The Interrupted Tale (12 page)

“It would make a dreadful mess, too, since the pillows are stuffed with feathers.” Miss Mortimer bent low and scooped Shantaloo into her arms. “Children, do you know what sort of sound chickens make? Show the baroness, please.”

“Buck-buck, buck-buck!”
the Incorrigibles clucked, proud to know the answer. They flapped their arms like so many tasty chicken wings.
“Buck-buck, buck-buck!”
They flapped and
buck-buck
ed all around the baroness, until she threw up her hands in a panic.

“Keep those Incorrigible chickens away from me!” she screeched as she escaped down the hall. “Find those files! And
no candy
!”

 

O
NCE SHE WAS GONE, THE
children tried to decide which would be tastier: candied chicken, or chicken candy. They even imagined a colorful, marshmallowy sort of candy in the shape of a baby chicken. (Many years later, this last invention actually came to pass. It remains popular with candy lovers to this very day, although the Incorrigible children are rarely, if ever, given credit for inventing it.)

“What reason could the trustees have for demanding the student files?” Penelope asked. The children were now quite sticky from all their experimenting and needed a good hand and face washing, so they had all taken a brief detour to the nearest washroom.

Miss Mortimer shrugged. “The same reason they give for outlawing singing and birthday parties, which is to say, no reason at all. The baroness is the worst of them, although I am quite sure she is merely doing Quinzy's bidding. It was she who created the Defense of Definitude Office and whipped everyone into a frenzy about changing the name of the school.”

Penelope gasped. “The School for Miserable Girls! No! It cannot be!”

“Do not give up hope, Penny! It has not yet come to pass. She means to make the new name official tomorrow, after your speech. She intends for the trustees to pass a resolution at the CAKE.” Unexpectedly, Miss Mortimer smiled. “Eight times twelve is ninety-six! Do you recall that peculiar letter I sent you? Filled with pages about multiplication and ferns and so on?”

The mention of her speech made Penelope feel a surge of panic. Tomorrow! How had the day come so quickly? She shook off the feeling to answer, “Yes, of course I remember. It did strike me as odd.”

“Since our mail is being read by the DODO, I took pains to make my letter as boring, dull, tedious, and uninteresting as possible. I knew that only a true Swanburne girl would have the pluck and determination to find the real message within—like searching for a needle in a haystack.” She paused. “That is what I suspect the baroness has been told to do. Create one distracting uproar after another.”

Penelope struggled to understand. “Do you mean to say, all the baroness's meddling . . . the silly rules, the strict budgets, the meaningless demands for paperwork, the proposed name change . . .”

“Are merely the haystack. Designed to engage all our attention and make the needle within impossible to see.”

“But what is the needle?”

Miss Mortimer sighed. “That, dear Penny, is an excellent question.”

 

T
HE TOUR CONTINUED
. B
Y NOW
the Swanburne girls had returned to their classes, and the sight of all those eager students with their hands in the air, vying to be called upon, made Penelope feel fully at home for the first time since arriving at Swanburne. The girls were charmed by the Incorrigibles and positively starstruck by their governess. Some of them shyly asked if she had received their letters, which, of course, she had. She promised to reply to each one at the earliest opportunity, although with an important speech to write and so many mysteries to ponder, who knew when that might be?

The teachers were also overjoyed to see Penelope. Madame Pyrénées, the geography teacher, babbled excitedly in French and then embraced Penelope and the children in turn until she was breathless from planting multiple kisses on each cheek. Even Magistra Grimsby, an angular, ageless woman who taught Latin as if it were her native tongue, managed a brief, awkward hug.

“Little Penny Lumley, a governess! Tempus fugit,” she said, and shook her head in wonder. “What a long way you have come.
Per angusta ad augusta
. Through adversity, we march onward to triumph. Remember, Penny, even a narrow and difficult road can lead to a high place.”

Penelope was not entirely sure what Magistra Grimsby meant, but it did not matter. Just being in a Swanburne classroom again, with dedicated teachers who dispensed nuggets of pithy wisdom like so many gum balls tumbling out of a gum ball machine, was enough to lift her spirits, and she found her optimism returning at full strength.

