The Triple Goddess (151 page)

The demand for successive volumes of
The Dungeon Series
, as it came to be called, was constant; and Ginny Plunkett was so prolific that her supporter Father Anselm, whose aesthetic tastes were as catholic as he was, remarked how opposite she was in her work ethic to the composer Rossini: a man so lazy that, whenever he was late for deadline on a commission, which he invariably was, he had to be locked in his room, and told to toss each sheet out of the window as it was completed so that it could be rushed to the printer.

The
Series
’ readers were delighted, as knives flew, pistols cracked, and bullets homed to their targets, ricocheted and caromed. Heads rolled like bowls in an alley, throats were cut like so many parcel strings, and brains splattered like mud in a monsoon. More human torsos were scattered than marble ones littered the Louvre; and it was agreed amongst the adrenal cognoscenti of the Retributive genre that Plunkett could do more with a thymus or thyroid gland than an endocrinologist.

The fates reserved for her victims were eclectic. Not for them the repetitive monotony of the gallows, or electric chair: Ms Plunkett was no more indebted for her executive methods to that of the “seagreen incorruptible”, as Carlyle described him, Maximilien de Robespierre, in sending his victims to the guillotine during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, than she took as her model Baroness Orczy’s fictional hero The Scarlet Pimpernel,
Angallis arvensis
, in rescuing them.

Eugénie was a murderous Plantagenet through and through, and committed to proving to everyone’s satisfaction that there was no end to the ways of offing a nob.

But the most notable thing about the plots in
The Dungeon Series
, and that which most endeared Ginny Plunkett to her admirers, was not the skill with which she invested her feuds, vendettas, and assassination fatwas with such realism; nor was it the presence on every page of death by shooting, bludgeoning, hacking, stabbing, or other methods of puncturation; by poisoning, strangulation, suffocation, hanging, drowning, burning, crushing, and flattening; or by boiling, stewing, flaying and fileting, and slicing and dicing; or by electrocution, or being run over by trains or buses; nor was it the lovingly detailed descriptions of the effects of flesh-eating diseases, or the undiscriminating dining tastes of lions, tigers, wolves, and piranhas in those tropical and afforested parts frequented by big-game hunters.

Rather, it was the one constant in the stories, namely, that the most gruesome of the many demises in each book, and that which was always described as if in slow motion, and with microscopic attention to physiological effect, was reserved for a single person who in his looks and demeanour was always the same.

That no one knew the individual to be in every respect similar to a certain Otto, Lord Huntenfisch, son of a Bavarian pig farmer, did not detract one jot or tittle from the enjoyment the books’ readers derived from the sequence of his many prolonged and painful expirations, as this loathsome character’s soul fled screaming to Hades. But because he never picked up a book and was acquainted with no one who did, his lordship remained ignorant of how he was being alternately satirized and liquidated, as a gramophone needle stuck in the groove of a record plays the same notes over and over again.

It was hardly surprising, after the shameful way that she had been treated by her parents, and considering the natures of her consort and those he surrounded himself with, that Jenny particularly had it in for aristocrats when determining which of her characters were going to get topped.

An Oxford graduate student at Broadgates Hall, Sherri Negus, who, at the suggestion of her murder-mystery-loving English Language and Literature tutors, Professor Tenebris and Dr Fleapowder, compiled a bibliography of Ginny Plunkett’s
oeuvre
for her D.Phil thesis, and a concordance of mortality, calculated that a member of the upper classes died on average every three and a quarter pages: a rate which, if it kept up, would reduce the next editions of
Burke’s Peerage
, Baronetage, & Knightage
,
and
Debrett’s
Peerage & Baronetage
, to supplement size
.

In my aunt Jenny’s career as a pseudonym, and she went on to publish twenty-six books, in the royal and hereditary category alone Negus determined that her subject, having signalled her disowning of her class by adopting her common pseudonym, and being resolved to start at the top in taking down the hereditary Establishment, disposed of a king, a Prince of Wales, two queens, eight princes, five dukes, four duchesses, five marquesses…it should have been six, but in a rare moment of authorial carelessness he escaped to the Bahamas…two marchionesses, twelve earls, twelve countesses, seven viscounts, and five and a half baronets.

