Pencil Pete

Pencil Pete led a life well-suited to his moniker. To speak of this now; however, would be akin to talking of truce and treaty before one began to reminisce on how it was the war itself began. So, with your pardon, let us rewind the clock by a good thirty-seven years to better comprehend the life that followed. His mother, a woman as stoic as the dead, had known practically since the moment of his conception that he would never be worthy of the royal bloodline he'd be born into. With her previous four children, the pregnancies has been as easy and as comforting as a cucumber sandwich. Even their births had been nothing more than a viscous slip through her vaginal walls into the waiting and competent hands of the family midwife. Their deliveries had been barely worthy of a momentary grinding of the teeth, let alone the piteous wails she'd always been warned to expect. The unseemly trimesters preceding the cursed spawning of Peter Ignatius Bennet; however, had been a far different affair. They were marked by a near constant nausea that peppered her days with mad, frantic dashes to empty the contents of her stomach into the nearest and most promising receptacle. Half the time she made it. Half the time she did not. The many, many times she failed to make it never managed to ease the ensuing humiliation. As for the near ever present cramps, they drove her to the brink of madness. Stifling the screams that accompanied the crippling pain left her weak and broken. Had she given voice to them, they would have reverberated down the placid hallways of the castle, and that would never do. The shame of it would have been too much to bear. It was quite enough that she had to endure the rising disdain of the servants, relegated as they were to the oft repeated task of cleaning up the bile and partially digested chunks of all the many half eaten meals. It should come as no surprise that she had begun to loathe the child that plagued her swelling belly long before he was born.

Her water, when it broke, was as welcome as a heavy rain after a long hot summer. She collapsed to the floor in abundant gratitude, delirious with the joy that the era of agony was at long last behind her. Unfortunately, her presumptuous sense of relief was soon soundly clouted, as she began a period of labor that lasted a good forty-seven hours. It was as if the sadistic offspring inside her had made a pact with itself to inflict as much misery as possible before it relinquished tenancy in her womb. If only her old world harridan of a mother-in-law had condoned a C-section, she would have happily used her fingernails to strip away the flesh of her belly until she was able to grip the monstrous fetus inside her and rip it out like an unruly knot. Instead, she had no choice but to endure a hell on earth, pushing and pushing and pushing without relent, until she somehow managed to eject him from a body dancing on the threshold of death. Once the babe had been washed of blood and the detritus of the placenta, the midwife tentatively tried to place the newborn in the arms of his mother. The Duchess of Gainsborough quickly averted her eyes from the mewling lump and with a quick, contemptuous flick of her hand made it clear that she would never be able to forgive it of the crimes it had wrought upon her.

Thus it was that the progeny of royalty wound up being the ward of a lowly kitchen maid, Her name was Clara and she was as simple as she was wide. To the frustration of the entire staff, she was also the laziest and surliest servant the castle had ever known. As a result, she was as pleased as punch when her duties were shifted from the constant scrubbing of pots and pans to the relatively idle task of raising a child, especially since she intended to do so with as little fuss as possible. One trick she had up her sleeve in this regard was filling up his bottle with heavy cream. This would not only ensure the brat would grow to be as fat as she was, it would also render him lethargic. Lethargic was good! Lethargic meant no nursery rhymes or tiresome bedtime stories. Lethargic saved her the indignity of bouncing him merrily upon her knee. Lethargic meant not doing much of anything really. So, as the years passed, the child ballooned and Clara grew even fatter.

