by Ashly Graham
The invention that my aunt showed, in devising ever more delectable ways of doing people in, or rather stimulating the murderous proclivities of those who acted as her fictional proxies, knew no bounds. The exit of Countess Lucia Ogriba is worthy of comment, as an example of the liberties Ginny Plunkett took with fact, history, and chronology as she skewered her prey. The mistresses of Lucia’s last three husbands, each of whom she had arranged to be killed, bribed William Caxton to give them access to the print room of The Daily Chronicle in the wee hours.
As the presses rolled the following morning’s edition, they put the murderess to bed with the paper, toes first and kicking; and the next day fifty people were hospitalized after eating plaice and chips wrapped in the page of the newspaper containing the Ogriba’s obituary, stained with impressive evidence that she was, unlike the Chronicle, out of circulation.
The Dungeon Series was translated into every language from French to Farsi, and letters of adulation poured into the offices of Jenny’s agent and publisher. Fan clubs flourished. Around the world there was a decline in the number of real crimes committed, of every type and severity. Hardened felons, from first- and second-degree murderers, terrorists, drug-dealers, rapists, and pimps, to fraudsters, snitches, and the humble burglar and pickpocket: so busy were they reading Plunkett’s picaresques that they forgot to show up for work.
Even children, who stopped as matter of course on their way to school to steal sweets at the newsagent, now went to the bookshop to thumb editions that they couldn’t afford.
A hundred prison guards were sent on indefinite leave. As an experiment at a maximum security prison, the gates were thrown open, and the prisoners left to fend for themselves. Instead of showing the penitentiaries a clean pair of heels, the convicts stayed put and ordered in a steady stream of the books from the Barnes&Noble, Amazon and other dot coms, and the mobile library; and Italian sausage and pepper, pepperoni, meatball, Ultimate Cheese, and bacon and pineapple Hawaiian, pizza from Domino’s and Pizza Hut. They threw away the pineapple; nobody liked it.
Virtual crime was so much easier than the fag of having to commit it oneself, and, thanks to Lady Eugénie’s fructuous fantasy skills, twice as satisfying.
As a succinct example of Jenny’s style, a passage from her fifth novel, entitled The Mystery of the Minced Marquess, in which the heir to the throne receives what would have been his come-uppance, had he done anything to deserve his fate other than to behave naturally, comes to mind:
When the port was served after the ladies had left, and a footman had left several baskets of walnuts and nutcrackers on the table, the Prince of Wales filled his glass and passed the decanter to his left, according to the tradition that it circulate the table clockwise, even if the only person who would take any (an abstemious impossibility) was sitting on one’s immediate right.
George Arthur Smethwick Albert Edward Brian, known as Doddie, or Smelly because he was, raised the crystal before a candelabrum and admired the ruby colour of the wine, which was only marginally lighter than his complexion and that of the carbuncular ring on his finger.
The Prince of Wales’s host, the Earl of Damdify, was about to launch into one of his daffish anecdotes, and His Royal Highness prepared to be bored.
‘Yesterday, my third or fourth whelp,’ said Damdify, ‘I don’t remember which, or the slut I sired it on, came to me and said, “P-Papa, I’ve decided it’s time for m-me to d-d-do something with my l-life.”
‘“Demme,” said I, “and you not a day over forty. What d’you have in mind?”
‘“Well, sir, with your p-permission I rather like the sound of the Navy. I’ve already asked M-Mummy, and she says it’s all right if I p-promise to b-b-bundle up on d-deck.”
‘“You d-d-do, d’you,” I said, “and y’have, and ’tis?”
‘“Yes sir, I d-do and I have, and it is,” he answered.
‘“Son,” said I, meaning to razz him a little, “you recall the words of Churchill, d’you not? Not the first Churchill, nor the second, but one of ’em.”
‘“No sir, I’m afraid I don’t,” he said; “but might you be pleased to enlighten m-m...”
