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The story of a group of artistic aristocrats' long, hot summer by the lake. . . |
| [Introduction]
With the 19th Century just dawning, the baroque classicism of the last few decades is influenced, led and corrupted by a mixture of the darkness and despair of the French Revolution as well as by the dreamy wings of the spirit of freedom it has brought upon the world. With the rest of the countries in Europe fearing similar revolts, and traitors being chased in every shadow, the whole of the civilised world is locking down amidst its own atmosphere of paranoia and despair. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, it is a time when revolutionaries, artists, free-thinkers and poets seem to have all but free reign on the world and have become the outraged and outrageous celebrities of the day. Around this campfire, "Invalid Item"  tell the story of one such group of people. Children of their times, their minds are filled with a deep sense of injustice at the elements of society, government and religion which keep them chained to the ground, but they are also filled with the great, grand dreams of what the would could be if only humanity would become more than the sum of its parts.In these enlightening, changing times, soaked through with long conversations, strong beliefs in revolution, free love, women’s rights and drenched with art, poetry, drugs, and the produce of those views, it is a time when anything seems possible: Anything can happen . . . And it almost certainly will. |
| It was only June, but already the summer was well underway. It burned with the kind of violence that shivers with the certainty that it cannot last; that kind of heat never does. The scene was as perfect as a picture: the sky was a brilliant shade of turquoise, unblemished by even the faintest wisp of cloud; the sun was a small, painfully bright circle suspended in the heavens, shedding its watered-amber light over everything that lay beneath; the trees whispered to one another in the breeze, their great, green limbs stretched out lazily beneath the sky with a conceited kind of self-importance, filling the air with their rich, earthy scent; and the waters of the vast lake before the house were as bright and tranquil as a mirror, a shifting, silvered echo of the great and golden sky. The heat was painful on Clara’s skin as she sat on the jetty, dipping her toes in the water. Her cheeks and naked shoulders were already turning an angry shade of red with its touch, struck all the redder by the pale butter-colour of her lace-edged dress and the delicate translucence of her palest, blondest hair. Her feet were making the surface of the lake shiver, breaking up the reflection of the world and sky in a way that fascinated her. She stared into it vacantly, her fingers toying with the rim of her broad sunhat that every now and again she’d lift to fan herself with as if to drive the heat away. It never worked. A gentle breeze tugged absently at her pale-gold curls that had been twisted and decorated with flowers and ribbons. When he’d fixed it that way this morning, Daniel had whispered something in her ear about the May Queens of days long since passed. It was typical of him not to even realise that May was already long behind them. She shook her head and smiled. It was only the second day that she and her lover had spent here, but already the place, and the people they were associating with were filling her with a depth of ambivalent emotion. She wasn’t sure whether she was in love with it all or simple wanted to escape. She tried not to think about the grand, whitewashed house not too far behind her, or what was going in inside those walls. She tried not to worry about these strange people with their strange mannerisms and stranger words . . . Or where, exactly, all of that would lead. By the time he came out to her, she was already far too lost in her own internal reverie to notice him until his footfalls made the jetty shiver beneath her. Catching her breath, she turned and looked up at him, not quite sure what to expect, and when her eyes fell on Daniel’s too familiar eyes and warm, dark curls, she smiled and sighed with relief. As he slid down beside her, she noted behind elusive eyes that he was poorly dressed: his shirt was unfastened over his elegant, milk-coloured skin; his feet were bare and he was so far beyond the likes of jackets and top-hats that she doubted he even remembered what they were. His eyes were filled with all that dreamy innocence which let her know exactly what he’d been drinking, and as his arm slid about her shoulders and the exotic, buttery, New World accent snaked out across the watery tranquillity to meet her, she sighed. “Isn’t the day just beautiful,” he waxed, seemingly unaware of her unease. “A world away from all those intemperate storms the nights seem so determined to bring here?” |
