Chapter One Hundred and Thirty
The soft depression in the mattress where the duchess had slept, between the slumbering forms of Herr Voot and Sniggly, always with a dense, dreamy silence, formerly fragranced with her rose-petal lotion, now with the mongrel admixture of many men’s sperm, was bare. The cleaner Janice found her highness, stomach hacked open and entrails strewn about the cupboard, and made the necessary report to her higher-ups. Voot was bewildered; Sniggly inconsolable; Curtis/Thaddeus mildly amused; while everybody else took it as they would the death of a favourite character in a novel they were reading: unfortunate, but ultimately unreal.