Bleak Expectations

by Mark Evans

  ‘I must hear it from her or the marriage is not valid.’

  At this Mr Benevolent sighed so deeply that I could smell his breath even from some yards away; it had a sickly, evil odour of off-milk and celery. The vicar tried again.

  ‘Will you take this man—’

  ‘Yes, I will,’ came a sort of half-female voice, fortunately not from my poor deranged mother but from Mr Benevolent trying to pretend to be her, which he did unconvincingly.

  ‘No, Benevolent, the bride must say it. Will you, Agnes? Will you take him?’

  ‘Just say no, Mama!’ I yelled.

  ‘Come on, you mad witch, say it. Say “I will”! Say it!’ Mr Benevolent seized and shook my mother as if he could free the phrase from her, like word-ketchup from a speech-bottle. ‘Say it!’

  I could see my mother breathe in, preparatory to exclaiming something. A lump of apprehension grew in my throat as I feared I was about to gain a most unwelcome stepfather. But—

  ‘I won’t. I really won’t . . . go in the cupboard with the tea towels. They are beneath me. For I am a tablecloth, the gentry of the linen cupboard.’

  ‘There, she said it! Hooray for me, now let’s kiss the bride then bury her.’

  ‘No, she did not say it. In fact, she said the opposite. She said, “I won’t.” There is no wedding,’ the vicar declared, to my relief. ‘Besides, this woman is clearly too mad to marry.’

  ‘Ha,’ laughed Mr Benevolent, weakly. ‘Surely being mad is a precondition for getting married.’

  ‘You are forgetting the recent Maddus Maddiatus Act passed in Parliament.’4

  ‘Oh, cursed Parliament! One day I shall destroy that pathetic institution and— Wait! Plan B has just leaped to mind.’ Now Mr Benevolent rubbed his hands together excitedly and, for an evil person, distinctly stereotypically. ‘I could wait until next year when Pippa Bin turns eighteen . . . but Pippa and Poppy between them have a combined age of thirty-three, so I could marry them both simultaneously. Would that be legal, Reverend?’

  ‘There is no reason why not.’5

  ‘Alas, un-dear Gently, you shall never find them. For they are hidden safely far from your grasp.’ Aunt Lily smiled a small smile of triumph.

  Oh, curse my adolescent desire to impress and correct!

  For I could not help but blurt, ‘No they aren’t. They are back there, hidden in that pew.’

  ‘Oh, great, well done, Pip, good work.’

  ‘Thanks very . . . Oh, sarcasm. Whoops.’

  Now Pippa and Poppy rose from their pewish hiding place. ‘Yeah, great, thanks a lot, Pip.’

  ‘Henchman!’

  The huge man now lugged Aunt Lily and me across to Pippa and Poppy and seized them too, pausing only to put on a pair of arm-extensions so that he could hold all four of us at once.

  ‘Bring them here and we shall do it now,’ said Mr Benevolent.

  This was terrible. This awful man was about to marry both of my sisters, making him not just my guardian but also my brother-in-law squared, for marriages are a geometric mathematical function, not an arithmetical one.

  And it was my fault.

  All my fault.

  Well, not all.

  Because, frankly, if other people had—

  No, no blame shifting, it was basically my fault.

  Henchman the henchman now dragged my sisters to the altar, with Aunt Lily and me still clutched in his other arm, and the vicar began.

  ‘Will you, Gen—’

  ‘Yes, I will. Get on with it,’ snapped my evil guardian and would-be sinister relative by marriage.

  ‘And will you, Pippa and Poppy . . . I’m sorry, I don’t know your middle names.’

  ‘Wheelie,’ said Pippa.

  ‘Recycling,’ said Poppy.

  ‘Thank you. Will you, Pippa Wheelie and Poppy Recycling Bin, take this man to be your husband?’

  ‘Think carefully, my lovelies,’ said Mr Benevolent, producing a wicked-looking knife, which he held at my mother’s throat. ‘Wrong answer and it’s bye-bye, Mama.’

  ‘Ooh,’ said my mother, eyeing the knife. ‘That’s tarnished. I won’t have it on me, I won’t!’