“Surely an hour in the library will be more than enough time for me to prepare my remarks for tomorrow,” she thought as Cassiopeia proudly recited a few lines of Virgil for the delighted Magistra. “Whether the trustees will be moved by my speech, I cannot say; I can only do my part and let the rest unfold as it will. As Agatha Swanburne once remarked, ‘Do your best before lunch, and your best after lunch. During lunch, have a sandwich.'” Absently, she patted her tummy, for it had been some hours and a great deal of walking since breakfast. “Now, buck up, Penny! And no more fretting. After all, how hard could it be to whip up a CAKE speech?”

The last classroom they visited belonged to Mrs. Apple, an energetic lady with full red cheeks worthy of her name. The Incorrigibles were excited to learn she was a history teacher and bombarded her with questions: Was it true that plague had determined the outcome of the Peloponnesian War? What were the real reasons for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire? Beowulf particularly wanted to know if there had been peas in ancient Rome. When told yes, he made a face. “Ancient peas,” he said ominously to his siblings, and they all shuddered in horror.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Apple was delighted by their passion for her own favorite subject. She took the opportunity to show off a bit. “And that,” she said breathlessly (for the bell was about to ring, and she had been talking at a breakneck pace), “is the history of England as best as I can squeeze it into a quarter of an hour. From Hadrian's Wall to Admiral Nelson! Any questions?”

After the applause died down (for truly, it had been a masterful summation), it was little Cassiopeia who shyly raised her hand. “Where is the flounder?” she asked.

Mrs. Apple was momentarily stumped. “Fishing has long played a significant role in England's economy. Is that what you mean?” she began, but the girl shook her head.

“Our cook makes a tasty fish stew,” Miss Mortimer said kindly. “We can request it for luncheon, if you like.”

“No,” Cassiopeia insisted. “I want to see the
flounder
. Where is she?” She turned to Penelope for help. “Is she in the pail?”

Then Penelope understood. “I believe she means ‘Where is Agatha Swanburne?' Were you expecting to meet her today? And you, too, Beowulf? Alexander?”

First Cassiopeia, then her brothers, nodded solemnly. Apparently, all three had assumed that the wise old “flounder” was alive and well and could be found strolling about the school, giving sage advice.

“Agatha Swanburne?” Mrs. Apple exclaimed. “Well, I am afraid she is dead.”

The children looked shocked. Then they began to cry.

“Oh, my! I am sorry to upset you.” Flustered, Mrs. Apple tried to explain. “What I meant to say was, Agatha Swanburne is long dead.” But that made the children cry harder, for to them, being long dead sounded even worse than being merely dead.

“Flounder is extinct!” they wept. “Nevermore, flounder!” The distraught children ran to Penelope and clung to her skirts until she thought she might cry herself.

Miss Mortimer watched them, her face full of feeling. “My dear children, what tender hearts you have. Your governess has taught you well.” One by one they calmed and turned to her. She pulled up a little classroom chair, the kind used for the smallest students, and sat down in it herself, so that she might speak to the Incorrigibles face-to-face. “Agatha Swanburne was alive for a very long time, and in that time she did many marvelous things. She created this school, for example.”

“Wise . . . sayings,” Beowulf said, between gulping sobs.

“And pillows,” Cassiopeia ventured. Her sea-green eyes brimmed with tears.

“Precisely. And the pillows help us remember the sayings, and they are quite cozy and comfortable, too. She was a great teacher and lived to be a very old lady. And then she died, as all living things must, but not until it was her proper time to do so.”

“No gruesome end?” Alexander asked, in a trembling voice.

Miss Mortimer shook her head. “Quite the opposite, in fact. In her last days, she was as peaceful and well loved as a person could ever hope to be.”

Cassiopeia rubbed both eyes vigorously with her fists. “That's it, then,” she said, bravely accepting the truth. “We cannot meet the flounder today.”

