Monkey Business

By Vita Tugwell

Life with a hundred monkeys and two rival inventors can be tiring, so Petticoat Katie heads to Italy for a short holiday with the dashing Scipio Jones. Chaos, of course, fills in the gaps. When she returns, half her monkeys have a bun in the oven and Sledgehammer Girl's taken up acoustics. Next thing she knows, Katie's faced with eviction and the prospect of printing Mr Stirrup's salacious memoirs, the hottest property since the nefarious under-the-counter Chilli Chocolate at Fitzgerald's Fine Sweetmeats. And it looks like tacky souvenirs aren't the only thing Katie brought back from holiday... The third uproarious novel in the Petticoat Katie & Sledgehammer Girl series of silly steampunk adventures, featuring yet more crazy inventions, off-the-wall characters and impossible situations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lee McAulay
• Release date: Feb 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005135775

Vita Tugwell

Vita Tugwell is a 21st Century Suffragette. She lives in England in spite of its dreadful weather and light romantic comedies and partakes, often, of High Tea. She wishes ill fortune upon the person or persons unknown who have stolen her bicycle.Yes, she is currently working on the third novel in the Petticoat Katie & Sledgehammer Girl series, in between chocolate bourbons.

Book preview

Chapter One

Across the piazza from Verona’s magnificent Roman amphitheatre, the early morning sunlight slanted onto a hotel forecourt where an unusual couple sat at breakfast, in silence, alone.

Golden rays lit the breakfast-table where two coffee-cups, both empty, cooled beside a basket of ruined pastries and two small plates smeared with jam.

A lone pink rose protruded from a vase. Crumbs lay around it on the white linen tablecloth. The discarded peel of a tangerine curled into itself on a saucer.

On one side of the table, wreathed in the morning’s edition of the Corriera Della Serra, Mr Scipio Jones wore a travelling-suit of brown corduroy which matched perfectly the shade of his skin - or at least, the normal shade of his skin after a season of London drawing-rooms where he plied his trade as a gentleman adventurer of the old-fashioned sort. However, two weeks in Italy had ripened even his complexion to a healthy glow.

His pale companion, a young woman of independent means known to the taxman as Miss Katherine Fellowes and to her friends as Petticoat Katie, sat with her head bent over the business end of a picture-postcard.

Her long dark hair was held back from her face with the ribbon from a box of peppermint bonbons. She wore a long-sleeved dress of the sort favoured by artists and Bohemian ladies, patterned with the green of spring vegetation, and a yellow silk scarf secured the ballooning material around her tiny waist.

Her feet were nude. She scuffed them back and forth, toes barely touching the marble flagstones beneath her chair.

Katie sucked the end of the pencil and concentrated on a frown.

As if to remind herself where she was, she glanced at the front of the card. A grainy photograph showed the archways and curved walls of the Roman amphitheatre of Verona, and when she looked up again, there was the real thing, across the piazza from her breakfast table.

At the edge of her sight Mr Jones, hidden behind the vast broadsheet pages of the newspaper, crossed his legs.

In fact, she noted, the only parts of him visible from where she sat were his legs in his perfect-fit jodhpurs, eight dark fingers gripping the outskirts of the newspaper, and the crest of his black tight-curled hair.

Mr Jones? she asked, expecting no reply.

He complied, with added silence.

She sucked the end of the pencil. Nibbled the wood a little, releasing resins onto her tongue, the taste like tobacco against the faint echoes of her last cup of coffee.

Dear Victoria, she wrote.

The air was fresh and deliciously chilly on the piazza that morning, and Katie folded the hem of her unstructured dress under her bare feet, the smooth marble paving-stones still slightly warm from yesterday’s sun but not warm enough to temper the gentle breeze around her bony ankles.

Not even breezy enough to stir the ends of her hair, as wantonly hatless as she was undergarment-less. Being of a flat-chested persuasion, she saw little need. Especially when on holiday with a gentleman acquaintance.

