Brigadier Reginald Fitzhugh Hawkesbury-Upton had always prided himself on being fazed by nothing. Even finding that he had been deposited upon the island of Hopeless, Maine, when his intention had been to board the RMS Titanic, was something that he had taken in his stride. So ready was he to embrace his new life that he had insisted on being known simply as Reggie Upton, and had thrown himself completely into what passed as Hopeless society. One or two of his friends noticed, however, that, in recent weeks, his stoic approach seemed to have been somewhat bruised.
You may remember that he had discovered that the well-known song, ‘Goodbye Dolly Gray’, popular during the Boer War, had been parodied on the island by a former colleague and fellow comrade-in-arms, Colonel ‘Mad Jack’ Ruscombe-Green. It had shocked Reggie to learn that the colonel’s brief venture into the world of songsmithing had, apparently, occurred more than a century earlier. This was all very perplexing. As far as Reggie was concerned, Ruscombe-Green, who had been considerably younger than he was, and at the time a lieutenant, was last seen, no more than a dozen years earlier, causing mayhem in South Africa. To add to his confusion, this revelation had come not long after the young, and palely beautiful, Philomena Bucket had informed him that she had been born in the same year as his grandmother.
“I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” advised Rhys Cranham. “There is little rhyme or reason to anything that happens on Hopeless.”
“But I can’t help but worry,” confided Reggie, “take that new chap on the island, what’s his name? Bencombe…”
“Benny?” said Rhys. “He’s alright.”
“Don’t let him hear you calling him Benny,” broke in Philomena. “It’s Benjamin or nothing, as far as he’s concerned,”
“Well, as I was about to say,” said Reggie, slightly annoyed at the interruption, “he reckons that a few weeks before he found himself here, Britain had crowned a new queen. Another Elizabeth, apparently.”
“Is that bad?” asked Rhys.
“My point is,” said Reggie, “how far in the future does this happen? When I left England, the royal male line looked fairly solid. There was no sign of any woman called Elizabeth, or anything else for that matter, who might be likely to ascend to the throne.”
“Good luck to her, I say,” declared Philomena. “You lot might not be so warlike with a woman in charge.”
“Don’t be too sure,” said Reggie. “Queen Victoria built an empire. The Empire upon which the sun never sets.”
“That’s because you can’t trust an Englishman in the dark,” muttered Philomena.
Reggie was not the only person fretting about the island’s eccentric attitude towards time, and just about everything else, It had taken Benjamin Bencombe several weeks to come to terms with the strange fauna and flora, including that skeletal dog that seemed to get everywhere. He hated the eternal fog, and the total lack of any sort of modern amenity. Then there were all of the ghosts, even in the pub. No one batted an eyelid when that Jesuit priest drifted through the wall of the bar, or when Philomena’s grandmother manifested in the snuggery. And as for the headless woman haunting the toilet, how the devil did she get there? Then to cap it all, that massive yeti fellow turned up, speaking perfect English and treated by all and sundry as though his presence on the island was the most natural thing in the world.
“I don’t know if I will be able to survive this place for very much longer,” he confided miserably to Philomena.
“Of course you will,” she reassured him, “everyone says that when they first come to the island.”
‘And the majority of them don’t last a fortnight,’ she thought to herself.
‘But I am a man of science, a botanist,” he insisted. “Without my books I am lost.”
“There are plenty of books up in the attics,” said Philomena. “There must be something up there that you’ll find useful.”
“I will look,” Benjamin sighed, ‘but I don’t hold out much hope.”
It was some hours later when Philomena realised that Benjamin had not returned from the attics.
“Maybe he’s dropped off to sleep,” she said to Reggie. “I’ll send Rhys up to check on him.”
“No need, I’ll go up,” offered Reggie, who never minded a browse around the attics, himself.
Five minutes later he was back in the kitchen, his face deathly pale.
“Is everything alright?” asked Philomena. “Where is Benjamin?”
“He’s… he’s dead…” Reggie stammered.
Philomena was surprised at Reggie’s reaction; after all, he must have seen a lot of death during his time in the army.
“… And he looks as though he has been dead for several months,” he added, grimly.
To be continued…