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I had just finished my ablutions to remove the dust of the road, ready to face my fiscally imposed exile at the Shinra country place in Nibelheim.
As readers of the previous entries in my memoirs may recall, I take a gentleman’s interest in the improvement and beautification of the metropolis. My efforts have resulted in becoming a recipient of the Shinra family’s largesse. Elder Shinra fancied himself a patron of the arts and sciences and every year we happy patronized few must repair to Nibelheim and perform like trained dogs for our yearly dole. I’ve been doing so since the year Teioh first won the S-Class.
A gentlemen of somewhat independent means needs must do whatever he can to keep body and soul together, not to mention continue placing a shirt or two on a bird whenever Teioh wasn’t running. So, Reeve shall come when called, stand on his hind legs, and shake hands when ordered.
There was just enough time before dinner to leave my temporary domicile and join a step or two in the pastoral dances. I rang the bell. “Valentine,” I called, “Be so good as to fetch my new coat. I’m in the mood for an airing.”
Valentine did his usual silent shimmer into the Presence. “The navy with the superfluity of straps, sir?”
I ignored the superfluity crack; the obligations of noblesse oblige, you know. Using the velvet glove rather than the iron somesuch. “The very one.”
“I had thought it the unsuccessful experiment of a tailor to find new uses for fabric scraps. Therefore, I took the liberty of removing the coat from your luggage, sir.”
There was nothing to be helped, dash it. My coat’s debut at the Nibelheim revels would have to wait. “Then ready the soup and fish, Valentine. Nearly time to partake of the Shinra bread and salt.” I waited a breath. “And be so good as to lay out my new mauve socks.” Valentine’s reserve towards sartorial novelties was nothing new, but one could not simply let one’s man use one’s back as a promenade!
Valentine’s silence was positively glacial, but he went about his duty.
Scarlet West waylaid me in the reception room when I had partaken of only one glass of the social lubricant.
As followers of this chronicle may recall, Ms. Scarlet West is a fellow recipient of the Shinra largesse. Whilst Reeve dabbles in primping and planning for the metrop, Ms. West puts her mind to peace through superior firepower. To whit, weapon research. Every year Scarlet contented herself with making a few patriotic noises in the direction of Elder Shinra, shooting a few clay pigeons with the Younger Shinra, and collecting her expected helping of the milk and honey.
“Tuesti,” she said, in the dulcet tones of a firing squad. “I need your help.”
“And what emergency can’t wait for our return from our rustic exile?”
“Our budget proposals.”
“Not an emergency in the slightest,” I said. “You pass with flying colors every year.”
“The problem, ass, is that I’ve overspent.” Here she began a dizzying report about plates, treads, shells, and scaling that one could not be sure if she were planning a dinner party, an invasion, or an invasion with light refreshments afterward.
“So, you need a larger share of the dosh from the old man for the coming twelvemonth to keep body and soul together?” I called someone over for another glass.
“Right. And Rufus, that little snipe, has come bleating to his father about how they should economize.” She snorted. In all fairness to Scarlet, Rufus, Shinra fils, was known to nip into the coffers while his father’s back was turned in order to keep himself in the black. “So, any ideas?”
“My esteemed colleague, surely someone else could--”
“There is no one else. Faramis and Hojo are too busy squabbling with each other like schoolboys over the last toffee, Deusericus is a prig, Palmer is a clown, and Heideggar’s an even bigger ass than you.”
This really could not stand. I prepared a comment full of withering contempt, but Scarlet cut me off before I could begin my salvo.
“If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to put the matter before Valentine, and--”
Forebears of the Tuesti name, forgive me. I had to be curt to a lady in order to get a syllable in edgewise. “You do know that Valentine is not the only one of the Tuesti household with a modicum of intellect? And he’s had kippers and toast just this morning.” True to my word, the very thing had just materialized in the confines of the old lemon.
Scarlett frowned. “I don’t care about your blasted cat.”
“I refer to myself. I can very well get you out of your situation without the need for calling for Valentine like the babe lost in the woods.”
She frowned further. “And you’re sure that your Valentine couldn’t--”
“Ms. West. Colleague. Fellow mendicant. I told you that I shall take care of things! And my scheme is this: Sigh.”
Scarlet made a face as if someone had informed her that platinum blonde were no longer the hair color of choice for the femme du monde. “Sigh?”