| She half-turned, trying to shake away the lingering malaise that seemed to cling to her no matter how lovely the sparkle of the sun’s light on the warm glass of the lake, but whatever she might have said to Daniel died on her tongue as a voice behind them cut through their private joy like a cloud sliding across the face of the sun. "Let daylight keep her fierce bright blaze and all the fields their green array; for me, the soft embrace of night and thunder's roaring company." Clara stiffened, only Daniel's languid weight against her side keeping her from jumping with surprise, and Daniel stirred, looking back over his shoulder with a hazy smile on his lips, his brow slightly pinched as though he knew he ought to say something but could not quite lay his hands upon the words. Soft laughter danced across the back of her neck and sent a mix of emotions as potent as absinthe slither down into her belly, the wood of the dock creaking softly in answer to the click of a man’s boot heels, and when that resonant London voice spoke again it was too close for her to politely ignore any longer. “It’s good to see that your morning constitutional has sharpened your wits as usual, Mr. Breckenridge.” She could feel Daniel wilt slightly under the weight of the man’s regard, and then she knew without turning that his eyes were on her like the weight of a storm ready to break in an instant. “Lady Rochdale.” There really was no dignified way to find her feet from this position, and certainly none that wouldn’t result in Daniel falling into the lake in the process. Gritting her teeth silently, Clara shifted her weight and twisted her back almost uncomfortably in her light corset so she could look up into the face that belonged to that voice, the face she was coming to dread… and perhaps, on some unspoken level in the reaches of her being she would never have dared to speak of with her mother, to crave. “Lord Ruthven. Personally, I find the weather quite… enjoyable.” She hated the stammer in her voice, but could hardly help it; his features quite literally stole her breath as though he had sipped it from her throat. Angular cheekbones, hawkish nose, a Greek jaw with full lips framed by the tumble of his ebony hair, and deep-set dark eyes that seemed to stare right through her morning dress and corset and flesh and bone into somewhere eyes were never meant to go; he was captivating, the picture of a nobleman from one of Byron’s poems she wasn’t supposed to have read, and worst of all he knew it. That dark gray gaze with its tiny flecks of mesmerizing blue held her pinned to the dock at his feet, scarcely breathing and loathing the way her pulse hammered with Daniel scarcely a foot away, and the faint smile on Ruthven’s full, sensual lips told her he was perfectly aware of the effect he had on her. “M’lady must, of course, please herself.” There was something profane in the way his lips wrapped around those last two words and she felt herself blushing, suddenly profoundly grateful that Daniel was too far into the laudanum to truly follow the conversation, and desperately tried to compose herself. She was a lady of standing, an educated woman, and she knew as much about the scandals that Ruthven had caused in London as anyone; several of her closest friends knew men who had sworn to shoot the blackguard on sight if he showed his face in the city again, and she would be an utter fool to let herself be taken in by him. And yet… and yet, standing there under the sun in a morning coat as though the heat washed at some invisible barrier around him without touching him in the least, she could not think of anyone more fascinating she had ever known in her life. |
| Daniel turned away from the lord and the lady on the jetty, his eyes misted with a hidden depth and knowledge. Three times she had refused to become his wife, and three times he had laughed at him for asking. He stared out across the waters, his mind swelling as if to encompass a sudden glut of wisdom, as if God was going to reach down from the heavens and with lightening make clear to him all the mysteries of the world he had found himself trapped in. The mountains struck up around the edges of the lake, cupping the waters in their palm, the snow glistened on their crags and peaks, and in the silence brought by the army of thunder last night, he could hear the eagles singing to the valleys and the wild goats of the mountains braying across the infinite gulfs, reaching out to one another like lovers in a lake. He raised his arms and spread his fingers, feeling the breeze lick at his hands, the cold air that rolled down from those peaks so different from the stifling dust and dirt of the cities, so pure, as if God had made it only that morning. He took in a deep lungful of it, and felt it pervade his being. “Perhaps m’lady would care to join me in a casual walk around these shores,” Ruthven paused just a moment too long. “That is, of course, unless her escort finds offence in the offer.” He glanced over at Daniel, and didn’t even try to hide the contempt smirk that spread across his face. Clara followed his gaze, her eyes resting on the almost elfin figure stretched out like a sacrifice and so in love with the world that his mortal body was almost broken by the strain of trying to contain it. She sighed sadly to herself. “It is a fact!” Daniel said suddenly, turning on the two of them. “All life is but one, all matter and form spring from the same well and run through the same valleys, and through the same rivers and streams and tributaries to the same destination. It is only when it reaches there that its form and substance are decided. Like common water, it is poured into different shaped glasses and vases and bottles, and that is the only difference between one object and another. Is there some secret, mystical energy that is given to you and I and the birds and the beasts, some hidden fire that makes us live and breathe and love and die. Of course not! It is only the shapes of the vessels that we are contained within and we define each other by that separates us from the trees and mountains and sky.” He turned back, and