The Penderwicks at Last

by Jeanne Birdsall

  Ben and Lydia helped, and soon Alice emerged, red-faced and wet-haired from the heat inside the head. “—and also, Jeffrey stopped at the Robinettes’ on the way here to tell his mother—”

  “Alice, I will tell my own tale.” He clapped his hand over her real mouth and held it there firmly. “When I got off the plane, I got Jane’s message about Mom’s insane marriage threats. So I stopped by to reassure her that I don’t want to marry any of you, and I promised to spend time with her tomorrow afternoon, and I told her she should try to relax until then.”

  “And not come here to yell at us?” asked Lydia.

  “I was more diplomatic than that, but yes. I also told her that none of you wants to marry me. That’s still true, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t,” said Lydia.

  Alice was desperately trying to give her answer through Jeffrey’s hand.

  He cautiously uncovered her mouth. “Yes?”

  “I don’t want to marry you, either,” she said. “And I never did, and never will.”

  “I might think about marrying you, Jeffrey,” said Ben, “but not if you’re going to be disinherited and broke.”

  “That’s the spirit,” said Jeffrey. “Now, where are your sisters? Should I surprise them, too?”

  Everyone agreed that he should surprise them. The film crew plus Jeffrey set off for the carriage house, looking for Jane. Ben kept whispering for them to move quietly, like thieves in the night, and everyone did try, except when Alice realized that Ben and Lydia hadn’t heard the whole story about the end of Sigrid as a girlfriend and Jeffrey threatened to stifle her again, and when Lydia was too happy about Jeffrey being at Arundel to keep from dancing and humming “What a Wonderful World,” until Ben threatened to take away her job as sound technician.

  When they were within yards of the carriage house, Jeffrey called a halt, and whispered to Lydia, “Go take a peek inside before I burst in. Make sure Jane isn’t at work on her novel.”

  This was wise on his part. When Jane was lost in her fictional world, she didn’t like being startled out of it. She said that the best ideas could be lost that way, never to be recaptured. Lydia crept to the window. Jane wasn’t writing—she was at the ironing board, pressing an ivory-colored sash—and she wasn’t alone. Batty was in the apartment with her, being the dress dummy for Rosalind’s gown.

  This was the first time Lydia had seen Rosy’s wedding gown on a person instead of a hanger. How splendid it was, its elegant simplicity, its classic flow of lighter-than-air voile. And how regal and grown-up Batty was in the dress, her dark curls pinned up like Rosalind’s would be for the wedding.

  Lydia waved the others over, but with a cautious finger to her lips. Even Alice made the trip without any noise, and now they could all see the dressmaking scene in the living room. Jeffrey leaned down to whisper in Lydia’s ear.

  “I thought Rosy wasn’t here.”

  “She’s not.” Lydia saw that he was staring at Batty. “That’s not Rosy.”

  He took a step back in surprise, then forward again, as if to make sure he understood what he was seeing. At the same moment, obeying some quiet command from Jane, Batty turned to face the window and caught Jeffrey’s eye. For what seemed like a long time, the two stared at each other with matching confusion. Until, slowly, Batty smiled, her smile the first warm day of spring, with the daffodils and violets bursting into bloom. She opened her arms and reached toward Jeffrey, and without another word, he went inside.

  * * *

  —

  It was almost midnight, and Jeffrey and Batty had already gone through much of the Gershwin songbook, most of Les Misérables, the latest Norah Jones album, and a bunch of early Kinks songs. Now they were almost at the end of A Little Night Music and showed no signs of stopping. They always produced this great outpouring of music after they’d been apart for a while, sharing new songs, ideas, and musical viewpoints.

  Jeffrey had been Batty’s introduction to music—he started her on the piano when she was only five. By the time she was eleven, she was calling him her mentore (Italian for “mentor”), avidly learning whatever he could teach, following any musical lead he gave her. In the last year or so, Jeffrey had begun to reject the term mentore, declaring that Batty was his equal now. Each time he said so, Batty tried to argue, but he always managed to steer her away from dispute and into music, and laughter. Laughter and music—these dominated Lydia’s memories of Batty and Jeffrey together.

