The Unmapped Sea (25 page)

“As always, you are right, but what use is regret? The truth is, we cannot afford more mouths to feed,
in the house or in the fields.” He clicked his heels together. “Tsar Alexander, Boy, and Girl! I salute you and bid you farewell. We will always be grateful to you for saving Baby Max from the ice. But you are for England. Not for Plinkst. The teacher comes with us.”

The children stood mute with shock and heartbreak, and clung to their governess like barnacles. Penelope longed to say something to comfort them, but she, too, was in shock. This was all Edward Ashton's doing, she knew that. But why?

“Bye-bye!” The Babushkawoos waved cheerfully at the Incorrigibles.

“We shall love your governess nearly as much as you do,” Veronika promised. “About half as much, I would say.”

“Unless she makes us do math,” said one twin.

“Or read,” said the other.

“Or think,” said the first.

“So much for vows of eternal friendship,” Simon muttered. He turned to Dr. Martell, who had spent this entire exchange examining the contract. “Any luck? Surely there's a loophole?”

He shook his head. “I am sorry to say this document is legally binding in every respect. Miss Lumley has no choice but to go with the Babushkinovs, or else
she will face prison. Whoever wrote this contract knew the law very well.”

All eyes turned to the captive. “Thank you for your kind compliments,” Edward Ashton said. “Now, since my business here is done, I should like to leave.” He lifted his bound hands in calm expectation, as if waiting for a servant to take off his cloak.

“Not so fast, dead Edward!” Simon was full of rage and bluster. “If you've schemed to have Miss Lumley sent away, it can only mean one thing—you've planned for some harm to come to her in a far-off land, where you can escape detection. But I'll not have it!”

“Do you propose to hold me here against my will, pirate? Try it, I dare you!” Even seated and bound, Edward Ashton's ice-cold voice could inspire terror. “Need I remind you? Piracy is a hanging crime, Mr. Harley-Dickinson.” He turned to Penelope. “Breach of contract, Miss Lumley!” To the children, he barked, “Assault! Attempted murder! Kidnapping! One is enough to get you a whipping; two will send you to the gallows. Or perhaps you would rather live out your days locked in a zoo?”

The children stood proudly, but their lips trembled.

“Let him go,” Penelope said.

Simon turned to her in disbelief. “What?”

“I am sure we do not know the half of his wrongdoings, but we lack proof—and we cannot take the law into our own hands.” She kept her gaze upon him. “Release him. Dr. Martell, the gentleman is injured; would you be so kind as to examine his eye? I will go fetch some ice from the kitchen.”

She turned and quickly walked away. After a moment, Captain Babushkinov did the honors; he pulled a knife from a hidden sheath within his boot and cut Edward Ashton free. Veronika gave a pained yelp to see her toe-shoe ribbons sliced to pieces. Otherwise, no one dared make a sound.

With catlike poise, Edward Ashton slowly rose to his feet. He flexed his ankles and wrists, pocketed the broken eyeglasses, and brushed off his black coat.

“I hope your friend is not so foolish as to think she can simply run away,” he said sternly to Simon. “You ought to know me better than that, by now.”

“Here's what I know, Edward Ashton: If I had the power to lay a curse on you myself, I would,” Simon retorted, clenching his fists. But Penelope had already reappeared with the ice. Flustered, Dr. Martell offered to examine Ashton's swollen eye.

“That is not necessary, Doctor, but I thank you for your concern.” He turned to Penelope. “A great
adventure awaits you, Miss Lumley. May I be the first to say . . . bon voyage.”

Penelope stepped toward him and extended her hand. With a curious expression, Ashton took it. They locked eyes.

“Do svidaniya,”
she said quietly. “It means, ‘See you later.'”

T
HE
F
OURTEENTH AND
F
INAL
C
HAPTER
On a bridge to nowhere.

“S
EE YOU LATER
,”
INDEED—FOR
while shaking Edward Ashton's hand, Penelope had slipped him a note, written hurriedly in the kitchen as she waited for one of the scullery maids to chop a piece of ice off the ice block in the cellar.

Meet me on the chain pier at midnight,
she had scribbled on the torn-off piece of butcher paper.
We both want the same thing.

Thank goodness for her excellent penmanship!
Even a note scrawled in haste with a sliver of coal from a cold hearth could be clearly read. But would he come?

She wrapped her cloak tight around her and shivered. There was no darker and colder and windier spot in all of Brighton than the far end of the chain pier at midnight. Here, with water everywhere around her, there was no place to run, or to hide.

It would take an ocean drum the size of a steam engine to re-create the slow-motion crash of the waves against the distant shore. The air was wet with ocean spray, and her mouth filled with the taste of salt. “If only I could see the stars,” she thought, gazing up at the ink-black sky. “According to Simon, no sailor can navigate without them. Perhaps they would tell me something valuable about where I stand, and where I am headed.”

