ICAP 2 - The Hidden Gallery (11 page)

“Athens versus Sparta? I'm not sure I follow—”

She lowered her voice to a more confidential tone. “If you are willing, after we part I would ask that you go at once and visit as many bookstores as you possibly can. See if you find even one other copy of the
Hixby's Guide to London
. Or any other Hixby's guide, for that matter.”

“Easy enough.” Simon saluted as if he were already on his way. “But why?”

“Because I now suspect
this
,” Penelope said as she laid a hand on the book's cover, “is the only copy of
Hixby's Lavishly Illustrated Guide to London: Compleat with Historical Reference, Architectural Significance, and Literary Allusions
in existence.”

“Now, that is a fascinating and peculiar notion.” Simon stroked his chin, which he had shaved for the first time that very morning. “But if you're right, what do you suppose it means?”

“It means that I, Miss Penelope Lumley, am the singular person whom the author of this volume hopes to lure to that obscure and little-trafficked Gallery Seventeen.” She glanced around to make sure the children could not overhear. “It would also mean that Miss
Mortimer knows far more than she has told me—for it was she who sent me the guidebook to begin with.”

“Then she must know who made it,” Simon exclaimed.

“Exactly,” Penelope agreed. “And, perhaps, why someone would try to steal it.”

At that point Beowulf scooted up to show Penelope and Simon a new trick he had invented on the velocipede (he called it “popping a wheelawooo”), and that kept them occupied for another circumnavigation of Muffinshire Lane.

It also gave Simon an idea. Lacking a horse or cart, Simon suggested that it would greatly speed his efforts to visit every bookstore in London if he rode the velocipede himself. “If the children don't mind parting with it, of course,” he said, tipping his hat to them.

The Incorrigibles had no objection to letting Simon take the velocipede. It had been a long day, and now it was time to bathe and eat supper and hear the rest of that funny Scottish poem about the mouse, which they liked so much that just thinking about it started all three of them drooling—or possibly it was the idea of a tasty wee mousie that caused the saliva to flow. In any case, they were eager to hear more.

But Penelope had another concern. “Mr. Harley-Dickinson, I must be frank with you,” she said solemnly.
“I do not know to whom the velocipede properly belongs.”

“Was it lost?”

Penelope thought of the two loaves of rye bread and half dozen sticky buns. “More likely stolen, I fear.”

“Better not tell me about it, then. The less I know, the less they can make me confess on the rack.” It took her a moment to realize he was joking.

“But is it wise to tour London on a stolen velocipede?” she asked worriedly. Make no mistake: The Swanburne Academy for Poor Bright Females was an excellent and highly regarded school, but this was the sort of question that Penelope's education had utterly failed to address. “For what if you are caught? The officers of the law will surely think that you are the thief.”

“Contraband, eh?” Simon chuckled and hopped easily onto the seat. “This is getting positively dramatic! Don't worry, Miss Lumley, I'll be careful and steer clear of constables. Besides, I've a new friend who's a judge, remember? If that can't keep a fellow out of the lockup, nothing can.”

“Good luck, then. Oh, Mr. Harley-Dickinson! Do take a biscuit for the road.” She offered one from the charming little tin the bakery had provided.

“Custard cream! My favorite. Thanks, Miss Lumley.” He took one and popped it in his mouth. With that, he was off.

 

A
ND SO, JUST AS IT
was on the first day they met, (which, of course, had been only a few days before, though it truly seemed much longer), Miss Penelope Lumley and Mr. Simon Harley-Dickinson had bid each other farewell at the steps of Number Twelve Muffinshire Lane. Except this time Penelope knew exactly when she would see Mr. Harley-Dickinson again, and it would be quite soon. The very next day, in fact!

Not only that, but she felt Simon had proven himself someone whom she could trust and rely upon to help think things through. Despite all the days' mysteries, riddles, and conundrums, the realization that, in Simon, she had found a true friend, was enough to cheer Penelope to the core. As Agatha Swanburne once said, “When things are looking up, there's no point in looking elsewhere.”

