Then—then!—Benvenuti offered to do a portrait of me. And—brace yourself for some vulgarity here—free of charge. Artists, I decided, had the most disgraceful set of professional ethics I’d ever heard of. A scandal, what it was.
Well, I could hardly refuse under the circumstances. Especially after Jenny and Angela threatened to, ah, “withhold their affections.” So there I sat in a studio, day after day, sulking on a stool next to a table loaded with silly fruit. What made it all the worse was that Benny got really into the project.
When he finished, I took one look at the damn thing and flat refused to accept it. What an utterly slanderous portrayal! Jenny and Angela couldn’t budge me an inch. Benvenuti just shrugged and put the stupid thing on the market where, to my outrage and disgruntlement, it brought in an astonishing price. Eventually, I heard, it even wound up in some hoity-toity museum.
A Study in Melancholia, indeed!
* * *
Nonsense. What was involved here was my reason, not my emotions. Logic, pure and simple. Greyboar could sneer at my rude, crude, lewd and uncouth intellect. Crap. I knew cause and effect when I saw it.
If Greyboar hadn’t taken up philosophy, we never would have gotten involved in l’affaire Prygg. If we hadn’t gotten into that mess we never would have gotten into that other idiot business in Blain and Greyboar never would’ve gotten hooked up with Schrödinger’s Cat. If he hadn’t gotten the hots for a crazy woman, he never would have dreamed of mixing it up with an artiste. If he hadn’t mixed it up with high-falutin’ artist types, he wouldn’t have gotten soul-sick with the realities of a perfectly reasonable trade. If he had developed what he started calling weltschmerz, we never would have looked twice at doing jobs for out-of-town eccentrics. If he hadn’t been out of town doing a weird job for a heretic abbess, his girlfriend wouldn’t have run afoul of Church and State. If his lady love hadn’t managed to get herself into the silliest scrape you ever heard of—you’ll hear about it, hold your horses—he wouldn’t have made an even sillier attempt to rescue her. If he hadn’t tried to rescue her, we wouldn’t have gotten involved in the dwarf business. If we hadn’t gotten mixed up with the dwarf business, his sister Gwendolyn wouldn’t have developed a soft spot in her heart for the clown. And if Gwendolyn hadn’t decided maybe Greyboar wasn’t the absolute pure scum of the earth, after all, she certainly wouldn’t have—
Never mind. I’m getting ahead of myself. Just take my word, for the moment. Without philosophy, our life would have stayed on an even keel. Instead, like being sucked into a whirlpool, we wound up where we are today.
You’ll see.
Chapter 10.
Worse Than the Worst
The job started off bizarre, and then got weirder as it went
along.
First off, we were hired by means of a letter, delivered through the post just like we were the proper haberdasher or respectable jeweler. Not your normal method of employment for a strangler, don’t you know?
But there it was, big as life, a letter requesting our professional services. Just a note, really.
Dear Mr. Greyboar:
I find I have need of a professional strangler. Having made inquiries in the proper quarters, I have been assured that you are the very finest practitioner currently active in the trade. Would you be so good as to come to my Abbey? The work will need to be done here.
I shall, of course, reimburse you for all travel expenses, as well as paying your standard fee. I might mention that a very handsome bonus will be provided as well, upon satisfactory completion of the choke.
Sincerely yours,
Abbess Hildegard
Abbey of the Sisters of Tranquility
“The Abbess Hildegard!” exclaimed Greyboar. “What in the world could she possibly want with me?”
His puzzlement was understandable. Of course, we knew who the Abbess was, at least in a general way. She was famous—notorious, more precisely. The Twelve Popes had excommunicated her years earlier. She’d ignored them, just as she ignored every pronouncement coming from the Temple of the Ecclesiarchs. Rather irritated they got, the Popes, to put it mildly.