.”

  She clutched one hand with the other and wrestled them together. With all the strength she had, she twisted off one of her large jeweled rings and offered it to Madame Babushkinov.

  “Take this with you,” the old woman said. “My emerald. My favorite! A gift of great value, from an admirer, long ago. If I die, you can sell. Pay for funeral! If I live—too bad! Ah ha ha!”

  The cackling of the princess continued until the travelers were outside. After that, Max’s howls of dismay at being left behind drowned out every other sound, until the door had been firmly shut behind them.

  The recent snow had melted, but the air was cold and the ground was slick with mud. A team of porters loaded the Babushkinovs’ trunks and luggage onto the troika. Penelope carried only a carpetbag. It held a change of clothes and a flannel nightdress, a pen and some letter paper (in case a thank-you note or other urgent correspondence was called for), and a papier-mâché seashell the Incorrigible children had made during their winter holiday in Brighton. It was her only keepsake of them and weighed little, and she would not leave it behind.

  “And why are we not on our way? The tsar’s own palace could be built in half this time!” Madame Babushkinov began complaining the moment she was seated, but the troika driver would not be rushed. Patiently he checked all three horses, the fit of their harnesses and the condition of their hooves, before he climbed into his seat and gathered up the reins. He had the grumpy, reticent look of a person who preferred animals to people. Penelope thought of Old Timothy and held back a smile. The enigmatic coachman was hardly her favorite person at Ashton Place, but how her heart would have leaped with joy to see him now!

  “Heya, heya!” the driver called, and they were off. The twins immediately tried to stand and turn around, though they had been told a hundred times to stay in their seats. “Good-bye, house, good-bye!” they yelled. “If we are lucky, Veronika and her smelly toe shoes will never return! Finally, we can be happy!” At this Veronika sobbed. The captain growled at the boys and cuffed their heads, while Madame Babushkinov tried to comfort her daughter with promises of new dresses and plots of revenge against her brothers.

  Penelope did not turn back even once to look at the ramshackle estate, but kept her eyes fixed on the road ahead. Was she giddy with joy to finally bid the barren fields of Plinkst good-bye? One would expect so, but her time in this unhappy town had taught her that it was possible to find the gloom in nearly any situation. “Even to leave a place one dislikes is bittersweet,” she thought, “for it reminds us that time gallops in one direction only, and there are places we have been and people we have known that we surely will never see again.”

  But then she caught herself. She sat up straight and took a deep calming breath. What she needed now was not Plinkstian melancholy but pluck; yes, pluck of the most Swanburnian kind. Her plan to get back to Ashton Place and the Incorrigible children was in no way foolproof. It would require a great deal of good luck and not one spoonful of bad, and what were the odds of that happening? Only an optimistic—no, optoomuchstic!—person would have dared take the first step, and now she was on her way at last but still a very, very, very long way from home.

  “No hopeless case is truly without hope,” she reminded herself, then soothed her nerves by repeating under her breath, “The capital of Russia is Saint Petersburg!” over and over again.

  THE TROIKA WAS FAST, EVEN in the muck. The drumming of three sets of hooves, along with the ceaseless ringing of the bells that hung from the duga, the part of the harness that arched like a rainbow over the center horse, created a hypnotic, complicated rhythm, as if all the poetic meters ever invented were being tapped out at once. It made Penelope drowsy, and when the driver shouted and pulled the troika swiftly and hard to the rutted edge of the road, it startled her into a yelp. She had been dreaming that she was on a train, en route to her first job interview. . . .

  “Bandits!” yelled the twins, and readied themselves to fight by punching each other, for practice.

  Bandits! The clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop of hooves grew louder by the second. A wagon approached from the other direction. It was pulled by a pair of heavy-boned
workhorses, with broad chests and sturdy, thick-furred legs that churned like pistons.

  “It is not bandits, you ridiculous children,” Madame Babushkinov snapped. “It is the mail sled. Finally! I am glad we are not home to receive any. Bills and more bills!”

  Even with the Babushkinov’s troika dragged halfway into the gully at the road’s edge, the mail sled came so close that it splattered mud on them as it passed. The sled was piled high with burlap mail bags, all stuffed to bursting.

  “The mail sled?” Penelope repeated dumbly. She twisted ’round to watch the sled continue down the narrow road they had just traveled, gouging a fresh set of tracks in the mud.

