Storytime: A Night on the Town.

June 9th, 2010

It was a fine, ripe, mellow sunset that slid down past the horizon that summer eve, bloated and content in the knowledge that all had enjoyed its ruddy sheen and would be eager to attend its next showing the following morning. 
There, were, however, those who were glad to see it go.  It meant they could finally go get some clean, simple, dishonest work done, and the burglar was one of them.  He was so filled with impatience he half-thought he’d burst into a sopping puddle of it.  All his plans had been made, the ground scouted and prepared, the estate mapped, the guard routes memorized, the night when the homeowner would be out on extremely discrete business awaited with eager anticipation.  In fact, the burglar had prepared so carefully and so well that he’d been ready for the past eight hours with nothing to do and his brain was starting to bore its way out of his earhole in sheer mind-numbingly tense boredom. 
He’d brought a book with him to settle his nerves while he waited, a terrible potboiler that an idle housewife would’ve deemed not worth more than tinder.  It sat, prematurely dog-eared and page-marked without respite, on page one.  As the sun went down he let it slip from his hand and nimbly kicked it out of the window, where it nearly clipped a stray cat. 

The night was a fine, crisp one by city standards, with wholesome air that seemed to be worth a full meal per inhalation.  Given the particle density it’d acquired inside the city’s chimneys, slaughterhouses, tanneries, and other such places, it may even have been true, although the resultant meal wasn’t exactly one you’d tip your waiter for.  As he gingerly tossed his grappling hook over the high (and unguarded for another thirty seconds) east wall of the estate, the burglar decided the first thing he’d spend his money on would be a good dinner.  In a nice restaurant somewhere upscale, the best he could find, with a big steak and a particularly lovely dessert.  After this job, he could afford it. 
He swung himself over the wall on the line, huffing and puffing and cursing his inattention to fitness.  Well, if he had more of a work ethic, he supposed he might not be robbing a mansion at the moment.  Of course, he’d be doing some ghastly long-houred sort of labour and the mere thought of it gave him the creeping shivers.  No, this was a much better way to go about it, he decided as he gracelessly tumbled down the other side of the wall and nearly landed on the murderer. 
“Watch out!” snapped the murderer, slapping a hand across the burglar’s mouth and a knife to his throat.  He was skulking low and cautious against the wall, as inconspicuous as a six-foot-three man could be wearing his filthy, tattered, tawny suit and outstandingly bushy red beard.  “Keep it quiet, you lummox!  The guards’ll hear, and where’ll we be then?  Eh?  Eh?”
“Mmrrrph,” opined the burglar.
“Eh?  Speak up!  Don’t whisper!  Oh, yes.”  The murderer snatched his hand away and glared at it as though it had made an impolite gesture of its own will.  “Right.  Right!  What are you doing here, eh?”
The burglar looked at his soft, dark clothes and his soundless slippers and covered face and thin, strong rope, and then looked at the murderer.  There were no apparent signs of sarcasm on his face. 
“Thieving,” he said, using every ounce of will in his body to maintain a moderate, pleasant tone.
The murderer gawped, eyes popping slightly farther (if that were possible).  “You don’t say!  Hah!  Don’t that take the biscuit, eh?  What a luck, a lark!  Well, I’m here to murder him, so just stay out of my way and don’t try taking his watch or anything ‘till I’m through, we clear?”
“Perfectly,” said the burglar.  The knife didn’t seem very large, but the size of the fist it was clenched in might have tweaked his perspective on it. 
“Right!” said the murderer.  He got himself to his feet and brushed an imperceivable amount of dust off the arms of his tawny suit, which bore enough exquisitely-tailored scars for the burglar to suppose that he hadn’t made similar use of a rope and had simply heaved himself over the wall with fingernails and possibly teeth.  “Lord Hemmeley-Pewthrett On-The-Lake,” he said, extended the unknifed hand and seizing the burglar’s unresisting palm, which he then mangled crudely.  “Bloody good.  Bloody good, eh?!  Right then.  You take the east door and raise a ruckus, see if you can bait the bugger thataways, eh?  I’ll nip in through the servant’s entrance, see if I can be stealthy a mite.  See you at the bastard’s throat!”  He made a nasty hacking motion, then ran away chortling merrily. 

