Orlando Baptiste Luxuskaas - the gentleman charlatan, philanthropist and amateur chemist, part two

“Rack 'em up!”

Orlando Baptiste van Luxuskaas - intrepid adventurer, Victorian entrepreneur, bona fide gentleman – had an unusually confident tonal swagger to his utterances on this particular evening in the Abacus Gentleman's Club and Luncheon Emporium. The game was skittles and the stakes were suitably high. It simply could not be otherwise.

Earlier that day, whilst hiding in a bush fingering a dead hedgehog, Orlando had made himself a promise, a promise so immense that the promise itself had set in motion an infinity of events that, all permitting, would culminate this evening, in the company of his most esteemed friends and peers. “Ah the glory! The philanthropic joy!” he yelped before discretely smelling his fingers and lurking off across the park, hunched over like a partially-sighted hawker bereft of wares.

In the confines of his home, quite some time later, Orlando washed his hands and rubbed his moustache with the lard from choice quails (gently cooked in a vat of cinnamon and gravel for two-thirds of a fortnight by Messrs Frank, Frank and Dave, purveyors of the finest grooming products for the discerning gentleman, of which Orlando was most certainly one).

Once satisfied that his facial hair had gained the shape and presence befitting a man of his social benevolence, Orlando proceeded to sit jauntily at the edge of a solid, dark oak desk that more than occasionally doubled up as a table. This was his favourite thinking pose, having previously provided him with the basis for such feats of cerebral omnipotence as the realisation that a hat may (and on occasion even does) take on the characteristics of a sulking deer; that dust settles (under ideal conditions); the notion that geese can never be, under any circumstances but one, a suitable anagram for 318.33; and the by now irrefutable conclusion that everything leads back to something, provided that something is distinct, by some margin, to something else.

As he sat there, rather jauntily as previously established, he let out a series of randomly spaced shrills, intended to entice his gloves onto his hands. Having failed in this endeavour, despite several attempts and a splendid (and, it must be said, entirely improvised) impersonation of an intoxicated maid being reprimanded for inappropriate gaiety, Orlando composed himself. This was no ordinary evening, after all. He was to amaze his contemporaries to such a degree that any number of them could be excused for temporarily losing control of their sanity and glands.

He stared at himself in a mirror, gently humming what would, eventually, become the middle eight to the B-side of Enola Gay by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, a century and several decades later in a historical epoch that would be known, for the duration of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, as the Eighties. Orlando was not best pleased with his appearance but could conclude that pink lipstick coarsely applied his eyelids did little to change this view.

Back in the Abacus, things where unfolding.