And a true friend was a treasure beyond price. This Penelope knew from
The New Pony
, a lovely, early story that showed how young Edith-Anne Pevington and her new pony colt, Rainbow, first came to understand and love each other, despite a few blunders at the start—for
how was Edith-Anne to know that Rainbow much preferred carrots to sugar cubes, and could only stand to have his hooves cleaned if she sang to him while she worked?

Just thinking about it prompted Penelope to start humming the wordless little sea chantey that Simon had been whistling earlier.

“Apples, apples, apples.” Cassiopeia sang along as Penelope vigorously shampooed the child's head. The elephant smell had proved stubborn and required serious scrubbing. The boys had already taken their baths; at the moment they were busy adding pictures of antique Grecian helmets, weaponry, and naval vessels to their journals. Penelope had given up trying to convince them to use the journals as an accurate record of their stay in London; if Nutsawoo believed they had spent the time engaged in sea battles with the Spartan fleet, what harm could it do?

“Bubble apples, bubble apples!” Cassiopeia gave a little tug to the end of her governess's hair, which now hung loose around her shoulders, as it was late in the day and Penelope had already taken out the pins.

“Lumawoo apples, la la la!” Cassiopeia made a soapy mustache of her own hair and Penelope's, and then blew through the strands until soap bubbles floated
lazily through the air. The colors of the two strands of hair really were nearly identical.

“Close your eyes, dear, that's a good girl.” Penelope rinsed the soap away with a pitcher of fresh water and wondered: Did the similarity in her hair color and the children's have anything to do with Miss Mortimer's urgent request that Penelope use the hair poultice?

First the
Hixby's Guide
, now this! Penelope certainly did not want to feel cross with Miss Mortimer, but she wished her headmistress had been a bit more forthcoming. Perhaps it would be wisest to simply follow her instructions and use the poultice at once.

Of course, Penelope was going to see Simon the next day. Was it silly that she wanted to look her best? Surely the poultice could wait awhile longer? But then she remembered the way Judge Quinzy had stared at her that afternoon, as she had tucked the loose strands of hair away under her hat. Had he noticed the similarity as well? If so, why would it matter? Such coincidences happened all the time.

“In any event, I ought not to worry about Simon,” Penelope concluded, for a true friend would not care one way or the other what shade her hair was. Of that she was certain.

As for Judge Quinzy…perhaps she had imagined
him looking at her hair. But it jogged her memory. There had been something about his story that had troubled her; what was it?

As she squeezed the water out of Cassiopeia's hair, it came to her. The hairdresser! He said he had come to the house to see Lord and Lady Ashton, but Lady Ashton had been at the hairdresser.

But Lady Constance had not left the house. And had had no callers, either; Penelope had heard her say as much to Lord Fredrick.

Why would Judge Quinzy lie about something like that?

“Cassawoof poem, please,” the dripping girl requested as Penelope lifted her out of the hip bath. “Mr. Burns, please! ‘The best-laid plans of mousawoo…'”

“I will read you Mr. Burns's poem shortly,” Penelope said as she wrapped Cassiopeia in a towel. Penelope knew exactly where to find the hair poultice from Miss Mortimer; she had tucked the packet in the back of her dresser drawer earlier, when she first returned to the nursery. “Right now, I have some shampooing of my own to attend to.”

E
VEN WITH THE BRIGHT MORNING
sun streaming in her bedchamber window, Penelope's hair looked dull and drab. “The poultice worked perfectly,” she thought as she ran the brush through once more. “Now I seem more like my old self, anyway. It reminds me of my Swanburne days. And if the children notice the change in my hair, I will simply tell them I have turned apples into blackberries!”

Clearly, optimism can be a very fine trait, with the power to turn lemons into lemonade, apples into
blackberries, and so forth. But just as a scrumptious tarte Philippe will cause the most dreadful tummy ache if eaten in excess, too much optimism can plunge one into the precarious state of mind known as “optoomuchism.”