Ginny Plunkett’s twenty-six titles equalled the output of Sir Walter Scott in his
Waverley
series; though her works were a good deal shorter, many people are of the opinion that Scott might to good advantage have edited each of his books down to similar length.

Amongst the non-hereditary peers, no less than thirty-three barons and baronesses had their lifetime privileges terminated for them, amidst La Plunkett’s chapters. For international flavour, and in the interests of securing foreign publishing rights, three presidents, a tribal chieftain, an emperor-in-waiting, and an infanta also shuffled off their mortal coils.

For statistical accuracy, Negus asterisked the second queen as an iffy inclusion in the tally, because “she” was a male impostor, a raging queen with a small
q
. Argument over whether one of the viscounts had expired twice, was quelled by a footnote in the revised second edition of the published version of Negus’s thesis, which sold almost as well as the books it analysed, by clarifying that he had recovered from his wounds and lived to die again.

As to the fractional baronet, Julian, the aforementioned “half” appended to the class count of five: a chandelier fell on him as his father was downing a Rob Roy cocktail mixed by his wife, who had laced it with the
Amanita bisporigera
mushroom, known as the Destroying Angel. The timing of the chandelier’s collapse, because it happened a split second before Julian’s father hit the floor himself, meant that the son hadn’t quite inherited the title; though the ceiling’s weakness, whether it was owing to age, rot in the boards, or damp; or created by accident or design through jumping from above, and the baron’s exact time of death, were also the cause of disputation amongst Ms Plunkett’s avid readers, and responsible for a rift in the relationship between Professor Tenebris and Dr Fleapowder.

The categorization of the deaths of two lesser individuals was hotly debated too, because they were not as result of proximate action directed at them. The first was that of an under-gardener, the bastard son of an Earl, who sustained collateral fatal damage when a greenhouse exploded, taking out the orchid-loving countess, a woman not so loosely based on Lady Eugénie’s mother.

The second instance was a butler who committed suicide after seeing something he shouldn’t have taking place between the Duke of York and the butler’s footman lover, who had been hired by the Earl of Sussex to kill his brother. This the multi-tasking footman accomplished by whacking his passive partner over the head, during the intimate encounter, with one of Carl Fabergé’s more solid creations.

What was never in contention, was that Ginny Plunkett, a.k.a. Lady Huntenfisch, was a greater than average disliker of barons, eight of whom in her books bore the same name, Otto,—the one appellation that Vigilante editor Moira Bloodgood did not succeed in having altered—as her husband. In a burst of enthusiasm, Ms Plunkett placed three of her Otto-man octagon on the Titanic; according to the passenger list this was verifiably inaccurate, but her fans didn’t object to the creative licence.

Taking her work as a whole, however, according to her literary champion Sherri Negus, Ms Plunkett was an equal-opportunity slayer, who nevertheless showed, by never killing a princess, that she had a soft spot in her heart.

It was true: in Jenny’s opinion princesses had a hard time of it, being all too often paired off with frogs who failed to metamorphose into the handsome and loving princes of fairy tales. Princesses, she felt, deserved all the support they could get, and not just from mattresses with peas under them as in the fairy-tale by Hans Christian Andersen.

Otherwise, Plunkett’s dedication to getting rid of the nation’s bluebloods and powermongers left few to pass away in their beds at an advanced age of natural causes. Every time one of them was brought low, another appeared in his or her place, like a new head on the Hydra. Whereas when Cadmus sowed the serpent’s teeth on the site of Thebes, to have them spring up as Sparti, or Sown Men, and fight each other to the death until there were only five of them left, Jenny’s victims grew from more fertile soil.

