The Mysterious Howling (16 page)

Broken ornaments littered the floor. The women screamed; many of the men screamed also. The delicate sensibilities of Leeds' Thespians could not endure this ruckus. They clambered on top of the chairs and began declaiming, in their trained and resonant voices, an impressive variety of off-color phrases that are not necessary to reprint here.

Meanwhile, the chase continued. The squirrel maneuvered so quickly, it was nothing but a gray blur. Cassiopeia's champagne-soaked dress was badly torn; the boys' sailor suits were covered with stains and their straw hats all frayed. However, the children did look as if they were having a marvelous time.

After what seemed an eternity but was obviously not (in fact, calling any length of time “an eternity” is yet another example of hyperbole in action), the children succeeded in cornering the squirrel near the doors that led out of the ballroom. Then, in what was either a brilliant stroke of luck or a bit of disastrously poor timing, depending on whether you were rooting for
the squirrel or the children, the doors swung open.

“My word!” exclaimed Mrs. Clarke. She stood in the doorway, holding a large pitcher on a tray. “I just ran downstairs to get more milk for the tea, and on the way back I heard the most terrible racket—
Aaaaaaah!
Dear heavens above, what has happened in here? It's like a hurricane hit!”

Somewhere in its nut-sized brain, the squirrel must have recognized its only chance for escape. With a desperate lash of its tail the rodent bolted between Mrs. Clarke's legs, through the doors of the ballroom, and disappeared into the vast house beyond.

The children froze, but only for a moment. Then Cassiopeia raised her tiny fists in the air. “Mayhem!” she bellowed, pointing out the door.

Spurred on by her battle cry, the yapping Incorrigibles tore off after the squirrel, in hot and, it must be said, happy pursuit.

T
HE
F
OURTEENTH
C
HAPTER
In the wake of mayhem, a disturbing discovery!

A
TRAUMATIZED HUSH
fell over the party guests, punctuated only by the fizz of candles extinguishing themselves in the spilled wine that now spread in scarlet puddles over the recently scrubbed wood floors, and by the hiccupping sobs of Lady Constance. A more complete vision of chaos would be hard to imagine.

“Well,” laughed one of the male guests, after what seemed like (yet obviously was not) another eternity. “I'd say the Hesperus has been well and truly wreck'd at last!”

Then the floodgates opened. The shocked silence gave way to a roar of complaints: “Look, my shoes are destroyed—and I bought them in Paris!” “Has anyone seen my spectacles?” “What sort of poorly run household would keep squirrels as pets?” And, most chilling of all to Penelope's ears: “Those awful children! No doubt they will be sent to the workhouse after this. They are not fit to live among civilized society!” She thought it was the baroness's voice, but it was hard to know. Everything was madness and misery and people shouting at one another.

“Oh, where is Fredrick?” Lady Constance had crawled atop the piano for safety. “Where is he, where is he? He has missed the party, and now everything is ruined, ruined,
ruuuuuuuuuuuuined
!” Alas, it would be inaccurate to call her outburst anything but a howl of dismay.

Penelope struggled through the crowd to get to the door, her mind fixed on a single idea: She had to find the children! She knew if she could reason with them for a moment and perhaps offer some tempting biscuits and a soothing, gentle story, they would soon regain their composure and let the squirrel go in peace (assuming there was still an intact squirrel left to set free, of course).

“Look outside—an intruder!” It was not clear who gave the warning, but a fresh chorus of screaming and
weeping rose up as many frightened heads turned toward the window.

An intruder? Had the bandits come at last? Penelope was so overwrought, she was not thinking clearly. “What if the children were only trying to herd the squirrel outdoors?” she wondered frantically. “They may be outside this minute—they could be in terrible danger!”

Although she had nearly reached the door, now she turned and fought her back way through the crowd, toward the windows. Under normal circumstances Penelope was a stickler for good manners, but there was no way to get through without some pushing and elbowing, and her “Excuse me!” and “May I please get through?” went unheard in the hubbub. With some regret Penelope did what she had to do to reach the windows. When she arrived, she discovered that the ragged breathing of more than two hundred hysterical guests had fogged the glass. She had to rub a circle in it to see out.

