The Triple Goddess

by Ashly Graham

  Despite her good breeding, Jenny had never been surrounded by the trappings of privilege; and now that she was living with a man whom she wasn’t in love with, and who grew more offensive, if that was possible, as time went on, she longed for the idyllic life that she had led as a child. She dreamed of the old days, when the castle was unreclaimed from the wilderness; when it was one with the crashing waves and flung spume far below, and the sea fogs, and the wind that soughed about the pinnacle turrets and terraces.

  Instead of living a hermetically sealed and soundproofed existence behind tinted triple-glazed windows and electric blinds, she longed for draughts and rattling panes; to hear the cries of seamews, and the screams of terns, whose rounding, jinking, and diving flight patterns gave the eye an extraordinary depth of perspective at every level; to see the plundering Viking surf, and peregrine falcons stooping towards the swell of—in the Old English kenning terms for the sea—the gannet’s bath, the swan’s road, and the whale’s way.

  She stayed aloof as much as possible in her own quarters, which she maintained as they always had been, spare and simple, and resigned herself to living as a prisoner.

  Because it was impractical for more than the public areas and private suites, kitchens, and storage areas at Dragonburgh to have been subjected to Huntenfisch’s passion for renovation and upgrade, Lady Eugénie was able to preserve a considerable amount of privacy for herself, even when she was around and about the castle. For in addition to the priests’ holes, and hidden rooms behind sliding sections of wall, and trap-doors between floors, there was a warren of secret passageways that only Jenny and the oldest castle retainers knew about, which ran between double stone walls and behind the tapestried wooden panels of the galleries, halls, drawing-rooms, and corridors.

  If she heard someone coming, at the touch of a finger on a spring or pressure point on a wall, fireplace or section of furniture, she could noiselessly retire behind a revolving bookcase, or invisible door, into a network of spaces that was as extensive as that of the public rooms. Dozens of peepholes made it possible to spy out from sanctuary, and tell when it was safe to emerge.

  There were other, less substantial, observers: members of Lord Huntenfisch’s entourage were often alarmed to hear whispered conversations and footsteps when nobody was present; or turn to find that a decanter had moved, or a cigar been extinguished in a brandy glass. Not a few of the guests had to his lordship’s chagrin departed early, after swearing to having seen ghostly figures floating down halls and through walls, and leering in at windows; after spending restless nights listening to creaking furniture and floorboards in their rooms; hearing manic laughter, and bloodcurdling shrieks, and groans; witnessing doors open and shut of their own accord; feeling sudden cold spots in the air; and smelling odours that had no discernible source.

  Jenny, who was on a first-name basis with all of the castle’s phantom residents, enjoyed hearing about these disruptions, and plotted with them as to how best to put the frighteners on as many guests as possible, rattle their nerves, and play upon their phobias and superstitions. They all had a good laugh after Otto, who was himself immune to such conturbations, vowed that he wasn’t going to allow ectoplasm to ruin his grand project, when the exorcist whom he had hired to rid him of the plague was found gibbering on the platform at the railway halt waiting for the next train…which wasn’t due for two days.

  But such amusements were diversions only, and did nothing to improve Lady Eugénie’s lot.

  ”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “

  When it seemed that she couldn’t endure another day, Lady Eugénie Beauvais Plantagenet came up with a brilliant idea to ease her plight, and take revenge upon those who were invading her home, along with the man responsible for inviting them.

  Since she would never desert Dragonburgh, she would assert herself by writing books; not literary books, but murder mysteries and thrillers, such as would appeal to the general public, by describing in intimate detail the grisly torments and unnatural deaths of the sort of people she was surrounded by: minor royalty and peers, tycoons, and wealthy socialites.

  For just as the saying goes that there is more than one way to skin a cat, an empowered feline might also devise imaginative ways of dispatching its oppressors.

