The Thief And The Circus Queen - Part The Second

Part The Second – The Good Life

Thin he was and filthy-haired when he disembarked from The Reginald in merry old England – the result of a diet of hardened biscuits and discarded pelgegs. With his last frilly shirt sold to pay for a meagre breakfast, Egbert was forced to return to his wretched life of devious pilfering to get by. He soon discovered that his light-fingered ways had not deserted him and, now possessed of a quick wit and a penchant for cross-dressing that only a life on the ocean wave can provide, he found himself living a life of higher and ever higher means. Egbert soon discovered that those with breeding had generally had any last vestige of intelligence bred right out of them and he perfectly pilfered his passage into a purloined life of pampering and privilege (even managing to pluck a peerage off a passing popinjay).

Life for Egbert became one long round of sleeping on diamond-encrusted pillows and dining on Faberge eggs until he was reliably informed that this was rather silly and somewhat dangerous and so moved on to more conventional bedding and comestibles (dodo stuffed pillows, quails nostrils on toast, the usual fare, really). As a man who was not of noble breeding, he was often to make many a social faux pas, such as improperly tipping the local strumpets for debauched nights of rumpy pumpy or using the wrong length and thickness of stick to beat the servants with. His boorish sea-faring ways soon earned him some notoriety amongst the bigwigs with whom he was wont to hobnob.

However, this rough manner made him somewhat favoured with the ladies (yes, in some respects, like father, like son) and he was never bereft of fine female frivolity. He soon, however, began to tire of the same old faces at the same old soirees and yearned to find someone different, someone exciting. You see, for someone used to the swell and sway, the ebb and flow of maritime life, a life on land was becoming increasingly monotonous.

And so it was that, one fine summer’s evening, Egbert and a troupe of his cronies (all nobility have cronies and general hangers-on – it’s the done thing) availed themselves of the travelling circus that was visiting. And thus was history made...


To be Furthered...