Through that circle she saw—no, not the children—it was a ghost! “‘A sheeted ghost'!” she croaked in horror. (As you no doubt recall, “sheeted ghost” was Longfellow's evocative phrase. Penelope had not gotten a clear-enough look to see if this ghost was, in fact, wearing a sheet, or some other ghostly garb more suitable to the weather. However, the expression was fresh
in her mind, and out of her mouth it flew.)

Now, you may think it silly for a person already fifteen years of age to believe in ghosts, but Penelope had once heard a very frightening Christmas story with ghosts in it, and it had affected her thinking on the subject. It was by a rather popular writer named Mr. Dickens, who lived in London and published stories in the magazines. Miss Charlotte Mortimer had sometimes cut them out to read to the girls.

When Penelope saw the pale, wizened face in the darkness just outside the window, where no face had any business being—why, she recognized it at once! It was the very specter Mr. Dickens had described, the one who had spooked her so thoroughly that she could not bear to finish hearing the tale, even though Miss Mortimer had assured her it ended happily, with much laughter and a prize turkey fully twice the size of Tiny Tim.

“It is the ghost!” she screeched in terror. “The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come!”

But it was not that ghost nor any other: A second rub of the fogged glass revealed it was Old Timothy, the coachman. Penelope quickly saw her mistake. Luckily, no one had paid attention to her panicked screech, as it was merely one among many, but the revelation filled her with fresh dread: Why was Old Timothy at
the window? Had the pandemonium in the ballroom roused his curiosity enough to scale the hedge and look inside? Or was there some other, more sinister reason for his unexpected presence in the shrubbery?

She rapped on the windowpane, hard enough to rattle it. “Did you set a squirrel loose in the house?” she demanded to know. Conveniently, the enigmatic coachman could not hear her, since she was on one side of the glass and he was on the other, but their eyes met for the briefest second before he slipped away into the moon-cast shadows. In that second she was sure she had her answer: Old Timothy was the culprit! What other explanation could there be?

Mrs. Clarke appeared at her side drenched with milk, for the pitcher had been upended when the squirrel made its dramatic exit. “Miss Lumley! There you are,” she huffed. “You must go find the children. I don't like the way some of the gentlemen are talking. Stop staring out the window like that, dear! Heavens, you look like you just saw a ghost!”

“But why would the coachman do such a thing?” Penelope felt the urge to weep welling up inside her. “Why set a squirrel loose—when he knows how the children can barely control themselves—unless he wanted them to—unless he
intended
them to . . .” She could not make
enough sense of it all even to finish her own thought.

Mrs. Clarke dragged Penelope away from the window. “Calm down, dear. It's no wonder a squirrel got in. There's a window open—and look at all the trees that have been brought in the house! The poor squirrelykins couldn't tell indoors from out, that's all. Now pull yourself together, for if you don't find the children soon, the gentlemen are going to form a search party.”

Whatever else Mrs. Clarke intended to say was drowned out by the rising wail of a most unpleasant sound—high-pitched, unhinged, emanating from the vicinity of the piano yet entirely unmusical.

“Find those Incorrigibles!” Lady Constance screamed. “They are running amok!”

“
Find those Incorrigibles! They are running amok!
”

A
S YOU MAY KNOW
, the phrase
running amok
originally referred to elephants that had become separated from their herds and went galumphing through local villages, causing wreckage, destruction, and miscellaneous (to use Cassiopeia's term) mayhem.

Whether three small- to medium-sized children and one tiny, terrified squirrel could cut a swath of destruction comparable to that of an enraged elephant remained to be seen. Perhaps Lady Constance was guilty of hyperbole when she said the children were
“running amok,” or perhaps she was offering an accurate assessment of the situation. No matter. Penelope fully intended to find the children, although she was far more worried about them (and, to a lesser but real extent, the squirrel) than she was about the antique furniture or the precious hand-loomed Arabian carpets that Lady Constance was so frantic about.

