The Interrupted Tale

by Maryrose Wood

  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.)

  On another page Penelope had made a list of the sayings of Cicero, whose knack for a catchy phrase was nothing short of Swanburnian. “There is no place more delightful than one’s own fireplace,” she read, and nodded in agreement, for the library had begun to get chilly now that afternoon was turning to dusk.

  Otherwise, all she had were doodles. On the page that ought to have held her CAKE speech were a dozen little drawings of Edward Ashton, standing in a line. The transformation from the stocky, fair-haired Edward in the portrait that hung in Lord Fredrick’s study to the lean, black-haired, putty-nosed, thickly bespectacled Quinzy was depicted step by step, with each subsequent drawing looking less like one and more like the other.

  “As Cicero once said, ‘The causes of events are ever more interesting than the events themselves,’” Penelope mused. “Knowing that Edward Ashton is alive is interesting, but to discover why he would go to the trouble of faking his own death would be more interesting still. And to think that, all these years, Lord Fredrick has believed his father to be dead, when it turns out he never died at all!”

  But then she stopped, for the shame and hurt brought on by Edward Ashton’s remark about her family tree washed over her once more. His words stung because they were true. Penelope’s family tree was scarcely more than a twig. There was Penelope herself, and the fading memory of two long-lost parents, and that was all. The bare and lonely fact of it made her feel like a solitary stalk of grass left waving forlornly in a field after the thresher had come and harvested all the rest for hay.

  “But a library is no place for tears,” she thought, wiping her nose on her sleeve (truly, the new dress was already looking rather worn), “not with so many books around that could easily be damaged by salt water. In any case, my time here is nearly up. I ought to scurry and choose a bedtime book for the children. Something soothing and familiar is in order, I think. . . . I shall have to work on my speech after they are asleep.”

  Out of habit she made a beeline to the favorite shelves from her girlhood, the ones where the pony stories were kept. As had often been the case in the past, the first volumes of the Giddy-Yap, Rainbow! books were already checked out. It was the later, more eccentric installments of the series that tended to gather dust on the library shelves: the one where Rainbow and Silky run away to join the French Foreign Legion, for example, or where Rainbow develops a taste for opera—

  “If you are interested in the Giddy-Yap, Rainbow! books, I would recommend starting with the first one and reading them in order. Although, frankly, you might find them a bit young.” The librarian appeared at her elbow. She was brisk and cheerful and not much older than Penelope, and she held a pocket watch in her hand. “Might I recommend something else? Robinson Crusoe is quite popular at present, if you don’t mind reading about—”

  “Cannibals, I know. Wait!” Penelope exclaimed, for the mere sight of a helpful librarian had caused a question to pop into her mind. “I understand the library has special archives. Could you tell me what they contain?”

  The woman frowned. “You must mean our collection of the letters of Agatha Swanburne. There are thousands of them, for she was a faithful correspondent. Luckily, her handwriting was superb.”

  Penelope froze. “Are you certain there are no other special archives?”

  The librarian nodded.

  That meant Edward Ashton had learned about the cannibal book by reading the letters of Agatha Swanburne. But how would Agatha Swanburne have known about such a book in the library at Ashton Place? What connection could there be between Agatha Swanburne and the Ashtons?

  “Might I see these letters?” Penelope asked quickly. “I know the library is about to close, but it is important . . . if I might have five minutes . . .”

  The librarian shrugged apologetically. “The Swanburne letters are kept locked in a safe. Even I cannot access them. Only qualified persons are permitted to request access, which is granted rarely, and only with proper permission.” She looked Penelope up and down. “Are you a member of the faculty?”

  “Not precisely,” Penelope conceded. “But I am a professional governess. And I will be giving a speech tomorrow to the entire student body that promises to be highly educational”—although at this moment even Penelope could not say what information it might contain.

  “Follow me, please.” With one eye on her watch, the librarian marched back to her desk and began to search through the drawers. “I am not sure if that qualifies you or not. However, as Agatha Swanburne once said—”

  “If one never tries, one never succeeds,” Penelope interjected.

  “Precisely. To request permission, there is a form to fill out. It is fairly simple, with only ten or twelve pages of questions, and it has to be signed by the proper authorities . . . ah, here it is.”

  Penelope took the pages from her. “I will have Miss Mortimer sign it at once.”

  The librarian shook her head. “Only the trustees can give permission. Four signatures are required: the chairman, plus three other board members.”

  Penelope crumpled the useless form behind her back. “I see. Thank you. You have been very helpful.”

  “Would you care to check out a book before you go? Robinson Crusoe, perhaps?” the librarian called after her. But Penelope did not answer. She was lost in thought about needles and haystacks, and all she heard was the quiet click of the library door closing behind her. It was the sound of one more piece of Edward Ashton’s puzzle falling into place.

