Blotto, Twinks and the Ex-King's Daughter

by Simon Brett

  ‘Well, if you’re sure . . .’

  ‘I am sure. Hand it over, Schiffleich.’ The manservant did as he was told and Blotto stowed the two pistols in the bottom of one of his valises. As he was doing so, he saw his faithful cricket bat and gave it a sentimental pat and a stroke.

  While the young man helped him to change into his nightwear, Blotto observed, ‘Must be a bit of a homecoming for you, Schiffleich. Zling born and bred, are you?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking, milord.’

  ‘Hm.’ Blotto felt his nostrils once again invaded by a not-unfamilar perfume. A perfume that would have sat perfectly on his sister Twinks, but wasn’t really quite the thing when splashed all over a manservant. ‘Tell me, Schiffleich . . .’

  ‘Milord?’

  ‘Are you wearing cologne?’

  ‘Yes, milord.’

  ‘Well, could you kindly desist from doing so in future? The British Empire wasn’t built by namby-pambies going round smelling like spoffing florist’s shops.’

  ‘No, milord. Mind you, I would like to point out that, as a Mitteleuropian, building the British Empire is not high on my list of priorities.’

  ‘Maybe not, but you are on my side. We’re on this mission to protect the honour of the Tawcester family, and the interests of the Tawcesters and the British Empire have always been identical. So no more of the spoffing cologne tomorrow – right?’

  ‘Very good, milord.’

  Successfully installed into his pyjamas, Blotto made for the brandy and soda. ‘So tell me, Schiffleich, where have they billeted you in this rabbit warren?’

  The young man indicated a small door behind him. ‘There is a small anteroom there, milord, with just a truckle bed in it. I will be there, sir, all night, to protect you if necessary.’

  Blotto laughed at the suggestion. The idea that he could be protected by Klaus Schiffleich was incongruous. Putting aside false modesty, Blotto knew himself to be a well-proportioned slab of solid muscle at the peak of physical fitness. Whereas the young manservant was so slight – hardly larger in figure than dear old Twinks – and the innocence expressed in his azure eyes, pale skin and ash-blond hair did not suggest he would be a match for the feeblest of assailants.

  Still, didn’t do to point out a chap’s deficiencies – even when that chap was only a servant. ‘I’ll sleep all the better, Schiffleich, knowing you’re there,’ said Blotto magnanimously. ‘And I think sleep’s probably what I need right now. Good for the old brain, sleep. I always hope I’ll wake up with a more efficient brain than the one I went to sleep with.’ He may have always hoped for that, but sadly it never happened. ‘Because tomorrow I’ve really got to work out how I’m going to rescue ex-Princess Ethelinde.’

  ‘That is the aim of your mission here, certainly, milord.’

  ‘Yes. I’m sort of going on the assumption at the moment that the poor little thimble is being held against her will somewhere in this very castle.’

  ‘That’s entirely possible, milord. Korpzenschloss is renowned throughout Mitteleuropia for the extent of its dungeons. There is a positive labyrinth of them, carved into the solid rock of Zling. That would be the obvious place to start looking for the ex-Princess.’

  ‘Good ticket, Schiffleich.’ For a moment Blotto looked wistful. ‘Must say, I feel a bit alone on this mission . . .’

  ‘But why, milord? You have me here to assist you – not to mention the bloodthirsty Corky Froggett.’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  ‘What is it, milord?’

  ‘Fact is, Schiffleich, I’ve got a sister called Twinks. That’s not actually her proper name, but that’s what I call her. And when it comes to investigation and all that sort of rombooley she’s the absolute lark’s larynx. If old Twinks were here, she’d know exactly how to snuffle out the ex-Princess. Trouble is, though, Twinks isn’t here.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure, Schiffleich. She’s hundreds of miles away.’

  ‘She might be nearer than you think.’

  Blotto looked at his manservant in amazement. Klaus Schiffleich had spoken the last sentence in almost perfect English. No trace of an accent. Proper upper-class English, the very kind that Blotto and Twinks had been brought up to speak.

  ‘There, Schiffleich! You can speak English. You don’t need that spoffing Mitteleuropian accent, do you? Well, why on earth didn’t you start speaking properly before?’

