indeedsir_backup | A Fluffy Bunny Of A Fic

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What-ho! Just me again, with a silly little fic that I hope might make you smile. I realize it probably takes some liberties, and my Jeeves-voice needs lots of work, but I enjoyed the idea and hope you will too. Since I'm from Florida, it made my day when I spotted a reference to Jeeves wanting to go there.

Anyway, hope you enjoy it!

(And belated thanks to the person who made this icon!!!! I'm sorry I can't remember the right name at the moment, I know its in my LJ somewhere.)

THE SAND CASTLE

It was in the late spring, when Mr. Wooster finally agreed to my suggestion that we spend a holiday in the southern part of the United States, where the tarpon fishing is excellent. We traveled via the Queen Anne to New York City, and after a pleasant week in our usual hotel, we journeyed southward on the train, finally disembarking at Jacksonville, in the state of Florida. From the local agency I was able to locate a small house---more of a cottage, really, and only a few steps above what is known by the natives as a “Cracker Shack”---on a lonesome but rather picturesque cove just above Saint Augustine. We spent only a few days there, as Mr. Wooster soon tired of both the solitude and the mosquitoes, but in that short time I learned something that has given me many a thoughtful hour, as I have mused upon fate and its role in human relations.

The weather during our residence was very lovely, the skies completely swept of clouds and the temperature hovering at a balmy eighty degrees. On the morning after our arrival, Mr. Wooster announced his intentions to go swimming, which rather alarmed me, for my own skills in this exercise are limited, and I doubted that he had ever experienced such strong tidal undertows as the area is noted for. I walked with him to the beach, and my problem was solved when Mr. Wooster spotted a school of porpoises some fifty yards off-shore. He pronounced them to be sharks, and I chose not to enlighten him.

“I don’t want to be some bally fish’s luncheon, Jeeves.”

“Indeed not, sir.”

“Well then, I suppose… I’ll just settle in here and watch the ships at sea,” he said, as I spread out the blanket I had carried down for him. “Bright sun, fresh air, can’t beat that for a healthy lifestyle, what?”

“It is considered most invigorating, sir. However, if I might be excused to complete the unpacking?”

“Of course, run right along, Jeeves. Don’t worry, I won’t be doing anything more than wading in the surf---not with those man-eating monsters so close by.”

I tipped my hat and returned to the house, though I will confess that I often looked out of the seaward window, to make sure that Mr. Wooster was keeping his promise. An hour passed pleasantly, with only the sound of the waves and the calls of exotic birds in the distance. It has always been my nature to be comfortable in whatever situation I find myself, and I soon located the basic necessities of cooking utensils and began to draw up a menu. I wondered if Mr. Wooster would prefer fish or ham for his midday meal, and decided to return to the beach to inquire.

It may surprise, or even alarm, the reader to learn this, but I have always considered Mr. Wooster to be the most handsome man of my acquaintance. Walking toward where he sat on the slope of the dune, I was reminded again of this assessment. The bathing costume displayed his impossibly long legs and arms to an almost immodest degree, and his hair was much rumpled and tossed by the warm wind. There is a perfect English beauty to those blue eyes and rose-kissed cheeks, and I feared suddenly that the tropical sun might not be kind to his skin. Indeed, as I approached I noticed that his arms were already becoming rather pink, as was the end of his nose.

“What-ho, Jeeves. The sharks are still patrolling.”

“I see, sir. I merely came out to ask if---“

“Jeeves? What’s the matter?”

I was staring at the construction beside him. Mr. Wooster had located a pail some previous resident had discarded, and had used it to form what might have been a replica of the Tower of London, built solely with packed sand and decorated with seaweed and shells. The sight jarred something inside of me, loosened a memory.

“You have been busy, sir,” I heard myself saying.

Mr. Wooster laughed. “Yes, it seemed rather the thing to busy myself with. I say, Jeeves, did I ever tell you about that time at Brighton, when I was just, oh, six or thereabouts?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, it involved a sand castle, very much like this one, and a nasty pair of blokes who….”

**

They’d destroyed it.

The little boy in the sailor suit stared at the remains of the castle, which he had labored over all morning. His nanny had left him alone while she went to talk to a man in a black coat, probably a butler or maybe even a king---the boy was never sure of the difference between the two, since both of them pretty much ran things---and he’d been left alone on the resort beach to create his dream. He’d hoped to show it to his sister; she and Aunt Dahlia would be back any time now, and he knew it would make her smile. She smiled so rarely these days, since their mama and guv’nor had died. The little boy still wondered, from time to time, what dying really meant. Their nanny had said it meant going to sleep and never waking up. He wondered if he could do that, just sleep and never wake up, but no one would ever allow him to find out. They were always waking him up, much to his disappointment.

He felt his eyes begin to sting as he considered the ruins. The young men had been on bicycles, and had plowed through his castle as if it had been a steeplechase fence they couldn’t jump. They’d laughed, and one had paused long enough to kick sand at his face, calling him a mealy-mouthed brat. They were now buying ice cream from a stand, with pretty girls gathered beside them.

Bertie Wooster sniffled and blinked several times. He wanted to cry, long and hard, but one of the last things he remembered his guv’nor telling him was that a Wooster lad did not cry. Stiff upper lip, Bertie, that’s the thing. You must always uphold the Code of the Woosters.

He wasn’t sure he much liked this code, if it meant he couldn’t cry.