  The Ninth Chapter

  A work of art reveals more than it intends.

  PENELOPE HAD MADE IT HALFWAY to the faculty lounge before realizing that she had forgotten to choose a bedtime book for the In
corrigibles. She raced back to the library, but it was too late. The librarian was gone, the room was locked, and a sign on the door read THE LIBRARY IS NOW CLOSED. WILL REOPEN AFTER THE CAKE. HAPPY READING!

  “Oh, the CAKE! Oh, my speech! Oh, blast!” she cried aloud to the empty halls. In the whole sticky-fingered, dessert-filled history of humankind, had anyone ever dreaded anything called CAKE as much as Penelope did at that moment? The mere sight of the word made her teeth ache. No doubt it was a significant discovery that Quinzy was really Edward Ashton, and that his wish to gain access to the letters of Agatha Swanburne might be the very needle in the haystack that Miss Mortimer had voiced suspicions about—yet what use would any of that be the next evening when she had to stand in humiliation before the entire student body, faculty, and honored guests, with not one intelligent thing to say?

  “Woe!” she thought, for woe is what she felt full of. “O, woe! What shall I do?” Ought she lie, and say some horrible fate had befallen her speech, thus rendering it unspeakable? Perhaps it had been lost in a comical mix-up involving two identical sheaves of paper, in which Penelope’s notes were mistakenly swapped for, say, a collection of soup recipes. Or, perhaps, a dog ate it. Or, perhaps, the finished speech had been left unattended by an open window and was carried off, a page at time, by strangely aggressive birds.

  But none of these excuses would do. For one thing, she had no soup recipes, only the recipe for Hungarian goulash that Cecily had sent her. Nor were there any badly behaved dogs at Swanburne. There were only the clever and well-trained ones kept by Dr. Westminster, and they were never allowed inside the school because of Shantaloo, who was no great fan of dogs, or really any sort of creature other than herself. (Those of you who are familiar with cats will have no trouble recognizing this type of personality.)

  And even in her current desperate state of mind, Penelope had to admit—for a speech to be stolen by birds seemed highly unlikely. Some birds, such as parrots, are known to be good talkers, but to Penelope’s knowledge there had never been a great orator among them. Whether a wing’d and feather’d Cicero might someday hatch from an egg was an intriguing question. But it did not matter, for in her heart, Penelope knew she could not and would not deceive Miss Mortimer.

  She paused at the top of the stairs to catch her breath. “There is nothing to do but confess my lack of preparedness to Miss Mortimer,” she thought. “I am heartbroken and ashamed to fail her on such an important occasion, but alas! Circumstances have conspired against me, just as they did on that long-ago day in the milk bath. . . .” Indeed, there had only been one time during all Penelope’s student days in which she had been unable to complete an assignment, and the memory of it still made her itch. It was during her bout with the chicken pox, when she dropped her painstakingly researched art history paper into the milk bath while attempting to proofread it. Tearful, feverish, and scratching, she had to explain to her teacher why “Damp and Spooky: The Depiction of Grottos in Ominous Landscapes” would not be handed in on time.

  Luckily, the teacher was sympathetic; she even tried to cheer Penelope by showing her how to write invisible messages using milk for ink. These messages could only be revealed by letting the milk dry and holding the paper over a candle flame, whose heat soon made the milk turn dark enough to read. Cecily had also been sick with chicken pox (unsurprisingly, since they still shared a cot at the time), and the two friends spent the rest of their illnesses writing secret messages to each other from their respective milk baths. It had been a most welcome distraction.

  Thinking of those notes in invisible milk ink might have made Penelope smile had she not felt so pained about disappointing Miss Mortimer. “Still, she may be intrigued by what I have learned about Edward Ashton,” she told herself, scraping together the last bits of optimism she had left, much the way children will lick the final drops of cake batter off the mixing spoon. “He must have believed that some information of great worth would be contained within Agatha Swanburne’s letters. And it seems that with the discovery of the existence of the cannibal book, he has found what he was seeking—or thinks he has, anyway.”

  Her brow furrowed in concentration; anyone who knew her would recognize it as a sign that her powers of deduction were in use. “But what valuable secrets could lurk inside that strange diary, which is still hidden in the bottom of the armoire beneath my rolled-up stockings, where no one would ever think to look? I wish I could read it and find out, but the pages are so faded from sun and sea as to be indecipherable. If only Simon were here! More than ever, I long to know what his great-uncle Pudge said about that ill-fated voyage to Ahwoo-Ahwoo so many years ago.”

