The Unseen Guest Page 9
Without waiting for a reply, Lady Constance wheeled ’round and marched back to the house, her small, pale hands clenched into fists. The Widow Ashton followed, walking backward the whole way, blowing kiss after tearful kiss until she and Margaret disappeared from view. Just before they did, Margaret gave a little secret wave to Penelope and the children, and mouthed the words “Good luck.”
“Soft-hearted women,” the admiral grumbled. “Any more soggy good-byes and we’ll be standing here until Christmas. Off we go, troops!” He adjusted his pith helmet, and the children followed suit.
“Hup, hup, hup, hup!” he chanted, to set a marching rhythm. The children swung their arms in time, and Penelope gave a final backward glance at the house.
“Mysteries and mouseteries, eh?” Like a jack-in-the-box, Old Timothy had popped up from nowhere. Penelope gasped at the sight of him; where on earth had he come from? Had he been hiding inside the POE? But there was no time for questions.
“Timothy, you must help us.” She spoke in a low voice, for she did not want the children to hear. “Lord Ashton has threatened to follow after us tomorrow, with a hunting party. I know he often takes you with him when he goes hunting—can you make sure that he does not shoot at Bertha?” Or at anyone else, she was about to add, but Old Timothy cut her off.
“Musn’t dilly-dally, miss. Remember, ‘A trip worth taking is a trip worth beginning,’” which made Penelope startle again, for she was quite certain that Agatha Swanburne had once said the very same thing.
She was about to ask him if he was familiar with the wise sayings of Agatha Swanburne, and if so, how, but as if in a promise of annoyances yet to come, a pesky mosquito chose that moment to land on the tip of Penelope’s nose. Cross-eyed, she batted it off, but it left behind an itchy tickle that could not be scratched away.
“Ah-choo,” Penelope sneezed.
“Gesundheit,” the enigmatic coachman answered under his breath. The admiral began to march, and the children fell in behind. Penelope scurried to catch up, and when she looked behind her, Old Timothy was gone.
“Hup, hup, hup, hup!” the admiral said, and the expedition was under way.
THE SEVENTH CHAPTER
Luckily, there are no cannibals in the woods—or are there?
WAS PENELOPE BOTH DEEPLY EXCITED and more than a little afraid to begin this rough-and-tumble excursion into Parts Unknown?
Do bears live in the woods?
(Note that in this case, the rhetorical question about bears is meant to mean: absolutely, positively yes. Bears do live in the woods, and Penelope was both excited and fearful, and about either fact there can be no doubt. “Is the pope Catholic?” is another popular version of this type of question, but new ones are invented all the time. Is a Swanburne girl plucky? Does an ostrich have long legs? And so on.)
Although in the end she had packed lightly, according to the children’s instructions, Penelope had insisted on tucking two books into the large pockets of her rugged twill safari skirt. One was her favorite book of melancholy German poetry in translation, which she always carried with her when she felt in need of reassurance. The other was a fictional tale of danger and exploration that she had found in Lord Fredrick’s library while doing research into wilderness survival techniques. It was about a man who had been shipwrecked on a remote Tahitian island and managed to survive by means of his determination, his skill at building shelters and canoes, and his fortunate knack for avoiding being eaten by cannibals.
Penelope found the tale unsettling, frankly, but as much as she would have preferred to bring Rainbow in Ribbons, she thought this shipwreck saga might be of practical use should she and the children get separated from the admiral and have to survive on their own for, say, eight-and-twenty years. This was the length of time the poor sailor in the book was stranded on the island, which, understandably, he came to call the Island of Despair.
But before we continue any further with the adventures of Miss Penelope Lumley and the three Incorrigible children as they venture into the forest in pursuit of a runaway ostrich, let us look away for a moment (for they will have to do quite a lot of hup, hup, hupping before they get far enough into the woods for things to become interesting) and consider some matters of linguistic significance, starting with three letters: namely, P, O, and E.