The burglar spent almost 20 seconds of his meticulously timed and planned route sitting there in the mud, mind working its way inch by inch through the shock and patiently reminding him that this opportunity wouldn’t last forever.  Besides, if the distant and strangled shriek he’d just heard was any indicator, the murderer had just barged in on the cook.  He hoped the man wasn’t far gone enough to resort to random killings just yet.  The burglar knew of his motives, of course.  The owner of the estate was a rich man, a man of high society, and riches at such heights were often most easily obtained out of the pockets of any peers you had to hand.  Hemmeley had been hard-hit, but even so he appeared to have taken it more passionately than most did. 
The east door was empty ahead of schedule, and the fading sound of a jogging guard told of Hemmeley’s unintentional if highly effective distraction.  The burglar slipped in as lightly as his rotund self allowed, squeezing his paunch uncomfortably against the doorframe. 

Inside, his task became easy, his pulse slowed again, his movements slipping into confidence and concentration out of confused anxiety.  There was little sign of the servants he’d expected to encounter, and his path was speeded greatly on its way, expensive knick-knacks sailing off shelves and into his pockets.  So greatly was he sped, in fact, that he nearly ran headfirst into the youngish and rather fetchingly dressed man waiting right outside of his lordship’s bedchamber, skidding to an arms-windmilling, desperately-balancing stop no less than an inch behind the man’s sculpted buttocks where he peered through the keyhole.  He showed no sign of awareness, peeping cautiously through the keyhole, one hand nervously fiddling with his collar and an unbecoming sheen of sweat gracing his face. 
The burglar pulled out his leather cosh cautiously, then sneezed.  The man spun about in horror, finely-combed moustache twitching hysterically. 
“What?  What what what oh my goodness, thank goodness, it’s a mere thug.”  He slumped in relief.  “Thank goodness, I thought you were Lord Dracey.”
“Yes?” inquired the burglar cautiously.  He waggled the cosh threateningly, which he was dismayed to note was completely ignored.  Indeed, the young man was perking up quite rapidly.  “Yes indeed.  Oh, pilfer what you’d like indeed, I won’t say a word.  Fat old fool deserves what’s coming to him – no offence, you are most nimble for a man of your stature, I mean no slur against you sir brigand – and more, for indeed sir, his material treasures distract him from his greatest source of light in life!”
“Being?” inquired the burglar, fascinated in spite of himself. 
“Lady Dracey, sir!  A more precious jewel you could not find in all the lands, in India, Tibet, or China!  She is filled with goodness, too good for the likes of that fat dotard of a husband!  Twice her age, oh pilferous sir!  Pshaw!  Such a man knows not how to treat a woman of her fabulous wonderousness, and so I have taken it upon myself to woo her gently, to treat her as he shall not.  And I shall woo her most well.  I have, thieving sir” – and here he preened his moustache in a manner so smug that the burglar nearly fell over –“a certain degree of experience with these matters.”
“So it seems.  Why then the key-hole peeping?”
The adulterer looked embarrassed for the first time.  “Ah, well, you see… the lady, I confess, is not within the bedchambers for the moment, and it was her location I was attempting to discern.  It appears she may not have received my note, which I did not wish her dullard of a husband to receive.  I was very discrete with it.  Possibly too much so – I handed it to her chamber maid’s uncle’s sister-in-law, with instructions to pass it on.”
“Ah.”
The adulterer shifted from one foot to the other.  “So as not to be indiscrete, you see.”
“Ah.”
“Yes.  Well, as I said, it is possible I was too discrete.”
“It very well may have been so.”
“Indeed.”  He cleared his throat.  “Tell me sir…know you where the lady might reside?”
The burglar thought.  “I haven’t the faintest idea, truth me told.  She putters around the estate quite a bit.  You might try for the flower beds.  West side of the house, to your right.  Can’t miss them.”
“I thank you greatly, kind sir of quick fingers.  Away I shall be, and trouble you no more!”  With a bow and a tip of his hat he was away and scampering down the hall, keyhole left gaping and forlorn.

The burglar stood there a while, thinking quietly but not without internal turmoil.  At last he cautiously poked his head into the room, glanced about, then looted freely and with little care weighing down his heart.  The jewellery box in particular was a fine haul, and surprisingly easy to open, thanks to a specialized little tool he’d brought along. 
As he turned to leave, a hulking presence barged in the door, breath reeking of whiskey and fire, soot-covered and with a knife in each hand. 
“Hello!” exclaimed the murderer cheerily, teeth surprisingly yellow against his dark red (and black now) beard.  “These chaps” (and here he jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the burly, glowering chef and two under-chefs behind him, nearly taking off his ear in the process) “have a bit of a beef with the bloody little pillock themselves, eh?  So I’ve brought ‘em along and we can all have a lovely piece of his hide each.”
“I get th’ scalp,” said the head chef, testing the edge of his abnormally large cleaver with unsavoury anticipation.  The two underchefs nodded and hefted their meat tenderizers with appropriate menacing grunts, muscles squirming like meerkats in a sack. 
“My,” said the burglar, with even more care than was usual.
“Cheap bastard,” the chef elaborated.  “Under-pays, an’ too rarely.  Slice ‘is head off, I reckon, grab our wages from the safe and scarper.  ‘E here?”
“No,” said the burglar.  A small plan was forming behind his eyeballs.  “But try the west garden.  If he isn’t there, a man is who’d be happy to join you.”
“You heard the rascal!” boomed the murderer, waving his weapons most alarmingly (one was still bloody, noted the burglar – hopefully from a pot-roast rather than a guard).  “Let’s move out!”
The burglar waited some seconds for the sound of the stampede to fade, which he spent slowly letting his grin grow wider and wider before erasing it with a serious effort.  Then the bedchamber was behind him and he was off upstairs, humming a reckless little tune. 