  ‘Can’t you guess?’ came the reply, again in perfectly modulated English.

  ‘No, I can’t. And I’m afraid, Schiffleich, it’s too late for me to start playing guessing games with servants. What I need is some shut-eye. Before that, though, what’s required is . . . a quick baptism in this magnificent B and S.’

  But as he raised the glass to his lips, Blotto stopped, with the shocked expression of a man whose filling had just dropped out. The repeated admonition of ex-King Sigismund rose to the surface of his mind. In Mitteleuropia trust no one. And he remembered the native proverb he had been told: He whom you trust at ten o’clock will stab you at one minute past.

  Blotto looked suspiciously at his Mitteleuropian manservant. ‘Did you prepare this brandy and soda yourself, Schiffleich?’

  ‘That was not possible, milord. The bottles of alcohol and other catering supplies we brought in the Lagonda were impounded on our arrival here at Korpzenschloss.’

  ‘I see. So where did you get the drink from?’

  ‘I asked one of the guards outside the door to order it from the castle’s butler.’

  ‘In that case –’ Blotto handed the glass across – ‘I would like you to drink some of it before I do, Schiffleich.’

  ‘Well, if you really want me to, Blotto . . .’

  As the manservant took the glass and a hefty swig, his master bridled. Blotto had always prided himself on his common touch, but there were limits. And when a servant used the first name of a titled gentleman to his face, such a limit had been breached.

  ‘I’ll thank you, Schiffleich, to call me “milord”.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so stuffy, Blotto me old gumdrop.’ This, from a servant, was even more offensive. And copying his accent in that way was positively insolent, thought Blotto as the young man went on, ‘Can’t you see that I’m –?’

  But who it was that he claimed to be was not at that moment to be revealed. Klaus Schiffleich swayed suddenly, reaching an effeminate hand up to his temple. His azure eyes glazed, as he fell to the ground, unconscious.

  Blotto knew he had had a narrow escape. Ex-King Sigismund had been right. In Mitteleuropia trust no one. Even the King’s own appointee, Klaus Schiffleich, was now revealed to be a traitor. The young man had organized the brandy and soda to knock out – or possibly even kill – his new master.

  Blotto opened the door of his room. In the corridor the two green-uniformed guards eyed him suspiciously from beneath their black helmets.

  ‘There is a criminal in my room,’ said Blotto. ‘He is currently unconscious, which should render your task of removing him very easy. See to it that he is incarcerated in one of your deepest dungeons.’

  The magnificence with which he made this speech was rather diminished by the fact that neither guard understood a word of it. Eventually, Blotto had to resort to sign language to demonstrate to them what had happened. But when he used the word ‘prison’ they got his meaning. Unceremoniously picking up the limp body of Klaus Schiffleich, they removed the traitor from the room and summoned other guards to arrange his imprisonment.

  One up to me, thought Blotto proudly. I have foiled the first evil plot against my safety here in Zling. I have removed the first viper from my . . . well, from whatever part of a boddo’s anatomy it is where vipers go.

  And as he settled down in his canopied bed to sleep the sleep of the just, Blotto’s last thought was: Twinks would be really proud of me.

  18

  Crying in the Night

  There were always two dominant instincts within t
he noble breast of the Right Honourable Devereux Lyminster. One was his love of chivalry, the other was his love of sleep. So when he was woken up later that night by the sound of a woman’s crying, Blotto got as near as he ever did to a moral dilemma. Half of him knew he ought to be leaping on to a metaphorical white charger to alleviate the damsel’s distress. The other half desired only to turn over in his sumptuous Mitteleuropian bed and continue his interrupted slumbers.

  It was a tough choice and, had not the feminine weeping suddenly increased in volume and urgency, he might well have slept on through till the morning. As it was, honour demanded that he take some action. Struggling reluctantly from the horizontal to the vertical, Blotto belted his dressing gown about himself, stepped into his monogrammed slippers and out on to the landing.

  The first thing he observed was the absence of surveillance. Of the two guards whom he had last seen manhandling the perfidious Klaus Schiffleich off to prison there was now no sign at all. The dimly lit corridor was ominously empty and silent . . . but for the increasingly loud weeping which, Blotto could now identify, issued from the bedroom next to his own.

