The Interrupted Tale

by Maryrose Wood

  Without further delay, Cecily threw back her head and screamed.

  “Ahhhhhhhhhh!”

  What a scream it was! Nowadays it would be featured in the sound track of a horror movie. It was an eardrum-piercing, bloodcurdling nightmare of a scream, petrifying enough to make even a Swanburne girl forget all her antipanicking skills.

  “Wolves!” Cecily yowled. “Wolves! Wolves at Swanburne!”

  “Wolves at Swanburne! Run for your lives!”

  “Wolves! Wolves at Swanburne!” Others picked up the cry. Fear crackled dangerously through the crowd, like a brushfire snaking through a drought-stricken field.

  “Wolves!”

  “Wolves at Swanburne!”

  “Ahwoooooo!”

  “Ahwoooooo!”

  “Ahhhhhhhhhh!”

  Cecily’s lung power had only improved with time. She screeched like the brakes of a Bloomer steam engine pulling into the station. She moaned like the ghosts that haunt other ghosts. She wailed as if she were the headmistress of the Banshee Academy for Hair-Raising Wails. “Wolves at Swanburne! Run for your lives!”

  “Stop!” yelled the baroness. “Back to your seats! We must appoint a new trustee and conclude our vote!” But no one listened. The dining hall had turned into a free-for-all of chaos. Miss Mortimer stood placidly in the middle of it all. Clearly, there would be no more voting that night.

  “Wolves! Danger! Mayhem!” yelled Penelope, getting into the spirit of it. “Now, to the chicken coop!”

  The Fourteenth Chapter

  In the chicken coop, blurry things come into focus.

  PENELOPE SLIPPED OUT OF THE chaos of the dining hall unnoticed. “It may not have been a Great Oration, but at least there was plenty of it,” she thought with pride as she trotted toward the chicken coop. Had the fernibuster bought enough time for the Incorrigibles to accomplish their tasks and for Simon to prepare the visibilizer? Were all their questions about the mysterious events on the island of Ahwoo-Ahwoo about to be answered?

  “Ahwoo! Ahwoo!”

  “Ahwoooooo!”

  The odd, wolfish duet floated through the air: this time it was a pair of high-pitched, girlish howls, followed by a deep and manly one.

  “Lord Fredrick’s lesson seems to be going well,” Penelope thought. “Clever Cassiopeia! She will have the makings of an excellent governess someday.” Quietly, she opened the door to the coop. Once inside, she wrinkled her nose, for the smell was much worse than usual. It was as if someone had made a goulash out of spoiled fish, sprinkled it with pungent cheese, and then served it in an unsanitary shoe.

  “Boo!” Alexander and Beowulf jumped out from the shadows. “Lumawoo, look! Boo!” The boys’ faces and hands were scarlet with paprika. The pair of chickens that pecked and strutted at the boys’ feet were also covered with the stuff. The red paprika dusted over white feathers had turned them a most unchickenlike shade of pink.

  “We are the Crimson Postal Ghostlies, with our Spooky Baby Dodo Pets,” Alexander explained. “This one is named Pinky.”

  “This one is named Pinky Too,” said Beowulf. The boys were in high spirits. The chickens seemed pleased as well (although if they understood that they had been seasoned, rather than merely decorated, they might not have felt so, well, plucky).

  Penelope lifted her skirt and sidestepped past the rosy birds. “I see the paprika was successfully obtained. Good work, Beowulf.”

  “The cannibal book, too. I followed my nose and the scent of the sea, all the way inside Quinzawoo’s room, under his bed, and into the secret compartment of his hidden suitcase. Easy!” Alexander inhaled deeply to demonstrate his sniffing powers, but the paprika made him sneeze. “Ah-choo!”

  “Gesundheit!” Simon’s voice rang out from the back of the coop. “I’m in Dr. Westminster’s office. The visibilizer is simmering like mad.”

  Penelope and the boys ran to the office, with Pinky and Pinky Too buck-buck-bucking close behind. Simon looked up from his improvised laboratory. “It’s all right; you can come in. The confidential ingredient mixing is finished. Now I’m just cooking it up.”

  With a pair of kitchen tongs, Simon lifted the cannibal book from a vat of bubbling liquid that sat upon a makeshift stove, fashioned out of Bunsen burners from the Swanburne laboratory. He held up the book for all to see. “Someone’s tried to visibilize it already, but they obviously didn’t have the right formula. See the faded letters peeking through here and there?”

