Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  “‘I am absolutely mortified,’ Alexandra said in a low voice. ‘I can’t believe that we met the sultan of Morocco when we look like this, and that we barged in on a royal dinner for the ambassador! Our parents will kill us when they hear about this.’

  “‘Barged in?’ cried Gladys, whose hat was still tilted sideways on her head from her fall. ‘We did not. We were invited to dine.’ A waiter laid a beautiful lamb tagine and pear in front of us, followed by many other dishes of delicious Moroccan food. ‘And just in time,’ continued Gladys, shaking a napkin out and placing it on her dusty lap. ‘I’m famished.’”

  Mister Kinyatta woke up and looked around sleepily. He stretched and shook his huge ears. A delicious smell wafted in from the kitchen down the hallway.

  “Mmmm,” Virginia said. “Incidentally, that’s what lamb tagine smells like. It’s one of my favorite Moroccan dishes. Patel must have gotten inspired by my storytelling.”

  Cornelia’s heart skipped a beat. “Is it dinnertime already?” she exclaimed. “I have to go.”

  “Thank you for spending the afternoon with me, Cornelia S.,” said Virginia, reclining on the silk pillows again. “You are a wonderful listener, and that’s just as important as being a good storyteller.” She thought for a minute. “Well, almost as important anyway.”

  “I’m not a good storyteller, though,” said Cornelia. “I don’t have anyone to tell stories to, and anyway, if I did, no one understands my long words. I’m a linguistic recluse.” By this, she meant that she was a person who withdraws from the world and into words.

  Virginia looked at Cornelia quizzically. “Well, words have many uses, as you will learn. I like to share them with as many people as possible.” She yawned. “And don’t forget that I understand your long words. They will be our secret code.”

  Cornelia nodded, thrilled to have a new partner in crime. She thanked Virginia and ran home to the chill of her apartment next door.

  Chapter Five

  The Souk in Hell’s Kitchen

  Several days after Cornelia’s visit with Virginia, Lucy came home from her vacation. She strode into the apartment and heaped her luggage in a little mountain near the front door. Cornelia ran out of her room and down the stairs to greet her mother.

  “Hello, darling,” Lucy said, and gave Cornelia a big showy kiss on her forehead. Lucy was very brown from the Moroccan sun, and Cornelia felt like a pallid, melted snowflake next to her. “Look how tan your mama is! Isn’t it lovely?”

  “Yes, very,” said Cornelia.

  Madame Desjardins bustled out of the kitchen into the hallway. “Bonjour, Madame!” she said. “Welcome home.”

  “Bonjour, Dominique,” Lucy said, walking down the stark white hallway to the study. Dominique was Madame Desjardins’s first name. “The apartment looks perfect, as usual. Oh! Before I forget—can you bring my luggage in to be repaired this week? One of the cases got damaged on the flight back. I’ll need it back as soon as possible.”

  “Ohhh,” said Madame Desjardins tentatively. “Madame must have forgotten that this is my week off.” There was an uncomfortable silence. “I am going to my family’s house in France tomorrow morning,” she added apologetically, wringing her hands.

  “Ah,” Lucy said finally. “You’re right. I had forgotten. When will you be back? Don’t forget that I’m leaving for France myself at the end of the week, for that concert in Paris.”

  “I am back in time for your trip, Madame, do not worry,” Madame Desjardins said. Both women then looked at Cornelia, who stood there in the hallway as quiet and still as a teacup.

  Lucy cleared her throat. “So, you and I will have a lovely week together then, won’t we, darling?” she said to her daughter. Cornelia nodded.

  The next afternoon, Lucy picked Cornelia up from school in a taxi.

  “Darling, I have to bring you on an errand with me,” Lucy said from behind a huge pair of sunglasses. “I know it’s boring, but Ingrid is cleaning at home. She’s in such a fierce mood that I’m afraid that she’ll vacuum you up if I leave you there.”

  The taxi smelled like Lucy’s perfume, and Cornelia snuggled into the seat next to her mother. It was very cold outside, and their breath clouded up the back windows.

  “Where are we going?” asked Cornelia, praying that it wouldn’t be a sit-in-a-restaurant-for-three-hours type of errand.

