Creeps, Ghouls and Jewels by AF Linley

Author:AF Linley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: creepy, weird fiction, humor horror, odd tales, short shories
Publisher: AF Linley

Under a Lady’s Skirts

It was perhaps a month after the harrowing events at the Earl of Stagford’s manor that the Hon. Aubrey Merridew got it into his head to walk about the city and take the air. His newly-acquired nurse accompanied him, and while she was pleased that her charge was finally getting out of his house, this was not precisely what she could have hoped for. “This is highly irregular,” the soberly-dressed young woman fretted, as she followed him down the sidewalk.

“Irregular?” asked Merridew innocently. “Nonsense. I put on a second pair of nice thick wool socks and remembered to wrap my muffler well.”

“But it is July.”

“Yes! And one never knows when a freak blizzard may blow up.” Merridew tapped his pink top hat to a dashing angle with the knob of his walking stick and smiled jauntily. “Particularly in this city.”

“But really, sir, as your nurse, I must protest. You’ll suffocate in this heat. And think of how people will stare!”

“Why should they not? In any event, I shall be the one laughing when they all perish of rapid-onset frostbite.”

Nurse Piggott rolled her eyes. “There is no such thing.” She looked around doubtfully. “Where exactly are we going?”

“We are going, my dear Duenna Violet, into the oldest town of this haggard old city, to the shop of my dear friend Madame Saundra, the finest fortune-teller for a hundred miles around, as the stone flies, for my monthly supply of used tea leaves.”

“Used tea...?” The nurse shook her properly-bonneted head sharply. “And please do not refer to me by that outlandish name. My name is Jane—Jane Piggott—Nurse Piggott to you, Mr. Merridew.”

“Names are such cumbersome things,” complained Merridew in his vague way, drawing his cloak closer about his thin shoulders and stamping his gumboots heartily.

Nurse Piggott was beginning to have second thoughts about her new job.

And lo and behold, who should she see at that moment but the man most responsible for her current embarrassing predicament: Mr. Edmund B Finch, of the firm of Finch, Fowler and Faust, the very gentleman who had hired her, coming out of a ramshackle stationer’s shop. “Look, Mr. Merridew,” she said quickly, “isn’t that your solicitor?”

Merridew peered ahead curiously. “D’you know, Violet, I believe it is.”

“Please do not call me that.”

Her patient ignored her, yanking down the layers of garish knitted muffler that obscured his mouth. “Oy, Nedders!”

The pale, pointed face of the legal man flinched to hear his name called out so vulgarly, but he could not snub his client, and so crossed the street to them. “He looks ill,” said Nurse Piggott quietly, recollecting how he had appeared four weeks prior, during her interview in his office.

“More snakish than ever,” Merridew agreed, heartily shaking his old friend’s hand. “And how’s your lovely family?”

“Fair to middling,” replied Ned. “Mrs. Finch has been receiving a larger than usual spate of outraged letters in light of the new book, and she tells me that Kate’s adorable new pet is leaving trails of unspeakable slime on all the carpets.

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