The Interrupted Tale (25 page)

 

B
Y THE NEXT MORNING IT
was Penelope who had lost her voice; all her fernibustering had caught up with her, and she could scarcely utter a croak. Miss Mortimer brought her cups of soothing tea laced with honey, and the children laughed and clapped to see her acting out all her thoughts, rather than speaking them. Luckily, Penelope had always been good at charades, and she found she rather enjoyed the challenge.

When the girls of Dormitory C learned of her condition, they insisted that she take back her fountain pen. “You will need it to write down your words,” they explained. Penelope tried to refuse, for they had won it fair and square, but it was hard for her to be convincing when all she could do was shake her head and mouth the word “no.” In the end the good-hearted girls had their way, and the pen was back in Penelope's possession, along with a fresh new pad of paper to write her thoughts upon.

“The generosity of the staff at Ashton Place, and now the kindness of these girls, shall make this pen a reminder of what is truly important,” Penelope thought (luckily, even the worst case of laryngitis does nothing to prevent one from thinking). “I resolve to use this pen, and often: to write to the Swanburne girls and to Cecily, to Miss Mortimer and Mrs. Apple, to Dr. Westminster and even Mrs. Worthington, and to all the other people who are important to me, and to not let time and miles come between true friends.”

She twirled the pen between her fingers. It felt good to have it in her hand once more, she had to admit. “Perhaps I shall write some verse, as well. I rather liked the sound of those rhyming quatrains. . . .”

 

S
IMON TOO SPENT ONE LAST
night at Swanburne. Miss Mortimer offered him a guest room (there were plenty available, now that the trustees and most of the alumnae had gone home), but he preferred to sleep in the hayloft. He liked the view, he said, for it reminded him of the crow's nest aboard ship. “I always feel better when I can see the stars,” he confided to Penelope. “It's the navigator in me. I like to know which end is up.”

Sadly, the train schedules dictated that he leave quite early, before breakfast. Penelope walked him to the crossroads to wait for the coach. His intention was to go to London to see if he could interest one of the theaters there in a play about his adventures with the pirates. After his business in London was settled, his next port o' call would be Brighton.

You have grown used to being near the sea,
Penelope wrote on her message pad. She felt oddly forlorn at his leaving. How could a simple landlubber of a governess ever compete with the lure of the waves and the tides, the tang of the salt air, and the beckoning twinkle of the stars?

He shrugged and shuffled his feet. “It's not only that. I've been awfully worried about Great-Uncle Pudge, ever since I was kidnapped. I hope he made it back to the Home for Ancient Mariners all right. That troubled me a good deal while I was stuck at sea with the pirates. I'd like to think some Good Samaritan on the boardwalk at Brighton wheeled him back to the HAM.”

Penelope gestured in the air with her pen, as if to ask, “Why not write him a letter?”

He understood at once. “Oh, I've written him plenty, but I've no return address for him to send a reply to. I'm no more likely to get an answer than you are to find all those bottles I tossed into the waves. I'll have to go back to Brighton and see for myself.”

He tilted his head to one side, in the precise way that made that unruly lock of hair tumble across his forehead. “Say, Miss L, now that I've got my land legs back, I feel a bit silly about sending all those letters from the briny deep. What was I thinking, throwing bottles overboard and imagining they'd somehow reach you on a landlocked English estate? But when you're at sea, it's hard to remember what dry land is like.”

Penelope could only shrug. Bravely, she wrote,
The bottles may turn up yet.

He grinned. “That'd be a stroke of luck, wouldn't it? Funny thing, luck. You can't tell if it's good or bad until well after the fact. Why, if I'd never been kidnapped by pirates, I'd never have learned to make the visibilizer. . . .” His smile dissolved, and he looked glum. “And then Edward Ashton would never have been able to read Pudge's diary. Well, we got a piece of it, anyway. Pity old Pudge can't simply tell us what he wrote! But an oath's an oath.”

Penelope could not answer, of course, but there was no need for a reply. They both knew the oath of a sailor—and of a Harley-Dickinson, no less, steadfast, loyal, and true!—would not be easily broken.

