Blotto, Twinks and the Suspicious Guests

Book 11: Blotto Twinks

by Simon Brett

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

An explosion of disgust - 'What? You mean the Earl does it for money?' - from Blotto is provoked when Twinks informs him of the activities of the Earl of Woking. The gentleman in question is the owner of Clusters, a stately home not far from Tawcester Towers, who has been renting out his property for private functions - and CHARGING his guests! The discovery of this appalling lapse in aristocratic behaviour sets Blotto and Twinks off on their latest adventure. Determined to find out more about the Earl of Woking's activities, they discover the existence of a sinister group called Aristotours - brokers between impoverished owners of stately homes and the common people, offering a taste of the high life to such plebeian characters as stockbrokers, surgeons and solicitors. And as if this were not bad enough, they discover that Aristotours has its beady eye upon Tawcester Towers itself!

Release date: June 7, 2022

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 60000

Sample

‘What, you mean the Earl does it for money?’ asked Blotto, appalled. ‘That’s way beyond the barbed wire! What a stencher!’

It was rare for Devereux Lyminster, younger son of the late Duke of Tawcester, to express criticism of a fellow aristocrat. Centuries of the feudal system and public school (which were more or less the same thing) had inculcated in him the honourable principle of sticking together with your own kind (and treating everyone else like dirt). But then it was rare for Blotto to have heard the kind of revelation he just had about the activities of the Earl of Woking.

The person who had unleashed this bombshell on him was his sister, Lady Honoria Lyminster, known to everyone who didn’t call her ‘milady’ as ‘Twinks’. Both siblings were extraordinarily good-looking. If a Greek god were blond (and it’s always hard to tell hair colour from the statues they have left to posterity), then he’d be the ideal lookalike for Blotto. The young man was in his twenties and had the figure of an athlete, honed by years of cricket and riding to hounds, at both of which sports he excelled. His tanned face boasted honest blue eyes under a thatch of wheat-coloured hair. Each feature was perfectly formed, the patrician nose, the resolute chin, and even the ears (although there was nothing between them).

But any intellectual inadequacy was more than made up for by the intelligence of his sister. Twinks was exquisitely petite, which might suggest that her brain weighed in at less than the national average, but there was no mistaking its power. Rarely, save in the Senior Common Room of St Raphael’s College Oxford, did she find brains that could engage with hers on equal terms. And it was a constant source of amazement that someone so gifted intellectually could be a creature of such beauty. Also blonde, her hair was of a finer silver filigree than her brother’s. Her skin had the glow of alabaster warmed by the first pink light of dawn. Her azure eyes were bottomless pools of seduction. Amorous swains fell for her with the frequency of apples thudding to the ground at the end of summer.

That evening the siblings were sitting over cocoa in Twinks’s boudoir. She was not only smoking a cigarette but had also made the cocoa herself. Blotto sometimes had his breath taken away by how modern a girl his sister was. He always felt secure, though, in her boudoir, a confection of white silk and lace.

Twinks had summoned the confab to discuss the latest crisis in the Tawcester Towers’ finances. It was the same old problem – the plumbing. During the early years of the twentieth century, shortcomings in that area were tolerated by guests at stately homes (unless they were Americans – and nobody with any breeding cared what Americans thought). Someone staying for a weekend house party would not be surprised by a heating system which clanked through the night like a medieval ghost army, by the fact that there was only one bathroom per twenty bedrooms, and that all the taps yielded was a thin trickle of lukewarm brown water. But though they set the bar low, weekend guests did have an expectation that, at however modest a level, the plumbing should work. And in Tawcester Towers that very rarely happened.

To the family resources this represented a major drain – one which, unlike most of the drains in the Lyminster ancestral home, was not blocked. Outgoings on the Tawcester Towers plumbing were at least as great as other notorious ways of losing money – like keeping a string of racehorses in training – and much less fun.

Now the main boiler, a massive, daunting contraption in one of the Tawcester Towers cellars, which looked and behaved like a terrifying, coal-gobbling monster from a medieval vision of Hell, had finally given up and exploded.

It was to devise a way of raising the cash for this emergency that Twinks had summoned Blotto to her boudoir. Humbly, he knew his role in such discussions. He would listen while his sister outlined the potential solutions and then agree vigorously when she told him which was the best one.

She gave short shrift to the idea of either her or Blotto marrying somebody enormously rich. Such a plan had frequently been suggested by their mother, the Dowager Duchess of Tawcester, but it had never come off. This was because neither of the siblings was very keen on the idea of marriage. At an early age, Twinks had made a private oath to give herself to someone she not only loved, but who also was her intellectual equal. And the chances of those two qualities coinciding in a single man, of comparable breeding to her own, were so remote that she was quite reconciled to the idea of adventurous and active spinsterhood.