“Any time and every time you are in the Presence. A forlorn, lost, underfunded sort of sigh. Gentlemenly obligation at the very least should give cause to Elder Shinra to inquire about your current state. Mention the paucity of your current allotment, make your usual statements about the defense of hearth and home, and he shall bring out the checkbook in a trice.”
Scarlet crossed her arms. “I’d really prefer seeing Valentine.”
“Tut, tut,” I responded. “Try out this scheme at this dinner, and you’ll have more than your fill of the cabbage.” I was met with silence. Verily, the prophet is not accepted in his own country.
Shinra père et fils were at the head and foot of the table, respectively. Ms. West was at Rufus’s right. The rest of our fellow spongers were scattered about the table: Professors Faramis and Hojo, Faramis’s wife, Faramis’s daughter, and Messrs. Deusericus, Palmer, and Heideggar. There were others at the table as well. I sat to the side of some rustic-looking chappie who had a rather lovely girl at his other side. He was introduced to me as Joseph Lockhart and the girl was his daughter, Tifa. The Shinras were, no doubt, extending their board to some of the tenants in a show as the lord of the manor.
As the soup was being set on the table, Scarlet heaved a sigh that sounded like the 7:42 express rolling through a tunnel.
This of course caught the attention of all and sundry, but no gentlemanly inquiry was forthcoming from neither the head nor the foot of the table.
Scarlet looked about as if she were waiting for a bird that was five lengths from winning. Everyone returned to the consommé. Miss Faramis and Miss Lockhart murmured amongst themselves about some schoolgirl matter.
Near the end of the fish, Scarlet huffed like the 7:42 express going up a rather sticky incline.
Once again, one and all focused on the suspirations. Once again, nothing from Shinra elder and Shinra younger. The bird that Scarlet looked about for seemed to be ten lengths from placing. Mrs. Faramis and Miss Faramis looked at Scarlet with the same tender-hearted concern one would think two shepherdesses would have for a lost lamb. Mrs. Faramis, as befitted age, spoke first. “Are you quite all right, Ms. West?”
Scarlet took a swallow of wine. “Simply feeling a little… poorly.”
Mrs. Faramis turned that concern-for-a-lost-lamb look onto Professor Faramis. “Gast, dear, won’t you see to Ms. West?”
Professor Hojo cleared his throat. “I would like to offer my assistance as well, Ms. West.”
Scarlet paled and made noises about it being a trifling matter. She made innumerable remarks of the kind from the entrée to the sweets. It was her only topic of conversation.
As the gentlemen went off for brandy, I noticed Mrs. Faramis advancing upon Scarlet in the sitting room, murmuring things about digestion. Miss Faramis and Miss Lockhart left the table arm in arm; quite charming to see. Ah, the glories of fleeting youth.
I brought Valentine up to speed with Ms. West’s situation, awaiting for the deus ex whatsit to come racing with the dawn.
The dawn, alas, was not to come. Valentine took a breath. “I’m afraid, sir, that I would need more time to fashion a solution that would end satisfactorily for all involved.”
I threw myself upon a chair. A balm was needed. “A brandy and soda, as stiff as a corpse. And pour generously, Valentine.”
“Of course, sir.”
The malaise of defeat soured the morrow, a glorious day in late spring. Scarlet looked miserable in the face of the impending tightening of the wallet and having Professors Hojo and Faramis and Mrs. Faramis hovering about her like a gang of nursemaids. I was soured over the lack of schemes emerging from the combined might of my and Valentine’s brain power. The Shinras, unaware of the dark clouds gathering about the horizon, practiced their long drives on the edge of the lawn, away from Miss Faramis and Miss Lockhart’s game of croquet. Messrs. Deusericus, Palmer, and Heideggar were off doing a survey of the mountainside.
A growl like a flooded gutter pipe in the bowels of an inferno broke through the peace of the afternoon. The shrubs that surrounded the lawn trembled like aspens and snapped like twigs in the wake of the… thing. It broke through the shrubbery, gave a howl that would make the Last Trumpet sound like the gentle mewling of a kitten, and made a charge for us. I did not die of fright, but it was a close thing.
Professor Hojo was the first of our party to respond. He turned pale, then ran back towards the house. I’d never seen the sour old twit move so quickly. It took but a quarter of a breath for the rest of us to join him. It’s rather amazing, what the frisson of absolute terror will do to stimulate physical activity.