  “Ugh—to see Melvin Horowitz, my accountant,” Lucy replied unenthusiastically. “Ugh, ugh, ugh.”

  Normally, the prospect of going to see an accountant would be enough to send any eleven-year-old into a tantrum, or at least a dour sulk. But Cornelia liked old Melvin, who was the most peculiar sort of person. First of all, Melvin worked only for artists, people like Lucy. Secondly, he didn’t have an office. In fact, they never went to see him in the same place twice. And the places where they did meet up with him were very odd for an accountant. For example, once he had set up a workspace in the old stables at Central Park. Another time, he worked from a comic-book factory on the Lower East Side.

  “I hate offices,” he told Cornelia once. “Hate ’em. All of those buzzing fluorescent lights. You might as well be working in a graveyard.”

  Cornelia, who had not had a lot of experience with offices herself, somehow understood and appreciated his resourcefulness.

  Today, the taxi pulled up in a neighborhood on the West Side of Manhattan called Hell’s Kitchen, an area once infamous for its gangs and riots and squalor. Lucy and Cornelia got out of their taxi in front of a rickety building that looked like a dirty old factory. Cornelia looked up at it warily, and imagined that the Somerset sisters must have felt the same way when they first reached their secret house in Marrakech.

  “Melvin’s in there?” she asked.

  Lucy lowered her sunglasses to the tip of her nose and then pushed them back up. “That’s what he told me on the phone this morning,” she said. “Who knows what else is in there with him. Have courage, Cornelia.”

  They rang the front bell and the door promptly buzzed open for them. Cornelia remembered what Gladys had said about never knowing what to expect on the other side of doors in New York City. When she and Lucy walked through this particular door, they entered an enormous yarn warehouse. The dingy ceilings loomed thirty feet above their heads, and rows of high shelves, crammed with big spools of yarn in every imaginable color, filled the room. Dim lightbulbs hung on wires suspended from the ceiling.

  “Come in, come in, lickety-split,” Melvin called from some faraway, unseen corner. “I’m in the back.”

  They walked up one aisle and down another, and then up yet another one before they found him. A rabbity little man, Melvin had pointy ears and glasses that swung dangerously on a chain around his neck. His nearly bald head glistened in the dreary light, except for one piece of hair that he had swirled elaborately around his head.

  “Oooh, call the press! They’re here at last!” he shouted when he saw Lucy and Cornelia. He leaped up from behind his desk, made from a big door on top of two big wooden crates. “What do you think of my new headquarters?” he asked. “Wait! I’ll roll out the red carpet.”

  He bounded over to a nearby shelf stuffed with yarn and snatched up a maroon spool. Holding the end of the string, he threw the spool along the floor toward Lucy, unraveling a long line of dark red yarn between the two of them. Lucy laughed, walked over to Melvin, and gave him a kiss hello on his cheek.

  “Hello, Melvin darling,” she said. She gestured toward Cornelia. “Do you remember my daughter? Madame Desjardins, our housekeeper, is away this week. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “And hello, Miss Cornelia Street,” said Melvin, looking down at her. “Look at those big hands. You’ll be a pianist soon too, just like your mother. Here,” he added, handing her a wad of licorice. “It’s all yours. I bought it for myself, but it practically ripped out every tooth in my head. You look like you got strong teeth.”

  Cornelia disliked licorice. “I’ll defenestrate it right away,�
� she said. The word “defenestrate” meant “to throw something out a window.”

  “That’s my girl,” said Melvin. And then he and Lucy sat down at the door-desk and started to muddle through piles of paperwork and receipts. Cornelia wandered up and down the aisles, looking at the thousands of colored spools. When the licorice got sticky in her hands, she surreptitiously stuffed it under a spool of thick puce-colored yarn.

  “Oh, no!” said Melvin to Lucy, several aisles away.

  “You can’t deduct Louis Vuitton suitcases as a travel expense. Nice try, you minx. By the way, Cornelia is starting to look less like her daddy and more like you all the time.”

  Cornelia stopped in her tracks, and she practically popped her eardrums straining to hear the rest of the conversation.

  “Yes, she is,” Lucy said. “But she has his mouth.” Cornelia heard Lucy light a cigarette.

  “You ever see him?” Melvin asked.

