by Cavan Scott
When the Scoundrels’ Annual Marlowe Banquet (thirteen courses and a reading of their treasured manuscript of Dr Faustus II) was announced, Harrison Mandeville made a special visit down to the kitchens to insist that the head chef cooked the feast personally.
‘I’m busy.’ Saffron was chopping carrots.
Mandeville leaned over the table and effected what was his most intimidating smile. ‘But the club is counting on you … my dear.’
Saffron shrugged. ‘Fine.’
‘Splendid!’ This was just about the longest conversation Harrison Mandeville had ever had with a woman (including Mrs Mandeville) and he decided to leave it while he was ahead. ‘You’re a damn fine cook. As for your desserts! Dear lady, you really understand sugar.’
Away he went.
Saffron remained at her chopping board, dicing meat slowly.
The best thing about the Marlowe Banquet from Mandeville’s point of view was that it allowed him to share his opinions with the other members. Thirteen courses may seem like a lot, but he ensured they flew by with topics such as ‘What’s Funny About Foreigners’, ‘There’s Nothing Wrong With The Poor That A Good Holiday Wouldn’t Sort Out’, ‘Why Tax Avoidance Is Good For The Economy’ and so on. All in front of a roaring fire.
Seven courses down, he moved on to his own achievements.
Truthfully, it had been a difficult year for Mandeville. Harrison’s (his chain of supermarkets) had had a few scandals – some dog meat had crept into the supply chain – and Mandeville took great pains both to explain his lack of involvement in this and also to argue that dog was, in many ways, a splendid meat. Having cleared that up (over a rather lovely rare fillet), he then amused himself with discussing the misfortunes of a few members. There was another of the Surgeon’s malpractice suits, a few juicy divorces and the sad (but so discussable) suicide of one member’s son.
Once he’d squeezed his fellows until the pips squeaked, he spoke about his pride and joy, his stable of racehorses. Senior managers in his supermarket had long ago accepted that they’d never be paid as much as one of his horses. ‘Well, suck it up,’ Mandeville was fond of telling them. ‘If you put a foot wrong I’m not permitted to come after you with a shotgun. More’s the pity.’
It might have been a tough year for Harrison’s supermarkets, but it had been a splendid year for his racehorses. He waxed lyrical about the achievements of Downton, his prize stallion, hotly tipped to win the Grand National.
Once that was done, and a selection of delicious towering cakes and trifles had been accounted for, it was time to loosen one’s waistbands and listen to the reading of Dr Faustus II, the lost play by Christopher Marlowe – a story so scandalous that, even though it was a short play (and lacking that bard’s loftier turns of phrase), it was always heard in gaping silence.
Mandeville raised his hand and clicked his fingers for the manuscript to be brought forward. He opened the locked lead box, and looked inside.
Nothing.
The members gasped.
‘What …’ thundered Mandeville. ‘What’s happened to the manuscript?’
At that point the large fire crackled. A small scrap of paper drifted out of it. Drifted out of it, wandered through the air and wafted down in front of Mandeville.
The scrap of paper was the size of an envelope and crammed with some of the worst handwriting ever known to man. It was quite unmistakable.
Christopher Marlowe’s.
Mandeville straightened slowly. He knew what must be happening. He was aware of – even mildly disconcerted by – the number of members who’d been dropping dead; he’d not forgotten the ex-member’s threats of revenge. But he’d always imagined that the club was inviolable. It was, after all, a private members’ club. Outrages did not happen inside. They simply did not.
He noticed the club librarian was sobbing: Dr Faustus II was their second most valuable manuscript. Well, let him sob! If that was the woman’s idea of revenge, they could all weather that storm.
Mandeville performed that marvel of the upper-class man, the slow handclap.
‘Oh very good,’ he bellowed sarcastically. ‘I’m a fox-hunting chap. We’re not afraid of burning books.’
There was silence.
‘Typical woman. Skulking in the shadows.’
That should have got a laugh. It did not.