  And dancing to their music. Lydia always danced for as long as she could keep up with them. And tonight she had the added joy of the new ballet skirt Jeffrey had brought her from Germany, a pale lilac one with silver threads woven in. He’d brought one for Alice, too, which made it even more special. But now Lydia was tiring and wanted to go to bed. At home, in Cameron, she would simply have done so. But she was in Arundel Hall, and couldn’t go upstairs, not as long as Batty was sitting on the piano bench with Jeffrey, singing. Because that would have meant going up alone. Jane was back at the carriage house, and Ben was already in his room, looking at the alien film footage. That left no one but Feldspar and Sonata, and they wouldn’t leave Batty.

  But there was hope for Lydia. Batty and Jeffrey were on the last verse of the last song of A Little Night Music. Surely they would stop now.

  “Hamilton!” said Batty. “We haven’t done Hamilton yet.”

  “Ready, and…” He played the opening chords on the grand piano.

  “No!” Lydia leapt at them from across the music room. “No Hamilton. Batty, please stop and go upstairs with me to bed.”

  “Is it that late already?” asked Batty.

  “Almost midnight!”

  “According to Alice, the mansion has ghosts,” Batty told Jeffrey. “This makes Lydia reluctant to sleep alone.”

  “Don’t laugh,” said Lydia.

  “I’m not.” Jeffrey frowned to emphasize his non-laughter. “Did Alice give details or just make generalizations?”

  “She said the ghosts are in the cellar.” Lydia decided not to mention that they were supposedly his mother’s ex-husbands.

  “I didn’t know about the cellar. When I was little, I thought the ghosts were in the dining room.”

  “Jeffrey,” said Batty. “You’re not supposed to encourage Lydia’s fears.”

  “Or increase them,” added Lydia. She hadn’t yet seen the dining room, but it was probably on this very floor of the mansion, even closer than the cellar was to her bedroom.

  “You’re right. I was very little at the time, though.” Jeffrey slid off the piano bench. “Let’s visit the dining room. If we don’t find ghosts, will you be less nervous?”

  Lydia couldn’t promise that. She could only promise that if they did find ghosts, she would never, ever sleep in the mansion again. And since she also couldn’t stay alone in the music room while the other two went off to the dining room, in a few moments she found herself creeping through the halls of Arundel, in pitch darkness, because Jeffrey said that turning on lights would scare away ghosts, nullifying the experiment. He went first, leading Batty by the hand, and Batty held Lydia’s. Lydia would have liked to have the dogs behind her, to separate her from the darkness, but Feldspar was out in front, his red shoe at the ready to repel any ghosts, and Sonata stayed close to Batty, whether to protect or be protected, Lydia didn’t know. Either way, this made Lydia last, and vulnerable to being sneaked up on.

  “We’ve reached the dining room,” said Jeffrey. “I’m going to push open the door, and we will quietly look around for ghosts. Ready?”

  “What do we do if we find any?” asked Batty.

  “Sing them something eerie. Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity,’ maybe.”

  Batty started to giggle, then choked into coughing when she tried to stop. Lydia couldn’t decide whether she wished Jeffrey and Batty would take the ghosts more seriously
or if their frivolity was a relief. In either case, she didn’t want anyone singing “Space Oddity,” a sad song about an astronaut alone in his spaceship.

  “If an astronaut dies in space,” she asked, “can his ghost come back to Earth to haunt people, or would he be stuck out in space forever with no one to haunt?”

  Lydia had meant this as a sincere question, but it had the unfortunate effect of making Batty giggle harder, and it was a while before everyone was quiet enough for Jeffrey to open the door.

  The dining room wasn’t as dark as the halls. Windows let in stray moonbeams, some landing on white dust sheets covering the furniture, others picking out the faces in the portraits. They weren’t friendly faces, mostly stern and taking themselves seriously, but at least they seemed to be staying in their frames. Except for one in the corner that might actually be empty—the moonlight showed just a dark rectangle with no one inside it.