  Who could stop this evil? Who could prevent the double wedding? There was only Harry left uncaptured, and the chances of him doing anything helpful seemed less than good. Pippa and Poppy looked at each other, then at me and Aunt Lily. What could they do? Apart from say ‘yes’. Their mouths opened, and a strange whistling sound seemed to emerge.

  Only it wasn’t from them.

  Though it was a familiar whistling sound, being one I had heard before – for that is what familiar means – a heavy, cast-iron whistling sound, indeed an anvilly whistling sound.

  Then the stained-glass window above the altar, which depicted a Union-Jack-clad Jesus refusing to help a dying French sailor, shattered into a thousand patriotically Christian fragments and Pippa’s anvil soared in, gloriously true in its trajectory as it headed straight for Henchman the henchman. He immediately released us and flung his hands up to catch the onrushing massy ingot, and, to give him credit, he did actually catch it, a fine take showing no little skill; but, regrettably for him, its tremendous momentum drove him across the church and into a wall, where he came to rest with a loud, injury-indicating thud, an impact lessened only slightly by the fact that, on his anvil-driven path, he had swept along with him the vicar, who now rested ’twixt henchman and wall doing a very good impression of the world’s first ever two-dimensional man, so flat had he been squashed.

  Good Lord. It seemed Harry’s plan had worked, and now not only were we free, but Pippa and Poppy would remain unmarried, for a vicarless wedding was like an Italian man who does not wink at pretty girls, that is to say impossible.

  ‘No!’ screamed Mr Benevolent, his face a crazed, rageful rictus. ‘Have you any idea how hard it is to find a henchman with the right combination of strength, cruelty and mute obedience?’

  I did not have any idea, and did not care, for with my guardian distracted by his fury, I seized my mother and ran for the door.

  ‘Careful, you’ll crease me, and then what will the master think when he comes to dine?’

  Having a mother who thinks she is a tablecloth may be a burden and a curse, but at least it means she is happy to be slung over your shoulder and carried like a piece of dirty linen.

  ‘Ooh, where are we going? Is it washing time? Easy on the starch!’

  I carried mad Mama outside; close on my heels were Aunt Lily, Poppy and Pippa. All we had to do now was get really, truly, properly away and life could yet be mended.

  1 By the nineteenth century, selective breeding had created this tremendous meat-bearing animal. Sadly, their offspring were often born with eight legs, therefore resembling woolly spiders, and they quickly died out as people kept trapping them under giant glasses or simply squishing them.

  2 Before the invention of cased ammunition, damp gunpowder was the primary cause of weapons not firing. Hence the phrases ‘keeping your powder dry’ and ‘Why won’t you fire, you useless wet weapon?’

  3 In these days, when there were still many arranged marriages, vicars carried a spiked staff to poke reluctant couples towards each other.

  4 By the early nineteenth century there was so much inbreeding among the upper classes that most of them were insane. This Act of Parliament was intended to prevent more inbreeding among already mad people and thereby restore the aristocracy to sanity. Did it work? You tell me.

  5 There are many reasons why not.

  CHAPTER THE NINETEENTH, N-N-N-N-NINETEENTH1

  In which there is fleeing and flight

  Outside we were greeted by a grinning Harry. ‘Hello! Did my anvil-firing help?’

  ‘It did, Harry, but now we must escape.’

  ‘I gave up on the whole trebuchet thing when I realized I didn’t actually know what one was, so I just twanged it in using a couple of saplings with my pants strung between them.’

  He pointed at an arboreal, str
etched-underwear sight I wish I had not seen but, grotesque though it was, it had saved us – at least for the moment.

  ‘We can escape in Benevolent’s carriage,’ yelled Aunt Lily, unnecessarily as we were all close enough together to hear even a whisper, but then perhaps she was excited.

  Alas, no escape would come from that carriagey quarter, for so tired and hungry were the two horses harnessed to it that they had each eaten the other’s leg, and now slept wonkily against each other.

  ‘Then we must cross the river!’ Aunt Lily was still shouting and, being closest to her, my ears were starting to hurt. But at least she shouted with sensible intention, for there was indeed a river running behind the church, swollen and water-plump following the recent storm.

  ‘I could use my tree-pant-apult to twang you across,’ suggested Harry, with much less sensible intention.

