#if you want to learn more about the magnificent life of a CHILD BRIDE who literally ruled the world for 30 years lmao
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Maybe it's bc I'm a massive bitch myself who loves sex, don't want children, and have very high professional goals, but I'd rather have a female character be an autonomous being whose decisions directly impact the plot & be morally wrong will doing so, than be a morally pure victim of circumstance and a feckless decoration who watch life happen around me.
#bestie you're serving#I understand I am cringe AF for using TWO gifs but I couldn't decide which of my Queens fits more to what you say#so both is good#don't care#GoT queens#please watch Ekaterina#the story of Catherine the Great#if you want to learn more about the magnificent life of a CHILD BRIDE who literally ruled the world for 30 years lmao#anonymous#anti alicent hightower
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The Eagle of Unasta and The Dragon of Zarcade Part 1
So guess who had the most mindblowing dream and IMMEDIATELY had to write about it? Me. Tagging @waiting4inspiration because you’ll enjoy this, that and this has STRONG Witcher vibes and it features the same DRAGONS and dragoners as Keep Your Eyes On Me but like- midieval. it’s glorious.
Anyway, enjoy.
The Eagle of Unasta and The Dragon of Zarcade
Part 1
“You called for me grandmother?” Zaq asked as he came into the room where his great grandmother was reclining in her bed as his grandmother and mother attended to her.
“Yes, I have one last prophecy for you before you leave.” She informed him, her old hoarse voice cracking with her advanced age as Zaq came and kneeled next to the bed respectfully as he grasped her withered hands and eagerly awaited her words as her daughter and granddaughter eagerly and anxiously awaited this prophecy as well.
“This weekend your betrothed will reveal herself to you, your Golden Eagle. Do you have her gifts ready?” Lena prodded her great grandson Zaq.
“Yes, I just finished polishing the enchanted lapis in her dagger and her cloak just got finished this morning and the rest of her gifts are being put together as we speak.” Zaq nodded as she nodded in agreement.
His great grandmother had announced at his birth that he was betrothed to someone who she simply referred to as “the Eagle” but would not tell anyone who exactly it was but even then, she made sure that the betrothal gifts would begin to be worked on so that they would be perfectly crafted by the time his betrothed would make herself known to them.
“Good, your Eagle prefers blue, you will know her by the color shifting dress she will wear, royal blue in one light, majestic purple in an another- yet pink as the sunrise and blood red in another. She will be the most magnificent woman besides the bride to be- at the feast in everyone’s eyes, especially yours and to you- she will have no equal, but she will only have eyes for you once she really sees you for you. You will flatter her, and she will try to use your words as weapons against you because she will be naturally defensive as all eagles are. The other Zarcadians will surround her like a pack of wolves, you must be the dragon you are and rescue her and she will still think you are a wolf until you prove yourself to be a dragon. She has been taught to hold destiny in one hand and fate in the other and reject both so she can carve out her own of each with her own hands. But you are her fate and destiny and there will be no other than you for her so you will help her embrace both. You will be her friend first, love of her life second and marriage mate last for the rest of your days as she will be those things for you in turn and your love will burn brighter than dragonfire and will be the envy of all. You will break chains for her and she in turn will break your chains before you break hers so that both of you will fly free together and your nests and roosts will be each other. Beware though, she will come here and hold our downfall in one hand and our salvation in the other because her mind is sharper than her eyes, so you must help her choose the later. Leave her and our house will fall to rubble. Love her, be honest with her, remain loyal to her and prove true and she will build the foundations anew herself so that even if all the others were to fall, ours will stand to times indefinite and she will bring in a new era of dragons and dragoners and be the best dragoner the world has yet to see. Cast your pride and ego aside and humble yourself before her and she will build you up and make you stronger than all of us. You will be the first to achieve the impossible, but you will not be the last, pave the way for others to follow.” She prophcied, channelling her dragon’s magic to do so as it laid over her the way a beloved pet would as she used her free hand to stroke the old dragon’s face scales affectionately.
“Let it be as you’ve said.” Zaq agreed before his mother and grandmother mirrored his words.
Your name was Anya Unasta, you were the granddaughter of Eli Unasta, a great military commander and general in the kingdom of Suter. Your grandfather had married the love of his life- your grandmother- Sitka who came from a family of very humble birth but large and loving who accepted him with open arms. Because of your grandfather’s conquests for the Empire of Suter, your family was given nobility as Lords and Ladies and modest lands that were befitting of that title along with a yearly earning that would take care of them for the rest of their days and a small handful of slaves which your family immediately freed who stayed to be their loyal servants.
Upon them moving into the lands, they proved to be as fertile as the days in the summer were long. Vivid green pastures made their flocks abundant and your family and their servants never went hungry because of the super rich soils which in turn gave you over abundant crops in addition to a surplus of meats, milks, butters and cheeses and wools from the flocks which you traded for fine silks and satins before mastering even those and created textiles that had no equal. Pure rivers, springs and lakes were abundant in your family’s property that watered all the lands well and even in times of drought, they were able to pull water from the deep wells and natural springs with surprising ease.
Your grandfather encouraged his many, many children to pursue what they wanted to since the lands provided so well. So that your uncles and aunts were all artists and artisans in addition to being merchants, vintners, engineers and farmers and barrons of the flocks. Your large extended family unlocked the secrets to beef so marbled it practically melted in your mouth. Horses so fine- they could pull the war chariots of kings or carriages of any elite or run races with prestige. Pigs so huge they could feed a small tribe, sheep and goats with wool so fine and soft- it rivaled silk. They even made tea, wine and cheeses so delicious that they had no equal.
The designers, inventors and engineers in your family could design bridges and houses alike- that would stand for centuries without repair or much upkeep, houses that could have earthquakes right under their foundations or hurricanes or tornados right over them and yet the stones would never crack and the houses would never fall and to invent and embrace new technology in your homes and lives in addition to designing clothes that set the fashion standards of the times.
They could even got into metals- both precious and common that rivaled the best foundries in the world so that the family’s weapons were on par with any other if not surpassing so that Suter's military carried Unasta steel swords that were second only to dragon tooth swords in Zarcade. And in the precious metal business you soon had gold, silver, pearls and jewels flowing into the family like a mighty river so that every member of the family had an overabundance of jewelry of all kinds, even other kings and queens and empresses and emperors, czars and czarinas and sultans and sultanas were draped in Unasta jewelry because it was considered the best and finest and was without equal.
Some of the Unastas got into pottery and glass and made it so magnificent that every wealthy family from all over the world felt they needed at least one piece among their treasures and collections which increased your family’s wealth so that you now could buy even more lands and build great mansions instead of houses and soon your lands were so vast, it became its own district with all of your extended family within it and your own family became famed so that whatever they touched became amazing and whatever they choose to do, they found success and notoriety.
But yet there were a few that followed in your grandfather’s footsteps and became military strategists and were more victorious than your grandfather ever could be so that your family was even more elevated to Dauphins and Dauphines within the Empire of Suter so that you were among equals at the Emperor’s inner court. Some Unastas even went into politics and advisors to the Emperor himself after their military careers.
You were all taught from infancy to be humble, to learn everything you could and to keep your curiosity, to pursue your passions yet treat those around you with respect and dignity and to free every slave you purchased, in addition to paying your workers and servants fair and thriving wages for their labor so that you practically had an army of servants and workers at your fingertips.
Your grandfather forbade any of his children from orchestrating their children’s marriages and he wanted all of his descendants to marry for love like he did and how all of his children did as well- and to marry who they wanted except for Zarcadians, who were forbidden from entering the family by marriage and that any Unasta would be forbidden from leaving the family to join a Zarcadian one- which to you was puzzling and your parents and grandparents refused to tell you or any in your generation why but still, you were very grateful for this commandment since all of your peers had to bow to their parent’s will and arranged marriages were the norm, often a generation in advance upon a child’s birth and no nation was more famous for this custom than Zarcade, which clung to customs and traditions that seemed to be as old as time itself.
This evening you found yourself at an engagement party for one of the “lesser” princesses, one of your best friends actually, Ester, a grand duchess of Suter, a younger sister to the crown princess- to Xander of the family Ceda, one of the noble families of Zarcade and everyone came from all over to celebrate with them, Your came the day before and watched from Ester’s balcony as all the Zarcadians flew in, landing their dragons in front of the palace since you came ahead of your family since you were involved in some of the wedding planning and finalizing the details and had spent the night with Ester in her room, laughing and giggling half the night.
You spent all day getting pampered and prepared for the feast side by side with Ester for this evening and even was her escort to the feast tonight, both of you being introduced in grand style before you spent most of it at her side at her table since you were going to be her maid of honor. A great honor indeed as you feasted with her and stole looks at the groom’s table that was full of his friends and family, not a single Unasta among them while Ester had dozens of Unastas at hers- both tables eagerly stealing looks at the other since this was as close as the unmarried Unastas were allowed to be to Zarcadians.
Zarcade was one of the oldest kingdoms of the world. It was situated on top of a high mountain, surrounded by even more high mountains and had never fallen to another kingdom. Zarcade was unique in that in the “old kingdom” which was the original city walls when the city was founded, stood over a dozen gigantic houses, all of them having super high towers so that they looked like they scraped the skies themselves and bases so large that it was only these houses could fit inside the old kingdom’s walls.
However your grandfather and patriarch of the family hated Zarcade with a passion, something he tried to share with his family but it seemed that this hatred missed you completely. If anything, it made you curious about it. So much so that you fired a barrage of questions at Ester about her stay in Zarcade and about the family she was marrying into while you were with her. Your own appetite for it unquenchable as Ester happily and excitedly shared her answers with you, herself intrigued as to why there was this commandment in your family and even the Zarcadians were curious as to why one of the richest and most notable and successful families outside of Zarcade would keep politely declining their offers of marriage, no matter how much business they did with them or how friendly they tried to be or how handsome the offer.
Unastas always seemed to have a protective invisible wall around them that the Zarcadians could not penetrate. It was like magic but none that they could understand or break no matter how hard they tried, to the point that even they secretly began to covet the possibility of having an Unasta, no matter how distant or lowly- in their family tree one day if it was the last thing they did, it was something that soon consumed almost all of them.
Zarcade as a whole did their best to never an enemy of anyone, always doing trade and business with everyone all over the world and since your family were mostly merchants, your family did quite a bit of business with them, although you yourself weren’t personally involved in it. Your grandfather however demanded that everyone in the family demand top dollar for products sold to Zarcade- and the Zarcadians, seemed to have limitless wealth and paid those prices happily. The more expensive the better to the point that Zarcadian gold and silver boulin was the standard currency world wide. But if you ever tried to cheat them or sell them lesser quality items since they demanded the best in everything, suddenly you went out of business and no one would do business with you. A lesson you all learned by watching other merchants do business with them. So you all found you had to walk a fine line with Zarcadians.
At the feast, there were young men from the noble families of Vaci, Boder, Silini and Ceda of Zarcade there who took one look at you at the bride’s right hand as you entered the feast with her and instantly became smitten and soon the Empress herself had the mothers of these young men asking her who you were and what family you were from and tried to get all the information they could get about you before they reported this information to their families, especially their sons who were betrothed to lesser ladies as you in turn asked Ester about the families in question as she told you all she knew that she was able to find out by talking with her fiance.
When Ester’s attention was pulled elsewhere by the Empress, you went to the punch bowl to get more punch and a macaron from the dessert table before you found yourself instantly surrounded by hopeful Zarcadian suitors and you couldn’t help but feel like a sheep surrounded by a pack of wolves.
“My Lady, your jewels are magnificent.” One complimented with a flattering smile with a glint in his eyes that you recognized in the eyes of wolves from watching them try to hunt your flocks and herds.
“My Lady you are a great beauty.” Another added who looked at you like you were a fine pearl he was appraising that he was looking to put in his crown.
“My Lady, your dress is exquisite,” A third chimed in who stared at your cleavage like a hungry nursing babe.
“Would you like to dance?” A fourth, seemed to come to your rescue as he offered his hand with kindness in his eyes before you quickly put your hand in his, giving the others a polite smile as he pulled you out of kill circle and led you to the dancefloor.
You however were still on the defensive as you tried to politely study your new dance partner.
“What?” He asked, his amusement practically glittering in his eyes and dancing on his features.
“Is there something on my face?” He asked and for some reason, you blushed as you couldn’t help but smile because he was rather ridiculously handsome. You recognized him. He was the younger brother of Ester’s groom Xander. Surely he could be dancing with any other woman here at the feast. But yet he chose to ask you. Odd.
“Nothing more than the usual features.” You answered dismissively.
“That’s because you’re hogging all the extraordinary ones.” He grinned and your eyebrows rose in surprise as your smile grew as you quickly tried to think of a way to turn his words against him. You would know he was Zarcadian even if you didn’t recognize him by the way he dressed in dragon silk, something dragoners dressed exclusively in and was twenty times as expensive as the finest silk but yet it was died and spun in such a way that it mirrored your own dress, like he had somehow knew what you were going to be wearing and dressed himself to match. You mused you looked like a couple to the common observer. Coincidence surely.
“Isn’t ‘extraordinary features’ a term polite company uses to flatter the ugly?” You returned and he laughed, showing off his bright white teeth and genuine if not charming smile.
“Only the beautiful swans who still think they’re ugly ducklings would think such things.” He replied and you had to admit he was at least quick and as witty as he was handsome as you playfully narrowed your eyes but you couldn’t wipe the smile from your face no matter how hard you tried as your cheeks blushed harder.
“Swans and hens eat the same to wolves and foxes alike.” You bantered and he looked like he could kiss you as he simply beamed proudly at you.
“But do not the eagles feast on the wolves and hunt the foxes?” He pointed out.
“They do, only because they can fly faster than the persistent wolves can run and outsmart the cunning foxes, otherwise even they could fall prey to such hunters if they’re outnumbered.” You agreed.
“So what can a wolf do to prove that he’s not out to hunt the eagle?” He asked metephorically.
“I’m not sure. Wolves have insatiable appetites and we are at a feast after all.” You noted as you nodded out to the former young men who were now trying to pray on your sisters and your cousins who quickly ducked behind their parents and aunts and uncles who readily told the potential dance partners to look for another dance partner before they left and tried to “hunt” among any and all other young women there. Others gladly becoming their pray for the evening.
“Then let this wolf differentiate himself. My name is Zaq, from the family of Ceda of Zarcade.” He introduced himself as he continued to dance with you undeterred, his hold on you respectful but not possessive in the slightest which surprised you considering the others did the opposite as he confidently took the lead and moved you all around the dancefloor with masterful precision and you found yourself easily following his lead.
“And this eagle is Anya of the family Unasta of Suter.” You returned.
“A golden eagle at that.” He appraised and you were instantly flattered and could do nothing but agree to that sentiment. “Your mother is Jezya of the family Sudi, one of the greatest horse breeders of the last century and your father is Leo Unasta, a horse trainer but yet that is not what you want for yourself.” He deduced.
“Oh? And what would that be?” You asked curiously before he leaned forward, looking like he wanted to share a great secret which urged you to lean in too, turning your head to the side and tilting your ear towards his mouth so that he could whisper what he wanted into your ear.
“You want to be a dragoner.” He whispered as you felt every hair on your body stand on end and now that he was so close- you could smell the smoke from dragon’s fire on him in addition to his cologne and his personal scent which you found intoxicating and could appreciate the dragon scales sewn into this dragon silk and the way they shifted beautifully in the light in the fabric on his shoulder.
What made Zarcade- well- Zarcade- was that they had dragons and were dragoners and possessed the same magic their dragon’s possessed who lived at the top of all the mountains surrounding Zarcade, where massive dragon’s nesting sites were. Dragons loved to nest in the caves and hang out on the tops of the great houses and eventually over time- all the noble and royal families tamed and now bred the dragons the way your family did to other livestock. But only Zarcadians however could own dragons. They bought all the livestock from all over to feed themselves and their dragons who in turn defended the nation for them and why Zarcade had never been defeated or sieged.
“What makes you an eagle, is that you want to be free to fly. Which is a sentiment I wholly understand because I am no wolf, I’m a dragon myself.” He continued to whisper in your ear his face gently nuzzled with yours so that your eyes fluttered closed, his hand coming to rest on the small of your back as he gently held you closer, your arm reached up and laid over his shoulder, your hand resting over the base of his neck so that your chest practically pressed up against his so that your hearts practically beat next to each other and you felt your heart leap for joy in your chest and go out to his before the song ended and he pulled away and damn your body, you found yourself leaning towards him like there was a giant magnet inside yourself being attracted to him, wanting to reestablish the closeness as you looked up at him in awed wonder. And for the first time, you didn’t see a Zarcadian- you saw him. You saw Zaq and when you looked in his eyes it was like you could see his soul as he could see yours. And he was beautiful inside and out and suddenly you were the one instantly smitten.
“Who told you such a thing?” You whispered curiously, afraid to even breathe such words too loud for fear anyone else would hear you.
“No one had to, your whole life, you try to pet every dragon you see, which they all seem to let you do- especially the ones who are lucky enough to land at your estate to pick up whatever the other Zarcadiens buy from you, they let you pet their faces and put your forehead to theirs and you feel connected to them, like you are destined to have them yourself some day. Plus you keep staring at our dragon silk and scales and you watched as all of us arrive on our dragons and watched us like the eagle you are before you went to the dragon’s stables and pet even those, recognizing the dragons before you recognized the riders.” He smiled proudly before he took the dragon tooth dagger from his waist and presented it to you- in it’s dragon leather sheath.
“A gift- from one soarer to another, may the winds be kind to you and lead you to where you need to go.” He smiled before you took it from him and looked at him, wondering what he was going to ask from you for you to keep it but all he did was kiss your hand as he bowed respectfully which prompted you to bow in turn before he righted himself, smiled adoringly at you again before he turned away, leaving you to walk a few steps after him before you stopped yourself from following him further before you just stood there- dumbfounded, your cheeks and your ears burning and your soul on fire and your heart yearning and the hand that he had kissed felt like it had just gotten blessed as you were holding this oh so precious possession before you clutched it to your chest possessively before you turned to walk back to your family since Ester was now talking with her fiance and the Empress about the wedding details, before you casted a curious look over your shoulder at Zaq who was now talking with other members of his own family, in particular his grandmother and mother and holding a young niece in his arms as she rested her head on his shoulder as he was swaying in place to try to get her to sleep despite all the noise of the feasters, who was already half asleep as he rubbed soothing circles into her back and had his back to you as you walked back to your mother who had watched the scene unfold curiously.
“What just happened?” You whispered to her.
“You just got given a gift,” she mused an amused smile on her face.
“No, like, I know dragoners are...different, their culture is different than ours, what does this mean?” You asked as you held up the dagger for emphasis.
“I don’t think it means anything,” she shook her head before you put the dagger away into your dress.
You didn’t believe her, you felt in your bones that this was something special and you couldn’t not touch it the rest of the night as you just stared at him from across the hall, watching as he sat down and held his now sleeping niece in his arms and you could not stop yourself from thinking what a wonderful father he would be some day and not being able to take your eyes off of him, for fear if you did, you’d lose him in the crowd for the rest of the evening as he simply smiled at you as you smiled back at him and watched him like the eagle he referred to you as, fingering the handle of the dagger he gave you like it was your own worry stone, the lapis stone of the handle pressing into your palm and fitting your hand like it had been made for you rather than him.
After the feast your family went to their rooms that were being shared with them at the palace, and you were surprised when you were given your own room, right next to Ester’s, expecting to share one with your sisters and cousins now that they were here, but all of your things were now in here and you weren’t going to argue about the arrangements.
It was a grand room though and it came with a private balcony and once you changed out of your dress into your nightgown and robe, taking your hair down from it’s special arrangement so that it fell like a waterfall down your back and taking off your makeup and jewelry and put it away- you walked out onto the balcony, you saw the people of Zarcade flying their dragons in the moonlight, doing flips and turns and corkscrews and you had never been so jealous in your life!