  “Look over there, in the corner,” she hissed. “One of the portraits is empty.”

  “That should be my great-great-aunt,” said Jeffrey.

  “If she’s not in there, where is she?” Lydia couldn’t spot anything that looked ghostlike.

  “This is spookier than I thought it would be,” said Batty.

  “I never did like this room,” said Jeffrey. “Maybe Alice is right about—”

  Suddenly Batty was yelping and letting go of Lydia’s hand, leaving Lydia alone in a dark room through which a ghost was now drifting toward the empty frame, accompanied by a scraping noise that didn’t sound like chains or bones but was nonetheless distinctly unpleasant. Lydia fell to the floor and curled up into a ball like a threatened hedgehog, wishing she weren’t in her ballet skirt, because the moonlight could pick out the silver threads and make her easier to see.

  “I just turned the lights on, Lyds,” said Jeffrey. “It was only Feldspar getting tangled up in a dust sheet.”

  “What about your great-great-aunt?” Lydia spoke into her own stomach, because she wasn’t uncurling until she knew it was safe out there. “Is she back in her frame?”

  “Yes, if she ever left it. The moonlight probably tricked us.”

  Lydia distrusted Jeffrey’s casual assurance. “What’s Batty doing?”

  “Clinging to me in terror.”

  “No, I’m not,” said Batty, but when Lydia stopped being a hedgehog and could see again, she was pretty sure Batty had just un-clung herself.

  More important, the great-great-aunt was indeed back where she should have been, but Lydia still didn’t trust her.

  “She’s smirking at me,” she said. “She enjoyed terrifying us.”

  “Don’t take it personally,” said Jeffrey. “She always smirks.”

  With the dining room lit up, it seemed safe enough to Lydia. Maybe the great-great-aunt ghost had been her imagination, but—holy bananas!—who were those people painted onto the ceiling? Alice hadn’t mentioned this crew, lolling around, wearing togas and eating grapes. They probably weren’t more of Jeffrey’s relatives, though they might have been friends with lonely old Zeus, stuck outside in the gardens.

  “Who are these guys?” she asked Jeffrey.

  “No one important. My great-grandfather’s idea of culture.”

  Batty looked up. “The grape man! I remember him. Was I in this room when I was little?”

  “My eleventh birthday party,” said Jeffrey.

  “Your birthday! Now I remember—mostly I tried to slide under the table to hide from Dexter. I seemed to spend a lot of that visit hiding under things.”

  “There was a lot to hide from.”

  “Not from you, though,” she said. “You were my hero.”

  “Yup, that’s me,” said Jeffrey. “Okay, so no ghosts. Ready for Hamilton, Batty?”

  “Jeffrey! Batty!” cried Lydia. “You’re not going to start singing again, are you?”

  “We didn’t find any ghosts, honey,” said Batty.

  “But you were scared, too!”

  “No, I wasn’t. Not really.”

  “Yes, you were.”

  “No, I—”

  “Stop,” said Jeffrey. “I have an idea.”

  He took Lydia upstairs to Ben’s room, and informed Ben that Lydia was going to sleep in his spare bed until Batty came to fetch her. Ben protested. Then Jeffrey described the sound-recording equipment his father would be bringing for the wedding and said that Ben would probably be allowed to use it. And Ben gave in, with one condition—that before morning, Batty would come collect Lydia and take her back to their own room.

  “Because waking up with Lydia here would be unacceptable.”

  Lydia was still trying to come up with a good retort when she fell asleep, curled up on his bed, dreaming about ghostly great-great-aunts wearing togas and eating grapes.

  “BATTY DIDN’T COME GET me until two in the morning, and she was still singing—in French.” Lydia yawned hugely, then sang, “Ne me quitte pas, blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. What am I going to do? Ben won’t let me into his room every night, no matter what Jeffrey says.”

  “Sleep in my room from now on,” said Alice. “You can have either the top or bottom bunk.”

  “Really?” What a relief to never again sleep in the mansion.