  The door to the faculty lounge was before her. “And to think I was invited back to demonstrate the accomplishments of a true Swanburne girl,” she thought ruefully. “Instead I can only serve as an example of what a Swanburne girl should not be. I have broken my promise, disappointed my headmistress, failed my alma mater in her time of need. . . .” She pushed open the door.

  “Friends, Romans, countrymen,” Beowulf shouted from atop the faculty dining table. “Lend me your ears!”

  Straight-faced, Alexander and Cassiopeia pretended to take off their ears and hand them over. All three Incorrigibles were costumed in the style of ancient Rome. Their Ghostly Postal sheets had been draped and knotted into togas, and there were wreaths of greenery circled ’round their heads. (In Roman times these wreaths would have been made of bay laurel leaves, but the resourceful children had fashioned theirs out of the same ivy that had overgrown the entrance to Swanburne.)

  “Hail, Miss Lumley!” Mrs. Apple was likewise wrapped in a toga, although the Swanburne emblem embroidered in the corners of the fabric suggested use as a tablecloth in the recent past. “What imaginative pupils you have! Would you like a wreath? We made extra.”

  “No, thank you.” Penelope looked around. “Where is Miss Mortimer?”

  “After our tea and biscuits, we visited the art studio. The children left their paintings to dry. Miss Mortimer just went to gather them up. Meanwhile, our studies of ancient Rome have kept us busy.” Mrs. Apple struck a pose in the manner of a Roman consul about to address the senate, much to the delight of the Incorrigibles. “Children, please proceed.”

  Mrs. Apple struck a pose in the manner of a Roman consul about to address the senate. . . .

  Beowulf jumped off the table, and the three Incorrigibles arranged themselves in a row. Cassiopeia’s wreath kept slipping over her eyes.

  “In honor of the great orations of antiquity,” Alexander intoned.

  “And Lumawoo’s speech,” Cassiopeia added, pushing her errant wreath into position.

  “And Mr. Gibbon’s book, too.” Beowulf held up the volume, although it was too weighty a work to keep in the air for very long.

  “We have made three tableaux vivant of ancient Rome,” Alexander finished. “First tableau: The Assassination of Julius Caesar.”

  The children sprang into position. Alexander played the part of Caesar, which was evident by the noble way he held one hand to his temple, as if his mind were filled with thoughts of empire. Moments later, his siblings snuck up behind him, bearing imaginary daggers. With many sharp cries they ran him through.

  “Et tu, Beowulf?” he groaned as his brother pretended to stab him once more. Then he crumpled, his toga flapping dramatically on the way down.

  After a moment of reverence for the fallen Caesar and a round of applause from Penelope and Mrs. Apple, the three children readied themselves for their next tableau. This time Beowulf announced the title. “Second tableau: The Roman Colosseum.”

  The Incorrigibles joined hands and formed a circle, as you might do to play ring around the rosy. In this way they meant to show the great open-air stadium in which the popular entertainments of Rome were held. These included high-speed chariot races, armed gladiators who fought to the death, and the feeding of unlucky people to hungry lions. Evidently, the Romans’ idea of what constituted a good show involved
a great many gruesome ends.

  “Your Colosseum is colossal,” Mrs. Apple said approvingly.

  Now it was Cassiopeia’s turn. Grandly, she proclaimed: “Third and last tableau: Fall of Rome!” Whereupon all three children collapsed to the ground, laughing uproariously at their own joke.

  “Children, this is excellent work.” Penelope glanced at the door. There was still no sign of Miss Mortimer.

  Cassiopeia jumped to her feet and tugged at her governess’s sleeve. “Your turn! Speech all done?”

  “Speech all done! Speech all done!” the boys chanted, still in high spirits from their success with the tableaux. In fact, they could not help but reenact the Fall of Rome several more times, as it was great fun to keep collapsing and getting up again.

  Penelope could barely make herself heard over the noise. “Well . . . not exactly . . . that is to say . . . when Miss Mortimer returns, I will explain. . . .”

  And then, just as in one of those marvelous old stories in which you only have to say the magic words to make the genie in the lamp appear, no sooner had Penelope said “Miss Mortimer” than the kind headmistress herself swept into the room, the children’s paintings balanced on her outstretched arms. “Good news, Incorrigibles,” she called out gaily as she carefully put the artwork on the table. “Your watercolors are dry as a bone.”

  “Miss Mortimer!” Penelope said again, and not because she imagined she could make a second Miss Mortimer appear by repeating the name (although that would have been an unexpected plot twist, to be sure).Rather, it was because she feared if she waited even one second more to tell the truth about her speech, she might lose her courage altogether and start spouting nonsense about soup recipes, thieving birds, or worse. “Miss Mortimer, I have something important to tell you. In fact, I have a confession to make—”