Mandeville started to realise that the members around him were not just silent but had that peaky, mild sheen that normally came over a fellow after a glass too many of the club’s brandy. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, noticing for the first time that the fire was a little hot. He ran a finger under his collar – then realised it had stopped moving. Curious. The finger was just jammed there, in his shirt. How odd. He tried to stand, and realised that that wasn’t happening either. He looked around the table and realised all the other members were similarly indisposed, their eyes rolling helplessly in their heads.
‘Drugged …’ gasped the Surgeon to his right.
The doors crashed open, and the Scoundrels’ head chef entered, followed by the club’s most notorious ex-member. She curtsied to them all. ‘So sorry I’m late. Just been running over a maths teacher with a milk float. You know how it is.’ She nudged Saffron. ‘Take a bow, my dear. MANDEVILLE! Saffron here – she used to be a slave on one of your family’s dreary plantations. The ones you’ve forgotten about because it was so long ago and the money’s still in your bank account. I let Saffron cook this meal for you lot as her revenge.’
‘You poisoned us! You witch! You harpy!’ Mandeville stood with difficulty, every limb shaking and burning with the effort. ‘You poisoned the whole meal.’
The woman looked affronted. ‘How dare you! That would have been an insult to the meat.’ She stooped to lift something heavy from the floor behind her and heaved it onto the table.
To everyone else, it was just a horse’s head, neatly severed. But Mandeville knew that noble brow, that clear eye and that tufted forelock only too well. Here was Downton, his prized stallion.
‘My horse!’
‘And your kingdom, yes, yes. Saffron here’s cooked your whole stable. And you ate them all.’ The woman stroked the horse’s bloodied mane. ‘No. Saffron couldn’t have poisoned Dobbin here. That would have been rude. No, no, no. It was the desserts that she poisoned. After all, she and her family really know their sugar.’
The assembled members of the Scoundrels were starting to make choking, desperate noises. As the poison passed through its victims, it allowed them some movement – just enough to thrash around in agony.
The woman put her hands on her hips. ‘Now, boys, I can’t let you suffer. There is, of course, an antidote.’
Several pairs of desperate, popping eyes stared at her.
‘Saffron!’ she clapped her hands.
The cook, smirking with something approaching satisfaction, reached into an old carpet bag, and produced a book.
‘Thank you, my dear.’ The woman held aloft the book. ‘Recognise this? It’s your first most-precious manuscript. The only remaining copy of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Won. Priceless and really rather dull, but Saffron soaked it in antidote.’ She licked the corner of a page. ‘Tastes very slightly of apricots. We all like apricots.’
She slammed the book down on the table. ‘The recommended dose is about a page.’
The agonised Mandeville led the members in falling upon the manuscript, tearing the priceless pages to shreds, cramming them into their maws, chewing and gagging and swallowing, flailing as their limbs burned and spasmed. Punches were weakly thrown. Faces were slammed against the table. But, eventually, all the men took their medicine, falling back, gasping and croaking into their chairs.
Of the priceless, incredible manuscript, the only surviving example of Shakespeare’s handwriting … nothing remained. Even the Surgeon was chewing grimly on a scrap of the cover.
‘Will we live?’ croaked Mandeville.
The woman just laughed.
&n
bsp; ‘Damn you, woman, will we live? You told us we would live!’
The woman laughed some more, dabbing at the corners of her eyes with a lace handkerchief. ‘Oh, bless you. Only stupid people trust what they’re told.’
Mandeville closed his eyes as his fellow Scoundrels, gasping and groaning and swearing, twitched and fell unconscious.
It should be noted that the members of the Scoundrels Club didn’t die right there and then. In fact, ‘there and then’ took on a whole new meaning, once they’d woken up and found themselves on the Mandeville sugar plantation in the eighteenth century. They were chained in manacles, trapped in a filthy hut with a lot of damp vermin sheltering from the storm outside. The recovering Scoundrels complained about this state of affairs very loudly.
Eventually, the door to the hut was thrown open and a large, angry man with a bullwhip strode in.
The Scoundrels demanded to know what was going on. They followed this up by further demands for warm baths, fresh towels, and a lack of rats.
The large angry man just laughed at them.