stared at the slopes of the mountains, his mind reaching into the hidden caves with their sights not disturbed since the dawn of time. “Of course the mountains and the sky and the very earth itself dreams! Such deep, slow dreams that to us they seem like nothing more than a half-imagined thought or a gently blowing breeze, but to them we seem like specks of dust, caught up and thrown around in the wild eddies of an exuberant breeze, tiny flecks of dirt that catch a ray of sunlight and glitter for only a second before our existence is once again negated.” He turned suddenly back to face them, the looks on their faces not reaching him. “And what separates us from the fish, the water?” he demanded, suddenly fumbling to make his way out of his shirt? “What separates us from the waves and their mistress the moon, from the great whales and dragons and serpents that sailors speak of in hushed tones to each other, but dare not mention to those folk confined on the land? Those folk locked like this country by the land, surrounded on all sides and unable to escape, unable to gaze out and see no horizon, to see the sky blend into the water and see no barriers . . . What separates us? Only the desire that we should be separate!” He threw his head back and laughed, turning and jumping into the lake, the cold waters swallowing him like a stone. |
| The lake seemed to swallow every sound from the air, even as it swallowed Daniel. In a second, the world seemed to move from being a place filled with the calling of birds, the braying of goats, and the strange, lilting sound of Daniel’s rich, foreign accent rising above everything like a soaring bird, into an unsettling kind of silence filled only with the sound of the water recovering from the blow he had wrought upon it. As that silence wrapped around her like a blanket, Clara could hear herself drawing breath; a sharp, sickening sound in the sudden silence as she pulled herself clumsily to her feet and stumbled back from the lip of the jetty. Perhaps she would have retreated so far and so fast with the shock that she herself would have been cast into the water, had Lord Ruthven not been there to catch her. His fingers closing about her shoulders, he turned her around slowly to face him, grasping her by the elbows and supporting weight near-effortlessly. “My dear girl,” he murmured faintly, leaning forward so his lips brushed against the coils of her golden hair as he spoke. “Do try to control yourself, won’t you?” Clara eyes dragged up slowly to meet his, raking laboriously up the fabric of his waistcoat like serrated knives, or unpolished stone. By the time she found herself staring up at him, her watery blue eyes were wide with shock and the air was catching in her lungs. She didn’t quite know whether to cry, scream, or just collapse in his arms. From somewhere behind her, she was vaguely aware of the sound of something breaking the surface of the water and drawing breath, but by now, her head was already beginning to swim and she wasn’t sure exactly how much longer she could keep her balance. “Perhaps,” Daniel’s strange, lilting voice called out from the water, mindless of whatever may or may not be happening around him. “That’s exactly what we are: the dreams of the Earth . . . The sky . . . The moon . . . Perhaps we’re just the momentary, sparkling facets of their long, drawn-out dreams that play themselves out over the centuries.” Almost before he was finished, Clara was turning around to face him, pulling away from Lord Ruthven in a swirl of butter-coloured cotton and lace, her voice sharp and unbecomingly shrill as it echoed out across the water. “Oh, Daniel, would you please, for the love of God, just shut up? Must you always make such a fool of yourself? Must you always make such a fool of me?” Shaking with a tearful rage brought on, in part, by the sudden relief of seeing Daniel alive, combined with the dangerous cocktail of emotions this other, darker man seemed to inspire in her, Clara picked up her skirts and ran towards the house, not stopping to look back at the two men she had left on the jetty behind her. Reaching the back door, she sat down on the steps and put her head in her hands. What exactly was she doing here, anyway? And why, in the world, had she agreed to stay here with these people? |
| The shrill dagger of her voice had brought Daniel up short, left him floundering in the water like the mythical millipede who when called upon to think about how he walked found he could not move his limbs. His head dipped under the surface and came up again, water running down over his wild hair and dripping from his long lashes as his eyes flailed about for some connection, some anchor to cling to now that Clara’s outburst had ripped the laudanum dream asunder and driven the outside world back into his thoughts. Then Ruthven’s voice caught and held him, a mesmerizing thrum that carried out over the lake like a thick clinging mist. “Be easy, Daniel. Let the water cradle you between earth and sky and think no more on it.” It was a voice from dreams, a voice to stir the stones themselves, and the laudanum made of Daniel’s thoughts a flawless resonating chamber; the lines smoothed from his face, the glaze over his eyes thickening until they reflected the sun as flawlessly as the shimmering water around him, and Ruthven left him there adrift in the endless rippling glass of the lake like a lily on molten golden. He hesitated on the path to the house, long curls framing his face and giving it an angelically pensive