 

A
FTER WATCHING SIMON BOARD THE
coach (when he was gone she dabbed the tears from her eyes with a commemorative Swanburne handkerchief, for who knew when she would see him again?), Penelope arrived at the dining room just in time for the morning's meal. And what a meal! It was a breakfast worthy of all the birthdays in the world. There were heaping plates of pancakes served with warm honey, and sliced peaches cooked in butter and sugar, and platters of fluffy scrambled eggs, tender and lemon yellow. The hens had been laying particularly well in recent weeks; perhaps it was all the dancing.

Miss Mortimer and Mrs. Apple sat with the Incorrigible children at a table crowded with happy Swanburne girls, but the seat next to Miss Mortimer had been saved for Penelope. Naturally, Mrs. Apple was in the midst of giving a speech.

“And speaking of ancient Rome,” she said, waving a fork in the air, “do you know the story of Romulus and Remus? They were twin brothers, and their father was Mars, the Roman god of war. He had many enemies, as one might expect, given his line of work. To protect his sons, the babies were put in a basket and set adrift on the River Tiber. Eventually, they were found and cared for by a kindly she-wolf.”

“Mama Woof!” Cassiopeia's mouth was full of pancake, but her excitement was evident from the way she bounced up and down in her seat.

Mrs. Apple nodded. “You could call her that. The boys grew up, as children tend to do. Together they founded a city on the banks of the Tiber. That's when the trouble started, for they both wanted to be its ruler. They argued terribly.
Tsk, tsk!
If you went through all the history books and tore out the parts where people squabble over who gets to be king, there'd scarcely be one slim volume left! But when your father is the god of war, I suppose you're bound to have a quarrelsome temper.”

She speared another pancake and put it on her plate. “Anyway, the brothers fought. In the heat of anger, Romulus killed Remus with a rock. And thus was Rome founded! For if Remus had killed Romulus instead of the other way 'round, it would have been the Reman Empire, instead of the Roman.”

The children seemed fascinated by the bloody tale, but Penelope gently cleared her throat. It was not the nicest story to tell a trio of siblings, after all, especially at such a pleasant breakfast.

“Well, it is only a legend, of course,” Mrs. Apple said quickly. “Such an unlikely tale could not really be true. Imagine! Children raised by wolves!”

Mrs. Apple was puzzled at first by the children's uncontrollable laughter, but eventually she simply laughed along. “Yes, all hail to the Roman flounders, quite right! Pass the peaches, please!”

Miss Mortimer remained quiet and thoughtful throughout this exchange. Penelope took the opportunity to pass her a note.
The Swanburne Seat???
she wrote, with extra question marks, for she was intensely curious to know what it was.

Miss Mortimer read the words and smiled. “The Swanburne Seat is written into the bylaws of the school,” she replied. “It is a hereditary position with no real duties, except for the rare occasions when circumstances demand otherwise.”

Penelope tried to write
Hereditary???
on her paper, but quickly lost patience with sorting out which vowels went where. She put down her pen. “You?” she mouthed.

The headmistress leaned close. “Agatha Swanburne was my grandmother. Few people know that, Penny, dear. I would be grateful if you kept it to yourself.”

Epilogue

 

T
HERE ARE LAWS OF PHYSICS
and laws of mathematics. Schools have bylaws and marriages have in-laws. Even the jungle has a law, although following it may make one the kind of person whom no one is particularly eager to sit next to at parties, for fear of being eaten.

And then there is the Law of Coming and Going, which states: When traveling round-trip, the fact that the distance from here to there equals the distance back again in no way guarantees that the journey home will not be a tedious torment of endless miles that somehow feel ten times as long as they did before.

Plucky and cheerful though they most often were, the Incorrigible children were no exception to this law. The return to Ashton Place seemed to last forever. The novelty of staring out train windows at sheep-dotted meadows had long since worn off, and the books they brought to read on the train had already been read to exhaustion.

Starved for entertainment, they begged Penelope to recite poetry, tell jokes, anything—but she could not, for her voice had not yet returned.
Too much CAKE speech!
she wrote on her pad by way of apology. This made the children wild with curiosity about what their governess had actually said at the podium (recall that all three of them had been attending to important responsibilities during her remarks, and had therefore missed them completely).