When the admiral first said POE, Miss Lumley thought he meant Poe, as in Edgar Allan Poe. This is because POE and Poe are homonyms, which means they are two different words that are pronounced the same way.
POE is also an acronym, which is a word made out of the first letters of other words. To the admiral it stood for Permanent Ostrich Enclosure, although POE could just as easily stand for something else: Pie Over Everything, for example, a tasty, if filling, notion. Or Ponder On Elks, which, as you already know, is nearly impossible to avoid doing once you have been told (and told, and told yet again, in the strictest possible terms) not to ponder on elks.
Some acronyms prove so catchy that they become words in their own right. Marine explorers know that “scuba” is an acronym for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. Those of you who enjoy shooting laser beams at your friends for sport can bamboozle your opponents by crying out, “Here comes my Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation!” just before you fire.
If you now think that you would rather confront a herd of Profoundly Outraged Elephants in a Perilously Oscillating Elevator than hear another word about homonyms, acronyms, or any other kind of nyms—well, think again. There is power in words used accurately and well, and tragedy and missed train connections in words used carelessly. Consider how disappointed you would feel if, after booking an expensive spa vacation, you found yourself on holiday with the Society of Professional Accountants instead. (Note: A word that no one has heard of is called a whatsthatonym, since the listener is bound to say “What’s that?” in response. A word that no one cares about is a sowhatonym. Alas, there is presently no word in English that means a word that does not exist, but perhaps the clever among you can invent one.)
“Please, Lumawoo. No more lessons,” Cassiopeia whined. For Penelope, too, had been using the occasion of their long march into the woods to review some of the finer points of the English language.
“We may be marching into Parts Unknown in search of a missing ostrich, but that is no excuse to neglect your education.” Penelope sounded more stern than usual, for her new hiking boots were beginning to pinch, and the trail had been going uphill for some time now. “But if you insist, let us move on to a more cheerful topic. Synonyms!” The children groaned, but Penelope paid them no mind. “Synonyms are two different words that mean more or less the same thing.”
“Dull and boring,” remarked Beowulf, poking his brother.
“Very good,” Penelope replied, choosing not to get the joke. “Dull and boring are fine examples of synonyms.”
“Tedious and uninteresting,” Alexander offered, concealing a smirk.
“Don’t care and cinnamins,” Cassiopeia said firmly. “Can I have biscuit?” Penelope sighed and offered her one. The pack she carried on her back was heavy enough, but even so, she wished she had not been so quick to leave the globe and abacus back at the nursery. Giving lessons “on the hoof,” as it were, was proving to be a mighty challenge.
“Pish posh, governess. A day or so away from the schoolroom won’t do the cubs any harm.” The admiral paused to wipe his brow, for the sun was now high overhead. They were somewhat sheltered by the forest’s canopy of leaves, but the day grew warmer by the quarter hour. “And they’re studying all the wrong things, anyway. How to tell tomorrow’s weather from the color of the evening sky. How to start a fire with wet wood and no matches. How to catch your evening’s meal and cook it over a spit. How to suck the venom out of a snakebite before it stops your heart dead—aargh!” To the children’s delight, the admiral faked a gruesome death by snakebite, clutching his chest and staggering to the ground while his tongue waggled out the side of his mouth
. After a moment, and to polite applause, he recovered. “Those are the things a person needs to know to survive, governess. Not thisonyms and thatonyms.”
Penelope did not bother to explain that the Incorrigibles were more than capable of catching their own meals and would probably prefer to eat them uncooked, rather than roasted on a spit. But the admiral did have a point about snakebites.
“Very well,” she conceded. “Synonyms can wait. But I shall read to the children this evening at bedtime, regardless; it is our custom. You need not listen if you find the tale dull. Or boring. Or tedious, or uninteresting,” she added, straight-faced. The children giggled at the way their clever governess had snuck the lesson in nevertheless.