  Jenny quickly proved that she was no slouch as an author, and she circulated the first few chapters that issued from her typewriter amongst the servants, with requests for their honest opinion. Most of them had known her all her life, and they were alternately appalled and delighted as they consumed the pages—and clamoured for more. Not that Jenny had ever been the sort to spend her days sighing with ennui, or sitting at an escritoire writing notes to her friends in violet ink on perfumed stationery; but for the daughter of an earl to be demonstrating such an aptitude for writing prussic prose was a real eye-opener.

  The book was completed in a fortnight, and printed by the castle chaplain, Father Anselm, on an ancient press that Jenny had discovered years before while exploring the dungeon, where it had been consigned when it was no longer needed to print orders of service for Mass, banquet menus, and flyers warning poachers and the more pusillanimous descendants of Picts and Scots of the dangers of risking the mantraps and tripwired shotguns that surrounded the pheasant nurseries.

  Father Anselm proved to be as proficient in removing oxidation from old machinery, and restoring it to working order, as his theology was rusty. Manifesting an energy in pedalling a bicycle that he had never demonstrated in his religious duties, which were not onerous because the earl and countess had only employed him for silent appearances, at dinners and other social occasions, and Huntenfisch wasn’t aware that he existed, the chaplain distributed copies around the estate.

  These were passed on in ever-widening circles to friends and relatives; and it wasn’t long before a copy sent to a cousin in Edinburgh found its way to another cousin, once, or it might have been twice, removed who was a writer’s agent in London.

  That was on a Monday; by Wednesday Jenny had agreed to be represented by an energetic agent, Aimée Papp; and on Friday she received a call to say that a bidding war was taking place amongst the London publishing houses.

  The book was bought for a sizeable advance on royalties by Vigilante Press, an imprint of Random House that specialized in what was known in the trade as “Retributive Literature”.

  Word of mouth made the book notorious before it was published; which it was, the following Thursday after the senior editor of Vigilante, Moira Bloodgood, had taken advice from her legal department, and made judicious name and sex changes to avoid substantial and incontestable actions for libel by the most briefly life-like or instantly recognizable in death characters—actually, all of them; except for one where Ms Bloodgood failed to get her way with the authoress, and persuaded her corporate boss to overrule the legal department, by convincing him that if they did not pump up the division’s earnings that quarter they would fail to meet the bloody budget.

  From the moment that the book hit the chain store shelves, supply couldn’t keep up with demand, requests for discounts were scorned, pirated editions flourished, and second-hand bookshops did a roaring trade at double the list price.

  The first edition of The Acid Bath: A Dissolute Dynasty was immediately followed by a second and third, in greater printings, and one in large print for the edification of her older fans.

  By the end of the month, Ginny Plunkett—for that was the nom de plume that Eugénie chose for herself, selecting as her author’s photo a portrait presumed to be of Lucrezia Borgia, with her left breast bared, by Bartolomeo Veneto—had eclipsed readers’ memory of the previous Retributive doyenne, Lotta Gore; hit number one on both hard- and paperback best-seller lists, where she looked set to stay; and was half way through her next book, a haematological hymnal of hatred called His Lordship Goes to Pieces.

  Ginny was also on her tenth typewriter ribbon, for she wrote like a woman possessed and hit the keys very har
d.

  Because Otto Huntenfisch was decent enough to neglect his wife from the day of their marriage, so that she had no distractions, and was generous enough to keep her provided with a ready supply of source material for her books, the well of Ginny Plunkett’s inspiration never ran dry. His lordship was often abroad with his cronies, hunting larger and fiercer game than was available locally, and leading parties who were as eager to deplete Africa of its lions and rhinoceroses as they were to shoot tigers from elephant houdahs in India; when no more tigers were to be found, they released the elephants and went after them on foot, taking care to send the servants and gun-bearers on ahead.

  Little did Huntenfisch suspect that massacres on an even greater scale were taking place in the study in his wife’s quarters at home.

  Reams of author’s copy were boxed up and sent down the cliff to be driven to the railway halt, where a locomotive that Vigilante Press rented from the Aln Valley Steam Train Society was waiting to puff across the moors to connect at Alnmouth railway station with the overnight express to London.