As for Blotto, he feared that the permanent presence of a woman in his life might have an adverse effect on the uncomplicated love he felt for his cricket bat, his Lagonda and his hunter Mephistopheles.

The solution of raising money by criminal activity was also quickly dismissed. Although the family fortune had been built up over the centuries by various forms of licensed larceny, Blotto and Twinks both had extremely high standards of morality. They believed it was wrong to steal money from anyone (except, of course, serfs, servants and tradesmen).

After once again rejecting marriage and crime to solve their problems, Twinks had moved on to the financial activities of the Earl of Woking, which had prompted such revulsion from Blotto. The peer in question was owner of Clusters, the nearest stately home to Tawcester Towers, less than fifty miles away and in the same county of Tawcestershire.

Between the two families there had always existed a rivalry. Had the earldom existed during the Wars of the Roses, this would have found expression with battleaxes and broadswords, but the Woking line wasn’t around then. The title had only been created in the sixteenth century, so the Lyminsters had never questioned their superiority over such parvenus.

The rivalry now took the gentle form of cricket matches and poaching domestic staff – particularly chefs – from each other.

‘So, tell me again, Twinks me old soup-strainer, what has that lump of toadspawn Woking been up to?’

‘He’s been renting out parts of Clusters for private functions!’

‘What, you mean actually charging money to his guests?’

‘Bong on the nose, Blotters! He’s been charging money for people he invites to shooting parties, weekends … even cricket matches.’

The news of this final perfidy prompted a rare display of foul language (in front of a lady) from her brother. ‘Broken biscuits!’ he said. ‘The four-faced filcher! Imagine charging money for your old muffin-toasters from Eton to come and play cricket!’

‘The Earl of Woking didn’t actually go to Eton,’ Twinks mentioned cautiously. She was a little anxious about her brother’s likely reaction.

‘Didn’t he, by Denzil?’

‘No, he was at Winchester.’

‘Poor greengage,’ murmured Blotto, expressing his natural sympathy for the afflicted.

‘Anyway, what Woking’s doing is worse than that, Blotto me old wisp of navel lint. He’s not charging his muffin-toasters. The people he’s getting to pay aren’t our sort of people.’

‘Not our sort of people!’ came the thunderstruck echo.

‘No.’

‘Toad-in-the-hole! You mean they haven’t got titles?’

‘No.’

‘They didn’t go to private schools?’

‘No.’

‘You’re saying that the Earl of Woking has been inviting oikish sponge-worms into his ancestral home, giving them hospitality as if they were the genuine article – and making them pay for the privilege?’

‘Give that pony a rosette!’ said Twinks.

‘Something must be done about this!’ said Blotto grimly.

The traditional method by which domestic harmony was maintained in aristocratic circles was ensuring that family members saw as little of each other as possible. This had always, since the founding of the feudal system, been particularly true of husbands and wives. Though a little inevitable commingling occurred for the purposes of procreation, recreational sex was generally outsourced. And conversational intercourse was restricted to occasions when protocol demanded that the couple should be seen together, in other words when other people were present. The idea that an aristocratic couple should engage in voluntary dialogue when on their own was bizarre and unthinkable.

The closeness between Blotto and Twinks was therefore unusual in people of their breeding. And communication between the two of them and their elder brother, the current Duke of Tawcester, was as rare as a chin at a Hunt Ball.

(On the matter of chins, it should be noted that, unfortunately for Loofah, as the Duke was universally known, his younger brother had monopolised the family allocation. Whereas the outline of Blotto’s jaw mirrored the Greeks’ sculptures of their gods, there was an undeviating straight line between Loofah’s lower lip and his collar stud.)

Also present in the Blue Morning Room that morning was the current Duchess. Loofah’s wife, known universally as Sloggo, had the translucent pallor of an uncooked shrimp. Indeed, there seemed to be an unacknowledged competition between husband and wife as to which of them could look the more anaemic. Had there been such a contest in the racing calendar as the Anaemia Stakes, they would have dead-heated on the line.

Sloggo’s pallor may have been in part due to the strains of childbearing. As the wife of a Duke, she had recognised early into her marriage that her aim in life was the production of a male heir. So far, her ambitions in that direction had not been fulfilled, though the Duke and Duchess’s quarters in Tawcester Towers were littered with innumerable daughters. The couple’s sense of duty, however, did not allow them to give up the quest, and their continuing vigorous and joyless attempts to manufacture the missing male heir perhaps accounted for their mutual pastiness.

The fact that the entire generation of the Lyminster family had been summoned to the Blue Morning Room was a measure of the occasion’s importance. And a demonstration, if one were needed, of the powerful will of the three aristocratic siblings’ mother, the Dowager Duchess of Tawcester.