“Stories at bedtime, eh?” The admiral checked his watch. “With any luck I’ll be back at the house long before then, smoking Ashton’s cigars, with Bertha safely locked up in the POE. ‘Finders keepers,’ he says. What nerve! The spoiled young lordship needs to be taught a lesson, if you ask me.” He pounded his cane into the mossy ground. “But never mind that. Ostriches are long of leg and short on brains. Bertha can’t have gone far. Cubs, fall in! Sniffing formation, hup! Now, any whiff of the bird?”
The children passed around Cassiopeia’s plume and sniffed deeply. At Alexander’s signal, they started tracking, moving in zigzags and ever-widening circles with their noses first to the ground, and then lifted high in the air. Soon they had disappeared into the surrounding woods. For five endless minutes the children were out of sight. They reappeared shortly, with muddy hands and knees, breathless and excited to be sure, but empty-handed.
“No bird to the north,” Alexander announced, checking the sextant.
“No bird that way, either,” Beowulf said, pointing southward.
“And no egg, nowhere. Nevahwoo!” Cassiopeia added.
“Blast,” said the admiral. “Well, it’s a big forest. We’ll just have to keep going.” With a grunt, he resumed the march.
Penelope limped along after him; her right heel was blistering inside those stiff new boots, and the bedroll strapped to her back dug painfully into her shoulders. She was desperate to sit down, remove her hot, itchy helmet for a few minutes, and fix herself a cup of tea. After a few painful strides, she caught up and tugged on the admiral’s sleeve. “We have been walking for three hours, at least. The children will need lunch soon, and a nap.”
“Naps!” He snorted contemptuously. “Nature is red in tooth and claw, governess. Tooth and claw! You don’t want to let it catch you napping.” He consulted his pocket watch once more. “Another hour and we’ll stop for grub. Hup, hup, hup!”
IT TURNED OUT THAT BY “stopping for grub,” the admiral meant pausing to distribute pieces of some sort of dried salted beef and a handful of nuts to each person, which they were then expected to eat on the march. “Can’t lose our momentum now,” he said cheerily, tearing off a bite. The children seemed to like the leathery strips, especially Beowulf, who never met an object upon which he would not happily gnaw, but Penelope felt as if she were trying to eat the sole of a shoe. She nibbled on the nuts instead and was grateful for a swallow of warm, metallic-tasting water from her canteen.
“Another hour and we’ll stop for grub. Hup, hup, hup!”
Midday turned to afternoon, and early afternoon to late. With blisters on her feet, gnats buzzing all around (real ones now, and hungry for blood), sweat trickling down her back, and an empty tummy that went from grumbling to growling to grumbling again, Penelope found it hard to believe that she had ever felt optimistic about anything. Surely it was the admiral’s problem if his ostrich was so ill-mannered that it ran away without so much as a by-your-leave? “Yet if we do not find her, Lord Fredrick might—and that will never do,” Penelope thought, wincing with every step.
“Boring. Tedious. Uninteresting. Don’t care,” the Incorrigibles chanted dully as they marched, deeper and deeper into the woods. Soon they became too tired to say even that much, and BTUD (Boring Tedious Uninteresting Dontcare) did not hold much promise as an acronym, even if the children had thought of making it into one. Gradually they fell out of formation; instead of marching in a crisp line with lifted knees and swinging arms, they bounded along, sniffing and leaping and tumbling over one another. This seemed to lift their spirits considerably.
In fact, the farther they marched, the more obvious it became that the children felt thoroughly at home here in the forest. Alexander’s stiff-backed schoolboy posture gradually altered into a light-footed loping stride. Every twenty paces or so, Beowulf would shinny up the trunk of a tree and leap from branch to branch, making quicker progress through the treetops than the rest of the party made on the ground. Soon Cassiopeia forgot herself completely and began to run on all fours. Penelope had to tug at the back of her dress to remind the girl to walk on two feet so as not to ruin her stockings.
