A Deuced Difficult Dilemma, ch. 11
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indeedsir_backupTitle: A Deuced Difficult Dilemma
Chapter: 11/?
Pairing: Bertie/OFC, Bertie/Jeeves
Summary: Bertie is dismayed to find that he rather likes the latest girl that Aunt Agatha is egging him on to marry.
Rating: G (so far)
Words: 1,821
Disclaimer: None of Wodehouse's characters belong to me. I'm just writing this for fun.
Here's a little more! The whole story is also on AO3.
“You what?! When?” I ejaculated. And if there was a bit of squeakiness in my delivery, what of it? Greater men than B. Wooster would be reduced to squeaking in the face of such a revelation.
“Last night, after you retired to bed.”
“Jeeves!” I spluttered, forgetting the recently established first name b. in my distress. “What would possess you to do such a thing? Have you entirely taken leave of your senses?”
He pursed a well-formed lip or two. “I must admit that the emotional strain of recent events has taken its toll on my faculties. But I felt that a sympathetic coadjutor might be of help in the rather difficult circumstances in which we find ourselves at present.”
“Oh, really? And I suppose you looked at my Aunt Dahlia and thought, ‘By Jove, if ever I saw a sympathetic coadjutor, this is the bird! Who better to tell of my scandalous liaison with the young master than his own blasted aunt?’”
“I merely felt—“
I was deeply stirred. “I never thought I’d find myself saying this to you, Jeeves, but what we want at the moment is a little less feeling and a little more thinking. Dash it all! And damn it all, too! Do you realize what you’ve brought down on our heads? I’ll never hear the end of this. At best, we shall be booted out of Brinkley Manor with fleas in our ears. I hardly dare to think about the worst. I’ll probably be expected to sack you, do you realize that? Curse all aunts! And while we’re at it, curse all bungling bally valets!”
Jeeves looked hurt, to the extent that he ever does. I was put in mind of the time when he found my stash of green silk handkerchiefs with the jolly blue stripes. “I beg your pardon, Bertram, but if we cannot trust Mrs. Travers, whom can we?”
I picked a couple pips out of a fretful lemon slice and took a few deep breaths to steady the quivering ganglia. “I’m sorry, Reg,” I said, a little stiffly. “Perhaps you’re right. You usually are, although I don’t mind telling you your recent track record leaves a bit to be desired. And switch off the ‘Bertram,’ dash it, I don’t want to feel like I’m getting a scolding from my mother. How did she take it, anyway?”
“She seemed unsurprised.”
“Unsurprised? Are you sure?”
“Quite sure.”
“Well, if you say so. Still, it’s bound to make for dashed awkward conversation over the breakfast sideboard.”
“Your aunt has already breakfasted. You will find her in the drawing room.”
“And what about Hecken?”
“The young lady is still in her room, as far as I am aware.”
I massaged the aching bean. “And I suppose her mother is still lurking about the premises.”
“Yes,” he said, visibly biting off a stray “sir”.
“Well, I suppose I must go and face the gauntlet. No use delaying the inevitable.”
---
A short time later, I slunk into the drawing room with rather less than the customary spring in my step. I wasn’t sure what Aunt Dahlia’s reaction to the revelation would be, but I couldn’t imagine that it would be anything less than volcanic. A quick scan of the premises confirmed Jeeves’ information. The aunt was indeed present, standing at the French window in a blaze of indecently bright late morning sunlight with a distant, thoughtful look on her map.
“Aunt Dahlia?” I said meekly.
She pivoted in my direction. “Hello, Bertie,” she rejoined in a tone so close to that of a normal decibel level for indoor conversation that I feared for a moment I had got the wrong relative. “Have a seat, why don’t you?”
I slid into a chair and braced myself for the worst.
“So, my dear young blighter,” said Aunt Dahlia, depositing herself across from me on the divan, “it seems we have much to discuss.”
“Jeeves—“
“Told me everything, yes. For heaven’s sake, stop looking so pale. I’m not going to bite you.”
Hope stirred in the Wooster bosom. “You seem remarkably plussed, aged a.”
“Well, it’s not as if it’s any great surprise. And it certainly explains the exceptional level of fatheadedness the two of you have been demonstrating over the past couple of days.”
“Aunt Agatha doesn’t know, does she?”
She waved a dismissive hand. “She’s long suspected that you and Jeeves might be on matier terms than are strictly considered cricket by some.”
“Well, that was news to me until yesterday,” I said, fiddling with a lint pill on the arm of my chair. “Why am I always the last to find out about these things?”
“Because you’re an ass,” she said affectionately. “Why do you think she disapproves of Jeeves so heartily?”
“I always thought it was because she didn’t like him shoving his oar into family business.”