look that would scarce have been out of place on the face of Giordano’s Saint Michael; on the one hand, it would be quite entertaining to pursue Lady Rochdale back to the house and watch that helpless blush creep back onto her cheeks. On the other hand, of course, he’d only just escaped from a late morning breakfast with Lady Drummond and was not yet prepared to step back into the spider’s parlor just yet. The bait or the hook, the cheese or the trap… the tiny clearing at the foot of the path echoed with his low chuckle as he spun together an off-cadence bit of doggerel and then discarded it in the same breath. Let the women tend to themselves for the moment; he needed his morning constitutional in any event, and if the incessant heat relented by early afternoon he might even find it possible to attend to his work as well. If not, well, there were other entertainments to be had. Allowing himself a wicked little smile, he turned on his heel and began the long walk along the side of the lake with a long, ground-eating stroll that carried him swiftly into the half-shadowed embrace of the trees without a hint of hurry. |
| From her seat on the steps of the house, Clara could saw Ruthven leave. She exhaled slowly, a deep, inward sigh of relief that crept out from somewhere deep inside her; having to face up to Lord Ruthven again so quickly would not have been good for anyone . . . least of all her. Slipping her hand into her reticule, she took out a carefully folded handkerchief and used it to dry the angry, hurtful tears from her gold-fringed eyes. She wrapped the small mixture of fabric and lace about her hands and stared down distractedly at the monogram embroidered in the corner: ‘D.B’. She sighed slowly and ran her fingers over the elegant, sloping edges of the letters, so caught up in her own reverie with Daniel’s token that she barely even noticed as he rounded the corner, pulling his dry shirt over his wet skin so that it stuck to him, clinging like a thin, ethereal layer of tissue paper to a basin of silvered water. “Clara . . .” he began slowly, his voice still drugged and distant. She caught her breath, her cheeks darkening quickly at finding herself disturbed from such secret, private thoughts. But, as her eyes fell upon him; glittering and effulgent in the sunlight that passed through the heavy trees, she felt the sharp pinprick of salt water come again in her eyes. “Daniel,” she said hurriedly, rising to her feet as if to draw even more of a line beneath whatever it was he may have said, given half the chance. “Please, I pray you, before you speak, listen to me.” She took a small, but confident step forward, all the nerves, all that embarrassment draining away from her now that she was once again alone with her sweetheart. When they shared moments like this, she found it hard to understand why things between them ever travelled so far from fine. Daniel watched her as she approached with his dark, drug-filled eyes. His mind was filled with a million flickering thoughts that he kept trying to catch and tie down for a moment, like an entomologist running haphazardly around a field with his net and his pins . . . His thoughts were as light and as fickle as butterflies; all the way back from the lake he had struggled to hold on to what he had decided to say, and now that she had confronted him and forced the words straight out of his mouth, he couldn’t remember for the life of him what it had been. So, he just watched her with his hollow, dilated pupils and he extended his hands to take her long, delicate fingers in his as she drew close to him. “My darling,” she began in a gentle, intimate voice, unaware of how much she was saying now would still be with him in even an hour’s time. “My sweet, strange, beautiful American poet . . . Please, you have to forgive me.” She spoke the words as earnestly as she could manage, her eyes already misting over and forcing her to look away, to trail slowly up the path leading up the wooded slope behind the house, towards the sky. “I don’t mean to become angry with you . . . I don’t mean to make you feel so little like a man and a gentleman by losing my temper in front of your friends or . . .” she trailed off . . . she couldn’t say it. Daniel gazed at the one violently-burning cheek and single, watering eye she had turned towards him and smiled faintly to himself. She couldn’t say it, but even his erratic and opium-touched mind could finish the sentence for her somewhere in the silence of his own head: ‘or by turning you down every time you ask for my hand.’ “I just,” she began afresh, trying to paint over the painful space filled only with their shared knowledge of what had gone unsaid. “I worry about you endlessly . . . And I feel so out of place here, among your friends. You are all so . . . You are all poets . . . And I am just a skinny, whelp of a girl from Nottingham . . . I cannot help but feel so out of place here . . . So lost among you and these companions of yours who seem to understand you so much better than I do . . .” ***** I wonder if they are at one another’s throats yet, Lord Ruthven mused to himself as he walked beside the lake, the forgiving, grass-clad ground thick and clingy with last night’s rainfall. Or perhaps they have just entirely forgone that, and are already simpering like two kicked puppies. He shook his head and sighed. He adored Daniel, he really did, over the last few years he had become something of mascot to Ruthven’s little circle of artistic reprobates, but sometimes he had the