Making Money

He returned to a bureau and was sifting through its contents when he heard a click and creak behind him and Adora Belle said, in a rather flat voice: ‘You did say Sir Joshua entertained young ladies up here, right?’

‘Apparently, yes. Why?’

‘Well, that’s what I call entertainment.’

Moist turned. The door of a heavy cupboard stood wide open. ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘What’s all that for?’

‘You are joking?’

‘Well, yes, all right. But it’s all so … so black.’

‘And leathery,’ said Adora Belle. ‘Possibly rubbery, too.’

They advanced on the museum of inventive erotica just revealed. Some of it, freed at last from confinement, unfolded, slid or, in a few cases, bounced on to the floor.

‘This …’ Moist prodded something, which went spoing! … ‘is, yes, rubbery. Definitely rubbery.’

‘But all this here is pretty much frilly,’ said Adora Belle. ‘He must have run out of ideas.’

‘Either that or there were no more ideas to have. I think he was eighty when he died,’ said Moist, as a seismic shift caused some more piles to slide and slither downwards.

‘Well done him,’ said Adora Belle. ‘Oh, and there’s a couple of shelves of books, too,’ she went on, investigating the gloom at the back of the cupboard. ‘Just here, behind the rather curious saddle and the whips. Bedtime reading, I assume.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Moist, pulling out a leather-bound volume and flicking it open at a random page. ‘Look, it’s the old boy’s journal. Years and years of it. Good grief, there’s decades.’

‘Let’s publish it and make a fortune,’ said Adora Belle, kicking the heap. ‘Plain covers, of course.’

‘No, you don’t understand. There may be something in here about Mr Bent! There’s some secret …’ Moist ran a finger along the spines. ‘Let’s see, he’s forty-seven, he came here when he was about thirteen, and a few months later some people came looking for him. Old Lavish didn’t like the look of them— Ah!’ He pulled out a couple of volumes. ‘These should tell us something, they’re around the right time …’

‘What are these, and why do they jingle?’ Adora Belle said, holding up a couple of strange devices.

‘How should I know?’

‘You’re a man.’

‘Well, yes. And? I mean, I don’t go in for this stuff.’

‘You know, I think it’s like horseradish,’ said Adora Belle thoughtfully.

‘Pardon?’

‘Like … well, horseradish is good in a beef sandwich, so you have some. But one day a spoonful just doesn’t cut the mustard—’

‘As it were,’ said Moist, fascinated.

‘—and so you have two, and soon it’s three, and eventually there’s more horseradish than beef, and then one day you realize the beef fell out and you didn’t notice.’

‘I don’t think that is the metaphor you’re looking for,’ said Moist, ‘because I have known you to make yourself a horseradish sandwich.’

‘All right, but it’s still a good one,’ said Adora Belle. She reached down and picked up something from the floor. ‘Your keys, I think. What they were doing in there we shall never know, with any luck.’

Moist took them. The ring was heavy with keys of all sizes.

‘And what shall we do with all this stuff?’ Adora Belle kicked the heap again. It quivered, and somewhere inside something squeaked.

‘Put it back in the cupboard?’ Moist suggested uncertainly. The pile of passionless frippery had a brooding, alien look, like some sea monster of the abyss that had been dragged unceremoniously from its native darkness into the light of the sun.

‘I don’t think I could face it,’ said Adora Belle. ‘Let’s just leave the door open and let it crawl back by itself. Hey!’ This was to Mr Fusspot, who’d trotted smartly out of the room with something in his mouth.

‘Tell me that was just an old rubber bone,’ she said. ‘Please?’

‘No-o,’ said Moist, shaking his head. ‘I think that would definitely be the wrong description. I think it was … was … it was not an old rubber bone, is what it was.’

‘Now look,’ said Hubert, ‘don’t you think we’d know if the gold had been stolen? People talk about that sort of thing! I’m pretty certain it’s a fault in the crossover multivalve, right here.’ He tapped a thin glass tube.

‘I don’t think the Glooper ith wrong, thur,’ said Igor gloomily.

‘Igor, you realize that if the Glooper is right then I’ll have to believe there is practically no gold in our vaults?’

‘I believe the Glooper ith not in error, thur.’ Igor took a dollar out of his pocket and walked over to the well.

‘If you would be tho good ath to watch the “Lotht Money” column, thur?’ he said, and dropped the coin into the dark waters. It gleamed for a moment as it sank beyond the pockets of Mankind.

In one corner of the Glooper’s convoluted glass tubing a small blue bubble drifted up, dawdling from side to side as it rose, and burst on the surface with a faint ‘gloop’.

‘Oh dear,’ said Hubert.

The comic convention, when two people are dining at a table designed to accommodate twenty, is that they sit at either end. Moist and Adora Belle didn’t try it, but instead huddled together. Gladys stood at the other end, a napkin over one arm, her eyes two sullen glows.