  The smell was so overpowering Penelope could barely speak. “Will it work?” she croaked.

  “Oh, it’ll work, never you fear. My formula’s foolproof. Another ten seconds or so should do it.” He lowered the book into the vat and sniffed. “Miss L, it was awfully clever of you to suggest we brew it in here, among the chickens. You can hardly smell the castor oil, or the rancid cheese, or the unwashed socks— Oops! Forget I said that. Here, let’s have another look.” Once more he lifted the dripping book from the vat. This time he laid it flat on a nearby bed of straw.

  “If you want a book, why not read Mr. Gibbon’s?” Beowulf asked helpfully. He and his brother seemed untroubled by the stink, but of course they had spent much of their early years in forests and caves and so on, and were accustomed to all sorts of gross and mushroomy smells. “Why cook a book?”

  “This book is special.” Penelope kept her eyes fixed on the diary. “It may tell us how to cure Lord Fredrick of his difficulties, and possibly much more as well. Poor Lord Fredrick,” she said, in a burst of sympathy. “Imagine, to be left howling and scratching every four weeks, with no explanation, and a father who simply—”

  “Abandoned ship,” Simon finished. “Aye. Look! I’m starting to see some letters! Although the prose looks a bit odd . . .”

  “That is because it is written in verse.” Penelope leaned closer. “At first glance, it appears to be rhyming quatrains in iambic heptameter.”

  “Poetry! Who knew old Pudge had it in him?” Simon angled the book toward the window so it caught the fading light better. The four of them crowded around.

  Penelope read quickly, her finger hovering over each stanza. “This first part tells of the voyage. There are lists of provisions, a description of the crew and the ship.”

  “And here’s some admiring bits about the admiral: stern of jaw, broad of shoulder, never blinks at danger. Sounds like quite a chap.” With great care, Simon turned the sodden page. “Now he’s standing on deck, cursing the wind or lack thereof, and praying for a breeze. Looks like his prayers are soon answered, for a storm kicks up and blows them hither and yon.”

  Again he turned the page, and his eyes grew wide. “Here comes a plot twist! The storm leaves them shipwreck’d on an unmapped island, somewhere south of the equator.”

  “Like ‘Wreck of the Hespawoo,’” Beowulf said.

  “Quite so, and the ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’ is written in quatrains as well, four lines to a stanza.” Penelope could not help adding this tidbit of information, for with so much going on, the children had been woefully short on lessons.

  Simon read:

  “Night after night, the moonlight fell

  As soft and pale as wool,

  ‘What curséd place is this,’ we cried,

  ‘Whose moon is always full?’

  “‘Ahwoo-Ahwoo!’ the answer came

  From creatures, nearby, prowling.

  ‘Ahwoo-Ahwoo! Ahwoo-Ahwoo!’

  How fearsome was their howling!”

  As Simon read, Penelope’s skin turned all goose bumpy. (“Chicken bumpy” would also be a logical way to describe it, for chickens, too, have bumpy skin when plucked, as would any bird. However, “goose bumps” is the usual term, and that is the one we shall use.) “How strange! An unmapped island with a moon that is always full.”

  “And woofs, too,” Alexander said, using his sister’s word for wolves.

  “They’d have to be unusual wolves, to live on a tropical island. It’s all quite strange. Let’s see what hap
pens next.” Once more, Simon turned the page and read.

  “‘Show yourselves!’ the admiral boomed.

  (It was a manly roar!)

  ‘Ahwoo-Ahwoo!’ The monsters fled,

  And left us as before.

  “‘These mocking wolves, these savage beasts

  Shall know my wrath anon.’

  The admiral’s fury sealed our doom:

  ‘Ahoy! The hunt is on!’”

  “The hunt is on. . . .” Penelope felt as if a eureka were brewing someplace inside her, if only she could put all the pieces together. “That is what Madame Ionesco said, too, when she first met the Incorrigible children. The wolf babies, she called them.”

  “We are not woofs,” Beowulf protested. “Or babies.”

  “I believe the good soothsayer was speaking metaphorically. You remember what a metaphor is: when one thing is used to describe another—” But Penelope’s explanation was cut short by a rhythmic sound.

  Ta-TUM, ta-TUM, ta-TUM, ta-TUM, ta-TUM!