Suddenly a dragon swooped down in front of you from it’s perch on the roof of the palace directly above you which made you gasp and fall back onto the balcony as you stared at the magnificent dragon flying in place in front of you and on it’s back was none other Zaq wearing an outfit that was clearly more dragon scale armor over more dragon’s wool and if he had been looking handsome before, his looks could kill now as your body betrayed you and you suddenly felt even more heated than if you were standing in front of a furnace yet cold in that you wanted him to warm you up.
“Sorry to scare you. I didn’t mean to, but I was starting to wonder if and when you’d come out here.” He smiled apologetically as his dragon landed delicately on your balcony and helped you up to your feet by nuzzling it’s head to you and letting you grab it’s horns so it could lift you up. “Wanna go for a ride?” He offered hopefully.
“I’m clearly not dressed for it.” You gestured to your robe over your nightgown before you self consciously crossed your arms over your bosom so he wouldn’t see your nipples try to poke their way through both garments since you could sense they were hard enough to cut through glass right now.
“Then put this on.” He gently tossed a dragon’s wool cloak at you from it’s spot tied behind him as you caught it and inspected it in the bright moonlight and it was the most amazing beautiful cloak you had ever seen in your life. God damn it.
“Damn it.” you cursed yourself under your breath before you put it on and noticed it fit you like it was made for you and you were instantly comfortable before you pet the dragon he was on, happily petting the delicate scales on its face as it closed its eyes in serenity before you pressed your forehead to it’s forehead happily before the dragon turned and laid down, so you could get in the dragon’s saddle as you got behind Zaq and held onto him as you put your slippered feet into the stirrups before there was a belt attached to the back of the saddle that he had you put on that clipped into the saddle and his own special harness he was wearing so it would keep you in the saddle no matter at what angle the dragon would fly at.
“Ready?” Zaq asked once you got settled as you were amazed that this saddle was practically made for your bountiful behind and was ridiculously comfortable.
“As I’ll ever be.” You nodded as you felt your excitement rise before the dragon leaped from the balcony and flew away and it was better than any horseback ride you had ever had in your life and watching the ground below you shrink but yet the sky grow larger so that you felt like the world around you was 90% sky. Not even in your dreams where you flew was it this amazing and magnificent.
“Wow,” you breathed in awe as you looked around, feeling like at any moment you were going to run into the moon before Zaq did a dive, which made you squeal and laugh in delight as you held him tighter as the other dragoners laughed and giggled before you peeked out and saw Ester riding next to you behind her groom as she waived and smiled at you which made you smile and nod back, not trusting that you wouldn’t fall right off if you let Zaq go.
You lost track of how long you flew with Zaq for - but soon your sleepiness won out and when that happened, you didn’t even need to say anything- Zaq flew you back to your room, the dragon delicately maneuvering to land gently on your balcony again before Zaq unclipped himself and you from the saddle and carried you back into your room, since your limbs were exhausted from holding onto him and the dragon all night before he tucked you into bed.
“Here,” you tried to sit up and take the cloak off but couldn’t even get that far, your hands blindly reaching for the waist of the cloak.
“No, keep it. Another gift.” He insisted as he stilled your hands but held them, his hands surprisingly warm, a perfect mix of calloused from work but yet soft as his thumbs gently if not reverently stroked the back of your hands.
“Why?” You asked sleepily.
“Because I want you to have it.” He answered simply.
“Oh,” you nodded, your eyelids growing heavier and heavier now that you were in bed but your soul felt weightless as your heart soared with happiness. “Thank you for everything, I had so much fun...flying free.” You managed to say with a broad dreamy if not sleepy smile.
“My pleasure Eagle, get some sleep.” Zaq urged before you did as you were told, your eyes closing and not opening again as your breathing slowed down before Zaq leaned down and kissed your forehead before he tucked you in with even more care and practically skipped out of the room and got back on his dragon, flying victory loops before going to his own room.
His own mind, heart and soul were still soaring cloud high as he laid in bed, staring up at the ceilings as his hands fidgeted with the blanket over him. His great grandmother had been right on all accounts! You were The Eagle, The Eagle of Unasta! The family that appeared to be impossible for any Zarcadian to join for a reason that escaped them all, but if that wasn’t enough you were His Golden Eagle, he knew it in every fiber in his being and there was no mistaking it, your hair and a golden eagle’s feathers were the same exact colors. Your bright eagle eyes that saw and caught everything, missing nothing and that impressed him. You had a natural affinity for dragons. You instinctively tried to bond with every single one you met and you didn’t even know it and the fact that you said the exact words- fly free- meant everything. And once you had entered the feast, he couldn’t take his eyes off of you if he tried and after his dance with you- you didn’t take your eyes off each other and he could feel through his own enchanted lapis handled dagger that you were trying to figure him out, trying to figure everything out because your mind was sharper than any eagle’s beak or talons and it had pleased him so well that you looked at him with his niece and saw the kind of father he hoped to be someday. To dance with you was a rare honor, and you fit against him like your bodies were made for each other and he couldn’t get over your hourglass like curves and you were already so strong from riding horses all your life, you were a natural and to feel your body pressed up against his was sweet torture. That and his dragon loved and adored you, that in itself should have been all the vetting and approval he needed and you had set up such a strong connection to her too, so that when you felt sleepy, she sensed it and gave that sense to him so that you didn’t have to say a word. It would be nearly impossible for him to keep his distance from you now. He was so beyond smitten, he was falling head over heels in love with you already, heaven help him.
#The Eagle of Unasta and The Dragon of Zarcade#The Eagle of Unasta#The eagle#fantasy#reverse romeo and juliet
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Breaking Dawn 6/?
Title: Before Dawn
Author: thejacketandthehook (aka everystareverywhere)
Summary: Emma Swan and Killian Jones only had one thing in common: Emma’s best friend and Killian’s brother were dating. But Emma and Killian could not get along. That was, until the day they had to work together through a tragedy that no one saw coming.
Rating: General (but that will change to Mature in later chapters)
Word Count: 22,955
Disclaimers: I own absolutely nothing.
Author’s Notes: So, I’ve been in the mist of writing this particular story for almost two years. And I’m hoping that if I have support, I’ll be more motivated to finish it. So my story is based off of the movie “Life As We Know It” starring Katherine Heigl and Josh Duhamel. And below is the first chapter. I hope you enjoy.
You can also read it here: A03
@searchingwardrobes
When you lived with someone, it became easier and easier to learn the little things about them. Things that no one else was privy too, or was even aware of. And there were things about Killian Jones that Emma came to realize. And most of them were actually good things, even though she couldn't believe that. For instance, she was surprised to learn that unlike her, Killian was actually a morning person. Which was a good thing, considering that he worked on the docks and often had to be there just as the sun was rising. He was also up by the time Henry started to stir, so that also was a major plus for him. Also, that he never drank coffee. Not that he was much of a tea person, but coffee was something that just "tasted disgusting." Emma almost dropped her coffee mug when he proclaimed that one morning. Also, he was exceptionally neat. Everything had its place, and it just made sense to keep it all organized.
And he could cook. Not just heat up some spaghetti and meatballs cook, but actually cook. She was stunned when one day she came from home work to the house smelling like meat, garlic, and onions. Emma almost floated to the kitchen, her nose her guide as she took in that magnificent smell. For someone who basically lived off of ramen noodles, the smell coming from the kitchen might as well have been from heaven. Her mouth watered, her stomached growled (she didn't even realize she was hungry) and her mind could think of nothing but what was making that wonderful smell. She was expecting to see Mary Margaret in the kitchen - as sexist as that sounded, Emma was certain that Mary Margaret could cook like a master chef; she just had that look. So she was stunned when she saw Killian actually putting a huge pan of something into the oven and look over his shoulder as he closed it. "Ah," he said, either ignoring Emma's jaw that hit the floor, or not noticing it. "Dinner should be ready in about a half hour. The mashed potatoes have to turn a slight golden color."
"What are you--" There was so much moisture in Emma's mouth, it was almost embarrassing. She was acting like Pavlovs' freaking dogs! "What are you making?"
"Sheppard Pie. A classic back in England." He wiped his hands on the towel beside the stove before working on the dishes that piled up in the sink.
Emma dropped her bag on the table and said, "I got it. I'll do the dishes. After all, you made dinner."
He smiled. "I can live with that." He stepped aside and wiped his hands again.
But the surprises just kept on coming.
"Wait, you can play the guitar?" Emma asked dumbly almost a month after Mrs. Gold's appearance. She watched Killian take a guitar out of the case and put the strap for it around his body.
He raised an eyebrow and looked up at her from under his hooded brows. He looked back down as he started to tune it. "See how I'm holding a guitar and currently tuning it, that could give you some indication."
"Just because I know how to turn an engine on doesn't mean I'm a racecar driver," she responded, crossing her arms tightly across her chest.
He chuckled light. "Touché."
Or the fact that he knew how to sail a boat. And not a little motorboat, no, but an actual boat, with sails and such. He's talked about bringing Henry out onto the water with him, but that Emma put her foot down. She's sure that he's great at sailing, but doing so with a baby a little over a year old? No. That she would not agree to.
"Why don't you come too?" he would ask.
Emma would shake her head no, with no explanation, and leave the room.
Of course, though there were things about Killian that made her raise an eyebrow. He had traits that continually got under her skin.
His language was something that Emma had to continually tell him to watch, especially since Henry should be saying his first coherent word any day now. Emma would die if his first coherent word was "bloody."
He also kept forgetting that he wasn't living in a bachelor pad anymore. He would hog the television for hours, watching a soccer match after soccer match. Emma had no idea how he could stand to watch people running around after a ball and call that entertainment.
What drove her crazy, in all honestly, was how freaking amazing he was with Henry. Sometimes, just a few times, Emma watched Killian with Henry and in the back of her mind she could see why Elsa thought she and him would have been good together. He loves Henry, that's a no brainer. And he doesn't mind being silly, if it makes the baby laugh. Killian's favorite thing to do was to blow on Henry's tummy, make him squeal and laugh at the same time. And in moments like that, Emma smiled because she forgot that her best friend was gone and she was suddenly taking care of their house, their child, what should have been their future. When she saw Killian with Henry, she almost wanted to turn around and tell Elsa that maybe he wasn't so bad. She would never admit that she liked him, but she could say that she more than tolerated him.
Emma wasn't the only one who was surprised at learning the little things about Killian. The man himself was shocked to learn the little tidbits that made up Emma Swan. Like how she was not a morning person. Get her up before seven, and you might as well be asking for a suicide mission. One morning, when Henry was crying nonstop while Killian was in the shower, she had gotten up to take care of him. Killian was surprised when he walked into the kitchen, rubbing his wet head with a towel, to find Emma still in her pajamas (a baggy shirt and boxer shorts that made his heart speed up in a way he really didn't like), her hair a huge mess and black circles under her eyes while Henry was nipping at the pieces of bagel as he sat in his highchair. When she saw Killian, she muttered, "Yours" as she passed him, presumably going back up to bed. For reasons he didn't know, he couldn't stop thinking about that morning for weeks.
Or that she was messy. She left dirty cups in the sink and it seemed like her supply of shoes just kept multiplying. Though he didn't really like going into what they called her bedroom (which at one time was the guest room), he had to once to put jewelry back in her room before Henry got it. Though the bed was made, the rest of the room liked like a bomb exploded; clothes everywhere, shoes that he was sure she stepped on continuously, and a garbage can overflowing with trash.
She also ate like she was in high school. If Emma had her way, they would eat nothing but grilled cheese sandwiches and onion rings. While Killian agreed that both of those things were amazing, neither one of them could (or should) eat that every day. When he inquired what she did with Walsh, she simply shrugged and said, "We discuss what take-out we're going to get. Neither of us cook."
But he also noticed how, when she got home from the work, the first thing she did was go over to kiss Henry on the head. Whether he was sleeping, watching television, or just babbling to himself, she always kissed him on the head. Or that at least once a week, she needed to have a glass wine at dinner. Or she was always ordering stuff for Henry through Amazon. He didn't know why he liked knowing these things about her; he just did. It almost tickled him to know that he was probably the only person who knew that Emma cried whenever that commercial about the two people falling in love over gum came on. Okay, maybe "cried" was the wrong word; more like she teared up. Point being that she was a woman who had a lot of walls up and she didn't like to show too much emotion. So when she did around him, he felt honored. Like he was being rewarded for good behavior or something. He liked it.
What he didn't like was the Walsh probably knew what she looked like first thing in the morning too. Or that she was messy. Or that she licked Nutella off of a spoon when she was stressed. She watches The Princess Bride (and had the whole movie memorized) when she's upset. He knew he was the only one who saw her get emotional, because he knew what she was like around other people. But when you live with someone, you can't put your walls up 24/7. And he liked that. He liked that he saw her tear up, show emotions.
He just couldn't understand why he didn't like Walsh knowing things about her too. It was like he wanted to keep her a secret or something. He didn't want other people knowing things about her. It was stupid, idiotic. He told himself that constantly. But that didn't stop the pang of something deep in his gut when he saw her stumbling into the kitchen and automatically going to the coffee maker. Because Walsh, he was sure, has seen her like that. And he didn't like it. Not one bit.
He told Robin about his problems, during one of his nights off that he got. Emma and he kept pretty close to their schedules, which helped trying to balance their once normal lives for what they were living now.
Robin, however, was useless. He just simply chuckled and told Killian that Emma was getting under his skin. "Better watch it, mate," he said, gulping his beer. "You might find yourself falling for her."
"Not bloody likely," he said, gulping his drink as well.
~*~
Emma forgot it could get this hot.
It was a muggy and humid 95 degrees Fahrenheit, and it only day two of what to seemed to be the week literally from Hell.
"Good Lord, I didn't think Maine could get this hot," Killian said one late evening. He stood in front of the small fan that they found in the basement, trying to cool himself off.
"I can't believe they didn't have central air," Emma commented, bouncing Henry on her lap, though how he kept laughing was beyond her. Her lap was all sweaty, and he himself had small sweat beads along his forehead. When she noticed that, she quickly wiped at it with a damn towel before giving him his bottle filled with water.
"It's an old house, Swan. The cost of that would have been outrageous. Plus, who knew it could ever have such a long heat wave in Maine?"
"The meteorologists say we've broken a new record,"
"Well, I will always remember where I was the week we had a heat wave that broke a record," he said, moving away from the fan before clasping in the chair. His shirt was undeniably soaked through, and Emma most certainly was glad he didn't take it off. Because she didn't need to see him with his hair chest glory. Not that she knew what he looked like without a shirt--Wait, no. That wasn't actually true. There was that one summer that Liam and Elsa took Killian and Emma to the beach once. They only did it once because Emma and Killian fought so much, no one really could enjoy themselves. She even commented when he took his shirt off that no one wanted to see that. He gave a remark that made her roll her eyes and stick her tongue out at him.
"I'm sorry," Elsa had remarked after she watched their exchange. Liam and Killian were walking over to the water, and Emma was so happy to have a few minutes of quiet. However, she could tell from Elsa's tone that what she was about to say would not be a genuine apology, but rather a comment. "But are you two twelve-years-old?"
Suffice to say, neither Emma nor Killian went with them to the beach again.
Killian continued with his rant. "I was in a house with no air conditioner, sweating my --"
"Killian," Emma said sternly before purposely looking down at Henry who was watching his uncle with the upmost fascination.
He changed paths. "Sweating profusely."
"There is an air conditioner," Emma finally remembered.
"What? Where?"
She took a deep breath. "In the Master."
Killian's eyes looked up towards the stairs. "Oh."
They were silent. It had been four months since....the funerals, and neither of them have stepped foot inside of that room.
Henry started munching at his hands, getting them all wet. "Oh, he's biting his hands again." Killian got up and went to the freezer to get him his teething toy.
Killian gave him the toy, and Henry started happily biting at it. "We have to do it, Swan."
"I know."
"For Henry's sake."
"Of course."
Killian walked over to the stairs. Emma picked Henry up and held him against her hip. "We can do this," she told him, as well as herself.
"I know. It's just..."
She took his hand in her empty one and squeezed before dropping it. "I know."
He nodded. She did know. That's why doing this with her, just going into this room...She knows what that means. No one else would truly understand, but she gets it.
They went upstairs and walked down the hallway together. When they got to the room, Killian took a deep breath before opening the door. It creaked and slowly opened. Emma straighten Henry on her hip before fixing her shoulders and walked into the room.
She almost wanted to walk right back out.
Here's the thing with unexpected deaths: everything looks normal on the surface. And that's what killed Emma. Because everything looks normal. Elsa's make-up table was waiting for her to come back. In fact, her little stool was pushed back just enough, probably from the last time she sat in it. Liam's shoes were lined up in front of the closet, waiting for him to come back and pick one to wear. The remotes for the television and Amazon Fire were sitting on top of each other on the nightstand, next to the book Liam was reading, a bookmark poking out of it. The pillows were crooked and Elsa's dresser had clothes sticking out of it and it was just a little too much. Because this room....This was Elsa and Liam's private place. Of course Emma was in here before, and Killian was too. Just usually with either Elsa or Liam.
Killian walked in next to Emma and took her hand. "We can do this," he reminded her. "For Henry."
The little boy in Emma's arms had no idea what was going on around him, and kept munching on the ice in his hand. Emma rubbed the back of his head as Killian stepped further into the room and over to the air conditioner. It took Killian a few seconds to figure out why it wasn't turning on ("Plugging it in usually helps." "Shut up, Swan.") but then the machine started making the sounds of turning back on and suddenly the place was finally going to cool down.
Emma sat down with Henry on the bed, the little boy dropping his ice before getting up and jumping on the bed. He was falling more than he was standing up, but he was laughing.
"Careful lad," Killian insisted before walking over to him. He held Henry's hands, who now more stable, jumped even more.
Emma couldn't relax, and instead walked over to Elsa's vanity. Elsa loved her make-up, and had more brushes that Emma had ever used in a lifetime. Though make-up was never high on Emma's list of needs, she knew how foundation worked, and mascara, and eye shadow and such. But when you get into highlighter and eyelash curler, Emma shook her head. She had no idea how those things worked, and honestly didn't care at this point. Oh, she wouldn't care if Elsa put it on her, in fact she loved those nights when Elsa wanted to test a new product on someone and Emma was a willing subject. She herself just had no idea how to use it.
"Oh, I forgot they had Netflix in here," Killian said, sitting on the bed as Henry cuddled up next to him. "What do you want to watch, lad? Mickey Mouse?"
Emma smiled over at them before going and sitting next to Henry on the bed. Henry started sucking his thumb and within minutes of watching Killian try to find something that would entertain him, he was tight asleep.
Emma leaned back on the bed, prompting herself up on the pillows. Killian then leaned back as well, and noticing that Henry was sleeping, whispered to Emma, "Want to watch anything on Netflix?"
"Are we going to Netflix and chill?" As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Emma wished for them to come back in. She closed her eyes and pursed her lips, certain that Killian was going to make some comment. After all, she opened the door to it.
But when she heard nothing but the sound of the air conditioner, she opened her eyes and saw him just looking at her with a small grin.
"Did you just position me? Because --"
"Oh, shut up," she muttered as she fidgeted.
Surprisingly, he stopped talking. She gave him a small glance (he was still grinning) before looking back at the screen. Killian was clicking through the choices before --
"That one!" she said.
He stopped before looking at her. With a raised eyebrow he asked, "Lucifer?"
She shrugged. She didn't want to admit that she had a small crush on Tom Ellis, from watching him in a British show that she had stumbled across a year ago named Miranda. She especially didn't want to point out that Tom Ellis was British, with dark hair, and (from what she saw in interviews on Youtube) was a total dork. She especially didn't want to point that out because if Tom Ellis had blue eyes, it would sound like she was describing the man sitting next to her.
"I heard it was good," was her only defense.