The admiral noticed the change as well. The shadows that crept along the forest floor grew long and melted into the dusk. Finally, as they reached a small clearing, he ordered, “Halt! At ease,” and they stopped to make camp for the night before it was too dark to see. He set the children to gather kindling wood for the campfire. While they were busy at their task, he approached Penelope, a greedy, conspiratorial look in his eye.
“Governess, I have a business proposition to discuss with you.”
Penelope was trying her best to erect a shelter for herself and the children; at the moment she was puzzling over which side of the tarpaulin was the top, and making no progress whatsoever. She ached from head to toe; she wanted a hot bath and a bright fire to read by and was in no mood for the admiral’s bluster. “My business is giving lessons, Admiral. Is that what you mean? As you recall, I only know the sorts of things you consider to be useless: thisonyms and thatonyms.”
“You can keep your whatonyms and whatnots. My business is profit, and when I see an opportunity to make some, I act upon it.” He leaned forward on his cane. “Exotic creatures are my specialty, governess. I’ve traveled the globe in search of the rare, the fascinating, the one of a kind. Or, in this case, three of a kind.”
The tarp slipped from Penelope’s hands. “Exotic creatures? What on earth do you mean?”
His voice was low and excited. “I’ve plundered the pyramids in Egypt, swum with sharks in the coral reefs of Botany Bay, and scaled the slippery summit of Mount Crisco, but never in all my travels have I come across three specimens like these Incorrigible wolf children of yours. Think of the exhibitions we could give!”
Penelope turned so abruptly that her pith helmet slid forward over her face. She pushed it back and looked the admiral in the eye.
“Are you suggesting that you would put the children on display? Like animals in a zoo?”
“They’d be wasted in a zoo, governess. It’s their abilities that amaze. I’d put them in a special habitat, where their talent for tracking could be fully appreciated. A Permanent Incorrigible Enclosure.”
The thought of Alexander, Beowulf, and Cassiopeia being put in a PIE was more than Penelope could stomach. “As their governess, the only ability of theirs that concerns me is their ability to make accurate use of the apostrophe,” she retorted. “And may I remind you, Admiral, they are doing you a service by helping you find Bertha. Surely you would not repay them by baking them in a PIE?”
Of course, she meant to say “locking” rather than “baking,” but this is precisely what is so tricky about acronyms and homonyms. Penelope knew the admiral meant a fenced-in enclosure designed to house the Incorrigibles, but in her mind’s eye all she could see was a rolled-out pastry crust with the children’s three auburn-haired heads sticking out one side and their feet wriggling out the other, just like the four-and-twenty blackbirds in the famous nursery rhyme:
Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye,
Four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing;
Oh, wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king?
The admiral drew himself up to his full height and peered down at Penelope as if she were nothing more than a zoo specimen herself. “It takes a person of vision to appreciate a golden opportunity when it arrives. I thought you might be such a person, governess. It seems I was wrong.” Cunningly he added, “Anyway, it would be for the children’s own safety. When Ashton gets tired of them, what do you think he’ll do? He’s not the sentimental sort, from what I can tell. They’ll end up in an orphanage. Or worse. Now if they could earn their keep by doing a few simple, enjoyable demonstrations for an adoring and well-paying public, all while living in a snug, homey PIE of their own, you wouldn’t have to worry about Ashton’s whims.” His tone grew ominous. “Or his eyesight.”
“Are you trying to frighten me, Admiral?”
“Not at all, governess. Merely discussing business.”
But the discussion was over. He strode across the clearing to the woodpile where the children were stacking the kindling and asked, “What say you, pups? Any scent of Bertha?”
Penelope tried once more to fashion the tarpaulin into a tent. The admiral’s proposal was absurd—imagine, putting the children in a PIE!—but it raised another, deeper anxiety, one that had been growing within her all day as she watched her pupils gradually revert, bit by bit, to their animal-like habits: What was the risk that the three Incorrigible children would be overcome by the lure of their woodsy, wolfy origins and, like Bertha, run off altogether?