  “The grocer. The butcher. The man who sells feed for the chickens.” Madame was still going on about the bills. “Those are the true bandits, demanding our rubles or else! ‘You are out of credit,’ they say. The nerve! We are the Babushkinovs! Our name ought to be credit enough.”

  “Grocers must eat too, my darling,” her husband interjected.

  “They will get paid when I say so, and not a moment before. As far as I am concerned, the more they ask, the longer they must wait. . . .”

  Penelope could not tear her eyes away from the receding sled. There it went, bound for Plinkst, piled high with sacks of mail. Surely one of them held her long-awaited letter from Simon Harley-Dickinson! For all she knew, there were dozens of letters in those sacks, from him and the Incorrigibles, and perhaps from Miss Charlotte Mortimer, too. But it was too late to turn back now.

  “The mail is so slow,” the captain observed. “It is worse than a strike.”

  “Strike? You mean like this?” Constantine struck his brother to demonstrate. Calmly the captain picked up the boy by the back of his coat and moved him, arms flailing, to sit on his mother’s other side, uncomfortably squeezed between his parents.

  “Forgive me for asking,” Penelope said, keeping her voice steady, “but why is the mail so slow?”

  “It is the fault of the beets,” the captain said. “Plinkst has no beets. No beets means no rubles. No rubles means no pay for postal workers. No workers means no mail.”

  “Beets! I curse them, roots and stems and all.” Madame Babushkinov sneered. “Beets have been our ruin, Ivan! We never should have left the hat business.”

  The captain shrugged. It was an argument he had lost long ago.

  Left without a twin to punch, Boris was forced to pull Veronika’s hair to get his parents’ attention. She shrieked in outrage, an earsplitting noise that made the horses’ ears pin back and their tails lash. The troika driver grumbled under his breath as he coaxed the nervous animals back onto the road.

  “But then how did Nikki’s letter arrive?” Boris asked.

  “Yes, how?” his brother parroted.

  Beneath her lap blanket, Penelope’s hands curled into fists of fear. On the other hand, this show of logic by the twins was impressive, and she wondered if she had taught them a little something after all.

  Madame Babushkinov smacked Boris, then Constantine, then both boys at once. “Do you think the tsar cares about the problems of Plinkst? About our failed crops and lazy postal workers? No! If he wants a letter delivered, you may rest assured it will be delivered, no matter what. That is what it means to be the tsar!”

  THE JOURNEY TO SAINT PETERSBURG was long and dull and cold and wet. The rain mixed with sleet that felt like needles against the skin, and the troika had to go slowly over the muddy roads, which were beginning to freeze. Veronika was so nervous, she could only wring her gloved hands and weep. Boris and Constantin alternated saying, “I’m bored!” and “Are we there yet?” until they forgot whose turn it was to say what and quit in frustration. For entertainment, they pinched their sister to make her scream, while their parents snarled and blamed each other for things that could not be helped: the poor weather, for example, or the long wait when the troika driver had to stop and have one of the horses reshod.

  Lips chapped and tempers frayed, and the ceaseless ringing and jingling of the troika bells grew so wearisome, it was like something out of Poe. (Fans of gloomy talking birds are already well acquainted with Mr. Edgar Allen Poe, who famously wrote a poem about one. He also wrote a poem about bells, bells, and more bells, ringing and clanging and jangling away, from tinkling sleigh bells like those of a troika, to the deep, basso tolling of funeral bells. That poem, aptly titled “The Bells,” uses so many different words to describe the sounds made by bells that Mr. Poe evidently ran out and had to invent a new one: “tintinnabulation.” Tintinnabulation, honestly! As if further proof were needed of the slipperiness of poets! They make up words willy-nilly and have them mean whatever they like. Thank heavens they are licensed and thus kept somewhat in check. If they were not, could full-blown mayhem be far behind?)

  Only Miss Penelope Lumley sat straight-backed and uncomplaining as the time dragged on. She entertained the horrible Babushkawoos as best she could with stories and games, and offered gentle reprimands whenever their behavior grew intolerable. She did all this calmly, without seeming effort, for caring for children in this way was second nature to her and left her mind free to wander. Outwardly, she was steady and efficient; inside, she was full of secrets.

