Making Money - Terry Pratchett [26]
“Is Miss Drapes a useful member of the staff?”
“Indeed. She performs her duties with care and alacrity.” He paused. They were at the top of the stairs. Bent turned and looked directly at Moist.
“I have worked here all my life, Mr. Lipwig. Be careful of the Lavish family. Mrs. Lavish is the best of them, a wonderful woman. The others…are used to getting their own way.”
Old family, old money. That kind of family. Moist felt a distant call, like the song of the skylark. It came back to taunt him every time, for example, he saw an out-of-towner in the street with a map and a perplexed expression, crying out to be relieved of his money in some helpful and hard-to-follow way.
“Dangerously so?” he said.
Bent looked a little affronted at this directness. “They are not at home to disappointment, sir. They have tried to declare Mrs. Lavish insane, sir.”
“Really?” said Moist. “Compared to who?”
THE WIND BLEW through the town of Big Cabbage, which liked to call itself The Green Heart of the Plains.
It was called Big Cabbage because it was home to The Biggest Cabbage in the World, and the town’s inhabitants were not very creative when it came to names. People traveled miles to see this wonder; they’d go inside its concrete interior and peer out through the windows, buy cabbage-leaf bookmarks, cabbage ink, cabbage shirts, Captain Cabbage dolls, musical boxes carefully crafted from Kohl Rabi and cauliflower, which played “The Cabbage-Eater’s Song,” cabbage jam, kale ale, and green cigars made from a newly developed species of cabbage and rolled on the thighs of local maidens, presumably because they liked it.
Then there was the excitement of Brassica World, where very small children could burst into terrified screams at the huge head of Captain Cabbage himself, along with his friends Cauliflower the Clown and Billy Broccoli. For older visitors there was, of course, the Cabbage Research Institute, over which a green pall always hung and downwind of which plants tended to be rather strange and sometimes turned to watch you as you passed.
And then…what better way to record the day of a lifetime than pose at the behest of the black-clad man with the iconograph, who took a picture of the happy family and promised a framed, colored result, sent right to their home, for a mere three dollars, S&H included, one dollar deposit to cover expenses, if you would be so good, sir, and may I say what wonderful children you have there, madam, they are a credit to you and no mistake, oh, and did I say that if you are not delighted with the framed picture then send no further money and we shall say no more about it?
The kale ale was generally pretty good, and there’s no such thing as too much flattery where mothers are concerned, and, all right, the man had rather strange teeth, which seem determined to make a break from his mouth, but none of us is perfect and what was there to lose?
What there was to lose was a dollar, and they add up. Whoever said you can’t fool an honest man wasn’t one.
Around about the seventh family a watchman started taking a distant interest, so the man in dusty black made a show of taking the last name and address and strolled into an alley. He tossed the broken iconograph back on the pile of junk where he had found it—it was a cheap one and the imps had long since evaporated—and was about to set off across the fields when he saw the newspaper being bowled along by the wind.
To a man traveling on his wits, a newspaper was a useful treasure. Stuck down your shirt, it kept the wind off your chest. You could use it to light fires. For the fastidious, it saved a daily resort to dockweed, burdock, or other broad-leaved plants. And, as a last resort, you could read it.
This evening, the breeze was getting up. He gave the front page of the paper a cursory glance, and tucked it under his vest.
His teeth tried to tell him something, but he never listened to them. A man could go mad, listening to his teeth.
WHEN