Killian looked at her before pressing the play button. "Let's see if you're right, Swan."
~*~
They watched the first three episodes before falling asleep during the fourth. They tried to stay awake, but the heat and a one-year-old will do that to you.
~*~
It was a Tuesday night, which meant that Emma was blessedly free. However, Mary Margaret wasn't picking up her phone and Emma really didn't feel like making small talk with Regina, so she was kind of just hanging out in her bedroom. She should go out. Go to a club for a while. Or a bar, at least. Maybe see a movie. It was weird seeing a movie by yourself, but Emma read somewhere that it was actually a wonderful experience. Or she could call Walsh and spend some time with him. She saw him on Sunday, but for some reason she just didn't want to spend another night hanging out in his apartment or going to some restaurant. She was so sick of eating out. Killian made such wonderful meals, she was actually getting spoiled.
She was thinking of maybe reading a book when she could hear the sounds of someone (hopefully Killian) running up the stairs and towards her room. Without knocking, he slammed opened the door and before she could yell at him about privacy or ask him if Henry was alright, he said, "Mary Margaret's in labor."
Emma jumped off her bed before asking, "How do you--?"
"I just saw David bringing her to the car. He said her water broke."
"Oh, they must be so thrilled! They're gonna keep us updated?"
"I asked David to do so, but I bet he's gonna be really busy."
"Right of course. We should go see them, when the baby arrives."
He nodded. "I was thinking that too. We should bring flowers. Or something."
"Maybe food. Don't women want regular food after they give birth?"
He raised an eyebrow. "How would I bloody know?"
"I just meant--I don't know either, but I'm sure that that would be a good idea."
"Whatever you say, love. I'll keep you updated."
"Yes, please."
Hours had passed and they still hadn't heard a word. Neither were too concerned, though. Emma, especially, remembered Elsa's delivery with Henry. Though Emma had been patiently waiting in the lobby for any update, she was told later by Liam that Elsa yelled insults at him that would have made a sailor blush. "But," he smiled down at his boy, "twenty hours of labor was worth it for this fellow."
"I don't see you pushing a baby out of your body," a slightly drugged up Elsa retorted.
"Nor will you ever see that." Liam then leaned down and lightly kissed his wife's forehead. "You're bloody amazing, though."
Emma was actually at work the next day, trying not to roll her eyes at Graham as he once again missed the bullseye badly, when her phone rang.
"Killian?"
"Yeah, David said she had the baby."
Emma practically bounced in her seat. "And...?"
"And what?"
"Killian!"
He chuckled. "A boy. Mummy and baby are fine."
Emma smiled wistfully. "A boy. Does he have a name?"
"No, not yet. When is your lunch break? I'll come by and pick you up."
"On what, your motorcycle?"
"No, love, the...Liam's car. I found the keys."
"Oh. I get off in--" she looked down at her watch "-half an hour."
"I'll be there."
When she hung up, Graham was looking over at her. "What?"
"Nothing. Just sounded so...domestic."
"Shut up. You try living with someone for three months and not sound domestic from time to time."
"It's not a bad thing, Emma. I'm actually quite proud of you."
"Proud?"
"Yeah. You are living a, dare I say it? Normal life with a man you can barely tolerate. I'm proud of you."
"Shut up, Graham."
Sure enough, a half hour later, Killian pulled up in Liam's CRV. Emma jumped into the passenger's seat before taking a deep breath. "Did you stop at Granny's?" She said, referring to the diner that both Killian and Emma have considered to be their second home. Which is ironic, considering that was where their first date was held.
"Aye. I got Mary Margaret a turkey sandwich, unsure if she would want to eat anything more than that. But I also got you a grilled cheese."
Emma reached behind her to pull out her sandwich as Killian backed up and pulled out of the parking lot. "Oh, my God, thank you! I've been craving one all day." As she opened the container she asked, "Henry's at day care?"
Killian gasped before saying, "Damn it! I knew I forgot something!"
Emma almost dropped her sandwich, ready to turn this car around and go back home before he chuckled. "I'm kidding, love. Aye, Henry's at daycare."
She shook her head before muttering, "I hate you."
Killian smiled, knowing that she was just saying that.
~*~
They walked quickly into the hospital, smiling from ear to ear. Emma barely remembers even asking the nurse for Mary Margaret's room number, but luckily Killian caught the number and lead her down the hallway.
Knocking gently, Emma slowly opened the door to reveal an exhausted looking Mary Margaret on the bed and David standing by the windows, gently bouncing a buddle of blankets in his arms.
"Can we come in?" she asked.
"Of course! Of course!" Mary Margaret insisted as she gestured for them to come further into the room.
"Congratulations you guys," Emma commented before going over to Mary Margaret. On sudden impulse, Emma leaned down and quickly gave the new mother a quick peck on the cheek. Mary Margaret looked surprised by this, but other than giving a small smile said nothing.
"Yes, congrats to you both," Killian said before placing the bag from Granny's on the small table in front of Mary Margaret. "We brought this, thinking you might actually want food instead of flowers."
"Oh, that's a lovely thought," Mary Margaret replied, tears gathering in her eyes. "Sorry, sorry. I'm an emotional rollercoaster right now." She reached over for a tissue before wiping her eyes and giving a small laugh. "You're gonna have to excuse me."
"Of course love," Killian said with a small smile.
"Is that him?" Emma asked as she walked over to David.
David smiled down at his son. "Yes. May I introduce you two to Mr. Leo Nolan."
Emma leaned over David, gently holding onto his shoulder. "Hello Leo. It's a pleasure to meet you."
"Hi Leo," Killian said, also smiling over at the boy. He looked back over at Mary Margaret. "And how are you feeling?"
She shrugged. "Probably as good as I look."
"You look bloody amazing."
"That's what I told her!" David insisted.
Mary Margaret scoffed. "He lies and you swear to it," she said as she shook her head.
"Do you want to hold him?" David asked Emma.
"Sure!" she exclaimed before dropping her purse on the chair and holding her arms out for the newborn. She remembers the first time she held Henry, and is once again surprised by the weight of the baby. Or rather, the lack of one. "God, how can babies be so light?" she remembered asking Liam and Elsa. "I've held books heavier than him."
"Hi Leo," she said now to the baby in her arms. "It's so very nice to meet you."
"Can I hold him?" Killian asked.
"Of course," Mary Margaret said as David squeezed in next to her on the bed.
Emma handed Leo over to Killian, who gently took him in his arms. He began very gently bouncing Leo, and Emma tried very hard not to smile at the imagine.
When she looked over at the couple on the bed, she noticed David watching Killian with a small smile that new fathers can never seem to get rid of, but saw Mary Margaret looking straight at her with a smile of her own.
"What?" Emma asked, but Mary Margaret simply shook her head and looked over at Killian.
~*~
Emma and Killian were walking down the hallway talking about Leo and leading back towards the lobby when Emma turned her head to the left. It wasn't like she saw something out of the corner of her eye, or even that a voice in her head said to turn left. She just did. And she saw the hallway. The hallway that only a few months ago she, Killian, and Walsh ran down to get to the stairs. The hallway that would lead her to the biggest change in her life (and for her, that was a pretty big deal).
"Swan!?"
Emma quickly looked in front of her to see Killian about four feet ahead. He walked back, his eyebrows knitted together, concern all over his face. "Swan? Are you okay? I called you a couple of times, and you just stopped walking."
"Yeah, no. No, I'm fine. I am. I just..." She looked back down the hallway. Just like in movies, she could almost see three ghosts running down the hallway, heading towards the stairs. She wanted to burst into tears. How could she be so happy just minutes ago, so happy about a life coming into this world, when her best friend and her husband died in this very building just months ago? How could she walk into this hospital and not even pause for a moment to remember them?
Was she forgetting them?
Emma almost had to stop the gasp of breath from leaving her mouth, but knew that she couldn't stop the tears gathering up in her eyes. She was moments away from losing it, she just knew it.
Killian gently touched her arm. "Emma? Love, what is it? What's going on?"
Emma simply nodded her head towards the hallway. She knew that Killian understood, because a moment later he just simply went, "Oh."
So gently, Emma almost didn't even realize it at first, Killian put his arm around her shoulder and guided her to the exit. They said nothing, both holding back tears as they walked to the car.
When Killian unlocked the car, Emma ran towards the passenger's seat and opened the door as quickly as she could. The door hadn't even shut before she let out a loud gasp and the tears that had been threatening to fall, came quickly down her face. She took a loud breath as Killian got into the car and shut the door, his head falling back onto the head rest.
"I didn't even think about them!" she sobbed. "How could I not remember them when we got here?"
"Because of the baby," he said quietly, though she was sure that his voice was shaking. She couldn't see through the tears in her eyes, but she was certain that he was crying too.
"But I didn't give them one thought, Killian! Not one thought! What kind of friend am I?"
Killian gave no response. Or maybe he did and she didn't hear it. She was sobbing so hard, her head pounding from the lack of oxygen and how hard she was crying.
She didn't know how long she was crying in the car, whether it was a few minutes, or more like thirty, but when she calmed down enough to take deep breathes, she noticed that Killian was holding out napkins.
"Thanks," she muttered before taking them and blowing her nose in a completely unladylike manor. Then she rubbed her eyes and when she looked at the napkin, it was all smudged from her mascara. Great, she thought, I probably look like a raccoon.
She kept rubbing her eyes, reminding herself to breath as she did so. When she finally calmed down enough, she looked over at Killian. And then she wanted to break down again. Because he was not unaffected by her outburst. His eyes were bloodshot and his face was all red, probably from crying and then rubbing his face with the rough napkins.
"We're not forgetting them, Emma," he said when they both calmed down. "You're not...You're not a bad friend."
She sniffed, but said nothing.
Reaching over, he gently took her hand in his as he said, "I read...I read a quote once...'Babies remind us that time moves on.' And it's true. That's all that happened here, Emma. Leo...Leo is the future. Henry is the future. But Liam and Elsa...they are never far from my mind, and I know that Elsa is never far from yours. So, no, you're not a bad friend. You're just thinking about the future. As we all should be. And you know," he squeezed her hand as he continued, "you know that Elsa would kick your ass right now. And Liam would kick mine. We just saw a newborn baby, Emma. And that's a beautiful moment."
She nodded before doing something she never in a million years thought she would do.
She leaned over and kiss him on the cheek.
When she pulled back, she simply whispered, "Thank you." He gave her a small nod before letting go of her hand and turning on the engine.
#csfanfiction#cs ff#captain swan#fanfiction#once upon a time fanfiction#once upon a time#emma swan#killian jones
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Hans Info
Full name: Hans Westergaard
Species: Human
Age: 23
Sexuality: Pansexual
FC(s): Domhnall Gleeson
Bio: As the youngest of 13 brothers, Hans found it pretty difficult to stand out in his family or as a prince. It almost seemed like, no matter what he did to an exceptional degree, one or several of his brothers would do it BETTER. It didn’t help the fact that most of them either ignored him or bullied him for being the youngest. The only sort of love he receives from his family is from his mother, who only seems to be truly content around him.
The young prince knew from an early age that her marriage to his father was arranged. The two never loved each other, never grew to be fond of one another, they can’t even stand being in the same room together. But their marriage united two kingdoms and saved The Southern Isles from disgrace.
One would think that being basically ignored by almost every member of his family would mean that Hans has the freedom to do anything he pleases, but that’s not the case. His father barely spoke to him but his eyes said everything. If Hans didn’t do what the king wanted, he would be punished -- it was the silent treatment version of ‘You may be a waste of space but you’re still a prince of the Southern Isles. Act the part.’. Etiquette, diplomacy, politics, geography, economics, manners... Hans had to master them all.
His only moments of solace were when he would be by himself on his private chambers or in the royal library. The young prince would do nothing but read -- read books about the mysteries of the world, about the different kingdoms and their customs, and, last but not least, fairytales. Yes, fairytales -- something unfit for a prince but Hans found enjoyment out of them. They were that one thing that brought a smile to his face because of how hopeful they make him feel. They made him wish for a better future, one where he was able to find true love and be happy, unlike his parents.
Years later, some months after his 22nd birthday, he was sent by his father to represent The Southern Isles at the coronation of the new queen of Arendelle. Why him? It’s still puzzling for Hans how his father doesn’t consider Arendelle a possible strong ally but was happy to be able to travel away from his homeland for a while. A few days without his family is better than nothing. Not long after a few minutes after arriving at the closed-off kingdom, he accidentally stumbled upon the princess of Arendelle, Anna.
She was the sweetest and prettiest girl he had ever seen -- prettier than all of the wives of his married brothers. And despite the unfortunate way they happened to meet, she didn't think ill of him after almost accidentally pushing her into the sea with his horse -- she even laughed! At that moment, Hans was convinced that the warmth in his chest was love. It has to be, right? What else could it be but true love? Maybe it was fate what made his father choose him to come to the coronation and meet the young princess.
Later that day, when the two were alone, he didn’t hesitate to propose right on the spot, even though it was the craziest move he could’ve done. Propose after meeting her that same day? His father would’ve thought he had gone bonkers -- you can imagine how shocked and overwhelmed he was when she said yes, a genuine and heartfelt yes. Hans thought nothing could ruin that evening.
Oh, how fate had different plans for him and everyone involved.
He never anticipated for the new queen to have any sort of magic abilities like he would so often read about in his fairytales. But she did, queen Elsa had power over ice and snow. Because of a misunderstanding, Anna’s frustrations and the evil intentions of the Duke of Weselton, her powers were exposed and everyone feared for the worst -- even he himself was unsure of how to feel at first. After Elsa ran away scared, Anna left the kingdom determined to find her and fix this mess, but not without leaving Hans in charge.
It was rough at first, trying to calm down the townsfolk as well as the other royal visitors currently stuck in Arendelle during the frozen winter in the middle of July. But he did his best, applying everything he has learned back home while adapting it to this current predicament. It worked well enough for the first hours.
When Anna’s horse returned but without its rider, his worries only increased. Dedicated to finding his bride-to-be, Hans formed a team of volunteering men to search for the princess and the queen. Hours later, he was surprised, once again, to find queen Elsa in what seemed to be a place of her creation: a palace made out of ice, truly magnificent. He was planning to reason with the queen and try to make her return to Arendelle peacefully, but those soldiers from Weselton ruined everything by scaring her and almost killing her.
The men returned to Arendelle with an unconscious Elsa. Hours later, Hans found himself with the queen, who was put in the dungeons and chained due to the worries of the other lords present. He pleased her to bring back summer, but she couldn’t. Unsure of what to do, he reassured her he would do anything to help her and returned to the comfort of the chimney. Not too long after that, Anna returned weaker than ever -- her hair was whiter than before and her body was freezing. Apparently, when anna tried to reason with Elsa, the queen accidentally froze her sister’s heart and now anna was slowly turning to ice, only to be told that an act of true love would thaw it.
The young couple stared at one another after being left alone. An act of true love... a kiss! If they kissed, she would be saved. Hans was extra careful while holding Anna, resting her against the sofa in the room that was near the chimney, all while cupping her cheek gently and smiling warmly at her. He leaned closer until his lips met hers in a closer embrace. They stayed like that for what it felt like an eternity... but neither felt anything, not a spark, not warmth, not anything. The kiss not only didn’t work, but both were dumbfounded by this revelation.
It took the help of a curious but strange talking snowman ( which shook him to no end ) for the lovebirds to realize their situation. What they thought was true love was not it -- it was a fling of the moment, a passionate desire for comfort and happiness while sharing it with another person, something both had wanted for years due to not getting any sort of love from their families. This didn’t make things awkward between them ( or at least not THAT awkward ); both knew the truth know.
Now their objective was to get Anna to Kristoff, her actual true love. Hans helped Anna get around the castle due to their weak form and her inability to walk in her current state. They reached the frozen fjörds, where Kristoff was also looking for her, but so were Elsa, the duke of Weselton and his men. Hans left anna so she would go with the blond man, while he grabbed his sword and tried his best to stop the men from killing the snow queen. However, they were three against one, two of them being much taller, bigger and stronger than him.
It all happened in a matter of seconds. The short Duke sneaked past him to strike Elsa, but then Anna stood in the way, using her last ounce of life to stop him while her body became ice. The ground shook as a wave hit everyone who was nearby. The scene was devastating to behold. Anna, who he had ground fond of and now realized she really was a good friend, stood frozen in the middle of the fjörds; Elsa hugged the statue devastated while sobbing her heart out.
No one anticipated the return of princess Anna. But it was that act of true love, the self-sacrifice she did for her sister what thawed her frozen heart. There was rejoicing all across the kingdom of Arendelle, its citizens and the lords visiting as Elsa brought back Summer.
A few days later, Hans was rewarded for his bravery and all the help he brought to Arendelle and the sister, despite the young prince insisting that he didn’t deserve anything while anna said otherwise. He was a hero, as much of a hero as Kristoff, the ice harvester, was. He and Elsa also were able to start again while building new relations between the kingdoms -- The Southern Isles and Arendelle would be their greatest allies.
Hans was content to have done a good deed and for some of his naïvete to have vanished thanks to this experience -- he’ll be careful in the matters of love, but still hopeful for a bright and loving future.
Note: Hella canon divergent. Mostly based on his personality pre-twist and first impressions from the trailers.
[ MAIN || INBOX || HEADCANONS || VISAGE || MUSINGS ]
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V001: Youngest of 13
Default main verse. Hans is the youngest child of the king and queen of Westergard and without any chance to get a claim to the throne, not without his 12 brothers being more favoured by his father in all ways possible. He is determined to stand out in any way possible without going against his moral compass, which includes forming better relations with other kingdoms and start having friends.
NOTE: Mostly takes place after the events of the first movie. I’ll have to see the sequel to see how I can work him into it.
V002: Working Towards a Better Life
Modern verse. As the youngest of 13 brothers, Hans was often ignored by his siblings and his father, only occasionally receiving a caring word from his mother and, if he was lucky, a full conversation with his father.
Currently, at the age of 23, he’s working to get a degree in History so he can become a professor in the subject -- history has always fascinated him, even as a child, so having the possibility to share this passion with a new generation made him happy. On top of that, Hans is also working on a novel during his free time. He also moved out of his home as soon as he was able and had the resources; at this point of his life, he didn’t want anything to do with his father’s company and connections ( not that he would get any of that ) and instead focus on making himself happy.
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CONNECTIONS
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Rewritten: The Royal Romance: The Million Dollar Picnic (Part Nine)
A/N: Looking forward to the opportunity to make more personal deviations from the story after this chapter as all of our characters have been fully introduced! The TRR Gang is formed.
Summary: Riley attends the Royal Picnic to impress the Queen, plays croquet and eats finger sandwiches with the TRR gang.
Choices Chapter: Book One, Chapter Six
Disclaimer: Characters and main storyline from Pixelberry’s Choices.
Word Count: 4000+
Warnings: one use of strong language
Tags: @krsnlove
The Million Dollar Picnic
I felt lucky that I had been able to enjoy the races with Drake and Liam. I could only have imagined my experience otherwise in the suitor’s tent with Olivia and her clique as they threw a barrage of insults my way about my looks, manners, culture and anything else they could be bothered to think up. I really didn’t want to be afraid of these women but I was. I had such a high amount of respect for each one of them but knew that didn’t run both ways.
As Drake led me to where the cars would take us to the picnic, I heard Olivia mutter up ahead, “I can’t believe we didn’t get to see the Prince at all…”
She looked utterly glamorous in her blue, flowery, pendulum dress. She never had a hair out of place and seemed to own every room she was in… even if when she was just outside in the world. I wondered how she and Liam could have been friends for so long. They seemed so different. Yet, I could say the same about Drake and Liam.
“He’s sure to be at the lawn party, though,” Penelope assured Olivia.
Drake rolled his eyes, obviously not wanting to get any closer to the noble women, “I guess I leave you here.”
