PRIDE&POOP (cont'd)......
"Gardiner," called out Mr. Darcy, as the sun began to sink below the tops of the trees in the nearby woods, "with all due respect to the charming Miss Beagle, I do believe that a postponement might be in order."
"Oi 'ope so," piped up Mrs. Squiggle, the sow, underscoring her comment with a loud oink. "Oi'm all outta slops, an' it's lookin' ter rain."
"Jane appears exhausted," remarked Lizzie to Mr. Darcy. "Thank you for your consideration."
He perked his ears and gave her a disdainful glance. "I assure you, ma'am, I am not so much thinking of your sister's physical discomfort as I am my cousin's discomfit. He offered for the bitch, she accepted, and now she keeps him standing by the mating pen for hours while her humans are off doing Dog knows what, and to exacerbate matters even further, her tart of a sister has run off."
Lizzie swung about and bared her teeth. "How dare you?" she snarled. "What sort of insensitive hound are you, Mr. Darcy? As if Jane has any dominion over the actions of the humans up at the Hall! As for my younger sister -- she, whom you so easily disparage with a vile label, do you suppose we should be callous enough to simply dismiss her from our thoughts on an occasion like this one? You may have no feelings for your own sisters, but this is not, thank Dog, the case here." And with her head held high and her tail even higher, Jane pushed past him.
Story continued under "comments."
posted by LuLu @ 11:33 PM
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Mr. Darcy followed her. "Miss Elizabeth, if you please," he called out, while catching up to her at an easy trot. "I meant no genuine offense, but you must admit, this is a most unorthodox mating -- or perhaps I had best rephrase the sentence by referring to what we have here as an aborted "attempt" to mate."
"And for that you blame my sister?" she countered. "Look about you, sir. Behold all the leering hounds from your pack waiting impatiently for poor Jane to be shoved into a mating pen with a dog she scarcely knows. But has she quavered? No, she has not. She has remained stout and brave and true, even though she has been standing there for hours."
"As has Gardiner," Darcy was exasperatingly quick to point out, "and please keep in mind, Miss Elizabeth, that those leering hounds, as you call them, are his friends and relatives. They are gathered here to see him mated -- not insulted!"
"You look for slights and insults where none are intended, sir," fumed Lizzie, "but here is one you can take to the bank; I think you are rude, arrogant, unfeeling, and wholly unworthy of ever becoming Jane's cousin."
At that, Lizzie swung about and went back into the stable yard.
Thoroughly titillated, Mr. Darcy went off to tree a squirrel. What a delicious little bitch Miss Jane Beagle was, he decided. A pity her family was so low and unorthodox; otherwise, he might seriously consider leading HER to the mating pen -- if only to teach her a lesson.
Story to be continued...
Story continued...
"Male trouble, lovey?" asked Rosebud the mare, as Lizzie padded past her stall, still panting with rage.
"Not really," Lizzie replied. "The very term 'male trouble' would seem suggestive of love gone wrong. I hate Mr. Darcy, but there has never been, and never can be, any love involved. That can't be 'male trouble,' can it, Rosie?"
"It depends," said the pretty mare, who had suffered her share of inappropriate kicks and jabs from wild stallions in her time, but had yet to hang up her horse shoes. "Too bad about your sister running off."
Lizzie glanced up at her. "Do you know something, Rosie?"
The mare neighed and twitched her ears. "Not much, lovey. I do know that Lydia has spent far too much time with that wicked tabby cat of late."
"You mean Wickham?"
"I certainly do. He's got an ego more exaggerated than some of Bonaparte's marshals. And for the past several weeks, he's talked about nothing but going off to London."
She flicked her tail, shooing flies. "It's been London this and London that. I can't imagine what he hopes to accomplish there. Are London rats and mice any tastier than ours here in the country? He'll come to a bad end, Lizzie. Mark my whinny!"
At that very moment, in a large house located in a rather bohemian section of the great city of London, a statuesque female clad in nothing but a lacy bustier was raising a glass of Irish whiskey in a "toast to better times."
"Make that hotter times, my dearest," said another, more petite version of feminine pulchritude, as she fluffed her dyed black hair, recently cut short and worn in a pigtail.
"'Ers to Mr. Horocks 'ou always thought me so very wicked," giggled the last of the Graces, as she leaned across the cushions which supported her ample endowments, and nibbled at the ear of a handsome young man with the magnificent thighs of a Greek statue.
Nearby, sound asleep in the midst of scattered bones and bits and pieces of dropped delicacies, Lydia and Loutie lay side by side.
Wickham sat atop the table above them, nibbling caviar out of a silver bowl.
Those he had left behind him might be wondering about him and his whereabouts, but he never spared a thought for any of them.