  “Iambic pentameter?” Alexander said, his voice quivering. The sound grew closer by the second.

  Penelope grabbed both boys by the shoulders. “It is hooves, at a gallop. Someone is coming, and quick! Everyone, hide!”

  IF YOU HAD DROPPED BY the chicken coop a scant moment later, you would have seen nothing out of the ordinary. True, there were traces of red powder scattered on the otherwise clean-swept dirt, and the stink was more foul than fowl. But rows of fat hens roosted contentedly in their roosting boxes, with their red-combed heads nestled into their plump bodies. No doubt they dreamed happy chicken dreams, of tasty feed and egg-filled nests, and perhaps the occasional dance step, too.

  Outside was a far less peaceful scene. There was the snorting protest of an overridden horse and the anxious stamping of hooves, followed by a thud as of a man leaping from the saddle. Still the chickens did not stir, not even as the heavy tread of boots on dirt approached. The door to the chicken coop swung open.

  “I have had quite enough of your games, governess!” Edward Ashton roared. (One could fairly call it a manly roar. Perhaps it was a talent he inherited from his grandfather, the admiral.) “Reveal yourselves!”

  The rustling of feathers and some mild squawking was the only answer he received. He lowered his voice and tried again. “I know you are in here, Miss Lumley. And I know you have my book. Give it to me now, or suffer the consequences. Prison . . . orphanages . . . workhouses . . . the choice is yours.”

  Silence.

  Taking one slow step at a time, Ashton surveyed the coop’s inhabitants. The birds were drowsy and contented, with their feathers fluffed around them like pillows. Down the rows of snowy-white and dappled-brown chickens he walked, yet not a creature stirred; one would think nothing unusual had ever happened in this chicken coop in the entire history of chickens. Then he arrived at the end of the row, where Pinky and Pinky Too sat, pink as a pair of flamingoes.

  “What pretty pink chickies,” he cooed. “Please, pretty chickies, won’t you tell me if someone is hiding in this stinky, stinky coop?”

  Alas, Alexander’s good manners got the best of him; the man had said please, after all. “Apologies, but there is no one here. Except for us chickens, of course. Buck-buck-buck,” he added, but it was too late.

  “As I thought,” Ashton snarled. “Come out at once, all of you!”

  Heads hanging in defeat, the two boys, Penelope, and Simon emerged from their hiding places, covered with hay and feathers. Edward Ashton loomed before them. He wore no glasses. There was no putty concealing his long, sloping Ashton nose, nor was there a handkerchief tied ’round his face. He bore little resemblance to the portrait in Lord Fredrick’s study, for his plumpness had dwindled to a lean and catlike frame, and his hair was as black as if it had been dyed with India ink. But those eyes were unmistakable—dark as twin smudges of pitch, dangerous as a pair of bottomless wells.

  He surveyed the guilty foursome. “One is missing,” he said. “Where is the girl?”

  “Cassawoof is giving howling lessons,” Beowulf said with an edge of pride.

  Ashton let out a bark of a laugh. “Howling lessons? That is even more impractical than poetry. But this ridiculous school is no longer my concern; I have learned all I need from it. Miss Lumley, for the second time in two days, I command you: Give me my book!”

  “It is not your book and never will be,” Penelope retorted.

  Ashton took a threatening step closer, but Simon blocked his way. “Simon Harley-Dickinson, at your service.” He extended his hand, which was ignored. “Last time we met you were someone else! Say, Edward—I’d call you Lord Ashton, but it seems a bit formal for a dead person—that diary you’re so keen to get your hands on was written by my great-uncle Pudge. Surely, that makes him the owner, wouldn’t you say? Him being the author and all.”

  “The cabin boy Pudge was in service to my grandfather when he wrote his account of their voyage.” Ashton sniffed deeply and swiveled his head, as if searching. “It was the admiral’s property then, and it is my property now.”

  He sniffed again and turned once more to the chickens. Following his nose, he stopped in front of Pinky (it might have been Pinky Too, actually; they were not easy to tell apart). His hand darted out so quickly that the chicken scarcely had time to buck-buck-buck in protest, as Ashton reached underneath and extracted the diary as if it were some precious egg that the pink bird had just succeeded in laying.

  “I, too, have a keen sense of smell, at least during the full moon. A talent left over from the howling days of my youth.” He opened the book, and his eyes grew wide as he read aloud.

