The Triple Goddess

by Ashly Graham

  When he unfolded them, the odour of violets spread through the room as if bravely bent upon deodorizing the Annexe’s interior. Everything in the room seemed to brighten, and there was a fluttering in the pit of Dark’s stomach that he could not attribute to the earlier onset of his matutinal movement. He traced the embossed Lamia crest and address at the top of the first page of cream-laid satin-weave notepaper with his finger, and read the italic script...which was written in accordance with the general theme in violet ink…plummily aloud as if it were a benedicite:

  LADY VIOLET ENDERBY

  THE MOATED GRANGE

  OLD NICHOLAS

  Dear Father Fletcher:

  Although we are not acquainted, this is a situation that I hope to rectify quam celerrime. Though I fancy I did once press your hand in a former life, and flatter myself that a certain understanding passed between us when our eyes met, I must declare that it is my nature to be more worshipful than worshipping.

  Before I proceed, let me tell you that the Moated Grange at Old Nicholas, the historic seat whence I write, is an estate proximate to the parish that rejoices to have had a man of your distinction as its vicar. I should have introduced myself to you before, or called on you in your official capacity, and for this omission I apologize. For privileged though I am in title and resources, alas! the exigencies of work dictate that my time is not my own. Needs must when The Devil® drives, as they say.

  Fr. Fletcher, my reason for writing arises from a compulsion to tell you that, in my opinion your irreligious talent has been shamefully overlooked by certain Other Powers That Be™. This situation, with your permission, I intend to rectify. Courage, mon ami!

  Without further ado, therefore, my dear Fr. Fletcher, I will declare that I am possessed of an incendiary agenda to promote your sublunary interests. In so doing I have no selfish motive other than a burning desire to see that you receive your desserts on earth and just deserts thereafter.

  When I say that I am not a churchgoer, Father, that is an understatement. I am not in favour of the Church at all (my bad); and I hope it will not come as too much of a shock to you when I say that I do not think you are either, any more now than you were when you were active as a minister. As dutiful a priest as you were, Father, I maintain that your heart was never in your job, and that this caused you deep unhappiness.

  I have therefore made it my mission to do what I can, and I can do a lot, to obtain for you much greater preferment in your profession, and in your personal life. (Though you were married to the Church for so long, everyone deserves their bit on the side, don’cha think?)

  For I am convinced, Fletcher, that you are a latter-day Samson who shall bring the Church a-tumbling onto the Philistine heads of archbishops, bishops, archdeacons, deacons, provosts, canons, deans, prebendaries, and vergers...have I, your would-be Delilah, left any of the malefactors and miscreants out?...to wit, all those plaque-like personages who in their chapters, synods, councils, and convocations are clogging the arteries of the world.

  I here beg you, dear Fletcher, not to be offended by the anarchic content and tone of this letter, should they offend your delicate sensibilities. I am, without apology, a strong-willed woman who, being possessed of a fortune, has the means to give it practical expression, and it is not in my nature to do things half-heartedly. Life is too short.’

  ….

  There was more but at this point Dark’s reverent reverie, his mesmeric moment, was broken by a tugging at his sleeve, and with the greatest reluctance he descended from the violet-tinged cloud that he was being transported on, and returned to the reality of his dingy living room.

  He felt like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, upon the occasion of his being called out on business by the wretched person from Porlock while he was penning the great poem Kubla Khan; lines that had come to him in a vision, and which he later imperfectly remembered. It was the reverend’s own Porlock or poor luck moment to be bothered by one of the Barts!, who, as a prelude to announcing its business, was waving a piece of wood under his nose.

  ‘Bugger Bart! off!’

  As the creature fell to the floor and polished his shoes with its hair, Dark wondered what might have happened if Coleridge had taken a carving-knife to his persecutor, dragged him into the garden, buried him, and resumed his writing while it was still fresh in his mind. Pursuant to the notion, he considered where he might find some “caverns measureless to man” of his own to which he might consign his servant Bartholomew.

  ‘Damn you, Bart! What is it? Speak slowly, and remember that the proper place for the tongue is inside the mouth.’

  ‘Nng...phnairva ghneugh hign hng-hngng euhffer phne lld hign.’

  Dark, who had perforce acquired some proficiency in interpreting his menials’ language, frowned. ‘A new sign hanging over the old one—what are you talking about?’ Seizing the board, which was crudely fashioned from a piece of diseased elm, with some difficulty from the crabbed grip of the Bart!, he saw spelled out upon it in spray-painted letters: THE OLD FARTERY. Some jackanapes, most likely one of his correspondents, had upped the ante from the written insult to the practical, bypassing the verbal, by renaming his residence.