Upstairs, he nearly tripped over Lady Darcey as she left the reading room, too distracted for her to hear even his creaking, clanking, overburdened footsteps. 
“Goodness,” she cried, eyelashes a-flutter, “are you here to ravish me?”
“Never, lady,” he replied. 
“Oh pooh,” she grumped.  “I need someone to do it, because my husband surely won’t.  That impotent old toad – I knew I shouldn’t have married for money.”  She moved into the burglar’s personal space and sighed extremely gustily.  “And he keeps such a greedy eye on me that I’ll simply never get a chance to have some fun.”
“West gardens, follow the rummaging, talk to the big fellow with the red beard,” said the burglar, as quickly as he could.  “I believe they have a solution to end all your problems for good.”
“Oh, it’s to be a lynch mob then?” she inquired.  The Lady laughed.  “Goodness me, what a lark!  Thank you, mysterious man of my dreams.  Care for a little moment of celebration?”
“No thank you,” said the burglar, backing away from her grasp.  “Must move on!”  Her laughter trailed him, and he smiled where she couldn’t see it. 

By the time the burglar was through hurriedly pillaging the upper floor, the mob had re-assembled itself at the staircase below, and it now contained practically all the estate guards, who seemed to be something of the same mind as the chefs. 
“No trace,” said the murderer.
“Nary a sign, alas,” sighed the adulterer.
“’ide nor ‘air” hissed the cook between his teeth, as the underchefs rumbled their disapproval. 
“I’ve not seen him since this afternoon,” sighed the lady.  “Where on earth could he be?”
“There is a wine cellar, is there not?” inquired the burglar.  “Mayhap he’s been drinking.”
“But he has the key,” she complained.  “And he won’t tell me where he keeps it!”
The burglar fished an object from around his neck, where he’d stored it for safekeeping.  “This?”
The cook snatched it from his fist with the speed of a snapping adder.  “’at’s it,” he agreed.  “Where you find it?”
“Underneath his third-best hat,” said the burglar, which was an utter lie.  “Shall we?”
There was a general roar of approval and many a sharp object was brandished in the milling midst of the parade the burglar led down to the darkest and coolest corner of the cellars, where the great winery door stood foursquare and tall, fastened with a padlock that would make a sledgehammer blanch in stark existential terror.  The burglar fancied he could feel it glaring at him as it thumped neatly into his palm, flapping open.
“AT HIM, LADS!” he called, and charged beyond the darkened door, where he flattened himself to the wall and allowed the rest of the hooting, hollering bunch to stream past.  He then darted back outside, slapped the padlock on, allowed himself five seconds of maniacal laughter, then ran for it. 

Lord Darcey’s estate was the centre of a great scandal, to be sure.  For the whole staff to run riot with the aid of so many nefarious plotters of murder was one thing, but the wholesale pillaging of valuables was quite another.  Thankfully, the vast majority were insured, and Lord Darcey himself reaped a tidy profit, which, combined with the sale of the old manor (“Bad memories,” he claimed), led to his acquiring a tidy and sprawling new home in the country, one nearly beyond even his reputedly vast amassment of fortune, which showed no sign of shrinking. Even more thankfully, much of his property was seized by the police and returned to him from several fences after a flurry of anonymous tips. 
The murderous instigators were for the most part free to go under little more than stern warnings, but Lord Hemmeley-Pewthrett On-The-Lake and the dashing young Sir Albert Lawrence were examined more seriously, the former on grounds of mental health and the latter on the producing of an extremely passionate letter from Lady Darcey’s own chambermaid’s uncle’s sister-in-law, which Lord Darcey had fortunately discovered by sheer luck.  The Lady was placed under scandalous regard and they soon separated. 

The steak dinner had to be put off until after the legal business had been settled.  It would’ve ruined his appetite. 

 

 

“A Night on the Town” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2010.

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