“Well, that’s part of it, of course. But she also thinks he’s the greatest obstacle to you getting respectably married to some respectable girl and breeding a lot of respectable little Woosters. And you can hardly argue with that.”
“But she doesn’t know, does she? Good lord, she’d have me hauled before the constabulary—“
Aunt Dahlia snorted derisively. “And risk tainting the family name with a scandal of that magnitude? She’d sooner die.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“You should take a page from Jeeves’s book sometime. What is that business he’s always prattling on about – the psychology of the individual? You ought to know by now that Agatha doesn’t operate that way. Bribery, blackmail, and underhanded skullduggery are her preferred methods of dealing with family contretemps. Truly a sister after my own heart, in some respects,” she mused, with a hint of ghoulish pride. “For all the fuss she made, I’d be willing to wager a fair sum that she was secretly thrilled to find you rolling about in the garden shed with that Fernsby girl. She thought she finally had you squarely under her thumb and ready to truss up and drag to the altar. In fact, she’s probably your greatest ally against the senior Fernsby’s matrimonial plans for Jeeves.”
I shuddered. “Good lord. But why is this Fernsby menace so keen to marry her daughter off to a servant? Isn’t she concerned about family honor and all that too?”
“That is where she differs from your aunt Agatha. Mrs. Fernsby adheres to some sort of ghastly moral code, I gather, and actually feels obliged to make an honest woman of her daughter by marrying her off to Jeeves.”
“Good lord!” I reiterated. “But . . . but what about you, Aunt Dahlia?”
“What about me?”
“How do you feel about the whole thing? Having a nephew who’s . . . bent?”
“Oh, honestly, Bertie, I suppose I ought to disapprove, but I just can’t bring myself to it. What’s the harm, after all? And who better to shepherd you through life than Jeeves? Anyway, you’re hardly the first man in the family to have eccentricities in that direction.”
I boggled. “Really? But who . . .”
“You remember your uncle Henry, of course.”
“How could I forget? Kept rabbits in his bedroom, generally disapproved of by all and sundry, though he always struck me as a perfectly decent chap.”
“And he was. The best brother a girl could have. But, as I say, eccentric. The rabbits were only the skin on the pudding. The part you didn’t hear about growing up was that he used to dress up as a geisha and hang about in the Piccadilly Circus, going by the alias ‘Princess Yum Yum.’ He would get pinched regularly, and Agatha would send one of the servants round incognito to bail him out.”
“What!”
“There was one rozzer in particular who seemed to make it his life’s work to pinch the mysterious Yum Yum at every opportunity. Eventually, this strapping young constable began to skip the station altogether and took to simply dropping Henry off on the edge of the family estate under cover of night.
“I gather that one night the officer hinted broadly to Henry that he was about to take a holiday in the south of France, and heavens, wouldn’t it be a shame if he had to arrest someone on the train and abscond with him to Antibes, or something of the sort. Well, Henry never made it to the train. I’m not sure how she did it, but Agatha somehow pipped him at the post and managed to shackle the poor dumb chum to your aunt Emily within a week. You know the rest, of course . . . they had Claude and Eustace together, and Henry lived out the rest of his days in a more quiet and respectable sort of lunacy, surrounded by rabbits. Agatha considered it a triumph on par with the moulding of your aunt Julia and the undoing of George and the barmaid.”
“Both of which Jeeves and I had a hand in scuppering,” I mused.
“Is it any wonder she considers the pair of you scourges of the first water?”
“But I always thought Uncle Henry was fairly potty about Aunt Emily.”
“Oh, there was no question that he loved her, in his way. And he found a certain amount of happiness, to be sure – taking solace in his rabbits and doting on those two lunatic sons of theirs. Still, I always felt a pang for him when I thought of that young policeman.”
You could have knocked me down with a toothpick. “Well, I’m blowed, Auntie. Positively blowed. Old Uncle Henry! Who would have thought?”
“Nobody, if Agatha had anything to say about it.”
I wrung the mitts fretfully. “But, dash it, Aunt Dahlia! If Aunt Agatha nobbles me and Jeeves like she did Uncle Henry and his policeman . . . or, just as bad, if Mrs. Fernsby forces Jeeves and Hecken to marry . . . I mean to say, what am I going to do?”
“Well, normally I’d suggest consulting Jeeves, but at the moment he seems to be nearly edging you out in the race for chump of the year. It must be contagious. I may not have his prodigious brains, but I’m at least compos mentis for the moment. Let me do a little thinking and see what I can dredge up.”
I was deeply moved. I had always known that Aunt Dahlia was a sound egg, but I had never expected this level of sympathy and good sportsmanship. “Aunt Dahlia, you are the queen of your species,” I gushed, swooping in for a peck on the cheek.
“Don’t get too cozy with me just yet, you fiend in human shape. I might contract chumpitis from you too, and then where will you be? Now, off with you!”