A shadow fell over him, and he looked up into another boy’s face. This boy was older, but not nearly as old as the ones who’d destroyed his careful work. He had black hair, and was dressed in the kind of clothes that his Aunt Dahlia’s page boys wore on their days off, dark and common, so much that he almost blended in with any crowd of his elders. Bertie drew back, expecting another kick.

“I saw what they did,” the boy said, nodding towards the young men.

“It wasn’t nice,” Bertie answered. “I worked all day on this. It’s for my sister.”

The boy tilted his head, and his dark, glossy hair made a little comma over one brow. “She’ll be disappointed.”

“I know. And I wanted to make her happy."

The older boy studied him for a moment longer, then knelt in the sand. “Let me help you fix it.”

In the back of his head, Bertie remembered something that his nanny had told him, about not chatting up strangers. He looked up to the boardwalk and spotted his nanny, still talking with the man in black. Well, if she could talk to strangers, he could too. Besides, the other boy was already shoving sand back into place and seemed to know a great bit about fixing things.

They worked in relative silence, concentrating on making quick repairs, rebuilding the walls and the turrets. Then the older boy leaned forward, gesturing up the beach.

“Watch those fellows now.”

The young men were mounting their bicycles, waving to the girls. Both pushed off to pedal away.

It was so much like a magic trick that it made Bertie gasp. One lad’s bicycle’s chain suddenly went flying, and the rider was propelled over the handlebars. His companion’s machine abruptly pitched into the dirt, both tires flat. The girls began to laugh and point, calling the young men a bunch of silly asses.

Bertie laughed too. Then he looked at the other boy.

“How did you know?”

“People shouldn’t be mean,” the older boy said, with a wink.

Bertie was about to ask him more, to explain, but then he saw his sister and Aunt Dahlia coming down the boardwalk. The castle looked almost finished, and yet somehow inadequate.

“It’s not done.”

“This should finish it with some finesse,” the other boy said. Bertie wondered what finesse meant. The dark-haired boy scooped up wet sand in one hand and allowed it to dribble through his fingers. Bertie watched, spellbound, as the sand shaped into a spire, like something out of the book of fairy tales his mother had often read to him. His castle suddenly looked better than any other he had seen along the seashore.

“Bertie! There you are---but where on earth is Nanny?” Aunt Dahlia asked. Bertie pointed, and Aunt Dahlia roared out like she was at a fox hunt. Bertie’s sister crouched down, staring at the huge castle.

“Did you build this, Bertie?”

“Yes, I---well, he helped me.”

“Who?”

Bertie turned, but the boy was gone. He’d vanished, as swiftly and strangely as he’d come.

**

“I always wondered if I’d dreamt it, Jeeves. But it just came back to me now, while working on this construction project. I can see that young fellow in the somber clothes, but I never got his name. Nor can I duplicate that rather clever thing he did with the mud to make the spire. I’ve been trying for half an hour now, and I just can’t seem to get the hang of it.”

During my young master’s recitation, I had taken the liberty of removing my jacket. The sun was blissfully warm against my shoulders, and the smell of the ocean filled my senses. I pushed back my shirt cuffs.

“Was it, sir, something like this?”

He had dug down to the moist spot in the sand, and I scooped out the wet earth, allowing it to fall drop by careful drop. It requires some patience---and some finesse---but the effect is rather beautiful, for all its transience.

I looked across the spire. Mr. Wooster’s mouth was open, his eyes as wide as the proverbial saucers.

“Jeeves! That’s just how he---oh my word! Was...was that you?”

I nodded, remembering a brief holiday with my one of own aunts, at Brighton, during a week’s break from my work as a page at a girl’s school. I’d had but two pennies in my pocket, not even enough for an ice cream or a glass of lemonade. I suppose I should have resented the small boy on the beach, in his pristine sailor suit that spoke so openly of his class, but after watching the louts in their Oxford blues run his poor castle into the ground----well, I have never much cared for unkindness, especially against a weaker person.

“Jeeves, and did you...were you the one who—“

“Undid the chains and allowed the air out of the tires? Yes, sir, I had accomplished that well before I walked over and began assisting you, while their attention was diverted at the refreshment stand. I thought a slight comeuppance, especially as it made them appear ludicrous before the young ladies with whom they were flirting, would perhaps make them consider the error of their ways in regards to tormenting young boys who had done them no harm.”

Mr. Wooster shook his head. “But all this time, why did you never tell me?”

“Because, sir, until this moment, I never knew that it was you I had encountered.”

My young master’s face was now even redder, and not just from the sun. He shook his head. “Jeeves---have you always looked after me? Always been my guardian angel?”

I found I could not answer that question without betraying my innermost emotion. Instead, I dug deep into the earth again.

“Shall I teach you how to do it, sir? It does lend a touch of the art-deco to this Versailles of the Atlantic shore."

He nodded eagerly. Before the morning ended, both of us were so sunburned we were forced to spend the next two days doing little more than applying salve and sitting beside an oscillating fan, sipping cool drinks and laughing at ourselves for being foolish Englishmen.

It still haunts me now, at odd moments. Was I somehow predestined to become Mr. Wooster’s companion and protector? There are times when I still see that lovely, lonesome blue-eyed child, so trusting and so determined not to cry. I think of the fates and the gods and know that a man of science would decry it all as merest coincidence.

And I know I could never, and would never leave him, whatever else our destiny has decreed.