most appalling taste in women. Or, just the most unbecoming tendency for falling head-over-heels for them, he thought. Still, he must admit, this latest catch of his companion’s was about the pick of the lot; young, beautiful, rich . . . wayward . . . utterly decided upon horrifying and disgusting her family. Ruthven had to admit, he was impressed. Given half the chance, he would have chosen her for himself, in fact, he may still do just that . . . But not before he had toyed with them both just a little while longer. Sometimes, the journey simply more important than the destination, he thought. Drawn from his musings, Ruthven became slowly aware of something shifting timidly in the undergrowth, making the great, ferny leaves of bracken shiver with its presence. He slowed as he approached it and inclined his head a little, his dark brow knitting together over storm-brewed eyes. He didn’t have to wait too long. As the dark-haired girl flung herself at him, screaming and waving her arms, Ruthven did his best to greet her with his finest, most unimpressed expression. “Oh,” said the girl disappointedly, her howling and hand-waving coming quickly to an end. “And I had so hoped to surprise you, Aven.” “And perhaps you would have done, Miss Drummond,” he said matter-of-factly. “Had I not seen you shivering with excitement from far down the way.” The girl sighed and lifted her bramble-scarred skirts up, slipping across the turf to meet him and lacing her arms wantonly about his neck. She was wearing a broad, straw sunhat, and the pleasing, pale dress embroidered with the smallest and most delicate of flowers in a spread of pastel colours that he had bought for her not three weeks before he left from Dover. “Oh,” she said again, although there was now a flicker of charming allure in her voice. “I thought you to have mistaken me for a rabbit, or some other such inoffensive, woodland creature.” “My dear Miss Drummond,” he said darkly, a smirk tugging at his full, Cupid’s bow lips. “I fear I could never mistake you for something, as you put it: small and inoffensive, no matter how hard I may try.” “Aven!” she exclaimed, using the epithet that Daniel had given him as if it was her birthright. “How rude you are this morning! What is it that has put you in such a bad temper today? Did I not do enough to lighten your mood last night,” she leaned forward, her voice lowering as her lips brushed against his ear. “When the others were all in bed?” Ruthven gave her the kind of smile that someone may give an annoyance they are tolerating for now, but ultimately would much rather do without. “Perhaps you didn’t,” he said dryly, resting his hand firmly on her shoulder to lever her away. “Perhaps your cousin would have done a finer job than you.” It was a low blow, and he knew it, but he was in no mood for her games just now. “Who, by the by,” he continued. “Is currently possibly drowning in the lake . . . or possibly finding himself thoroughly emasculated at that hands of that awful Lady Rochdale.” “You leave Clara out of this, you scoundrel,” she said, taking a step back and wrapping her arms about her waist as if she had been kicked in the stomach. “She is a lovely girl, and she has been most kind to me.” “Though I venture to say,” Ruthven postscripted sardonically. “She has not been quite so kind to your cousin.” “Why you are in quite the intolerable mood this morning, Aven!” she proclaimed in a high, strident voice; the deep, rich-as-molasses Mississippi accent, that was far less pronounced in her than in her less-polished cousin, biting at the edges of her words. “I do declare I shalln’t spend one more second in your company while you are like this. I bid you good morning.” She turned to stalk away through the thick, cloying grass, but as she did, he reached out and caught her by the waist, pulling her back into his arms in one single, smooth motion. “Oh no,” he purred darkly in her ear as she melted against him like butter. “I don’t think there will be any need for that just yet.” ***** |
| The heavy, orange sun had toppled over its apex and was slipping slowly beneath the lines of trees and mountains that served to divide the sky from the land. The afternoon was unseasonably warm, and many miles away in the towns the stray dogs were basking in the slim shade offered by the buildings and the men and women who had lived their whole lives under this sun’s oppressive mastership walked slowly and languidly, not bothered by the silent ticking of time as it fell away. The heat seemed to deny in them any passion, and quarrels and loves were saved for the cooling touch of twilight, where the energy that they had soaked up in these hot hours like lizards would burst and flare and they would fit into a few hours what other men are forced to spread over whole days. On the shores of the lake, the house waited and basked in the cool breeze drifting off the waters of the lake, breathing it in slowly to try and disperse the cloying heat that was building up in its rooms, and the cool air ran through the rooms like excited school children until, exhausted, it collapsed and dispersed its atoms so finely that many might call it dead. Like the morally corrupt in society, the hot air rose to the very top of the house, settling in the space in the attic and slowly seeping through the roof and back out into space. The small window in the attic space had its heavy shutters drawn tightly closed, denying the sun any true path into the room, and so instead it had to make its way around the seals and