  “No,” said Lucy. “And I don’t read his reviews or listen to his CDs either. I’m just glad that he lives in Europe, so I don’t have to keep running into him around town.”

  “That’s a shame, just a shame,” Melvin said. “And it would be even more of a shame if Cornelia didn’t play that piano of yours, being the daughter of two famous piano players like you and Leonard.”

  “I don’t want to force her,” Lucy said. “If she wants to play, I’ll get her lessons. But whenever I ask her, she says she never wants to learn.”

  “Don’t let hands like that go to waste,” advised Melvin. It was quiet for a minute while they worked.

  “You ever gonna take that kid with you when you go on a trip?” he asked. “She looks like she could get out more.”

  “Oh, be quiet, Melvin,” Lucy said. “She’s too young. And she wouldn’t be interested in going to my concerts. I spent all of my teenage years traveling around and playing in concerts, and look what happened to me.”

  “Harrumph,” said Melvin, looking unconvinced and shuffling some papers around. Then something caught his attention. “Oh, give me a break. Now, what is that, Lucy? You wanna write off this Moroccan retreat as a medical expense?”

  Cornelia stopped listening. Numbness spread to her hands and feet. She knew everything that Lucy had told Melvin already, but any mention of her father always gave Cornelia an unpleasant jolt.

  She tried to distract herself from thinking about the situation by walking around the warehouse again. She pretended that she was in a souk, and that people and donkeys and spices and rugs filled the warehouse. When she reached the aisle of green yarns, she imagined that she was sitting down for some mint tea with the Somerset sisters. In the red aisle, she pretended that they were buying more haiks. When Cornelia got down to the far end of the warehouse, in the brown aisle, she imagined that they were visiting the henna lady. She got completely lost in her own thoughts and didn’t even notice Melvin and Lucy standing at the end of the corridor, looking at her.

  “Cornelia,” Lucy said. “Who were you just talking to?”

  Cornelia snapped to attention. “I was just pretending,” she said, her cheeks burning with embarrassment.

  “Thank you, Melvin darling,” Lucy said. “We’ve staved off prison and poverty for another year, I think.”

  Melvin helped her into her coat. “Of course we did,” he said, still looking curiously at Cornelia. Then his phone rang back at his door-desk and he galloped off to answer it, hooting good-bye to Lucy and Cornelia as he went.

  “What were you pretending, Cornelia?” Lucy glanced down at her daughter as they got into another taxi.

  “That I was at the souk,” Cornelia said. “Buying a haik, or going to see the henna lady. That place just reminded me of how it all might look.”

  Lucy looked at Cornelia in surprise. “Where did you learn those words? Did I tell you about them?”

  A wave of regret and protectiveness washed over Cornelia. Suddenly she realized that she didn’t want Lucy to know about her new friend. She wanted to keep the world next door and Virginia’s stories to herself. What if Virginia and Lucy met and, even worse, became friends? Then Cornelia would stop being Cornelia in Virginia’s eyes; she would just be Lucy Englehart’s daughter, as usual.

  “I’ve been learning all about it in school,” Cornelia said casually, and looked out the window.

  Lucy continued to gaze at Cornelia, clearly skeptical. “What else have you learned about?”

  “All sorts of things,” answered Cornelia, feeling safe behind the shield of her lie. “About sultans and mint tea and Moroccan weddings and old palaces with walls that have dead bodies in them.”

  “Oh,” Lucy said after a minute. “Well. I never learned such interesting things at school.” They were silent for a block or two, and then Lucy continued, “Morocco is a wonderful place. When you’re older, you can go there yourself and see.” She stretched her hands out on her lap. “Now we have to scramble home so your mama can practice the piano. The noose of the Steinway tightens, and Rachmaninoff must be practiced.” She sighed.

  “What?” asked Cornelia.

  “What I mean, darling,” Lucy said, “is that I have another performance in Paris next week. At a very important concert hall, the Salle Pleyel.” She smiled and smoothed Cornelia’s hair. “Maybe they’ll teach you about Paris next in school.”

  Or maybe you can tell me something about it, or take me with you for once, Cornelia thought ruefully. But I won’t hold my breath.