‘“Certainly,” I replied; “what the man said was, ‘Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash.’ What d’you think o’ that, me boy? Rum, sodomy, and the lash!”
‘The milquetoast’s face fell. “Oh sir,” he said, “that I didn’t know, and I thank you for the w-w-warning. The only taste of rum I ever had caused me to p-pass out.”’
While the others chortled, the Prince of Wales downed his glass of port and frowned at the bitter taste. Also inexplicable was the smell of almonds, for there were none in the basket before him, only walnuts.
It was just like Damdify to serve an inferior vintage; and HRH decided to demand of his host that he have the butler bring up a better bottle from the cellar.
‘I say, Damdify,’ said Doddy, ‘ring for your man. This port tastes like poison.’
And with that, George Arthur Smethwick et al. frothed at the mouth and fell to the floor. The others watched, fascinated, as HRH’s face empurpled with agony, and the muscles of his neck stood out like whipcords.
The spectacle was quickly over, and Damdify dabbed his lips with his napkin and smiled into the fold. He was now third in line for the throne; which was not bad, considering that a mere twelvemonth ago he had been languishing at number fourteen.
”
Chapter Twenty-Six
“
Eugénie Beauvais Plantagenet had only just reached her majority and sent back the proofs of her twenty-second, and what she intended to be her last, novel to the Vigilante Press when she was herself the subject of an extraordinary adventure, which beggared anything that she had committed to paper, and put an end to any regret she might have about discontinuing her career as a writer.
She stuck the knife in one last time by making public avowal of her literary identity as the progenitor of The Dungeon Series, and scourge of the titled, upper, and moneyed classes. The members of the castle staff, who were as loyal to their mistress as if they had sworn a blood oath, had refrained from leaking the fact. Nor had the truth been forthcoming from Jenny’s agent and publisher: despite their hunger to release the information that would boost the already astronomic sales of her books, the canny Father Anselm, whom Jenny had appointed to oversee her affairs, had taken steps to ensure that they were contractually bound to confidentiality.
The stigma that marked Otto Huntenfisch, as soon as Ginny Plunkett in all her gory glory was revealed to be his wife, resulted in his being ostracized by Society.
Piling Pelion on Ossa, owing to the prolonged distractions of his Dragonburgh project, and the unforeseen and punitive costs of upgrading the castle and estates to what he deemed to be the requisite standards, his lordship was also brought low in his financial affairs.
But Huntenfisch, ever orgulous and resourceful, didn’t abandon hope of resuming his social agenda. He retained ownership of the castle by the simple expedient of transferring the title to his wife. By rights, Eugénie would in due course have inherited the place, had not her parents been overcome by greed; but now she was spared the temptation to take a leaf out of one of her own books as a means of getting rid of her husband, in order to regain the freehold.
Then Huntenfisch, through many further shady commercial ventures and tradings of the kind that he had been so successful in earlier in his career, contrived to expunge his debts and accumulate a second fortune even bigger than the first; in celebration of which he went on safari in Africa, having forged a licence to shoot the last remaining white rhinoceros.
After bagging the rhino, and sending the horn home to be ground into powder for his personal use as an aphrodisiac, his lordship flew to Alaska on his new Gulfstream private jet with a mixed bag of his cronies, a lot of powerful weaponry, and malice aforethought to molest the brown bear population.
Lo! While Lord Huntenfis
ch was out of the country, a freak storm blew up out of the North Sea: a storm of such phenomenal strength that it threatened to destroy Dragonburgh castle itself, and bring it crashing down upon its rocky foundations.
Even for Dragonburgh, which in its bleak position had withstood many centuries of battering from the full force of the mightiest winds and waves from the arctic north, this was an event of catastrophic magnitude.
To experience foul weather at the fortress was so common as to be little heeded; but there had been nothing in Jenny’s lifetime, nor was there contained in the memory of anyone associated with the place, nor in the historical records of the locality, to compare with this. It was the mother of all tempests, and to say that there was thunder and lightning and rain does nothing to convey the impact of the assault.