Indeed, as he listened to the sound of raucous laughter coming from a room close by, he purred with pleasure, and considered himself at home at last.
Correction.....
We know it's "horseshoes" instead of "horse shoes." But grant us at least one or two typos per article. It's not like we're the New York Times.
Hey! Wait a minute! How many typos do they make?
Another day dawned at Hound Hall. The cock crowed, the crow cocked, horses neighed, cows moo'd, sheep said "bah," and Sir Bernard Dogorrel thought that he might be dying.
"My God!" he gasped, clutching his valet's arm. "I can see things clearly. Colors are bright, lines are straight! I am not in the least dizzy, and I do not feel the need to vomit. My heart is beating at a slow and even pace, and I don't have hedgehogs scrambling up my brain. This must be it, man. I must be about to cast off my mortal coil and join my distinguished ancestors."
"Might I remind you, sir," said the long-suffering valet, "that you retired in an unaccustomed state of sobriety last night. It's likely been a whopper of a shock to your system, sir, and will take some getting used to."
"Sobriety?" Sir Bernard covered his face with his hands. "I must be losing my mind. No gentleman ever goes to bed sober -- nor does he rise until well after ten without a headache."
The valet rewarded his master with a smile as warm as sleet. "There is a first time for everything," he reminded him.
Once he was washed and combed and dressed, a process which took far less time to accomplish than usual, Sir Bernard positively skipped down the stairway which led to the main part of the house, but he suddenly paused on the landing when he recollected the reason he had put aside his tumblers and beakers the night before.
"Britney." He spoke her name aloud. "That's it, of course. My wife has been kidnapped. Oh, the pity of it all." And he felt very sorry for himself.
But by the time he had reached the dining room, he realized he was famished and proceeded to tuck away a hearty breakfast, pretty much forgetting all about Hound Hall's tragic missing mistress.
A good hour later, his fair cousin, the Duchess of Avalon, deigned to stagger downstairs for a second breakfast, after drinking her first one.
Sir Bernard noticed for the first time how blotched her skin was, how dyed her hair, and how bloodshot her eyes. She did possess a handsome pair of melons, but aside from those endowments, her assets were few, and a peg leg did not exactly brighten the picture.
She was accompanied by that poet fellow, Manfred Twittle, who had consumed more than a quart of brandy the night before and looked like a piece of bad cheese. She was also closely attended by her master of the hounds, John Smalls, who, in Sir Bernard's opinion, was allowed to take liberties generally permitted only to those far above his station in life.
To make matters worse, the fellow carried himself well and had (by damn!) almost the look of a gentleman about him. In fact, now that Sir Bernard was capable of looking at Smalls and actually seeing him for the first time, he was taken aback to realize that there was something oddly familiar about the man.
Story to be continued...
Story continued...
"Any word about her ladyship?" asked Mr. Smalls, with a slick politeness that did not settle well with his host.
"I'm afraid not," Sir Bernard replied shortly, and cut his eyes to his cousin. "I should think, had she been kidnapped, we would have heard from the villains by now; we would have received a note -- some word, would we not?"
The duchess snapped her fingers. "Pah!" said she. "Britney's probably dead by now, and fair riddance to her. She never really did her part, Bernie. Oh, granted, she brought you a nice dowry, but she never gave you a son and heir -- or even a comfortable home."
She sat down at the table and scanned the room with a sharp, beady eye. "This place needs a great deal of renovation, and you need a new wife, my dear -- one with a substantial amount of money, who will be able to both transform Hound Hall -- " she purred like a contented tigress --"and see to your OTHER comforts."
Sir Bernard turned pale and gulped; while Manfred Twittle darted a swift, questioning glance in Mr. Small's direction, but that "almost" gentleman was blandly occupied with the buttering of his toast, a task he undertook with a firm and steady hand.
"We cannot, surely, just dismiss Britney," said Sir Bernard. "She is my wife, Elswytha. Besides, she comes from a fine family. Questions will be asked."
But the duchess merely shrugged. "I see no reason why we can't simply dismiss her. Let me see, she was quite young when you snapped her up, and her immediate family was small. Gracious, most of them are long dead and buried. You never go into town; you haven't been to court in ages.
"In short, Bernie," she went on, wagging a fork at him, "who is there to miss the woman?"
"But...."
"No buts, Bernie," and she stretched out a sinuous arm and stroked his hand before turning to Mr. Smalls and asking: "Don't you think it's time we mated those beagles, John?"
He finished his toast and smiled at her.
Unfortunatley, early that very same afternoon, the Duchess of Avalon fell ill with a strange malady, and for several days her very life hung in the balance.
