11. TOTAL CONFUSION AND A BUS SHELTER

THE FANCY DRESS BALL (11)

The two men with the electric milk float looked as if they didn’t know what was going on as Cynthia Absinthe glanced in my direction and shook her head before encouraging Trigger to charge back the way we had come, jumping over the fence that led almost straight onto a road, and I watched in horror as it seemed likely that the poor beast would collide with an elderly Land Rover before the latter swerved and screeched to a halt. It’s driver stuck his head out of his window and bellowed something that just had to be offensive before he noticed just how almost naked Cynthia was, and shut up.

The two women on the horse continued up the road, going back the way we had come, heading hopefully in the direction of Sir Jeffery’s manor house. The young Jessica was still shouting at her mother in a way I’d never heard either twin shout before. I’d looked upon them as rather sweet and polite young ladies, and what I was witnessing now was certainly very much at variance with that assessment. She was shouting like a fishwife at her mother and although most of it was lost to the distance I’m sure I heard the word Tiffany...

I was still staring after the horse when I became aware that the two men who had allegedly kidnapped Jessica, though I was beginning to ask myself what had really happened, noticed me standing there, not quite as in the shadows as I had thought, and announced their awareness by shooting at me. Fortunately, the shot went wide and the deafening sound it made in the quiet park must have caused them to think twice about firing again. Instead, shouting, they ran towards me.

I had quite a lead on them and decided to make the best of it. Dressed only in a dented helmet, sandals and a coarse tunic cut on the short side, I tried to sprint towards where I hoped there might be a gateway into the park.

I should have remembered that there wasn’t, that the locals had raised a stink because their children were obliged to go the long way road if they wanted a go on the swings, but I didn’t, and it was only by fortune and a fluke that I spotted a trail that led through the hedges and shrubs that lined the park, and into somebody’s garden. There wasn’t a gate but the garden’s boundary fence had been bent low by frequent use in one place and I was able to struggle over it, almost doing myself irreparable damage as a sharp spike found its way under my tunic and threatened my manhood! But that was a danger I avoided as well and escaped intact, and somehow, gasping and breathless as any man of my age would be, I tried to melt away into the night by sneaking through a vegetable garden and, hopefully, towards the world beyond the house.

I was probably saved from discovery because most of the locals will have gone to the fancy dress ball and, in fact, once out on the roadway I saw a medieval knight and his maiden not in distress but snuggling up to him, laughing at what they perceived as a strange end to the evening’s entertainment. It did tell me one thing, though: I was going the right way if I wanted to find out exactly what was going on.

I paused for a while, wondering what had become of my pursuers. The fact that they were armed with a gun scared me, and the additional fact that they weren’t afraid to use it terrified me. But there was no sign of them and I guessed they would have soon given up pursuing me on foot and returned to their milk float.

The mad dash on Trigger earlier had taken me a couple of miles from the Manor House and I obviously had to walk back, aware that the two gunmen would probably have to do the same thing, but in a milk float. Then there was Cynthia in the guise of Lady Godiva but wearing a Roman hauberk, it would be logical for her to want to return home too. We would look to be an eccentric trail of weirdos making our way through the falling night should anyone chance to be watching us.

At first I was alone on that road, surrounded by farmland and just the odd house, and then, at first a whisper, far off but sounding ever nearer, I heard the distant clomp of horse’s hooves on the tarmacked road. I looked around for somewhere to hide, and I was in luck. A few yards ahead of me was a bus shelter, one of those sociable enclosed ones where I could easily conceal myself..

I ran the few steps it took to reach it and sighed my gratitude that it was in total darkness and nobody would be able to see me from the road if they passed me by.

I was right that nobody would be able to see me. That bus shelter was the perfect hiding place, and someone else had found it.

“Well well,” came a familiar and what I thought loving voice, “fancy that, meeting you here dressed like that,” it said.

It was Millie, the woman I had chosen to start living with and who had gone to the ball with me, and she was still dressed as a fine Roman lady in a diaphanous floaty outfit and with her hair gathered into a bun.

“Millie!” I exclaimed, “what are you doing here?”

“I thought you’d end up coming this way,” she said, and for the first time ever I detected a slight hard edge to her voice.

“But why?” I asked, confused, “I mean, what made you think that?”

“Because you had to hide somewhere, and this bus shelter is as good a place for a silly old romantic like you to hide as anywhere.”

“Silly old Romantic…?” I stammered.

“With your ideals. They’re fine things to have, are ideals, but there’s one trouble with them. There’s no profit in ideals. No profit at all.”

As we’d been talking the sound of Trigger’s hooves on the hard road had become almost deafening. I pulled myself away from the shelter window and away from Millie, who I was suddenly beginning to have serious doubts about, what with all that talk of profit versus ideals.

“Quick! Roger!” shouted Cynthia’s voice, “up behind me before they get you!”

“No you don’t!” shrieked Millie, reaching towards me. But for the first time in ages I became greased lightning as I jumped back out of the bus shelter and allowed her to pull me back onto her horse. There was no sign of Jessica and I had no idea why she’d gone, or where or how, but it did mean there was just about room for me again.

I was totally and utterly confused as Cynthia, as far as I could tell by the light of a street lamp, smiled at me.

“What on Earth’s going on?” I begged her.

Still smiling she replied, “you tell me: I’m at a total loss, and why was my Jessica so nasty to me? Is there something you know that I don’t?”

“I wish there was,” I replied, and added, “those men shot at me, you know!”

© Peter Rogerson 27.07.20