Tag: Lord Jeremy Coldsore

‘Oy, Rodney’ Gets Sticky

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Author Violet Crepuscular has apologized, in advance, for Chapter CXLVIII of her epic romance, Oy, Rodney. “A few readers, just a very few, but not to be ignored, have complained that the story I am telling strikes them as preposterous. For this I apologize, but it’s too late to change it. Besides which, I don’t think it’s preposterous!”

In this chapter, Sir Ector Fullovit, Queen Victoria’s Witch-Finder General, arrives in Scurveyshire to investigate rumors of strange events around the vicar’s backyard wading pool. The itinerant spider girl, Lizzie Snivel, promptly falls in love with him. She has a bad habit of falling hopelessly in love with unsuitable men.

Sir Ector first calls at Coldsore Hall, where he finds Lord Jeremy selling lemonade at the entrance to his palatial driveway. Lord Jeremy’s wedding to Lady Margo Cargo looms in the background. You can see it looming if you know where to look.

“This lemonade tastes horrible,” Sir Ector says. “Are you a practitioner of witchcraft?”

“If I were, sir, I’d have better lemonade.”

“Why haven’t you, as Justice of the Peace, put a stop to these goings-on around the vicar’s wading pool?”

This question is a poser, and Lord Jeremy has no answer for it. “Never mind,” says Sir Ector. “I suspect everyone.”

That night, he stakes out the wading pool, driving several stakes into the ground and waiting for something to happen. The following morning, Miss Lizzie finds his sneakers and his witch-finder’s hat on the ground beside the pool–but no Sir Ector. Her screams and lamentations bring Constable Chumley running to see what’s the matter.

“Black Rodney’s got Sir Ector!” she wails. “Look at these deep drag marks leading to the pool!”

“‘Tis a swaikful dreeg,” sighs the constable.

“Why don’t you do something? Why don’t you get some men to lift up the pool?”

Chumley shrugs. He has not thought of this. “‘Tain’t my hozza to feern a dibble con,” he answers, in his old-fashioned country dialect. What country, we are not told.

 

The Wedding Rehearsal (‘Oy, Rodney’)

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Now that he’s been elected justice of the peace, Lord Jeremy Coldsore can perform his own marriage to Lady Margo Cargo, the richest widow in Scurveyshire, and so save Coldsore Hall from its wolf-pack of creditors–some of whom have already been shot, and hidden away, by his friend Willis Twombley, the American adventurer who thinks he’s Sargon of Akkad.

Welcome to Chapter CXLII of Violet Crepuscular’s epic romance, Oy, Rodney. Here we adjourn to Lady Margo’s parlor for the wedding rehearsal. Present are Jeremy and Lady Margo, Twombley, and Lady Margo’s pet crayfish, Oswin, serving as a witness. The crusty old butler, Crusty, has refused to come up from his butler’s pantry: “I refuse to be a party to this monstrosity,” he says.

“I feel a bit strange about all this, Sargon,” Lady Margo says. “I find it hard to remember that you and my dear Jeremy are actually the same person.”

“Don’t you let it worry you, l’il gal,” says Twombley. “It took me a long time to learn how to be two different guys at once, but it’s the only way I can keep them pesky Babylonians from dry-gulchin’ me.” He points to the window. “See that gardener out there, with the wheelbarrow full of poison ivy? He don’t look it, but he’s two guys masqueradin’ as one–a Babylonian spy. I’ll deal with him later.”

Lord Jeremy, as justice of the peace, will perform the ceremony, with Twombley as best man. From time to time they must switch their positions. Like this:

“Do you, Lord Jeremy Coldsore, take this woman, Lady Margo Cargo, for your lawfully wedded wife?” He then moves to Lady Margo’s side to say “I do.” Meanwhile, Twombley takes his place as justice of the peace. After saying “I do,” Jeremy goes back to being the justice of the peace and Twombley takes his place next to Lady Margo. “Do you, Lady Margo Cargo, take his man, Lord Jeremy Coldsore, for your lawfully wedded husband?” Glancing at Twombley, she replies, “I do! I mean, I think I do. This would be so much easier if we had the vicar here!”

