We waved a series of uncertain hi’s and strained milord’s at the earl, not quite sure how formal we were expected to be, given the circumstances.
“Right this minute, or God as my witness—” continued Justice Mayhew behind us. He hadn’t even paused for breath.
“Delighted to meet you all,” said the earl. He was a short man, with beetling brows and hair that had long since shaded to grey.
From his tone, I couldn’t tell if he actually was delighted to meet us or not. He had that aristocratic way of speaking that made everything sound at once like he was discharging a grave duty and doing you a massive personal favour. “Once this little unpleasantness—”
“No respect, that’s the trouble, no respect at all—”
“Is dealt with, might I suggest you accompany us back to Lettice Manor where we’ll be more than happy to accommodate you.”
I leaned back in my chair. “Oh, thank fuck.” Then I realised I’d just said fuck in front of an earl and felt weird. Then I realised that I’d just had an incredibly I-know-my-place internalised-classist reaction to saying a bad word in front of a man whose only distinction was that one of his distant ancestors had been mates with the king, and felt weirder. “Sorry, I was just thinking we might have to sleep in the bus.”
“Wouldn’t hear of it.” The earl shot a glance across the room to Justice Mayhew. “Are you done, Randy?”
“Almost. Giving this reprobate a piece of my mind.”
The Earl of Coombecamden nodded graciously. “If you could wrap it up a tad quicker, old boy?”
“I’ll be speaking to your superiors,” Justice Mayhew finished.
And that was it. Oliver had, as always, been right. Whatever the limitations of the British criminal justice system were, they definitely didn’t include a tendency to be overly harsh on people who hung out with landed gentry.
The bus, as it turned out, had been left at the crime scene. Well, the tort scene. Well, the scene of the incident that there’s unlikely to ever be an official record of because we were never formally charged and an angry racist came and told everybody to let us go.
But the police were very nice about it and gave Rhys a lift to pick it up, and then we all got back in and followed the earl to Lettice Manor.
Alex insisted on riding with us, on the basis that it would be “a wheeze”—possibly because he’d never been on a bus before—but it… Well. It wasn’t. Not that we weren’t all pleased and grateful to be out of custody after only a brief stay of several hours, but somehow ending a four-hour drive with half a cup of tea and being arrested hadn’t put many of us in a wheezing mood.
“By the way, Luc,” said Alex, “got a joke for you.”
Really? Was this how my day was going to end? “You’ve got a joke for me?”
“Thought it was about time. Turnabout is fair play and all that.
And actually I’ve done fearfully well out of all the corkers you’ve given me down the years. Told a couple to Miffy when we first met and she absolutely adored them. Told one to the earl when I asked his permission to marry the filly too.”
I wasn’t going to ask which. I wasn’t going to ask which.
“Which?”
“The one about the pieces of tarmac.”
I wasn’t going to ask why. I wasn’t going to ask why. “Why that one?”
“Well, he likes cycling, so he liked that it was about a cycle path.
Had to explain the play on words to him, mind, and he agreed with me that it didn’t work terribly well joke-wise but that no harm had been done and we shouldn’t hold it against you.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks?”
“Anyway.” Alex clapped his hands and beamed. “Here’s my joke.” He cleared his throat. “What does a Roman pirate say?”
“I don’t know, Alex.” I thought it only fair that I go through the full joke-recipient routine. “What does a Roman pirate say?”
“Summus.”
Everybody laughed except me. Because I went to a state school.
The annoying thing was I could probably work out why it was supposed to be funny from context. I mean it was a pirate joke.
There’s only two endings to a pirate joke, and one of them is just an attempt to subvert the original ending. Even more annoying was that I was about sixty percent sure that at least one other person in the bus was in the same boat I was but had cruelly abandoned me to be the only one sitting here not laughing like some kind of uneducated, humourless joke pleb. “Rhys,” I asked, “why is that joke funny?”