  The demand for successive volumes of The Dungeon Series, as it came to be called, was constant; and Ginny Plunkett was so prolific that her supporter Father Anselm, whose aesthetic tastes were as catholic as he was, remarked how opposite she was in her work ethic to the composer Rossini: a man so lazy that, whenever he was late for deadline on a commission, which he invariably was, he had to be locked in his room, and told to toss each sheet out of the window as it was completed so that it could be rushed to the printer.

  The Series’ readers were delighted, as knives flew, pistols cracked, and bullets homed to their targets, ricocheted and caromed. Heads rolled like bowls in an alley, throats were cut like so many parcel strings, and brains splattered like mud in a monsoon. More human torsos were scattered than marble ones littered the Louvre; and it was agreed amongst the adrenal cognoscenti of the Retributive genre that Plunkett could do more with a thymus or thyroid gland than an endocrinologist.

  The fates reserved for her victims were eclectic. Not for them the repetitive monotony of the gallows, or electric chair: Ms Plunkett was no more indebted for her executive methods to that of the “seagreen incorruptible”, as Carlyle described him, Maximilien de Robespierre, in sending his victims to the guillotine during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, than she took as her model Baroness Orczy’s fictional hero The Scarlet Pimpernel, Angallis arvensis, in rescuing them.

  Eugénie was a murderous Plantagenet through and through, and committed to proving to everyone’s satisfaction that there was no end to the ways of offing a nob.

  But the most notable thing about the plots in The Dungeon Series, and that which most endeared Ginny Plunkett to her admirers, was not the skill with which she invested her feuds, vendettas, and assassination fatwas with such realism; nor was it the presence on every page of death by shooting, bludgeoning, hacking, stabbing, or other methods of puncturation; by poisoning, strangulation, suffocation, hanging, drowning, burning, crushing, and flattening; or by boiling, stewing, flaying and fileting, and slicing and dicing; or by electrocution, or being run over by trains or buses; nor was it the lovingly detailed descriptions of the effects of flesh-eating diseases, or the undiscriminating dining tastes of lions, tigers, wolves, and piranhas in those tropical and afforested parts frequented by big-game hunters.

  Rather, it was the one constant in the stories, namely, that the most gruesome of the many demises in each book, and that which was always described as if in slow motion, and with microscopic attention to physiological effect, was reserved for a single person who in his looks and demeanour was always the same.

  That no one knew the individual to be in every respect similar to a certain Otto, Lord Huntenfisch, son of a Bavarian pig farmer, did not detract one jot or tittle from the enjoyment the books’ readers derived from the sequence of his many prolonged and painful expirations, as this loathsome character’s soul fled screaming to Hades. But because he never picked up a book and was acquainted with no one who did, his lordship remained ignorant of how he was being alternately satirized and liquidated, as a gramophone needle stuck in the groove of a record plays the same notes over and over again.

  It was hardly surprising, after the shameful way that she had been treated by her parents, and considering the natures of her consort and those he surrounded himself with, that Jenny particularly had it in for aristocrats when determining which of her characters were going to get topped.

  An Oxford graduate student at Broadgates Hall, Sherri Negus, who, at the suggestion of her murder-mystery-loving English Language and Literature tutors, Professor Tenebris and Dr Fleapowder, compiled a bibliography of Ginny Plunkett’s oeuvre for her D.Phil thesis, and a concordance of mortality, calculated that a member of the upper classes died on average every three and a quarter pages: a rate which, if it kept up, would reduce the next editions of Burke’s Peerage, Baronetage, & Knightage, and Debrett’s Peerage & Baronetage, to supplement size.