Not long thereafter, the lady, along with her official lover, her master of the hounds, and her varied and various servants, all left Hound Hall for a nearby spa, where it was hoped the duchess might soon regain a modicum of health -- or whatever passed for it in her case. Her beagles, quite naturally, went with her -- a great relief for Lizzie Beagle, who oddly enough began to spend her days taking long, solitary walks in the woods...and moping about, sniffing amongst the pine needles.
As for Jane Beagle, she too began to spend a good deal of time in the woods, making plans along with her mate, Mr. Bingley. Jane, as it happened, soon found herself in a most delicate condition -- the results of which could no more be forestalled than the rising of the sun, the crow of the cock, the neighs of the horses, or the "bahs" of the sheep.
"Oi don't know what's goin' on 'round 'ere; oi don't," bemoaned Mrs. Squiggle, the sow. "But the mistress 'as gone missing, thet little tart beagle 'as runned off, 'er grace is still puttin' the moves on Sir Bernard, and now Jane Beagle 'as up and disappeared."
Rosebud, the pretty mare, tossed her head and stamped her hooves. May had arrived with a vengeance, and she was hot in her stall. "Well, if YOU don't know what's going on, all IS lost," she neighed, with just the hint of asperity mixed in with her oats.
"Oi never said oi didn't 'av it figured, Rosie. Oi can put two an' two togedder as well as most, oi can."
Rosebud swished her tail, swatting at flies, and perked her ears. "Oh, so you have it figured out, do you? Well, missus, what's your theory, if you honestly have one?"
Mrs. Squiggle raised her snout from her slops and hauled her plump form over to Rosebud's stall. "See thet spider's web 'buv the winder there?" she asked the mare, who nodded.
"A perfect design, Rosie, when yer looks at it close. All thet shiny silk tied up tight wi' no loose ends."
Rosebud snorted. "Are you trying to tell me that everything is connected?"
The old sow nodded sagely. "'er ladyship and Sally vanishes at the exact same toim as Lady Lucas leaves 'ome," she said. "Then thet cat Wickham, 'oo dreams of goin' off ter London, 'ee leaves too, right along wi' Lydia -- and Loutie's, 'oo's also gone, iff'n you've noticed."
"And you think they all went off to London together?"
Mrs. Squiggle nodded. "Oi do, Rosie girl. Oi do."
"I might suggest that you have an overactive imagination," observed Rosebud. "Still, what you say does make a certain amount of sense. But what of Jane Beagle? Did she run off to London, too?"
Mrs. Squiggle found some mud and rolled in it. "Thass better," she sighed. "Oi don't know as oi cares for this 'ot weather."
She got to her paws and grunted. "As for Jane -- it's the quiet ones you 'av ter watch, Rosie. Oi say she's run only as far off as Farmer Durben's farm, where she'll soon be whelpin' pups -- er's and thet Irish pocadan's. Why, them two're crazy for each other."
Rosebud neighed and kicked her stall door. "Go on! Jane's so very proper, I'm surprised she urinates in public. Did you see her at the breeding pen with that adorable Mr. Gardiner? She looked like she was facing the hangman!"
Mrs. Squiggle oinked with glee. "Watch them proper ones, Rosie! Watch 'em well."
"Well, what about the duchess?"
The old sow scratched her ear. "Ooof! Poor Sir Bernard. Thet peg leg's never slowed 'er down; an' now that she's recovered from what ailed 'er, oi understand she's writin' our master passionate notes an' longin' ter see 'im. Why, she's 'otter to trot than a thoroughbred at Epsom with a nettle under 'is blanket. Oi shouldn't be surprised to foind out she planned the 'ole thing just to get 'er cousin in ter bed."
"Are you saying you believe the duchess got Lady Lucas to leave her husband, and she got Lady Britney and Sally to go with her?
Maybe she even induced them to take Lydia, Loutie, and Wickham to London with them?" Rosebud asked drolly, then shook her head and snorted loudly.
"It t'ain't impossible," replied the old sow, eyeing the intricate web again. "A course, it's also possible they all got massacreed by 'ighwaymen!"
Mrs. Beagle, entering the stable at that inopportune moment, gave a yelp and began to howl. "Oh, Dog! Both my females! The pick of all my litters! Murdered by highwaymen!"
"Marjorie, my dear, please try to compose yourself," implored her mate, hurrying to her side. "Perhaps Sir Bernard will let us breed again." (And if so, thought Mr. Beagle, he sincerely hoped all the pups would be males.)
"But this means we've got only Lizzie left!" yiped Mrs. Beagle, without heeding him. "Oh, Mr. Beagle, she will have to be led to the breeding pen with Mr. Darcy at once. At once, I say -- or we will be ruined socially! Utterly, utterly ruined!"
Outside in the stable yard, Lizzie turned tail and fled into the woods. She hadn't heard from Darcy in weeks, and if she was to be led to the breeding pen, she at least needed time to catch a hare.
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