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After a hard week of stove-endarkening, Lady Weasel was exhausted. She had never realized the work involved in keeping the servants focused on one task; Lord Badgerbugger usually did that. After she’d discovered that he’d taken the shotguns AND the whips AND the tasers with him on his ‘hunting expedition’ to the Storyville district of London, she realized that she’d have to use her feminine wiles to trick the staff into the work. She’d hoped to pawn the effort off on to Covington, but after the shipment of Rhode Island Reds from an anonymous “freind” had arrived, he had disappeared, and only the occasional squawk of outrage from the general direction of the Chicken Coop gave any hint as to where he might have gone.

In any case, the stove was beautiful now, endarkened as the Highest Card of the strongest trump suit of a deck of Hoyle’s playing cards. The secret had been to fall into a rage and insist that the staff were absolutely forbidden to touch the stove while carelessly letting slip that the Genie in the stove would only give gifts to those who polished the stove in just the right way to his, ahem, ‘satisfaction’, and that she wanted the rewards all for herself. After that, it was just a matter of chasing them out of the room, muttering some hocus-pocus over the stove while she applied a small bit of polish and then grinning hugely at the gold coin she made ‘appear’ in her hand by pulling it from its concealment in the polishing cloth.

Still, she needed the long weekend before her to rest. “I vant to be alone” she’d said in her best Garbo accent. She’d given the staff two shilling, one farthing and 17 pence each and told them to leave the Coastal Property for the next three days. She told them that the Genie had given her the money to give to them. They all grinned and nodded knowingly,clutching the coins in their stained hands. She’d have sent Covington away too, if she could have found him to send him away.

After the bus pulled away from the estate, she decided to draw herself a hot bath – one of the great pleasures of English life was the giant claw-footed bath tub that Lord Badgerbugger had insisted be brought from the London Estate. It had a pillow rest built intho the porcelin, as well as a tea cup holder for the camomille tea she preferred. Thinking of the tea, she was reminded of the laptop. “Pity about that”, she thought. She wondered exactly what picture Lord Badgerbugger had been looking at when she’d stumbled and poured the tea all over the keyboard, causing the laptop to make a sharp zap!sound before catching fire. He’d been very graceful to her about the whole affair, and had said little enough except to explain that some of the tea had apparently splashed onto the front of his trousers.

The hot bath made her feel sleepy, and she was unaware of Agent 9 peering into the window of the bathroom, from his hiding place high up in the branches of the old Oak that graced the Western garden.

Little did Agent 9 know, Badgerbugger, plucking feathers from his teeth, was slowly lumbering his way back to the homestead. As he came to the gate of the western garden, his sniffer alerted him that everything was not right. Beady little eyeballs shifted left and right, down and ahhhhh…….Badgerbuggers gaze narrowed with anger as he realized a peeping tom was peeping with his peepers at his beloved. Slowly, he swung his shotgun around, took aim, and……….

Agent 10 was given the unpleasant task of sneaking onto the Badgerbugger estate in the middle of the night and collecting the remains of Agent 9, which were in a rather tattered and bloody state. Lord Drakinor had been quite insistent. ” We may not know who his father was, but everyone has a mother, and she’ll be wanting to have her bit of a lad back, even if he’s now ‘bit’s of a lad’, so to speak”, and thus Agent 10 found himself, dressed in his Ninja-Warrior!™ outfit, searching for body parts, with a tiny flashlight.

“Cor , ‘e were a nasty bugger, anyhow” thought Agent 10.

“Always ‘angin’ round the ladies room, he were, and wanting to show us the little mirrors on the tips of ‘is bleedin’ shoes, ‘e was. Good riddance to bad rubbish, says I”.

He paused in his work of picking up the scattered bits of Agent 9, to wonder if there might be some easier riddance to bad rubbish, other than wandering around at midnight with a flashlight and rubber gloves, picking up tiny bits of nasty bugger.

Lord Badgerbugger, in his drunken rage, had apparently blasted Agent 9 into postage-stamp size bits, he thought. Then the image of licking postage stamps flashed into his head and he frantically searched the dusty corners of his mind for an image to replace those bleedin’ stamps. “Bite-size bits?” was the only thing he could think of, and it didn’t seem much of an improvement.

“Cor – ‘ere’s a shoe tip with the little mirror still attached he thought, revulsed.

But nature, being what it is, took over, and Badgerbugger gingerly tasted the fragment of meat fused into the shoe tip. ‘Mmmmmm….tastes like the snack I had in the chicken coop this afternoon.’

‘Weasel, dear girl, shall we order in from ‘Mouse Xpress’, I’m feeling a bit famished’.

Um…weasel, is that a photoshopped pic of a badger roadkill too?

He’s not dead, he’s just doing crunches.

