PRIDE&POOP by Jane Airedale (and LuLu)
Rosebud the mare was out in the fields, nibbling on sweet May grass, when she glanced up just in time to behold an old friend coming her way.
"Why, Gracie the coachdog!" Rosebud neighed. "I haven't seen you around here since last September. "How are you, my dear, and how is life on the highway?"
The attractive black-and-white dog, whose most salient claim to beauty was one cornflower blue eye and another of the deepest brown, barked a merry greeting. "I have been up to London and seen some friends of yours," said she.
"Really?" Rosebud twitched her ears and abandoned the grass. "Of whom do you speak, my dear?"
Gracie sat down close by Rosebud's hooves and smiled a broad, rakish smile. "Why, that naughty cat Wickham, of course, and along with him two hounds well-known to these parts -- namely Miss Lydia Beagle and her dear friend Loutie."
Story continued below....
posted by LuLu @ 12:46 AM
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Story continued...
Rosebud felt a thrill of excitement charge through her veins like the prick of a nettle. The mare was not a born gossip like some she knew, but she loved knowing things. She lowered her head and gently nudged Gracie. "No!"
"I kid you not," swore the grinning, tail-wagging canine. "Oh, come now, Rosebud. I've heard tales that you were Lady Britney's favorite mare, and I know you've kept certain things to yourself, such as how matters stand between her ladyship and a certain member of the Lucas family."
Rosebud cut her eyes to a distant rock. What Gracie had said was true, and she missed her ladyship, but she also knew how unhappy she had been while living at Hound Hall, and she wished her well.
"Tell me everything!" she insisted.
The dog stretched her paws and bit at a flea. Life on the road had turned her into quite a little informer, and she knew how to build suspense before offering up the meat of her information.
"Gracie!" Rosebud prodded.
"Oh, all right. Wickham told me that Lady Britney and Lady Lucas, who are both as well as well can be, are planning to move to the Continent soon, and he is going with them."
"What? But there's Bonaparte to consider! Besides, I can't imagine that Wickham, having at last attained his dream of moving to London, would ever wish to leave."
Gracie went for the flea again. "Oh, I doubt that two English gentlewomen will be much bothered by Napoleon. They plan to invest money abroad, after all. As for Wickham, he's a born adventurer, my dear."
Gracie gave up on the flea. "I would not be surprised if he showed up chasing after mice in the Levant -- or even in China.
Story continued....
Story continued...
"Well, where are Lydia and Loutie? Are they tether-tied at last?"
"Lydia and her handsome brute are not tether-tied, and they are living with Sally and Groton in a big house close to the center of town," her friend replied. She then glanced down at her paws and pretended to follow with her snout the progress of an insect in the grass.
"This is all very strange," remarked Rosebud. "Why, Sally and Groton were only servants! How could they afford a house? And where are the ladies themselves presently living?"
"My dear, the house belongs to the ladies, and Sally and Groton manage it for them. This I had straight from Wickham's whiskers, which he now waxes!"
Rosebud allowed herself a neigh of laughter, but her amusement was tinged with a hint of perplexity.
"How odd this tale seems," she remarked. Have the ladies gone into trade, then? Is this house some type of shop?"
Gracie got to her paws and rubbed her small body against Rosebud's slender legs. "I hear my master's whistle," said she, "and must be off. "My dear, I have told you all that I know, and you may use the information as you will."
Rosebud stood watching as Gracie darted off. "I feel certain there is more to this story," she said aloud, "and I wonder what it might be?"
Not far away, Mrs. Squiggle arose from the wonderful puddle she had discovered only a few hours earlier. Occasionally a day's break from the stable yard did her a world of good, and this most certainly was one of those times.
As she grunted her way home, pausing only long enough to loudly break wind, she replayed Gracie's story over and over in her brain, and drew her own conclusions.
Once back in the stable yard at Hound Hall, she fast imparted Gracie's tale, along with those conclusions, to any and all who would listen.
Rosebud, still out standing in the fields, reared up when she heard a loud howl followed by a yelp.
"Oh, my Dog! We are ruined socially! We are utterly ruined!"
Not long thereafter, Elizabeth Beagle came charging past her, looking for all the world as if the devil had her by the tail.
"Where on earth are you off to, Lizzie?" asked Rosebud. "Shouldn't you be home with your pack?"
"To hell with the pack," the harried bitch replied. "I'm off to Northanger Abbey. Nobody will find me there, mainly as the book has yet to be published."
And off she went.
In a few short months, Mr. Darcy would, in fact, find her there, but that's another story...
Pride&Poop concludes next week.
"Pride&Poop" was meant to be our summer story, and since it is now almost Thanksgiving, it's way past time for us to terminate our torrid tale.
Let us allow the secondary characters (the humans) to act out their stories first, mainly as they don't have much to recommend them, and I was rather sorry that I decided to include them in the first place.
Elswytha, the peg-legged Duchess of Avalon, made every effort to woo her cousin, Sir Bernard Dogorrel, but succeeded only in scaring the questionable wits out of him.
When she at long last threatened to turn him over to the magistrates for "murdering" his wife, Sir "Bernie" once again sobered up, faked his death, and fled across the ocean to America.
Word later drifted back to England that he had joined Lewis and Clark and perished in the vast American wilderness, which caused his cousin to fall into a gin fit.