What nobody realized was that the barely noticed Pete was not nearly as sleepy as he appeared. This meant that the boy wasn't growing up as dim as he was round. Without anyone to distract him, Pete soon learned the wonders of numbers and counting, Counting was going on all the time in the kitchen. Footmen counted off the number of times they ran a cloth over the shoes of their betters. Cooks counted off cups of flour and the cracking of eggs. The head cook was also quite keen on taking a proper inventory of all deliveries, from the grand to the small. In a loud and imperious voice she would sound off the tallies, "FORTY BUSHELS OF CORN", "THIRTY-TWO TINS OF LARD", "SIXTEEN CASES OF CABERNET"..... It was as if she was a herald announcing the arrival of guests at a coronation ball. When there was nobody at hand in the audible act of counting, Pete would happily give way to counting flagstones in the fireplace, the number of candlesticks on a shelf, and even the many buttons to be seen on every uniform in the room. The kitchen, as humble as it appeared, provided a first rate education to a boy who thought his world would always be redolent of the smell of bread and onions.

At the age of five, Pete had reached the age upon which he would be expected to pull his weight, already quite considerable, to the unceasing dearth of tasks that besieged the staff seven days a week. Usually a child of his age would begin his servitude by the emptying of chamber pots, or the steadying of buckets means to catch the sudden rush of blood after the throat of a pig had been properly slit. This would have been Pete's ignoble fate as well had he not long ago come under the keen and watchful eye of one Mr. Shaker, the highly respected and much beloved House Accountant. He was far too clever not to claim the boy as his apprentice, knowing that a failure to do so would have resulted in a tragic waste.

Within a matter of weeks, Pete had grown ever so deeply smitten with a kingdom built of ledgers and balances. He lost any and all interest in the barbaric game of cricket. He became impatient and contemptuous with the stupefying ordeal of Sunday services. In their place, he lost himself in the beguiling intricacies of 'accounts payable' and soon came to dread the threat of insolvency far more than the ridiculous concept of hell and its army of prancing demons. It didn't take long for the undeniably brilliant Mr. Shaker to see in Pete a pupil who would soon outgrow his tutor. As much as he would dearly miss the now twelve-year-old protege, he was forced to concede that keeping him under his wing would be a great and unforgivable disservice.

After a great deal of uncharacteristic dithering, he reached out to one of his mildy wicked second cousins, known only now as Seven To ONE. This particular mildy wicked cousin was a member of a sizable pack of bookies that had sworn allegiance to the "Spade Keepers", easily the most notorious and powerful gang in all of London. Mr. Shaker, in his usual jovial manner, discreetly inquired as to whether those higher up in the food chain might have need of a wunderkind, a young bookkeeper so impressively skilled that he could do anything from spot the absence of a single farthing, to building up a slush fund that would be the equal of a king's ransom. To be fair, Mr. Shaker would never have set the lad on such a course had he not devoutly believed in both his work ethic and his character. If anyone could rise through the ranks of the underworld without getting blood on their hands, or at least not a great deal of it, it would be his precious Pete.

Seven To One had been gifted with the good instincts essential to keeping him alive on the streets. It was these very same instincts that were now telling him that setting up some kind of meeting for the boy genius might very well be rewarded with some small ascension in his position. As it happened, his sly maneuverings to set things in motion miraculously managed to find their way into the ears of the Godfather himself, the well-esteemed and quite understandably feared Pocket Prince. 

The leader, ipso facto king of the not so motley ban of thieves, found himself amused by the notion of giving audience to the mysterious Pete and thus made it happen the very afternoon he had heard of him. The very moment the Pocket Prince set eyes on Pete, he knew he had found a gem. The Godfather had always trusted a fat man and Pete was by far the fattest man he had ever encountered. On the spot he bestowed upon the boy the moniker of Pencil Pete, somehow divining that the rotund fellow would never have need of a pencil as pencils were for those who made mistakes.

Twenty-five years later, Pencil Pete sat forlornly at the deathbed of his boss/best friend, holding his hand, caressing his brow and doing his very best to whisper words that would offer some form of comfort. Before the old man took his last rattling breath he looked his right hand man dead in the eye with a palpable intensity and told Pencil Pete that he was the only one worthy enough to take his place. Thus, at the relatively young age of thirty-seven, Pencil Pete, or just plain Pete, had traversed a path composed of many twists and turns, never knowing that the shadow of his bulk would one day strike terror in all those who had cause to stand before him.