ICAP 2 - The Hidden Gallery Read Free Page A

once taken a class at Swanburne called Great Orations of Antiquity, in which she had to memorize famous speeches given by generals and politicians from days of old. From this exercise she had learned that when faced with the task of having to convince the citizenry of a flimsy argument, the best strategy is to speak in a loud voice and leave no time for questions.
    â€œNo luggage. There; that settles the matter,” shebellowed. “Nutsawoo will stay here and keep an eye on the nursery while we are gone. On to geometry! Gather your graph paper, please.”
    Cassiopeia’s eyes began to well up with tears.
    â€œIt will be a short trip and the time will go quickly,” Penelope added, sounding less firm than before.
    â€œPostcard?” the girl asked with a sniff. “For Nutsawoo?”
    Penelope was about to explain that Nutsawoo could not read, but then she sighed. For how could she argue? After all, these were three children who had lived in the woods with no one but wild animals to care for them. If they could be taught, by patient repetition and the judicious use of treats, to live indoors, eat cooked food (liberally doused in ketchup, of course), appreciate the rudiments of poetry, and even perform complicated dance steps, as the Incorrigibles had already, impressively, done, who was to say that dear Nutsawoo, somewhere in the shallows of that simple, frantic squirrel brain, might not appreciate receiving a picture postcard from London? The naughty fur ball might even write back, for all Penelope knew.
    â€œOf course we will send postcards to Nutsawoo. And we shall bring him back a present as well. In fact,” she went on, with the instinctive knack every goodgoverness has for turning something enjoyable into a lesson, and vice versa, “I will expect all three of you to practice your writing by keeping a journal of our trip so that Nutsawoo may know how we spend our days. Why, by the time we return, he will think he has been to London himself! He will be the envy of all his little squirrel friends,” she declared.
    Penelope had no way of knowing if this last statement was true. Could squirrels feel envy? Would they give two figs about seeing London? Did Nutsawoo even have friends? To seriously consider the answers to these questions would require Penelope to do something called “going off on a tangent,” which is another way of saying “to stray from the subject at hand.” To go off on a tangent is always a risky maneuver, for once one has gone, it is often surprisingly difficult to find one’s way back. Penelope knew better than to let this happen, so she simply stood her ground and waited.
    Luckily, it took only a moment for her statement about Nutsawoo to have the desired effect on the children.
    â€œPictures?” Beowulf asked. Beowulf loved to draw and had a real talent for it, too.
    â€œYes, you may include pictures in the journal.” Fearing she was making the assignment too easy, Penelopeadded, “But the captions must be written in French. Now, that is quite enough discussion, for ‘Ten parts talking is half as much as one part doing,’ as Agatha Swanburne used to say. Never mind about the graph paper. We shall study geometry by calculating the volume of our suitcases and organizing our packing accordingly.”
    The children eagerly obeyed and gathered their possessions into neat piles, which they proceeded to measure. Alexander jumped on his pile and knocked it over a few times before settling down to work, and Beowulf had a tendency to gnaw on his ruler, but not to the extent where it threw off his arithmetic. Cassiopeia, though the youngest, was a whiz at math, and easily finished before her brothers.
    All the while Penelope heard the three of them murmuring to one another in funny little grunting sounds, which, she assumed, constituted their efforts to learn some French in time for the trip. She hardly expected them to do so, as they