In actuality, Bernie had simply joined the vaudeville act of Louis&Clark (&Gooch and Kaminski), who worked out of Boston. He enjoyed a modicum of success with a rather funny shtik called "riding to the hounds," before giving up show biz, marrying the homely daughter of a rich merchant, and subsequently living a thoroughly boring and mundane life, which perfectly suited him.
Once convinced that her cousin was gone for good, the lecherous duchess settled a rather large sum of money on her master of the hounds, John Smalls, and married him.
Their union was not a long-lasting one. While honeymooning in the Alps, the duchess' new husband gave her a push in the right direction, and returned home with only her peg leg for a souvenir.
It then came to light that the plebeian Mr. Smalls was really the aristocratic Randall Dogorrel, Sir Bernie's missing brother. He used his late wife's hefty dowry to reclaim his estate, and promptly assumed the title.
Sir Randall married the pretty daughter of Farmer Bingley, who by then had transformed himself into Squire Bingley. The couple moved into (and completely restored) Hound Hall. Of course they set aside a pleasant cottage for Manfred Twittle (whose twaddle never made him poet laureate) and his charming wife, who taught a new generation of Dogorrels appallingly bad French.
Lady Britney and Lady Lucas moved to France after the fall of Napoleon, and opened a fashionable "sporting club" just outside of Paris. Their former servants, Groton and Sally, ran a similar club for them back in London, and the merry quartet became outrageously rich and deliciously notorious.
The two women, whose relationship was a 19th century version of the one later enjoyed by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, traveled the world together, met everyone of importance from Bombay to New Orleans, and generally enjoyed the best life had to offer, which made them even more notorious -- since most of the world cannot stand merry people who have become blindingly successful, and don't in the least understand them.
Story continued...
Story continued...
Sir William Lucas and the vicar, Andrew Dinmont, lived together for the next twenty-five years. Both of them enjoyed dressing up as Marie Antoinette from time to time, but basically they were stay-at-home types who kept in touch with the fashionable world only through Lady Lucas' racy letters, which they read aloud to one another while applying their beauty patches in the mornings.
The two footmen, Spaven and Reddle, opened a tavern together and did rather well, particularly since they managed to make off with what was left of Sir Bernard's once well-stocked wine cellar. Naturally they kept all the good French brandy for themselves.
Now, dear Readers, enough about the hoi-polloi. Let us move on to the main characters -- the dogs, the cats, the horses, and the swine.
Mr. and Mrs. Beagle were not ruined socially by Lydia's precipitant actions. In fact, they remained happily at Hound Hall for the rest of their years, and were well companioned in their old age by Jane and her beloved mate, Mr. Bingley, who produced four litters of hardy beagle-blend puppies.
The "Bingley Beagles," as they were called, became known as fine hunting dogs far and wide, and every squire and nobleman for kilometers around wished for at least a pair of them. One of the bitches mated with the good-natured Mr. Gardiner, and their pups won ribbons at all the major hunts.
Mr. Beagle and his Marjorie whelped two more litters, but Mr. Beagle was not in the least put out -- mainly as Sir Randall was a generous hall master, and always made certain that his old dogs got extra portions of food and the very best bones.
Rosebud the mare became the favorite mount of the new Lady Dogorrel, and Mrs. Squiggle never became bacon. She lived on to become an ancient pig as pig lives go, and spent her time enjoying her slops and the local gossip up until the very day her tail uncurled.
Lydia and Ludie (also spelled Loudie and Lutie), who lived with Sally and Groton, never officially tether-tied, but they produced litter after litter of friendly mixed-breed pups, and half the young bloods in London survived a stern lecture (or worse) from a wife or sweetheart by bringing home a cute puppy (and hopefully nothing else) after a rollicking night at the sporting club.
Wickham, the wicked tabby, learned to tolerate the name "Chutney," and wound up traveling the globe with his two notorious ladies. He became impossibly vain, posed for famous artists, and became a hit with the Paris demi-mode. In his old age he fell in love with a beautiful Angora cat named Sultana, who led him a merry chase and used to leave dead mice in his bed.
Charlotte and the basset, Mr. Collins, soon discovered that they had nothing in common aside from a litter of pups. One night Spaven and Reddle found her walking the streets, and took her in. She was surprisingly content as the watchdog of a pub, but she soon lost her cultivated bark and became rather coarse about her appearance. Mr. Collins spent the rest of his days wondering what went wrong. He never managed to figure it out.
Lizzie Beagle made it to Northanger Abbey, and Mr. Darcy tracked her there. The two dogs spent months attempting to be civil to one another, and by then the book was ready to be published.
Still unsure of her feelings, Lizzie backtracked to another Airedale novel, "Scents and Scentsability," where she encountered even less luck with a perfidious pointer named Willoughby.
Thus ends our summertime offering, my encapsulated version of Jane Airedale's "Pride&Poop." The completed book -- all 956 pages! will soon be available at a bookstore near you just in time for the holidays! Granted, my book is a tad more expensive than Miss Airedale's version, but my book doesn't have a moral, and it will soon be out on DVD.
I'm sure you'll agree, that's a much better deal!
Love, LuLu
PS: If I forgot to mention any of the characters, just use your imagination (or buy the book)!!!!
It's only a story after all....
PPS: Actually, it's not an encapsulated version of Jane's book; it's an encapsulated version of my version of her book. Actually, it's my version.
Oh, just buy the book!
My version.
L.
And have a GREAT holiday season~
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