  It was a pathetic and cowardly prank, and especially demeaning to one who was accustomed to receiving billets-doux from wealthy aristocrats who would leap fully accoutred with arms and libel writs to defend him at a moment’s notice.

  ‘Oh, what a jape,’ snarled the reverend; ‘how very droll. Sticks and stones. Is that the worst they can do? I’ll show them.’ And with bravado he snapped the wood across his knee and flung the pieces, except for the shard that was lodged in his leg, into the cluttered fireplace, thereby causing the missing door-knob to roll out of the grate onto the hearth. ‘Pick that up and fit it back on the door,’

  Dark shouted, yelping as he pulled the jagged point from the flesh above his patella, and coming as close to praying as he ever did that there was no bleeding. He could not stand the sight of blood and was relieved to see that there was only a little. The splinters he could deal with later after a slug or two of scotch. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying, Bart!? Speak to me, idiot.’

  ‘Yss mstrr, ss-srry mstrr hnh hnh.’ The Bart! grovelled in the ashes, retrieved the article with the claw that protruded from one of his, or her, ravelled and mucus-encrusted sleeves, and bore it hence. Smacking his forehead with frustration, Dark dismissed the nuisance, and hopped back onto cloud nine to read the remainder of the letter.

  The plan that I wish to acquaint you with, Father Fletcher, [continued Lady Violet, who had been waiting most patiently during the interruption] is to adopt you as my new Fra. Girolamo Savonarola in plumbing the depths to which humankind’s iniquity has proved itself capable of sinking.

  I have every confidence that I have chosen my agent wisely; for from the moment I laid virtual eyes upon you, and heard tell from afar of how you used to hold your congregations spellbound with your perspicacious pronouncements, it was as if I already beheld a negatively unearthly radiance shining from your brow (which had nothing to do with the positively earthly heat that you generate on your forehead as you fortify yourself at the table, for example, or indulge other of your wonts—you are an open book to me, dear Fletcher!).

  If, therefore, after reading the above you are not indifferent to the idea of our meeting in order that we might come to know each other much more intimately, until the day that you may satisfy me with the long-desired presence of your person, please believe in the continued deep and earnest admiration of

  Your sincere supplicant,

  Violet Enderby

  PS. As William Hazlitt has it: “...like women’s letters; all the pith is in the postscript”, I wonder if you might be available to take a glass of sherry with me on Tuesday evening? Should this be convenient, my chauffeur, ffanshawe, will call for you at 5.45. It’s only a short drive. VE.

  PPS. Don’t bother to reply. Postmen have never been greatly successful in effecting deliveries to the Gr
ange, and my astrologer assures me that you will come. Hugs. VE.

  Dark felt like an explorer, who, after years of dining on snake, rat, monkey brains, and tapir testicles in the jungle, the bush, on the veldt and in the malaria- and typhoid-ridden swamps and deltas of the tropics, on returning home is invited to dinner by Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia, whose chef is the extraordinary French chef Anatole.

  Such was his P.G. Woodhousean euphoria, after a life that had been barren of romance, that his giblets jumped, his liver bungeed, his spleen did somersaults, his kidneys cartwheeled, and his heart raced across country pursued by Jabberwockies. The rancid pores of his skin opened and sucked in fresh air like turbofans, and instead of gall and wormwood he tasted honey. He was Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, William the Conqueror, Sir Walter Raleigh, Errol Flynn, and James Bond rolled into one.

  But wait! thought the reverend: Fletcher Abraham Dark had no need to borrow the mantle or cloak or toga or suit of others. Had he not inspired, by his appearance and reputation alone without uttering a single silken phrase, the adoration of a Shakespearean “Mariana in the moated grange”—as Alfred, Lord Tennyson portrayed Angelo’s betrothed in Measure for Measure—a woman who needed nothing more than the promise of Fletcher Abraham Dark’s boudoir utterances to make her cast off her weariness, and forget her customary loathing of the dreary hour when the thick-moted sunbeam lay athwart the chambers, and the day was sloping toward his western bower? Had not an aristocrat living in a grand and ancient dwelling—one no doubt riddled with priests’ holes, and boasting a wood-panelled library, billiard- and gunrooms, and staffed by a dozen aged retainers; one where the ancestral ghosts were thicker than hundred-year-old cobwebs, and the vaulted cellars were filled with oaken casks, hogsheads, and pipes, and dusty racks, of wine, brandy, malmsey, Madeira, mead, crusted port, sherry, and Tokay—certified his genius?

  ‘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.