The Interrupted Tale (2 page)

 

P
ENELOPE FOUND
M
RS.
C
LARKE IN
the pantry, inspecting bags of flour for beetles. “The children are not feeling well,” she said, trying not to look, for the thought of bugs in the flour threatened to put her off her own breakfast. “Alexander is dizzy, and Cassiopeia is in bed with a tummy ache. Would you be so kind as to have the doctor called?”

Mrs. Clarke dug into each bag with a tin flour scoop and a sieve. “The doctor? For a child's tummy ache? Nonsense. I'll send up Margaret with a hot-water bottle, some castor oil, and a nice big spoon. Hold the bag open, would you, dear, while I snoop around for weevils.”

Penelope obliged, although she was not wearing an apron and the flour made white streaks on her skirt. “Beowulf is also ill. He claims to have a headache in his leg.”

“In his leg? Well, that's peculiar. Got one!” Mrs. Clarke crushed the bug between two fingers and flicked it to the ground.

Penelope winced. “Highly peculiar, I agree. That is why I would like the doctor to examine them—”

“A sip of brandy will dull the pain. Anyway, it's not the end of the world to let them suffer. Builds character! Look, there's another weevil right there.” She squinted at the tiny intruder. “We'll have to sift this whole batch.”

To suggest that sick children ought to be left to suffer in order to improve their characters seemed quite unlike Mrs. Clarke, whom Penelope knew to be thoroughly kindhearted. Then again, Penelope had never asked her to summon a doctor before. Perhaps there was more to it than she realized.

“If you say so, Mrs. Clarke,” she replied cautiously. “But if they get any worse, I will have to insist that you reconsider. And while I am thinking of it . . . when the children are feeling well again, perhaps in a few days, or next week, I would like to have a small party in the nursery for them. Could I trouble the kitchen to provide a cake for the occasion?”

Once more, Mrs. Clarke's response seemed to lack her usual warmth. “Oh, cake's an awful bother. A plate of buttered toast and sugar will be more than enough.”

“Toast and sugar!” Penelope could not hide her dismay. Even at Swanburne, a birthday girl might sometimes get a spoonful of jam in her porridge.

The housekeeper clucked disapprovingly. “Plenty of children would be grateful for a piece of toast, Miss Lumley, even without the sugar. You can see for yourself, we're short of good flour. I'll speak to the kitchen and find out what can be done. No promises, though.”

 

S
ICK CHILDREN
. N
O PARTY
. T
OAST
instead of cake.

Sixteen years old, and nobody cared!

Penelope's mood was grim. In fact, she felt things could hardly get worse, which is a dangerous way to think, and not only because it makes one the sort of miserable, dissatisfied person whom no one wants to sit next to at parties. Just as an excess of optimism (also known as optoomuchism) can cause one to act without considering what might go wrong, so can an excess of gloom incite one to recklessness. For if things truly cannot get any worse—and alas, this is rarely the case—why bother being careful?

It was in just this sort of rash and foolhardy mood that Penelope decided not to go straight back to the nursery. Instead, she took a detour that brought her to the entry hall of Ashton Place. There she found the housemaid, Margaret, energetically polishing the already gleaming brass door handle.

“Good morning, Margaret.” Penelope tried to sound cheery. “Lovely day, isn't it? By any chance, has the mail come?”

“It surely has, Miss Lumley. Just look on the mail tray,” the girl replied in her piercing mouse squeak of a voice. “Any special reason you want to know?”

“No! No special reason.” Penelope leafed idly through the unopened letters. Ashton, Ashton, Ashton—those were for Lord Fredrick. They were all from his gentlemen's club or from various banks, except for one thin, stained envelope with no return address but which bore many colorful postmarks and exotic stamps from distant lands.

There was also a small, square envelope of heavy, cream-colored paper addressed to Lady Constance Ashton. It looked like a party invitation, Penelope thought with a pang. How unfair it was that some people were invited to parties for no good reason (other than being a Lady and young and fashionable and very rich, of course), while other people, whose actual birthday it was, could scarcely beg a piece of toast from the kitchen!