She instructed Mrs. Clarke to tell the servants not to run about the house yelling for the children (so as not to frighten them into hiding). Then her search began. There was a scattered trail of cookie crumbs to follow for a while, but it disappeared at the foot of the great central staircase. If only the children had not been so thorough in the use of their napkins!

But now was no time for regrets. She had to decide which way to go: upstairs, downstairs, or down the opposite hall to the other side of the house? “The children will be following the squirrel, that is the key,” Penelope mused, which led her to the intriguing question: If Penelope were a squirrel, where would she run? (Although admittedly intriguing, the question was also nonsensical. Obviously, if Penelope were a squirrel, it would be a highly unusual squirrel. It would be a Swanburne squirrel through and through, and, therefore, its behavior could not be considered representative of
the high-strung and woefully undereducated furball that is more typical of the species. But Penelope was too flustered to think of this at the time.)

“Up,” she decided with conviction. “It is a squirrel's instinct to race up the trees when threatened. I have seen them do it a hundred times. I will continue my search by heading upstairs. Surely there will be some sign that the chase has gone by. I will soon pick up the trail.” She did not know what exactly she expected “some sign” to be. Truthfully, she was afraid to imagine the scope of destruction the children might have left in their wake.

She was right to be afraid. The stairs themselves seemed more or less unharmed, save for some carpets kicked askew and the ribbon bows untied and thrown everywhere, but the second floor landing was, as they say nowadays, trashed. Paintings had been ripped from their frames. A chunk of plaster had been clawed or kicked out of the wall, with a long network of cracks emanating from the spot. A large vase of cut pussy willow stalks had been tipped over and shattered, with shards of broken crockery and stray catkins everywhere.

Still, Penelope convinced herself that the havoc trended in one direction slightly more so than in the other. Soon she found herself nearing Lord Fredrick's
study. “If the squirrel were clever, it would hide among the taxidermy and hold very still, as if stuffed,” she thought. Of course squirrels were not known for being clever; the crafty notion of using camouflage to hide in plain sight was more the kind of thing that, say, Edith-Anne Pevington would have thought of, and in fact, she had thought of it in the plot of
Too Many Rainbows
. That was the tale in which Edith-Anne had dusted a whole herd of ponies with cornstarch so that gray-dappled Rainbow could go unnoticed among them and thus escape the clutches of Barnabus Bailey, a wicked circus owner who longed to steal the talented pony for his own greedy purposes.

Penelope knew it was unlikely that any squirrel would possess even a fraction of Edith-Anne's resourcefulness, and this one in particular had already shown signs of muddled thinking. Nevertheless, she thought she ought to take a peek in the study just in case, for, as Agatha Swanburne once said, “You'll find it in the last place you look, so, for heaven's sake, keep looking until you find it!”

As she came nearer, she heard voices—men's voices—in animated discussion. She knew better than to eavesdrop, yet once more it simply could not be helped, for the voices rang out strong and clear.

“Is all this weaponry really necessary?” It was Baron Hoover.

“It's only self-defense!” the Earl of Maytag snorted. “I heard Lady Ashton say the little one bites.”

Penelope froze. Mrs. Clarke had said something about a “search party”—surely they meant to search and not to hunt?

She knew it was urgent that she find the children, but now she felt it was equally important to know what the gentlemen (if one could still call them that) were planning to do. Putting aside her qualms about eavesdropping, she crept close enough to the door that she could hear every scrap of the conversation within, and listened.

“Good point. I'd prefer not to be bitten, personally. Look at this old musket! Ashton's got quite a collection here.”

“We'll find them easily in this moon. It's like daylight outside. I've never seen a moon so full. And where in blazes is Ashton? He's missing all the fun.”

“They're fakes! Probably just three strays he nabbed from an orphanage. I'll wager he promised them new shoes and some candy if they'd bay at the moon in front of his friends and then make themselves scarce.”

“I'm not as sure as you, Maytag. What do you say, Quinzy?”