through the gaps, turning itself muted and distorted, and slight a reflection of the glory it carried before it outside. Caught in the subtle half-light, specks of dust hovered and danced, wavering slowly in their progression from one rising vent of air to another, and just like the men and women of the towns not worrying about the cruel slice to time as they went about their lives. The only furniture in the room was a plain wooden table that seemed left by the servants who used to live and love in the room, and an equally plain wooden bed dressed in yellowing bed sheets which rose and fell as their occupant slowly breathed in and out. She was timeless and immortal, resting somewhere above the dizzying eddies of the streams of time that seemed to run so fast and so brutal, unchanging and separate almost entirely from the world outside. Her eyes watched the backs of her eyelids with a languid intensity, a confident, steady stare that had nothing else to look at and no intention of finding anything. The air in her lungs moved and circulated only out of habit, an impulse she could not find the will inside herself to deny or fight. **** In the full and brilliant sunshine, soaking up its radiance like a mirror and basking in its glory as if this friendship were the only one he could bring himself to love and trust, Lord Ruthven threw his head back and laughed, a cruel salute to the nobler humours. “What on earth is so funny?” Clara asked as she slowly approached, her arm linked through Daniel’s. Just like mortal men and women living in this heat, the sun had dulled their passions and they were for a while content to simply enjoy its heat and the freshness of the air, so alien to them who had grown up in cities choked to bursting with people. They had walked about the shores of the lake, and Clara had found herself wondering at the mountains, at the shear size and age of them, at the impossible geometry of their slopes and their nature. She had asked Daniel how old he thought they were, and he had told her about the titans and the gods, and how under of their battle the ground had buckled, eventually swallowing the mighty titans and closing them in massive burial mounds. She was far too much a child of Natural Philosophy to believe, but her mind failed to find anything else to convince itself as to the construction of such defying structures. Lord Ruthven glanced at her from under his main of hair, and with a wicked smile pointed out to the waters of the lake. Clara followed his finger, and gasped as she saw rings of white water where it had been dispersed in waves, rolling out from a sinking point in the centre. “You monster!” she shouted, suddenly and at the top of her voice. “She can’t swim!” She let her companion and her possessions drop as, overwhelmed with such a tumult of passions she couldn’t hope to categorize or name them all, she ran forwards and dived into the water, ducking under its surface like a swan. Daniel calmly continued at the same pace, drawing up beside the Lord as he watched the display with a lecherous look hovering in the corners of his eyes. “I have promised Clara a trip into the mountains,” he said, relaxed and unconcerned. “We mean to discover the flash of light, the genius liquid that compels us to live and think and love when all around us, the world is content to wait until its inevitable destruction. Would you care to join us?” |
| “Naturally, Daniel. I would never dream of missing such an expedition.” Ruthven shaded his eyes from the sun for a moment, the better to appreciate the vision of Clara dragging a water-logged and gasping Miss Drummond from the lake, both of them soaked through to the skin and utterly askew in defiance of any remnant of propriety. “I would never miss a chance for one of your little adventures, no matter how … spontaneous. They always seem to lead us to the most interesting places, and I cannot imagine a more enjoyable use of my time.” Reaching out to clasp Daniel’s shoulder, he gave the younger man a fiercely wicked little grin and stepped down toward the two women with an easy, unhurried grace. Clara met him halfway, tumbling over her own soaked skirts and almost incoherent in her anger, and her hand caught his perfect cheek with a wild fury that rocked him back half a step with its sheer desperate force. “You wicked, horrid, thoughtless, reckless bastard of a man! She might have drowned! How dare you, Sheldon?!” She drew back her hand to strike him again, whole back tensed into the blow, and staggered off balance as he caught her wrist in his hand inches from his face and held her there with a fierce, impaling gaze that left no room for escape or struggle. He spoke softly, almost too softly to hear, but the force of his voice was like a blade against her throat. “You receive one for free, Clara, because I find you quite lovely. You will not get a second.” |