Miss Lockheart, like some lady knight--is there a word for a lady knight? Valentine would know--kept Miss Faramis out of harm’s way, wielding her croquet mallet like a very Excalibur.
We made it back to the house more or less safe and sound. I only say “more or less” because we looked like we’d made a terrified dash for our lives across the lawn; which, of course, we had. Professors Hojo and Faramis had bolted up the stairs the moment they’d crossed the threshold, leaving Mrs. Faramis and Miss Faramis behind. It seemed rather like scientific knowledge crowded out whatever parts of the grey matter were devoted to being a gentleman.
The two Shinras leaned upon their golf clubs gasping as heavily as if they were ancient men in the need of additional props. I’d be doing just about the same, had I my own golf clubs. I compensated by mopping my brow with a handkerchief.
Miss Lockhart, still brandishing her croquet mallet, glared at the front door as if daring it to do something uncouth.
Miss Faramis looked at the front door as if expecting it to beg for table scraps. “What are we to do?”
“It would be best if we looked to Ms. West in situations such as these,” Valentine said. Though I hadn’t seen him out on the lawn, the poor man was also looking a bit worse for wear, or at least what would be considered an approximation of such for Valentine.
Scarlet took on the air of a platinum bobbed Bellona. “We must raise a defense and hold fast,” she said with finality. Shinra père et fils perked up with esprit de corps like drooping plants finally blessed with a downpour of the necessary.
A Tuesti knows more than most about the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party, but the warrior spirit, alas, runs weak in the recent generation. I walked hither and thither across my room, quite liable to carve myself into a trench. I craved a bottle or three of a strengthening elixir.
I was about to reach for the bell when Valentine stepped in and watched me pace. “Ms. West is in fine form, sir. She is developing strategy and giving orders in a style rather reminiscent of a military campaign. It is quite exemplary.”
I looked out the window, out onto the lawn. The croquet kit and the refreshment table were still there, undisturbed. “That thing we saw, do you suppose it’s still hanging about?” Indeed, there hadn’t been hide nor hoof nor howl of it since we’d all barricaded ourselves inside the house.
Valentine joined me at the window. “No, sir, I do not believe that the beast should become a further nuisance.”
“Nuisance” would be a dog howling two doors away when all you’d like is a quiet tea-time. “Nuisance” would not be the word I would use for that… thing.
Valentine cleared his throat. “Sir, if we make haste, we should be able to reach your car by using the back stair. I have already taken the liberty of preparing our baggage.”
“Then let us make haste, Valentine. We return to Midgar.”
On my third day back in the metropolis, two letters came for me in the afternoon mail. The first was from Scarlet West, and chivalry required that it be attended to first. “Listen to this, Valentine. Ms. West writes that she’s received twice the amount for her budget from last year.”
“Heartening news, sir.”
I brandished a slip of paper that had been enclosed with Scarlet’s letter. A check for a comfortable sum. “She also encloses a token of her esteem for you, Valentine, for acting as her herald.”
I swear I had seen the right corner of Valentine’s mouth turn up an eighth of an inch. “A most generous gesture.”
I presented Scarlet’s check with a flourish. “You deserve every last bit.”
“Thank you, sir.”
The remaining letter was the harbinger of crisis.
“This is the harbinger of crisis,” I said. Valentine waited for me to continue.
“Here. Listen to this: ‘In light of recent events, more emphasis must be given to security and peacekeeping. Sacrifices must be made.’ They call for austerity, Valentine. My budget is to be reduced. Reduced by half! This simply cannot be borne! How are we to live, Valentine?” I wished nothing more than to go to bed, put my head under the coverlet, and stay there until the following year.
Valentine cleared his throat. “This won’t be a problem, sir. Our funds have run a surplus for quite some time. I’ve made some wise investments with this surplus that should be coming to maturity soon.”
The sun broke through the clouds. “We’ll be able to keep on in the lifestyle to which we’ve become accustomed?” The late spring day has taken on a golden glow. “Valentine, you are a marvel.”
“I endeavor to give satisfaction, sir.”
His action, of course, required a token of esteem of my own. “Valentine?”
“Sir?”
“My navy coat. Dispose of it how you will.”
“Thank you, sir. I have already donated it to a scrap fabric collection effort.”