  In my aunt Jenny’s career as a pseudonym, and she went on to publish twenty-six books, in the royal and hereditary category alone Negus determined that her subject, having signalled her disowning of her class by adopting her common pseudonym, and being resolved to start at the top in taking down the hereditary Establishment, disposed of a king, a Prince of Wales, two queens, eight princes, five dukes, four duchesses, five marquesses…it should have been six, but in a rare moment of authorial carelessness he escaped to the Bahamas…two marchionesses, twelve earls, twelve countesses, seven viscounts, and five and a half baronets.

  Ginny Plunkett’s twenty-six titles equalled the output of Sir Walter Scott in his Waverley series; though her works were a good deal shorter, many people are of the opinion that Scott might to good advantage have edited each of his books down to similar length.

  Amongst the non-hereditary peers, no less than thirty-three barons and baronesses had their lifetime privileges terminated for them, amidst La Plunkett’s chapters. For international flavour, and in the interests of securing foreign publishing rights, three presidents, a tribal chieftain, an emperor-in-waiting, and an infanta also shuffled off their mortal coils.

  For statistical accuracy, Negus asterisked the second queen as an iffy inclusion in the tally, because “she” was a male impostor, a raging queen with a small q. Argument over whether one of the viscounts had expired twice, was quelled by a footnote in the revised second edition of the published version of Negus’s thesis, which sold almost as well as the books it analysed, by clarifying that he had recovered from his wounds and lived to die again.

  As to the fractional baronet, Julian, the aforementioned “half” appended to the class count of five: a chandelier fell on him as his father was downing a Rob Roy cocktail mixed by his wife, who had laced it with the Amanita bisporigera mushroom, known as the Destroying Angel. The timing of the chandelier’s collapse, because it happened a split second before Julian’s father hit the floor himself, meant that the son hadn’t quite inherited the title; though the ceiling’s weakness, whether it was owing to age, rot in the boards, or damp; or created by accident or design through jumping from above, and the baron’s exact time of death, were also the cause of disputation amongst Ms Plunkett’s avid readers, and responsible for a rift in the relationship between Professor Tenebris and Dr Fleapowder.

  The categorization of the deaths of two lesser individuals was hotly debated too, because they were not as result of proximate action directed at them. The first was that of an under-gardener, the bastard son of an Earl, who sustained collateral fatal damage when a greenhouse exploded, taking out the orchid-loving countess, a woman not so loosely based on Lady Eugénie’s mother.

  The second instance was a butler who committed suicide after seeing something he shouldn’t have taking place between the Duke of York and the butler’s footman lover, who had been hired by the Earl of Sussex to kill his brother. This the multi-tasking footman accomplished by whacking his passive partner over the head, d
uring the intimate encounter, with one of Carl Fabergé’s more solid creations.

  What was never in contention, was that Ginny Plunkett, a.k.a. Lady Huntenfisch, was a greater than average disliker of barons, eight of whom in her books bore the same name, Otto,—the one appellation that Vigilante editor Moira Bloodgood did not succeed in having altered—as her husband. In a burst of enthusiasm, Ms Plunkett placed three of her Otto-man octagon on the Titanic; according to the passenger list this was verifiably inaccurate, but her fans didn’t object to the creative licence.

  Taking her work as a whole, however, according to her literary champion Sherri Negus, Ms Plunkett was an equal-opportunity slayer, who nevertheless showed, by never killing a princess, that she had a soft spot in her heart.

  It was true: in Jenny’s opinion princesses had a hard time of it, being all too often paired off with frogs who failed to metamorphose into the handsome and loving princes of fairy tales. Princesses, she felt, deserved all the support they could get, and not just from mattresses with peas under them as in the fairy-tale by Hans Christian Andersen.

  Otherwise, Plunkett’s dedication to getting rid of the nation’s bluebloods and powermongers left few to pass away in their beds at an advanced age of natural causes. Every time one of them was brought low, another appeared in his or her place, like a new head on the Hydra. Whereas when Cadmus sowed the serpent’s teeth on the site of Thebes, to have them spring up as Sparti, or Sown Men, and fight each other to the death until there were only five of them left, Jenny’s victims grew from more fertile soil.