| For many years, Clara had considered herself quite the enlightened child of her age. She had read her Mary Wollstonecraft and guessed to know her rights and worth as well as any woman who had ever lived, so on finding herself restrained by a superior strength and presence, and, being female, unable to do anything about it, she turned her eyes on Daniel for a long and desperate moment. She found herself wishing, with all her heart and soul, that once, just once, the man she loved would step in to defend her honour now that she was soaking wet, shaking with rage and thoroughly slighted. She knew at the back of her mind that it wasn’t going to happen – Not now, and maybe not ever. The knowledge of that made her sick somewhere deep inside. She wanted to cry until this desperate sense of futility went away, she wanted to scream and strike Ruthven again, no, she wanted to pull his pistol from his belt and see how much of a man he would make of himself then. But, she knew that all these things were beyond her. She was a lady, what’s more, she was a lady of standing, and must at all times consider her reputation, and so she simply shook with rage and stared coldly at Lord Ruthven until the immediate onset of his capricious boredom led him to release her. Then, she turned sharply and hurried back to the other girl’s side, the lake-water deftly hiding her salt-soaked eyes as she knelt down by her side and ran her fingers through the girl’s tangled, matted hair. “What terrible, frightful, cruel and unkind creatures they are!” she exclaimed desperately, more to herself than to the other woman. “It’s all right, Miriam It’s all right . . . Come,” she says firmly, turning her eyes on the two men with a vile and ferocious fire burning deep behind them. “Let me take you back to the house and get you dry and changed . . . Get us both dry and changed, as I doubt that anyone here is gentleman enough to escort us . . . We exist in a den of thieves and devil-worshipers . . . Come, let us leave.” “My dear Lady Roachdale,” said a deep, warm voice approaching from the woodland that made Clara start. “I’m afraid I must dispute your words, as I consider myself neither a thief, nor a devil-worshipper.” Twisting around, Clara looked up at the immaculate figure that approached her. Turned out perfectly in his blood-red officer’s jacket, and with such warmth, affection and concern in his voice as he limped with his cane and his one good leg towards her, the sight of him was enough to make her blush deeply at her words, and the way she was knelt in the mud beside the lake, soaking wet and bedraggled. “Captain Redbridge!” she said hopelessly, her cheeks burning violently. “I didn’t . . . I mean . . .I wasn’t aware . . .” “I know you weren’t, my dear,” he cut in tenderly as he closed the distance between himself and the others, the late afternoon sunlight catching in his rich, red-brown hair. “It was simply an attempt a good humour, I do hope you will forgive me. Perhaps I may begin by escorting yourself and Miss Drummond back to the house, if you would allow yourselves to be escorted by an aging cripple, that is.” A mixture of grief and utter, bitter relief suddenly washed through her. Clara could hear herself laughing, she was almost certain it was so she didn’t have to weep. “Oh, Captain Redbridge, if you would do us the honour of escorting us back home, I would be deeply in your debt,” she said, sounding far more desperate for his aid than she had meant to. |
| The captain laughed, his cane clicking on the ground. “My dear Lady Roachdale,” he said. “You sound almost like a heroine in one of those . . .” he paused, waiting for the word to present itself to duty with a sharp salute, but was grossly disappointed. “We really must get you inside, before you die of the cold and the wet,” he finished quickly, hoping he could cover over the pause and wash away any thoughts that it may have given birth to. He feared the thoughts of his companions; he was a man in the army of a country that was at war . . . and many, many miles from any battlefield. He had already part-convinced himself that they thought him a coward, and he wanted to give them no grounds to suspect that his mind was left on the field amongst the blood and shot, his body rambling around in a distant haze like so many other men he had seen staggering away from the galvanomic horror of the skirmish. Miss Drummond half laughed, half chocked. “I feel like that wretched dog of yours,” she said with a bitter look towards Lord Ruthven. “Then perhaps,” Ruthven said with a wicked smile. “The good captain here can bring you back inside, have a servant dry off your coat, and give you your food and water in bowls on the floor. I’m quite sure I’d find that most agreeable, and that you would, too, my dear.” Clara turned to him and for a few moments that volcanic desire welled up inside her to strike him for his impudence, that gross tensing of the fingers and flexing of sinew and nerve, and the light of that lava-fire shone behind her eyes. But she cast her gaze instead over the lake and over the mountains, and beside those great, awesome cathedrals of rock that had been pulled from the ground by some unseen and unknowable hand or force, she felt pitiful and tiny, a single spark on a long, low burning candle of which she was a part but quickly gone and never missed. She sighed, and inwardly wished that her companions could understand how she felt here, how she felt so alien and so at home both at the same time, how the terrible beauty of the landscape mirrored the tracks of land in her mind which the weather and movements of her life had shaped and beaten; she wished she had some means by which she could explain to them, so means to draw them a picture in words or ink or music by which they could see through her eyes, if only for a briefly glimpsed moment. She sighed, and glanced up again at the captain. “Perhaps you would be so good as to escort us somewhere to dry off, somewhere where we might find the company of civilised men. I’m quite sure we shan’t be missed here.” “It would be a pleasure, my ladies,” the captain assured him, offering her his arm. “You seem almost too