The very rock, on which the castle had been built so long ago that it seemed to have become part of it, shook as if from an earthquake, and walls that had stood for nigh on a thousand years shuddered with mortality, as if Zeus had hurled a volley of thunderbolts at them. The waves must have been stirred from the deepest depths of the North Sea; the winds, launched from the four corners of the world; the hail, flung from the empyrean. Slabs of stone and roofs were tossed and torn asunder like rice-paper, turrets were toppled, and cascades of water—whether of rain or sea it was impossible to say—poured into the many breaches.
The place that had been taken for granted by generations of Plantagenets, for the first time seemed vulnerable.
It was a testament to Lady Eugénie’s extraordinary sympathy with the various moods of her surroundings, that she slept through all of this, and awoke at the normal time to find the castle in chaos and uproar.
As if pretending to share her innocence of what had taken place overnight, the weather conditions were a picture of passivity. There was a gentle sea-swell and a playful breeze. The sun was smiling sweetly upon the sea-lavender and thrift atop the cliff, and seals were basking on the rocks at the base. Of the many birds, the puffins, guillemots, fulmars, shearwaters, and razor-bills, and the stormy petrels—Mother Carey’s Chickens—were going about their business as usual with unruffled wings. How any of them had survived such a night was a marvel; but the kittiwakes were as noisy as ever, and the cormorants...or shags, or scarts...were skimming the surface as they always did. Gannets were plunging, and the gulls and skuas and sea-swallow terns, and sea-pies or oyster-catchers, uttering their screams and rasping cries and piping, were flocking and circling and slicing the air, diving and banking.
The condition of the castle was a different matter. Of the huge sums of money that Lord Huntenfisch had expended on upgrading Dragonburgh to the grand state with which he wished to impress his visitors, no evidence remained.
Most strangely, despite whatever destruction might be thought to have been wreaked the night before, the elements had been most partial in what they attacked. As a tornado is selective in leaving some buildings untouched, and reducing others to rubble and matchwood, everything that had been rebuilt and remodelled and modernized was in ruins, while the rest was as it had been, as non-functionally functional as ever.
While all the tons of Carrara marble that had recently been imported, fabricated to measure and installed, were demolished and broken, the fragile ancient appointments that had survived centuries, in states of terminal disrepair, were no less intact than before. While the new fabrics and soft furnishings—the window treatments, carpets, and upholstery—were stripped and soaked and shredded, everything that was original of the tapestries and rugs and antiques…all the “new” ones were smashed…remained as delicate and threadbare and close to collapse as they had been for hundreds of years.
But the newly imported beds, tables, sofas, and chairs, and the new cabinets, cupboards, sideboards, wardrobes, and chests, and other furniture and replicas, as selected by interior designers from such as the Sir Humphry Wakefield, Baronet—an aesthete, he had been spared the Plunkett purge—Baker Stately Homes Collection, and other pieces custom-made from exotic woods by the Linley Company, were crushed and splintered beyond salvage and repair.
All the new state-of-the-art appliances, and the new fixtures and fittings, and the renewed plumbing in the old kitchens and bathrooms, now resembled transplanted organs and grafts that had been rejected by the human body.
And the smoothly filled and repointed and repainted walls and ceilings, and restored woodwork, were so crumbled, besmirched, and pitted that they looked exactly as they had before the army of decorators arrived.
The storm had reserved the worst of its wrath for the wing that had been appropriated by Otto Huntenfisch as his personal private quarters. In fiery defiance of lightning conductor rods and electrical earths, this area had been struck repeatedly by lightning, accompanied by a series of thunderclaps that had sounded like Big Bertha, the First World War howitzer produced by Gustav Krupp’s factory and named after his wife, at point-blank range.
As the quailing servants had watched from the keep, a red brick and steel communications tower, bristling with antennae and aerials and satellite and radio dishes, had been toppled; and his lordship’s office, bedroom, lounge suite, screening room, billiard and snooker room, and—his pride and joy—the gun and tackle room, were no more.
