IN THE WORDS OF AGATHA Swanburne, “Many are happy to give advice; few are happy to take it.” As usual, the wise old founder was right, for most people tend to trust their own opinions far more than they should and are stubborn, recalcitrant, unyielding, and even obstinate when someone helpfully suggests that they wipe the fog off their pince-nez and have a good look at hard truths that have been staring them in the face all along.
Of course, there is such a thing as bad advice, and not every pithy nugget of wisdom is worth stitching onto a pillow. Consider the old saying “Out of sight, out of mind,” otherwise known as OOS, OOM. OOS, OOM absurdly suggests that things that cannot be seen are quickly forgotten, but nothing could be further from the truth. Objects that are out of sight are rarely out of mind, and things unseen can be more present than that which is right in front of one’s nose. Just ask a long-grieving widow whose husband drowned in a medicinal tar pit, or a plucky young governess who spent more than half her life wondering whether she might someday see her parents again.
To put it bluntly: OOS, OOM is poppycock, balderdash, rubbish, and nonsense. Even the clumsy, unattractive, and bad-tasting dodos have occupied people’s thoughts far more in extinction than they ever did when they were alive.
And speaking of dodos, and tar pits, and things unseen: Edward Ashton had long been thought dead, or even very dead, but apparently he was not as dead as a dodo. Thanks to the skill of a soothsayer, the scheming of an impostor (or two), and the optoomuchstic hopes of the woman who loved him, Edward Ashton had become, not quite living, but somehow less dead than before.
Penelope was up to her elbows in suds, but her mind wandered, as minds tend to do, and the topic of Edward Ashton was where it settled. “He is still lost, one could say, but not long lost,” she thought as she poured a pitcher of fresh water over Beowulf’s head.
“Ow,” said Beowulf, squirming in the tub. “Soap in eyes. Rinse again, please.”
“Ahoy, shipmates.” Alexander popped up from beneath the bubbles. “Sunken treasure!” He offered up the washcloth, which he had just retrieved from the bottom of the tub.
It was not their usual bath night, but the Incorrigible children had been itching and scratching with increasing frequency since their adventure in the forest. At first Penelope panicked; she thought they might have somehow caught the strange moon sickness endured by Lord Fredrick Ashton, but the true explanation was simpler: The children had fleas. Within days the whole nursery had become infested. The rugs were brought outside to be swept and beaten on the lawn; the children’s bedding and clothes were laundered; and everything in the room was scrubbed by hand in hot water and strong soap, including the Incorrigibles themselves.
Cassiopeia was done with her bath and had slipped on her nightgown, but her long auburn hair was still very wet.
“Careful, Cassiopeia—use a towel, please; do not shake—oh!”
It was too late. Cassiopeia put her head down and shook her wet hair vigorously, like a dog that has just come out of a lake. Water droplets flew everywhere and needed to be mopped up. This task finally tore Penelope’s mind away from her ruminations about how many degrees of dead there might be, and back to the bright, cozy nursery and the extremely lively children who lived there.
Afterward, the children asked for a chapter from one of the Giddy-Yap, Rainbow! books. Penelope agreed, but even in performing this happy task, a note of melancholy crept in. The book pleased her, of course, but it pleased her in a different way than it had in the past. It pleased her because it made her think of how much she had always loved these stories, all the many times she had read them over the years. It pleased her because she liked feeling, just for a while, like the girl she was when she first met and loved Edith-Anne and Rainbow. It made her remember how sweet it had been to curl up among the hand-stitched pillows in the window seat at the Swanburne Academy (she would scarcely be able to fit into it now, of course) and imagine that she herself was a character in the books—a character who was partly Edith-Anne and partly Penelope, too.
She would always find these books delightful; of that she had no doubt. But after her recent thrilling adventures, and in light of the somber questions that now flooded her mind at odd moments, demanding answers, the Giddy-Yap, Rainbow! books did not seem to offer quite the right range of experiences to be of practical use to her anymore. All except the one about Edith-Anne and Albert, of course. That one continued to fascinate.
It was much like the way small children can devour head-sized mounds of cotton candy with sticky-handed glee one summer, only to discover that by the time summer rolls ’round again, the notion of plunging one’s face into a glob of spun sugar has lost much of its appeal. After that happens, there is no turning back: the love of such gluey, toothache-inducing treats will soon give way to an appreciation for bittersweet chocolate and tarte Philippe, onion sauce and strong, ripe cheese (not all at the same time, of course).