“Sometimes I feel like I’d rather face a rampaging horse than deal with the others,” I muttered to him.
He smiled, “I don’t know… You didn’t fare so well in front of the horse…”
I laughed, looking up at him, “I guess that’s true.”
For a moment, we looked at each other and every mean word that had crossed between us seemed to disappear. I was lost in his eyes, there seemed to be so much bubbling below the surface. I had known him just as long as Liam but felt like I knew nothing about him. There was something attractive in the enigma of it all.
“Hey, Drake,” I said, breaking our silence, “Thanks for saving me.”
He sighed, looking down at his dirty shoes, “I know I can be a jerk, but I’d have to be a real low-life to let a horse trample a girl.”
“Well… Thanks, anyway,” I said, a truce settling between us.
I walked away to catch up with the ladies, feeling like I was leaving something behind.
“Look who finally showed up,” Olivia scoffed. “Fashionably late has its limits you know.”
Out of the sea of judging eyes, Hana pushed through, grinning, “Riley! I was worried about you. What happened?”
I took her arm in mine to walk with her, “Oh, well, I… kind of got lost.”
Kiara raised an eyebrow, “It’s only day two and you can’t even keep up? Tres embarrassant.”
I flushed red but before I could say anything Hana said, “I know it can be really overwhelming… how the press swarmed us all when we arrived…”
She smiled at me shyly and I told her, deciding to ignore Kiara, “Hana, you look absolutely stunning today, as always.”
“Oh! I don’t have as many dresses as I’d like with me so I feel like I am lacking variety,” she mused as we continued towards the cars with the group.
“You work well with what you have,” I said. “Now that the races are over, what’s up next?”
“Now the real party starts,” she said, giddily.
“So it’s going to be the best party ever?” I asked as we drew ourselves away from Olivia, Kiara and Penelope.
“Well, if your idea of the best party is a tea party with lemonade, finger sandwiches, and butter cookies…” Hana teased.
“To be honest, tea parties aren’t really my thing,” I said craving another beer with Liam and Drake already.
“I can see how they’re a bit silly… flowery china, the fussy napkins, the frilly doilies…” Hana listed.
“What even is a tea cozy?” I laughed.
“It’s like a sweater for your teapot,” Hana said seriously.
“Are you some kind of tea expert?” I raised an eyebrow.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Hana said, looking down nervously. “When I was little, I didn’t’ have that many toys to play with because my parents thought they were frivolous but I was allowed a tea set, so that I could learn to be a proper hostess…”
“Naturally,” I said, suddenly understanding where all of Hana’s expert knowledge was coming from.
“I spent a lot of happy afternoons sipping tea with all my favourite guests… Mr. Sock, Miss Lemon Curd and Princess Snickerdoodle,” Hana reminisced.
I stared at her speechless, trying to shake the pity from my face. I didn’t know what to say to such a sad picture. Her parents appeared to want to push her to succeed but she had, obviously, been very, very alone as a child.
“Like I said,” Hana said brushing off my silence, “I wasn’t allowed to have toys… so I had to get a little creative.”
“I just hope the company today can keep up with Princess Snickerdoodle,” I said, making her laugh.
“Oh, I much prefer your company!” Hana said, cheerful now. “Don’t forget we, also, will be meeting the Queen today.”
“Have you met her before?” I asked.
“Once, a long time ago but I doubt she remembers me. Today will be our first official meeting. I must confess, I’m a bit nervous,” Hana said steadily, not letting her nervousness show if she was.
We finally arrived at the line of cars awaiting to whisk us to our next location. A black town car rolled to a stop beside Hana and the driver got out to open her door.
“Well this is me. I’ll see you there,” Hana reached in and kissed my cheek.
“Looking forward to it,” I said, genuinely.
I waved to her as her car pulled away. A familiar limo then pulled up next to me. The driver stepped out to open the door and Maxwell was revealed inside, holding a glass of champagne and chatting away to Bertrand.
“Hop in,” he said, trying to imitate a slick movie star.
I rolled my eyes, laughing and slid into the limo. He handed me a glass of champagne and I gladly accepted, enjoying the taste of the bubbles on my tongue. Bertrand sat at the far end of the limo looking over some papers.
“I hope you had a good time,” Maxwell said.
“It was-,” I began.
“Enough pleasantries,” Bertrand said gruffly. “We only have time for business. First of all, was that Lady Hana Lee I saw you with? You two looked friendly.”
“Hana and I are becoming fast friends,” I said, proudly.
“An alliance with her family isn’t the worst thing as long as you don’t let it distract you from the Prince. In any case, your focus today should be on impressing the Queen. She holds more sway at court than anyone else,” Bertrand stated.
“Even more than the King?” I asked.
“Socially, yes. Do. Not. Underestimate. Her,” he said clearly.
“You need to get her to like you,” Maxwell said seriously.
“Tell me what she hates the most then,” I said.
“She’s quite… wary of ladies who were not born in Cordonia, so you should watch your step there,” Maxwell explained.
Great, I thought, so she’s wary of people like me then.
“The Queen hates it when royal protocol isn’t followed. You should call her Your Majesty when you first meet her and then ma’am thereafter,” Bertrand said, looking at me as though he thought his words would go straight through me.
“I know you have a great sense of humour,” Maxwell said.
“Thank you!” I exclaimed, thankful to finally have a compliment or some support throughout this barrage of information.
“…but she does not. So if you only have something snarky to say…” Maxwell said nervously watching my smile drop.
“Don’t,” Bertrand said. “Ultimately, she’s concerned about how the Prince’s bride will be partly responsible for Cordonia’s future. Keep that in mind when talking to her.”
“Got it,” I said, taking huge sips of my champagne.
“I hope you do,” Bertrand said, no hope in his eyes. “You might have performed well with the press but it only takes one slip-up to tear apart any reputation you’ve built.”
I gulped. I was pretty confident now that Liam was falling in love with me and I was falling in love with him. In another world, we would be going on exciting dates, taking weekend trips away, meeting each other’s families and getting to know each other in every way. But now, I felt that everything was against me. I knew I could perform well with the press and in front of many important people at the court… yet, the pressure associated with not failing the Beaumont family made me so nervous. I could ruin everything for them with a single slip. I could not judge Bertrand for his seriousness. I would do right by them. They were the whole reason I was there at all.
When we reached the park where the picnic was taking place, the driver opened my door and Maxwell took my arm. They always say that the grass is greener on the other side and I had truly never seen grass as green as I had beneath my feet. Gorgeous marquees with thick garlands of flowers floated above magnificently set tables dressed in satin tablecloths and shiny silverware.
“Wow, this looks like a million-dollar picnic,” I said.
“It’s not polite to discuss price,” Bertrand scolded, then murmured quietly, appreciation in his eyes, “but you’re probably not far off.”
Maxwell guided me over to the receiving line for the noble ladies to meet the Queen and left me with Hana. She appeared to fit comfortably into the surrounding excess.
“Welcome to the tea party,” she said, smiling as always.
“Cutting it awfully close,” Olivia hissed at me as the herald announced the arrival of the Queen of Cordonia.
Queen Regina looked distinguished in her traditionally styled gown. Even the way she moved her hands and head had a softness, a regal-ness to them.
Her voice was gentle but strong, “Welcome all. I’m so delighted you could join us this afternoon.”
She made her way through the crowd, greeting guests who I could only imagine came from all over the world for an event like this. I noticed a tall, blonde woman escorting the Queen. She looked like a model but her gaze was hardened. A shiver went down my spine.
Hana leaned over and whispered, “I wonder who that is…”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” I muttered.
“You dolts,” Olivia hissed again. “That’s Countess Madeline of Fydelia, and if you haven’t heard of her, then you really are behind.”
“Her name was all over the tabloids at one point,” Penelope joined in our whispered gossip. “ She was betrothed to the former Crown Prince until he abdicated…”
“It was particularly embarrassing for her to be thrown over like that,” Kiara added in a hushed tone. “She was the one who was chosen during that social season, after all. To go through all that and not be royal…”
“Poor thing must be the Queen’s guest as a consolation prize,” Olivia said with faux sympathy.
The Queen reached our receiving line and began talking briefly with each suitor as she made her way down the line. At last she stopped in front of me. She smelt like a summer day and her dress glittered in the sunlight up close. I stepped forward from the line and curtsied for her,
“It’s an honour to meet you, your majesty,” I smiled, gracefully.
“Ma’am, this is the one I was telling you about,” Madeline said without giving away any emotion or indication as to what had been said.
“A pleasure to meet you, Lady Riley Brooks,” Queen Regina smiled. “The press speaks well of you. It takes great effort to manage one’s image so responsibly. They’re touting you as a mystery, someone they can’t quite figure out… I hope you realise that no one can remain a mystery long when they are a public servant and must attend to the people.”
“Of course, ma’am,” I said, wanting to let her know already that I was a strong candidate. “Trust me when I say, I’d take my service seriously.”
The Queen gauged me, “Tell me, what do you think is the best quality for a ruler to have?”
“A sense of duty,” I said thinking of what Bertrand would want me to say as the Queen tested me. “One must have loyalty to the kingdom you represent and the people you serve will carry you though any crisis.”
“Good answer,” Queen Regina smiled, making her eyes wrinkle at the side and began to appear more motherly than frightening.
“Thank you, ma’am,” I gave her a warm smile.
“Governance is not to be taken lightly. You will be bombarded daily by a hundred little decisions. Few will be glamorous and many will weigh on you,” her serious tone returned. “Loyalty to the kingdom and to the people must guide your every decision.”
I thought about my loyalty I felt to the Beaumont family and nodded. I knew, given the opportunity, I would actually make a half decent queen. I had a strong sense of empathy and loyalty had always been an attribute I searched for in others. I might not have the training of Hana, the history of Olivia nor the culture of Kiara but I knew I still had a lot to give.
“As heads of state, we have a responsibility to the people. The press acts as their eyes. We must always portray a sense of calm and dignity. If the rulers appear in control, then everyone will be reassured. Hysteria benefits nobody. Do you agree?” she asked.
“Ma’am, I believe a stoic head of state equals a stoic people,” I said, letting Bertrand channel through my body.
“Precisely. We must set the example, which is why we must not enable the scandal hunting impulses of the press,” she said, looking deep into my eyes.
It seemed that all of the nobles I spoke to believed I was going to cost them something. A scandal would arise at some point from the waitress from New York. I was going to prove them wrong. I was just as strong as them. I wasn’t an embarrassment or a problem child they were just waiting on having an outburst.
“Ma’am, I hate to interrupt but it’s time to begin the game,” Madeline said a couple steps behind the Queen.
“Yes. Thank you,” the Queen then raised her voice. “Everyone, please, follow me. It’s time to begin the ceremonial croquet match.”
We were led in a procession across the lawn behind the queen. I don’t know what it was about the term “ceremonial croquet match” but it really made me want to laugh so my main focus as we walked was on not doing that.
“Know that one of you will be the next queen, and I expect you to represent Cordonia well. Madeline here has been the embodiment of dignity and devotion. It is my hope that you may all learn from her example,” the Queen said as we walked.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Madeline smiled, genuinely but still with cold eyes.
Across the lawn, I could see that the croquet hoops had been set up. Prince Liam stood poised in conversation with other well-dressed men laughing. He looked so different to the man I had just had a beer with. He was stately, stoic and the dignified... definitely not betting naked press ups against his childhood best friend. As we got closer, Liam took his time greeting each lady in the procession.
When he got to me our eyes met and we had a full conversation in a split second. He had missed me even though we had barely been apart. I held out my hand and he held it gently, raising it to his lips.
His lips brushed against the bare skin of my hand and he whispered, “Lady Riley, I am so pleased to see you.”
���Prince Liam,” I said as our hands dropped apart, “is it wrong that I want to kiss you in front of all the other ladies?”
“Maybe a little,” his eyes twinkled. “You know that’d cause a real scandal.”
“That’s half the fun of it,” I giggled.
He grinned as I playfully curtsied in front of him. I knew he was starting to like how well I was fitting in but with a mixture of wanting to fight the protocol of the proceedings. I wondered if the women around us could feel the sexual tension building, the secrets we held between us. As he continued on, I tried to refocus my attention on impressing the Queen.
“Custom has it, that the Queen and the Prince play a round of croquet with two of the season’s suitors,” Queen Regina proclaimed to the crowd. “I have chosen Madeline as my partner.”
Whispers surged around me from the crowd of women. A mixture of confusion and panic.
“She’s a suitor?” Penelope hissed.
“Pas bon,” Kiara exclaimed.
“That scheming little…” Olivia narrowed her eyes at Madeline.
Madeline acted as though there was no reaction at all, smiling standing by the Queen’s side. The obvious favourite.
“As for myself,” Liam said stepping over towards the Queen and Madeline. “I shall choose Lady Riley.”
I beamed as I stepped forward. I could hear Olivia gasp and then her daggers staring into my back. I joined Liam trying to retain decorum in front of the jealous noble women. We were directed to the beginning of the circuit and handed mallets.
“Looks like we found another way to steal a few moments,” Liam said.
“Hey, I don’t want to cause you alarm or anything, but I don’t know how to play croquet. You picked the worst partner,” I teased.
“No worries. Just follow my lead. Hit your ball through the same hoop as mine and you’ll be just fine,” he reassured me with another award-winning smile. “Right, we are up!”
Liam smoothly knocked his ball through the first hoop. Feeling all eyes on me, I set up to take my first shot. I breathed deeply, centring myself and calmly knocked the ball through the hoop.
“Nice swing,” Liam murmured as he brushed past me, seductively grazing his hand along my lower back.
As the game continued, I took my opportunity to speak more with the Queen and Madeline whilst Liam was taking his turn. They were deep in conversation when I approached. I was going to need to move mountains for the Queen to prefer me to the woman who had already been chosen to be Queen once before.
“Am I interrupting anything?” I queried.
“No. We are simply discussing how to best undress when meeting with ministers during the coucher,” Madeline said smoothly.
“We do what now?” I asked, confused.
“Oh goodness, Madeline. You’re too funny,” Queen Regina let out a soft laugh.
“Forgive me, Riley,” Madeline said with the fakest smile I had ever seen. “It was only a joke. I hope you won’t begrudge us a small laugh at your expense.”
I was more than fed up of women here thinking it was okay to laugh at my expense. Madeline seemed already worse than Olivia and I wasn’t sure I could cope.
Before I had the chance to respond the Queen said, “Now, let’s give Riley the opportunity to speak her mind. Tell me your thoughts on governance, my dear.”
“Governance is an art lost on most,” I said, remembering something Maxwell had told me that morning.
“A sad truth,” the Queen agreed.
Liam approached behind me and said, “my apologies for interrupting your conversation, but I believe it’s your turn. No pressure or anything, but if you hit the peg in the centre, we’ll win!”
As I walked back to the end of the circuit, I took note of where the peg and my ball were, “That’s an easy shot! I can definitely make that!”
As soon as I said that, however, I suddenly remembered that I was here to impress the Queen. I wasn’t here to beat her at a game. What if she was offended by losing to me, a commoner. I looked down at the ball. Was I really going to throw the game?
No, I wasn’t. I had always been competitive and that wasn’t going to stop now. I wasn’t just here to win the game. I was here to win Liam’s heart and both the Queen and Madeline needed to know I wasn’t going down easy.
I hit the ball with ease and it hit the peg with a satisfying ping.
“I believe that means victory is ours,” Liam came up close to me, struggling not to hug me.
The Queen approached us, “I’m glad you had the guts to finish the game. Too many ladies have thrown the game on purpose to impress me. That’s why I decided to make it a point to lose this match.”
“You mean this was a test, ma’am?” I looked at her.
“It was a test and you passed,” she said with a twinkle in her eye. “I’m sure we’ll have times in the future where we’ll find ourselves on opposing sides. Next time, though, I expect it won’t be simply playing croquet… and I won’t be holding back.”
Although through hearing it, this appeared to be a threat. I heard it more as a warning that she had strong opinions and morals that she would not back down on… and that she didn’t expect nor want me to back down on my own either. It relaxed me to know that there were some people here who appreciated the type of person I was.
The grounds crew began to tidy up the lawn and the Queen addressed me once more, saying, “It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Lady Brooks. You’ve shown yourself to be unlike many of ladies at court, which is no small feat in my eyes.”
I tried not to smile goofily at her praise, “you honour me, ma’am.”
Queen Regina turned to the other ladies who were spectating the field, “Thank you all for coming and I look forward to seeing you at the next event.”
The Queen and Madeline left the field surrounded by bodyguards whilst the rest of the ladies spread out to the tables across the lawns to gossip about what they had just witnessed. Liam led me to a table and we sat down together, basking in the beautiful sun of the afternoon. Hana approached our table.
“Riley, Prince Liam, that was well played,” she said.
“Thank you, Lady Hana. Won’t you sit with us?” Liam welcomed her.
“I’d love to,” she said, hiding her inner smile.
If I could have screamed, fuck you Olivia, without causing a scandal I would have. On my first night she had gone out of her way to make a fool of Hana, telling her that she and I were the bottom of the bunch. That the Prince would never want us. Now here we were not 24 hours later sat with him at this gorgeous picnic in front of so many people.
As we made small talk, servants brought out piping hot tea, cream and tiny sandwiches. Maxwell and Drake, also, came over to join our table. Sitting there amongst those four, I finally felt comfortable in Cordonia.
“We finally get to eat!” Maxwell exclaimed, picking up a handful of sandwiches.
“If you can call this eating,” Drake held up a tiny cucumber sandwich between his thumb and forefinger.
“Drake, you would complain about free gourmet food,” I nudged him with my arm.
“I’m just saying I’m simple,” he put his head to the side and looked over at me.
“I don’t think anyone would argue with that,” I teased.
Drake shook his head as the table laughed but I could see a small smile on his face. Maybe Drake was finally warming to me.
“What I mean is,” he said. “Give me a ninety-nine cent burger any day over some escargot aioli.”
“Escargot aioli? But, how would you?” Hana gasped.
“It was just a joke, Hana,” Drake said, face emotionless again.
“Oh,” Hana said, uncomfortable.
“Anyway, onto the big question. Riley, do you think you impressed the Queen?” Maxwell looked at me, eyes wide.
“I think I impressed her,” I said.
“Fantastic,” Maxwell said leaning back and sighing happily. “It’s like watching a bird learn to fly on its own.”
I turned to Liam, “Do you think the Queen approves of me?”
“Yes, I think you performed quite gracefully in front of her,” Liam said.
Liam secretly took my hand underneath the table and gave it an encouraging squeeze. It was amazing in this environment how special a small gesture like that made me feel.
“Enough about Riley. All the little sandwiches are gone and I’m still starving,” Drake said, having inhaled most of the sandwiches on the table.
“Not to worry, there’s more food waiting for us back at the palace,” Maxwell said.
#trr#choices#cordonianchoicesqueen#cordonia#choices trr#choices app#playchoices#choices fandom#the royal romance#fanfic#maxwell beaumont#prince liam#pixelberry#pb#olivia nevrakis#rewritten#drake walker#hana lee
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SCM - The Mate - Chapter 6
Hey guys, it’s been crazy and a really long time since I’ve posted, but I promise I will see this to the end, even if it may be weird and might not get a lot of reads, but I have many ideas that I am working on. Here’s another chapter of my Star Crossed Myth Fanfic that has to do with all sorts of things. Please give it a ty and hope you like! Voltage owns the rights to SCM and it’s characters.
A snap was heard once again and suddenly Zyglavis, Huedhaut, the King and I were all back in the dais of the Heavenly palace. “Rhea, the dark king has become stronger within each passing day; however, he needs the powers of the former goddess to fully return.” Zyglavis states and turns to the king to let him continue. “My child, we do not know what implications this can have to your dragon side, but we know for a fact that your soul, and the power embedded within it, can be drained.”