  ‘Yes, Harry, you could. Or we could use that,’ Aunt Lily said, pointing at a small, rickety-looking bridge a little way downstream, which would be both more practical and more hygienic than Harry’s device. We headed quickly in that direction, but after only a few steps, I stopped, for our aunt was not with us, having stayed behind in the churchyard.

  ‘Aunt Lily, what are you doing?’

  ‘I shall stay and hold Benevolent off while you escape.’

  ‘Then I shall help you,’ I said, returning to her side. I removed my tableclothy mother from my shoulder so that I might have both hands free to fight, and laid her gently on the ground.

  ‘As shall we all!’ Now Pippa, Poppy and Harry returned also.

  ‘Children, no. This is not your fight.’

  ‘He is our evil guardian so I think you’ll find it very much is,’ I said.

  Pippa and Poppy nodded in agreement, and then our aunt looked at us and sighed as if giving in to a reluctant desire. ‘I had not wanted to show you this until later, but you have more to live for than you know.’

  She reached into her bag and removed a newspaper. On the front was a large painting of the Royal Navy’s latest vessel being launched, a huge ship-of-the-line named HMS Grrr.

  ‘Much as I like naval things, how is this something for us to live for?’

  ‘Look on the dock beside the ship,’ she said, pointing to the corner of the picture, and I saw what she meant.

  ‘Papa!’ For it was indeed our father, looking straight at the artist as if pleading for someone to notice him. ‘He is still alive!’

  ‘This paper is only a week old – you were not told true about your father’s death. For his sake, you must flee that you may live and find him.’

  As if to reinforce that notion, from where she lay on the ground, my dear, linen-crazed mother noticed the picture and whispered a distinctly sane-sounding ‘Thomas . . .’

  Had the picture of Papa and the knowledge of his aliveness re-saned her?

  If so, it was only temporarily, for she now lay back on the ground and started placing cutlery, plates and a candelabrum upon herself, still very much in her mind a tablecloth.

  Worse, the imparting of this information had taken time, and suddenly Mr Benevolent burst from the church, still furious but now in a controlled, frightening fashion as if his rage had been focused through an anger-lens to be directed at us like a beam of pure ire.

  ‘There will be no thwarting of my evil plans today!’ he shouted, somewhat hammily it must be said, then ran towards his carriage and, on arrival there, reached inside and removed a blunderbuss, that most accurate of firearms.2

  Faced with such a deadly weapon, our fighty determination dissolved, like an over-dunked piece of shortbread or a chicken in an acid bath, and as Mr Benevolent’s finger tightened on the trigger, we ran.

  The report of the weapon was mighty, like a vibrant slap to the ears, and as a visible blizzard of shot rushed forth we dived desperately into cover, Aunt Lily behind a tree, Pippa and Poppy behind a gravestone, and I behind Harry because he was there and wider than me.

  By some miracle, the shot missed us all, succeeding only in shredding the leaves of a nearby tree and exploding three chaffinches therein.

  ‘Fettocks!’3 screamed Mr Benevolent, waving his emptied blunderbuss around angrily. ‘Now, if you’d just give me three minutes to reload . . .’

  But we were in no mood for reloading generosity and set off at speed towards the bridge, Mr Benevolent instantly pur-suiting us. I quickly realized we had left Mama behind, but as I turned to go to her, Aunt Lily pushed me onwards, shouting, ‘You serve your mother better by saving yourself, Pip.’

  I knew she was right, and carried on bridge-wards, though not without yelling behind me, ‘We will find you, Mama! Wherever you are, we will find you and save you!’

  Given the circumstances, I thought this was fairly brave and suave or bruave of me, but I am not sure my mother either heard or cared, for I could see she was now happily balancing a cruet set on her stomach and a decanter on her forehead.

  Our flight was swift. Harry, Pippa and I soon reached the bridge and started across. It swayed; it creaked; it wobbled; bits fell off where we trod and were swept away in the thundering rush of the bloated river below.

  As bridges went, it was rubbish.

  But it got us across. Or, at least, three of us – for as I arrived on the far bank of the river, I looked back to see Poppy tripping and falling as she stepped on to the fragile wooden span. Aunt Lily immediately raced back to help her re-foot herself, but was not quick enough to prevent Mr Benevolent grabbing my youngest sister by the arm.

  ‘Mine, I think you’ll find,’ he sneered.