Alas, it is a slippery slope. True optimism, as Agatha Swanburne defined it, is the habit of expecting happy endings in a way that keeps one cheerfully working to make them come true. But optoomuchism is optimism taken much, much too far. It puts one at real risk of getting carried away, or even going overboard, especially when at sea. Caught in the throes of optoomuchism, people become convinced that nothing can go wrong. They invest their life savings in harebrained schemes, buy trans-Atlantic passage on “unsinkable” ships named
Titanic
, and generally fail to recognize when it is time to try Plan B. (Note that in the expression “Plan B,” the letter B does not stand for anything in particular; it merely means that when Plan A falls to pieces and disaster looms, it is wise to have an alternative at the ready.)

Penelope's tumble from the velocipede (prompted, as you recall, by her optoomuchstic belief that she could ride blindly through an intersection while sniffing for elephants) had been a painful lesson, and Penelope had already resolved to keep her optimism
within reason from that day forward. But old habits die hard. Despite her good intentions, Penelope could not help being cheerful about the lackluster condition of her hair.

“It is a pity there is no way to tell in advance how much optimism is the correct amount,” she thought as she pinned her dull, drab locks into a dull, drab bun. “But I fear such judgments can only be made with the gift of hindsight.” In this she was correct. And, like a mail-order snow shovel that gets lost by the post office and finally turns up in July, the gift of hindsight always arrives too late to be of practical use.

Still, the day was off to a promising start. Simon was on his way, and the children had updated their journals with pictures of elephants, orangutans, and some brave attempts to spell “Peloponnesian.” Alexander had used his wobbly cursive to address all the picture postcards to “Nutsawaoo, Treetops, Ashton Place.” Beowulf had decorated each card with a pen-and-ink drawing of a trireme (which, as you may already know, was the many-oared warship used by the ancient Greeks during the Peloponnesian War), and Cassiopeia had signed them “Love Woo Frum Cass.” Now she was bouncing with eagerness to drop them in the post.

All in all, it seemed to Penelope that a modest
amount of optimism could safely be given free rein. “Perhaps things are looking up,” she thought as she led the children downstairs to wait for Simon, for it was already nearing eleven o'clock. The children would be safe with her, and once they located Madame Ionesco and learned what Simon had discovered on his bookstore excursions, the mysteries posed by Miss Mortimer and the guidebook would doubtless be solved before teatime. The children would find it all highly educational, and Penelope had the pleasant company of Mr. Harley-Dickinson to look forward to.

Truly, what could go wrong?

 

F
IRST
, S
IMON DID NOT
show up.

Eleven o'clock came and went. Then eleven-thirty. Then noon. The children grew restless and began to whimper.

It is not easy to wait patiently for someone who is late. In fact, there are many who would grow deeply angry. They would spend the time preparing themselves to boldly confront the tardy person and “read them the riot act,” an expression that means to scold someone so thoroughly that he or she will feel as if they have been sprayed full blast with a fire hose.

But Penelope had put her trust in Simon, and her
faith in people was not so easily swayed. First, she waited. Then, she worried. Then, she had what is nowadays called a brainstorm.

“Contraband!” she shouted abruptly, much to the surprise of the Incorrigibles, who had decided to occupy themselves by building a model of a trireme out of bits of the potted fern that sat in the entry foyer. It was Alexander's idea, and a clever one, too, for the fern fronds served nicely as the three tiers of oars that jutted from each side of the ship.

“Contrahwoo?” Beowulf asked, looking up from his work. Penelope paced the slippery floor in deep concentration, for her powers of deduction were at full throttle.

“Contraband means goods which have been illegally obtained,” she paused to explain (she was still their governess, after all). “It is the stolen velocipede that has waylaid Mr. Harley-Dickinson, I am certain of it. He must have been stopped by a police officer, for why else would he not be here as planned?”

Thrilled at this dramatic turn of events, the children took up the cry. “Contraband! Contraband!” they whooped. Mrs. Clarke had been upstairs looking for something, but now she waddled down to see what all the ruckus was about.