quiet, Daniel. I have grown to expect at least a whimper from you, now and again.” It seemed to be Ruthven’s way to be cruel and callous whenever he was permitted by circumstance to be so, and although that streak within him accounted for less than half of his character, it was the part that was aired in the light most often. His poison darts and arrows flew through Daniel most often as they might fly through cloud, finding nothing solid to embed themselves in and continuing harmlessly on their way. “Do you ever think, my friends,” Daniel started, staring, like his lover, into the mountains and the sky beyond. “Of the Titans of Greece? These beings, these creatures of such magnificent fire that they were grown so far past man that one could not be identified with the other. How they sat, and watched over the slowly flowering buds of the human race, only to be turned insane and jealous by their own greed and fear. How that fear and greed bent and twisted them, how it wrapped like rose-thorns around their hearts and transformed them into their father, that despicable tyrant whom they had sacrificed so much to dethrone . . . and then, just as they had done, their children rise up against them, angered and driven by the same cruelty that had driven themselves all those years ago, and history is repeated . . . What creatures they must have been, who from their wars and their hate rise up such monuments as these, such vast constructions which make a man, for all this thoughts and dreams and hopes, feel nothing more than a blade of sunlight on a cloud-stricken day, fearfully waiting the cloud that comes to destroy him. “What will our wars and our hate raise, I wonder. What terrible monuments will our hate and fear leave for our children’s children to gaze and wonder upon?” “I’m not sure I like this ‘New World’ of yours, Daniel, if it leaves one so open to fancy and fable.” “You may ignore him quite easily, Daniel,” Clara said, smiling as she laid her hands upon the often-phantom hilt of the rapier of her wit. “It is simply that he envies your imagination and the distant, dizzying eddies that those wings of yours so often take you, just as the grounded squirrel envies and attempts to imitate the flightful butterfly.” Ruthven snorted. “The tiger must be kept behind bars, for the safety of the keeper as well as the on-lookers. And if they find the site a bore, then perhaps they should find some other caged animal to gawk at, if you’ll pardon the vulgarity.” |
| “More mewling tomcat than tiger, I should say.” Clara laid her arm across Redbridge’s with the low, contemptuous snort only a lady of breeding could have brought off, her other arm keeping protective hold of Miriam. Her blood hammered in her ears, every fiber of her being flush with a rage as vast and terrible as the mountains above them, too explosive for her slender being to contain. “Good day, gentlemen.” The last word was acid on her tongue, and she snapped her gaze away from Ruthven’s untouchable smirk as though jerking a horse’s reins. Daniel hardly seemed to notice their departure, eyes still cast toward the cliffs above and the swirling vastness beyond, but Ruthven watched them stumble along at an uncomfortable mixture of Lady Rochdale’s infuriated stalk and Redbridge’s halting stride, their flight punctuated by Miriam’s occasional lagging glance behind and Clara’s sharp tugs to keep her friend from slowing down, from becoming caught in the honeyed image of Ruthven standing fixed as the stars against the backdrop of those sky-clawing mountains and the dark swirl of clouds just beginning to pour over the peaks and catch at the blazing glory of the sun. Shadows brushed across his wild dark hair, mingled into the darkness of his garb, until only the storm gray of his eyes seemed clearly visible… and then the shadows broke for just a moment as Clara flicked a single look backward, like Lot’s wife in flight, and the drowning sun cast him in a shaft of golden light as his lips parted in that cruel, enigmatic smile which had so haunted her idle thoughts in spite of all her efforts. She hesitated, caught her breath, fled, and with that same smile still on his lips and his eyes still following them into the trees Ruthven let the cruelty drop from his voice and answered Daniel with a tone that might almost have been called wistful from another man’s lips. “Tis not our fear or our hate that will make us monuments, Daniel, for we are not so great in our wrath nor as vast in our strength as the Titans of old. It is our passion and our craft that will mark our art, will make something to kindle the fire of ages. It is not in our repetition of history but in our wild, striving efforts to overcome it that we will cut our marks.” He brought Clara’s face to his mind and that same blade-sharp smile to his lips again, savoring the thought of the chase to come as thoroughly as he knew he would savor the eventual prize. “Let us be our own fathers, our own mythmakers, our own Prometheus. Let us take up our meager strength and use it as the jeweler will use the tiniest chisel: to cut to the very heart of things with one perfect stroke.” He turned and laid his hand on the musing poet’s shoulder, brushing his fingertips through the soft curl of Daniel’s hair as he brought the smaller man around and pierced those dreamy eyes with his. “‘We’ll make in Hades darkest gloom a single poppy flower grow, with which to wet the red-stained lips of she whose touch these halls do crave.’” |
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