Miss Mortimer's eyes shone, but she also looked as if she might laugh. “I am afraid not. Not the same way you can meet me, and Mrs. Apple, and the good Magistra and all the rest. But there is a spark of Agatha in all of us here at Swanburne, for a good teacher leaves a little bit of herself in all her students. As they grow up, they pass that spark on to others in turn, the way one candle is used to light another.”

She looked fondly at Penelope, and then turned to the children once more. “That means the spark of Agatha Swanburne lives in each of you three. Every time you think of one of her wise sayings and use it to help muddle through your own life, it is as if you are meeting her again and again.”

“Not the same.” Beowulf sniffed again, loudly, and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Decline and fall. Bye-bye, Rome. Is sad.”

His siblings circled close to comfort him, and Penelope sighed, for although Miss Mortimer was quite right in what she had said, so too was Beowulf, and there was no use pretending otherwise. Three children who had been raised by wolves had certainly known enough of death to understand: A duck, once eaten, does not come back to paddle 'round the pond another day. The taxidermy animals in Lord Fredrick's study were proof enough of that.

Miss Mortimer, wisely, did not argue with the children. “The hands of the clock spin in one direction only, it is true. But that is the way of life, my dear children. Time flies; things change.
As Agatha Swanburne herself once said—”

But then the bell rang, and it was time to move on.

The Eighth Chapter
Something valuable is learned in the library.

“And fast through the midnight dark and drear,

Through the whistling sleet and snow,

Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept

Towards the reef of Norman's Woe.”

 

P
ENELOPE RECITED IDLY TO HERSELF
as she wandered through the library. The words had sprung into her mind when the children mentioned “sheeted ghosts” to the baroness. Now they were stuck in her head, like a catchy tune from a nautically themed operetta that one cannot help singing in the shower, despite having a strong dislike for the show itself. (To be fair, there are those who genuinely admire
Pirates on Holiday
,
never mind all the dreadful reviews in the London papers. P
IRATES ON HOLIDAY IS LOST AT SEA
was one of the kinder headlines. S
OMEBODY SINK THIS SHOW, QUICK
was another. Those of you with hearts stony and cruel enough to grow up to be theater critics are free to imagine the rest for yourselves.)

The fact that Mr. Longfellow's poem was about a shipwreck also made Penelope think of the cannibal book. The cannibal book put her in mind of Simon Harley-Dickinson, and the thought of Simon, a playwright, made her think of Shakespeare . . .
The Tragedy of Julius Caesar
 . . . ancient Rome . . . Cicero . . . orations . . . the speech! Thus, like a toy train doing endless figure eights on a looping track, her thoughts inevitably circled back to the very spot they kept trying to leave behind. But tomorrow was the CAKE, and the task of preparing her speech could not be put off any longer.

“‘Finish today's work today, for tomorrow will bring its own,' as Agatha Swanburne liked to say,” she thought as she removed several weighty collections of famous speeches from the library shelves and lugged them to her table. “At least the Incorrigibles are being well cared for while I work.”

Indeed, the children could not be in better hands. Once the classroom tours were done, Miss Mortimer and Mrs. Apple had invited Penelope and the Incorrigibles to the faculty lounge for tea and biscuits. The children were eager, but Penelope had declined, explaining that she needed to put a few “finishing touches” on her remarks. She was too embarrassed to admit she had not yet written more than ten words.

Miss Mortimer had smiled knowingly at Penelope's request to be excused. “By all means. Mrs. Apple and I will keep the children occupied so you can work in peace. Will an hour be sufficient?”

“Oh—more than sufficient!” Penelope stammered.

“A speech, how marvelous! I do love a good oration. ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends!'” Mrs. Apple slashed an imaginary sword through the air, much to the delight of the children. “I shall be on tenterhooks to hear what you have to say tomorrow.”

“Yes! Well, I hope . . . that is to say, I am looking forward to it also,” Penelope had replied with a gulp.

