The Penderwicks

by Jeanne Birdsall

  The key was under the doormat just as Cagney had said it would be. Mr. Penderwick unlocked the door and the family piled through. If possible, the inside of the cottage was even more charming than the outside, all in pretty shades of blues and greens and with the comfortable kind of furniture too sturdy to damage unless you try. Off the living room was a cozy study with a big desk and a sleeping couch, which Mr. Penderwick immediately claimed for himself, saying he wanted to be as far as possible from the madding crowd.

  Now it was time for the sisters to go upstairs and choose their bedrooms.

  “Dibs first choice.” Skye headed toward the steps with her suitcase.

  “No fair!” said Jane. “I hadn't thought of it yet.”

  “Right. I thought of it first, which is why I get first choice,” said Skye, already halfway up to the second floor.

  “Come back, Skye,” said Rosalind. “Hound draws for order.”

  Skye groaned and reluctantly came back downstairs. She hated leaving important things up to Hound, and besides, he usually drew her last.

  The Hound Draw for Order was a time-honored ritual with the sisters. Names were written on small pieces of paper, then dropped on the ground along with broken bits of dog biscuit. As Hound snuffled among the biscuit pieces, he couldn't help but knock into the papers. The person whose paper his big nose hit first was given first choice. Second hit, second choice, and so on.

  Rosalind and Jane readied the slips of paper, Batty crumbled a dog biscuit, and Skye held Hound, whispering her name over and over in his ear, trying to hypnotize him. Her efforts were useless. Once let go, he touched Jane's paper first, then Rosalind's, and then Batty's. Skye's piece of paper he ate along with the last piece of biscuit.

  “Great,” said Skye sadly. “I've got fourth choice and Hound's going to throw up again.”

  Jane, Batty, and Rosalind flew up the steps with their suitcases to stake their claims on bedrooms. Skye sat downstairs and fretted. She'd been looking forward to picking out a special bedroom, painted white maybe, which she could keep neat and organized. Once upon a time, many years ago, she had slept in a room like that. But then Batty was born and put into Jane's room, and Jane moved in with Skye, and suddenly half of Skye's bedroom was painted lavender and filled with Jane's dolls and books and untidy piles of paper. Even that wouldn't have been so bad if the dolls and papers weren't always drifting over to Skye's side of the room. It had driven Skye crazy and, since Jane had gotten no neater over time, still did. And now, on vacation, Skye had the last pick and would probably end up in some dark, ugly closet. Life was unfair.

  Rosalind was calling from upstairs. “Skye, we've all chosen. Come see your bedroom.”

  Skye dragged herself up the stairs and down the hall to the bedroom Rosalind pointed out. She walked in and was so surprised she let her suitcase fall to the floor with a loud thump. This was no dark, ugly closet. Her sisters had left her the most perfect bedroom Skye had ever seen. The room was large and white and sparkling clean, with polished wood floors and three windows. And two beds! A whole extra bed without a sister to go along with it!

  She wouldn't change a thing about the room, Skye decided. She would leave her stuff in her suitcase, and store the suitcase in the closet, and keep the dresser top bare and the bookshelf empty. No dolls, no combs and brushes, no notebooks full of Sabrina Starr stories. And she would use both beds, sleeping in one on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and in the other on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Sunday nights she would have to switch in the middle of the night.

  Skye opened her suitcase, pulled out a math book—she was teaching herself algebra for fun—and wrote the bed schedule next to her favorite word problem about trains traveling in different directions. Next she rummaged around for her lucky camouflage hat, the one she'd been wearing when she fell off the garage roof and didn't break any arms or legs. There it was, under her black T-shirts. Skye crammed the hat onto her head and closed the suitcase and shoved it into the closet.

  “Now for exploring,” she said, and, after one more long, satisfied look at her glorious bedroom, left in search of her sisters.

  Rosalind was down the hall in a small bedroom— with only one window and one bed—neatly transferring clothes from her suitcase to dresser drawers.

  “You gave me the better room,” said Skye.

  “I wanted to be near Batty,” said Rosalind.

  “Well, thanks,” said Skye, who knew that Rosalind would have loved the luxury of a large bedroom.

