ICAP 1 - The Mysterious Howling Read online

  Despite their sad history of neglect, they are alert and healthy looking—thin but strong-limbed, with shining auburn hair that is even more vivid in color now that it has been washed and the burrs have been taken out.

  I hope all is well at Swanburne. I miss its halls, and all the girls, and, most of all, you, but have so far been much too busy—and too surprised!—to feel sad.

  With affection and deepest thanks,

  Your own,

  Penny

  Penelope had just finished signing her name to the letter and was about to start on one to Dr. Westminster when the nursery door creaked open.

  “Miss Lumley? May I enter?”

  Penelope stood up. The children followed her example, although Cassiopeia first sat on her haunches and had to be nudged to her feet by Alexander.

  “Good morning, Lady Constance!” Penelope smoothed her dress and hoped Lady Constance had not seen the children biting one another, as it might have given the wrong impression. “We were not expecting visitors so soon, but you are most welcome to come in, of course.”

  “Is it safe?” Lady Constance whispered hoarsely, hovering in the doorway. “Mrs. Clarke has been telling everyone that the children were naked as monkeys.”

  “Indeed they were, but only while getting out of the bathtub. There was some brief difficulty with the trousers, but with the help of your manservant Jasper, it was resolved.” Penelope glanced at the boys. “So far the pants have stayed up, so I think the lesson was well learned.”

  With that assurance, Lady Constance took one hesitant step inside the nursery and allowed herself a look at its occupants. The children were clean, and although their clothes were a bit large and their hair was long and loose, they looked far more like children than wild animals.

  Penelope stood straight and still and fixed the children with a strong look. “Allow me to present Alexander, Beowulf, and Cassiopeia. Children, this is your mistress, Lady Ashton.”

  “Hello, children,” Lady Constance said in a shaky voice.

  “Hewwooooooo!” the three children intoned.

  “Oh my heavens!” Lady Constance covered her ears. “What a din!”

  The children, who had spent the morning repeating the words that Penelope had tried to teach them, likewise covered their ears and howled, “Whatawooooo! Whatawoooo!”

  Lady Constance looked mortified. “They are not making fun, my lady,” Penelope quickly explained. “Until they can read well enough for textbooks, I must teach through the use of example and imitation. May I demonstrate?”

  “If you must,” said Lady Constance weakly. She seemed eager to leave, but Penelope had already turned to the children.

  “Let us play fetch again, as we did earlier,” she said to them, “and show Lady Constance what you have learned. Alexander! Ball!”

  Alexander loped across the nursery, fetched a ball out of the toy trunk, and brought it back to drop at Penelope’s feet. She patted his head. Beaming, he took his place again with the others.

  “Beowulf! Soldier!” Beowulf scampered to the toy box and returned with a tin soldier.

  “Now, Cassiopeia—doily!” With some guidance (on the first attempt she grabbed a doll in a lacy dress), Cassiopeia succeeded in bringing a doily back to Penelope.

  “You see,” Penelope said to Lady Constance with pride, “in this way they have learned the words for many common items, such as ball, doily, and so forth. And they have also learned to stand in line. That is a skill that comes in useful in any classroom.”

  “How fascinating,” Lady Constance said, not sounding interested at all. “Miss Lumley, will the boys be having haircuts soon? Their appearance is positively poetic!”

  The boys’ hair was quite long, hitting the middle of their backs, but it was clean and brushed and Penelope saw nothing objectionable about it for the time being. “They will, when they can sit calmly in a barber’s chair,” she said. “I think it would be unsafe to rush too soon into any activity where razors are involved.”

  “I suppose.” Lady Constance pursed her lips in distaste. “But if they are to continue living in the house, they must be presentable. What if important friends of Lord Ashton’s drop by?”

  At which point, Cassiopeia scampered over to Lady Constance’s feet, seized one of her hands, and licked it, from top to bottom. Then she gazed up at her, looking very pleased with herself.

