Sat, May 19 2012
| TITLE: | The April Gift |
|---|---|
| AUTHOR: | Sherry Thornburg |
| CATEGORY/TYPE: | Silly Story |
| RATING/WARNINGS: | G, Gen, Tame |
| MAIN CHARACTERS: | The cast of SAJV. |
| DESCRIPTION: | What happens when you cross a Fogg? |
| STATUS: | Complete |
| DISCLAIMER: | The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne is not mine, never will be and was only borrowed for my own fun and enjoyment. |
Enter Rebecca Fogg. She entered through the door of her cousin’s home in London looking gloriously livid. Her long fire colored curls bounced with each step. The fabric of her dress and skirts swished with her determined movements as she sidestepped her cousin’s loyal retainer. ‘A misplaced loyalty if there ever was one,’ the determined woman thought as she entered the study. Rebecca found the study bare.
“Hiding his he?”
The angry woman nailed the valet to the wall with a look as she willed him to tell her where Phileas was. The man stiffened, but said nothing. ‘All right, if that’s the way it’s going to be.’
Rebecca systematically searched the rest of the house. No cousin. Not up or down stairs. Not in the attic or the cellar. She moved her search outside through the small back yard and into the side yards. No Phileas. The thwarted woman smiled. ‘No, he wouldn’t be here. This is exactly where he knew I would look first. The coward is on the Aurora.’
Heading for the side gate Rebecca took a quick stride through the streets leaving the valet behind with great relief written all over his face, relief that is for himself, but not for his employer. ‘Will I have a master after this afternoon,’ he wondered?
It didn’t take long for the angry agent to traverse the distance from the house to the airship. Rebecca contemplated all the ways she would get her revenge. ‘There is dynamite on the Aurora. I could blow his precious toy to bits. But no, that would hurt Passepartout more than Phileas,’ she allowed. ‘Nail him to the bulkheads with throwing knives?’ She considered with glee. ‘No,’ she thought hitting on a better plan, ‘better yet a sword fight. Give him a clear chance to defend himself. I’m so angry now that not even his considerable skills with a sword could help him.’
The Aurora was finally in sight. Rebecca redoubled her pace. But damned if the most unlikely savior for that miserable dandy didn’t cut her off before she could cross the street to the airship's mooring place. Rebecca stopped short of her goal as a black coach came to a stop before her. Out of it came Sir Jonathan. He had an insufferable smile on his face. The same smile he had had earlier today at the offices as he had watched from the door at her humiliation. Rebecca stiffened as she stood ramrod straight before her boss who had placed himself between her and her prey.
“Now, Rebecca you don’t really want to speak with him about this now. You should wait until you calm down. It was a harmless…”
“Don’t tell me what it was!” Rebecca said too loudly. She forced her voice to a calmer tone considering the public place she was in. Mother’s pushing carriages looked to her momentarily as they passed wondering at her outburst. Rebecca counted to ten letting them get well away before she addressed the man before her again. “This is a family matter Chatsworth. Stand aside.”
Knowing she would likely go through him if he didn’t, the man reluctantly stepped aside allowing her to pass. As she headed on, he called out to her hoping to intervene one last time. “I’m sure he never expected things to work out the way they did. Try to remember that. If you must be angry, be angry with me. I’m the one who gave you the order to clean up the mess. And I’m dreadfully sorry for that. Truly I am. I had no idea…”
“Are you going to tell me you knew what was coming?” Rebecca challenged as she turned on Chatsworth, swishing her skirts wide as she faced him.
At the look of daggers in her eyes, Sir Jonathan changed his mind about running interference between the cousins. He had no intention of becoming the focus of Rebecca Fogg’s anger. “No, I had no idea what was coming. I was as surprised as you were.”
‘But more than happy to aid and abed,’ Rebecca thought wondering what she would do about his part of this disastrous day. ‘You were more than happy to twist the knife my cousin buried. Yours will come later Sir Jonathan Chatsworth,’ her gaze told the man before her. With that she turned again to her quarry.