  Rosalind took a framed picture out of her suitcase and set it on her bedside table. Skye walked over to look, though she already knew the picture by heart— Rosalind kept it beside her bed at home, too, and Skye had seen it a million times. It showed Mrs. Penderwick laughing and hugging little baby Rosalind, still so young that not even Skye had been born yet, let alone Jane or Batty.

  It was a strongly held belief among all the Penderwicks that Skye would grow up to look exactly like her mother. All the Penderwicks, that is, except for Skye. She thought her mother the most beautiful woman she had ever seen, and it certainly wasn't beauty that Skye saw when she looked in the mirror. The blond hair and blue eyes were the same, true, but that was it, as far as Skye could tell. And then, of course, there was that other big difference—Skye couldn't imagine herself ever hugging a little baby and laughing at the same time.

  Batty burst out of Rosalind's closet, her wings flying behind her.

  “I found a secret passage,” said Batty.

  Skye looked into the closet and saw straight through into another bedroom exactly like Rosalind's, but with Batty's suitcase lying open on the bed. “It's not a secret passage. It's a closet between two bedrooms.”

  “It is a secret passage. And you can't use it.”

  Skye turned her back on Batty and said to Rosalind, “I'm going exploring. Do you want to come?”

  “Not now, I'm still getting settled. Can Batty go with you?” said Rosalind.

  “No,” said Skye and Batty together. Skye left before Rosalind could try to change anyone's mind.

  Jane had staked her claim on the third floor, which was really the attic. Skye skipped up a steep flight of steps and discovered her younger sister perched on a narrow brass bed, writing furiously in a blue notebook and muttering to herself. “The boy Arthur shook the iron bars and raged against his wicked kidnapper—no, that's too dramatic. How about, Arthur stared sadly— no—the lonely boy named Arthur stared sadly out the window, never dreaming that help was on the way. Oh, that's a good sentence. Unknown to him, the great Sabrina—”

  Skye interrupted her. “I'm going exploring. Do you want to come?”

  Her eyes shining, Jane said, “Look at this wonderful bedroom. It was meant for an author. I know I can write the perfect Sabrina Starr book here. I can feel it. Can you feel it?”

  Skye looked around the tiny room with its sloped ceiling and one round window high on the wall. Already there were books all over the floor. “No. I don't feel anything.”

  “Oh, try harder. The feeling is so strong. I'm sure that some famous writer has been here before me. Like Louisa May Alcott or Patricia MacLachlan.”

  “Jane, do you want to come with me or not?”

  “Not now I have to write down some ideas for my book. I might have Sabrina Starr rescue an actual person in this book. A boy. What do you think?”

  “I didn't think she could even rescue a groundhog,” said Skye, but Jane was already writing again.

  Skye ran down two flights of steps and outside. She found her father getting Hound settled in his pen. It was, to Skye's eyes, a sort of doggy paradise. The metal fence was tall—and Hound didn't like fences—but the pen was large, and inside it were trees for shade, sticks for chewing, and a patch of dirt for digging. Plus Mr. Penderwick had put out a huge bowl of Hound's favorite food and two bowls of fresh water. Hound, however, wasn't grateful. When he saw Skye, he rushed the gate, barking and whining as though he was being locked up in a dungeon.
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  “Be still, demon dog,” said Mr. Penderwick.

  “He's trying to open the gate,” said Skye, watching Hound poke and prod with his nose at the metal latch.

  “That latch is dog-proof. He'll be safe in here.”

  Skye reached through the fence and scratched Hound's nose. “Daddy, I'm going exploring. Is that okay?”

  “As long as you're back in an hour for dinner. And Skye, quidquid agas prudenter agas et respice finem.”

  Mr. Penderwick didn't use Latin just for plants, but in his everyday speech, too. He said that it kept his brain properly exercised. Much of the time his daughters had no idea what he was talking about, but Skye was used to hearing this phrase, which Mr. Penderwick translated loosely as “look before you leap and please don't do anything crazy.”

  “Don't worry, Daddy,” she said, and meant it. Sneaking into that Mrs. Tifton's gardens, which is what Skye planned to do, wasn't crazy. On the other hand, it wasn't the most correct thing—according to Harry the Tomato Man—but maybe he'd been wrong. Maybe Mrs. Tifton loved having strangers wandering around her gardens. After all, anything's possible, thought Skye, and off she went, waving good-bye to her father and Hound.

