At last! Lord Jeremy Coldsore has eloped to marry Lady Margo Cargo, the richest widow in Scurveyshire.
Chapter CCCXLI of Violet Crepuscular’s epic romance, Oy, Rodney, opens with Lord Jeremy and the vicar waiting in the abandoned warehouse in Plaguesby, where the marriage is to be secretly performed. They have to be careful because there’s plague in Plaguesby. Also in attendance, as best man, is Jeremy’s bosom friend, the American adventurer, Willis Twombley. He has a burlap bag over his head. This provokes a fit of the giggles from the vicar.
“Why has he got a burlap bag over his head?” the vicar asks, giggling.
“Because Lady Margo thinks he and I are the same person, and it confuses her when she sees us both together,” Lord Jeremy explains. The vicar finds that richly humorous.
Midnight draws near, without a sign of Lady Margo. “What’s keeping her?” Jeremy grumbles.
“Alas, dear reader,” Ms. Crepuscular breaks into the narrative, “Lady Margo, escorted by her crusty old butler, Crusty, has misunderstood the plan and gone to an abandoned warehouse in the isolated nearby village of Plaguespot. The place has an unwholesome reputation! It is said that Black Rodney’s brother, Red Pokey, passed through Plaguespot in 1483 and, just for practice, put a terrible curse on it.”
As midnight draws near, Crusty grows impatient.
“I told you Coldsore was no good, you stupid old bat,” he confides in Lady Margo. “How can you trust a man with two left feet? Both of which seem to have gotten cold!”
“I can’t say I like this as a location for a wedding,” mutters Lady Margo. “All those sinister voices whispering I don’t know what, all around us in the dark! Are you sure this is where dear Jeremy said he’d meet us?”
Crusty is jealous: he has long desired Lady Margo for himself.
Just then, a long-drawn-out, hideous moaning erupts from the shadows–
We suspect it’s the reader.
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