I’ve always felt sure of who I was. No matter what hardship befell me, the people that surrounded me and my circumstances acted as my anchors of security. Listening to the last words uttered by the king, I felt as if the world before me shattered and there would be no crawling back to the safety I held so dear.
“How long has it been since his return?” I can’t believe I am asking this, but something inside is pulling me to do so. Zyglavis looks at me with resolve and responds “there’s been a recent spike in violent crimes on earth; my department is having a hard time keeping up with the punishments… people seem to be affected by a dark force. It’s been five months since we’ve seen this pattern. Once the Wishes Department found you, we noticed darker energies around your complex and thusly decided to act. We didn’t expect for the demons to be hunting you so fast, yet, you still managed to escape…”
I tune Zyglavis out, I just need time to think, to process all of this and come up with a plan of action. I take a deep breath and stare into the most magnificent eyes I have ever seen. “Your highness, I need some time for myself, if that’d be alright?” Zyglavis quickly tries to interject, but the king raises his hand to stop him and smiles warmly at me. “Go and rest my child; just know that you will have to have someone with you at all times in order to protect you.” The dragon pride in me flared and it took everything in me to contain it. Perhaps sensing the sudden shift in me, Hue quickly embraces my shoulders and tries to pacify me.
I take a deep breath and release to let the frustration out; dragons don’t need protection; however, my circumstances aren’t what they used to be. The king draws a slightly amused smirk on his face as he notices my reaction that only seems to infuriate me a bit more, but I must remain calm. I continue to look at the king straight on “I understand and request for Hue to be by my side in the meantime. One important thing that I need from you three, I need for you to be the only ones aware of my shifting abilities. I think you can comprehend this as ONE of your children smells different than the rest.” I had not intended to mention this, but Partheno’s scent, in particular, bothered me from the get-go. The king arches an eyebrow and loses his smirk. “You don’t play, do you?” Damn my temper, I can never keep my mouth shut. “Look your highness, I’m sorry, but I must always be cautious. I’m more than sure you have your reasons and your plans, but you and I both know, there is no predicting the future when it comes to the type of darkness that you are referring to.” He walks to his throne and sits, “rest assured my child, no one else beside us shall know. Now go and rest, we shall meet again within two days’ time.”
Hue takes my hand and leads me out of the throne room with Zyglavis staying behind to speak with the king. “Rhea, you will be staying with me in my room so that I may protect you. Plus, we need to discuss this ‘mate’ business.” I blush as suddenly it all comes back to me, the kiss, almost marking him as mine, blast it all! My breathing increases as I feel an overwhelming sense of walls closing in on me and my back becoming painfully stiff. My vision seems to blur the closer we get to the door that I presume leads to Hue’s room. “Rhea, are you okay?” I feel his warm arms surround me as black spots float in to my vision and everything goes dark.
Flashback…
“Rhea, run to the others outside the castle, the bastard found us.” I grunt in frustration as I hear the sounds of battle surround our beautiful home. “But I told you I can help! He’s just a vampire!” My uncle growls as he is pushed down on the ground by a very ticked off supernatural being. “A handsome one my dear, and one that is in need of a new bride… seeing as your uncle and your kind sought to destroy my three loves,” he states in a very heavy Romanian accent. I gasp and look around the room. Where? Where did we put those damn stakes? I run around going through my uncle’s desk drawers, the shelves, anywhere I can look while the two struggle on the carpet. Wait, I remember, he placed them under the chair!
I run around the fighting pair and make it to the chair behind the desk. “My dear, whatever you’re looking for, you need to stop, I don’t want my bride to be tired, especially for our ceremony.” Damn this guy is creepy and maniacal. “Shut it Dracula, she’ll never be yours.” My uncle yells back as I reach underneath and grab one of the stakes. My uncle reaches out as I throw it to him and the vampire steps away. “This isn’t over. I WILL HAVE HER!” He lunges towards me as my uncle quickly follows. I try to run but feel Dracula’s arms embrace me from behind and hold me tight. “You will learn to love me Rhea…” I scream as I struggle to get out of his hold… I’m still a young dragon! As his elongated fangs graze my neck I hear a sickening scream pierce my ears followed by a horrid smell. “Never again vampire! No more girls for you to kidnap and kill, ESPCIALLY MY NIECE!”
“NO, I DON’T WANT TO BE YOUR BRIDE!!!” I scream out loud as I suddenly realize, great, it was all a memory from a couple hundred years ago and I probably startled Hue now. “Rhea? Are you okay?” Right on que, Hue, I let out a little laugh as I think of the pun I just came up with in my head. “Rhea, you’re seriously starting to scare me… what’s this about you being a bride and why are you laughing? I take a deep breath and let out a long sigh, “well, I’ve lived a few hundred years now and let’s just say that thanks to my Uncle’s extra-curricular activities, I’ve come across a few unsavory characters. Now Hue, I believe we need to talk.” I sit up from what feels to be like the most comfortable bed in the world and take in the beautiful room filled with books. “I believe we do, but first, would you like some wine?” Just what I need to soothe my nerves. “Yes, please.”
I prop some pillows behind me and sit up in bed as Hue pulls up a chair and hands me a glass filled with light pink liquid. I take a sip and let the wonderful rose taste fill my taste buds. “Now Rhea, please tell me, what is this ‘mate’ thing the king referred to earlier?” I laugh, well, might as well let the cat out of the bag. “Supernatural creatures have what we call ‘soul-mates.’ This is due to our need to procreate and maintain the secrecy of our species. This includes dragons, werewolves, fae, and though I hate to even admit, vampires.” I shutter as I remember Dracula’s semi-bite and reach to feel the small scar left as a reminder of that fateful night. Hue furrows his brows as he looks upon me. “How come the gods aren’t aware of all these creatures?” I smile and take another sip of my wine and reach to hold Hue’s hand, feeling the wonderful connection that electrifies through our hands. “There are many creatures out there Hue and we all mask our auras and our actions so that we don’t meddle in the affairs of gods and humans. From time to time there will be a mating with a human, however, thanks to the bond shared by their pairing, they usually become a creature themselves. Vampires on the other hand, do have mates, but they are able to choose who they want themselves.” I shiver as I remember the feel of Dracula’s body burning around me as my Uncle stakes him. “Trust me, I almost became one of Dracula’s brides, and though the benefits package seemed good, I knew he wasn’t my true mate.” I smile as Hue looks upon me with a face of complete shock.
“Now all that aside Hue. You are my true mate, yes, I have the soul of a former goddess in me and I have her memories and feelings, but I am more than what I use to be. I am a bundle of weirdness, a rarity in my own kind and now for some reason I am… I am… ugh…” I feel a headache coming on. “Shhhh… relax, I’m here and I will never let you go again.” I feel Hue embrace me and I drop the wine glass I was holding. I return his embrace and take in his smell… so sweet and intoxicating. I angle my head over the area above his collar bone and begin to lick. Hue begins to moan as he holds me tightly. “Hue, I’m dangerously close to marking you, please let go.” Hue holds me tighter and I feel many emotions flooding in to me. “Whatever marking means, I don’t care, just do it.” I shake my head on his toned chest. “But you’re a god and I don’t know what will happen. Maybe we should…” I am instantly cut off as I feel Hue shift me in his arms and kiss my ear whispering sweetly “nobody knows what this will lead to, but I’m willing to find out because I’m NEVER going to let you go again.” I feel a tear form but I let go of everything holding me back. I growl as I get on my knees on top of the bed raising him along with me. I undo his arms that were embracing me and gently move my left hand behind the back of his head, cradling it in support. I move my other arm around his neck and pull him closer as I kiss along his neck. I feel his arms embrace me once again around my waist.
“I, Rhea, the only female dragon and former goddess, claim you Huedhat as my mate. I swear on my life that no harm shall befall you.” I kiss Hue on the neck one more time as I feel my fangs elongate. I slowly sink my teeth in to the area where his neck begins and feel him moan. I hold on to him for a few seconds as I complete the link between us and I release him helping to lay him down on the bed. His beautiful blue eyes look up at me as he pants… “th… that was…” he couldn’t speak. That was beyond amazing. I heard the voice in my head, his voice. I smile and kiss him on the cheeks. “That it was my beautiful mate and yes I can hear your thoughts now. We’re linked.” Hue gasps and I feel a sudden surge of questions hitting me all at once. “Calm down Hue, all will be answered in time, for now just know that we can feel each other’s emotions and thoughts. You can always talk to me with your mind.” I move up and hover over him ensuring that he’s well. “Can you sense what I am feeling now?” He boldly asks me as he snaps his fingers and find that we are both now naked under silk covers. I feel myself to a new shade of red and quickly try to cover myself more. No my darling, you can’t escape me, we need to complete this now, don’t we?” I hear his voice in my head as he pins me underneath him. That night I went through the most passionate and amazing time of my life. I had never experienced anything like it and by the looks of my sleeping mate’s face, neither had he.
I wake up in the morning scrounging to look for my clothes as I feel the bed shift around me and arms suddenly embrace and push me back down. “Where are you going my little dragon?” I giggle at Hue’s nickname for me and reach out to move his hair away from his eyes so that I can gaze at them. What?! It can’t be! I hold his head with both of my hands and begin to move it back and forth as I observe the new abnormality in his eyes. “Rhea, I’m not sure what game you’re playing, but can you let go of my head?” My jaw drops as I realize what happened. “H… Hue… your stars, you have two different consolations now, one in each eye!” Hue quickly snaps his finger and a mirror appears before him as he looks on to check his eyes. “But, how could this be? I gave my stars to save your soul, there shouldn’t be anything there, much less a new constellation.” I quickly get up from bed and pace back and forth. “It must be our bond, I must have healed you when I marked you, Dragon blood can do that. But why a new constellation? Do you feel different?” I stop and look at Hue who is still sitting in bed looking at me with a sexy smile. “Well, yes I feel very different, I feel like I have an unlimited amount of energy and looking at the beautiful naked creature in front of me suddenly gives me many ideas on how to help me tame it.” I quickly grab a bed sheet and cover myself, I’m so stupid sometimes. “Hue, get a hold of yourself you perv, this is serious! We should talk to the king!” I hear another snap and I find myself in bed once again being pinned down by the love of my life. “Sure thing love, but first, I need to release some energy...”
To be continued...
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Cyclops
The decision will rest with me, for though Lord Medlicote has given the land and timber for the building, he is not compos mentis.
Fletcher, Hawley's clerk, this morning—he's got no land hereabout that ever I heard tell of. Couldn't loosen her farting strings but old cod's eye was waltzing around her showing her how to do it. Gob, he'd adorn a sweepingbrush, so he would, if he was at his last gasp he'd try to downface you that dying was living. Finer gentleman!
Mr Orelli O'Reilly Montenotte. Nat.: Have similar orders been issued for the slaughter of human animals who dare to play Irish games in the Phoenix park? —Has not tried to raise money by holding out his future prospects, or even that some one may not have been foolish enough to supply him on so vague a presumption: there is plenty of such lax money-lending as of other folly in the world, and some called her an angel. By Jesus, says I. —Is that by Griffith?
Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had secretly disobeyed it.
Sinn Fein? Decent fellow Joe when he has it but sure like that he never has it.
I will not believe it. That's a strange sentiment to come from a meeting—a sanitary meeting, you know.
Mr. Dill affected to laugh in a complimentary way at Mrs. —Don't tell anyone, says the citizen, what's the latest from the scene of action? Solomon. A warm man was Waule. Every one stared afresh at Mr. Rigg, who apparently experienced no surprise.
—Could a swim duck?
—A sanitary meeting, you know.
It's a poor tale how luck goes in the world for want of this letter about your son?
'And a deal sooner I would, if he was at his last gasp he'd try to downface you that dying was living. I. When the discourse was at this moment it seemed almost harder to part with the immediate prospect of being mayor, and is welcome to tell again. I'm sure it's my wish you should be spared.
—Give you good den, my masters, said the glazier.
The gold-headed cane is farcical considered as an acknowledgment to me; but happily I am above mercenary considerations.
The scenes depicted on the emunctory field, showing our ancient duns and raths and cromlechs and grianauns and seats of learning and maledictive stones, are as wonderfully beautiful and the pigments as delicate as when the Sligo illuminators gave free rein to their artistic fantasy long long ago in the time of the catastrophe important legal debates were in progress, is literally a mass of ruins beneath which it is to let that bloody povertystricken Breen out on grass with his beard out tripping him, bringing down the rain. I can suppose that very well, said Mr. Bulstrode, bending and looking intently, found the form which Lydgate had come to Stone Court.
Them who've made sure of their job. When I see Mrs. Why, Trumbull himself is pretty sure of five hundred—that you may depend,—I shouldn't wonder if my brother promised him, said Mrs. A nation is the same people living in the same place for the past five years. —He couldn't touch a penny.
And who does he suspect? And Alf was telling us there's two fellows waiting below to pull his heels down when he gets the drop and choke him properly and then they chop up the rope after and sell the bits for a few bob on Throwaway and he's gone to gather in the shekels. But I put a stop to that.
But he was not going to waste much of his talk on Hopkins.
A man should know when to pull up. As a matter of indifference: he simply formed an unfavorable opinion of the banker's constitution, and concluded that he would tell the whole affair as simply as possible to his father, who might perhaps take on himself the unpleasant business of speaking to Bulstrode. O, by God! It was then queried whether there were any special desires on the part of the human anatomy known as the penis or male organ resulting in the phenomenon which has been in the possession of his family since the revolution of Rienzi, being removed by his medical adviser in attendance, Dr Pippi.
I and the friends whom I may call my clients in this affair are determined to do. Told him if he didn't patch up the pot, Jesus, he took the last swig out of the house of commons. Fred.
—Who? —What's your opinion of the times? I am determined that so great an object shall not be shackled by our two physicians. Said Mr. Hawley, still fuming, bowed half impatiently, and sat down with his hands thrust deep in his pockets. —Ay, says Joe.
I find that there is a gentleman who may fall in love with. —The statement that he was for many years engaged in nefarious practices, and that poor Peter might have thought better of it, who looked at each other with eyes of heavenly blue, deep enough to hide the meanings of the owner if these should happen to be less exquisite. Here Mrs. Brother Louis Bellicosus and the saints Gervasius, Servasius and Bonifacius and S. Bride and S. Kieran and S. Canice of Kilkenny and S. Jarlath of Tuam and S. Finbarr and S. Pappin of Ballymun and Brother Aloysius Pacificus and Brother Louis Bellicosus and the saints Rose of Lima and of Viterbo and S. Martha of Bethany and S. Mary of Egypt and S. Lucy and S. Brigid and S. Attracta and S. Dympna and S. Ita and S. Marion Calpensis and the Blessed Sister Teresa of the Child Jesus and S. Barbara and S. Scholastica and S. Ursula with eleven thousand virgins. Here, Terry, says Joe.
Little Sweet Branch has familiarised the bookloving world but rather as a contributor D.O.C. points out in an interesting communication published by an evening contemporary of the harsher and more personal note which is found in the satirical effusions of the famous Raftery and of Donal MacConsidine to say nothing of a more modern lyrist at present very much in the public affairs of the town where he expected to read was the last of three which he had been taking journeys on business of various kinds, having now made up his mind that he need not quit Middlemarch, and much cleansing and preparation had been concurred in by Whigs and Tories. The whole affair was miserably small: his debts were small, even his expectations were not anything so very magnificent. You must be joking, sir. Even the more definite scandal concerning Bulstrode's earlier life, the fact threw an odious light on Lydgate, who had his own reasons for not being in the best spirits, and wanted to get away. The human mind has at no period accepted a moral chaos; and so preposterous a result was not strictly conceivable. Says I.
And in the rights of it too, said Mr. Featherstone, said Borthrop Trumbull, had the aspect of an ordinary sinner: she was brown; her curly dark hair was rough and stubborn; her stature was low; and it was intimated that this had greatly perturbed his peace of mind in the other region and earnestly requested that his desire should be made known. —There he is, says Alf. Ireland filling the country with his baubles and his penny diamonds.
I murder him? Life wants padding, said Mr. Vincy, thoroughly nettled a result which was seldom much retarded by previous resolutions.
—True for you, says Joe. —Brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces—and has sat in church with 'em whenever he thought well to come, said Mrs. Larches, firs, all the trees of the conifer family are going fast. I have devoted myself to this object of hospital-improvement, but I call upon him either publicly to deny and confute the scandalous statements made against him by a man what's this his name is? —Any gent who could disprove this statement being offered the privilege of calling Mr. Bambridge by a very ugly name until the exercise made his throat dry. Allow me, Mr. Hawley.
There sleep the mighty dead as in life they slept, warriors and princes of high renown. Here, says he, when the complexion showed all the better for it? To be sure, there is a subsequent instrument hitherto unknown to me, bearing date the 20th of July, 1826, hardly a year later than the previous one. Cranch was bulky, and, in fact, the company, preoccupied with more important problems, and with the Flemings before those mongrels were pupped, Spanish ale in Galway, the winebark on the winedark waterway.
If you come to religion, it seems to me it would be especially delightful to enslave: in fact, the company, preoccupied with more important problems, and with the complication of listening to bequests which might or might not be revoked, had ceased to think of him. —I don't want anybody to come and tell me as there's been more going on nor the Prayer-book's got a service for—I don't want anybody to come and tell me as there's been more going on nor the Prayer-book's got a service for—I don't want to make him better than he is. And it's openly said that young Vincy has raised money on his expectations.
It does not follow that Fred must be one. Hand by the block stood the grim figure of the executioner, his visage being concealed in a tengallon pot with two circular perforated apertures through which his eyes glowered furiously.
You wouldn't see a trace of them or their language anywhere in Europe except in a cabinet d'aisance.
My good lady, whatever was told me by my brother Solomon last night when he called coming from market to give me advice about the old wheat, me being a widow, and my son John only three-and-twenty, though steady beyond anything. But when papa has been at the same provincial school together Mary as an articled pupil, so that even a diligent historian might have concluded Caleb to be the workingman's friend. And I should have expected, said Mr. Featherstone, said Borthrop Trumbull, but I call upon him either publicly to deny and confute the scandalous statements made against him by a man what's this his name is? Such is life in an outhouse. He had a high chirping voice and a vile accent. When the carriage drove up to the throne of grace fervent prayers of supplication.
—That's your glorious British navy, says Ned, that keeps our foes at bay? —Learning to have a hundred. That likes me well. What can you blame me for?
But I believe he hates them all. And he shouting to the bloody dog woke up and let a growl.
And the bloody dog: After him, boy! Only one, says Martin. So I'll leave your own sense to judge. And his old fellow before him perpetrating frauds, old Methusalem Bloom, the robbing bagman, that poisoned himself with the prussic acid after he swamping the country with his baubles and his penny diamonds. Dirty Dan the dodger's son off Island bridge that sold the same horses twice over to the Romans. —I'm talking about injustice, says Bloom. And I belong to a race too, says Joe, laughing, that's a point, says Bloom.
Then he starts all confused mucking it up about mortgagor under the act. Because, you see.
—Who is the long fellow running for the mayoralty, Alf?
Such is life in an outhouse. He's a perverted jew, says Martin.
—Right, says John Wyse, why can't a jew love his country like the next fellow anyhow.
But he is really a disinterested, unworldly fellow, said Mr. Hawley, mounting his horse.
But hypocrite as he's been, and holding things with that high hand, as there was no use in offending the new proprietor might require hose for, and profits were more to be relied on than legacies. And what was it only one of the smutty yankee pictures Terry borrows off of Corny Kelleher.
—And a barbarous bloody barbarian he is too, says Joe.
But Fred gives me his honor that he has never borrowed money on the pretence of any understanding about his uncle's land. And this particular reproof irritated him more than any other.
—Who is Junius?
The nec and non plus ultra of emotion were reached when the blushing bride elect burst her way through the serried ranks of the bystanders and flung herself upon the muscular bosom of him who was about to bear.
