I’m dashed if I know how he does it. My man, Jeeves, I mean. The fellow is an absolute marvel.
We’d had a party last night celebrating the birthday of the lassie that old Bob Inder is so keen on. Alice, you know. Alice Kiss. He’s an artist, is Bob, and he’d gone to my uncle’s place in the country to paint various scenes. My Uncle Roderick is better known in Burke’s Peerage as the Eleventh Earl of Cruxton, and the scenes painted by Bob included a series of pictures of the serving girls now widely considered to be masterpieces. So successful, in fact that Alice had left Cruxton Abbey without a tear or a backward glance and was now working in London as a model, and was often seen on Bob’s arm.
Any fool would agree that Bob has fine taste. She certainly has model looks! They say that when she takes a stroll through Horse Guards Parade the guards on sentry duty buckle at the knees. She’d gone to see the Changing of the Guard once and the result had been a chaotic heap of collapsed soldiers and tumbling bearskins. The chap in charge of the Coldstream Guards was considering banning her from coming within a mile radius of the Admiralty Arch.
Be that as it may, I have no hopes in that direction. What chance has a bumbling twit like me with a stunner like Alice when there’s a chap like Bob around with his cleft chin and film-star good looks? I did try, you know. I’d found a really natty silk cravat in Harrod’s which I was convinced would knock her for six. Jeeves didn’t like it, of course, but I’m afraid that his opinion falls short when it comes to fashion. So I’d topped off my checked suit with said cravat and headed for London Town expecting to have Alice on my arm and Bob gnashing his teeth with rage within the hour.
To cut a long story short, dear reader, she took one look at me, frowned, and then proceeded to wrap herself around that bounder Bob. I was left watching them two-stepping around the dancefloor while I made do with a competent but unexceptional bottle of Beaujolais for company. And Jollyrei, of course, for whom interest in Alice could only be purely academic unless he wanted to incur the wrath of the Honourable Lady Barbara Fotheringhay-Moore, to whom he is (currently) engaged. Jollyrei, of course, is a man of steel, as you have to be with Barb around, and Beaujolais, to him, is like water.
So it was that my recollections of the latter half of the evening had become rather indistinct. Was it three bottles we’d drunk? Four? Five? One of life’s mysteries, perhaps. I’d woken this morning at a ridiculously early hour, and Jeeves had appeared moments later with a steaming hot cup of tea which he set beside me on the bedside table. I took one look at it and gagged.
Jeeves drew back the curtain and opened the window. Outside the window a robin was shrieking at full volume and then the clock on St Eulalia’s Church tower added to the cacophony as it began chiming eleven. I buried my head under my pillow. Dimly, I was aware of Jeeves reversing the changes he’d made.
“Forgive me, sir. I fear that hot tea is an inappropriate beverage this morning. If you will please permit me to replace it with something more appropriate?”
I made a gurgling noise from beneath the pillow which he correctly interpreted as consent, and he withdrew, leaving me in the sanctuary of my darkened room which clock and robin were not quite managing to penetrate.
Jeeves was back within two minutes, and proceeded to distinguish himself as a marvel.
He offered me a glass full of a steaming red liquid. “If you would care to consume this, sir, it may restore some of your joie-de-vivre.”
I had no idea what ‘joie-de-vivre’ was, but if Jeeves felt that restoring it was one of his duties as a valet, who was I to argue? I took the glass, and poured the contents down the inside of my neck as quickly as I reasonably could.
You may possibly not have experienced somebody letting off fireworks inside your head. Neither had I, until that moment. Bright flashing lights and an intense but mercifully brief splitting headache. My eyeballs performed several revolutions within my eye sockets, possibly one for each bottle of wine I’d consumed last night, and then, in a miracle of medical science that only Jeeves understood, I ceased to be a quivering wreck beneath my pillow, and became, once again, Bertram Wilberforce Wragg, Gentleman, of Hampstead.