  ‘She will never be yours, Benevolent,’ said Aunt Lily, grabbing Poppy’s other arm.

  ‘Ow!’ said Poppy. ‘This grabbing really hurts!’

  Now they started tugging her to and fro with great grunts of effort.

  ‘Ow!’ said Poppy. ‘This tugging really hurts!’

  An almighty tussle developed as they struggled to gain control.

  ‘Ow!’ said Poppy. ‘This tussling really hurts!’

  Poor Poppy. I think the whole ordeal was causing her some pain. Indeed, she seemed to tire of being fought over because all of a sudden she lunged forwards and bit Mr Benevolent hard on the arm. With a yowl he let go, and Poppy and Aunt Lily were racing across the bridge to safety again.

  Mr Benevolent seemed to gird himself for further pursuit, but then stopped, de-girded, and instead bent down and took a large fallen branch from the ground beside him with which he started pounding the wooden frame of the bridge.

  The whole edifice shuddered with each blow, shedding worryingly large fragments, and then, hideously, it shattered and collapsed, plunging Poppy and Aunt Lily into the thundering waters beneath.

  ‘No!’ Pippa, Harry and I screamed, as they disappeared into the raving torrent.

  ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ laughed a gloaty Mr Benevolent, from the other bank.

  For they were gone.

  Swept away.

  Drowned.

  My aunt, whom I had known for such a short time yet loved wholeheartedly, and my sister, whom I had known a much longer time and therefore loved wholeheartedly-plus.

  And where they had been was only rushing water, and an aunt-and-sister-shaped hole in my wholehearted heart.

  1 The author did for a time suffer from an affliction known as Writer’s Stutter.

  2 Though we see a blunderbuss as an inaccurate weapon, compared to other weapons of the time, such as muskets, flintlocks and guesswhereithits, it was like a modern sniper rifle. It could reliably hit an incredibly close target very nearly some of the time.

  3 Cross between fetlocks and buttocks. Popular nineteenth-century swear word, along with ‘bumsnot’ and ‘moobwang’.

  CHAPTER THE TWENTIETH

  From despair to hemi-joy to re-despair

  Oh, woe of woes, grief of griefs, misery of miseries! Oh, wretchedness of wretched— No, hang on, there was an arm, shooting up from the water downstream and seizing hold of an overhanging tree branch. Even bett
er, it was Aunt Lily’s arm, and with her other she was clutching Poppy.

  We raced to help her as she struggled to get ashore. The riverbank was distinctly slippery with mud, and we trod carefully lest we ended up in the water also, thereby serving no useful purpose other than as companions to the already river-trapped pair, something that would no doubt be a cheering boost to their morale but would in all other respects be completely useless.

  Somehow Aunt Lily managed to manoeuvre Poppy through the waters until she was close enough to grab.

  ‘Perhaps I should invent some form of Poppy-grabbing device,’ Harry pondered. ‘What with my tree-pant-apult being so successful.’

  ‘Yes, Harry, or you could just use your arms,’ I suggested.

  ‘Ooh, clever.’ He reached out with Pippa and me, and together we managed to grasp part of Poppy.

  Alas, it was merely the part of her that had been disguised as a mock rhododendron, and instead of sister all we dragged ashore was bits of twig and petals. Again we tried, and this time we took hold of her sub-fake-shrub dress and hauled her to safety.

  Or would have done if the dress hadn’t neatly slipped off over her head.

  It was as if she didn’t want to be rescued.

  Again we lunged for her, and this time we grabbed the long braid that was her hair.

  I half expected her to be wearing some kind of wig or hair extension that would now also come away in our hands, but miraculously she was not and we hauled her from the river to safety, though not without a good deal of ungrateful whining from her along the lines of ‘Ow’, ‘Stop pulling my hair’ and ‘My scalp really hurts.’

  Now there was just Aunt Lily to rescue. She was dragging herself along the branch towards the bank when, with a crack, the branch broke, and she plummeted river-wards once more.

  Yet, with reflexes quicker than that of a caffeinated cat, I managed to catch her, my hand grasping hold of her wrist – though her weight instantly started to drag me down the muddy bank towards the river, and I slipped and slithered helplessly to a watery doom.

  She looked me in the eye with a determined gaze and said the bravest thing I have ever heard anyone say: ‘Pip, save yourself, let me go.’