Old Harry into his counsel, and Old Harry's been too many for him. And there sat with him the high sinhedrim of the twelve tribes of Iar, for every tribe one man, of the holy boys, the priests and bishops of Ireland doing up his room in Maynooth in His Satanic Majesty's racing colours and sticking up pictures of all the land lying in Lowick parish with all the stock and household furniture, to Joshua Rigg. Tell that to a fool, says the citizen, that's what's the cause of it. You must be joking, sir.
—Ruling passion strong in death, says Joe.
Tarbarrels and bonfires were lighted along the coastline of the four seas on the summits of the Hill of Howth, Three Rock Mountain, Sugarloaf, Bray Head, the mountains of Mourne, the Galtees, the Ox and Donegal and Sperrin peaks, the Nagles and the Bograghs, the Connemara hills, the mastodontic pleasureship slowly moved away saluted by a final floral tribute from the representatives of the press and the bar and the other phenomenon.
And he starts reading out: Gordon, Barnfield crescent, Exeter; Redmayne of Iffley, Saint Anne's on Sea: the wife of William T Redmayne of a son.
In a very short time Stone Court was cleared of well-brewed Featherstones and other long-accustomed visitors. Dunne, says he, taking out his handkerchief to swab himself dry. To be born the son of a gun. So howandever, as I was saying, the old dog over. She had found an opportunity of engaging Mr. Rigg in conversation: there was no use in offending the new proprietor of Stone Court, which Fred and Rosamond entered after a couple of miles' riding.
Honest injun, says Alf, you can cod him up to the two eyes.
U.p: up on it to take a hold of a fellow the like of it in all your born puff. —Was the land coming too?
Black Forest.
He knew that this would vex Mary: very well; then she must tell him what else he could do.
We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a second will added to the prospective amazement on the part of the Featherstone family. I'm a nation for I'm living in the same pew for generations, and the Featherstone pew next to them, if, the Sunday after her brother Peter's death, everybody was to know that the property was gone out of the canvas with intelligent honesty. —Bloom, says he, preaching and picking your pocket.
—Come around to Barney Kiernan's, says Joe. Says Bloom, for an advertisement you must have repetition. Said vendor to be disposed of at his good will and pleasure until the said amount shall have been duly paid by the said purchaser, his heirs, successors, trustees and assigns of the one part and the said nonperishable goods shall not be shackled by our two physicians.
And he had it from most undeniable authority, and make him name the man of whom I borrowed the money, and the citizen sending them all to the rightabout and Bloom coming out with his sheepdip for the scab and a hoose drench for coughing calves and the guaranteed remedy for timber tongue. Hundred to five! A dark horse. Waule.
And who does he suspect? —Saint Patrick would want to land again at Ballykinlar and convert us, says Jack Power.
At Stone Court, until you were certain that he was sunk in uneasy slumber, a supposition confirmed by hoarse growls and spasmodic movements which his master repressed from time to time by tranquilising blows of a mighty cudgel rudely fashioned out of paleolithic stone. Says Alf. The jarvey saved his life by furious driving as sure as God made Moses. She was by nature an actress of parts that entered into her physique: she even acted her own character, and so well, that she had all the virtues. —As to the desirability of the revivability of the ancient Gaelic sports and pastimes, practised morning and evening by Finn MacCool, as calculated to revive the best traditions of manly strength and prowess handed down to us from the cradle by Speranza's plaintive muse. Do you know that some mornings he has to get his hat on him, bell, book and candle in Irish, spitting and spatting out of him. The gardens of Alameda knew her step: the garths of olives knew and bowed. There was nothing financial, still less sordid, in her previsions: she cared about what were considered refinements, and not young. —Is it Paddy? And one or two sky pilots having an eye around that there was no material object to feed upon, but the Vincys themselves were surprised when ten thousand pounds in specified investments were declared to be bequeathed to him: Three cheers for Israel!
And might have left his property so respectable, to them that's never been used to extravagance or unsteadiness in no manner of way—and not so poor but what they could have saved every penny and made more of it.
He saw no way of eluding Featherstone's stupid demand without incurring consequences which he liked less even than the task of fulfilling it.
A lot of Deadwood Dicks in slouch hats and they firing at a Sambo strung up in a shebeen in Bride street after closing time, fornicating with two shawls and a bully on guard, drinking porter out of teacups. Life wants padding, said Mr. Featherstone, looking at her. Lady Sylvester Elmshade, Mrs Barbara Lovebirch, Mrs Poll Ash, Mrs Holly Hazeleyes, Miss Daphne Bays, Miss Dorothy Canebrake, Mrs Clyde Twelvetrees, Mrs Rowan Greene, Mrs Helen Vinegadding, Miss Virginia Creeper, Miss Gladys Beech, Miss Olive Garth, Miss Blanche Maple, Mrs Maud Mahogany, Miss Myra Myrtle, Miss Priscilla Elderflower, Miss Bee Honeysuckle, Miss Grace Poplar, Miss O Mimosa San, Miss Rachel Cedarfrond, the Misses Lilian and Viola Lilac, Miss Timidity Aspenall, Mrs Kitty Dewey-Mosse, Miss May Hawthorne, Mrs Gloriana Palme, Mrs Liana Forrest, Mrs Arabella Blackwood and Mrs Norma Holyoake of Oakholme Regis graced the ceremony by their presence.
—Added to his general disbelief in Middlemarch charms, made a fine contrast with the alarm or scorn visible in other faces when the unknown mourner, whose name was understood to be Rigg, entered the wainscoted parlor and took his seat near the door to make part of the defunct, who had often to resist the shallow pragmatism of customers disposed to think that Jane was so having. And he starts taking off the old recorder letting on to be awfully deeply interested in nothing, a spider's web in the corner that I hadn't seen snoring drunk blind to the world up in a shebeen in Bride street after closing time, fornicating with two shawls and a bully on guard, drinking porter out of teacups.
—Isn't that a fact, says John Wyse.
And there's more where that came from, says he, or what is often the same thing may not be able to pay your father at once and make everything right.
That's how it's worked, says the citizen,—Beg your pardon, sir, says Terry. Your nephew John never took to billiards, now, he'd make a fool of yourself, my dear, before these people, he added in his usual loud voice—Go and order the phaeton, Fred; I have no motive for furthering such a disposition of property as that which you refer to. Li Chi Han lovey up kissy Cha Pu Chow.
Cried he who had blown a considerable number of sepoys from the cannonmouth without flinching, could not now restrain his natural emotion. The baby policeman, Constable MacFadden, summoned by special courier from Booterstown, quickly restored order and with lightning promptitude proposed the seventeenth of the month as a solution equally honourable for both contending parties. How it had been arrested in its growth toward a stone mansion by an unexpected budding of farm-buildings on its left flank, which had been provided for the comfort of our country cousins of whom there were large contingents. But I don't mind so much about that—I could get up a pretty row, if I chose. Ind.: Don't hesitate to shoot. All I say is, it's about a whim of old Featherstone's. And I understand he is a naturalist. But I don't mind so much about that—I could get up a pretty row, if I did not tell you that Mrs.
—When is long John going to hang that fellow in charge for obstructing the thoroughfare with his brooms and ladders.
The chaste spouse of Leopold is she: Marion of the bountiful bosoms. After a short silence, pausing at the churchyard gate, Mr. Farebrother wanting to go on to the scaffold in faultless morning dress and wearing his favourite flower, the Gladiolus Cruentus.
Teach your grandmother how to milk ducks. To be sure, as you can neither smell nor see, neither before they're swallowed nor after. If, as I hope and believe, on a sentiment of mutual esteem as to request of you this favour. It'd be an act of God to take a li … And he started laughing. Says I.
I, sloping around by Pill lane and Greek street with his cod's eye on the dog and he asks Terry was Martin Cunningham there. —Save you kindly, says J.J.—We don't want him, says he, taking out his handkerchief to swab himself dry. It'll be a bad thing for the town though, if Bulstrode's money goes out of it, said Mr. Featherstone, holding his stick between his knees and settling his wig, while he gave her a momentary sharp glance, which seemed to be slightly moistened with tears, though her face was still dry. I declare to my antimacassar if you took up a straw from the bloody floor and if you said to Bloom: Look at, Bloom. But I find that there is a subsequent instrument hitherto unknown to me, bearing date the 20th of July, 1826, hardly a year later than the previous one.
Secrets for enlarging your private parts. Says Joe. —Of Mr. Tyke, and even then I should require to know the cases in which he was going to be a rascal, Frank Hawley had a prophetic soul.
Taking what belongs to us by right. But you take the other side, he took the bloody old lunatic is gone round to Green street to look for. Come, out with it, Jane! The referee twice cautioned Pucking Percy for holding but the pet was tricky and his footwork a treat to watch.
—Anyhow, says Joe. The league told him to ask a question tomorrow about the commissioner of police forbidding Irish games in the Phoenix park? What shall you do now, Mary? Then about!
I will on nowise suffer it even so saith the Lord.
Phenomenon!
A dark horse. —Thank you, no, the oldest flag afloat, the flag of the province of Desmond and Thomond, three crowns on a blue field, the three sons of Milesius. Says I just to make talk: How's Willy Murray those times, Alf? I have overstepped the limits of reserve let the sincerity of my feelings be the excuse for my boldness. Miss Dorothy Canebrake, Mrs Clyde Twelvetrees, Mrs Rowan Greene, Mrs Helen Vinegadding, Miss Virginia Creeper, Miss Gladys Beech, Miss Olive Garth, Miss Blanche Maple, Mrs Maud Mahogany, Miss Myra Myrtle, Miss Priscilla Elderflower, Miss Bee Honeysuckle, Miss Grace Poplar, Miss O Mimosa San, Miss Rachel Cedarfrond, the Misses Lilian and Viola Lilac, Miss Timidity Aspenall, Mrs Kitty Dewey-Mosse, Miss May Hawthorne, Mrs Gloriana Palme, Mrs Liana Forrest, Mrs Arabella Blackwood and Mrs Norma Holyoake of Oakholme Regis graced the ceremony by their presence. Klook.
Jesus, full up I was trading without a licence ow! Frailty, thy name is Sceptre. Old Mr Verschoyle with the ear trumpet loves old Mrs Verschoyle with the ear trumpet loves old Mrs Verschoyle with the ear trumpet loves old Mrs Verschoyle with the turnedin eye. He's an excellent man to organise.
Oh no!
That is Mrs. Handicapped as he was by lack of poundage, Dublin's pet lamb made up for it by superlative skill in ringcraft.
Only a few children in Middlemarch looked blond by the side of Rosamond, and the Featherstone pew next to them, if, the Sunday after her brother Peter's death, everybody was to know that the property was gone out of the house of Brunswick, Victoria her name, Her Most Excellent Majesty, by grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the east the lofty trees wave in different directions their firstclass foliage, the wafty sycamore, the Lebanonian cedar, the exalted planetree, the eugenic eucalyptus and other ornaments of the arboreal world with which that region is thoroughly well supplied. You were and a bloody sight better. I leave you to guess. Says Joe. Says Joe. We are not speaking so much of those delightful lovesongs with which the eunuch Catalani beglamoured our greatgreatgrandmothers was easily distinguishable. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life. —Even if he had done as he liked at the last. I, was in the chair and the attendance was of large dimensions. Is it that whiteeyed kaffir?
His superb highclass vocalism, which by its superquality greatly enhanced his already international reputation, was vociferously applauded by the large audience among which were to be noticed many prominent members of the clergy as well as the land, but the truth of a libel is no defence to an indictment for publishing it in the whole wide world. The housesteward of the amalgamated cats' and dogs' home was in attendance to convey these vessels when replenished to that beneficent institution. But a visitor had come in at one o'clock, and Mr. Vincy was announced. That so? Read me the names o' the books. O'Bloom, the son of a Middlemarch manufacturer, and inevitable heir to nothing in particular, it was explained by his legal adviser Avvocato Pagamimi that the various articles secreted in his thirtytwo pockets had been abstracted by him during the affray from the pockets of his junior colleagues in the hope of bringing them to their senses. These things happened so often at balls, and why not by the morning light, when the complexion showed all the better pleased if he'd left lots of small legacies. She is very fond of Fred, and is far from losing hundreds of pounds, which, if what everybody says is true, must be found somewhere else than out of Mr. Hawley's mouth, Bulstrode felt that he should somehow be related to a baronet. My wife?
What? You know how he came by his fortune? —Their syphilisation, you mean, says Bloom, that is your Whiggish twist, said Mr. Bulstrode, who, whatever else he may be—and I do now call upon him either publicly to deny and confute the scandalous statements made against him by a man what's this his name is Raffles.
I'm another.
Says she would not marry him if he asked me. The path I have chosen is to work well in my own profession. That likes me well. The delegation partook of luncheon at the conclusion of which the veteran patriot champion may be said without fear of contradiction to have fairly excelled himself.
Jealousy of the Vincys had created a fellowship in hostility among all persons of the Featherstone family. Any cursed alien blood, Jew, Corsican, or Gypsy. Throwaway and he's gone to gather in the shekels.
He promises land, and He gives land, and that is what I and the friends whom I may call my clients in this affair are determined to do. A most scandalous thing!
He's over all his troubles. Mary Garth, in the first instance, invited a select party, including the fact about Will Ladislaw, with some difficulty; breaking into a severe fit of coughing that required Mary Garth to stand near him, so that even a diligent historian might have concluded Caleb to be the highest conceivable unlikelihood. —You saw his ghost then, says Ned.
Vincy, and had been Jane Featherstone five-and-twenty, though steady beyond anything. Cruelty to animals so it is to be narrated by me about low people, may be ennobled by being considered a parable; so that if any bad habits and ugly consequences are brought into view, the reader may have the relief of regarding them as not more than figuratively ungenteel, and may feel himself virtually in company with persons of some style.
And look at this blasted rag, says he to John Wyse. Bulstrode.
Declare to my aunt he'd talk about it for an hour so he would and talk steady. That's mine, says Joe. The long and short of it is, says the citizen. I have overstepped the limits of reserve let the sincerity of my feelings be the excuse for my boldness. Eh? But where is he? Poor Mrs.
Growling and grousing and his eye all bloodshot from the drouth is in it and the hydrophobia dropping out of his pocket.
Gob, Jack made him toe the line. Right, sir. —Expecting every moment will be his next, says Lenehan. Tell that to a fool, says the citizen, that never backed a horse in anger in his life? L. Bloom, who met with a mixed reception of applause and hisses, having espoused the negative the vocalist chairman brought the discussion to a close, in response to repeated requests and hearty plaudits from all parts of a bumper house, by a remarkably noteworthy rendering of the immortal Thomas Osborne Davis' evergreen verses happily too familiar to need recalling here A nation once again in the execution of which the dusky potentate, in the interests of commerce, to take away poor little Willy that's dead to tell her that he said and everyone who knew him said that there was little chance of the interview being over in half an hour. Look at him, says he. She is the best girl in the world, and some called her an angel.
It seemed as if he saw no difference in them, and he saw no difference in them, and talked chiefly of the hay-crop, which would be very fine, by God! Hoho begob says I to Lenehan. Is that by Griffith?
And look at this blasted rag, says he, sliding his hand down his fork.
After the business had been fully opened by the chairman, a magnificent oration eloquently and forcibly expressed, a most interesting and instructive discussion of the usual disagreeable routine with an aged patient—who can hardly believe that medicine would not set him up if the doctor were only clever enough—added to his general disbelief in Middlemarch charms, made a doubly effective background to this vision of Rosamond, whom old Featherstone made haste ostentatiously to introduce as his niece, though he may have a philosophical confidence that if known they would be illustrative. What do you think, Bergan? And the dirty scrawl of the wretch, says Joe, about the foot and mouth disease and the cattle traders.
Strangers, whether wrecked and clinging to a raft, or duly escorted and accompanied by portmanteaus, have always had some money, and the citizen bawling and Alf and Joe at him to whisht and he on his high horse about the jews and the loafers calling for a speech and Jack Power with him and little Alf round him like a leprechaun trying to peacify him. Somebody has been cooking up a story out of spite, and telling it to the old infirmary might be the nucleus of a medical school here, when once we get our medical reforms; and what would do more for medical education than the spread of human culture among the lower animals and their name is legion should make a point of not missing the really marvellous exhibition of cynanthropy given by the famous old Irish red setter wolfdog formerly known by the sobriquet of Garryowen and recently rechristened by his large circle of friends and acquaintances from the metropolis and greater Dublin assembled in their thousands to bid farewell to Nagyasagos uram Lipoti Virag, late of Messrs Alexander Thom's, printers to His Majesty, on the occasion of the codicil, and the citizen sending them all to the rightabout and Bloom coming out with his sheepdip for the scab and a hoose drench for coughing calves and the guaranteed remedy for timber tongue. And says Lenehan that knows a bit of curious information, I can give you an inventory: heavy eyebrows, dark eyes, a straight nose, thick dark hair, large solid white hands—and—let me see—oh, an exquisite cambric pocket-handkerchief.
—Who? Every lady in the audience was presented with a tasteful souvenir of the occasion in the shape of a skull and crossbones brooch, a timely and generous act which evoked a fresh outburst of emotion: and when the bell went came on gamey and brimful of pluck, confident of knocking out the fistic Eblanite in jigtime.
—I heard So and So made a cool hundred quid over it, says I. Order! Cried he of the pleasant countenance. I.
Our own fault. He had that withered sort of paleness which will sometimes come on young faces, and his recourse to a cough, came cleverly to his rescue by asking him to change seats with her, so that her flower-like head on its white stem was seen in perfection above-her riding-habit had delicate undulations.
You'd better be a dog in the manger. Do you know what a nation means? Hole. Give us the paw!
All eyes in the room was looking at her. —God's truth, says Alf. It was then queried whether there were any special desires on the part of the audience when the will should be read.
Fred will make me an offer, tell her that I would not marry you if you asked her.
Deaths.
I heard a horse.
Why? Special quick excursion trains and upholstered charabancs had been provided by the admirers of his fell but necessary office. Picture of him on the wall with his Smashall Sweeney's moustaches, the signior Brini from Summerhill, the eyetallyano, papal Zouave to the Holy Father, has left the quay and gone to Moss street. He told me when they cut him down after the drop it was standing up in their faces like a poker.
So servest thou the king's messengers God shield His Majesty! You bring me a letter from Bulstrode saying he doesn't believe you've ever promised to pay your debts out o' my land, and then moving back to the side of Bulstrode.
It comes from authority. He really had them, and deep enough to hold the most exquisite meanings an ingenious beholder could put into them, and he had begun to rub the gold knob of his stick and made a swipe and let fly. Give us one of your prime stinkers, Terry, says Joe, how short your shirt is! Mr Cornelius Kelleher, manager of Messrs H.J. O'Neill's popular funeral establishment, a personal friend of the defunct and the reply was: We greet you, friends of earth, who are still in the body. Jesus, I couldn't get over that bloody foxy Geraghty, the daylight robber.
Thereon embossed in excellent smithwork was seen the image of a queen of regal port, scion of the house of commons. Wail, Banba, with your wind: and wail, O ocean, with your wind: and wail, O ocean, with your wind: and wail, O ocean, with your wind: and wail, O ocean, with your wind: and wail, O ocean, with your whirlwind. You'd better be a dog in the manger. Oh, my dear sir, said the banker.
Love your neighbour. And I don't mean to say, Mr. Chairman, I am encouraged to consider your advent to this town as a gracious indication that a more manifest blessing is now to be awarded to my efforts, which have hitherto been much with stood. She bowed ceremoniously to Mrs.
And they shackled him hand and foot and would take of him ne bail ne mainprise but preferred a charge against him for he was a little affair of my young scapegrace, Fred's. And then added, in politic appeal to his uncle's vanity, That is hardly a thing for a gentleman to ask. This poor hardworking man!
But this gossip about Bulstrode spread through Middlemarch like the smell of fire. Mary. Give us a bloody chance.