It was yet another example of how good luck and bad luck can be two sides of the same coin, for if Penelope had not had the misfortune of losing her voice, the Incorrigibles would have surely demanded an encore presentation of the entire fernibuster—spores, rhizomes, and all. Luckily, she
had
lost her voice, and she could only smile and shrug and wave her arms gracefully, like fronds, as the children tried to guess what sort of charade she was enacting.

In the end they concluded their governess had given a long and heartfelt speech about the Imperial Russian Ballet, and that was close enough.

 

L
ADY
C
ONSTANCE AND
L
ORD
F
REDRICK
Ashton had traveled home by private carriage, driven by Old Timothy. Although the carriage was slower than the train, they had left a day earlier, made no stops, and did not have to be picked up at the station, and so they arrived at Ashton Place not long after Penelope and the children did.

The usually no-nonsense Mrs. Clarke made an uncharacteristic fuss over Lady Constance. “My lady ate too much cake while she was away, I think! Look at her, growing plump as a partridge,” she said approvingly.

Meanwhile, Lord Fredrick Ashton was in a strangely cheerful mood. He even turned up in the nursery after dinner. Penelope could not recall him ever visiting the nursery before. Mrs. Clarke escorted him, as he might not have found it otherwise. Ashton Place was a very large house.

Penelope feared he might demand an explanation for the strange man in the chicken coop who had claimed to be his dead father, but he did not. He had come, he said, to let her know that he no longer needed any HEP.

“Do you believe yourself to be cured?” she croaked; indeed, for a moment she wondered if Edward Ashton had somehow already succeeded in his quest.

Lord Fredrick snorted. “Oh, I doubt I'm cured! Next full moon will tell. But I learned something important, thanks to my little instructor over there. The truth is, I don't mind the howling. It's nice to blow off steam, so to speak. And I'm used to it, too. I might even miss it if it stopped.”

Cassiopeia gave a
woof
of agreement. He looked down his long nose at her, and the expression in his blurry eyes seemed almost fond. “I've never howled with anyone before. It's more fun that way. Afterward, I realized it wasn't the howling itself that bothered me. It was that I felt so alone and ashamed about doing it. But when you know there are others like you . . . well, that's different.”

His voice grew stern again. “Even so, I don't want to put a child of mine through all this. No children, and that's that. I just have to figure out how to tell Constance. She's got babies on the brain lately.”

Mrs. Clarke overheard this and frowned but said nothing.

“And why does she keep asking me when she gets her ‘surprise'?” he added as he was leaving. “I suppose I ought to find out when her birthday is. Blast! I hope I didn't write it in the almanac. It's a slippery book, that almanac, always wandering off. . . .”

 

W
ITH PERMISSION, OF COURSE
, C
ASSIOPEIA
had borrowed her Swanburne uniform on what Miss Mortimer called an “open-ended loan.” This meant that there was no due date, as there would be with a library book. Rather, the kind headmistress had assured her that in no time at all she would outgrow the uniform altogether, at which point she could simply wrap it up and return it by post, so that one of the “little” girls could wear it.

The thought of handing down her Swanburne uniform to an even littler girl made Cassiopeia feel thrillingly grown-up. It also made her want to wear the uniform as much as possible while she still could, for after hearing Miss Mortimer's words she now imagined herself doubling in size overnight with no warning. She had worn the uniform for traveling and had kept it on all afternoon their first day back at Ashton Place, and now she wanted to sleep in it.

It was not Penelope's usual practice to let the children sleep in their clothes, but with hardly any voice to argue, she could only raise her eyebrows and hold up one finger.

“Yes, one time. Just for tonight.” Cassiopeia hugged her governess around the legs (for she was still really rather small, on the outside, at least). “Thank you, Lumawoo!”

Before bedtime the children wanted to play at the fall of Rome, which was their new favorite game. They joined hands and spun and declined and fell until they were dizzy, and then they rose and did it again.

