The Triple Goddess (96 page)

‘Calloo, callay,’ sang Dark, and in Lewis Carroll
Jabberwocky
style he chortled in his joy. ‘Totally egregious, man—I mean, like, vorpal. I see cigars and I see krugerrands. She’s got the hots for me as surely as the Pope is Catholic and bears shit in the woods. Church? Schmurch!’

Yes indeedy, he was her beamish boy, and in no time he would be inhaling Napoleonic fumes from a snifter before a fireside with his feet propped on a wolfhound. No doubt marriage would follow, and already he pictured himself standing in a grey morning cutaway coat before the altar at Westminster Abbey (at the last Church ceremony he would attend, unless it were being conducted over his dead body) as the Earl of Shortly to Expire without an Heir & Desperately in Need of a Son-in-Law tottered up the gangway with his gorgeous daughter.

Picture the serfs who would tug their forelocks to him, as like stout Cortez...it might not have bothered Keats, but Dark would lose a few pounds before then...with a wild surmise he surveyed his fee and all his men, silent on the peak of a grey hunter!

In the slum of the Old Fartery—well, to Hell with it, that’s what it was—the reverend danced a jig, and gleefully anticipated the disdainful answer that he would give when all the bishops who had ever denied him promotion, having begged his secretary for an appointment, crowded in to beg his forgiveness, in vain; and instead of trout for dinner, Lady Violet’s Anatolian chef would cut off their heads and gut them, and pan-fry them with garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, and parsley, and he would wash them down with Muscadet, belch, and order their bones tossed on the midden.

To calm himself, the hyperventilating reverend consulted his footstool encyclopaedia regarding the aforementioned Savonarola, his role model cited by Lady Violet, and discovered that he was
a fifteenth century Dominican friar who preached vehemently against the moral corruption of the clergy, who was charged with heresy and sedition, excommunicated by the Pope,
tortured on the rack, ritually stripped of his clerical vestments, hung in chains from a cross, and burnt on an enormous fire that nonetheless took a long time to consume his body.

Hey, thought Dark, who was in no mood to be discouraged—up till then the man’s life was peachy.

More regrettable was that Lady Violet had told him that there was no need to respond in writing, thereby denying him the opportunity to confirm that—sight unseen and scorning the example of Henry the Eighth, who was suspicious enough to have Holbein nip over to Germany to paint Anne of Cleves’ portrait for him to take a gander at before he agreed to marry her—he reciprocated her amorousness, that his heart swelled to the sound of her music; and that,
pace
Hamlet, a consummation was very undevoutly wished by Yours Truly.

But prescient as his Vi, or her consulting astrologist, might be in anticipating his acceptance, Dark decided that he would send an answer anyway. With a gazelle-like agility of which no one including himself would believe him capable, the reverend sprang to the incongruously geometrically aligned piles of junk mail, special offers, free newspapers, utility bills, his bank statement—on his metal desk, and swept them into the air with both arms. There they hung crackling in disbelief, that the disciplinarian they knew and loved so well could prove so fickle…before fluttering to the floor in despair, where Dark kicked them and jumped on them and ground his heels into them.

Drawing up a plastic chair and pulling open a drawer, Dark removed a sheaf of writing-paper and discarded several blemished sheets. Then he rummaged through a collection of leaky ball-point and dried-up fibre-tipped pens, and the stubs of pencils, until he found a cracked fountain-pen and a bottle of black ink, most of which was sediment. Filling the pen, he wiped away the excess on his sleeve, curled his left wrist so that the nib was directed towards him, and with tongue protruding in the manner he deplored in the Barts! began the laborious process of composition.

THE ANNEXE

Dear Lady Enderby
:

Despite your kind assurance that it is not necessary to reply to your letter, I feel moved to tell you immediately how sensible I am of the honour you do me, in writing so frankly on matters both professional and personal. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, you give expression to images which find a mirror in my mind, and sentiments to which my bosom returns an echo. Oh, the flowers that burgeon in my soul!

That last sentence is, I blush to confess, mine own.

Although I fear that, in me, you may have chosen a poor champion to carry out your inspired plan, my state of arousal is such that any who not follow me onto the field, if I may borrow King Harry’s Bardic exhortation before the battle of Agincourt, shall think themselves accurs’d they were not there, for he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother, be he ne’er so vile.

The rest, madam, must wait until I am able to give more forceful assurance of my gratitude in person. In the meantime, please believe that I will do my best to contain myself in a spirit of unholy joy.

I have the honour to be, madam, your sincerest and most subservient, single, servant,

Fletcher Abraham Dark

PS. I love sherry, and will be ready and waiting when your chauffeur ffanshawe arrives. I am glad you are sending him, for to my embarrassment I am not familiar with the location of the village of Old Nicholas. This lacuna in my knowledge can only be attributable to the very different circles in which, regrettably until this time, we have moved. FAD.

Job done, Dark’s tongue retreated into the buccal cavity and he fell back in his chair with a gasp. The ascent of Mount Parnassus was no stroll in the park, and such was the intensity of his concentration that he had omitted to breathe. A thought induced him to pull the contents of a cupboard onto the floor and search among them for maps of the area. Those he found he spread out, and, kneeling with his rear end pointed at the ceiling, pored over the names of every village, hall, and manor house that were within a ten-mile radius, reading them aloud as he traced them with his finger.

Neither Old Nicholas nor the Moated Grange was anywhere to be found, even on his largest scale six-inch-to-the-mile Ordnance Survey sheet of the area.

