Blotto, Twinks and the Ex-King's Daughter

by Simon Brett

  Svetlana Lubachev reached into what Blotto thought of as her ‘golden kind of strapping sort of thing which covered the sticky-out bits of her upper body’, announcing, ‘I have something in here.’

  He didn’t doubt it, and couldn’t help watching with fascination as she pulled on a golden chain to extract a heavy ring of keys from her capacious bosom. How something so substantial had been concealed there prompted new conjectures in Blotto’s mind about the precise details of female anatomy.

  ‘These,’ Svetlana breathed on, ‘are copies of the keys to all the dungeons of Korpzenschloss. If you can use them to rescue my dear close friend Princess Ethelinde, I shall be eternally in your debt.’

  ‘Don’t worry, old pineapple. It’s something I was going to do anyway.’

  ‘Why are you, as an Englishman, so concerned with the Princess’s safety?’

  Blotto was about to say that it was the only way of getting her spoffing father and entourage out of Tawcester Towers, when it occurred to him that that might not be the most chivalrous of responses. So he contented himself with, ‘Just one of those family honour things, you know.’

  ‘I understand completely,’ said Svetlana Lubachev She looked at an ormolu clock on the distant mantelpiece, which showed the time to be just after 3 a.m. ‘You must wait for an hour before you do anything,’ she murmured. ‘At four o’clock the shift of the dungeon guards changes. It is precisely then that you must make your rescue.’

  ‘How do I actually get down to the dungeons?’

  ‘At the end of the corridor if you turn left out of my door, you will find a small door studded with metal. There is a spiral staircase there which goes down through eleven floors of Korpzenschloss until it opens into the chamber of the dungeons. It will take you nine and three-quarter minutes to get down there.’

  ‘Excellent.’ Blotto stifled a yawn and looked at his watch. ‘Right, not for nearly an hour. How am I going to fill that hour? I don’t want to risk falling asleep again.’

  Svetlana Lubachev reached out a hand for his and drew him towards her on the bed. ‘First,’ she said, ‘you have to undo the chain that is attached to the keys.’

  ‘Yes, fine.’ So close to her flesh, Blotto felt himself enveloped in the intoxicating miasma of her perfume. ‘Is it one of those little jiggly hook things?’

  ‘Yes,’ sighed Svetlana, as his hands clumsily tried to work the fastening open. ‘Are you a married man, Mr Blotto?’

  ‘Good Lord, no. Don’t need any of that guff. Life’s full enough with hunting and cricket.’

  She chuckled. ‘So you are unattached?’

  ‘I’m currently attached to this spoffing great chain. Whoever fixed this round your neck certainly didn’t mean it to come off in a hurry’ As he concentrated on the clasp, his face was so close to Svetlana’s that he could feel her warm breath on his skin.

  ‘Blotto,’ she exhaled, ‘you are a very attractive man.’

  ‘Oh, don’t talk such toffee. I’m no different from the next chap.’

  ‘I would say you are, Blotto. I find you very attractive.’

  ‘Well, you want to get your eyes tested, old thing. Ah,’ he sighed with relief as the golden chain came free. ‘There – all tickey-tockey.’

  He tried to back away, but couldn’t. The woman was still holding the end of the chain and seemed to be pulling his face nearer hers.

  Svetlana Lubachev had had affairs with all the predictable minor English royals, who, as lovers, she had found totally inadequate. But maybe the country’s aristocrats might prove to be more skilled . . .? The Right Honourable Devereux Lyminster was certainly good-looking enough to qualify for her attention. Maybe he might turn out to have hidden skills of the carnal variety. Svetlana thought she might indulge in a controlled sexual experiment.

  ‘Blotto,’ she sussurated, ‘given the fact that you still have three-quarters of an hour before you can fulfil your mission . . .’

  ‘Yes . . .?’

  Her voice was as soft as the perfect landing of a hand-tied fly over the mouth of a gaping trout, as she went on, ‘. . . would you like to share my bed?’

  ‘That’s frightfully decent of you,’ said Blotto, ‘but they have actually sorted me out with one of my own.’

