Paris, 17th March 1482
Baldrick "Quasi" McModo lurched along the boulevard, gritting his tooth against the freezing sleet that battered his pockmarked face. With his one good eye he glanced up at the twin towers of the brand new cathedral, and poked his tongue out at the gargoyles which gurned back at him in mockery.
"Gaaaah!!" he rasped in his cracked voice. A passing toff crossed the road. Quasi cackled, and spat thick phlegm into the straw lining the thoroughfare. "Feck arf!" he barked. The toff started to run away.
He turned the corner into the street where She lived. She Wot Must Be Obeyed. She Wot Owned Him. He whistled "On the street where you live" from My Fair Lady.
A bucketful of urine launched from a third-floor window crashed onto the dirt road in front of him, splashing his already filthy rags. Lerner & Loewe were dirty words in these parts.
"Feckin gobshite bastards!!" he roared, waving two of the three remaining fingers on his good hand at the perpetrators above. He hopped around the puddle of piss, and hirpled unevenly to Her house, where he pulled on the bellrope and assumed a position of abject lack of self-esteem while he waited for the gatekeeper, Jacek, to shuffle to open the door.
Fifteen minutes passed.
"Who go there?" eventually came the muffled demand.
"It be I, Baldrick "Quasi" McModo, executive slave to Milady Esmeralda de Wayne de la Bough," he whined in his most obsequious whine.
He heard the sound of bolts being slid back, and the door opened with a creak. A crabbed hand appeared.
"Cross me palm with silver, luvvie!"
Quasi kicked at the door savagely and pushed through. Jacek was lying flat on his back.
"Ye Scotch baskit!" he moaned. "Ye've broke me back! Yer gipsy queen will be told!"
Quasi clambered over him and made for the caravan in the stableyard at the back. Milady's 27 pairs of shoes were set outside on the steps for him to clean. He got out his filthy handkerchief and did his best to summon up some spit. When he had cleaned all her shoes, he scratched at the door, subserviently.
"Entrez," came the peremptory response. His heart sank and soared at the same time. His daily agony and ecstasy was about to start. There was nothing in this world, NOTHING, worse than being in love with a social climbing gypsy princess. He adjusted his hump, assumed the position, and crawled on his hands and knees into the caravan.
Milady Esmeralda de Wayne de la Bough, formerly Gladys Perkins of Wapping, was choosing ribbons from a box.
"Ah, there you are, McModo," she called down to him from her pedestal. "Help me decorate this tambourine. What day is it today?"
Quasi cast his good eye through the hole in the roof at the sky.
"March 17th, if it please Milady, begging your pardon."
"Green then. Here!" she threw a tambourine at him and a bunch of green ribbons. "It'll be Oh Danny Boy, My Lagan Love, and Black Velvet Band, and finish up with Seven Drunken Nights. Go and practice being a leprechaun."
Quasi shuffled out, weaving the green ribbons into the tambourine as he went. He sat patiently on the steps, waiting for Milady to appear, some hours later, looking like the absinthe fairy. He struggled to keep up with her as she riverdanced down the street to Notre Dame Cathedral, where beggars scurried away in terror at the sight of her terrible greenness. She looked up at the stone effigies of saints.
"Now where is he .... Saint Patrick? Oh this one will do. Give me my tambourine, slave!"
Quasi handed her the green-ribboned tambourine and prepared to caper along behind her spirited Irish gypsy dance with the collecting hat.
"Ah one, ah two, ah one-two-three-four .... "
Milady launched herself into a performance reminiscent of Isadora Duncan doing the Harlem Shake. Quasi hopped along behind her in the snow, ecstatic in his misery and humiliation. She was so beautiful, and he was so .... enslaved. She had saved him from the gibbet, and now she made him suffer, oh how he suffered. It was exquisite. His misery was complete ..... there was no happier one-eyed hunchback in all of Paris.
(to be continued)