She glanced again at Scipio Jones.

His companionship was entirely platonic. She was starting to accept that she might never induce him to share any intimacy with her, however hard she might try.

She’d thought perhaps this trip - a rare occasion when she allowed herself some leisure, she being the proprietor of a peculiar small business in Piccadilly - perhaps this trip might have been an opportunity for she and Mr Jones to indulge in a spot of naughtiness.

Frolics, even.

No such luck, she thought, staring at his black knuckles on the borders of the newspaper.

She glanced up into the morning’s sunshine breaching the town walls over on the far side of the piazza. On the fawn-coloured stonework, dark shadows hung beneath the banners hawking the evening’s performance at the amphitheatre.

A couple of cats lounged on ledges high up on the piazza walls, stretching or lazing or doing whatever cats do before the rest of the world is awake to feed them a saucer of milk.

Katie turned back to the postcard, moving a pocket-book of postage stamps out from underneath so as not to write over a bulge and squidge her letters.

How are the monkeys? she wrote. I will be back on Monday, all being well. Mr Jones is -

She stole a glance towards him, just as he turned one of the enormous pages, and saw his face break into a kindly smile for a brief moment as he spotted her, then resumed reading.

- Well, she finished, and sucked the end of the pencil.

His business here is almost done, he says, she added, without being any the wiser as to what his business actually was.

You’d love it here, all the cafés have steam-driven coffee machines. I don’t know how they do it but it’s noisy and rather impressive. The men all remind me of Darius, have you heard from him recently?

At that point she paused to suck the end of the pencil again. She was running out of space.

With a deft twiddle of her fingers she turned the pencil so that the sharpest part of the tip touched the card, and signed her name. In blocky letters she wrote out the name of her housemate and their shared address back in London.

I’ll probably get home before this postcard, she thought, and flipped it over again to the side with the grainy picture. She marked an ‘X’ on one side of the photograph in the traditional manner, although her hotel, and its sumptuous balcony, was not actually visible.

Everything about the trip had been a surprise.

Mr Jones, the only black man in London to have scaled Mont Blanc and the Eiger, had sprung the invitation upon her as they discussed her latest dilemma - there was always a dilemma - on one of her visits to his Mayfair abode, and she had initially declined.

When she’d mentioned the invitation that evening, at home, her substantial housemate, Miss Victoria Templeman - the same Victoria to whom the picture postcard was addressed - had given her an odd look, told her she was being daft and said that she’d go if Mr Jones was desperate for company, and bustled off upstairs to fetch her coat.

I don’t think he meant just anyone, Katie said when the other woman returned to the parlour of their shared lodgings in Centaur Street, Waterloo.

And I’m not just anyone, Victoria had replied, punching her way into a mackintosh that barely met over her plain cotton blouse. She stopped, with a rare grin, half of one arm in the sleeve. Go on, Katie. You deserve a break.

But what about the monkeys? Katie had asked.

I’ll look after them.

You?

Can’t be any harder than looking after little ‘uns, can it? All I have to do is feed them bananas, or walnuts, and make sure they have enough ribbon for their typewriters.

And keep them from throwing their poo at each other when they’re bored.

At that point in the conversation, Victoria had begun to struggle back into the mackintosh.

And now, from the luxury of a hotel patio overlooking the finest piazza in Verona, Katie was very glad she had accepted the invitation, despite Mr Jones’s business engagements taking him - and his polite attentions - out of her reach since their arrival.

Their evenings were spent at the opera or at private showings of art in the miniature palazzos of the wealthy whose patronage Mr Jones sought for his adventures. But during the day she was at liberty to amuse herself, alone in a foreign city with little in the way of funds.

On the first day she’d wandered the city on her own, following the river as it curved under a series of spectacular stone bridges, and climbed up a steep hill to some sort of church or monastery that afforded a magnificent view of the mist shrouding the valley beyond the town walls.