  19

  The Secret Prisoner

  Blotto was aware that the mission on which he was embarked was a hazardous one. But when he searched the valise in his bedroom before setting off down to the dungeons of Korpzenschloss, it was not the two pistols that he was looking for. He left them in the bag, snugly side by side, as, reverently, he picked up his cricket bat. As he ran his hand down its battered surface and sniffed the evocative smell of linseed oil, he felt suddenly secure. Devereux Lyminster of the house of Tawcester, armed with his cricket bat, would be equal to any foe.

  The studded door was at the end of the corridor as Svetlana Lubachev had predicted, and Blotto started his descent of the spiral staircase that led down to the Korpzenschloss dungeons. He didn’t count the steps, but there must have been many hundreds, and he reached the lowest level feeling like an overwound elastic band. The slightest jolt, he felt, would make him go ‘ping’ and unravel at great speed.

  The staircase had been dimly lit by irregularly spaced sconces, and there wasn’t much more illumination in the chamber at the bottom. It was a wretched space, which Macbeth’s witches would have rejected as too dingy for a coven meeting. In the flickering light the green slime of ages glimmered on the encroaching walls, whose only decorations were rusting manacles and other instruments of torture. The ancient doors to the cells were of solid iron, their peepholes closed with heavy shutters. On a dilapidated table bottles, drinking vessels and a couple of sabres suggested recent occupancy, but there was no sign of any guards.

  Blotto didn’t stop to question this oddity – stopping to question things was not in his nature. All he knew was that he had to rescue ex-Princess Ethelinde as soon as possible. He moved to the nearest cell door and riffled through the ring of keys that Svetlana had given him.

  The third one fitted. With a groan like an asthmatic octogenarian being impaled on a toasting fork, the door gave inward. Cricket bat raised as if ready for a bouncer, Blotto advanced into the gloom.

  There was silence in the fetid interior, and yet he knew there was someone there. Blotto held his breath, assuming that the cell’s other inhabitant was doing the same. See who could hold it the longer.

  They both broke the silence with a simultaneous whoosh of air. The whoosh that didn’t come from Blotto was accompanied by a rattling of chains.

  ‘Is that you, Princess Ethelinde? I’m sorry, I mean ex-Princess Ethelinde?’

  ‘No!’ cried a heavily accented but youthful voice. ‘I am not Princess Ethelinde, but I am the man who loves Princess Ethelinde!’

  Well, there’s a coincidence, thought Blotto. I come in here looking for the ex-Princess, and by pure coincidence I bump into a chap who’s in love with her.

  But the young man in chains had not finished his burst of rhetoric. ‘And I will kill anyone who allows his lips to sully the name of Princess Ethelinde.’

  ‘Who’d want to do that?’ asked Blotto.

  ‘You! You have just sullied her name with your lips.’

  ‘Oh, I think that’s going a bit far. I did mention her name, yes, not arguing about that, but I wouldn’t have said I sullied it.’

  ‘Anyone unworthy who mentions the Princess’s name is sullying it!’

  ‘Ah, well, here, old chap, we get into the question of who’s unworthy or not. And I would like to point out that in England, where I come from, I am generally to be reckoned a fairly worthy sort of pineapple.’

  ‘You are from England?’

  ‘Yes. Where on earth did you think I was from?’

  ‘I thought you were from here in Zling. I thought you were another of Usurping King Vlatislav’s evil guards who had come to give me a beating with that club.’

  ‘This isn’t a club.’

&
nbsp; ‘Then what is it?’

  ‘It’s a cricket bat.’

  ‘Oh.’ The young man’s attitude changed instantly. ‘Do you mean to say that you play cricket?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I’m frightfully sorry that I even suggested that you might be unworthy, or indeed that you might sully Princess Ethelinde’s name. The lips of a man who plays cricket could never sully anything.’

  ‘That’s jolly decent of you to say so. I take it, by the way, from what you’re saying, that you play cricket too?’

  ‘I have played a little. I am trying to introduce the game into my country.’

  Blotto was ecstatic. ‘Here? You’re trying to introduce cricket here? Hoopee-doopee, I knew there was bound to be some cricket somewhere in Mitteleuropia!’

  ‘Mitteleuropia is not my country.’

  ‘Oh. Perhaps it’s time for a few introductions? I’m Devereux Lyminster, younger brother of the Duke of Tawcester, but everyone calls me “Blotto”.’