The invention that my aunt showed, in devising ever more delectable ways of doing people in, or rather stimulating the murderous proclivities of those who acted as her fictional proxies, knew no bounds. The exit of Countess Lucia Ogriba is worthy of comment, as an example of the liberties Ginny Plunkett took with fact, history, and chronology as she skewered her prey. The mistresses of Lucia’s last three husbands, each of whom she had arranged to be killed, bribed William Caxton to give them access to the print room of
The Daily Chronicle
in the wee hours.

As the presses rolled the following morning’s edition, they put the murderess to bed with the paper, toes first and kicking; and the next day fifty people were hospitalized after eating plaice and chips wrapped in the page of the newspaper containing the Ogriba’s obituary, stained with impressive evidence that she was, unlike the
Chronicle
, out of circulation.

The Dungeon Series
was translated into every language from French to Farsi, and letters of adulation poured into the offices of Jenny’s agent and publisher. Fan clubs flourished. Around the world there was a decline in the number of real crimes committed, of every type and severity. Hardened felons, from first- and second-degree murderers, terrorists, drug-dealers, rapists, and pimps, to fraudsters, snitches, and the humble burglar and pickpocket: so busy were they reading Plunkett’s picaresques that they forgot to show up for work.

Even children, who stopped as matter of course on their way to school to steal sweets at the newsagent, now went to the bookshop to thumb editions that they couldn’t afford.

A hundred prison guards were sent on indefinite leave. As an experiment at a maximum security prison, the gates were thrown open, and the prisoners left to fend for themselves. Instead of showing the penitentiaries a clean pair of heels, the convicts stayed put and ordered in a steady stream of the books from the Barnes&Noble, Amazon and other dot coms, and the mobile library; and Italian sausage and pepper, pepperoni, meatball, Ultimate Cheese, and bacon and pineapple Hawaiian, pizza from Domino’s and Pizza Hut. They threw away the pineapple; nobody liked it.

Virtual crime was so much easier than the fag of having to commit it oneself, and, thanks to Lady Eugénie’s fructuous fantasy skills, twice as satisfying.

As a succinct example of Jenny’s style, a passage from her fifth novel, entitled
The Mystery of the Minced Marquess
, in which the heir to the throne receives what would have been his come-uppance, had he done anything to deserve his fate other than to behave naturally, comes to mind:

When the port was served after the ladies had left, and a footman had left several baskets of walnuts and nutcrackers on the table, the Prince of Wales filled his glass and passed the decanter to his left, according to the tradition that it circulate the table clockwise, even if the only person who would take any (an abstemious impossibility) was sitting on one’s immediate right.

George Arthur Smethwick Albert Edward Brian, known as Doddie, or Smelly because he was, raised the crystal before a candelabrum and admired the ruby colour of the wine, which was only marginally lighter than his complexion and that of the carbuncular ring on his finger.

The Prince of Wales’s host, the Earl of Damdify, was about to launch into one of his daffish anecdotes, and His Royal Highness prepared to be bored.

‘Yesterday, my third or fourth whelp,’ said Damdify, ‘I don’t remember which, or the slut I sired it on, came to me and said, “P-Papa, I’ve decided it’s time for m-me to d-d-do something with my l-life.”

‘“Demme,” said I, “and you not a day over forty. What d’you have in mind?”

‘“Well, sir, with your p-permission I rather like the sound of the Navy. I’ve already asked M-Mummy, and she says it’s all right if I p-promise to b-b-bundle up on d-deck.”

‘“You d-d-do, d’you,” I said, “and y’have, and ’tis?”

‘“Yes sir, I d-do and I have, and it is,” he answered.

‘“Son,” said I, meaning to razz him a little, “you recall the words of Churchill, d’you not? Not the first Churchill, nor the second, but one of ’em.”

‘“No sir, I’m afraid I don’t,” he said; “but might you be pleased to enlighten m-m...”

‘“Certainly,” I replied; “what the man said was, ‘Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash.’ What d’you think o’ that, me boy? Rum, sodomy, and the lash!”