‘Let me explain a few things to you, gents,’ he said, spitting in their direction. ‘This here is an highly lucer-ative sugar plantation. We’re in the business of making the Mandeville family stinking filthy rich. Only problem is that yesterday I woke up to find my whole workforce gawn. Can you believe it? The whole lot scarpered. Why, when I get my hands on them, I’ll hobble them all with a chisel, you see if I don’t.’ The large man momentarily lost himself as if in a rather gory reverie before finding his subject again. ‘Anyway, that leaves me with no slaves and a lot of sugarcane to be harvested before these storms get worse. Filthy work it is, filthy. Anyway, there am I at my wits’ end, when up pops a female pirate with you lot.’
‘A female pirate?’
‘Hey, it takes all sorts to make a world, that’s what I say. She pops up with you lot – a bunch of bankrupts shipwrecked on the way to New South Wales.’
‘What? How dare you!’
There was a short pause while the foreman kindly demonstrated to them how well his bullwhip worked. Once the whimpering had died down, he continued. ‘I was only too happy to take you off your rescuer’s hands for a song. And you’re barely worth what I paid for you – don’t look like you’ve done an honest day’s work in your lives.’
This was, the foreman would have been pleased to learn, entirely true. He gestured to the open door, outside which the storm was raging.
‘Anyway, can’t sit around here gassing all night. The Mandevilles are not forgiving employers. So it’s time for you to learn all about hard work …’
Several hundred years later, Harrison Mandeville was running. He’d been running ever since he’d woken up. A voice called to him down the echoing corridors: ‘Coooeeee! Cooooeeee!’ He was being hunted.
Ragged, disoriented, his head buzzing with the after effects of being drugged, Mandeville staggered into the clubroom. There was a phone in there. There had to be a phone in there. And there it was, on the card table. He looked from left to right, decided to risk the open, and staggered towards it.
At which point a colossal dart shot into his left buttock.
Mandeville gasped in agony and toppled forward onto his front. Fire surged through his veins. A crossbow thudded onto the carpet beside him, and a voice spoke to him.
‘Tut tut, you’ve fallen in the wrong place, you clumsy goose.’
Mandeville felt himself grabbed by the ankles and dragged towards the fire. It was roasting hot. He tried to flinch away. He couldn’t move. And yet his legs and arms were being carefully, deliberately shifted.
‘I’m just rearranging you. The first time I poisoned you, that was just a temporary paralysis so that you’d all shut up. The second time was knock-out drops. Now I’ve embalmed you. You’ll make a lovely wee rug for ages and ages. And you’ll be awake for all of them.’
Harrison Mandeville tried to scream, but nothing happened. He saw the woman, his tormentor, settle herself down in her chair (second from the fire, not too ostentatious), kick off her shoes and plonk her feet down on his skull.
‘Finally! Oh dear me, this has all been exhausting, I tell you. I could die, all over again. But I won’t.’ She leaned forward, smiling with her very sharp teeth. ‘Say something nice, dear.’
Mandeville tried to threaten her, but couldn’t.
‘Oh dear. Never mind. Forgot. You’ll never be saying anything ever again.’
The woman settled back in her chair, easing into the soft leather and exhaling gloriously. ‘All I wanted was a sit down. That’s all. And you couldn’t even give me that. And now look at what you’ve done. This whole club is mine now. I’m the last surviving member.’
From the chair nearest the fire there came a murmur of alarmed protest.
‘Oh yes. I’ll get to you in a moment, sweetheart.’ She turned her attention back to her new rug, drumming her heels against it. ‘I’ve picked a name. For myself. Lovely Saffron suggested it: Missy. Has a ring to it. Approachable. Gets things done. No messy. No fussy. Just Missy.’
The fire crackled.
‘If you don’t like it, speak now or forever hold your – oh sorry, that’s tactless.’
The woman now known as Missy sprang to her feet and began to pace. ‘What am I going to do with this place? Am I going to give it to Saffron? Turn it into a pound shop? Or just keep it as it is?’
Forgetting Mandeville entirely, she advanced on the chair closest to the fire.