In descriptions of this monument to the effects of inbreeding, ‘battleaxe’, ‘trout’ and ‘old boiler’ have been used, but the word that it is hardest to avoid is ‘dinosaur’. At the risk of being discourteous to fossils, not only did the Dowager Duchess share certain features with exhibits in the Natural History Museum, it was also easy to believe that she had been in existence since the Triassic Period. Her habitual expression made the North Face of the Eiger look hospitable. The maternal instinct was a weakness that had, over generations, been bred out of her. Her attitude to her children was that, since each had been born with a silver spoon in his or her mouth, she was not required to add any further indulgences, like affection, to their cutlery drawers.

Even Twinks found her mother daunting, and the two male offspring were frankly terrified of her. Sloggo was equally cowed, so it was no surprise that nobody in the Blue Morning Room spoke until the Dowager Duchess herself had initiated the conversation.

‘It will not have escaped your attention,’ she began, ‘not even your attention, Loofah and Blotto, which most things manage to escape …’ (She had no illusions about her sons’ intellectual abilities.) ‘… that Tawcester Towers is currently boilerless. And while it has always been my belief that getting cold never did anybody any harm, and that excessive bathing tends to weaken the protective layers of the skin …’ (Here she was simply affirming two articles of faith with which ladies of her breeding had grown up.) ‘… the lack of hot water for the kitchen staff to use in cleaning the crockery and cutlery could possibly be injurious to the family’s health.

‘This is a particular danger at this time of year. Though still clement enough now in early September, the English weather does not allow me to relish the prospect of a winter without hot water.

‘It is for this reason that I have summoned you all here this morning.’

‘You mean, Mater,’ said Twinks, considerably quicker on the uptake than other representatives of her generation present, ‘that you want us to come up with some spoffing tasty wheezette as to how we can get the old jingle-jangle to mend the boiler?’

This was familiar territory. The usual reason for a summons to the Blue Morning Room was to offer solutions to the perennial problem of the Tawcester Towers plumbing. And, indeed, many of Blotto and Twinks’s exotic and life-threatening adventures had begun with just such a briefing.

Twinks was therefore surprised at her mother’s reply. ‘No,’ boomed the Dowager Duchess. ‘I have brought you all here to show you how things should be done, how things used to be done before this benighted country succumbed to the infection of Socialism. There is someone I wish to introduce you to, someone who will immediately solve our current problem.’

‘Oh?’ asked Loofah timorously. ‘You mean a money-lender?’ then, even more fearful, ‘Is it a banker?’

That would have made sense. Reliance on bankers and money-lenders to sort out mortgages, overdrafts and other such tedious details had a long tradition in the British aristocracy.

‘No,’ pronounced the Dowager Duchess, pulling the bell-rope conveniently placed near her throne as she spoke, ‘it is not a banker. It is a plumber.’

An audible shudder ran through the family assembly. The last word was not one that had been heard before in the Blue Morning Room.

The man whom the Tawcester Towers butler Grimshaw, summoned by the Dowager Duchess’s bell, ushered into her presence, did not look as though he had ever been in a space like the Blue Morning Room before. He wore a white overall and white gloves. He was literally ‘cap in hand’, in his case a flat one in indeterminate brown tweed. The black boots which sank into the pile of the carpet had been cleaned specially for the occasion. Beneath his nose was a small unnecessary moustache and his hair was slicked back with some plebeian equivalent of pomade. Premature baldness had deprived him of a forelock, but if he’d had one, he would undoubtedly have tugged it.

Yet, though he showed appropriate deference, the man did not appear overawed by his surroundings. Clearly, he had met and gained the respect of the Dowager Duchess before, and knew that, unlike her family, he had no reason to fear the most fearsome presence in the room.

Having granted Grimshaw leave to withdraw, she announced, ‘This, children, is Mr Rodney Perkins. He is a plumber.’

They did not know whether to be more astonished by her calling them ‘children’, or by the continuing shock at the fact that the Dowager Duchess actually knew a plumber. No doubt, amongst the circle of aristocratic crones and cronies whom she so constantly disparaged, recommendations might be exchanged for jewellers, couturiers, or milliners, but not for plumbers. Booking such menials was surely the province of some minor functionary like the butler or the estate manager?

And yet here was the Dowager Duchess of Tawcester introducing a plumber, whom she had clearly met before, into the Blue Morning Room of Tawcester Towers! Whatever next, they all wondered. At some time in the future, might the heir to the British throne go off with an America divorcée? The idea was no less incongruous.

‘Mr Perkins,’ the Dowager Duchess continued, ‘has been generous enough to inspect the boiler in the Tawcester Towers cellar and pronounced it to be … what was the word you used, Mr Perkins?’

‘Defunct, Your Grace.’

‘“Defunct”, children, is a word which su. . .