The Penderwicks on Gardam Street by Jeanne Birdsall Read Free Book Online

Penderwick vehemently.
    “Daddy!” Rosalind was shocked, for their father never showed temper.
    But Skye laughed and squeezed his arm, and together everyone went inside.

CHAPTER FIVE
    The First Date
    A FTER CHANGING OUT of her soccer uniform, Jane gathered some supplies—an apple, a pen, and a blue notebook—and headed up Gardam Street. She was going to Quigley Woods, her favorite place in the whole world.
    Quigley Woods was forty acres of glorious wilderness carved out of the middle of Cameron. No one remembered who the Quigleys were, or what they’d done when they lived there. The only traces of them were low stone walls that wandered here and there through the woods—so maybe the Quigleys had been farmers, or herders, or as Jane liked to pretend, aristocracy escaping the French Revolution, though she hadn’t come up with a good reason why French dukes and duchesses would have been named Quigley. Anyway, now the land was owned by Massachusetts, but since the major entrance was off the Gardam Street cul-de-sac, the children of Gardam Street considered it their private domain.
    It was an unwritten rule of the neighborhood that you didn’t go into Quigley Woods alone until you were ten, and even then, you didn’t go deep in without at least a teenager, if not an actual grown-up. Everyone knew what “deep in” meant—past the wide burbling creek that cut across the main path about a quarter of a mile from the entrance. This still left what felt like a vast natural kingdom to play in, and Jane and her sisters knew every tree and rock and dip of land.
    That day she headed to what she called her Enchanted Rock. Though she was ten, all certainty of magic had not yet been squashed out of her, and she believed that if there was any at all in Massachusetts, it would be stored in that rock. Her sisters could know none of this—Rosalind was too old for magic adventures, Batty too young, and Skye had given up on magic the day she discovered long division.
    “Hello,” she said when she reached her destination. “It’s me, Jane.”
    She was in a round clearing in the woods, filled with wild asters and ancient rambling roses planted long ago by the mysterious Quigleys. But the asters and roses, however lovely, were overshadowed by Jane’s Enchanted Rock, in the center of the clearing. It was big—taller even than Jane, and just as wide as it was tall—and with lots of smaller rocks piled up around it. Jane was sure that such a large rock would have a fabulous history. Maybe it was even a meteorite, tossed out of the heavens to land here in Quigley Woods. The smaller rocks she wasn’t so sure about. Maybe they’d been dragged to that spot by some fantastical magnetic force in the big one, doomed for eternity to serve as its worshipful underlings.
    “And I have an offering.”
    She hoisted herself up onto the smaller rocks, then knelt and reached way down, feeling along the surface of the big rock. Years ago she’d discovered a natural crevice down there, just wide enough for her hand and just deep enough to make it the perfect hiding space. She used it for only certain of her treasures, those most likely to be happy in magical surroundings. Like the shells she’d collected on Cape Cod the last summer her mother was alive; the poor doll named Anjulee, whose head Skye had knocked off; the pen with which she’d written her first Sabrina Starr book; and a Bruins ice hockey puck that Tommy had left in the Penderwicks’ driveway last winter. Many times she’d imagined him wondering aloud what had ever happened to his Bruins puck, and she would be able to say, Why, Tommy, I’ve kept it safe for you all this time.
    There was the crevice—she’d found it. And now for her offering. She pulled several sheets of paper out of her sweatshirt pocket and stuffed them deep into the rock.
    “As you protect my treasures, Enchanted Rock, please accept in addition this awful thing, and purify it, and take away its