  He approached the door and made a tentative tap on its dark surface. This prompted only another surge of hysteria from within. He tapped again more loudly, but still receiving no words of permission to enter, took it upon himself to open the door.

  The room was probably about the same size as his own, but the light from the single oil lamp by the bedside did not penetrate its furthest extremities. The outlines of what lay on the bed were also blurred by the draperies of translucent scarlet silk that descended from the canopy above, but Blotto could still recognize that it was a woman. From whom the crying continued to emanate.

  ‘Um . . .’ he began, but then realized his usual conversational gambit might not be adequate to the current situation. He tried an ‘Erm, well . . .’ instead, and went on, ‘What’s up, old thing? Hit a sticky patch, have you?’ he asked, assuming that the weeping woman understood English. ‘Man trouble, is it?’ he added, vaguely remembering that his sister had once said this was an affliction that affects the supposedly weaker sex.

  At the sound of his voice, the red hangings were thrust aside, and he found himself looking at someone wearing less than any woman he’d ever encountered. (Which, in Blotto’s case, was actually not saying a lot. Given his upbringing, the only areas of female flesh he had ever seen were faces and hands.)

  The woman wore what he would have described as ‘a golden kind of strapping sort of thing which covered the sticky-out bits of her upper body’ and golden trousers which were slashed to show a lot of what Blotto could only assume were legs. (He always had his suspicions that women had legs rather in the same way that men did, but this was his first visual proof of the fact.) Between the ‘strapping thing’ and the trousers was an area of uncovered dusky midriff.

  Blotto boggled. He stared at the woman mesmerized. At that moment, you could have snaffled major organs from his abdomen and he wouldn’t have noticed.

  ‘Erm, well . . .’ he said again. ‘Sorry, we haven’t been introduced. I’m Devereux Lyminster, but everyone calls me “Blotto”.’

  Wiping her eyes with one hand, she extended the other for him to kiss. Blotto shook it.

  ‘And I . . .’ she said in a voice as thick and opaque as frozen honey, ‘am Svetlana Lubachev.’

  For once she told the truth. That was her real name. Blotto, having never stirred far from Tawcester Towers, had not heard it before. If he had done, he would have been aware of what he was dealing with, and been on his guard against her feminine wiles.

  Because Svetlana Lubachev had the most developed feminine wiles of anyone in the twentieth century. Or the nineteenth. Or any century, come to that. She was just about the wiliest female ever. Though still technically married to a Polish count, whose bride she had become as a rather mature fifteen-year-old, since then her list of lovers had encompassed most of Europe’s royal families. (There was indeed a scurrilous rumour that it was her ambition to have had a lover from all of Europe’s royal families. And that she was only two short of her target.)

  Many men had tried to describe her, but their accounts of her beauty differ. They all start with the eyes, dark as chocolate sauce, and then seem to become vague about her other charms. A magnificent décolletage is mentioned by many, but that’s about it. The hypnotic powers of her eyes seemed to have stripped her paramours of all descriptive skill. (She slummed once by having an affair with an untitled, though internationally renowned, poet, and even he didn’t get much further than saying that she was ‘jolly pretty’, and writing a poem in which ‘love’ rhymed with ‘the stars above’.) But, if the precise details were vague, it was generally agreed that she could have any man she wanted. And that she had had most of them.

  Svetlana Lubachev was equally skilled in the arts of the boudoir and the cabinet room. At least three royal divorces had been attributed directly to her influence, along with a couple of depositions and a minor revolution in the Caucasus. She knew the intimate secrets of crowned heads, colonels and cabinet ministers, and it was often she who dictated where the bodies should be buried. And when they were, she remembered the exact locations.

  Svetlana was beautiful, devious and ruthless. She used sex like a machine gun. She had cut a swathe through monarchs and left walking wounded in all the palaces of Europe. The man who could resist her wiles had not yet been created.

  So, despite their difference in size, when it came to deviousness, to put Blotto up against Svetlana Lubachev was like fixing a match between an angora kitten and an anaconda. (The match-fixer, in this case, had been Usurping King Vlatislav, another of Svetlana’s lovers, who had entrusted to his mistress the task of ascertaining the real purpose of Blotto’s visit to Zling.)