Whether this shift in taste is a gooden thing or a baden one is a matter of opinion, but that it happens is a fact of life, and no amount of burying one’s head in the sand will make it otherwise. Penelope was just beginning to understand this, and frankly, she was not sure how she felt about it. In the words of Madame Ionesco, “People change, darling. People change.”
WHEN THE CHILDREN WERE SLEEPING and she was alone in her room, Penelope once more took out the curious volume about the cannibals. The pages were warped and brittle from having been soaked again and again in seawater and then, she imagined, laid out to dry in the sun. The ink had run; the text, where it survived, was written in enigmatic verse, and the centerfold map was almost completely obscured with smears and blotchy stains.
Penelope closed the covers with care, but even this small movement caused the yellowed pages to crackle. Could this account really have been written by Simon’s great-uncle Pudge, when he was a cabin boy so many years ago? “One of Lord Fredrick’s ancestors was an admiral, known for his seafaring adventures,” she thought. “If they were on the same voyage, it could explain how this book ended up in the Ashton Place library. If only I could make sense of it!”
But it was no use. Perhaps Simon would learn something interesting from Great-Uncle Pudge himself, at the old sailors’ home in Brighton, and send news. Of course, any news at all from Simon was good news, and what could be more interesting than that?
THE NO-LONGER-WIDOW ASHTON SOON DECIDED to return to the Continent, but not to mourn. She said she wanted to see her friends, to devote more time to croquet (“I have long wanted to improve my jump shot,” she explained, “but until now I was too sad to apply myself properly to the task”), and, of course, to wait for Edward’s return.
Her son treated her kindly enough, but once she was gone Lord Fredrick was visibly relieved. “If I had to hear one more word about dear old Dad risen from his gooey grave, with his dreamboat eyes like the dark side of the moon…why, it’s enough to bring on a headache. Blast! Has anyone seen my almanac?”
Lady Constance cooed fondly and falsely over the children while her mother-in-law was watching, but that too changed the moment the lady was gone. “Fleas! How disgusting. More and more I feel you should have left those wild, filthy creatures in the woods, Fredrick. To think your mother prefers them to the idea of us having children of our own! Well, we shall see about that, won’t we? Babies are a dreadful bother, of course, but I cannot stand being told I cannot have something, even if it something I do not particularly want…. Fredrick? Fredrick! Are you listening?”
Bertha seemed happy enough in the POE, for now. But Penelope resolved to write to the director of the London Zoo and see if there was some way to return the big bird to Africa, so she might live out her days in her native habitat, among others of her long-legged, dim-witted kind. In the meantime, the children kept her company and took occasional rides on her back, but only when she was in the mood.
As it happened, Nutsawoo and Bertha got along quite well, for they possessed similar levels of intelligence (although Nutsawoo may have had a bit of an edge). Bertha liked to race with him around the POE, and the shining-eyed, bushy-tailed squirrel learned many new tricks to earn himself tasty bits of SPOTs, all of which he frantically buried, for the summer was drawing to a close.
IT TOOK SOME WEEKS FOR the opportunity to present itself, but eventually Penelope was able to sneak into Lord Fredrick’s study and get another look at the portrait of Edward Ashton. The burly man whose likeness stared down at her would never be mistaken for Quinzy, at least at first glance. One was tall and big bodied, the other was tall and trim. One had a thick head of silvery hair; the other had a thick head of ink-black hair. Both had dark eyes, but that hardly proved they were the same eyes, did it?
“The Widow Ashton was convinced they were, but after wanting and hoping and dreaming about it for so long, the poor woman could easily be convinced of anything.” Penelope kept her gaze fixed on the portrait, so that she would not have to face the glassy stares of all those dead, stuffed creatures. “What a tragedy, to spend one’s life waiting for a loved one who may nevermore return. Nevermore!” she could not help adding, although there were no peas nearby to toss in the air.
Yet the very thought made her blush scarlet, for how many heavy-hearted hours had Penelope spent longing for just such a reunion? Was she, too, living in a haze of hope? Was she so lost in the fog of wishing that she could no longer see what was right in front of her, as plain as the nose on her face—or the hair on her head, as Old Timothy had once, enigmatically, remarked?
“Almost done, miss?” Margaret squeaked nervously from the hall. The reluctant girl had been persuaded to serve as lookout. She would not dare set foot inside the study herself, of course, because of all the dead animals.
