Tag: silly romance novels

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.,

An Exciting Chapter of ‘Oy, Rodney’

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Moving right along to Chapter CXII of Oy, Rodney, Violet Crepuscular’s epic romance, we find the Queen sitting alone in St. Pablum’s Church. The vicar has been carted off with conniptions, and everyone else has followed Jasper the Village Idiot out to the vicar’s back yard, where Constable Chumley has disappeared under the wading pool. Lady Margo Cargo, who was to have been married that day to Lord Jeremy Coldsore and the American adventurer Willis Twombley, has been taken back home because her wooden leg fell off again.

As the Queen grumbles, the Japanese ambassador makes an unexpected entrance. He has an urgent message for her, but has forgotten it. Something about jumbo shrimp. He apologizes humbly and departs.

Lagging well behind the others, and trying to find some way to save the wedding, Lord Jeremy and Twombley are met by Jeremy’s chief creditor, Mr. Softy. “I am here to take ownership of Coldsore Hall,” he says, twirling his mustache. Twombley shoots him.

“I say!” cries Lord Jeremy. “You really can’t do that, don’t you know!”

“Well, I jist did,” says Twombley. “Help me hide the body somewheres.”

Meanwhile, Jasper urges the crowd to greater speed. “It may not be too late to save the constable, if only we hurry!” he declares. “Oh, make haste, my friends, make haste!”

But when they arrive at the pool, they find Constable Chumley standing a safe twenty yards away from it, idly bobbling his nightstick. He wants to know what all the fuss is about.

The mayor frowns. “Jasper, you idiot!” he says. “Sorry!” mutters Jasper. “But wait! It may be that this individual is not Constable Chumley, but an insidious double who has appropriated his uniform. I prithee, examine him!”

“Prithee?”

“‘Tis a forn misstal we be corkin’, Mayor,” says the constable. The crowd decides to examine Jasper instead, and hustles him off to the local house of pain.

Here the narrative is interrupted by Ms. Crepuscular offering to sell the book’s movie rights to any studio that’s interested.

 

‘Oy, Rodney’: The Wedding (Well, Almost)

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In Chapter CX of Violet Crepuscular’s epic romance, Oy, Rodney, the author takes a break from storytelling to wax petulant to her readers, denouncing “certain brusque persons who keep demanding to know when the title character, Rodney, is going to appear in the story. Clearly these are persons who know nothing of the craft of the novelist. One must work up to these things gradually!” Well, gee, she’s already spent some 400 pages working up to it, and still no Rodney.

Chapter CXI finds us in St. Pablum’s Church for the wedding of Lady Margo Cargo and Lord Jeremy Coldsore, whom she thinks is the American adventurer, Willis Twombley, who thinks he is Sargon of Akkad. Twombley, in fact, is serving as best man. He has assured Lady Margo that he and Lord Jeremy are one and the same man, made to appear as two different individuals simultaneously by his secret Akkadian power of illusion. In fact, Lady Margo has fallen asleep on her feet and is swaying gently back and forth. Lord Jeremy is worried. If this wedding doesn’t come off, the creditors grab Coldsore Hall. And there is Queen Victoria herself sitting in the front pew and whispering harshly to the vicar, “Get on with it, man!”

The vicar grins and says, “If there is anyone here who knows of any reason why these two should not be wed, let him speak now or forever hold his peace.”

Up from a middle pew rises a tall man with doom in his face. He has been eating something not so good for him.

But before he can speak, in through the door bursts the village idiot, Jasper. The prose does not leave us with any certainty that the door was open at the time.

“Stop! Stop!” he cries. All eyes turn to him. “It is I, Jasper, the village idiot!” Everybody knows that already. “Oh, lamentable tragedy! Come, come, quickly–it may not be too late to save him!”

“Oh, now what?” mutters Queen Victoria.

“I notice that no one here has said, ‘Save who?'” continues Jasper. “Indeed, it is none other than our esteemed public servant, Constable Chumley. With my own eyes I saw him dragged under the vicar’s backyard wading pool, leaving nothing behind but his helmet–ah, that was a sight to daunt the soul! I implore you, good people–”

But he gets no farther, because at this point the vicar relapses into the most awful conniptions, and it is quite a spectacle. The Queen is not amused, and lets out a loud, impatient sigh.

The chapter ends with some brief reminisces of Violet’s days as a Girl Guide in Greenland.

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.

‘Oy, Rodney,’ Continued

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My heel spur was acting up today, and I turned my ankle yesterday on those confounded walnuts that are all over the yard, and a pipe broke in our basement so we can’t use the washing machine and I had to go to the laundromat instead–so it seemed an apt time to read Chapters XLV and XLVI of Oy, Rodney by Violet Crepuscular.

(I have been asked why I always show the cover of Lord of the Tube Socks instead of the one for Oy, Rodney. It’s really much nicer, that’s all.)

The mysterious stranger who looks like Ed Begley but isn’t, it turns out, has been in the book under false pretenses, having sneaked in from another book entirely. Ms. Crepuscular was rather put out when she discovered that, so that character has since been abruptly written out–leaving the way clear for our hero, young Lord Jeremy Coldsore, to propose marriage to Lady Margo Cargo, the richest widow in Scurveyshire. In a real stroke of luck, Jeremy finds the glass eye that fell out of Lady Margo’s head some months ago and is trying to get up the nerve to return it to her.

Meanwhile, the vicar, recovering from the conniptions he suffered when he peeked under the  backyard wading pool to see what was making that awful noise, has stopped speaking backwards and now speaks sideways, which makes him even more difficult to understand. It has not yet occurred to him that he could write down what he saw and then people would know.

Jeremy’s scheme to introduce wild koalas to Yorkshire has gone belly-up and he’s running out of time to recover his family’s lost fortune and save Coldsore Hall from another mysterious stranger who wants to tear it down and build a MacDonald’s in its place. Under pressure, Jeremy hints, “Maybe it’s time I went to see Rodney.” I still think Rodney will turn out to be a rabbit.

But that’s enough for now.