  The land surrounding the cottage was large enough for three or four soccer fields. Not that anyone could play a normal game of soccer there, thought Skye— too many trees. They grew thickest behind the cottage, and the spaces between were filled with nasty thorny underbrush. The land in front was much more inviting. Here the trees were farther apart, and pretty grasses and wildflowers grew among them.

  On one side of the property, a high stone wall separated the cottage from its neighbors. Along the front and the other side ran a boundary hedge. Skye knew that Mrs. Tifton's gardens were beyond that hedge. She had two options for getting there. She could walk back up the driveway and through the break in the hedge. Boring, and likely to lead to being caught—it's hard to hide on a driveway. Or she could crawl through the hedge and emerge in some sheltered garden nook where neither Mrs. Tifton nor anyone else would be likely to see her.

  Definitely option two, Skye decided, veering away from the driveway and toward the hedge. But she found the hedge to be thicker and more prickly than she had anticipated, and after several attempts to crawl through, she had accomplished nothing except snagging her hat twice and scratching her arms until it looked like she had fought a tiger.

  Then, when she was just about to give up and go around by the driveway, she discovered a way in. It was a tunnel, carefully hidden behind a clump of tall wild-flowers and just the right size for going through on all fours. Now, if Rosalind had been the first to discover that tunnel, she would have noticed that it was too neatly trimmed and pricker-free to be there by mistake, and she would have figured that someone used it often and that the someone probably wasn't Mrs. Tifton. If Jane had been the first, she, too, would have realized that natural forces hadn't formed that tunnel. Her explanation for it would have been nonsense—an escape route for convicts on the run or talking badgers—but at least she would have thought about it. But this was Skye. She only thought, I need a way through the hedge, and here it is. And then she plunged.

  She emerged on the edge of the enormous formal gardens, directly behind a marble statue of a man wrapped in a bedsheet and holding a thunderbolt over his head. It seemed to Skye a ridiculous thing to put in a garden, but she was glad for the cover. She peered around the marble man—she was in luck. There was only one person in sight, pulling weeds from between flagstones, and he was already a friend.

  “Cagney,” she called out, and ran over to him, lifting her hat to show him her blond hair. “It's me, Skye Penderwick.”

  “Blue Skye, blue—” he started to say but was cut off, because now someone else was shouting his name. Someone who was close by and coming closer. “I'd better hide you. Sounds like she's in a bad mood.”

  “Who?” asked Skye, but Cagney was already lifting her right off the ground and into a large urn carved all over with vines and flowers.

  “Keep your head low and stay quiet till she's gone.”

  Skye crouched down and wished that Cagney had put her into an urn that didn't have three inches of dirty water at the bottom, but there wasn't time to worry about that, because the person in a bad mood was coming closer still, and now Cagney was calling out, “Over here, Mrs. Tifton!”

  Skye froze—the mysterious Mrs. Tifton! If only Skye could see! Why didn't urns have spy holes in them?

  “For heaven's sake, Cagney, didn't you hear me calling? I don't have time to be hunting you down.” The voice was sharp and impatient. It reminded Skye of her second-grade teacher, the one who'd accused her of cheating when she did long division, because second graders were only supposed to add and subtract. Along with the unpleasant voice came an annoying tap tap tapping noise on the flagstones. Mrs. Tifton must be wearing high heels. Snooty high heels.

  “Yes, ma'am, I'm sorry, ma'am. It won't happen again, ma'am,” said Cagney.

  “I've just received the schedule for the Garden Club competition. The judge and the committee will be here at Arundel three Mondays from now You know they'll be looking at gardens all over Massachusetts. I want mine to win this year.”

  “It will, Mrs. Tifton. I promise.”

  “You still have a lot of work to do.”

  “Yes, ma'am.”

  “What are you going to do with these urns? They look ridiculous empty.”

  To Skye's horror, the tap tap tapping noise was now heading toward her. She scrunched down even lower and was glad, at least, for her camouflage hat. It might hide her from above, if Mrs. Tifton was half blind.

  Suddenly there was a big thump, and Skye rocked back and forth in her hiding place. Cagney had taken a great leap in front of Mrs. Tifton and landed against the urn.