“He’s still down with the conniptions, l’il gal,” Twombley explains. “We can always fit him in if he snaps out of it.”

He and Jeremy trade places again, and Twombley says, “If there is anyone here who’s got any kind o’ tomfool reason why these two here should not be hitched, let him speak now or forever shut his trap.”

“I object!” peeps the crayfish.

And Lady Margo, having time only to mutter, “Black Rodney strikes again!” keels over in a swoon. Twombley, unable to catch both her wig and her glass eye, lets both drop to the floor. In fact, so does Lady Margo.

“We’ve got to do better than this!” cries Lord Jeremy.

“Practice makes perfect, Germy,” says Twombley. “And a certain crayfish is gonna wind up in a bowl of gumbo if he tries any more tricks!”

 

The Trial of the Century (‘Oy, Rodney’)

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In Chapter CXL of Violet Crepuscular’s indescribable romance, Oy, Rodney, she takes up “the Trial of the Century” in Scurveyshire.

Jasper, the village idiot, comes before Lord Nodule, Justice of the Peace, on the charge of creating a public nuisance. Before any testimony can be given, Lord Nodule bangs his gavel and announces, “I sentence you to be impaled!”

A shocked silence falls over the courtroom, broken only by Willis Twombley’s comment to Lord Jeremy Coldsore in the gallery, “Y’know, Germy, them johnny-come-lately Assyrians used to impale folks all the time. Did wonders for public morale. I’ll definitely consider it, once I git my kingdom back. Run out the Turks and impale the whole gang.” Twombley, an American adventurer, still thinks he’s Sargon of Akkad.

Jasper is the first to find his voice. Well, not the first: more like the second. “My lord, I must object most vigorously to this absurd and barbarous sentence, and you may be sure I shall file a formal complaint with the Chief Justice of England. You have no authority to levy these draconian punishments!”

Lord Nodule is confused. “Draconian?”

“Yes, my lord. According to Plutarch and other classical writers, Draco was made dictator and lawmaker of Athens in the generation or two before Solon–”

“Enough!” Lord Nodule snatches off his wig and slams it on the bench. “Enough, I’ve had enough of mollycoddling public offenders! No impalings indeed!” He hurls his gavel over his shoulder and storms out of the courtroom. His parting shot: “Tell the Lord Chief Justice he can’t fire me, I quit!”

Suddenly Scurveyshire is without a justice of the peace. The mayor laments, “Suddenly we are without a justice of the peace! What are we to do? We need a replacement!”

“I nominate Jasper,” calls out Mr. Jimcrack, the wool magnate. A hubbub ensues, until Sir Alastair Widget, an amateur scientist who breeds very skinny, bad-tempered hogs, calls for silence.

“There is only one obvious replacement for Lord Nodule!” he bellows. “I nominate Lord Jeremy Coldsore of Coldsore Hall! He’s the only lord we’ve got left.”

Jeremy is speechless. The crowd goes wild with enthusiasm, and he is elected on the spot by popular acclaim. Twombley claps him on the back.

“Atta boy, Germy! You’ll soon set this place to rights!” And whispers into his ear, “You can save the impalings for later, after the folks get used to you.”

Jeremy can only mutter, under his breath, “Oh, no!”

Twombley Plays His Trump Card (‘Oy, Rodney’)

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In Chapter CXXXVI of Violet Crepuscular’s epic romance, Oy, Rodney, Willis Twombley, the American adventurer who think he’s Sargon of Akkad, visits the taproom of The Lying Tart to buy drinks for Col. Fildebert Blemish, who insists that he married Lady Margo Cargo by proxy many years ago. If his claim stands, she won’t be able to marry Twombley and Lord Jeremy Coldsore: Twombley has convinced her that he and Lord Jeremy are actually the same person, and marrying into her wealth will enable Lord Jeremy to keep possession of Coldsore Hall.

But first, for reasons known only to the author, the jolly villagers in the pub break into song, “We are jolly villagers.” Ms. Crepuscular has probably watched one too many old pirate movies.

By now Col. Blemish is well and truly tanked, and Twombley is telling jokes. Each one evokes loud belly-laughs from the colonel.