  ‘I think I have heard of you – or possibly read about you in Wisden. Are not you the very Right Honourable Devereux Lyminster, who once scored a hundred and seventy-six in the Eton and Harrow match?’

  ‘Guilty as charged,’ said Blotto, with a self-deprecating chuckle.

  There was a rattle of chains as the invisible prisoner tried to shake his hand. ‘I’m really honoured to meet you.’

  ‘And sorry, you haven’t said who you are yet . . .?’

  ‘I am Crown Prince Fritz-Ludwig of Transcarpathia.’

  ‘Ah. And can I ask what you’re doing in this dungeon? Presumably not just visiting?’

  ‘No. I have been imprisoned by the vile lackeys of the wicked Usurping King Vlatislav.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘This very day.’

  Suddenly something very rare happened. Two thoughts within Blotto’s brain connected. ‘You must be the johnnie he mentioned at dinner.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I dined with the Usurping King Vlatislav this evening. And in the course of the meal a vile lackey came and gave him the news that one of his enemies had been captured.’

  ‘Yes,’ Crown Prince Fritz-Ludwig confirmed. ‘He would have been referring to me.’

  ‘So what have you done to put a needle up old Vlatislav’s nostril?’

  ‘What have I not done? Ever since the vile usurper purloined this country, I have been determined to unseat him from his stolen throne. You see, King Sigismund of Mitteleuropia and his entourage were guests of my father, King Anatol of Transcarpathia . . .’

  ‘Oh yes, he told me that when he was at Tawcester Towers.’ By now his eyes had accustomed themselves sufficiently for him to see that Crown Prince Fritz-Ludwig was a blond young man with a gossamer-thin moustache and beard. In the manner of Continental royalty, he wore a uniform so tasselled and frogged with gold that it could have been melted down and made into a substantial dinner service.

  ‘Well, ever since the evil coup –’ Blotto refrained from responding with another ‘Coo’ – he knew it would only lead to complications – ‘I have been determined to restore the status quo. It is, you see, a matter of family honour.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Ex-King Sigismund and his entourage were guests of the Trancarpathian royal family when his throne was snatched. Until the rightful King is restored to power, our family honour will be sullied.’

  Back to sullying, thought Blotto. He was about to say that he was in a similar gluepot, having to settle an issue of family honour before he could get the ex-King and wretched entourage off the premises at Tawcester Towers, but he decided it might not be tactful.

  ‘Anyway,’ Crown Prince Fritz-Ludwig of Transcarpathia continued, ‘I have been planning a counter-coup. All of the might of the Transcarpathian army are, as we speak, massed a mere five miles away on the border of Mitteleuropia, waiting for the signal to invade.’

  ‘And is ex-King Sigismund – I mean, King Sigismund – aware of your plans?’

  ‘He should be. I sent a special emissary to him at Tawcester Towers to inform him of my intentions.’

  ‘I say,’ said Blotto, having another of those rare moments when two thoughts connected. ‘Chappie’s name wasn’t Captain Schtoltz, was it?’

  ‘It was.’ So at last there was an explanation for the murder at Tawcester Towers. ‘Do you know, Blotto, if he managed to get my message to the King?’

  ‘Can’t be sure, but I think he may well have been prevented by a bad tomato called Zoltan Grittelhoff.’

  In the pale prison light Crown Prince Fritz-Ludwig’s face turned even paler at the sound of the name. ‘Zoltan Grittelhoff! I always suspected that he was a traitor! He and his brother were with the King in Bad Vibesz when the coup happened.’

  ‘Right.’ Blotto managed to see the face of his watch in the thin light. It was nearly half-past four. ‘Maybe we ought to push on the pace pedal? Don’t know how long it’ll be before the guard johnnies turn up again. Didn’t you say something about the Transcarpathian hordes waiting for a signal to invade?’

  ‘Yes. I was on my way to give the signal when I was captured by the vile lackeys of Usurping King Vlatislav If my forces do not see the signal by five o’clock, they will return to their barracks in Bad Vibesz.’

  ‘Then we’d better shift like a pair of cheetahs in spikes. What is the signal they’re waiting for?’