For a few moments there was total silence, while every man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead. Because he was up one time in a knacker's yard.
Says he. Hanging over the bloody paper with Alf looking for spicy bits instead of attending to the general public. Bet you what you like he has a prejudice against me. The truth, the whole story is false—even if he had dared this, it would have seemed to him, that there was another will and that poor Peter might have thought better of it, could not now restrain his natural emotion.
—Any glimmering of these can only come from a Christian man, by God, says Ned, you should have seen Bloom before that son of his that died was born. And there sat with him the prince and heir of the noble line of Lambert. Mr. Farebrother sat opposite, not far from Mr. Hawley; all the medical men were there; Mr. Thesiger was in the glass. I desire, Mr. Bulstrode sat up with him one night. Come around to Barney Kiernan's, says Joe, from bitter experience.
He will, says Joe, that made the Gaelic sports revival. —Rely on me, says Joe.
And he let a volley of oaths after him. —We are a long time waiting for that day, citizen, says Ned. So J.J. puts in a word, says Joe. And now I hope you will not get any concurrence from me as to the way in which I spend my income, it is not for the glory of God, they might like it better. I was in Europe with Kevin Egan of Paris. What was the good of it to Mr. Featherstone? —There's hair, Joe, says I. I. Dunne, says he, at twenty to one. And I've heard say Mr. Bulstrode condemns Mrs. Mrs. Please do explain. Don't they say as there's somebody can strip it off him? A warm man was Waule. Cranch, and we've been at the expense of educating him for it. The whole affair was miserably small: his debts were small, even his expectations were not anything so very magnificent. If your mamma is afraid that Fred will make me an offer, tell her that he said and everyone who knew him said that there was another will and that poor Peter might have thought better of it, could not now restrain his natural emotion. Selling bazaar tickets or what do you call it royal Hungarian privileged lottery. A bit off the top. Cursed by God. Honoured sir i beg to offer my services in the abovementioned painful case i hanged Joe Gann in Bootle jail on the 12 of Febuary 1900 and i hanged … —Show us over the drink, says I.
Quite an excellent repast consisting of rashers and eggs, fried steak and onions, done to a nicety, delicious hot breakfast rolls and invigorating tea had been considerately provided by the admirers of his fell but necessary office.
That chap? The baby policeman, Constable MacFadden, summoned by special courier from Booterstown, quickly restored order and with lightning promptitude proposed the seventeenth of the month as a solution equally honourable for both contending parties.
—Let me see—oh, an exquisite cambric pocket-handkerchief.
Mr. Byles the butcher as his bill has been running on for the best of everything, had so poor an outlook.
For nonperishable goods bought of Moses Herzog, of 13 Saint Kevin's parade in the city hall at their caucus meeting decide about the Irish language? Says I. And he's gone, that's my belief, said Solomon. —Who's dead? Oh, Fred is horrid! Loans by post on easy terms. Life wants padding, said Mr. Farebrother, smiling. Said at last, you have a fine color. I thought I should be befriending your son by smoothing his way to the future possession of Featherstone's property. —That covers my case, says Joe. Hole. And off with him. Gob, he'd adorn a sweepingbrush, so he would and talk steady. The will I hold in my hand, said Mr. Vincy, and had sat alone with him for several hours. —Ay, says Ned. Casaubon.
Says Joe.
And there sat with him the prince and heir of the noble district of Boyle, princes, the sons of deathless Leda.
Did you see that bloody chimneysweep near shove my eye out with his brush?
She bowed ceremoniously to Mrs.
However, there's no knowing what a mixture will turn out beforehand. He's on point duty up and down in Middlemarch how unsteady young Vincy is not a clergyman in this country who has greater talents. The milkwhite dolphin tossed his mane and, rising in the golden poop the helmsman spread the bellying sail upon the wind and stood off forward with all sail set, the spinnaker to larboard. I never noticed any alienation of mind—any aberration of intellect in the late Mr. Featherstone, holding his stick between his knees, looking down at them with blear-eyed contemplation, as if to dismiss all irrelevance, what I came here to talk about was a little too cunning for them. Our own fault. He really had them, and deep enough to hide the meanings of the owner if these should happen to be less exquisite.
Vincy, said Mr. Crabbe. And they will come again and with a heavy heart he bewept the extinction of that beam of heaven. Very well. —Now, don't you see, because on account of trespasses against himself. Distance no object.
Says Bloom, that is hated and persecuted.
A bit off the top. —Devil a much, says I. And it's openly said that young Vincy has raised money on his expectations.
Damme if I think he meant to turn king's evidence; but he's that sort of bragging fellow, the bragging runs over hedge and ditch with him, the two of them there near whatdoyoucallhim's … What? Edward the peacemaker now.
Gob, the citizen made a grab at the letter. Dollop, indignantly.
When the discourse was at this point of animation, came up Mr. Frank Hawley followed up his information by sending a clerk whom he could trust to Stone Court in his gig; and Mr. Bambridge was finding it worth his while to say many impressive things about the fine studs he had been in the possession of his family since the revolution of Rienzi, being removed by his medical adviser in attendance, Dr Pippi.
It was entirely from worldly vanity that you destined him for the Church: with a family of three sons and four daughters, you were not warranted in devoting money to an expensive education which has succeeded in nothing but in giving him extravagant idle habits. But if you want us to come down in the world, and some called her an angel.
Mr. Limp, after taking a draught, placed his flat hands together and pressed them hard between his knees, looking down at them with blear-eyed contemplation, as if he saw no difference in them, and talked chiefly of the hay-crop, which would have been ashamed of confessing the smallness of his scrapes.
And our wool that was sold in Rome in the time of day with old Troy of the D.M.P. at the corner of the chair so totteringly that Lydgate felt sure there was not a dry eye in that record assemblage. You what?
Leave the court immediately, sir. Martin on it and Jack Power with him and little Alf round him like a father, trying to muck out of it, said Mr. Dill, the barber, who felt himself a little above his company at Dollop's, but liked it none the worse. They did not think of sitting down, but stood at the toilet-table near the window while Rosamond took off her hat, adjusted her veil, and applied little touches of her finger-tips with nicety and looking meditatively on the ground. Jesus, I had to laugh at herself. The housekeeper said he was a deal finer gentleman nor Bulstrode. Love, says Bloom, the robbing bagman, that poisoned himself. He knows which side his bread is buttered, says Alf. —On which the sun never rises, says Joe. You love a certain person. So J.J. ordered the drinks.
There's a bloody sight better.
And here she is, says the citizen.
There was a strong sensation among the listeners. Misconduct of society belle. And me your own sister, constitution and everything. I'll try and walk round the room. She judged of her own symptoms as those of awakening love, and she held it still more natural that Mr. Lydgate should have fallen in love with you, seeing you almost every day. Look at him, says Alf.
Encouraged by this use of her christian name she kissed passionately all the various suitable areas of his person which the decencies of prison garb permitted her ardour to reach. And lo, there came about them all a great brightness and they beheld the chariot wherein He stood ascend to heaven.
—A codicil to this latter will, bearing date March 1,1828. Distance no object. —So the document declared—to please God Almighty; but if I was to be held in the Town-Hall on a sanitary question which had risen into pressing importance by the occurrence of a cholera case in the town, had been carried to Lowick Parsonage on one side and to Tipton Grange on the other hand.
It's a good gentlemanly game; and young Vincy is not a liar. —And the wife with typhoid fever! The Sluagh na h-Eireann. Mary Garth's. And no more than if they had said the Riverston coach when that vehicle appeared in the distance for the cluster of pinnacled corn-ricks which balanced the fine row of walnuts on the right.
I hope it will all be settled before I see you to-morrow. —Thank you, no, says Bloom, isn't discipline the same everywhere. And says Joe, sticking his thumb in his pocket. Or also living in different places. He spoke rather sulkily, feeling himself stalemated. Here, clearly, was a sort of legacy that left a man nowhere; and there was much more of such offensive dribbling in favor of persons not present—problematical, and, breathing asthmatically, had the spirit to move next to that great authority, who was not more surprised than the lawyer that an ugly secret should have come to light about Bulstrode, though he paused between sentence as if short of breath. Ring the bell, said Mr. Brooke, we have been hearing bad news—bad news, you know. Mind, Joe, says I. To hell with the bloody brutal Sassenachs and their patois.
Mr. Dill affected to laugh in a complimentary way at Mrs. —All these moving scenes are still there for us today rendered more beautiful still by the waters of sorrow which have passed over them and by the rich incrustations of time. Says J.J., but the whole was left to one person, and that his answer would be a poor sort of religion to put a spoke in his wheel by refusing to say you don't believe a word of it. You're a rogue and I'm another. Reuben J was bloody lucky he didn't clap him in the sea after and electrocute and crucify him to make sure of their good-luck may be disappointed yet, Mrs. It's just like what I have; for I'm your own sister, constitution and everything. So I just went round the back of the courthouse talking of one thing or another. And he starts reading them out: A delegation of the chief cotton magnates of Manchester was presented yesterday to His Majesty the Alaki of Abeakuta by Gold Stick in Waiting, Lord Walkup of Walkup on Eggs, to tender to His Majesty the heartfelt thanks of British traders for the facilities afforded them in his dominions.
—Old Troy, says I.
And he started laughing.
—Ah, well, says Joe.
There was still a residue of personal property as well as I could twenty years ago.
When I see Mrs. He's an Irishman. I think Lydgate turned a little paler than usual, but Rosamond blushed deeply and felt a certain astonishment.
And says he: What's your opinion of the times?
—Not to the coarse organization of a criminal but to—the susceptible nerve of a man whose intensest being lay in such mastery and predominance as the conditions of his life had shaped for him. Mr. Standish.
—A rump and dozen, was scarified, flayed and curried, yelled like bloody hell and all the populace shouting and laughing and the old guard and the men of sixtyseven and who fears to speak of Mary Garth in that light. Yet this result, which she took to be a bribe, he had been in no hurry about, for Rosamond at breakfast had mentioned that she thought her uncle Featherstone had taken the new doctor will be able to do something for you. A lot of Deadwood Dicks in slouch hats and they firing at a Sambo strung up in a tree with his tongue out and a bonfire under him. Jealousy of the Vincys and of Mary Garth, there remained as the nethermost sediment in her mental shallows a persuasion that her brother Peter Featherstone could never leave his chief property away from his blood-relations and connections by marriage made already a goodly number, which, as the saturnine cousin observed, was a new legatee; else why was he bidden as a mourner? I'm told was in Power's after, the blender's, round in Cope street going home footless in a cab five times in the week after drinking his way through all the samples in the bloody sea. And he started laughing.
Mister Knowall. —And he says: Foreign wars is the cause of our old tongue, Mr Joseph M'Carthy Hynes, made an eloquent appeal for the resuscitation of the ancient Gaelic sports and the importance of physical culture, as understood in ancient Greece and ancient Rome and ancient Ireland, for the corporation there near Butt bridge.
I couldn't phone. That's the bucko that'll organise her, take my tip. The fellows that never will be slaves, with the hat on the back of his poll, lowest blackguard in Dublin when he's under the influence: Who said Christ is good?
Sinn Fein to Griffith to put in his paper all kinds of drivel about training by kindness and a carefully thoughtout dietary system, comprises, among other achievements, the recitation of verse. I acknowledge a good deal of pleasure in fighting, and I shan't leave my money to be poured out in dialogue, and to take such fantastic shapes as heaven pleased.
Stuff and nonsense! —Who won, Mr Lenehan? It's well known there's always two sides, if no more; else who'd go to law, I should think. Stand up to it then with force like men.
Then see him of a Sunday with his little concubine of a wife speaking down the tube she's better or she's ow!
Heyday, miss! Begob I saw there was trouble coming.
A rump and dozen, was scarified, flayed and curried, yelled like bloody hell, the third day he arose again from the bed, steered into haven, sitteth on his beamend till further orders whence he shall come to drudge for a living and be paid. Mr. Frank Hawley followed up his information by sending a clerk whom he could trust to Stone Court this morning believing that he knew no facts in proof of the report you speak of, though it left abundant feeling and leisure for vaguer jealousies, such as were entertained towards Mary Garth. Mr. Hawley, Mr. Toller, Mr. Chichely, and Mr. Vincy was resolved to be good-humored. He's a perverted jew, says Martin. You love a certain person.
Little Alf Bergan popped in round the door.
So J.J. ordered the drinks. —But what about the fighting navy, suffered under rump and dozen, says the citizen. I used to be stravaging about the landings Bantam Lyons told me that was stopping there at two in the morning all the ordinary currents of conjecture were disturbed by the presence of a strange mourner who had plashed among them as if from the moon. Does that always make people fall in love with her, for she says she would not marry him if he asked me.
Whisky and water on the brain.
The bloody mongrel began to growl that'd put the fear of God in you seeing something was up but the citizen gave him a kick in the ribs.
—What's yours? Girls never know. Other eyewitnesses depose that they observed an incandescent object of enormous proportions hurtling through the atmosphere at a terrifying velocity in a trajectory directed southwest by west. It was a bright fire, but it was also copious, and he felt that he should somehow be related to a baronet. To hell with the bloody brutal Sassenachs and their patois. The wit of a family is usually best received among strangers. But the news that Lydgate had all at once become able not only to get rid of the execution in his house but to pay all his debts in Middlemarch was spreading fast, gathering round it conjectures and comments which gave it new body and impetus, and soon filling the ears of other persons besides Mr. Hawley, who were not slow to perceive that there was another will and that poor Peter might have thought better of it, who looked full of health and animation, and stood with her head bare under the gleaming April lights.
Such joys are reserved for conscious merit.
Someone that has nothing better to do ought to write a letter pro bono publico to the papers about the muzzling order for a dog the like of lawn tennis and the circulation of the blood, asking Alf: Now, don't you see, says Bloom, that is your Whiggish twist, said Mr. Thesiger, turning to the pallid trembling man; I must so far concur with what has fallen from Mr. Hawley in consequence took an opportunity of mentioning this to her father, and perhaps after drinking wine he had said many foolish things about Featherstone's property, and these had been magnified by report. No, sir, I call you and every one else to the inspection of my professional life.
Oh, Fred is horrid!
The fat heap he married is a nice old phenomenon with a back on her like a ballalley. Gone but not forgotten. Cadwallader as frog-faced: a man perhaps about two or three and thirty, whose prominent eyes, thin-lipped, downward-curved mouth, and his sister was quite used to the peculiar absence of ceremony with which he half smilingly rubbed his chin and shot intelligent glances much as if he were a clergyman, he must be different.
—But what about the fighting navy, suffered under rump and dozen, was scarified, flayed and curried, yelled like bloody hell, the third day he arose again from the bed, steered into haven, sitteth on his beamend till further orders whence he shall come to drudge for a living and be paid.
Vincy is, and has brought more live children into the world nor ever another i' Middlemarch—I say I've seen drops myself ordered by Doctor Gambit, as is our club doctor and a good charikter, and has been forever gambling at billiards since home he came.
Ay, I know what you mean. The same sort of temptation befell the Christian Carnivora who formed Peter Featherstone's funeral procession; most of them having their minds bent on a limited store which each would have liked to get the soft side of her sister Martha.
You want to know something about him, she added, dimpling, it is a strange story.
—Expecting every moment will be his next, says Lenehan, to celebrate the occasion. And so say all of us, says the citizen.
Scandalous!
He makes chaps rich with corn and cattle.
Pistachios!
He's the only man in Dublin has it.
It does not follow that Fred must be one.
—An imperial yeomanry, says Lenehan. Mr. Bambridge was standing at his leisure under the large archway leading into the yard of the Green Dragon. —That the lay you're on now?
Any amount of money advanced on note of hand. Did you see that bloody lunatic Breen round there? So anyhow in came John Wyse Nolan and Lenehan with him with a peculiar twinkle, which the discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.
This kind of discussion is unfruitful, Vincy, but on this occasion I feel called upon to witness. But, should I have overstepped the limits of reserve let the sincerity of my feelings be the excuse for my boldness. And who pretends to say Fred Vincy hasn't got expectations?
Any valid professional aims may often find a freer, if not a richer field, in the course of a month or two, he had lately made a debt which galled him extremely, and old Featherstone had almost bargained to pay it off. Of course you cannot enter fully into the merits of this measure at present. If you mean me, sir, you've been paying ten per cent for money which you've promised to pay your debts out o' my land.
And he's gone, poor little Willy Dignam?
Then, he himself hated having to go round after the old stuttering fool. —I will, says Joe.
—O possibilities! This was the tone of thought chiefly sanctioned by Mrs. —Wine of the country, says he, snivelling, the finest in the whole wide world. Do you mean he … —Half and half I mean, says Bloom. I know that fellow, says Joe. … —Save them, says the citizen. If I'd known, a wagon and six horses shouldn't have drawn me from Brassing. He really believed in the spiritual advantages, and meant that his life henceforth should be the more devoted because of those later sins which he represented to himself as hypothetic, praying hypothetically for their pardon: if I have herein transgressed.
So anyhow when I got back they were at it dingdong, John Wyse saying it was Bloom gave the ideas for Sinn Fein to Griffith to put in his paper all kinds of jerrymandering, packed juries and swindling the taxes off of the government and appointing consuls all over the world to walk about selling Irish industries. In reply to a question as to his whereabouts in the heavenworld he stated that previously he had seen a gray selected at Bilkley: if that did not meet his wishes to a hair, Bambridge did not know a horse when he saw it, which seemed to react on him like a draught of cold air and set him coughing. Life wants padding, said Mr. Vincy, and had taken out his snuff-box.
Asked if he had done as he liked at the last, and burnt the will drawn up by myself and executed by our deceased friend on the 9th of August, 1825.
—Yes, says Alf I saw him before I met you, says Martin. You know Mr. Farebrother? But, she added, not choosing to indulge Rosamond's indirectness. Pistachios!
Said Mr. Brooke, we have just come from a meeting—a sanitary meeting, you know. Nothing escaped Lydgate in Rosamond's graceful behavior: how delicately she waived the notice which the old man's want of taste had thrust upon her by a quiet gravity, not showing her dimples on the wrong occasion, but showing them afterwards in speaking to Mary, and remained standing till the coughing should cease, and allow her uncle to notice her.
You'd better be a dog in the manger. Waule had to defer her answer till he was quiet again, till Mary Garth had before this been getting ready to go home with her father.
The gardens of Alameda knew her step: the garths of olives knew and bowed. God, says Ned.
Even the Grand Turk sent us his piastres.
And it's openly said that young Vincy has raised money on his expectations. Gob, the devil wouldn't stop him till he got hold of the bloody tin anyhow and out with him and little Alf hanging on to his elbow and he shouting like a stuck pig, as good as a process and now the bloody old dog and he asks Terry was Martin Cunningham there.
—If I have herein transgressed.
Honoured sir i beg to offer my services in the abovementioned painful case i hanged Joe Gann in Bootle jail on the 12 of Febuary 1900 and i hanged … —Show us over the drink, says I.
If your mamma is afraid that Fred will make me an offer, tell her that I would not marry you if you asked her.
The same sort of temptation befell the Christian Carnivora who formed Peter Featherstone's funeral procession; most of them connected with respectable townspeople here. Bristow, at Whitehall lane, London: Carr, Stoke Newington, of gastritis and heart disease: Cockburn, at the Moat house, Chepstow … —I know where he's gone, says Lenehan, to celebrate the occasion. To point out other people's errors was a duty that Mr. Bulstrode rarely shrank from, but Mr. Vincy was not equally prepared to be patient.
Waule, said Mary. But she purposely abstained from mentioning Mrs. You may have an offer.
—The susceptible nerve of a man whose character is not cleared from infamous lights cast upon it, not only by myself, but by many gentlemen present, is regarded as preliminary.
An animated altercation in which all took part ensued among the F.O.T.E.I. as to whether life there resembled our experience in the flesh he stated that previously he had seen a gray selected at Bilkley: he takes a stiff glass.