  ‘Well, look, my old bloater, what’s your prob?’ asked Blotto, trying without marked success to avoid looking at any exposed flesh.

  ‘Oh,’ said Svetlana Lubachev, carefully controlling the flow of tears so that they sparkled on her eyelashes but did not threaten to get her make-up streaky. ‘Where shall I begin with the problems of a poor feeble woman like myself? They are so terrible, you do not wish to hear them.’

  ‘Oh, all right then,’ said Blotto, relieved at being let off the hook.

  ‘But hear them you must!’

  ‘Ah. Well, you don’t have to tell me all of them. Just one or two will probably fit the pigeon-hole.’

  ‘Very well . . . what did you say your name was?’

  ‘Blotto.’

  ‘Very well, Blotto. Have you ever had a friend?’

  ‘Oh yes, quite a few. Boddos I was at school with, that sort of thing. People I’ve met hunting.’

  ‘Have you ever had a really close friend?’

  Blotto cleared his throat with some embarrassment. ‘Well, no. Chaps don’t have really close friends. That is, normal chaps don’t.’

  ‘But it is possible for women to have really close friends.’

  ‘Yes, so I’ve heard. My sister Twinks has got a few chums like that. No holds barred in the sort of things they’ll talk about when they get together. You name it . . . hat styles, shoes, even the length of skirts. There’s no stopping them.’

  ‘I too have such a friend,’ said Svetlana Lubachev tragically. ‘I should say I had such a friend. Because of her current whereabouts I have no idea at all.’

  ‘Really? Done a bunk, has she? Maybe eloped with some johnnie her parents didn’t think matched the wallpaper. Happens quite a lot, I gather . . . at least if the Sunday papers are anything to go by.’

  ‘No, no, my friend would not do anything like that. She knows what kind of behaviour belongs to a Princess.’

  Blotto caught on very quickly to that. ‘Oh, so she’s a Princess, is she?’

  ‘Yes, but a Princess who has suffered terribly, and who dares not put a foot down on the soil of her native country.’

  Blotto looked shocked. ‘Are you telling me the poor girl’s got gou
t?’ he asked.

  ‘No, she is physically well. But for how much longer who can say – given the sufferings that she has to undergo.’

  ‘I think it might clear the fug a bit if you were to tell me your friend’s name.’

  Svetlana Lubachev breathed the words like a long sigh. ‘Princess Ethelinde.’

  Blotto’s countenance cleared instantly. ‘Oh, don’t you worry about her. She’s all tickey-tockey.’

  ‘Is she?’

  ‘Yes. She was kidnapped in England . . .’

  ‘Was she?’

  ‘Yes, by some bounder called Grittelhoff. And I’m actually pretty sure she’s being held in the dungeons of this very castle.’

  ‘Then, if, as I say, she is my close friend, why should I not be worried?’

  ‘Because, my old biscuit barrel . . . I am here to rescue Princess Ethelinde. That is the sole purpose of my mission.’

  Svetlana Lubachev was frankly disappointed. As a femme fatale, she did have some standards – not to mention a high opinion of her own abilities. When Usurping King Vlatislav had charged her with finding out Blotto’s real purpose in travelling to Mitteleuropia, she had anticipated a long teasing game of cat and mouse. She had relished the prospect of slowly winkling out the truth from the buttoned-up Englishman, of deploying the full arsenal of her feminine wiles, and ultimately perhaps resorting to torture (in whose practice she was at least as skilled as the Mitteleuropian secret police).

  But as it was . . . she’d just asked him the straight question and he’d given her a straight answer. She could now report back to Vlatislav, who could arrest Blotto as an undesirable alien and let him join the other prisoners who the next morning were going to prove the efficacy of the Accrington-Murphy in the Square of the Butcher. Really, working with someone like the Right Honourable Devereux Lyminster just took away the fun from the whole business of femme fatalisme.

  Still, Svetlana Lubachev had a task to complete. Vlatislav wanted more than a confession from Blotto; he wanted the young man actually to be caught in the act of trying to rescue the Princess. It was up to Svetlana to organize that. She’d already arranged the absence of the two guards on the corridor. Now all she had to do was to send Blotto down towards the dungeons, where he would be intercepted as he was breaking into Princess Ethelinde’s cell.