  “Actually, I do prefer the top bunk, so if you wouldn’t mind the bottom—”

  “No, I mean, do you really think I can stay with you? Wouldn’t your parents mind?”

  “They’ll like it. They’ve decided you’re a good influence on me.”

  Lydia thought that being a good influence made her sound as boring as being a person who liked everyone (except she didn’t). But if that was what she had to suffer to get out of the mansion, she’d accept it.

  Both girls were in their new ballet skirts, swishing along on their way to see Blossom. Alice was carrying the oats in a bag—the skirts were without pockets—and Lydia was carrying Natalie’s phone, plus two books, in another bag. Alice knew about only one of the books, Practical Magic, written by an Alice for grown-ups. The other, sneaked in by Lydia, was a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. She was hoping to convince both Alice and Blossom to love it. Unless—she stopped walking—that could be considered being a good influence. No, she decided, and started walking again, quickly, to catch up with Alice as she entered the field.

  They’d decided to begin the visit with a dance, the best way to show Blossom their new skirts. This was the first time the two of them had danced together seriously, and anyone other than sheep would have appreciated the vision—the beautiful skirts, the fusion of ballet and tae kwon do, the paean to freedom and friendship. But to Blossom, the oat carriers seemed to have gone crazy, spinning around like bugs trying to escape a water trough. She stopped halfway across the field, apparently planning to chomp on grass until they became less buglike.

  The dancing a failure, the girls moved on to the second part of the entertainment. Alice took out oats, Lydia took out Practical Magic, and Blossom came the rest of the way over, accepting the oats and ignoring the book.

  Undeterred, Lydia opened it. “Blossom, although the book reading didn’t work out last time, we’re trying again.”

  “It was Lydia’s idea,” said Alice.

  “And a good one.” She started to read. “ ‘For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in town.’ ”

  “Skip to the conversation,” said Alice, giving out oats. “I like conversation.”

  Lydia skimmed through the beginning pages. “There’s none for another five and a half pages.”

  Alice groaned. “Then go on with the boring part.”

  “ ‘If a damp spring arrived, if cows’— Blossom, be careful!”

  Blossom had just stomped one of her hooves, nearly squashing Lydia’s right fo
ot in the process.

  “Maybe she doesn’t want to hear about cows,” said Alice.

  “I’ll skip the cows.”

  The phone in Alice’s bag dinged. A new photo had arrived from Jack, the first since the girls had sent him the one of Ben being a garden-pot-breaking superhero. It showed Jack and Slapshot jumping off a dock and into a lake. The lake was enough of a taunt—Arundel had no lake—but Jack had upped the sting with a message. Ben Penderwick does look interesting, but you don’t. Ha-ha.

  “Now it’s war,” said Alice. “Lydia, we have to be fascinating in the next photograph. Think. It’s important.”

  Lydia put away Practical Magic and pulled out Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. “I know you don’t like this book, but I think a photograph of Blossom listening to us read it would be fascinating.”

  “But she won’t listen! Look at her.” Blossom had wandered off to practice stomping where there weren’t feet in the way.

  “You said she didn’t want to hear about the cows. There’s a sheep in this book. Don’t you think she’d like to hear that?”

  “No!”

  “Please.”

  Alice did Mrs. Tifton’s pickle face—rating of two—but relented. “Do you promise that if this doesn’t work, we’ll think of something better for Jack?”

  “Yes, I promise. Get ready. I’ll start right where the sheep shows up.” Lydia cleared her throat and began to read. “ ‘ “Oh, much better!” cried the Queen, her voice rising into a squeak as she went on. “Much be-etter! Be-etter! Be-e-e-etter! Be-e-ehh!” The last word ended in a long bleat, so like a sheep that Alice quite started.’ ”

  “Blossom’s actually coming this way!” whispered Alice.

  Not wanting to break the spell, Lydia kept reading. “ ‘She looked at the Queen, who seemed to have suddenly wrapped herself up in wool. Alice rubbed her eyes, and looked again. She couldn’t make out what had happened at all. Was she in a shop? And was that really—’ ”