The air was so still that chimneys pushed smoke up like paint spurting out of a tube. Tall conifers rose like green pillars beside the hillside villas, and out in the countryside fields of maize glistened in the sun.

She’d learned to perspire like a local, without effort, in the absence of any cooling breeze.

She’d also learned to eat ice-cream like a local, and was decidedly bouncy with the effects of all that sugar and an almost endless supply of coffee.

Oh, the coffee.

Not here the dull grounds of Britain, that might be roasted dandelion roots or chicory for all she knew or cared.

The coffee in Italy, a potion of spice and pungent vigour that pepped the spirit with the merest hint, was sheer charisma in a cup. Even though that was a tiny cup, in the Turkish fashion, into which it was impossible to pile more than two spoons of sugar.

Katie had been enraptured from her very first whiff.

Behind the counter-top of every cafeteria sat a domestic monster of steam and magic.

Each cup of coffee was forced from the bean with finesse as well as strength, unlike the fashion at home where one dropped the grounds into a percolator and came back half an hour later to see whether any chemistry at all had occurred before giving the whole mess up for a bad job and making a pot of tea instead.

(Having tried the tea on the train, Katie understood why the entire Continent of Europe drank coffee. The tea was atrocious. She’d poured her only cuppa down the little sink in her sleeping-compartment and noticed that others had done the same thing before.)

After she’d become enamoured of the coffee-machine in the hotel’s breakfast lounge as it whizzed and rattled and hissed her morning spark into a cup and saucer, Katie had abandoned all attempts to seduce Mr Jones. His polite indifference to her attentions finally won through.

So she’d become enamoured of the breakfast waiter instead.

And here he came across the hotel forecourt, armed with another pot of that fabulous coffee and a selection of gritty little chocolates, his dimpled smile as fresh as orange juice and his crisp white shirt impeccable. His name was Alfredo, he said, and she didn’t ask further.

She noted how he smiled with a dimple in his chin, his dark eyes lush with lashes, his hair slightly curled and resisting the slick-back of pomade. He personified every music-hall stereotype of the languid Italian waiter, and what was more, he spoke very little English.

Katie had decided some time ago she liked this combination.

More coffee, signorina?

She winked at him.

He winked back and held up four fingers on one hand, all five digits of the other.

She stole a glance at Mr Jones, who had not moved from behind the newspaper.

Nine o’clock, she mouthed.

The waiter nodded.

She tore one of the postage stamps out of the little booklet and licked it with the tip of her tongue, watching him all the while.

He wagged his eyebrows at her and sauntered off, all nonchalance and bravado, but she knew he’d be waiting for her in her room at nine.

The stamp-glue tasted awful, in the manner of stamp-glue everywhere. While it was still tacky she thumbed it onto the top right-hand corner of the postcard and smoothed it into place, then poured herself another thimbleful of coffee.

She almost burnt her tongue supping it to remove the taste of the stamp.

But the tingling sensation on her lips had nothing to do with the coffee.

Chapter Two

On the third floor of a nondescript office block deep in Piccadilly, Miss Victoria Templeman stood watching a room full of monkeys.

A substantial woman known since her schooldays as Sledgehammer Girl on account of her brusque manner and formidable bearing, she wore a dark skirt of the latest length and a pair of sturdy boots that laced all the way up to her petticoat hem.

Her walnut-coloured hair was pinned into a bun as tight as humankind could imagine and supported a straw boater with a ribbon she changed according to mood and seasonal festivities.

Peering down until her chin doubled back into her throat, she stared at her second-best blouse.

Normally spotless except for a blot of Indian-ink, the white cotton strained over the crest of her ample bosom and displayed a smear like a bird-dropping.

Victoria grunted.

Bananas, in her limited experience, were not intended to be liquid.

Ripe, yea even unto softness, yes. She’d known a few ripe bananas in her time. Usually spotted with brown freckles like some elderly redhead, the flesh inside powdery and gentle and highly scented.