He actually looks very similar to the Badger in this picture

http://www.cornwallwildlifetrust.org.uk/imagedatabase/rh0002_badger.jpg

whom I don’t believe is dead….but simply enjoying sunny-day snooze. I say this with some conviction, since my very fat cat used to like to do this in the window of our townhome – sleeping feet up and so fat that he looked like a dead cat swollen by the heat of the sun.

It made us very popular with the neighbors, who’d suspected that the Lokki’s were strange anyhow.

*****

Covington limped towards the door of the Inn of the Crotchless Panty mumbling “…If I gave me’ ‘eart t’ you, ……then I’d ‘ave none an’ you’d ‘ave two….”. Pausing in the dark outside the inn, he straightened his kilt – so to speak – , brushed a stray black Jersey Giant feather from his pants, and ran his fingers beneath his shapeless cap and through his thinning hair. “Gor!”, he quietly muttered, “Them scullery maids’ll be the death o’ -“.

“Psst!”

Looking around and seeing (still another) corner behind him. Squinting into the shadows beyond the structure, he espied what appeared to be a large whiskey barrel firm up against the inn’s ancient stone wall.

“Blimey! Did someone psst at me?” He inquired, staring intently at the oak cask. Hearing nothing, Covington warily approached the large barrel. Peeking carefully over the top, he saw…nothing.

“Coochy-coo!”, shouted a voice, as he was seized from behind and firmly wedgied by a pair of smallish but strong hands. The resulting cloud of feathers obscured Covington’s sight as he was bodily lifted off his feet and unceremoniously dropped into the barrel. As his apparent attacker dived over the rim to join him, Covington’s sight cleared, and he cried, ” I remember you from last year! You’re…you’re…!”

“…Tired o’ waitin’ fer yous to com’ back! Now drop ’em’, me’ foin feathered lover, an’ we’ll ‘ave us a barrel o’ fun! ‘Now ‘urry! I’m on me’ break!”

“I’m doomed….!” cried Covington, ecstatically.

*****
(The next morning)

Lady Weasel watched silently from her bedroom window as the small, decrepit motorcycle puttered erratically down the distant hill and along the Garden Lane towards the Coastal Property Mansion. Heavily laden, the tiny vehicle appeared to be occupied by two individuals – possibly more.

“Who can that be at this early hour?”, she remarked to Foursche.

“Who, m’lady?”

“There.” Pointing.

“Perhaps its a delivery of seafood from the South Forest, m’lady. I believe today it’s shrimp casserole for lunch. Or some laying hens! Some of the Dominiques died yesterday, I was told. Covington said we had stoat troubles.”

“Um…yes, I, er…suppose,” Lady Weasel mumbled uncertainly. “She’ll learn,” the lady thought to herself, continuing to watch the arriving strangers.

At one point in the distance, one of the passengers appeared to fall – or jump – off and collapse. But the second stopped the vehicle and recovered the first, and loading him onto the rickety bike again – It was an ancient Vespa, she could now see – , continued onward.

As it pulled up to the side entrance, Cook Yarbles came running out, quite upset, apparently.

“Was taten Sie ihn, Sie Peniskopf – verkehr ihn im Esel mit einem Huhn an? he was heard to shout, no-doubt warning the driver of the wet grass, waiving his arms to drive away a cloud of feathers.

The motorcyclist – strangely clad in eastern european garb – roughly booted the second person off the motorcycle and began yelling – gesticulating all the while at the now-supine rider.

“Скажите вашему человеку следующий раз, что он трахает мой yurlov борющийся петух, я сокращу его член!”, he shouted angrily – apparently explaining that he didn’t speak German.

“Was ist yous speak? Replied Yarbles.

” Хулиган цыпленка!” retorted the ‘Biker – pointing at the unconscious rider.

“Sitzen Sie auf diesem, Teigwarengesicht!” Said Cook indignantly, flipping the cyclist the universally understood “I seriously disagree with you” finger-sign.

Sticking his tongue out and delivering a juicy (and scholarly) “Ppphhhtttt” to Yarbles, the cyclist remounted his vehicle and – turning around in the grass – drove off the way he came.

Reaching down and turning over the besotted rider, Yarbles was stunned to see – Covington!
*****

He’s not dead, he’s just doing crunches.

LOL
Ooooo…weasel has herself a beefcake badger.

Well done, Lokki! That is indeed the badger picture wot I knicked. And I’m pretty sure he’s just sleeping; they do roll around like that.

I saw a nature program with lots of live footage of badgers rolling about scratching their testicles with three-inch claws. The presenter’s face went green.

ROFL
Hey McGoo or Lokki, you need to work Badgerbugger’s testicles and 3 inch claws into your story.

Gonna miss you here in Boston.

–formerly Bostonian

Ha! How’d you come to trade “Bostonian” for the euphonious “qrtstuv”? It falls trippingly off the tongue…