Jeeves drew back the curtain, and, once again, opened the window. St Eulalia’s rang out the quarter-hour perfectly tunefully, and the robin had clearly nipped off for some singing lessons because this time his song was delightful.
“Jeeves! I don’t know what on earth was in that glass, but you do realise that it is pure magic?”
“That is very kind of you to say so, sir. My grandmother gave me the recipe.”
“Well, you can tell your grandmother that she is a jolly good egg!”
“I will pass on your kind words, sir. She is currently one hundred and three years old and in robust health, I’m glad to say.”
“What, and she has a glass of that wonder juice every morning?”
“So I am given to understand, sir. She feels it to be a very effective ‘pick-me-up’.”
“An opinion with which I heartily concur, Jeeves. I have never been so effectively pick-me-upped in my life!”
“I am delighted you are feeling so much better, sir. Perhaps you now feel equal to breakfast?”
Half an hour later some of Jeeves’ excellent bacon and eggs had begun their journey through my digestive system, and, with the back pages of the Daily Telegraph informing me that the England bowlers had reduced Australia to 77 for six in their second innings, I was beginning to understand what Jeeves had implied by his use of the term ‘joie-de-vivre’.
In the distance I heard the doorbell ring, and then voices in the hall as Jeeves answered it.
Presently he shimmered in. “Lord Jollyrei to see you, sir.”
Jollyrei steamed into the room, evidently in a state of some agitation.
“What-ho, Jollyrei! How’s your hangover?”
“Never mind hangovers, my lad!” stormed Jollyrei. “Look at this!”
He slammed something down onto the table in front of me, making my empty coffee cup jump out of its saucer, and the sugar spoon fall out of the basin, spilling sugar onto the cloth. Jeeves looked pained.
I looked at the item that Jollyrei had placed in front of me. It was a photograph.
But what was on the photograph made my monocle drop out with shock.
In a forest there was a cross.
On the cross was a woman.
On the woman was absolutely nothing in the way of clothing.
But, and this was the real shock, the crucified woman in her birthday suit was very clearly none other than our birthday girl of last night, the lovely Alice!
TBC
We’d had a party last night celebrating the birthday of the lassie that old Bob Inder is so keen on. Alice, you know. Alice Kiss. He’s an artist, is Bob, and he’d gone to my uncle’s place in the country to paint various scenes. My Uncle Roderick is better known in Burke’s Peerage as the Eleventh Earl of Cruxton, and the scenes painted by Bob included a series of pictures of the serving girls now widely considered to be masterpieces. So successful, in fact that Alice had left Cruxton Abbey without a tear or a backward glance and was now working in London as a model, and was often seen on Bob’s arm.
Any fool would agree that Bob has fine taste. She certainly has model looks! They say that when she takes a stroll through Horse Guards Parade the guards on sentry duty buckle at the knees. She’d gone to see the Changing of the Guard once and the result had been a chaotic heap of collapsed soldiers and tumbling bearskins. The chap in charge of the Coldstream Guards was considering banning her from coming within a mile radius of the Admiralty Arch.
Be that as it may, I have no hopes in that direction. What chance has a bumbling twit like me with a stunner like Alice when there’s a chap like Bob around with his cleft chin and film-star good looks? I did try, you know. I’d found a really natty silk cravat in Harrod’s which I was convinced would knock her for six. Jeeves didn’t like it, of course, but I’m afraid that his opinion falls short when it comes to fashion. So I’d topped off my checked suit with said cravat and headed for London Town expecting to have Alice on my arm and Bob gnashing his teeth with rage within the hour.
To cut a long story short, dear reader, she took one look at me, frowned, and then proceeded to wrap herself around that bounder Bob. I was left watching them two-stepping around the dancefloor while I made do with a competent but unexceptional bottle of Beaujolais for company. And Jollyrei, of course, for whom interest in Alice could only be purely academic unless he wanted to incur the wrath of the Honourable Lady Barbara Fotheringhay-Moore, to whom he is (currently) engaged. Jollyrei, of course, is a man of steel, as you have to be with Barb around, and Beaujolais, to him, is like water.
