The Queen Will Visit Scurveyshire

The news today is just awful, as usual, so turn we unto something a little less awful…

In Chapter CII of Oy, Rodney by Violet Crepuscular, everything has been disrupted by the startling news that the Queen plans to visit Scurveyshire.

“What queen?” wonders Lady Margo Cargo.

“It don’t matter–a queen’s a queen,” replies her fiancee, the American adventurer Willis Twombley, who thinks he is Sargon of Akkad.

“But this is wonderful, Sargon! If we have her as a guest at our wedding, she may help you get your empire back!”

“Well, maybe. But listen, l’il gal, I got to tell you a secret, and you got to keep it. Okay?”

“I can keep a secret, my dear. I always forget secrets before I can tell them.”

Twombley takes a deep breath. “L’il gal, it’s like this. You know Lord Germy Coldsore?”

“I’ve known Lord Jeremy all his life,” says Lady Margo, “ever since he was a foundling left on the doorstep of Coldsore Hall.” Anyone else would be floored by this shocking revelation, but Twombley lets it slide right past him.

“Here’s the secret: me and Lord Germy, we’re the same guy. So when you marry me, you’ll be marrying him, too.”

“Oh, Sargon, how can that be? You don’t even look like him.”

“That’s on account of my secret Akkadian powers of illusion,” Twombley explains. “I can look like me and him standin’ side by side at the same time. Been doin’ in for years. I had to learn it because, you know, bein’ king of Akkad, I got a lot of enemies. Especially them Babylonians–they’re always tryin’ to do me in. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Mind what?”

“Me bein’ Germy, too, and you marryin’ him and sayin’ it’s me. That’s okay with you, ain’t it?”

“Whatever you say, Sargon dear.” At this point she has to pause and rearrange her wig.

Sargon of Akkad: add a cowboy hat, and his resemblance to Willis Twombley is easily detectable.

Meanwhile Constable Chumley, guarding the wading pool in the vicar’s back yard, reports that “I seen a perby divvil of a throll peekin’ out from under yon pool, and it skeered the limmins out of us!” No one is quite sure what he means.