“Here, now,” says Twombley, “let me tell you the funniest joke I know. Quiet, everybody!” The villagers comply. “Are you ready for this, ol’ Fildy ol’ pal?”

“Ready and willing, Twombley–fire away!”

“All right. Now, Colonel, the first thing is, you’ve got to say ‘I am a bigamous bounder!’ Say it nice and loud, y’hear. And then I’ll say the punch line.”

The colonel burps. “Right-o, Twombley!” He clears his throat and announces, loud and clear, “I am a bigamous bounder!”

Twombley leaps to his feet. “Right! You all heard that! Col. Blemish has admitted to the crime of bigamy. He can’t marry Lady Margo Cargo! You all heard him say it!”

The crowd cheers: they don’t like the colonel. “You bigamous bounder, you!” shouts a mob of assorted laborers, scriveners, and shepherds. They begin to throw things at the colonel. He laughs uproariously until he realizes that Twombley has destroyed his claim to being Lady Margo’s lawful husband. He flees the scene, colliding with the Japanese ambassador who is just trying to enter the taproom. Trampling over him, Col. Blemish vanishes into the night.

Lord Jeremy has his doubts about this procedure. “Won’t he just come back and try again, once he sobers up?”

“Not a chance, Germy! See, I done some readin’ up on him, and he really is a bigamist. He has wed three wives!”

Jeremy sighs with relief. “So then the way is clear again,” he says, “for us to marry Lady Margo.”

“That’s about the size of it,” says Twombley–“once the vicar gets over his conniptions, that is.”

Is She Already Married? (‘Oy, Rodney’)

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Returning to a point raised some chapters ago, Chapter CXXXII of Oy, Rodney has author Violet Crepuscular devoting some time to the man who supposedly married Lady Margo Cargo by proxy many years ago. Unfortunately for all concerned, Mr. Proxy cannot be found.

The man in question addresses the crowd of inebriated villagers in the taproom of The Lying Tart:

“I am Colonel Fildebert Blemish, of the East Bunkingham Blemishes. In the year 18-something-or-other, while serving with Her Majesty’s 8th Hussars in Africa or somewhere, I married Lady Margo Cargo by proxy. This marriage has been valid all along; she is not free to marry anyone else.”

In the crowd, Willis Twombley whispers to Lord Jeremy Coldsore, “Don’t worry ’bout him, Germy. I’ll bushwhack him when he leaves tonight.”

“He isn’t going to leave! He has a room upstairs in this establishment.”

“Then I’ll have to do what I once did to some snake in the grass from Babylonia,” says Twombley. He still believes he is Sargon of Akkad. Lord Jeremy does not want to hear what he did to the snake in the grass from Babylonia.

Conspicuously absent from the gathering is Lady Margo herself. On her way out the door this evening, her wooden leg fell off again. It being his night off, Crusty the butler is not available to re-attach it. He has gone all the way to Plaguesby to attend a lecture on the mating habits of literary men.

Crawling about in the dark, Lady Margo soon loses her way–until suddenly, as the moon emerges from behind a cloud, the dreadful shape of the vicar’s backyard wading pool looms up in front of her.

She just has time to say “Uh-oh.”

Here the chapter concludes with Ms. Crepuscular’s recipe for cat food casserole.

‘Oy, Rodney’ Continued…

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Willis Twombley, the American adventurer, has shot another one of Lord Jeremy Coldsore’s creditors. This was a Mr. Hornswoggle, whom Twombley caught fumbling around in the cellar in what was once the fifth Baron Coldsore’s torture chamber, estimating the resale value of the thumbscrews.

“If’n I can pick off all these leeches, Germy, your problems will be over,” Twombley says, as he and Jeremy hide the body in an unused cedar chest.

“I truly wish you wouldn’t, old boy. Once we are married to Lady Margo, her wealth will make my creditors disappear. I don’t fancy a date with the hangman.”

This is Chapter CXXIV, by the way. The author, Violet Crepuscular, has tried to slip it into the text without a number. She apologizes later.