And so it was she found herself in the library, with her new fountain pen close at hand and no time to waste. Instinctively, she settled herself at the same library table she had preferred in years gone by. It was here she had written many a term paper with great success during her student days. Perhaps it would bring her good luck one more time.

First she wrote down a list of words that she thought might come in useful when talking about the Swanburne Academy. “Education” was one. “Pluck” was another. “Tradition.” “Agatha.” “Friendship.” “Goulash” came next, for she realized she was writing on the back of the goulash recipe Cecily had sent her. Somehow it had gotten tucked into her notebook. She doubted “goulash” would be helpful and considered crossing it out, but one never knew, and so it remained.

For inspiration, she doodled in the margin of the page. First she drew Cicero, then Demosthenes. In their flowing togas they looked a great deal alike, although Demosthenes's cheeks were puffed up because of the pebbles. That was easy for her to draw; she simply pictured Nutsawoo with his cheeks full of acorns.

She wondered what it might be like to have a mouthful of pebbles. That put her in mind of the sheep the children had seen earlier through the telescope, ceaselessly chewing on its cud. She drew that as well.

None of this was getting the speech written, of course. “With so little time left, I must make every second count,” she resolved. “First I shall review, say, ten or twelve more speeches of Cicero's, to put me in the right frame of mind.” She jumped up and lugged another armful of reference books to the table, which she then arranged in size order. “And what of Queen Elizabeth's rousing speech to the English troops as they prepared to do battle with the Spanish Armada in the year 1588? Mrs. Apple made glowing mention of it in her brief but thorough talk on English history. Surely, I ought to have a peek at that as well.”

She found the appropriate volume and flipped through the pages. “Elizabeth, Armada . . . Elizabeth, Armada . . . Eureka! Here it is.” Quietly, but with deep feeling, she read the words aloud.

“‘I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart of a king, and of a king of England, too; and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realms.'”

“I have no wish to invade your realms, Miss Lumley. But perhaps I might borrow a chair? The one at my table is rather wobbly in the leg.”

“Impostor—I mean, Judge Quinzy!” Penelope exclaimed, but quietly, since she was, after all, in a library. “What are you doing here?”

 

“I have no wish to invade your realms, Miss Lumley.”

 

“One does not become a judge without reading a great many books. Please forgive my appearance. It is a precaution against cats.” In addition to his customary thick glasses, he wore a handkerchief tied 'round his nose and mouth, like a bandit. “I am doing what anyone would do in a library. Looking for answers.”

She willed her voice to stay even. “Surely a law library would serve you better.”

“My questions have to do with genealogy.” The handkerchief twitched, as if he were smiling. “I am researching my family tree.”

“There must be little here to interest you, then,” she said, and pretended to go back to reading about the Spanish Armada.

“You are wrong, Miss Lumley. The Swanburne library is not as vast as the one, say, at Ashton Place. But it has some unique holdings. I have gone to a great deal of trouble to gain access to them. They have proven invaluable.” Supple as a snake, he slid into the empty chair at her table. “For example, it was not until I consulted the special archives here at Swanburne that I discovered the existence of a diary. An extra-ordinary, one-of-a-kind document. It chronicles the tale of a most . . .
unusual
seafaring expedition.”

The back of her neck went suddenly cold.

“A long-lost diary,” he continued, “regarding a doomed voyage undertaken by Lord Fredrick Ashton's great-grandfather, Admiral Percival Racine Ashton. According to the archives, the book is part of the holdings of the Ashton library.”

“But surely you were already familiar with the contents of the library at Ashton Place.” She spoke slowly, for she sensed a trap being set. “You and Lord Fredrick are such good friends, after all.”

“I have spent countless hours there, true. And yet it seems there were some books that escaped my notice. That diary would be a great boon to my research, but Fredrick tells me it is missing. You don't happen to know where it is, do you, Miss Lumley?”

“I am a governess, not a librarian. In any case, the diary you describe would be of use in researching the Ashton family tree, not your own.” She looked him square in the face, but his glasses blurred his eyes in such a way that she could not gauge his reaction. “Unless, of course, you and Lord Fredrick are related in some fashion?”

