The Moonstone Readalong - How could you...
... lose such a ridiculously ginormous piece of bling?! Seriously. The moonstone was supposed to fetch £20,000 in 1848, which is now about £2,025,000 (or $3,169,125 for us Americans). Thanks a lot, inflation!!
Messy drawing is messy~ I have no idea what Rachel looks like in the movie, but I'm too scared to google for fear of spoilers.
Betteredge is a FANTASTIC narrator who has all these silly quirks:
- he tends to point out "foreign" education and/or thinking: "that foreign training of his - those French and German and Italian sides of him, to which I have already alluded - came out, at my lady's hospitable board, in a most bewildering manner"... is this Betteredge being Betteredge, or is this a Wilkie-ism? I'm not sure I quite get it.
- he's an old man, can't fault him for that, but please man, get on with it! It took forever to get to the main story, but I love that he pretty much writes like he talks - rambling this way and that until Penelope or Franklin prods him back on track. Thank God for them, or else we'd have Betteredge writing about his favorite passages of Robinson Crusoe instead.
- his description of the Ablewhite sisters: "they were as nearly as big as their brother; spanking, yellow-haired, rosy lasses, overflowing with superabundant flesh and blood; bursting from head to foot with health and spirits. The legs of the poor horses trembled with carrying them..." <-- I pretty much lost it at that part there!
So, to wrap it up, Betteredge is an awesome butler/narrator, and now the diamond/$3mill paperweight that Rachel got for her birthday that she carelessly sticks in a wooden drawer and not-so-surprisingly-gets-stolen gets the whole household in a tizzy. Thankfully, the brilliant and extremely Sergeant Cuff is on the case and my finger is totally pointed on Rosanna, the ex-convict/housemaid, but I'm pretty darn sure that since there are 400 more pages to go, I'm going to get smacked with a frozen red herring. I've pointed at everyone else in my head (even Betteredge, the unreliable narrator, perhaps?!), and then 400 pages prematurely, I get smacked with that frozen red herring when Sergeant Cuff states "nobody has stolen the Diamond". H-WHAT do you meeeeean by thissss, Cuff?!
To be continued... NEXT WEEK!
Glad to see someone is all gaga for Betteredge as much as I am. And I totally dig Cuff and his logical "Well it's just missing for now, not stolen." it's so sensible.
ReplyDeleteHe's so funny and harmless that I'm going to absolutely crushed if it really was "the butler that did it!". He's said the most sexist things (like marrying his wife for free rent and household cleanings) and he somehow gets away with it all because he'll wander off in his mind to Robinson Crusoe again...
ReplyDeleteI love your drawing of Rachel! It's perfect.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the "NO ONE HAS STOLEN THE DIAMOND" is itself a red herring... Maybe Cuff is telling people that just to see how they react? Cuff is a cunning gentleman, after all...
That drawing is AWESOME. I'm so glad you're here to be our illustrator. Now we just need Betteredge and Lady Verinder. :D
ReplyDeleteAnd yeah, I've basically accused everyone. Wilkie, you are so crafty, though.
I forgot to mention the Ablewhite sisters. I loved that line about their poor horses.
ReplyDeleteI love that drawing and now I have an idea of the size of this diamond. Cos "the size of a plover egg", that is not helpful.
I have so accused everyone in my brain, except Cuff, who I don't think could have done it, but WHAT IF HE DID?!
ReplyDeleteWhatever, it was probably Fosco or something... Depending on whether this was written before or after The Woman in White, of course!
hahaha Cuff is too eccentric to even care how much the moonstone is worth... he probably signed up for the case just to look at the rose gardens. I sort of want it to be that ladies man/cousin-lover Godfrey. The man is just too slick!
ReplyDeleteHonestly, what the heck is a plover? Have I even seen one before?! That's so random - he could've picked like a pigeon or a robin or something...
ReplyDeleteThanks! Oh Lordy, I fail at drawing old people, and I'm even worse at drawing butlers!
ReplyDeleteYep, I've accused everyone - EVEN BETTEREDGE. What if his harmless rambling ways are just to throw us off?!
Thanks, Rayna!
ReplyDeleteI love Cuff - he sure is a sneaky one! He's made everyone feel stupid at least on 3 different occasions, and still has time to stop and smell the roses.