“Now, now, dearies, don't tell me you're playing at minotaurs again! I thought we learned our lesson about that—”

“Not minotaur, matador—never mind—Mrs. Clarke!” Penelope seized the housekeeper by both arms. “Our friend Mr. Harley-Dickinson may have been thrown in ‘the lockup' for being in possession of stolen property. We must help him!”

Mrs. Clarke clucked and shook her head. “You shouldn't get mixed up with that sort, Miss Lumley, that's a bad business all around. Although just hearing the words ‘stolen property' put me in mind of old Mr. Clarke, rest his soul.” She placed a hand over her heart, and a wave of nostalgia softened her features. “They tossed him in the chokey once a week, in his prime. Disorderly in public was practically his middle name.”

Penelope would have very much liked to hear more about the obviously fascinating, dearly departed Mr. Clarke, but she suspected the tale might not be suitable for children's ears, and in any case she was in a hurry. “I assure you, Mrs. Clarke, if any charge has been made, it is a false one. And it will be up to us to prove his innocence. But how?”

She concentrated once more. “I know! Lord Fredrick has a friend, Judge Quinzy, whom I am sure can
sort things out, for Simon was in his company all day yesterday. Surely there is no better alibi than the word of a judge! Where might we find him?”

“His Honor? He's a strange duck, isn't he? Gives me gooseflesh to think of him, somehow.” Mrs. Clarke gave a little shiver, to demonstrate. “You'll find Judge Quinzy at Lord Fredrick's club, I know it for a fact. The gentlemen had plans to meet for lunch and a game of billiards.”

“Do you happen to know the address?” Penelope asked, for after her painful lesson of the previous day, she knew it would be optoomuchstic to try to find Lord Fredrick's club by, say, following the smell of expensive cigars.

“Do I know the address! Who do you think's been sending over Lord Fredrick's clean shirts, shaving kits, new spectacles, skin creams, headache lozenges, and whatever else His Lordship demands? In fact, I was just about to have Old Timothy ride over with this.” She waved the book she was holding. “Lord Fredrick's almanac. He wants it, and he wants it right away. You'd think the great Lord Ashton was a sailor, the way he refers to his almanac all day long,” Mrs. Clarke said with a sigh. “He checks the moon and the tides the way other men check the financial pages.
But to each his own, I suppose.”

“The children and I will bring the almanac to Lord Fredrick ourselves.” Penelope practically snatched the volume from Mrs. Clarke. “And Timothy need not trouble himself; we shall take the omnibus.” She turned to the Incorrigibles. “Thank you for your patience while waiting, children—and the trireme is very impressive, I must say! But put it aside for now, for at last it is time to go.”

“Theatrical haunts with Simawoo?” Cassiopeia asked, confused.

“That was Plan A. Now we are switching to Plan B,” Penelope explained. “Perhaps if we can find Simon in prison and obtain his freedom, we can resume Plan A after lunch. Button your coats, please.”

“Don't lose that almanac,” Mrs. Clarke cautioned, “or Lord Fredrick'll have my head.”

“We go to prison?” Alexander asked nervously.

“Guillotine?” Beowulf added, no doubt because of Mrs. Clarke's comment about Lord Fredrick having her head.

“Simawoo no prison!” Cassiopeia insisted. “He perfectly nice!”

Penelope pinned her hat firmly to her dark, dull hair (it was still her old hat, for with all the excitement
she had not yet had time to shop for a new one). “You are quite right, Cassiopeia. And, dear me, nobody is going to the guillotine! Come along, everyone. We must speak to Judge Quinzy.”

 

A
T THE
S
WANBURNE
A
CADEMY FOR
Poor Bright Females, all of the girls were taught to have excellent manners, and Penelope was no exception. She knew perfectly well that there was something not quite right about examining another person's property without permission. And yet, as she rode the omnibus with the three Incorrigible children seated next to her and Lord Fredrick's precious almanac in her lap, she found herself deeply curious about the contents of this book. She longed to peek inside the covers, and was finding it difficult to resist doing so.

