Barkley Bohner, Celebrity Philosopher

Chapter Ten

In the Bohner family all history begins with the Battle of Hastings, but the real story is the Secret Betsy Ssterhood.

Soon after the battle, William the Bastard – now improbably known as The Conqueror rather than The Loser – assumed the English throne. He awarded Titan an estate near the Welsh border on the understanding that he never talk about the battle and never show up at William's court. He also banned the use of mint.

Titan named his estate Bonheur, meaning Good Hour. This was an apparent reference to his big moment during the Battle of Hastings. The estate was probably little more than a dank stone house with no chimney, in some clearing that bordered a smelly primeval forest out in the middle of nowhere.

Twenty years later it appeared that the estate was doing okay. The Domesday Book of 1086 listed Bonheur, formerly known as Gyrrd, on the River Gyrrd, in the shire of Nossex, as previously held by Tostig Forkbeard in desmense to Edward the Confessor, currently held in fee simple by le Titan in desmense to William.

"Wait!" said Moosh, spearing a fork in his take-away Chinese. "Say that in English."

"The first Barkley Bohner was lord of the manor," I explained. "He basically owned his land subject to the King."

"Yeh, but who's this Tostig Fuckbeard?"

"Forkbeard. He would have been the unfortunate Saxon that William evicted to make room for Titan."

The Domesday Book amounted to a major inventory of the holdings of William's kingdom. Now William had a record of who owed him what for tax collecting purposes and military obligations. According to the Domesday Book, Bonheur Estate was taxed for but one hide – about 120 acres – in 1066. Now, twenty years later, five hides were in production, but the tax remained the same.

This had to be the doings of Titan's third, maybe fourth, wife, a comely Welsh lass with a name with a lot of Ls and Ws that loosely translated to Betsy. Betsy wasted no time in exploiting the largely tax-free income of the estate to considerable advantage, namely by lending money at high but fair rates of interest to cash-strapped nobles.

"Very clever," said Moosh.

"She wasn't known as 'The Cunning' for nothing," I replied. "When the nobles defaulted, she attached encumbrances to their land. This had the effect of turning them into her vassals."

"Don't you mean her husband's vassals?"

"Conveniently dead. Died in bed, indoor hunting accident. The fate of many Bohner men. Technically, she was Lady of the Manor until her son, Barc'ylly the Squeaky, born eleven months later, reached majority."

Moosh thoughtfully swallowed a forkful of his Chinese. "All this is very interesting," he said, "but why are you telling me this?"

Because everything about the Secret Betsy's starts with Betsy the Cunning, I wanted to say, and the Secret Betsy's are trying to kill me.

Should we just drop the pretense of me being Dunstar Fobash right now?

Moosh seemed to be reading my mind. "Barkley Bohner," he said. "The current one is missing. Back in England, some people made an apparent assassination attempt on him."

Quick flashback, London, three months earlier: There I am, leaving our Knightsbridge flat, intending on spending a few days at Great Bottom, the family estate north of the city, not to be confused with Bonheur on the Welsh border. I'm just about to get into my car when a meteor crashes through my windshield.

Miraculously, the windshield is left intact, with no sign of the meteor. Next moment, I'm hailing a cab to Heathrow.

Had it not been for the meteor, I would be dead. Indeed, a team of assassins was waiting for me along a roundabout on my intended route to Great Bottom. This happened to coincide with where Her Majesty the Queen was due to make a public appearance.

The assassins patiently waited, trying to blend in with the crowd with their hard shell travel golf bags and telescope cases. Their continued presence drew the attention of six branches of Scotland Yard, including the Queen's security detail. So it was the authorities apprehended my would-be killers and charged them with attempted regicide.

Their defense to the attempted regicide was they were trying to kill me, instead.

The attempted regicide was just making world news as I landed in Oslo, the first stop in my getaway. I only learned the event had something to do with me some six weeks later from Wendy of Joe and Wendy from Belvedere, Ohio, while I was hiding out in Costa Rica, pretending to be your normal average retired white man.

Wendy passed on the information, not knowing my true identity. This came in the course of a rather layered conversation involving white cheddar, Wayne Newton, and cruise ship bathrooms.

"Not tonight, dear!" squawked her parrot, Tango.

So, here we were, right now – in the present, back to a steaming hot day, over my kitchen table in my Ungentrified Harlem hideout – Moosh and I, eating Chinese with plastic forks. The room was back to smelling like yellow curry, oppressive yellow curry with a hint of chrome.

"The current Barkley Bohner," Moosh said. "Believed to be somewhere in the Amazon rain forest. No one will find him there."

As you will recall, I have one birth certificate stating I was born in the Amazon. This was the place my father called home, where he led one expedition after another. As a kid, I hardly ever saw him. I think this was my mother's doing.

My father set off for one last visit in the mid-1980s. He begged me to go with him. What he didn't tell me was that he was going there to die. Had I only known. Ever since, I had been planning my own Amazon excursion. It was always going to happen next year.

"Barkley Bohner finally got around to it," Moosh let me know.

All this, I gathered, was his way of telling me I was safe right where I was, for right now, and that he was looking after me.

"No one knows where Barkley Bohner is," Moosh emphasized. "No one's seen Barkley Bohner, no one's been talking to Barkley Bohner." 

Least of all a certain New York City homicide detective, he could have added. Okay, I got it.

"So – Dunstar," he said, looking me straight in the eye. "You're telling me about the Bohner family history out of general interest, right? All these women named Betsy - these Secret Betsy's – they're sorta your hobby, right?"

"Uh, that's right," I said.

"Good," he said, drumming on my tablecloth.

Good, I indicated with a nod of my head.

Suddenly, Moosh's eyes shot over to his take-away. "Son of a bitch," he gasped. "Did you see that?"

"See what?" I asked.

"My mooncake. Would you call mooncake the Chinese equivalent of toast?"

"That might be a stretch," I said. "What did you see?"

"Maybe nothing. But, well, I swear for one second, my mooncake was hovering an inch above the table."

My toast! His mooncake!