10,000 Butlers

Norbert and Bobbin and Reginald and Frisky were all standing with their white gloves on, wringing their hands, bowing and shuffling. They had been taught what to do if the mistress tinkled her little bell or the master bellowed. But not one of the classes had explained how to deal with this type of disaster.

Sure, Gilbert and Filbert and Wilson and Narwhal had learned how to press the lord’s boxers and puff the lady’s niblets, and they were well schooled in how to pretend not to see indiscretions of any type occurring directly in their line of sight. It’s an art form. Not seeing what you’re seeing. One must be properly educated in order to avoid eye contact, to erase from memory the fact that the capital-M Master of the house is canoodling in the linen closet with Maggie the maid or Lucinda the laundress or Mariposa the masseuse while the queen mother is off at bridge or canasta or having her toes waxed or her eyebrows tattooed.

So someone is lying in a pool of blood and it’s obvious this wasn’t any accident. Nobody dies like this by accident. It was an on-purpose death, a murderous death, a death that makes you call in the detectives, and when the detectives arrived, well, they had their work cut out for them. Let me tell you.

We all know the cliché of any old-fashioned detective mystery. Say it loud. Say it with gusto: “The butler did it!” Even in modern movies and series du mini, every so often, the butler still did it. The writers try to fool you because they know you know they know the butler always did it, so they know you know the butler can’t have done it. And still? The butler did it.

But what happens when a butler is murdered at a butler convention? What happens when the police show up and there are a thousand possible suspects and many possible motives and every last one of the folks who had a reason to push poor Nigel down the stairs was a butler?

The truth was that Nigel couldn’t hang with the others. He didn’t like the white gloves. He didn’t appreciate the starched collars. He was not a natural yes man, yes ma’am, no sir, sorry sir? He had to bite his tongue so as not to say, “You know, you could reach for the teapot yourself. It’s, like, five inches from your manicured hand, from your plump palm, from your wrist weighed down by that $250,000 watch. Which is more than what most people’s houses cost, Sir.” No, he had to chew the insides of his cheeks to keep from saying, “Maggie the maid has syphilis, my liege, so enjoy going blind.”

This is why he’d signed up for the convention in the first place. He was the type of person who craved knowledge, wanted to know every last bit, every shred of detail, about any profession or interest or niche concept that came into his mind. When he’d been a gardener, for a season, he had learned about the life cycles of the most obscure plants, and he’d studied seed behaviors, and he had pissed off his roommate by germinating sprouts in paper towels in darkened corners, including said roommate’s sock drawer.

And when he’d decided to be a house painter, he had become educated about edging, and which tapes you used for the tiniest, most fiddly little corners, and he’d buffed and sanded and polished, but the thing was, he got bored. That’s what always happened. He mastered something, anything, whatever the thing, and he almost immediately lost interest.

Unlike his brief stint as a cabbie (he didn’t like backseat drivers) and his six-month foray into candle making, he’d become a butler out of pure necessity. The candles, it had turned out, were made with wicks that didn’t catch easily, and when they did, the scent of the candles (he'd tried to blend his own fragrance) turned off even the most patchouli-loving fanatic.

Financial need and the free room-and-board had become more important than the job itself. At first, he’d done the gig fine. Except for the internal infernal voice in his head wanting to talk back. That’s why gardening had been the perfect position for a while, because plants not only didn’t talk back but they seemed to appreciate the sound of his baritone rumbling voice. It had been the owners of the plants—as it always seemed to be—that got him in trouble.

Same with the painting. He’d be fine, would have been fine, if he could have taken his time with the jobs to do them properly, but everyone wanted things chop chop fast fast and he had ultimately splashed red paint down a wall in a bright crimson streak of screaming rage and left. Left his brushes. His gear. His truck. Walked away.

Anger and Nigel kind of went together. Something about this world just turned him off.

Butlering, or butling, or possibly buttling was really probably not the best way to go. Yet he lucked into an opening, and he read some books on how to be one and what to do and he was a quick study. The problem was that he couldn’t give a flying leap about polishing the samovar so that the master or the mistress or the maid being taken by the master or the farrier (in common parlance “horseshoer”) being ridden by the mistress could see their face (or any other part of themselves) in it.

Yes, he was meticulous. Yes, he was a careful man with a high level of competence, but sometimes you had to say what in the actual flick?

Training himself not to swear was like quitting smoking but worse.

A fundamental problem with being a butler that Nigel had unexpectedly experienced was that the rich people were always rewarding themselves with niceties, telling themselves they deserved a yacht with the biggest mast or a half a million dollar trip to the bottom of the ocean or a watch that cost a house, and yet to Nigel’s way of thinking it was the poor people who could use the massages and the pampering. Poor Mariposa was always rubbing the doughy bodies of her employers who couldn’t even be bothered to go to the WC on their own. They had high colonics to do that. Nigel found the paradox of the wealthy feeling overworked while they overworked their staff and underpaid everyone to be confounding and confusing.

The chauffeur said you just had to roll with it, but it helps if you’re a heavy drinker at the end of the day. The chef said, "Take whatever they don’t notice. And they don’t notice a lot. Plus, go through their garbage. It’s gold.” The security guards didn’t talk to anyone.

Nigel didn’t appreciate any of the advice. He wanted to not only do his job well but basically to like it.

He’d seen the ad for the butler convention in the back of Butlers Weekly, and he’d scraped together enough coin by selling weed (he still knew a thing or six about germinating seeds), and he packed his gloves and collar and off he went.

What a mistake. The convention wasn’t filled with people like him—men who were interested in becoming better butlers—but butlers who were already passionate about finesse and propriety and seemed to be here for a weekend of being snooty to one another. That damn Jeeves had really set Nigel off during one lecture when he’d stopped the speaker in order to point out that Nigel had an EarPod in. Dude. It was totally possible to pay attention to the lecture (on how to fold napkins into swans in case the parlor maid was busy in the broom closet with the duke), and Nigel was listening to the basketball game.

From then on, it seemed as if all the butlers had it in for him. He was used as an example of how not to press your shirt and why extra pairs of white gloves should be on your person at all time. Nigel has simply forgotten to take his off when dipping a French fry into catsup. Could have happened to anyone.

What apparently was the last stop for Geoffrey was the joke Nigel had made in the elevator about how this convention should be held in companion with the parlor maid convention. There had been something about tickling with a feather duster. Nobody laughed. Nigel was beginning to think that maybe buttling was not going to be his end all/be all, and that’s when a group of them surrounded him at the top of the stairs, and before he knew it, he was tumbling through space and time to land sprawled in a slump in the lobby.

Emergency services could do nothing. The death had been instantaneous, although in those final few seconds before landing, he’d wished he'd stayed a house painter, high on the purple kush he’d grown in his roommate’s bathroom, never laying his eyes on a single white glove.

The detectives began their questioning, trying their best to keep the butlers apart, but feeling somehow as if the herd had closed ranks, one butler running into the next. They all seemed to have identical haircuts, strong jaws, piercing blue eyes. At least, those were the young ones. The older ones combed their hair back over their bald spots and had slightly grizzled looks about their muzzles. But in a row, or in a swarm, they seemed to move with one heartbeat, one nervous system. Which actually made the detective, Mr. Harlow-Marlow-Farlow-on-the-Barrow nervous himself.

He nudged one of the younger detectives, who moved closer in to him, and he said, “I say! Here’s a twist for once. The butler didn’t do it. The butlers did!”