The children were also interested in the almanac, and peppered her with questions.

“What is almanac?”

“Why a sailor?”

“Why have Mrs. Clarke's head?” Beowulf made a throat-cutting gesture that was so impressively gruesome, it made his sister squeal with delight.

Before answering, Penelope glanced at the address Mrs. Clarke had written down for her, and craned her
head out the window to see where they were. “Three more stops, children. Very well. An almanac is like a detailed calendar in book form that includes many facts about nature. It is the sort of information that a farmer—or a sailor—might find useful,” she explained. “For example, the almanac will predict when the last frost will come and the ground will be ready for planting, when to expect a dry spell or a rainy one, times of sunrise and sunset, ocean tides, phases of the moon, and so on.”

“Moon,” Cassiopeia said approvingly. The children were very fond of moons, though a full one did tend to get them worked up.

“Yes, moon.” Penelope's desire to teach got the better of her. Impulsively, she flipped open the almanac to the appropriate diagram. “Here, I will show you. These are the phases of the moon—new, crescent, quarter, gibbous, and full—see how it waxes and wanes? And here are all the dates for the year, and…hmm, this is odd.” For Lord Fredrick, or someone, had circled every single date that there would be a full moon, for the whole year.

The children tried to count the circles, until they made themselves dissolve into laughter and had to start over again: “moon, moon, moon, moon, moon…” But it kept them occupied until the omnibus neared their destination.

“Why should Lord Fredrick be so concerned about the full moon?” Penelope wondered. “Perhaps it has to do with his hunting habit, for those would be the brightest nights to go out to the forest—time to stand up, children! This is our stop.”

They alighted directly in front of the address Mrs. Clarke had provided. In terms of grandeur the building fell someplace between the London General Post Office and Buckingham Palace, which is to say it was very grand indeed. A burly doorman stood watch at the entrance; happily, his uniform did not include a single tuft of fur. When Penelope and the children approached, he scowled.

“State your business.”

“I have something to deliver to Lord Fredrick Ashton.” Penelope tried to peer around the doorman but could see nothing; the big fellow loomed too large. “Is he inside?”

“I'll take it to him, miss.” The doorman held out his beefy hand.

Instinctively she hugged the almanac close. “Thank you, but I have instructions to hand the item to him personally. It is an object of particular importance to Lord Ashton.”

“Moon, moon, moon, moon, moon,” Cassiopeia
explained helpfully. Her brothers nodded.

The doorman gave them a curious look. “No offense, but this is the Fox and Hounds Club. It's a gentlemen's club. It's no place for women and children.”

Penelope thought of Simon. In her mind's eye she saw him locked in a dungeon somewhere. She stood straight as a poker and spoke in her most no-nonsense voice. “I am Lord Ashton's employee. He requested this volume be brought to him at once, and that is what I intend to do. And these children are his legal wards,” she added, though she was not sure how often Lord Fredrick recalled that the Incorrigibles even existed.

The doorman looked the children over. Alexander and Beowulf bowed, and Cassiopeia curtsied. He frowned.

“Very well. Make it quick, though. Lord Ashton's party is in the billiard room; it's just inside and to the left.”

Needless to say, Penelope had never entered a wealthy gentleman's club before. The dark wood paneling, sparkling chandeliers, and patterned carpets were as luxurious as one would find in any fine house, but there was a subtle, masculine difference in the feeling of the place. From distant rooms she heard men's voices, gruff and serious, or ringing out with bold laughter. The air carried the scent of pipe tobacco
and imported cigars, mixed with the spice of cologne and the saddle smell of expensive leather.

She turned left, as directed, with the children close behind. Now she heard the sharp
clack-clack
of billiard cues, then the muffled thud as the ball hit the felted rim of the table and ricocheted into the pocket. The door to the billiard room was half open. A group of Lord Fredrick's friends were gathered around the green-topped table, cues in hand. There was the Earl of Maytag and Baron Hoover, both of whom Penelope remembered all too well from the Ashton Place holiday ball. Judge Quinzy did not appear to be with them.