Meanwhile, Lady Margo is distracted by the erratic behavior of Oswin, her pet crayfish. “He has been acting like a hamster lately,” she confides in Mother Fong, the wise woman who lives in the woods and is believed to practice witchcraft. She is a dues-paying member of Amalgamated Wise Women of the Woods, AWWW, an organization which some people persist in thinking has something to do with cute puppy and kitten videos. Mother Fong examines Oswin, at the cost of several painful nips.

“I like this not,” she says. “It fears me that Rodney has returned to our peaceful English shire.”

“Rodney!” Margo cries. “Do you mean Black Rodney? But he died when I was just a little girl, and he was already an old man then!”

Mother Fong mutters cryptically. “Dinna ye know Black Rodney fuddered in the forbidden arts of Evil Hobart? Forsooth, ’tis rofin time I mithered off to Floridy!” She packs her toads and roots, and nothing more is heard of her. We have Ms. Crepuscular’s promise that we have seen the last of her.

For the time being, Lady Margo has no alternative but to install a hamster wheel in Oswin’s aquarium.

‘Oy, Rodney’ Gets Mushy

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I am tempted to pass over Chapters CXX and CXXI of Violet Crepuscular’s epic romance, Oy, Rodney because they are intolerably mushy. Ms. Crepuscular acknowledges that. “You may find these next two chapters intolerably mushy,” she warns.

Lady Margo Cargo, the richest widow in Scurveyshire, is prepared to marry Lord Jeremy Coldsore and the American adventurer, Willis Twombley, who thinks he is Sargon of Akkad. Twombley has convinced her that he and Lord Jeremy are one and the same person.  But the wedding was disrupted and has not yet been rescheduled: Lady Margo thinks she might have a touch of leprosy.

“It’s only wind, you silly old bat,” says her crusty old butler, Crusty.

Then the mush creeps in as Lord Jeremy renews his wooing, this time in person.

“Madam, as soon as the vicar gets over his conniptions, we must be wed,” says Jeremy. They are having rock-hard biscuits baked by Lady Margo’s lunatic aunt. In the opulent comfort of Lady Margo’s parlor, her pet crayfish, Oswin, sulks in his aquarium.

“I love you so much, I could plotz,” says Jeremy. “Your ears are like prize cabbages.”

“Eh?” Those ears do not always function as they should.

“Your hair–” a wig, actually–“is as soft as yogurt,” Jeremy continues. This goes on for the whole two chapters.

Meanwhile, the whole village is startled out of sleep one midnight by horrible groans and shrieks issuing from under the wading pool in the vicar’s back yard. A crowd of peasants armed with scythes and torches descends upon the scene, but then goes home because no one dares lift up the pool and look under it. Constable Chumley reassures them: “‘Tis only yair fickling rawstie,” he explains. This gives them something to think about for the rest of the night.

‘Oy, Rodney’ Gets Rather Odd

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Violet Crepuscular leads off Chapter CXVI of Oy, Rodney with the admission that she has borrowed much of the story from a not-quite rational neighbor. Then she remembers that she has left Queen Victoria waiting in the church for the wedding that hasn’t come off, and quickly returns her to Buckingham Palace.

Meanwhile, Lady Margo Cargo’s crusty old butler, Crusty, tries to convince her that she can’t marry Willis Twombley, who she thinks is also Lord Jeremy Coldsore of Coldsore Hall, because she is already married to another man–the mysterious stranger who stood up to object to the latest wedding but was interrupted by events beyond his control.

“Really, Crusty, I am sure I’ve never seen that man before,” she says, as he reattaches her wooden leg.

“He married you by proxy, Ma’am. He was in India at the time, so he sent a proxy.”

“I thought that man’s name was Mr. Proxy. And no one ever told me it was a wedding. I thought it was a game of blind man’s buff, without the blindfold.”

The scene shifts to Scurveyshire’s favorite pub, the Lying Tart, where Lord Jeremy  and Twombley are concealing the body of Lord Jeremy’s chief creditor, Mr. Softy, shot by Twombley as he tried to take possession of Coldsore Hall. They are breaking into the pub because everyone else has run off to take part in the strange events around the vicar’s backyard wading pool.