There were no more letters on the tray. She had hoped a card might come from Cecily, at least. Cecily was a clever, round-cheeked girl with wildly curly hair that she kept in two thick braids. She and Penelope had been the best of friends at Swanburne; they were assigned to the same dormitory and had even shared a cot when they were small. Like Penelope, Cecily had graduated early. Now she worked as a companion and translator for an elderly Hungarian lady who lived in the town of Witherslack. Cecily had always been a whiz at languages; no doubt she could say “happy birthday” in at least four or five, although Penelope would have settled for one.

And what about Miss Charlotte Mortimer? Surely Penelope's former headmistress would never have forgotten her sixteenth birthday! Apparently, she had. Apparently, Miss Mortimer's attention was now wholly fixed on her current students, and she had no time at all to think of Penelope—why, she had not even replied to the last letter Penelope had sent, even though Penelope had marked it
Urgent: Alarming News Contained Within
, underlined twice. The alarming news concerned a shady character who had recently joined the Swanburne board of trustees. He went by the name of Judge Quinzy, and Penelope had reason to fear he was up to no good. Such a dire and clearly marked warning ought to be worth a reply. But, apparently, not.

As for her parents, whom she had not seen for many a year and whom she had come to think of as the Long-Lost Lumleys, “Not a card, not a letter, not even a picture postcard,” Penelope whispered to herself. A tear might have begun to roll down her cheek, but if it did, she brushed it aside so quickly that no one was the wiser.

 

P
ENELOPE'S RESOLVE TO THROW A
party for the Incorrigibles was now twice as keen as before, even if it meant she would have to bake the cake herself. She marched with purpose to the nursery. Outside the door all seemed quiet, but the moment she entered, each of the children assumed a pose of distraught misery, accompanied by moans and feverish gibbering. Penelope shooed them into the night nursery and ordered them to nap or read in their beds until Margaret arrived with the hot-water bottle. (Even in her unhappy state, Penelope was much too kind to mention the castor oil and large spoon that Mrs. Clarke had threatened. If the children did not already know that castor oil was the most vile-tasting substance ever invented, they would find out soon enough.)

Finally alone, she collapsed into her usual armchair and stared at the clock. Eleven o'clock in the morning! The whole long, partyless, presentless, friendless, cardless birthday loomed before her. Was it possible that time had actually stopped? She knew the Latin phrase “tempus fugit,” which means “time flies,” like a bird—but there were flightless birds, after all: ostriches and emus and dodos and so on. Could some days be made of flightless time?

Her thoughts were interrupted by a dreadful scuffling noise from the back nursery, followed by a cry.

“Lumawoo, come quickly! Beowulf's leg is worse.” It was Alexander, calling in a highly dramatic voice. “Alas, it is
much
worse, woe is he!”

Penelope hurried to look. Beowulf writhed on the bed while his brother and sister stood by. “Leg
awoooo
!” he howled in pain.

“How about a peg leg instead?” Alexander suggested, offering a wooden pointer that seemed about the right length. “Will be good for playing pirates.” But Beowulf only whimpered and moaned.

“Poor Beowoo.” Cassiopeia took Alexander's hand. “He was nice. But at least we will still have each other.”

Penelope did her best to examine the miserable child, but he would not stop thrashing. “Beowulf, I can see nothing wrong with your leg. Why are you making such a fuss?”

Bang!

Bang bang!

Bang bang bang!

Someone was pounding on the nursery door, which was odd, as Penelope could not recall locking it. “Who is there?” she cried, at her wit's end. “Margaret, is that you?”

“Open the door, Miss Lumley. It's Mrs. Clarke! I've fetched the doctor.”

“The doctor, thank goodness!” Penelope ran to the door and flung it open. “You are not a moment too soon. Beowulf is worse, and I cannot tell why . . . what?”

Just outside the door was a serving cart, upon which rested a large covered tray. Behind the cart stood Mrs. Clarke, Margaret, and nearly a dozen other members of the household staff.

“Surprise!” they yelled as one.

“Surprise?” Penelope did not know where to look.

Mrs. Clarke lifted the cover off the tray to reveal a decorated cake, edged with marzipan flowers and iced with the words
Happy 16th Birthday Miss P. Lumley
.

“Surpris
ahwoooooo
!” the three perfectly healthy children cried as they raced to their governess and threw their arms around her.