“In a minute,” Penelope murmured. “The nose on his face…the hair on his head…what am I failing to see?” She stepped closer to the painting. There were the pale, long fingers. The slight, contemptuous curl to the lip. And those eyes—black they were, and bottomless as tiny twin tar pits.
Penelope was not a playwright, like Simon, but she had once attended nearly all of the first act of a show in the West End, so she was no stranger to stagecraft, either. (The title of the show should be on the tips of the tongues of those of you who have been paying attention to this point and therefore need not be mentioned here; no doubt you recall that the plot had to do with pirates.) “If he lost a great deal of weight,” she thought, “and blacked his hair with dye, and wore glasses to conceal his eyes, and covered that distinctive sloping Ashton nose with putty, of the sort actors use to change their appearances…the sort that might get sticky and soft if the wearer stood too close to an open flame…”
It was all quite improbable and unbelievable; unlikely and implausible, too. And yet, hypothetically, it was possible that “Judge” Quinzy, who might not really be a judge, was actually the long-dead Edward Ashton, who might not really be dead, despite Quinzy’s claim that he was only pretending to be Edward Ashton—which could, of course, be a lie.
“But if that were so,” Penelope thought, once she had wrapped her mind around it all, “why would Edward Ashton fake his own death? And why would he turn up now, so many years later, and lurk around his former home in the guise of a judge?”
And what did the Incorrigible children have to do with it all? For by now Penelope was quite sure it was Quinzy, or Ashton, or whoever he was, who had set Bertha loose to begin with, and all as a way of getting the Incorrigible children back into the woods, where Lord Fredrick’s hunting party might find them, and where they might come to some dreadful harm, accidentally or otherwise. If not for Old Timothy…
“The hunt is on, Mr. Quinzy-Ashton-Whoever-You-Are,” she whispered to the portrait. “The hunt for answers, that is. But from now on, I shall be the hunter, and you shall be the one pursued. I wonder where you will turn up next?”
DESPITE ALL THE PRECAUTIONS TAKEN, it soon became evident that Miss Penelope Lumley had acquired some fleas of her own. “It is just as well,” she thought ruefully, as she worked a fresh coat of Miss Mortimer’s poultice into her hair. “For I am overdue for a treatment of this mixture, and Miss Mortimer has made it quite clear that she intends for me to use it regularly. Her package has arrived just in time.”
And it had: At long last, Penelope had received a reply from Miss Mortimer, complete with a fresh supply of the hair poultice, some picture postcards for the children showing animals from the various zoos of Europe, and a letter to Penelope as well. Now that the poultice had been applied and her head wrapped firmly in a towel so that it might set there for an hour before rinsing, Penelope sat down to read her long-awaited correspondence.
My dear Penny,
Well! After many weeks of travel I have returned to a towering pile of mail, much of it from you! Once again, family business has caused me to go abroad. No doubt any questions you posed to me in your earlier letters have long since been sorted out, so I will not waste ink and paper answering them now.
I hope you have found time to enjoy the great outdoors during this fine summer weather. Book learning is all very well, but as Agatha Swanburne liked to say, “If you want fresh ideas in your head, get some fresh mud on your boots.” I am sure I hardly need to remind of you that.
Do you recall meeting Miss Swanburne? I expect you do not; you were so very small, and she was in the final months of a long and highly satisfactory life. (She was always a bit cagey about telling her age, but we thought she might have been ninety-six when she finally entered the Realm Invisible.) You had just arrived at school, four or five years old at most, and were feeling a bit sad and lost, as little girls do when away from home for the first time. Even in her frail condition, Miss Swanburne took a special interest in you. “That,” she said to me after you had gone, “is a true Swanburne girl. She has the look.”
Speaking of Swanburne: Your alma mater soldiers bravely on, although there are struggles. Books and pencils and porridge oats get dearer by the day, and the girls go through embroidery floss at an alarming rate. The trustees have begun to solicit donations to help pay expenses, with mixed success. You may be interested to know that, while I was abroad, a certain Judge Quinzy was appointed to the board of trustees. It is unusual for a gentleman of his means and influence to show such an interest in the education of poor girls, so when he contacted the board and offered his services, along with the promise of a generous donation, they welcomed him with open arms.
In his letter he mentioned that he belongs to the same gentlemen’s club as Lord Fredrick Ashton. It is a small world, is it not?
Warmest regards, from your loyal friend,
Miss Charlotte Mortimer