He let out a bark of laughter. “Touché, Miss Lumley. Your years at Swanburne have given you impressive powers of observation and deduction. As it happens, the ancestry of the Quinzys and that of the Ashtons are intimately linked. As is true of many old English families, of course.” He leaned closer, and his hands slid forward on the table. “Lord Fredrick's grandfather was a judge, too, you know.”

“The Honorable Pax Ashton. His portrait hangs at Ashton Place.” She willed herself not to stare at his hands. They were long and slim fingered, like two pale, deadly spiders crawling toward her. “I once heard Lord Fredrick's mother say that he was a most unpleasant man.”

“He was stern. Uncompromising. Unswayed by emotion. Able to keep a secret to his grave, and beyond. Surely these are not bad qualities to have in a judge.”

“They would be difficult qualities to have in a father, though.”

“You would have to ask his son, Edward, about that. Alas, Edward Ashton is unavailable for comment.” He clucked his tongue in pity. “Drowning in a medicinal tar pit,
tsk tsk
! What a gruesome way to die.”

The nerve of him, to go on pretending he was not Edward Ashton! “And yet his body was never found,” she said sharply.

Quinzy lifted first one eyebrow, then the other. Then he did something extraordinary. Slowly and methodically, and taking special care about his nose, he removed his glasses. He looked at her with those dark eyes, frank and unhidden. Unmistakable, the Widow Ashton had called them. Molten and frozen at the same time, deep and dark as the mouths of caves. They were Edward Ashton's eyes, lifted straight from the portrait in Lord Fredrick's study.

“Touché again, Miss Lumley.” His smooth, low voice was scarcely more than a breath. “Edward Ashton was lost in the tar. Yet sometimes even long-lost things can be found. If one knows where to look.”

He put his glasses back on, and in that moment Penelope had all the proof she needed. He
was
Edward Ashton. She knew it, and he knew that she knew it. Yet here they sat, toying with each other like predator and prey. But which of them was the cat, and which the wee mousie?

He pushed back his chair and stood. “Genealogy is a fascinating hobby, Miss Lumley. I highly recommend it. But perhaps my remarks are insensitive, given your personal circumstances. You hardly knew your parents, after all. Your family tree must feel as bare and cold as—well, as the trees in winter will soon be.”

A rushing sound filled Penelope's ears, like an angry sea. “I do not recall discussing my personal circumstances with you, sir,” she said coldly.

He gave an indifferent bow of apology. “I beg your pardon. Lady Constance must have mentioned it to me in passing. You know how she likes to gossip about the servants.” With a nod, he left.

 

Ga-dong! Ga-dong! Ga-dong! Ga-dong! Ga-dong!

“Iambic pentameter!” Penelope exclaimed in despair. How could it be five o'clock already? But tempus fugit, as the chiming of the library clock made clear, and since Edward Ashton had left, the time had flown faster than a keen-eyed peregrine falcon swooping earthward for its prey.

The librarian rang a little bell. “The library will be closing shortly. Please come to the circulation desk and check out your books. Return all reference books to the reshelving cart.”

Defeated, Penelope looked at her notes. On one page were a few lines from
Julius Caesar
. “Et tu, Brute?” she read with a sigh. (Magistra Grimsby would have pointed out that the phrase “Et tu, Brute?” was Latin for “Even you, Brutus?” These were Julius Caesar's dying words when he realized that even his dear friend Brutus had been part of the murderous plot against him. To this very day, people will exclaim “Et tu, Brute?” to point out a terrible betrayal by a friend. Latin is sometimes called a “dead language,” since there is no longer a nation on earth where people speak it as their everyday tongue. But consider: If even in our own uncomfortably modern times, there are ideas and feelings that are perfectly expressed in no other way but Latin—“tempus fugit,” for example, or “alma mater,” or “Et tu, Brute?”, to mention just a few—then surely Latin is not as dead as all that, and certainly a long way from extinct.)