I uttered a few more garbled words of thanks and staggered off.
Chapter: 11/?
Pairing: Bertie/OFC, Bertie/Jeeves
Summary: Bertie is dismayed to find that he rather likes the latest girl that Aunt Agatha is egging him on to marry.
Rating: G (so far)
Words: 1,821
Disclaimer: None of Wodehouse's characters belong to me. I'm just writing this for fun.
Here's a little more! The whole story is also on AO3.
“You what?! When?” I ejaculated. And if there was a bit of squeakiness in my delivery, what of it? Greater men than B. Wooster would be reduced to squeaking in the face of such a revelation.
“Last night, after you retired to bed.”
“Jeeves!” I spluttered, forgetting the recently established first name b. in my distress. “What would possess you to do such a thing? Have you entirely taken leave of your senses?”
He pursed a well-formed lip or two. “I must admit that the emotional strain of recent events has taken its toll on my faculties. But I felt that a sympathetic coadjutor might be of help in the rather difficult circumstances in which we find ourselves at present.”
“Oh, really? And I suppose you looked at my Aunt Dahlia and thought, ‘By Jove, if ever I saw a sympathetic coadjutor, this is the bird! Who better to tell of my scandalous liaison with the young master than his own blasted aunt?’”
“I merely felt—“
I was deeply stirred. “I never thought I’d find myself saying this to you, Jeeves, but what we want at the moment is a little less feeling and a little more thinking. Dash it all! And damn it all, too! Do you realize what you’ve brought down on our heads? I’ll never hear the end of this. At best, we shall be booted out of Brinkley Manor with fleas in our ears. I hardly dare to think about the worst. I’ll probably be expected to sack you, do you realize that? Curse all aunts! And while we’re at it, curse all bungling bally valets!”
Jeeves looked hurt, to the extent that he ever does. I was put in mind of the time when he found my stash of green silk handkerchiefs with the jolly blue stripes. “I beg your pardon, Bertram, but if we cannot trust Mrs. Travers, whom can we?”
I picked a couple pips out of a fretful lemon slice and took a few deep breaths to steady the quivering ganglia. “I’m sorry, Reg,” I said, a little stiffly. “Perhaps you’re right. You usually are, although I don’t mind telling you your recent track record leaves a bit to be desired. And switch off the ‘Bertram,’ dash it, I don’t want to feel like I’m getting a scolding from my mother. How did she take it, anyway?”
“She seemed unsurprised.”
“Unsurprised? Are you sure?”
“Quite sure.”
“Well, if you say so. Still, it’s bound to make for dashed awkward conversation over the breakfast sideboard.”
“Your aunt has already breakfasted. You will find her in the drawing room.”
“And what about Hecken?”
“The young lady is still in her room, as far as I am aware.”
I massaged the aching bean. “And I suppose her mother is still lurking about the premises.”
“Yes,” he said, visibly biting off a stray “sir”.
“Well, I suppose I must go and face the gauntlet. No use delaying the inevitable.”
---
A short time later, I slunk into the drawing room with rather less than the customary spring in my step. I wasn’t sure what Aunt Dahlia’s reaction to the revelation would be, but I couldn’t imagine that it would be anything less than volcanic. A quick scan of the premises confirmed Jeeves’ information. The aunt was indeed present, standing at the French window in a blaze of indecently bright late morning sunlight with a distant, thoughtful look on her map.
“Aunt Dahlia?” I said meekly.
She pivoted in my direction. “Hello, Bertie,” she rejoined in a tone so close to that of a normal decibel level for indoor conversation that I feared for a moment I had got the wrong relative. “Have a seat, why don’t you?”
I slid into a chair and braced myself for the worst.
“So, my dear young blighter,” said Aunt Dahlia, depositing herself across from me on the divan, “it seems we have much to discuss.”
“Jeeves—“
“Told me everything, yes. For heaven’s sake, stop looking so pale. I’m not going to bite you.”
Hope stirred in the Wooster bosom. “You seem remarkably plussed, aged a.”
“Well, it’s not as if it’s any great surprise. And it certainly explains the exceptional level of fatheadedness the two of you have been demonstrating over the past couple of days.”
“Aunt Agatha doesn’t know, does she?”
She waved a dismissive hand. “She’s long suspected that you and Jeeves might be on matier terms than are strictly considered cricket by some.”
“Well, that was news to me until yesterday,” I said, fiddling with a lint pill on the arm of my chair. “Why am I always the last to find out about these things?”
“Because you’re an ass,” she said affectionately. “Why do you think she disapproves of Jeeves so heartily?”
“I always thought it was because she didn’t like him shoving his oar into family business.”
“Well, that’s part of it, of course. But she also thinks he’s the greatest obstacle to you getting respectably married to some respectable girl and breeding a lot of respectable little Woosters. And you can hardly argue with that.”
