Introducing Chapter CCLXVI of her epic romance, Oy, Rodney, Violet Crepuscular writes–
Whoa! Hold it! What happened to Chapters CCLII through CCLXV? That’s fourteen chapters missing!
Ms. Crepuscular explains, “A few readers may be confused by the absence of the intervening fourteen chapters. Well, I removed them from the story because nothing happened in them. Really, we are all better off going directly to Chapter CCLXVI.”
Somewhere in the missing chapters, Lord Jeremy has organized an expedition to go under the vicar’s backyard wading pool and rescue Lady Margo Cargo so that he and she can have their wedding. In fact, Lady Margo is languishing in the Plaguesby jail; but no one in Scurveyshire Town knows that.
Pressed into service for the expedition, whether they wish to go or not, are fifty bearers to carry supplies and equipment, a dozen armed askaris for defense–
Where in Scurveyshire did they find askaris?
“In all those famous expeditions to find the source of the Nile,” Lord Jeremy explains, “bearers and askaris are a must. For our purposes, a dozen Scurveyshire lads with slingshots and rakes will have to serve. We don’t have time to order a dozen genuine, authentic askaris from Zanzibar, where they are always looking for work.”
Handicapped by having two left feet, Lord Jeremy cannot lead the expedition in person. This job he has given to Constable Chumley, admonishing the bearers and askaris to obey the constable’s every command as if their lives depended on it. “And probably they do!” he adds.
The constable’s first command is, “Arree, sumble yer batpins and grith bair lunnies!” Everyone just stands around staring at each other. A few shots from Willis Twombley’s Colt revolver, fired judiciously around their feet, get them moving. One by one, following Constable Chumley, sixty-two men march under the wading pool and disappear from sight. A dreadful calm descends on Scurveyshire.
Meanwhile, back in Plaguesby, Lady Margo does some more languishing in jail before that hamlet’s chief magistrate, Tom Squim, the Great Conquering Khan of Plaguesby, offers to let her out if she will marry him and help him to found a dynasty rivaling, he says, the Plantagenets. She scornfully rejects him. “The Plantagenets are highly overrated,” she sniffs.
“We have ways of making people get married, here in Plaguesby,” he sneers. He does not reveal what those ways are.
I resent Lady Margo’s comments about the Plantagenets, to at least one of whom (Richard III) I’m very much attached (not literally).
But oh, what Cecil B. DeMille could have done with that expedition under the vicar’s wading pool!
Lady Margo was in a bad mood when she said that.
I can only imagine the ways Plaguesby employs to enforce an engagement. I will be on tenterhooks.
You might want to steer clear of Plaguesby until you find out. The Great Conquering Khan, Tom Squim, has introduced some rather eccentric laws there.
Yes. A forced marriage might interrupt my plans. I take it that Plaguesby is in a Blue state. 🙂
It figures, the best part of the book and Violet Crepuscular deletes it. How fortunate you have a copy of it. In 50 years it should sale for as much as a Beatles’ letter.