As if in answer, the black velvet stage curtain that concealed the heavens drew open, parting just enough to reveal the immensity of the full moon. The cool blue light was a relief, but the man in the moon's familiar, kindly face looked fresh from a fight, with a blackened eye and a trickle of blood smeared across its lips.

Ahwoo!

Ahwoo!

Ahwoooo!

The skin on the back of Penelope's neck prickled, and not from the cold.

“Do you hear my son?” Edward Ashton stood quite close to her, unseen in the darkness. He pushed back the hood of his cloak until his face caught the moonlight. “What an odd meeting place. I would have preferred somewhere indoors, near a fire, with a fresh pot of tea close at hand. But there is not much open in the off-season, and the hour is late, so I suppose one must make do. Mind your step, Miss Lumley. It is dark out here, and the pier is narrow. A person could easily fall in.”

“Mind your step, Miss Lumley. It is dark out here, and the pier is narrow.”

Penelope felt strangely calm, now that he was here. “Edward Ashton. There is no need for us to pretend. I know who you are, and what you seek, and why.”

“That makes two of us, then. But who are you, Miss Lumley? Can you tell me that?”

She took a deep breath. “Yes, I can. I believe—that is, I have come to suspect—that the Incorrigible children and I are all descendants of Agatha Ashton, just as you are a descendant of her twin brother, Pax.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Well done. What else do you know?”

“I know you think the only way to end the curse
upon the Ashtons is for your side of the family to . . . eliminate . . . mine.” She spoke in a rush, for she did not want her courage to run out before she had said all that she had planned to say. “That is why I asked you here, so that we might speak frankly, and alone. For any family to turn against itself is not right. I am sure such a terrible act can never lead to a happy outcome.”

His mouth twisted in anger. “It is not what I ‘think.' It is what that blasted wolf decreed, on Ahwoo-Ahwoo, four generations ago!” He paused, and calmed himself. “The terms of the curse are clear. Only one side of the family can survive, or both will be destroyed.”

“You wish to throw us to the wolves, in order to save yourselves,” she said, without rancor. “I do understand. But surely there is another way—”

“There is no other way! And time is running out.” His eyes flashed; his long fingers trembled. Penelope had always found him terrifying because of his cold intelligence, his fierce control, but now he looked half mad.

Ahwoo!

Ahwoo!

Ahwoooo!

Again came Fredrick's mournful cry. Ashton's temper flared red hot. “My son—my foolish son! For his own
sake, I shielded him from all knowledge of the curse. I told him his full-moon ‘condition' was an embarrassing but minor illness, shared by all the Ashton men in their youth. I counted on his own dimwittedness to prevent him from starting a family of his own. My mistake! He managed to find a wife even more dimwitted than himself. And now they have stupidly conceived a child.” He paced the narrow width of the pier, a caged animal. “The curse can only be lifted in the fourth generation. Once their child is born, it will be too late. All of Ashton descent will be doomed. That includes you, Miss Lumley, and those wolf children, too. We will all be dead as the dodos. Extinct as the dinosaurs.”

“I would rather take my chances with a long-dead wolf than become a murderer myself,” she retorted. “And if you have been trying to kill us, so far you have not done a very good job.” Instantly she regretted the remark.

“Four times I have tried to undo the curse!” he roared. “And four times I failed. The first plan was the best. What could be simpler? To have those three innocents stolen from their home and set loose in a forest where my son, an avid hunter with incredibly poor eyesight, roamed. One day Fredrick was bound to do them in. I was sure of it! One side of the family
would have wiped out the other. It would be a tragic accident, but the curse would be over.”

So it was Edward Ashton who had put the Incorrigible children in the woods! Penelope was full of questions, “Stolen from whom?” being chief among them, but Edward Ashton was lost in his own mad thoughts.

“Years passed. The children grew and thrived. Mortimer's spy, Old Timothy, made sure of that, expert sandwich maker that he is! And of course I let him, for I, too, needed the children to survive, at least long enough for Fredrick to find them. Yet he kept missing them, hunt after hunt, season after season! When the day came that he finally caught them, did he shoot? No! He decided to keep them as pets!”

Penelope thought of Nutsawoo, the rambunctious squirrel whom the Incorrigibles had also quite improbably taken in as a pet. “Unexpected things do sometimes happen,” she said, with a mix of stubbornness and hope. “No one's fate is written in India ink.”

“Written in the blood of wolves, you mean. In haste, I made a second attempt. You must remember it, Miss Lumley. You were there.”

“It must have been the Christmas ball,” she guessed. “You arranged the evening to set the children off,
barking and howling and running back to the woods, so that you might stage another hunt. Is that it?”