Shaking his head at his narrow escape, Sir Jonathan stepped back into his coach and headed back to the office. He had come with every intention of aiding Fogg. A strange turn that, but Sir Jonathan had not laughed so hard in years and felt that he owed the man a service for it.
‘I will cancel my appointments for tomorrow. Maybe the next day too,’ he decided. It was cowardly but healthier that way. ‘She can’t stay angry forever,' he hoped. 'By the time Rebecca sees me again she will have to back down.’ Relieved, the man knocked on the coach roof with his cane to signal his driver to move on.
Rebecca stepped up onto the deck of the airship and turned the knob. ‘Locked?’ She giggled to herself as she pulled her lock pick out and made quick work of it. “No dear cousin,” she said aloud as she stormed the parlor. “You won’t keep me out that easily.” On the table she saw a pair of scissors. She idly looked down on them as she passed, then stopped dead in her tracks as she took in the bits of pink ribbon lying on the table with them.
“The scene of the crime!” She rang out to the still hidden man. “They always return, don’t they dear cousin!”
In the deafening silence that followed those words she heard a minuet creaking upstairs. Rebecca smiled sweetly with triumph. ‘He is here, and cornered.’ She had caught him unawares after all leaving the offices early. He was in his cabin now moving to the upper observation deck. Phileas couldn’t get away from her now. Rebecca raced up the circular stairs as fast as her wide skirts and walking shoes would allow. She caught him on the upper deck.
He wasn’t trying to get away from her. Phileas’ stance was relaxed, lazy even as he leaned against the rail facing her. “Now Rebecca, you’re not going to hold that little mishap against me? Are you?” He asked smiling at her. Yes she was, he realized. And he was likely a dead man. Phileas decided to brazen it out anyway.
“How do you know what happened?” Rebecca growled. For a moment, Rebecca realized in the rush to face her cousin, she had forgotten to bring up the swords. 'Drat that!' She thought in disappointment. She had so looked forward to skewering him for this.
“Marcus told me,” he admitted, “and Thomas Paine, and Alex came over to inform me as well.”
A red haze burned its way across Rebecca’s vision. She lifted the reticule that was dangling at her left wrist. Loosening the strings she reached inside burning a hole in her cousin’s head as she stared him down. She pulled out one small item. Rebecca’s mind forced her to remember this afternoon’s shock as the feel of it assaulted her senses. Rebecca had entered her office after lunch to find the box with its pretty bow on her desk. For a moment she had been perplexed as to what it had been doing there. There had been a card slipped under the big pink ribbon. Rebecca had pulled it loose and had read the contents.
“To my lovely cousin in return for your gift on this fine day.”
She hadn’t realized what the card had meant. Rebecca had just returned from a long mission and had lost track of time. She had opened the box in complete innocence. ‘And with Chatsworth standing at my door to witness the event,’ she remembered in mortification. He had happened down the hall to greet her just in time. He had made his salutation as Rebecca pulled the ribbon loose and lifted the lid. The shock of the box's contents had so unnerved her that she had jerked away unsettling the box, which had still been attached to the lid by the ribbon. And that did it. The box hit the floor, allowing fifty little furry bodies to scatter across her office floor.
“Make sure you clean that up before you leave,” a voice had said just as the door to her office had closed swiftly.
The animal wiggled in between her pinched fingers as she lifted it by the scruff of the neck to her cousin’s face for his inspection. It was a plain little white mouse with a pink ribbon about its neck.
“All I did was send you one cute Wallaby from Australia,” she said indignantly. “For that I had to individually handle fifty of these when that box hit the floor!”
One cute Wallaby that had hissed and hopped about the house for an hour after it had escaped its carton, Phileas remembered. A Wallaby he and Passepartout had had to corner four times before capturing again.
“Well, there are no Wallaby’s in England Rebecca, so I sent you the equivalent in what was at hand. Next time you decide to send me an April fools gift, you should consider the consequences.”
The End