Not liquid.

Charles Darwin had as little to say on the subject as a Sunday School Bible, but not even Brewer’s Dictionary suggested there was a liquid state in the life cycle of the banana.

Not even the one with which she’d been pelted.

She glared into the room where eighty-eight monkeys typed. Scanned the little faces, each earnestly hunched over the keys of a typewriter, hammering away with their little curly fingers.

Victoria was not even sure which of the little creatures had launched the mess in her direction. They all looked very similar, if you overlooked the differences between species, and when she’d been left in charge nobody had given her a copy of The Definitive Guide To Typing Monkeys.

Once or twice, one of them would glance up in her direction, but as soon as she looked towards the face its owner dipped back down behind the paper in its Underwood ‘98 and she couldn’t tell which one was which.

Flummoxed, she stomped out of the room.

A chorus of cheeky-sounding eeks rose from the monkeys the moment she entered the office next door.

She twitched her head and forced herself to ignore them.

Against one wall of the office, a bookcase groaned under stacks of the sort of Penny Dreadfuls mothers warned their offspring about. Boxes of the same novelettes crowded around a battered office chair and a broad mahogany desk with a green leather inlay on the top.

Victoria thumped across the linoleum to the far wall and peered into the office sink, looking for a dishcloth.

Apart from a couple of teaspoons and a mismatched cup-and-saucer, the sink was empty. It was a small sink. Two teaspoons and a cup-and-saucer pretty much filled it on a normal day.

In the little cupboard underneath she found a knitted dishcloth and a chamois leather duster.

Victoria wrenched at the tap on the wall above the basin and wet the cloth.

Chamois, in her extensive experience, had a habit of staining. Normally she wore overalls when the services of a chamois leather were required, but nothing was normal about her and the monkeys.

She dabbed at the banana-slime on her blouse. Once or twice during the dabbing she sighed, her chest heaving under the damp blouse to reveal the outline of significant undergarments. The sticky mess would attract grime all the way home on the Underground no matter how successful she might be at removing the evidence.

She gave the dishcloth a final rinse and hung it over the tap to drip-dry into the saucer below, then turned back to the desk.

One corner of the green leather inlay curled up, as though some previous owner had slipped a ten-shilling note underneath in an attempt to evade the bailiffs. Ring-marks on the leather showed where a careless owner had placed a cup of tea - and it was always tea, in this office, this being Piccadilly and not far short of the Fortnum & Mason’s shop.

Behind the desk, the novelettes massed.

Each one of the books had been typed by the monkeys in the room next door.

Victoria’s best friend and housemate, Petticoat Katie, had once complained to the previous owner of the business about the atrocious quality of his novelettes.

When the odious man had fled the country he’d dropped the monkeys on her, so to speak, as a parting gift of the sort one reads about in Ancient Greek texts full of wars and women with ship-launching faces.

And in order to keep the monkeys fed, watered and attended by the cheapest of London’s veterinary practitioners, the business needed new books.

Many, many new books.

So many, in fact, that quality went out the window.

The novelettes were truly atrocious.

The reading public loved them.

Human authors churning out tripe with such alarming regularity ran the risk of going mad. Few had the stamina for more than a handful of Katie’s Penny Dreadfuls.

Only the monkeys could keep up.

But even when the monkeys were exposed to classics such as the Norse Sagas or Shakespeare and prodded away at the typewriter keys with renewed vigour, their stories showed no marked improvement in their ability.

Literary classics have their place, Katie always said, But most folk prefer tripe. It’s easier to spell, for starters.

To be fair, the monkeys never doubted the merit of their output. Katie kept them fed and watered and fussed over them when they were poorly, and they rewarded her by typing trashy novelettes. A veritable tsunami of tripe hit the bookshops every week.

Victoria’s taste in reading material veered away at high speed from any such literature.