The reverend’s puzzlement was compounded by loud noises at the door, the cause of which he ascertained to be the Barts! attempting to replace the door-knob. To the dismay of his housekeepers he leaped up, snatched it from whichever one of them was about to attempt to spatchcock it back, drew it to his shoulder and putted it like a shot through the window, shattering the glass. The action drew screams, of annoyance from himself at failing to register that the window was not open, from the Barts! in unison, and from a recumbent cat in the shrubbery outside in whose solar plexus the item had landed.

Dark quickly reminded himself of the futility of getting het up over trifles. He had so many more elevated matters to occupy him, now that he was moving up in the world. In no time at all he would be far too busy squiring Lady Violet Enderby to concerts and artists’ studios and the theatre and hunt balls, and drawling Wildean
aperçus
in salons and at cocktail and dinner parties, to concern himself with items of domestic hardware.

After hustling the bleating Barts! down the hall, he returned. Looking to see that no one was lurking outside, and that the moggy had hied itself hence, he cleared his throat and, after a false start or two, raised a thin but pure tenor voice in song through the broken window. The enraptured reverend imagined the sound wafting to the Moated Grange, where a lady was seated on the sunny lawn (it was starting to rain in the Annexe’s miserable microclimate) with an open calf-bound octavo volume of Tennyson printed on fine India paper, while a servant held a parasol over her head and fanned her.

And Tennyson is what he gave her:

‘“Come into the garden, Maud,”’ warbled Dark,

‘“For the black bat, Night, has flown,

Come into the garden, Maud,

I am here at the gate alone...”’

Breaking off and clasping his hands before him in the approved crooner’s position, he compressed his diaphragm and segued into Gilbert and Sullivan:

‘“Oh never, never, never, since I met the human race,

Saw I so exquisitely fair a face!”’

Then with palms and shaggy eyebrows raised:

‘“Is you is, or is you ain’t my baby?”’

And with a jaunty flourish as he tapped the rhythm of Gus Kahn’s lyric with his foot:

‘“Yes sir, That’s my Baby,

No sir, don’t mean Maybe—

Yes sir, that’s my Baby now!”’

In the Annexe where another poet, Andrew Marvell, might have observed—had he been present, and had he not already done so in the
Definition of Love—
that “feeble Hope could ne’r have flown
|
But vainly flapt its Tinsel Wing”, Dark, after licking five second-class stamps and affixing them to an envelope addressed in a wobbly hand to The Moated Grange, ran out to catch the next post.

Chapter Thirty-One

Through a concatenation of extraordinary circumstances: of felonious convictions and sackings and resignations; of the results of political intrigue, espionage, sabotage, skulduggery, internecine conflict, exactions of vengeance and retribution, personal clashes, fallings out and by the wayside, internal alliances and misalliances; of oversights, left-hand-right-hand problems, collapse and disappearance of stout parties; of misunderstanding, bungling, compromise; of sicknesses and deaths…and the absence of any alternative…Ophelia was going to be inducted as a bishop.

How the unthinkable had happened, and catapulted a lowly curate to stardom, was the matter of hot debate in circles high and low: from Windsor Castle, and Buckingham, Lambeth and Bishopthorpe Palaces; to high society and London’s Clubland and every living room; to television and radio shows, newspapers, journals, blogs, chat rooms, You Tube; to restaurants, pubs, cafés, tea-rooms, fish-and-chip shops, and soup-kitchens.

Once the media got hold of the scandal, and it had gone viral, the public was greatly tickled to learn of Ophelia’s promotion. The Establishment, it was agreed, had received a much needed kick up the arse. As the situation unfolded, in the dog-day doldrums of the silly season, people avidly consumed anything and everything on the subject. Photographers took to camping out in the village and ambushing her whenever she went outside, and on her walks; and Ophelia’s picture became a familiar sight in broadsheets and tabloids alike, wearing either a self-conscious smile or the expression of a sheep startled on a remote hillside.

It all began when the Archbishop of York popped his clogs, after the second most important bishop in England’s number came up three times in succession at a roulette table in Monte Carlo; following which Ebor (the Roman name for York was Eboracum, and the Primate of England signed his name as Ebor—the Archbishop of Canterbury, or Cantuar, was Primate of
All
England)—suffered a massive coronary while attempting, afterwards in his suite at the Hermitage Hotel over a bottle of the Widow Clicquot, to convert the young woman croupier who had presided over his good fortune to an experimental religion of his own devising that celebrated the mystical interconnectedness of the male and female bodies.

A number of ambitious eligible episcopals immediately started vying with each other and lobbying for the vacant post. More warlike even than the knights of the civil and diplomatic services, they were armoured cap-à-pie by their squires and squiresses and hoisted upon their destriers, richly caparisoned; whereupon the alarums were sounded and bloody battle was joined in earnest...or would have been, had not the war been a cold one waged in the discrete and shady and hugger-mugger arena of covert operation and behind closed doors.

It was not that the moral and ethical lapses and financial irregularities common within the religious fraternity were a secret amongst its senior members. On the contrary, they had always winked at their own
sub rosa
practices, and joshed each other about them at the dinner table over the port and walnuts. But until now, the tenured Old Boy network of the Church, which had a very Establishmentarian King as its “Fidei defensor”, “Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England”, had every incentive to keep its insider knowledge to itself. All that now changed as in the general scramble for promotion the rule book, etiquette, courtesy and politeness, and the old school tie went for a Burton.

As soon as Ebor’s perky young croupier had sold her story to Sky News, in return for an interview in which she agreed to describe His Grace’s sexual quirks and anatomy in exquisite—there was not much to tell—detail, jealous and ambitious Churchmen at every echelon of the profession cottoned on that, in the event that they remained unscathed themselves, and they could only pray that they would, it would behove them to take a proactive role in besmirching the reputations of their superiors and colleagues, if they were to steal a march on them, rather than relying on media telephone hackers to do the job for them.