“Correct. And this time I had a whole pack of hunters from our gentlemen's club in pursuit! They had been told the children were more animal than human, but even so, some were squeamish. It did not matter. Any of them would have stood aside and let me take the shot, for to have a judge owe you a favor is more valuable than money to a rich man. I would have preferred to let Fredrick do the honors, but as you may recall, my son was indisposed that evening.”

“That Christmas fell on the full moon. I remember,” Penelope said.

“We rode half the night, but the children were nowhere to be found. I thought the fates were mocking me. I feared the curse was a trick, a riddle with no answer. I thought the Ashtons were doomed. I confess, I lost hope. But by then you had arrived at Ashton Place, Miss Lumley. I began to take an interest in you. And my hope returned, for soon I saw what I had previously missed.”

“Which was?”

His eyes flashed in the darkness. “For all those years I believed there were three ‘cubs' to hunt. I was wrong. A fourth was delivered right to me, the day you
came to work at Ashton Place, although it took some time and research for me to be sure. That hair color of yours. . . .” He smiled thinly. “It was clever of Mortimer to hide it. It threw me off the scent, for a while.”

“You said there were four tries,” she pressed. “What was the third?”

He covered one eye with a hand and hummed a few bars of a familiar tune.

“That is from
Pirates on Holiday
!” she exclaimed. “So it was you onstage, with the parrot on your shoulder!”

“Training that bird to howl took weeks. But it provoked mayhem, exactly as I had hoped. Once more I was in pursuit, with an angry mob at my command, and I had all four of you in my sights this time! But you escaped my clutches once more.”

“Yes, for that time we had help.” She had met Simon by then, and Madame Ionesco, too. Miss Mortimer had extended a warning, and even her parents—her own dear long-lost parents!—had sent a clue that led her and the children to a safe hiding place. “I know what the fourth attempt was,” she said, realizing it. “It was when you arranged to set Bertha the ostrich loose in the woods of Ashton Place.”

“A glorious chase! If those blasted wolves had not helped you and the Incorrigibles escape . . .” He
swiveled his face away from her and briefly disappeared, like a new moon. When he turned back, his eyes gleamed yellow. “Another man would have given up. But I would not quit. Instead, I had to face facts—that despite all the soothsayers I had consulted, and all the spooky tomes I had read over the years, I did not understand this curse well enough. I must have missed some important clue. That is why I combed through Agatha Swanburne's letters and sought the old sailor's boyhood diary. That foolish, lilting poem!”

“But the curse was not in the poem,” Penelope interjected.

“I know!” he bellowed. “Another cruel joke! Imagine my rage,” though she did not have to imagine; it was on full display. “Page after page of useless, rhyming doggerel that told me nothing I did not already know. And then, when the news of the pregnancy reached my ears . . .”

He paced the width of the pier so quickly and so carelessly that Penelope thought he would surely fall in the water. “A baby!” he seethed. “There was no time to waste. I felt sure the old sailor must know more than what he had written in that awful poem. In a panic, with no clear plan, I came to Brighton. I gained entry to the HAM by getting a job there. I disguised myself,
of course.” At Penelope's puzzled look, he began to sing in a deep alto voice.

“What do you do with a drunken sailor
Earl-eye in the morning?”

“It was you who treated us to the punch!”

He nodded. “I thought it would be simple to pry the tale out of him, for all sailors like to spin yarns, especially when there is punch involved. Still, he refused to talk about the curse. His loyalty to the admiral was firm. And with each passing day, the birth of the fifth generation grew closer! I became anxious, and my impersonation took a toll on me: The padding and petticoats and long hours at the punch bowl made my joints ache. I began taking long, early morning walks on the beach to stretch my legs and breathe the fine sea air. The beach was empty in the off-season, which suited me—until the day I met Captain Babushkinov, taking his morning swim. His family had wanted a beach holiday, but he was short of cash. A trip to Brighton in the off-season was the only holiday they could afford.

“After that I saw him most mornings. At first we exchanged pleasantries, no more. But soon I began to
formulate a plan.” He stopped pacing and turned to her. “Have you heard of Siberia, Miss Lumley? A desert of snow and frozen earth. There, I thought—
there
is a place where a person could disappear, with no questions asked. Imagine how pleased I was to learn that the current caregivers for the Babushkinov children were so ludicrously incompetent! And although you and I are not friends, Miss Lumley, and can never be, I will be the first to say: You are a most excellent governess.”

Her nod of thanks was nearly imperceptible.

“When the rich lose their wealth they fear one thing, far more than poverty. They fear they will lose their place in society, and they will go to any length to maintain it. My casual suggestion to the captain and his wife that a proper British governess would make them the envy of their wealthy friends fell on fertile ground—far more fertile than the rocky beet fields of their barren estate! I offered to draw up the contract at no charge, as an act of international friendship and cooperation. The funds to buy your contract from the Ashtons were conveniently provided by a private charity called—hmm, what did I call it? Ah yes! Leed's International Educator Swap.”