 

A
ND A SURPRISE IT SURELY
was. It took Penelope a full minute to recover the power of speech, and when she did, all she could blurt was, “How did you know?”

“It was the cards that tipped us off. ‘Something must be up with Miss Lumley,' I said to Cook, ‘to get so many cards all at the same time.' So we did a bit of investigating.” Mrs. Clarke rubbed her hands together and laughed. “Oh, I do love a good mystery!”

Cook shrugged apologetically (doubtless she had a name, but everyone called her Cook, and therefore so shall we). “I tried, but I couldn't fit ‘Penelope' on the cake. Sorry 'bout that!”

Under normal circumstances, Penelope might have offered some educational remarks on the topic of abbreviations (for an abbreviation is what Cook had made by putting “P.” instead of “Penelope”), but the birthday girl was still reeling from the shock of her unexpected party. “The cards?” she repeated in a daze. “What cards?”

“The birthday cards! We hid them as part of the surprise.” Margaret held out a thick packet of correspondence, tied in a ribbon. There was a card from Miss Mortimer right on top, and another from Cecily in Witherslack. At least two dozen cards had a return address of the Swanburne Academy for Poor Bright Females in Heathcote—but Penelope had no time to look further, for her party guests had already lit the candles. Now they sang.

 

“For she's a credit to Ashton Place,

For she's a credit to Ashton Place,

For she's a credit to Ashton Place!

And so say all of us!”

 

The cake was cut into slices and gobbled up without delay. Everyone agreed that Cook had outdone herself with the marzipan flowers, which were both lifelike and delicious. Even Mrs. Clarke treated herself to a slice, although she had been watching her figure in recent months. After her last forkful, she announced, “And now your present.”

“A present!” Penelope could hardly believe it. But it was true. Even on their modest incomes, the servants had managed to pool together enough money to buy Penelope an absolutely spectacular gift. It was a new type of pen called a “fountain pen,” which could write line after line without having to be dipped into the inkwell. Penelope could not stop marveling at it and thanked them all repeatedly.

“Aw, Miss Lumley! We all know how much you like to write letters,” Margaret squeaked, and the rest of the servants smiled, because it was clearly a well-chosen gift.

The Incorrigible children each had presents of their own to give, not as fancy as the pen, perhaps, but they had been handmade for the occasion, and that made them all the nicer, everyone was quick to note.

Alexander had drawn a map of the nursery, tinted with watercolors and oriented according to the compass, with all the furniture drawn to scale, down to the last footstool.

Beowulf had gnawed a perfectly usable letter opener out of a piece of wood. That the wood looked suspiciously like the remains of a ruler Penelope had searched for in vain just the other day was a fact she chose to ignore.

As for Cassiopeia: “Here, Lumawoo.” The girl sounded uncharacteristically bashful as she offered her gift. It was a small, hand-sewn pillow, with one word embroidered crookedly on its front.

Loveawoo
, it said.

The stitching was far from expert, and the pillow was uneven in shape. The fabric, Penelope recognized at once, was cut from an old blanket that had been retired from use in the nursery after Beowulf had chewed off the corners, but still—who would have thought little Cassiopeia could manage such a thing?

“Fluffy,” Cassiopeia said, and gave the lumpy pillow a squeeze to demonstrate. “Bertha made the feathers.” (Bertha, as you may already know, was a sweet but dim-witted ostrich who had been left at Ashton Place by a recent visitor, and who was being cared for by Penelope and the children until a qualified person could be found to accompany the large bird back to Africa, where she rightly belonged.)

“Lumawoo likes pillow?” she nudged, for Penelope was still staring wordlessly at her gift.

“I do.” Penelope thought of the window seats at the Swanburne Academy, which were so full of embroidered pillows that one could scarcely find a place to sit and read. “It is the fluffiest and loveliest pillow I have ever seen.”

The girl lifted her hands and revealed tiny bandages of gauze tied about three of her fingers. “Sewing is hard,” she said. The sight of those dear pricked fingers made Penelope's eyes fill with tears, and the children jumped over one another to reassure her that Cassiopeia was not seriously injured. Cassiopeia proved it by using her fingers to do sums on her abacus, and flicked the beads up and down with nary a wince.