Elsewhere, if there were any steaming and smouldering beams and trusses in the roof, where sections of it had been exposed by the ravages of the lightning, nothing had ignited or seemed likely to do so, owing to the torrential rain that had accompanied them. Nor did anything seem in danger of further collapse.
In fact, Lady Eugénie noted with approval as she wandered about, calmly surveying the damage, the castle had been “restored” rather well. Like a great unkempt and rangy hound plagued by fleas, which its owner, grim and determined, had bathed and brushed and combed and styled, the fortress had risen and shaken itself and scrambled down from its rock to scramble through the surf, rollick across the moors, roll in the heather, and splash in the river; before returning home and falling asleep, dishevelled and content.
There being a nine hour time difference between Dragonburgh and the lodge on the Brooks river, Alaska, where Huntenfisch and his party were staying, his lordship had just retired to bed with a bottle of schnapps and the owner–manager’s daughter. [Aunt Jenny never treated me as other than an adult.]
Otto Huntenfisch was feeling his oats: it had been an exciting day, during which he had exited pursued by a bear, per the stage direction in The Winter’s Tale, from a cave into which he’d stepped in order to introduce a fifteen hundred pound male brown bear, Ursus arctos, the largest species of land-based carnivore—the grizzly bear, Ursus arctos horribilis, was smaller and lived inland—to a three-hundred grain bullet from his new point-376 calibre Steyr rifle.
This his lordship had succeeded in doing, but only later and outside the cave, from a distance as might have been advisable in the first place.
The group that returned to the lodge that night, after the bear had been skinned, was one member short, owing to the absence of Huntenfisch’s personal assistant, Jessman. Acting in accordance with the procedures enumerated by the Brooks Range guide who gave the party its bear safety lecture that morning, his lordship had been obliged to sacrifice Jessman to the aggrieved ursid, in order to save his own hide.
In the event of a confrontation, bear etiquette required that one should make oneself look as big as possible; not to climb a tree unless one wanted company; and not to take one’s leave uphill, because a bear’s powerful forelegs are built for fast climbing...downhill it isn’t as agile. One was not to make eye contact with the animal because this, rather than being taken as a mark of sincerity as one apologized for intruding upon its personal space, would enrage it.
One should speak loudly or sing, so as to reassure the dim-sighted beast that, although its acute sense of smell did not deceive it as to the direction of one’s streaming sweat glands, and wet or brown underwear, one wished it nothing but long life and happiness.
Ab
ove all, one should resist the temptation to pet its cub and tell it how cute it was.
If fishing, the line should be cut to disassociate oneself from the salmon that one is battling, from which connection the bear might presume that the human attached to it was also on the menu. If hunting, no shot ought to be fired if one wasn’t certain of a kill.
As Huntenfisch and Jessman entered the cave, unaccompanied by the guide because he was with the rest of the party eating lunch, and heard Bruin’s first roar of disbelief that some body should be entering its dwelling without an appointment or knocking, the solicitous Jessman—who had not attended the guide’s briefing after breakfast because, not being an outdoorsman, he had thought it prudent to consume extra pancakes and maple syrup to keep him going through the day—as his last service to his lordship reminded his boss of the cardinal rule, as Jessman understood it, about what not to do when there were bears around: Don’t Run Away.
For Jessman, bless his heart for taking his boss’s safety so seriously, had read in National Geographic magazine on his lordship’s private jet coming over, that brown bears can run over short distances faster than any animal outside the cat family.
To which Huntenfisch responded that, yes, Jessman, he was already aware of this, having learned it from the guide that very morning; and his lordship pointed out that, while impressive, a bear’s speed on its pins was irrelevant so long as he, Huntenfisch, was confident of being able to run faster than his companion.
Which is why, Huntenfisch said, he’d chosen the two hundred and fifty pound plus pancakes Jessman to accompany him into the cave, in preference to one of his lordship’s lither assistants.