Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion Read Online Free PDF Page B

anecdote now and then with the boys at the club. Then, it’s all chumminess an’ good fun, don’t you know. Ladding about, as it were, hey-what? To have one’s own trusted manservant spilling the proverbial beans all around the neighbourhood, well, that was rather another matter.
     
    However, be that as it may and whatnot, my current dishevelment of domestic affairs took the rumble-seat of the runabout, while Moggy’s crisis claimed the seat with the legroom.
     
    My first thought was that he’d gone and gotten himself in the soup over some girl again. Turns out, of course, he had. Just not in the usual way, where he’d fall in love with a waitress or hat-check chippie, then want my help convincing his uncle to permit the engagement. Not to mention convincing said uncle, a notorious skinflint, to increase his allowance in accordance with the commensurate costs of married life.
     
    No, this time, Moggy had actually gone and taken the whole-hog propositional plunge. His family was in no financial opposition, and for deuced good reason.
     
    “Gertrude Plimsby?” I’d echoed, sure I misheard him. “Not …
Plimsby
-Plimsby?”
     
    “Do you know her?” Moggy had a worried look I recognized; there’d been occasions before when he’d done the head-over-heels for someone I’d been engaged to myself, though I’d thus far always managed to escape the matrimonial noose.
     
    He and I were both relieved to put him off the hook. I’d never met the girl — and when I did, it was to discover she was the chirpy sort, a fluffy blonde dumpling of a creature with bright eyes and one of those voices that sounds sweet to start, then drives into your ears like needles. Not my type, not my type at all.
     
    The name, though …
     
    “Plimsby, as in, George Plimsby?” I said. “The industrial manufacturist? The one with that ruddy great flying brass behemoth circulating over Bristol, periodically blotting out the sun? ‘Another Fine Plimsby Product,’ and all that rot?”
     
    Moggy nodded. “He’s her father.”
     
    “Great Scott, Moggy!” One’s mind, such as it was, couldn’t help but reel at the implications.
     
    “She’s his only child, you see, and he dotes on her —”
     
    “And he’s letting her marry you?”
     
    “Thank
you
, Reggie!”
     
    “No, no, sorry, what I mean to say is —”
     
    “Oh, no, I understand very well what you mean to say. And that’s the problem, isn’t it? He thinks I’m a gadfly, a dilettante, a lay-about and do-nothing who stays out half the night at the clubs and the other half at the casinos.”
     
    I gave him the raised eyebrows as politely as one could under the circs.
     
    “Which may have been true enough before,” he hastened, blushing, “but that was the old Cyril Moglington. I’ve turned over a new leaf now. A good woman, treasured beyond pearls, or what have you. He’s given me a job.”
     
    “A job?” I cried, aghast at the very notion. “Not in a factory, surely!”
     
    “An important managerial sales post within the company. That’s why I need your help, Reggie.”
     
    “My help?” I’d fallen into a repeating habit, which my aunts said made me sound like a parrot, but what else was there to do?
     
    “Let me explain …” he’d said.
     
    Little was I to know his explanation would lead to my being in accidental possession of the sole prototype of a revolutionary new invention that did not, strictly speaking, belong to me.
     

     
    It had seemed like a solid gold scheme at the time. I hadn’t even given any thought as to whether or how I stood to profit from it, beyond the noble deed well done and pip-cheerio
bonhomie
for a chum and all.
     
    By the time that thought crept in, as well as others about the actual plausibility of Moggy’s plan, it was half-past too late.
     
    Which was how I’d ended up what felt like miles over terra firma, pretending to be someone else.
     
    Well, not instantly ended up, to be sure. There’d been