  “She means to show that she likes you,” Penelope started to explain, but Lady Constance was already recoiling toward the door.

  “Ugh! Ugh! Now I must go wash at once! Who knows what diseases these creatures must carry, after living so long in the wild?”

  “There is a basin and washcloth right here, my lady, allow me—”

  “No!” Lady Constance shrieked, before gaining control of herself. “That is to say, no thank you, Miss Lumley. Please continue with your lessons.” She backed out of the nursery, cradling her hand as if it had been burned. “Clearly, you have a great deal of work ahead of you.”

  LADY CONSTANCE, ALTHOUGH WRONG about some things, was certainly right when she observed that Penelope and the children had a great deal of work ahead of them. And yet it occurred to Penelope that the children should not be kept indoors too much at first; it might prove a shock to their systems and cause them to catch cold. On the other hand, if she let the children outside, she wondered if they might run off into the forest, or roll in the dirt and ruin their clothes, or (perish the idea!) attempt to catch and eat any of the pigeons that wandered the grounds near the house. That would be repulsive, as well as ruin the children’s dinner.

  But: “The best way to find out how fast a horse can run is to smack it on the rump,” as Agatha Swanburne once said, and so, at midafternoon, after arming herself with pocketfuls of biscuits, Penelope took the children out. If Mrs. Clarke or Lady Constance questioned what they were doing out of the nursery during school hours, “nature studies” would be her reply. Obviously the children were already well acquainted with nature, but giving plants their botanical names would serve as a good introduction to Latin, as well as to each kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, and so forth.

  However, Penelope was already feeling quite worn out from her first full day as a governess, and privately she hoped the children would forego educational pursuits and simply romp about in the falling leaves and wear themselves out a bit before supper.

  As it turned out, she need not have worried about the children running away. If you have ever secretly begun to feed a stray litter of kittens by putting an open can of tuna on the back porch at night when no one was looking, you know quite well that the problem is not that the animals run off. It is that they refuse to leave you alone ever again. Penelope never had to use the biscuit treats, and although the children were quite noisy and full of playful barks and growls, the worst thing that happened was that Beowulf put one knee right through the fabric of his new trousers.

  “Pants can be mended, never you fear,” she consoled, when he showed her the damage.

  “Pantsawooooo?” he said, with a puzzled expression on his face. Then, much to Penelope’s amazement, he called his siblings over. “Alawooooo! Cassawoof!” They came at once and obediently looked at his knee.

  “Pantsawooooo!” he explained.

  “Pantsawooooo,” they agreed sadly.

  Penelope could hardly contain her excitement at this remarkable exchange, but when she looked up to see if there was anyone nearby to share it with, she spotted only the bent form of Old Timothy, the coachman. He was watching them from a distance, half hidden in the shadow of one of the old chestnut trees that grew near the house. He might have been lurking there for some time, but for how long?

  She nodded once in his direction, to make sure he knew she had seen him. He nodded back. Then he slipped away.

  Being watched made Penelope uneasy, although she could not fully explain why. “I suppose I am unused to what it means to live in such a large house, with so many people going about t
heir business in every direction,” she thought. “Perhaps he is curious to see how the children are faring. After all, he was the first to spot them in the forest. It is possible that he will take a grandfatherly sort of interest in them.”

  Of course, Penelope had no personal experience of what a grandfatherly interest might be like, since she had no grandparents of her own, at least that she knew of. On the rare occasions that she had asked about her somewhat mysterious past, Miss Charlotte Mortimer had always encouraged her to concentrate on her studies and not trouble herself about questions that simply couldn’t be answered—at least not yet.

  Penelope nearly always found it best to follow Miss Mortimer’s advice. Although, watching the children scamper about, Penelope could not help feeling curious about to whom they might really belong and what sort of person might have been so cruel—or so desperate—to have left them in the woods of Ashton Place.

  Then she remembered Lord Fredrick’s words about the old coachman, as well as the coachman’s own remarks. “He can be ‘quiet in the trees,’ indeed,” she thought. “And recall that silliness about ‘It’s lucky a house can’t speak’—I would wager it is Old Timothy, not the house, who could tell the Ashton family secrets, if he so chose!”