  The trip to the yarn souk in Hell’s Kitchen was really the only time Cornelia spent with her mother that week. Lucy spent the days and nights thundering away at her piano, getting ready for her concert. Ingrid came every afternoon that week to straighten up, and ordered dinner to be delivered to the apartment each night before she went home. When the food arrived, Lucy abandoned the Bête Noire and emerged from the music room, with thick curls of cigarette smoke wafting out the door after her. She and Cornelia ate sitting on stools in the kitchen. Lucy’s tan grew paler and her mood darker, as it always did before a big performance.

  When Madame Desjardins came back on Sunday, a sense of normalcy returned to the apartment, for which Cornelia was surprisingly grateful. Lucy left for Paris the next day before Cornelia got home from school.

  Cornelia was secretly glad about Madame Desjardins’s return for another reason as well: the housekeeper was simply easier to fool than Lucy. That afternoon, Cornelia devised a little plan on her walk home from school. When Madame Desjardins opened the front door, Cornelia marched in and put her bag down.

  “Madame Desjardins,” she declared. “Lauren Brannigan asked me to go over to her house to work on a science project together. Can I go? She lives just up the street, remember?”

  “Oh, oui,” said Madame Desjardins. “Yes, the little girl with that horrible, nosy mother. When I see that woman on the street, she always talks to me forever about Madame Lucille. Are you sure you want to go?”

  “I have to,” Cornelia said. “It’s a school project.”

  “You can walk up by yourself? So I can stay here and cook dinner for us?” Madame Desjardins asked hopefully.

  “I always walk up there on my own,” said Cornelia, delighted that her scheme had worked so far.

  Of course, the second the door shut behind her, Cornelia walked straight up the hallway to Virginia’s door and rang the doorbell.

  “Oh, hello, Cornelia-ji,” said Patel, opening the door.

  “Come in, come in.” Cornelia kicked off her shoes in the foyer. “I have something to show you,” Patel told her.

  “You will like it.”

  They walked down the long corridor, through the velvet curtains at the far end, and into the Moroccan forest room.

  “Oh!” exclaimed Cornelia when she saw the surprise. She ran to the center of the room, where the star-shaped marble fountain had just been installed. Twenty-five big, fat bright orange goldfish circled around in the bubbling water.

  “Look!” said Patel, pointing to a fish filt
er in the back of the fountain. “Your idea. You are a very smart girl. And no new pipes in the floor, so everyone is happy.” The sound of gurgling water soothed Cornelia so much that she wanted to climb up onto the sumptuous daybed for a nap.

  “Virginia is in her French drawing room,” Patel said.

  “Come with me.” They went back through the curtains and walked up to a closed door. “Go visit with her, and I will bring you something to eat,” he promised.

  Cornelia knocked on the door. “Entrez-vous!” called out Virginia from inside. “Come in!”

  “It’s me, Cornelia,” said Cornelia, opening the door.

  Today, Virginia sat in an enormous, overstuffed silk chair by the window, peering outside through a set of binoculars. Mister Kinyatta slept curled up on a matching footstool at her feet. He opened one eye when Cornelia came in, then closed it, snoring again in no time.

  “Oh, hello, Cornelia S.! Come sit down.” Virginia adjusted the focus on the binoculars and looked through them again. “Did Patel show you the fountain? I am so happy with it.” And then she squinted through the glasses and said, “Oh, my!” She leaned forward and pressed the binoculars against the window.

  “Are you watching the boats?” Cornelia guessed. She craned her neck to see if there was any excitement on the river.

  “Heavens, no. I’m spying on people,” Virginia responded unrepentantly. “This is one of the ways I get ideas for my stories, through spying.” She looked at Cornelia. “All you need to see is a little bit of someone’s life, and you can imagine the rest. I’m sort of shopping for a story right now.” She squinted into the binoculars again. “Oh, my goodness!”

  “What’s happening? Can I look?” Cornelia asked.

  “Um, I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Virginia fumbled with the binoculars, suddenly embarrassed. “Anyway, I think I need to have these fixed. They’re a little cloudy.”

  She pushed the binoculars under the skirt of the chair, leaned back, and smiled. She was wearing her gold filament scarf over her head today, and a long pearl-colored dress with a fluffy fur collar. “How are you, Cornelia? I gather that your mother has been home. Patel and I heard a little bit of her playing through the wall.”