Watching them, Penelope could not help thinking of Romulus and Remus. That siblings could be hidden from danger by being left in the care of wolves was a wild and improbable story, just as Mrs. Apple had said, but this was one of the great virtues of studying history. If such a thing had happened once, even in the days of antiquity, surely it might happen again. Was it possible that the parents of the Incorrigibles had done the same thing, and for the same heartrending reason?

“If the three of you should end up founding an empire, I hope you will not fight over who gets to be in charge,” Penelope whispered hoarsely as she turned down the beds. “Or what to call it.”

Alexander struck an oratorical pose. “I shall name it Alexanderton!”

Beowulf pushed in front of his brother. “The Kingdom of Beowulf sounds better.”

Their sister would not be outdone, of course. “Quiet, subjects!” she bellowed, jumping on her bed. “You have entered the Queenly Realm of Me, Who Is Named Cassawoof!”

The three of them squabbled, and Penelope sighed. “And this is how otherwise reasonable people end up throwing rocks at one another,” she thought, and took out her pen. Hastily, she wrote the children a note suggesting that they could choose to work together, take votes to decide points of disagreement, and have sensible, plainly written bylaws so everyone understood the rules in the same clear way.

The children thought this over and agreed that it was a good plan. However, they still had to settle on a name they all liked. They thought deeply. Finally Alexander looked up.

“Eureka! How about the Incorrigible Land? That way no one is left out.”

Cassiopeia shook her head. “‘The Incorrigible Land, and Lumawoo, Too.'
Now
no one is left out.”

That solution was promptly voted on and unanimously adopted. After a few choruses of “All Hail to the Land Incorrigible,” the national anthem that they began making up on the spot, all three children finally declined and fell into their beds.

 

P
ENELOPE WENT BACK TO HER
own room, then. Oh, it was good to be home! As a child she would never have imagined preferring any bed to her narrow, lumpy Swanburne cot, but the truth was that she, too, had grown used to the comforts of Ashton Place. With a grateful heart she looked at the furnishings of her well-appointed room and appreciated each one anew: the pretty leaf-and-ivy pattern on the carpet, the delicate floral wallpaper, even the mushroom-shaped drawer pulls on her mahogany dresser.

Inside the closet hung her new dress. It had become so dirty during her travels that the Swanburne laundry had volunteered to take a whack at cleaning it. Now, after being washed in boiling water and bleach, it was no longer brown at all, but a perfectly lovely, nearly white color, not quite beige, not quite cream. “It is the color of moonlight,” Penelope thought, very pleased. She was certain Lady Constance would approve.

Once in her nightgown she slipped under the comforter, which was soft and mossy green as a forest floor. The mattress contained not a single lump. Contented, she gazed up at the posts of her four-poster bed, each one tall and straight as a tree trunk. Why, it was almost as if she were sleeping outdoors, in a surprisingly cozy forest where friendly animals would keep her safe from harm.

Her thoughts grew dreamy . . . perhaps she, too, had been sent away for her own safety, by loving but frightened parents . . . parents who had only her best interests at heart and who had not forgotten her, not for a single moment. . . .

“My imagination is leaping wildly tonight! Yet family trees do sometimes bear unexpected fruit.” She roused herself just enough to blow out the candle on her bedside table. “Think of Old Timothy and Dr. Westminster. And Miss Mortimer and Agatha Swanburne, although I confess, I still cannot see a resemblance between them, at least judging from the portrait. And the Incorrigibles . . . and Lumawoo, too?”

She turned her pillow over and over until it suited her perfectly. “Are we? Could we be? But how? That is to say, what are the odds? And why was Edward Ashton so keen on my taking up genealogy as a hobby, anyway?”

The answers to these questions, like so many others, remained unknown, at least for the moment. But Penelope felt quite sure they would be discovered at some future date. “And truly, the future gets closer every day,” she told herself, “like a train approaching the station, whose whistle can be heard in the distance though the train itself is still many miles off.
Whooo-whooo . . .
I think I hear it now. . . .”

Thoughts of that ilk galloped through her brain for quite some time—
ta-TUM, ta-TUM, ta-TUM, ta-TUM, ta-TUM
—long after a tired governess ought to have been asleep.