  “Night after night, the moonlight fell

  As soft and pale as wool . . .”

  He looked up. “What happened to the invisible ink?”

  “Simawoo cooked it in the visibilizer. Now you can read it fine,” Alexander bragged.

  Ashton smiled. “Simon Harley-Dickinson, at my service, indeed. It appears you have done me a great service, although, I assure you, I would have solved the riddle of the ink myself, eventually. I am nothing if not patient.” He closed the book and cradled it in his arms like a child. “Poor Fredrick! It was never my desire to pass my affliction on to him. But thanks to this volume, his suffering will soon be over.”

  “Surely, your cruelty is the true cause of his suffering,” Penelope said sharply. “You let him think you were dead, all these long years!”

  “My cruelty? Perhaps. Yet everything I have done, I have done for my family. Do you think it has been easy for me to stand in the shadows as my son grew to manhood? To know that, moon after moon, year after year, he hides himself away in the attic in shame? And all because he is an Ashton. That is the proud lineage that I gave him, along with its curse! It is my duty, my purpose—my obsession, if you will—to undo the harm my ancestors have wrought. Renouncing my name, my very existence, was a small price to pay. What I have had to do, and may have yet to do, I cannot do as Edward Ashton. Let Judge Quinzy bear the blame for my misdeeds! I will not bring more shame upon my family.”

  His words rained down, sharp as hailstones. “Do not speak to me of cruelty, Miss Lumley. Better Fredrick believe me dead than to think I abandoned him willfully. You of all people ought to know how it feels to be left behind.”

  As if on cue, the howling duet in the distance resumed. It sounded much closer than before.

  “Ahwoo! Ahwoo!”

  “Ahwooooooo!”

  Ashton cringed. “Listen to my son, Miss Lumley. Listen! And imagine the gruesome end that awaits him, and me, if this curse is not ended.” He held up Pudge’s diary. “I believe the answer is contained in this book, for it was on this voyage that the curse upon my family began.”

  Simon and Penelope exchanged a look. “But surely you already know what it says,” Simon interjected. “Didn’t your father tell you? It was your admiral grandpa who got the whole mess started, after all.”

  Ashton’s face clouded. “I was a bo
y, no bigger than this one”—he nodded at Beowulf—“when I first heard rumors of the curse’s existence. Mind you, I was its victim already. My earliest memories are of me howling in misery at the moon, helpless to stop myself, as my mother held me and wept. My father denied everything. ‘Curses are poppycock,’ he said. ‘You just need willpower, that’s all.’ Oh, the humiliation of it! My father ordered me not to speak of it or to complain. He told me to take up hobbies to distract myself, as he had done—hunting, oil painting, and so on. He even installed a secret attic apartment at Ashton Place so that I might suffer in privacy. Still, I would not give up. Eventually, he confessed the truth: Yes, there was a curse on the Ashtons, but one that could only be ended in the next generation of our lineage—my son’s generation, not mine. He promised he would tell me more when I was older. Before he did, he met a gruesome end.”

  “The Honorable Pax Ashton, pecked to death by murderous pheasants.” Just saying it made the back of Penelope’s neck grow cold.

  Ashton nodded. “My mother, Wilhelmina, was never the same afterward. She lived out her days hidden in those very attic rooms, railing against the evil of birds. Years later, it always pleased her when her little grandson, Fredrick, would bring her a pheasant he had shot. After my father’s death, I, too, became obsessed. I consulted soothsayers, and sought out the world’s experts on curses and the lifting of curses. Most were charlatans, liars, fakes, and phonies, but the ones with a true gift all had the same vision: a family tree split down the middle, like an oak after a lightning strike, sap running from the wound like blood.”

  Once more, Penelope thought of Madame Ionesco’s vision of the wolf babies—but the old soothsayer had said nothing about a tree. “A bleeding tree . . . what does it mean?”

  “That is what I asked as well. Always I received the same answer. ‘The hunt is on.’ That was my clue—my only clue. Still, I thought I understood. Four times I have tried to break this curse! Four times I have failed. Fredrick’s affliction remains; if anything, it grows worse. There must be more to it, I realized—more than my father had told me, more than the soothsayers could see. I would have to go to the source. Luckily, the school was in need of money; it was a simple matter for a wealthy and generous man like Judge Quinzy to charm his way onto the board of trustees.”