  ‘On the highest point of Korpzenschloss there is a beacon, which must be lit before daylight renders it invisible. As soon as its flame is seen through the darkness, the army of Transcarpathia will fire their cannon to let us know they have received the signal. Then they will mobilize, invade and defeat the ill-prepared and ill-disciplined forces of the Usurping King Vlatislav.’

  ‘Hoopee-doopee!’ shouted Blotto. ‘I’ll grab a flaming torch and have that beacon alight in two shakes of a poodle’s pom-pom.’ And, with cricket bat upraised, he rushed for the door.

  ‘Um,’ the Crown Prince shouted after him, ‘do you think you could just set me free first?’

  ‘Oh yes, of course.’

  ‘Strength in numbers, eh? The keys to my manacles are hanging from a hook by the guards’ table.’

  While he was unlocking the shackles of Fritz-Ludwig, Blotto suddenly remembered the real aim of his mission. He’d been distracted by all the talk of coups and counter-coups. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I should release ex-Princess Ethelinde too.’

  ‘Princess Ethelinde?’ The Crown Prince was thunderstruck. ‘But surely she’s in England?’

  ‘No, she was with her father at Tawcester Towers, but she was kidnapped from there by Zoltan Grittelhoff!’

  ‘The bounder! How dare he do that to the woman I love?’

  ‘Well, he did do it, and I have information that she’s currently locked up in another of these dungeons.’

  ‘That would make sense. The Usurping King Vlatislav is using her as a hostage to force the hand of King Sigismund, just as he is using me as a hostage to force the hand of my father King Anatol. So you’re sure Ethelinde is here?’

  ‘That’s what my informant told me.’

  ‘Then we must free her!’

  ‘Just what I was thinking, Fritzie-boy.’

  Blotto was right – or rather Svetlana Lubachev had been right. In the cell three doors away from the Crown Prince’s they found the ex-Princess, pitifully manacled as he had been, and still wearing the by-now-rather-grubby dress in which she had left the shores of England.

  It was a matter of moments to free her. As he struggled with the key to her chains, Blotto said, ‘Nice coincidence, actually, old girl. The man who loves you is here.’

  ‘I know, Blotto,’ she said, instantly putting her unencumbered arms about his neck. ‘I knew you’d come and rescue me.’

  Blotto was aware of Crown Prince Fritz-Ludwig giving him a rather old-fashioned look. Oh, broken biscuits, he thought.

  Still, no time to sort out misapprehensions of a romantic nature. The armies of Tran
scarpathia had to be alerted. ‘Come on, let’s get this beacon blazing!’

  ‘There is someone else we should release first,’ said ex-Princess Ethelinde.

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Your manservant, Klaus Schiffleich, is incarcerated in the dungeon next to mine.’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ said a voice sounding uncannily like that of Twinks. ‘Please set me free, Blotto! I’m not really Klaus Schiffleich, I’m Twinks!’

  For a moment he was nearly fooled. For a moment he was tempted to unlock the door and remove the prisoner’s manacles. The voice sounded so like his sister’s.

  But Blotto wasn’t stupid. The words of ex-King Sigismund returned to him. In Mitteleuropia trust no one. The traitorous manservant was an excellent mimic, but Blotto already knew that. He wasn’t going to be bamboozled so easily. Grabbing a flaming torch from a sconce with his free hand, Blotto shouted, ‘No, we’ll leave Schiffleich to rot down here! Right, up to the top of Korpzenschloss we go!’

  ‘I don’t think so!’ The unmistakable voice of Zoltan Grittelhoff echoed through the murky chamber.

  20

  A Short-Lived Freedom

  The murderer of Captain Schtoltz stood at the main entrance, flanked by Usurping King Vlatislav’s green-uniformed, black-helmeted guards. All of these had their bayonets fixed and barrels pointing towards the escapees. Logic dictated that a cricket bat wouldn’t make much inroad into their ranks before its wielder was mown down.

  ‘And of course I recognize you, the Right Honourable Devereux Lyminster. When I heard that you had come to Zling peddling machine guns, I was prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt. But now it seems that was not your mission. You were here to free the enemies of King Vlatislav.’

  ‘Usurping King Vlatislav!’ shouted Blotto defiantly. ‘The rightful King of Mitteleuropia is still at Tawcester Towers!’