“I’m not so sure we ought to be doing this, Sargon, old boy,” says Lord Jeremy: Twombley still thinks he is Sargon of Akkad.

“Well, Germy, you don’t want to git hanged, do you? Let’s put him somewhere down the cellar. No one’ll look there.”

Lord Jeremy is upset. “Are you mad?” he cries. “They keep all the pub’s supplies down there! Of course they’ll find the body.”

“Not if we stick it behind some barrels. Trust me, ol’ hoss. I’ve done this several times before.”

This task accomplished, Lord Jeremy is suddenly stunned and shocked by a message scrawled in the dust on the floor.

It is a single word. Rodney.,

Bonus ‘Oy, Rodney’ Episode

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In Chapter CVI of Violet Crepuscular’s epic romance, Oy, Rodney, Lord Jeremy Coldsore requests an audience with the Queen so he can invite her to stay the night at Coldsore Hall. Currently the Queen and her entourage have taken rooms at Scurveyshire’s most popular inn, The Lying Tart.

The most Lord Jeremy can get from the Queen is a bored “We’ll see,” and he is too nervous to invite Her Majesty to his wedding, and his friend Willis Twombley’s, to Lady Margo Cargo. On his way out of the inn, the discouraged young baron, or whatever he is, is buttonholed by the vicar.

“Lord Jeremy! A word, sir, a word!” He looks like he is about to relapse into conniptions, so Jeremy must hear him out.

“That woman, sir–that, my lord, is not the Queen of England! She is an imposter!”

“Not Queen Victoria?” Jeremy wonders. He looked it up yesterday: Victoria is presently Queen of England. Not Suzie, as he’d thought. “Go to, Reverend! She is the spitting image of the Queen. Why would you say different?”

Distraught, the vicar lapses into dialect. “Why, firmy man, yen jingly fleem be all ye throcken simbly–!” Lord Jeremy has to slap him. The vicar responds with a kick to the shin. In between agonized hops on one foot while holding his shin, Jeremy demands the vicar explain his allegation.

“Sir, I know the Queen like she were my own sister! We are lifelong friends–why, it was I who introduced her to Prince Albert, and got him to come out of the can!” Lord Jeremy stares. “I guess I ought to know her when I see her, sir–and that woman is not the Queen of England! There is devilry afoot, sir–devilry and danger, no doubt to the entire realm!”

The remaining paragraphs of the chapter are devoted to a description of Ms. Crepuscular’s hamster, Nestor.

‘Oy, Rodney’ Gets Serious

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I don’t know what possessed me to write that headline. Sorry.

In Chapter LXXXXI of Oy, Rodney by Violet Crepuscular, the jovial shepherd known as Mack the Jovial Shepherd goes missing overnight. His sheep are nonplussed. The next day he is found floating face-down in the vicar’s backyard wading pool. There are tentacle marks all over the body. Constable Chumley shakes his head and opines, “Aye, me gangers, ’tis a murragh dally-dooly ront, so I tell ‘ee.” The townspeople continue to believe they really ought to get a constable who speaks English.

Meanwhile Lord Jeremy Coldsore is horrified that the American adventurer, Willis Twombley, who thinks he is Sargon of Akkad, is going to marry Lady Margo Cargo, the richest widow in all of Scurveyshire. Lord Jeremy was supposed to marry her, as his only hope of staving off bankruptcy and losing Coldsore Hall. How this came about is very difficult to explain, and Miss Crepuscular finally gives it up as a bad job.

Willis comforts his friend. “Donchew worry none, Germy! Oncet me and Lady Margo is hitched, you and me, we’ll jist change places an’ the ol’ gal’ll never know the diff’rence!”

To everyone’s surprise, the vicar suddenly recovers from his conniptions and declares himself anxious to perform the marriage between Lady Margo and Sargon of Akkad, Ruler of All Mesopotamia. This is accompanied by a sinister smile that he never had before. When asked what he saw when he peeked under the wading pool, he only smirks and says “What conniptions?”

The other mysterious stranger who came into the book a few chapters ago hasn’t said or done anything yet.