  Luckily for her, every few hours the Babushkawoos complained and fussed themselves into exhaustion and fell asleep. Only then did she retreat into her own thoughts, and she had a great deal to think about, you may rest assured.

  However, even for patient Penelope the journey was a long one, with many hours yet to go before the troika arrived in Moscow, and then an even longer train ride north. It would be three full days before they arrived in Saint Petersburg. For the moment, then, let us turn our attention back to England, to the grand house known as Ashton Place. That well-tended estate was the very opposite of ramshackle, with no failing crops to be found, only daffodils in bright yellow bloom and the swelling green buds of tulips, full of promise. Yet the mood of the local villagers was not unlike that of the Russian peasantry, for a revolution of sorts was brewing among them. . . .

  “BREAD! WE NEED BREAD!” THE people cried. As you surely ought to recall by now (for this fact will soon become quite important to our tale!), the village baker had run off to America with fickle, stoop-shouldered Julia, the former baby nurse, and now there was no bread baker for miles.

  Lord Fredrick had placed an advertisement for a baby nurse before the full moon curse had come upon him, but bread baking? That was another barrel of flour altogether. As he said to Mrs. Clarke, “Blast! I don’t even know where bread comes from, and why should I? As far as I’m concerned, it ought to grow on breadfruit trees, like they have on those islands in the tropics. Perhaps we ought to plant some, what?”

  Lady Constance was no help either, and offhandedly suggested that the kitchen serve gooseberry pie to the villagers instead of bread and satisfy the people that way. Alas, there were simply not enough gooseberries on hand to make that many pies. It was a pity, too, as Mrs. Clarke’s gooseberry-pie recipe was beyond compare.

  Poor villagers! To let them eat pie was not an option, yet it seemed they could not go one more day without bread. Mrs. Clarke and Cook diligently searched for a replacement. They invited bakers from miles around to travel to the bakehouse at Ashton Place and bake samples of their finest loaves.

  Many came and took up the challenge. These were all experienced and well-qualified bakers, mind you, but for some mysterious reason, every attempt turned out a failure. Either the loaves failed to rise or else they puffed up absurdly and turned hard as bricks. Even worse, while in the oven, none of these loaves gave off that delicious baking-bread smell that makes the streets of Paris so appealing, as there is a boulangerie on nearly every street in that fair French city. Au contraire! These loaves smelled horrible. One gave off the stink of smelly toe shoes the minute it was put in the oven. Another smelled like a pile of wet rope encrusted with seaweed and left to rot in the sun, and a nasty, fishy aroma it was. Even a promising-smelling sourdough soon tur
ned rank. The longer it baked, the more it smelled like a wet dog that had recently encountered an angry skunk, and the terrible odor lingered for days afterward.

  It was uncanny, to say the least. If one were inclined to believe in the supernatural, one might even suspect that the bakehouse at Ashton Place had fallen under some sort of a curse!

  Now, Mrs. Clarke did tend to believe in the supernatural, within reason. But she was no quitter. Too, she had long been in the habit of having a piece of buttered toast and marmalade at eleven o’clock in the morning and was sad to miss it. Curse or no curse, a baker was needed, and a baker must be found, even if the whole of England had to be searched!

  The housekeeper thought hard about who to send on this difficult quest. It would have to be someone quick and close-lipped, for once rumors of those foul-smelling, inedible loaves spread, no respectable baker would dare come to Ashton Place for fear of the dreaded “bakehouse curse.” Imagine if such a thing were contagious! That could be the end of bread everywhere, for everyone. BREAD DECLARED EXTINCT, BAKEHOUSE CURSE TO BLAME, the headlines would read.

  “Quick and close-lipped . . . I’d say Old Timothy’s the man for the job,” she decided. The enigmatic fellow was well aware of the estate’s predicament, as he himself was a skilled sandwich maker, and the lack of bread had deprived him of his favorite lunchtime meal. Mrs. Clarke gave him strict orders not to return to Ashton Place until he had found a truly excellent baker. By now there were tummies rumbling from one end of the vast estate to the other, and the villagers would not settle for less.

  He chose a pair of his fastest horses and a small, swift carriage. “There’s only so much soup and boiled potatoes a man can stand at luncheon. I’ll find your baker, missus,” he declared, “even if I have to go to the edge of the earth, or beyond! Hey-ah!” he called to his team, and off he went.