  “Jasmine,” he said. “Lots of pink jasmine from the greenhouse. Would you like to go see it now? Help me select the best plants?”

  “Of course not. That's what I pay you for. Oh, and Cagney, I want you to cut down that big white rosebush next to the driveway.”

  “The Fimbriata?” To Skye, Cagney's voice sounded the same as her father's had the day Hound ate a rare orchid.

  “It scratched Mrs. Robinette's car after the last Garden Club committee meeting. Get rid of it.”

  “Yes, ma'am.”

  When Mrs. Tifton's high heels had faded off into the distance, Skye felt safe enough to look up. Cagney was staring down at her gloomily. He said, “My uncle planted that rose thirty years ago. He wrapped it in burlap every winter to keep it alive. I can't kill it now just because Mrs. Robinette doesn't know how to steer.” He lifted Skye out of the urn.

  “Your uncle was a gardener here, too?” said Skye.

  “Uh-huh. I started coming over after school to help him when I was younger than you. He retired last year, and Mrs. Tifton gave me his job.”

  Skye bounced up and down to squish the dirty water out of her sneakers, then had a thought. “Why not move that rose over to our cottage? Daddy can take care of it while we're here.”

  Cagney brightened. “I could do that. Mrs. Tifton would never know And I wouldn't need to bother your father. I'll come over to water it every day.”

  Then came that voice again, from far away. “Caagneey!”

  “Here we go again,” said Cagney. “You'd better get out of here. I'll head her off before she sees you.”

  Although Skye would have preferred getting into the urn and spying on Mrs. Tifton again, she knew Cagney was right. She shook his hand good-bye, then, dodging from bush to bush, made her way around to the back of the marble thunderbolt man.

  “Caagneey,” she heard again, closer. Skye hurled her-self into the hedge tunnel and—CRASH!.—slammed into someone and fell to the ground in a tangle of arms and legs.

  “Ouch!” She checked her head for blood. But the camouflage hat had softened the blow and there was no major damage. Which was good, because she'd still have the strength to murder whichever o
f her sisters had caused this accident. She untwisted herself, pushed her hair out of her eyes, and looked at the person lying half under her.

  It wasn't one of her sisters. It was a boy about her own age with freckles and straight brown hair. His eyes were closed, and he was pale and lying still.

  “Are you unconscious?” said Skye in a panic. She yanked off her hat and fanned him with it. She had seen a cowboy use his hat to revive another cowboy in a movie once. But it wasn't working—the boy's eyes didn't open. Sometimes in movies they slap people, she thought, but she hesitated to slap someone she had just knocked out. Still, the boy was in trouble. If she had to slap him, she had to. She pulled back her hand and—

  He opened his eyes.

  “Thank goodness,” said Skye. “I thought you were dying.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Does your head hurt?”

  He touched his forehead and winced. “Not too bad.”

  “Okay, good. I'm going to help you get home. Where do you live?”

  “I live—”

  “JEFFREY!” It was Mrs. Tifton's voice again, and she sounded very close now.

  Skye put her hand over the boy's mouth and whispered, “Shh, trouble. That's snooty Mrs. Tifton and she's a real pain. If she caught us in her gardens, she'd—”

  The boy jerked away from her hand and struggled to sit up. He was even more pale than before, so pale she could count every freckle on his face.

  “Are you all right? You look like you're going to be sick,” she said.

  “JEFFREY! Where are you?” came Mrs. Tifton's voice again.

  Then Skye finally understood. “Oh, no.”

  “Excuse me,” said the boy with great dignity. “My mother's calling me and you're in my way.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The MOOPS

  IT WAS BATTY'S BEDTIME. She had taken a bath, brushed her teeth, and put on her mermaid pajamas, and now she was standing in the middle of her Arundel bedroom, looking around. The butterfly wings were hanging on the closet doorknob, ready for morning. Her favorite picture of Hound, the one that her father had framed, was on the little white dresser by the window. Rosalind had put Batty's special unicorn blanket on the bed, and Sedgewick the horse, Funty the blue elephant, Ursula the bear, and Fred the other bear were sitting on the pillow. It was an okay bedroom, Batty decided, not as safe and cozy as her room at home, but at least the closet had that secret passage into Rosalind's room. Nothing scary could hide in a closet like that, not with Rosalind right there.