“But she doesn’t know, does she? Good lord, she’d have me hauled before the constabulary—“
Aunt Dahlia snorted derisively. “And risk tainting the family name with a scandal of that magnitude? She’d sooner die.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“You should take a page from Jeeves’s book sometime. What is that business he’s always prattling on about – the psychology of the individual? You ought to know by now that Agatha doesn’t operate that way. Bribery, blackmail, and underhanded skullduggery are her preferred methods of dealing with family contretemps. Truly a sister after my own heart, in some respects,” she mused, with a hint of ghoulish pride. “For all the fuss she made, I’d be willing to wager a fair sum that she was secretly thrilled to find you rolling about in the garden shed with that Fernsby girl. She thought she finally had you squarely under her thumb and ready to truss up and drag to the altar. In fact, she’s probably your greatest ally against the senior Fernsby’s matrimonial plans for Jeeves.”
I shuddered. “Good lord. But why is this Fernsby menace so keen to marry her daughter off to a servant? Isn’t she concerned about family honor and all that too?”
“That is where she differs from your aunt Agatha. Mrs. Fernsby adheres to some sort of ghastly moral code, I gather, and actually feels obliged to make an honest woman of her daughter by marrying her off to Jeeves.”
“Good lord!” I reiterated. “But . . . but what about you, Aunt Dahlia?”
“What about me?”
“How do you feel about the whole thing? Having a nephew who’s . . . bent?”
“Oh, honestly, Bertie, I suppose I ought to disapprove, but I just can’t bring myself to it. What’s the harm, after all? And who better to shepherd you through life than Jeeves? Anyway, you’re hardly the first man in the family to have eccentricities in that direction.”
I boggled. “Really? But who . . .”
“You remember your uncle Henry, of course.”
“How could I forget? Kept rabbits in his bedroom, generally disapproved of by all and sundry, though he always struck me as a perfectly decent chap.”
“And he was. The best brother a girl could have. But, as I say, eccentric. The rabbits were only the skin on the pudding. The part you didn’t hear about growing up was that he used to dress up as a geisha and hang about in the Piccadilly Circus, going by the alias ‘Princess Yum Yum.’ He would get pinched regularly, and Agatha would send one of the servants round incognito to bail him out.”
“What!”
“There was one rozzer in particular who seemed to make it his life’s work to pinch the mysterious Yum Yum at every opportunity. Eventually, this strapping young constable began to skip the station altogether and took to simply dropping Henry off on the edge of the family estate under cover of night.
“I gather that one night the officer hinted broadly to Henry that he was about to take a holiday in the south of France, and heavens, wouldn’t it be a shame if he had to arrest someone on the train and abscond with him to Antibes, or something of the sort. Well, Henry never made it to the train. I’m not sure how she did it, but Agatha somehow pipped him at the post and managed to shackle the poor dumb chum to your aunt Emily within a week. You know the rest, of course . . . they had Claude and Eustace together, and Henry lived out the rest of his days in a more quiet and respectable sort of lunacy, surrounded by rabbits. Agatha considered it a triumph on par with the moulding of your aunt Julia and the undoing of George and the barmaid.”
“Both of which Jeeves and I had a hand in scuppering,” I mused.
“Is it any wonder she considers the pair of you scourges of the first water?”
“But I always thought Uncle Henry was fairly potty about Aunt Emily.”
“Oh, there was no question that he loved her, in his way. And he found a certain amount of happiness, to be sure – taking solace in his rabbits and doting on those two lunatic sons of theirs. Still, I always felt a pang for him when I thought of that young policeman.”
You could have knocked me down with a toothpick. “Well, I’m blowed, Auntie. Positively blowed. Old Uncle Henry! Who would have thought?”
“Nobody, if Agatha had anything to say about it.”
I wrung the mitts fretfully. “But, dash it, Aunt Dahlia! If Aunt Agatha nobbles me and Jeeves like she did Uncle Henry and his policeman . . . or, just as bad, if Mrs. Fernsby forces Jeeves and Hecken to marry . . . I mean to say, what am I going to do?”
“Well, normally I’d suggest consulting Jeeves, but at the moment he seems to be nearly edging you out in the race for chump of the year. It must be contagious. I may not have his prodigious brains, but I’m at least compos mentis for the moment. Let me do a little thinking and see what I can dredge up.”
I was deeply moved. I had always known that Aunt Dahlia was a sound egg, but I had never expected this level of sympathy and good sportsmanship. “Aunt Dahlia, you are the queen of your species,” I gushed, swooping in for a peck on the cheek.
“Don’t get too cozy with me just yet, you fiend in human shape. I might contract chumpitis from you too, and then where will you be? Now, off with you!”
I uttered a few more garbled words of thanks and staggered off.
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