Kira went back to her guidebook. She was much, much better at the word-puzzles in the back than Nory was, because Kira was a wiz of a speller, and Nory was a speller from Mars, if not from the Big Dipper. Kira knew right on the spot that NGOL ERYLALG was a scramble of LONG GALLERY.
46. Some Chandeliers
On the stairs they passed by a painting of dead birds, which was called a still life because the birds are not moving or flying, but are just there, still as glass, which makes them easier to paint. ‘Still deads’ would be a more realistic name for them than ‘still lifes.’
‘Ulg, I think I just lost my appetite,’ said Kira.
‘Wouldn’t they go a little rotten while they were being painted?’ asked Nory. She was remembering something Mr. Blithrenner told them in History about the Aztecs, which was that once the priests were done with a sacrifice, they let the person’s brains rot in his chopped-off head. That was somewhat like what they did to Oliver Cromwell for chopping off the king’s head. They dug him up a few years after he was dead, then cut his head off of his by now totally disgusting body, and put it on a spike on a building so that any child passing by would point at it and say, ‘Mom, what is that strange black lump with teeth?’ Once again, nothing to be proud of.
The people who figured out Ickworth House had a better idea of what you would want to pass by on the stairway every day and instead of a big painting of dead birds they put up a woman holding a fan. The real-life fan that was painted in the picture was attached to the wall above the fireplace in one of the rooms upstairs, so you could compare the painted fan and the real fan and see how good a job the painter had done. He had done a fine job. Some fans used to be made from chicken skin, though, so they would qualify as being still lifes, too.
The Yellow Drawing Room of Wimpole House was quite reasonable, and it had a dome that was shaped like the Jasperium of the Cathedral, but with a chandelier hanging down from it that was slightly on the scrawny side. Ickworth had a humongous chandelier over the dining room table. A man there had explained that it used to be at a different house but it had suddenly plundered from the ceiling one day for some reason and they’d had to prune it down, like a huge bush that was run into by a tractor. They carefully saved all the good pieces, and threaded it with new string, and now you couldn’t possibly tell that it wasn’t the way it was meant to be when you looked at it, since it was an extravaganza of sparkles as it was. Kira found out from the children’s guidebook that it wasn’t actually a chandelier but a ‘gasolier,’ running on gas power.
‘Is it a diesel?’ Littleguy asked.
Nory suddenly remembered the bathrooms at the restaurant of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in San Francisco where she had gone to lunch one day with her parents. Each stall of the bathroom had a chandelier above it. She told Kira about it.
‘Wow, your own personal chandelier,’ said Kira. ‘That’s pretty incredible.’
Nory was quite content to have impressed her with a known fact about America.
45. The Bad Sister and the Good Sister
In the car home from Wimpole House, Kira licked Nory on her face, pretending to be one of the rare kinds of cow. Nory happened to be squeamish about being licked on the face and said, ‘Kira, stop.’
‘Let’s not have any saliva games in the car, please,’ called Nory’s father from the front seat.
That made Kira stop, and instead she and Nory played a game in which you pass a little orange ball back and forth, and whoever has the ball has to tell the next part of the story. Kira started it off.
‘Once,’ she said, ‘there was a good girl and a bad girl. They were identical sisters. One day the bad girl decided to play a trick on the good girl. This trick was …’ And Kira passed the orange ball to Nory.
‘Oh dear, I’ve come unbuckled,’ said Nory, fixing her seatbelt. ‘Okay, the trick was for the bad girl to put her foot down on the girl’s dress in a very fancy party that she was going to suggest to her mom that they have. She was spoiled and knew as a matter of course that her mom would agree. If she stepped on her good sister’s dress, her good sister would be embarrassed in front of everyone and be very upset. And so …’ Nory passed the ball to Kira.
‘So the mother let them do it,’ said Kira, and gave the ball back to Nory.
‘Let them have a big garden party,’ said Nory, and passed the ball back to Kira.
‘Have a huge garden party,’ said Kira. ‘But there was one desperate problem, and that problem was …’
‘That it was raining on the day they were going to have the garden party,’ said Nory.
‘So they decided to have the party inside,’ said Kira. ‘But there was another problem as well. The bad little girl, whose name was …’
‘Kuselda,’ said Nory.
‘Kuselda,’ said Kira, ‘was feeling rather sick. And the party went like this.’
‘The first part was successful,’ said Nory. ‘The good little girl was fussed over, everyone was nice to her, she was superb. Everything went well, until the bad girl decided that she would stagger out and she would still carry out with her plan. She suggested a dance, saying, “Of course I have to be with my beloved sister.” And the sister said …’
‘The sister said, “All right,” ’ said Kira. ‘And they had the dance. But when Krusella was just about to do it, something else happened.’
‘What happened was,’ said Nory, ‘the bad girl felt horribly sick. She felt so sick and faint she was almost too weak to press down hard enough with her foot on the dress. And yet she still decided she would try. But the mother, thinking it wasn’t intentional, called out, “Careful Kruselda, don’t step on your sister’s dress, you’re about to.” ’
‘So Kruselda had to not carry out her plan that night,’ said Kira. ‘But will she carry it out later? Find the answer.’
‘She decided firmly she would,’ said Nory. ‘She had made a plan and she was going to carry it out. She was so angry that she didn’t get to do it all that night she couldn’t sleep, and she was so tired that …’
‘She couldn’t get up for a week,’ said Kira. ‘Her plan almost slipped out of her mind, but at the end of the week, constantly thinking about how she could get revenge, she decided to …’
‘Not only step on her good sister’s dress,’ said Nory, ‘but somehow make her good sister’s hair come out of place and fluff up, in such a way that the good sister wouldn’t know it happened, just before she went out, so she would look just dreadful, and it would be just as well as she stepped on her dress.’
Kira whispered to Nory, ‘You still have to say when she would do this and how she would do this. Would she have another party, or what?’
‘But she didn’t know how to do carry out her plan,’ said Nory. ‘Then she finally thought of it. She’d have to …’
‘Have another party,’ said Kira. ‘But this time everyone was supposed to come all dressed up so you couldn’t guess who they were. If you guessed who a person was, the person had to …’
‘Duck for apples!’ said Nory. ‘And that would be pretty embarrassing at such a fancy wonderful party …’
‘Because you had to stick your head in the water,’ said Kira.
‘And because,’ said Nory, ‘the water would have food coloring in it, that made your face turn a awful color of pale green for a day, which would be extremely embarrassing, for this was a very rich and dignified family. So the bad girl asked her mom, who said sternly …’