So it was that my recollections of the latter half of the evening had become rather indistinct. Was it three bottles we’d drunk? Four? Five? One of life’s mysteries, perhaps. I’d woken this morning at a ridiculously early hour, and Jeeves had appeared moments later with a steaming hot cup of tea which he set beside me on the bedside table. I took one look at it and gagged.
Jeeves drew back the curtain and opened the window. Outside the window a robin was shrieking at full volume and then the clock on St Eulalia’s Church tower added to the cacophony as it began chiming eleven. I buried my head under my pillow. Dimly, I was aware of Jeeves reversing the changes he’d made.
“Forgive me, sir. I fear that hot tea is an inappropriate beverage this morning. If you will please permit me to replace it with something more appropriate?”
I made a gurgling noise from beneath the pillow which he correctly interpreted as consent, and he withdrew, leaving me in the sanctuary of my darkened room which clock and robin were not quite managing to penetrate.
Jeeves was back within two minutes, and proceeded to distinguish himself as a marvel.
He offered me a glass full of a steaming red liquid. “If you would care to consume this, sir, it may restore some of your joie-de-vivre.”
I had no idea what ‘joie-de-vivre’ was, but if Jeeves felt that restoring it was one of his duties as a valet, who was I to argue? I took the glass, and poured the contents down the inside of my neck as quickly as I reasonably could.
You may possibly not have experienced somebody letting off fireworks inside your head. Neither had I, until that moment. Bright flashing lights and an intense but mercifully brief splitting headache. My eyeballs performed several revolutions within my eye sockets, possibly one for each bottle of wine I’d consumed last night, and then, in a miracle of medical science that only Jeeves understood, I ceased to be a quivering wreck beneath my pillow, and became, once again, Bertram Wilberforce Wragg, Gentleman, of Hampstead.
Jeeves drew back the curtain, and, once again, opened the window. St Eulalia’s rang out the quarter-hour perfectly tunefully, and the robin had clearly nipped off for some singing lessons because this time his song was delightful.
“Jeeves! I don’t know what on earth was in that glass, but you do realise that it is pure magic?”
“That is very kind of you to say so, sir. My grandmother gave me the recipe.”
“Well, you can tell your grandmother that she is a jolly good egg!”
“I will pass on your kind words, sir. She is currently one hundred and three years old and in robust health, I’m glad to say.”
“What, and she has a glass of that wonder juice every morning?”
“So I am given to understand, sir. She feels it to be a very effective ‘pick-me-up’.”
“An opinion with which I heartily concur, Jeeves. I have never been so effectively pick-me-upped in my life!”
“I am delighted you are feeling so much better, sir. Perhaps you now feel equal to breakfast?”
Half an hour later some of Jeeves’ excellent bacon and eggs had begun their journey through my digestive system, and, with the back pages of the Daily Telegraph informing me that the England bowlers had reduced Australia to 77 for six in their second innings, I was beginning to understand what Jeeves had implied by his use of the term ‘joie-de-vivre’.
In the distance I heard the doorbell ring, and then voices in the hall as Jeeves answered it.
Presently he shimmered in. “Lord Jollyrei to see you, sir.”
Jollyrei steamed into the room, evidently in a state of some agitation.
“What-ho, Jollyrei! How’s your hangover?”
“Never mind hangovers, my lad!” stormed Jollyrei. “Look at this!”
He slammed something down onto the table in front of me, making my empty coffee cup jump out of its saucer, and the sugar spoon fall out of the basin, spilling sugar onto the cloth. Jeeves looked pained.
I looked at the item that Jollyrei had placed in front of me. It was a photograph.
But what was on the photograph made my monocle drop out with shock.
In a forest there was a cross.
On the cross was a woman.
On the woman was absolutely nothing in the way of clothing.
But, and this was the real shock, the crucified woman in her birthday suit was very clearly none other than our birthday girl of last night, the lovely Alice!
TBC
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