Sat there, strapped into it, was the Scoundrels member nicknamed the Surgeon. He was staring at her in terror.
She tapped him on the knee. ‘I know, this must all be terribly scary for you. All this death. It’s morbid, isn’t it? Mind you, you’re a surgeon. You must have a strong stomach. Shall we whip it out and have a peek?’
The Surgeon gave a muffled shriek of fear.
‘I’ll tell you one thing I’ve learned about all this. Rich people – they’re such fun to play with and so deliciously scared of dying. They’ll do anything to avoid it, won’t they?’
She nudged the Surgeon’s chair a little closer to the fire. ‘I’ve had a lovely idea,’ she said. ‘You’re going to invent something. Something wonderful.’ She kissed him on the nose and then stood back.
She started to rock the Surgeon’s chair backwards and forwards, singing along to his muffled screams. One moment the chair tipped towards the fire, the next away, then in, then away. Closer and closer. The flames roared.
‘Tell me, Dr Skarosa,’ Missy addressed him by name now that she had one herself. Her smiling face glowed in the firelight. ‘What are your feelings about cremation …?’
Lords and Masters
Cavan Scott
‘Some people are so touchy.’
Parasol under her arm, Missy hitched up her skirts and ran through the stygian gloom of the Jesalorian jungle.
Behind her, the Skarasens roared. Three of them. Talk about an overreaction. Trees splintered like twigs as the monsters crashed after her, carving a path through the forest as they followed her scent.
Missy liked Skarasens. She’d even owned one once, a lovely little thing by the name of Flipper. She’d lost count of the number of unsuspecting allies she’d plunged into Flipper’s tank over the centuries. How the console room had echoed to the sound of anguished screams and crunching bones.
Happy days.
Missy scrambled down a muddy slope, her parasol now gripped firmly in her hand. The descent was hardly dignified, but flair and panache could wait until she was safe. She didn’t even have time to impale the three-eyed toad that watched her lazily from a nearby log. What a day!
A shallow lake lay ahead, the foul water bubbling with countless unknown dangers that roiled beneath its scum-covered surface. An island rose at the centre of the lagoon, home to a single, solitary tree. Its great trunk was twisted, smothered in greasy purple lichen, but Missy knew that no birds ever found shelter in its leafy branches, or insects crawled between th
e deep crags of its faintly vibrating bark.
This tree was different. This tree was home.
She did not look back as the Skarasens appeared at the brow of the incline behind her, nostrils flaring and eyes burning with bloodlust. Calmly, she unfurled her parasol above her head, the anti-gravity generators in the umbrella’s ribs activating with the buzz of an angry wasp. Holding on to the handle, she rose into the air, floating across to the tree. Beneath her, fish leapt from the water, desperate to sink their fangs into her boots, as the Skarasens blundered down the slope behind, taking most of the soil with them. Soon they’d be in the water, but Missy would be gone long before they reached the island.
She drifted down to land beside the tree, her parasol closing as her feet touched the ground. Sensing her presence, doors opened where they had no place to be, splitting the tree in two. Light spilled out, illuminating Missy as she turned on her heels to blow a kiss to her monstrous pursuers before backing quickly into the opening.
The doors snapped shut around her.
Safe inside her TARDIS, Missy’s heels clacked as she deposited her parasol in the umbrella stand beside the doors and marched towards the console that dominated the high-vaulted control room. Like the walls that surrounded her, the console was as black as a brigand’s heart, its obsidian panels filled with a breathtaking array of switches and levers.
With a sigh, Missy leant against the console and closed her eyes for a second. This time she’d come so close. So close. If it wasn’t for that pathetic cry-baby of a Zygon Queen, the Sizradian Hypersphere would have been where it belonged, in her hands.
Yes, Missy had double-crossed the suckered sovereign, and, yes, boiling the royal hatchlings in acid may have been inappropriate at a feast in the Queen’s honour, but was that any reason for Brillana to set a pack of Skarasens on her trail?
The control room shuddered as the creatures threw themselves at the TARDIS, coiling their bodies around the counterfeit tree.