  Even with so many interesting thoughts in her head, Penelope found herself stifling a yawn. She was tired and hungry and imagined the children were as well. “It is time to go in, children,” she said, gathering the trio around her. “It is time for suppawoooo—I mean, for supper.”

  Accompanied by the children’s happy howls of “Suppawooooo! Suppawoooo!” the weary governess shepherded her three pupils back toward the house that was now home to all of them.

  THE SIXTH CHAPTER

  The children are given a name that sticks.

  AND SO, UNLIKELY AS IT ALL SEEMS, that is how Miss Penelope Lumley’s career as a governess began.

  The challenges posed by her new pupils put her in mind of one of the more well-known sayings of Agatha Swanburne. In fact, it was the saying Swanburne Academy had taken as its motto, chiseled into the stone arch over the entryway to the main building in which classes were held. Penelope had gazed upon the inscription countless times since she was a young girl no bigger than Cassiopeia, but its message had never seemed so apropos to her personal predicament as it did now: “No hopeless case is truly without hope.”

  Truly, sometimes Penelope felt as if the wise founder of her alma mater were speaking directly through the ages, just to her.

  Penelope’s days soon fell into a rhythm: She would wake in her charming room and suffer a pang of homesickness, which she would soothe by reading from her poetry book or adding a few lines to her latest letter-in-progress to Miss Mortimer. Then she would go to the nursery, where she would rouse and dress the children, take breakfast with them, and settle in for the day’s lessons.

  To her credit, Penelope’s enthusiasm for providing the children with a top-notch education remained in full force. She still hoped to begin French and Latin as soon as practical. She yearned to read her favorite poems aloud to them, to demonstrate basic techniques of watercolor painting, and to explain the difference between the Baroque sensibility and Romanticism in classical music, although she sometimes got them mixed up herself. However, other lessons proved more urgent and, surprisingly, more complicated.

  For example, Penelope had never before realized how difficult it was to explain the logic behind such common household paradoxes as: Standing on the floor is perfectly correct; standing upon the loveseat is not. Going up the stairs is often necessary, but climbing up the side of a bookcase never is, even if one has accidentally let loose of a yo-yo while trying to learn to go ’round-the-world, and one was merely trying to get a better look at where it may have landed. Or so Alexander attempted to explain, in his halting, howling way.

  Convincing the children of the importance of these distinctions required careful demonstration, a great deal of repetition, and the occasional use of tasty treats, yet Penelope remained patient and kind. “After all,” she thought, “the children can hardly be blamed for their uncivilized condition—no more than poor Silky could be blamed for his, or the Poor Bright Females of Swanburne Academy for their lack of solvent relatives!”

  She thought of her pupils as unusual, not unteachable. In fact, she found them endearingly eager to please (however, she did learn not to leave her shoes lying about unattended, as Beowulf had a tendency to gnaw). But clever as she was, even Penelope was often unable to predict what would set them off.

  Squirrels, for example. Squirrels proved to be a virtually irresistible source of provocation. At the mere glimpse of one of the nibbling, button-eyed, bushy-tailed creatures, the children would freeze to attention, stare, hunker down, and approach silently in low, even crouches until within striking distance. Then they would pounce. It was riveting to watch—nowadays it would make a fine documentary for broadcast on a nature channel on cable television—but there was a seemingly endless number of squirrels on the grounds of the estate, and they rendered Penelope’s outdoor excursions with the children much too full of excitement to be truly enjoyable.

  Nor did staying indoors provide an escape. Every day, the little gray-furred beasts would scurry tormentingly through the branches that hung outside the nursery windows, which threw all Penelope’s attempts to teach odd and even numbers into chaos. And there was always the worry that the children might actually catch one of the dimwitted rodents. Given Penelope’s tender feelings about animals, she did not think she could bear to see her pupils tear one limb from limb without becoming extremely upset.