Her favourite books came with diagrams and mathematical formulae stuffed with more Greek than numbers. She devoured instructions on how to build anything mechanical, especially those with cogs and gears and pistons and steam and brass weights that swung back and forth.

She was – most definitely – not interested in her best friend’s monkey business.

The rattle of typewriters all day long gave her sleepless nights.

Barely a week of watching Katie’s monkeys had passed and already she’d rebuilt her bicycle twice, even the wheels right down to the spokes, on the office linoleum.

To cap it all, the third member of the household she shared with Katie, Mr Darius Fitzgerald, had absconded to Glasgow, leaving her alone in the evenings with only The Airship Mechanic’s Gazette for company. His parting farewell had been simply: I’m going out. I may be some time.

And that was weeks ago now. Not even his family had heard from him.

Victoria sat behind the office desk and began to compose a telegram. The message would be short. She wasn’t good with words.

Some time later, after many false starts and crossings-out, she’d just settled on the opening line:

DARIOUS F OFF IN SCOTLAND

when she heard a commotion from the alleyway outside the office. It sounded like a dozen monkeys searching for bananas in a pile of empty boxes and making sure the neighbours knew there were none to be found.

She strode through to the monkeys in the office and found them all silent, still and wary.

No typing.

No eeking.

Just glances from one to another and an element of anticipation in the tiny brown eyes.

All right, Victoria said, counting the hairy little heads until she was sure they were all there.

The screeching from the alleyway rose in pitch and tempo. She’d never heard the signs of monkey distress before but whatever was going on out there sounded frightful.

She yanked open the door at the top of the stairs and descended to the street.

In the sweatshop beneath the office premises three Chinese tailors peered out of a window high up in the cellar wall, all stood on chairs and muttering in a mixture of Cantonese and pure Limehouse argot.

All right, cock? said one. His name was Ling Xan, he’d lived in London all his life and spoke with a strong Cockney accent that often flummoxed Victoria’s Black Country ear.

Victoria nodded. Yes, thanks, she said without thinking. But when she saw the scene in front of her she added under her breath, Actually, probably not.

The alleyway was heaving with monkeys.

In reality there were only twelve of them. Small marmosets, they were visibly agitated, and the fury with which they tossed empty cardboard boxes in the air turned the alley into a veritable whirlwind of monkey chaos.

Victoria took a deep breath.

These monkeys were fatter than Katie’s. They were certainly not so well-behaved, and from the doorway she smelled a distinctive musky odour with banana undertones.

She cleared her throat.

The monkeys in the alley stopped their tossing and shrieking and turned to glare at her. Their eyes held a fascinated gleam, and one of them bared his teeth at her. The teeth were frighteningly rotten.

Victoria was reminded of children who spent all their money on toffee-apples at the funfair and were rewarded with caries.

Come along now, she said, attempting to coax the monkeys away from their activity. This won’t do you any good, will it?

The monkeys continued to stare. One hopped towards her, a pencil-sized stick in its hand.

She peered.

Yes, it was indeed the stick from a toffee-apple. Broken at one end, slightly green as though it had been used to dig through grassy turf. Perhaps the sort of grassy turf underneath a circus tent.

Victoria stared back at the monkeys with her special Death-At-A-Thousand-Paces stare.

They all hesitated.

At least they’d stopped shrieking.

You need a hand, love? asked Ling Xan through the narrow window of the sweatshop.

Victoria shook her head. I’ll manage, thanks.

She heard his chair scraping across the bare floor of the sweatshop, and glanced over her shoulder to see the other two tailors still watching her.

She waved.

They waved back.

And at that point a walnut pinged off the inside of the window above, where Katie’s monkeys sat typing - or rather, currently not typing at all but crowded against the glass like spectators at the zoo.

That’s it! said Victoria in a schoolmistress voice.

Twelve monkeys going ape in the alley at the back of the building was bad enough, but she had eighty-eight in the room upstairs