  After giving the matter a great deal of thought, Penelope came upon what she felt was an ingenious solution.

  “I shall devise a squirrel desensitization program,” she thought. “Through careful repeated exposure, I will teach the children not to give two figs about squirrels. I wonder if it has ever been done before?”

  It had not. In fact (and unbeknownst to her, of course), Penelope had just made an important breakthrough in the field of behavioral psychology, one that would not be repeated by medical professionals for many decades yet to come. No doubt that is why none of the books Penelope had brought with her from Swanburne contained the information she sought. Nor did she think Dr. Westminster had ever undertaken such a project. Further research would be required, and that meant a trip to the library was in order.

  She made sure the children were safely occupied with chewable objects, obtained the necessary permissions from Mrs. Clarke, and paid her first formal visit to Lord Ashton’s library—an enormous, musty-smelling room she had peeked in longingly every time she walked past it.

  It was chilly and dark, even on a sunny afternoon, with many more books than even the library at Swanburne had contained. The section on animal behavior was exceptionally well stocked. In short, Penelope was in library heaven, and she prepared to start taking notes. She quickly found a book on wolves, which provided many thought-provoking tidbits of information and even shed light on some of the children’s more intriguing habits—the way Alexander, for instance, would occasionally discipline his siblings by knocking them to the ground and rolling them onto their backs. Or the way Beowulf would rise from his bed during the night and gaze out the nursery window, mournfully ahwooing for hours on end. Or Cassiopeia’s tendency to scamper closely after Penelope and sit at her feet the instant she stopped moving.

  “But was it truly necessary to select such extraordinary names?” It was Lady Constance’s voice, and she sounded both cross and quite nearby. “They will only serve to draw attention.”

  Lady Constance and Lord Fredrick had entered the library; Penelope could glimpse them through the stacks. A perplexing development! She had asked permission to enter the library so she could not be accused of trespassing, yet the encounter felt impossibly awkward, especially since the couple seemed to be in mid-argument. She did not know what to do except freeze in place and wait for an opportunity to make her presence known.
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  “Personally I would have christened them Tom, Dick, and Fanny,” Lady Constance nattered on. “However did you settle upon Alexander, Beowulf, and Cassiopeia?”

  Lord Ashton chuckled. “Simple! I started with A and proceeded down the alphabet in sequence.”

  “You are ridiculous,” she said, perhaps fondly or perhaps not; it was difficult to tell.

  “I was merely being prudent,” Lord Fredrick replied, in his merry, thoughtless way, “in case we find another twenty-three grubby children wandering in the forest. Twenty-six letters in the alphabet, what!”

  Even without being able to see her face, Penelope had a feeling that Lady Constance was not amused by this remark.

  “And what about a surname?” the lady pressed. “Surely you don’t mean to call them by the name of Ashton?”

  “Why? What’s wrong with the name Ashton?” Now Lord Fredrick was the one who sounded cross. Penelope realized the moment had passed when she might have revealed herself without embarrassment. Now she had no choice but to remain silent and unseen and wait for the ordeal to be over.

  “Nothing is wrong with the name of Ashton, dear husband! That is the point. Ashton is an ancient and noble name. A name ripe with glorious history. A name with illustrious and, dare I say, wealthy associations. What will happen when we have a child, Fredrick? That is who should bear the family name. Not these—these—incorrigibles!”

  A strange, faraway look clouded Lord Fredrick’s face. “Children of our own, quite right, quite right! Bound to happen sooner or later; I had forgotten about that.”

  Lady Constance giggled shrilly. “Forgotten? Oh, Fredrick, you are utterly ridiculous sometimes; that must be why I married you. But honestly, clawing and scratching and baying at the moon—can you imagine such a creature as heir to the estate?”

  “Of course not.” He sounded suddenly severe. “These three vagabonds are not Ashtons. Not Ashtons at all. They are the Incorrigibles, indeed—and that is what we shall call them, from now on.”