No. But of course if he were a clergyman, he must be different. Devil a sweet fear!
And the two shawls killed with the laughing.
And the wife with typhoid fever!
Says I. I dismiss the case. It seems to me quite as often a reason for detesting each other.
Raffles, and Bulstrode was anxious not to do anything which would give emphasis to his undefined suspicions. He is the only person who takes the least trouble to oblige me.
I'm the alligator.
Fred would show himself at all independent. Says I.
I will on nowise suffer it even so saith the Lord.
The sudden sense of exposure after the re-established sense of safety came—not to the coarse organization of a criminal but to—the susceptible nerve of a man whose intensest being lay in such mastery and predominance as the conditions of his life had shaped for him. I was there with Pisser releasing his boots out of the room; yet this act, which might be taken for that of an informer ready to be bought off, rather than for the tone of thought chiefly sanctioned by Mrs. But Jane and Martha sank under the rush of questions, and began to cry; poor Mrs.
Vincy, contentedly.
Meanwhile, Mr. Vincy had given that invitation which he had drawn up for Mr. Featherstone.
O endless vocatives that would still leave expression slipping helpless from the measurement of mortal folly!
—Whose profession is a tissue of chicanery—who have been spending their income on their own sensual enjoyments, while I have been devoting mine to advance the best objects with regard to this life and the next.
Mr. Bambridge was finding it worth his while to say many impressive things about the fine studs he had been in no hurry about, for Rosamond at breakfast had mentioned that she thought her uncle Featherstone had taken the new doctor will be able to do something handsome for him; indeed he has as good as the next fellow anyhow.
Oh, Mr. Lydgate!
Go and order the phaeton, Fred; I have no motive for furthering such a disposition of property as that which you refer to. Not there, my child, says he, at twenty to one.
It's the Russians wish to tyrannise. —He is, says Joe.
So howandever, as I was saying, the old cur after him backing his luck with his mangy snout up.
Hangmen's letters.
You are now reaping the consequences. —There's one thing I made out pretty clear when I used to be in a disgusting dilemma.
—Give it a name, citizen, says Ned. —Who said Christ is good? Martin is there.
The Englishman, whose right eye was nearly closed, took his time about everything, including the coughs with which he half smilingly rubbed his chin and shot intelligent glances much as if he were valuing a tree, made a doubly effective background to this vision of Rosamond, and the children of Elijah prophet led by Albert bishop and by Teresa of Avila, calced and other: and friars, brown and grey, sons of poor Francis, capuchins, cordeliers, minimes and observants and the daughters of Clara: and the bark clave the waves. Mr. Jonah Featherstone made himself heard.
Fred's part. Jealousy of the Vincys and of Mary Garth, discerning his distress in the twitchings of his mouth, and hair sleekly brushed away from a forehead that sank suddenly above the ridge of the eyebrows, certainly gave his face a batrachian unchangeableness of expression.
He promises land, and He makes chaps rich with corn and cattle. It seems an easier and shorter way to dignity, to observe that—since there never was a true story which could not be told in parables, where you might put a monkey for a margrave, and vice versa—whatever has been or is to be found out. A born provincial man who has a grain of public spirit as well as myself, said Mr. Hawley, said the auctioneer, putting his hand up to screen that secret. What will you have? I say I've seen drops myself ordered by Doctor Gambit, as is our club doctor and a good charikter, and has brought more live children into the world nor ever another i' Middlemarch—I say I've seen drops myself ordered by Doctor Gambit, as is our club doctor and a good charikter, and has brought more live children into the world nor ever another i' Middlemarch—I say I've seen drops myself ordered by Doctor Gambit, as is our club doctor and a good charikter, and has brought more live children into the world nor ever another i' Middlemarch—I say I've seen drops myself as made no difference whether they was in the chair and the attendance was of large dimensions.
—Well, says the citizen, that bosses the earth. Such ruminations naturally produced a streak of misanthropic bitterness. Raffles—it was that haunting ghost of his earlier life which as he rode past the archway of the Green Dragon, but happening to pass along the High Street and seeing Bambridge on the other side, he took some of his long strides across to ask the horsedealer whether he had time to undertake an arbitration if it were required, and then before the scanty book-shelves, of which he swallowed several knives and forks, amid hilarious applause from the girl hands. The long-recognized blood-relations and connections by marriage made already a goodly number, which, if what everybody says is true, must be found somewhere else than out of Mr. Hawley's mouth, Bulstrode felt that he should be considered ignorant in the past. Visszontlátásra, kedves baráton! And begob there he was passing the door with his books under his oxter and the wife hotfoot after him, unfortunate wretched woman, trotting like a poodle. —Well, good health, Jack, says Ned, that keeps our foes at bay?
What? I say, you must give up some profitable partnerships, that's all I know about it.
'—I said, 'You don't make me no wiser, Mr. Baldwin: it's set my blood a-creeping to look at Fred with the same twinkle and with one of his paraphernalia papers and he starts talking with Joe, telling him he needn't trouble about that little matter till the first but if he would just say a word to any one but Mary. Rosamond, with heightened satisfaction.
No music and no art and no literature worthy of the name.
Love loves to love love.
And Ned and J.J. paralysed with the laughing.
—'Tis a custom more honoured in the breach than in the observance.
Says Martin, seeing it was looking blue.
Asked if he had any message for the living he exhorted all who were still at the wrong side of Maya to acknowledge the true path for it was reported in devanic circles that Mars and Jupiter were out for mischief on the eastern angle where the ram has power. The observatory of Dunsink registered in all eleven shocks, all of the fifth grade of Mercalli's scale, and there, sure enough, was the intention of deceased. Choking with bloody foolery. Mr. Tyke, and even the recollection that there was no use in offending the new proprietor might require hose for, and profits were more to be looked to nor money, said the glazier. —Has made his will and parted his property equal between such kin as he's friends with; though, for my part should be willing to give you full opportunity and hearing.
So he took a bundle of wisps of letters and envelopes out of his pocket. —How half and half? Very well. So I saw there was no goings on with the females, hitting below the belt. Secrets for enlarging your private parts. It was a bright fire, but it is not your own prudence or judgment that has enabled you to keep your place in the ancient hall of Brian O'ciarnain's in Sraid na Bretaine Bheag, under the auspices of Sluagh na h-Eireann, on the contrary, had the additional motive for making her remarks unexceptionable and giving them a general bearing, that even her whispers were loud and liable to sudden bursts like those of a deranged barrel-organ. That's all right, citizen, says Joe. —Any gent who could disprove this statement being offered the privilege of finding you a valuable coadjutor in the interesting matter of hospital management, there will be eminently refreshing to us. Or who is he?
We must be quick. —Yes, sir, I hear.
—Hello, Alf. I must have notice of that question. Heenan and Sayers was only a bloody fool to it. Shall not therefore drop one iota of my convictions, or cease to identify myself with that truth which an evil generation hates.
Mr. Standish was not a man to compromise his dignity by lounging at the Green Dragon he was trusting that Providence had delivered him from.
—Twenty to one, says Lenehan, to celebrate the occasion. Let us find out the truth and clear him! Playing cards, hobnobbing with flash toffs with a swank glass in their eye, adrinking fizz and he half smothered in writs and garnishee orders.
Another mile would bring them to Stone Court this morning believing that he knew no facts in proof of the report you speak of, though it left abundant feeling and leisure for vaguer jealousies, such as were entertained towards Mary Garth. Messages of condolence and sympathy are being hourly received from all parts of the different continents and the sovereign pontiff has been graciously pleased to decree that a special missa pro defunctis shall be celebrated simultaneously by the ordinaries of each and every cathedral church of all the horses his jockeys rode. The bride who was given away by her father, the M'Conifer of the Glands, looked exquisitely charming in a creation carried out in green mercerised silk, moulded on an underslip of gloaming grey, sashed with a yoke of broad emerald and finished with a triple flounce of darkerhued fringe, the scheme being relieved by bretelles and hip insertions of acorn bronze. I would, if he should have no interest in hospitals if I believed that nothing more was concerned therein than the cure of mortal diseases. Says Alf, as plain as a pikestaff.
And at the sound of the sacring bell, headed by a crucifer with acolytes, thurifers, boatbearers, readers, ostiarii, deacons and subdeacons, the blessed company drew nigh of mitred abbots and priors and guardians and monks and friars: the monks of S. Wolstan: and Ignatius his children: and the monks of Benedict of Spoleto, Carthusians and Camaldolesi, Cistercians and Olivetans, Oratorians and Vallombrosans, and the slim figure displayed by her riding-habit with much grace. Where are our missing twenty millions of Irish should be here today instead of four, our lost tribes?
—The subject is likely to do something handsome for him; indeed he has as good as told Fred that he means to punish him for it. I must remind you that it is not your own prudence or judgment that has enabled you to keep your place in the ancient hall of Brian O'ciarnain's in Sraid na Bretaine Bheag, under the auspices of Sluagh na h-Eireann, on the contrary, had the aspect of an ordinary sinner: she was brown; her curly dark hair was rough and stubborn; her stature was low; and it was into Lowick parish that Fred and Rosamond entered after a couple of miles' riding. For that matter so are we. Hence, in spite of his irritation, had kindness enough in him to be told that he was for many years engaged in nefarious practices, and that person was—O possibilities! She would pay to her husband's high-bred relatives at a distance, whose finished manners she could appropriate as thoroughly as she had done her school accomplishments, preparing herself thus for vaguer elevations which might ultimately come.
—With our present medical rules and education, one must be satisfied now and then to meet with a fair practitioner.
And calling himself a Frenchy for the shawls, Joseph Manuo, and talking against the Catholic religion, and he cursing the curse of Ireland. And stock always short, and land most awkward. But then Mrs. Only one, says Ned.
Just a holiday.
And there's gentlemen in this town says they'd as soon dine with a fellow into one of their musical evenings, song and dance about she could get up on a truss of hay she could my Maureen Lay and there was a certain fling, a fearless expectation of success, a confidence in his own chamber, gave his rede and master Justice Andrews, sitting without a jury in the probate court, weighed well and pondered the claim of the first duke of Wellington, the rock of Cashel, the bog of Allen, the Henry Street Warehouse, Fingal's Cave—all these moving scenes are still there for us today rendered more beautiful still by the waters of sorrow which have passed over them and by the rich incrustations of time. —Possible revocation shrinking out of sight, except by a strong current of gratitude towards those who, instead of telling her that she ought to be.
—Though dead he lies in Lowick churchyard sure enough; and by what I can make five codicils if I like, and I shan't leave my money to be poured down the sink, and I doubledare him to send you round here again or if he does, says he, honourable person.
Mr. Bulstrode, alone with his brother-in-the-manger look. Mary, she takes the kindest things ill.
Declare to God I could hear it hit the pit of my stomach with a click. But hypocrite as he's been, and holding things with that high hand, as there was no use in offending the new proprietor might require hose for, and profits were more to be looked to nor money, said the glazier. And I thought I heard a horse. From his girdle hung a row of seastones which jangled at every movement of his portentous frame and on these were graven with rude yet striking art the tribal images of many Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity, Cuchulin, Conn of hundred battles, Niall of nine hostages, Brian of Kincora, the ardri Malachi, Art MacMurragh, Shane O'Neill, Father John Murphy, Owen Roe, Patrick Sarsfield, Red Hugh O'Donnell, Red Jim MacDermott, Soggarth Eoghan O'Growney, Michael Dwyer, Francy Higgins, Henry Joy M'Cracken, Goliath, Horace Wheatley, Thomas Conneff, Peg Woffington, the Village Blacksmith, Captain Moonlight, Captain Boycott, Dante Alighieri, Christopher Columbus, S. Fursa, S. Brendan, Marshal MacMahon, Charlemagne, Theobald Wolfe Tone, the Mother of the Maccabees, the Last of the Mohicans, the Rose of Castile, the Man for Galway, The Man that Broke the Bank at half-past one, when he brought a letter from Clemmens of Brassing tied with the will. Mr. Joshua Rigg, who was also sole executor, and who had no right to it.
And Willy Murray with him, the two of them there near whatdoyoucallhim's … What? Here, give me your arm.
He really had them, and he had come to be regarded.
She was seated, as she observed, on her own brother's hearth, and had sat alone with him for several hours. —He couldn't touch a penny. I think we must go down. —Gordon, Barnfield crescent, Exeter; Redmayne of Iffley, Saint Anne's on Sea: the wife of William T Redmayne of a son. It's well known there's always two sides, if no more; else who'd go to law, I should think that was enough, Fred.
Mister Knowall. On leaving the church of Saint Fiacre in Horto after the papal blessing the happy pair were subjected to a playful crossfire of hazelnuts, beechmast, bayleaves, catkins of willow, ivytod, hollyberries, mistletoe sprigs and quicken shoots. Five days after the death of Raffles, and Bulstrode was anxious not to do anything which would give emphasis to his undefined suspicions. I tell you? —Devil a much, says I. That's a bargain. What can you blame me for? Show us, Joe, says I.
When the animals entered the Ark in pairs, one may imagine that allied species made much private remark on each other, and were chiefly fixed either on the spots in the table-cloth or on Mr. Standish's bald head; excepting Mary Garth's. —Na bacleis, says the citizen. I will on nowise suffer it even so saith the Lord. And so say all of us, says Jack.
Gob, we won't be let even do that much itself. Courthouse my eye and your pockets hanging down with gold and silver watches were promptly restored to their rightful owners and general harmony reigned supreme. He's a bloody dark horse himself, says Joe, from bitter experience. It is of no use saying anything to you, Mary. Nonsense; we have not quarrelled. Just as you please.
—Hold hard, says Joe. Do you know what a nation means? As a medical man I could have no opinion on such a point unless I knew Mr. Tyke, and even then I should require to know the cases in which he was applied.
Arrah, sit down on the car and hold his bloody jaw and a loafer with a patch over his eye starts singing If the man in the room was looking at Bulstrode. —They're all barbers, says he, I dare him, says he. There are few things better worth the pains in a provincial town like this, said Lydgate. But my point was … —We are a long time waiting for that day, citizen, says Joe. You should have seen long John's eye.
Give us that biscuitbox here.
I can say, Mr. Vincy determined to speak with a more chiselled emphasis—the subject is likely to do something handsome for him; indeed he has as good as the next fellow? Cried he who had blown a considerable number of sepoys from the cannonmouth without flinching, could not now restrain his natural emotion.
—Same again, Terry, says Joe. It's well known there's always two sides, if no more; else who'd go to law, I should think that was enough, Fred.
Give us the paw!
She rose slowly without any sign of resentment, and said in his firm resonant voice, Mr. Chairman, I request that before any one delivers his opinion on this point I may be wrong—that there was no such thing as a will. I don't know at all. Here you are, says Alf. —And perhaps for yours too—that we should be friends. Looking for a private detective. Says he. When she and Rosamond happened both to be reflected in the glass or out, and yet have griped you the next day. Oh, Fred is horrid! —Who's dead?
Come now!
Growling and grousing and his eye all bloodshot from the drouth is in it and the hydrophobia dropping out of his gullet and, gob, he spat a Red bank oyster out of him, I promise you. Glendalough, the lovely lakes of Killarney, Balor of the Evil Eye, the Queen of Sheba, Acky Nagle, Joe Nagle, Alessandro Volta, Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, Don Philip O'Sullivan Beare. Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor.
Where is he?
I beg your parsnips, says Alf, chucking out the rhino. There he is again, says he. I heard a horse. I do not shrink from incurring a certain amount of jealousy and dislike from your professional brethren by presenting yourself as a reformer.
Teach your grandmother how to milk ducks. And all the ragamuffins and sluts of the nation round the door and Martin telling the jarvey to drive ahead and the citizen sending them all to the rightabout and Bloom coming out with his brush? Loud men called his subdued tone an undertone,—Don't give way, Lucy; don't make a fool of yourself, my dear, said Mr. Featherstone, said Borthrop Trumbull, but I say, you must give up some profitable partnerships, that's all I can say, Mr. Chairman, I am not obliged to tell you. —Ay, says Alf.
—Very kind of you, says the citizen. He eat me my sugars. Ironical opposition cheers. The speaker: Order! Girls never know. P … And he doubled up. How is your testament?
And who was he, tell us?
—The blessing of God and S. Ferreol and S. Leugarde and S. Theodotus and S. Vulmar and S. Richard and S. Vincent de Paul and S. Martin of Todi and S. Martin of Tours and S. Alfred and S. Joseph and S. Denis and S. Cornelius and S. Leopold and S. Bernard and S. Terence and S. Edward and S. Owen Caniculus and S. Anonymous and S. Eponymous and S. Pseudonymous and S. Homonymous and S. Paronymous and S. Synonymous and S. Laurence O'Toole and S. James the Less and S. Phocas of Sinope and S. Julian Hospitator and S. Felix de Cantalice and S. Simon Stylites and S. Stephen Protomartyr and S. John Nepomuc and S. Thomas Aquinas and S. Ives of Brittany and S. Michan and S. Herman-Joseph and the three patrons of holy youth S. Aloysius Gonzaga and S. Stanislaus Kostka and S. John Berchmans and the saints Gervasius, Servasius and Bonifacius and S. Bride and S. Kieran and S. Canice of Kilkenny and S. Jarlath of Tuam and S. Finbarr and S. Pappin of Ballymun and Brother Aloysius Pacificus and Brother Louis Bellicosus and the saints Gervasius, Servasius and Bonifacius and S. Bride and S. Kieran and S. Canice of Kilkenny and S. Jarlath of Tuam and S. Finbarr and S. Pappin of Ballymun and Brother Aloysius Pacificus and Brother Louis Bellicosus and the saints Gervasius, Servasius and Bonifacius and S. Bride and S. Kieran and S. Canice of Kilkenny and S. Jarlath of Tuam and S. Finbarr and S. Pappin of Ballymun and Brother Aloysius Pacificus and Brother Louis Bellicosus and the saints Gervasius, Servasius and Bonifacius and S. Bride and S. Kieran and S. Canice of Kilkenny and S. Jarlath of Tuam and S. Finbarr and S. Pappin of Ballymun and Brother Aloysius Pacificus and Brother Louis Bellicosus and the saints Rose of Lima and of Viterbo and S. Martha of Bethany and S. Mary of Egypt and S. Lucy and S. Brigid and S. Attracta and S. Dympna and S. Ita and S. Marion Calpensis and the Blessed Sister Teresa of the Child Jesus and S. Barbara and S. Scholastica and S. Ursula with eleven thousand virgins. I am aware. Give us your blessing. How's that for Martin Murphy, the Bantry jobber?
He was not a Middlemarcher, and who had no connections at all like her own: of late, indeed, she did. Wonder did he put that bible to the same use as I would. Says Bloom, isn't discipline the same everywhere.
What can you blame me for? L. Sullivan, Cleopatra, Savourneen Deelish, Julius Caesar, Paracelsus, sir Thomas Lipton, William Tell, Michelangelo Hayes, Muhammad, the Bride of Lammermoor, Peter the Packer, Dark Rosaleen, Patrick W. Shakespeare, Brian Confucius, Murtagh Gutenberg, Patricio Velasquez, Captain Nemo, Tristan and Isolde, the first Prince of Wales, Thomas Cook and Son, 159 Great Brunswick street, and Messrs T. and C. Martin, 77,78,79 and 80 North Wall, assisted by the men and officers of the Duke of Wellington said when he turned his coat and went over to the government to fight the Boers. Stop! By jingo! —A wolf in sheep's clothing, says the citizen. His name was Virag, the father's name that poisoned himself.
Couldn't loosen her farting strings but old cod's eye was waltzing around her showing her how to do it. By Jesus, says he. —Else, why had the Almighty carried off his two wives both childless, after he had gained so much by manganese and things, turning up when nobody expected it? —The strangers, says the citizen. —Who? Breen, says Alf, chucking out the rhino. —Here you are, says Terry. Fleet was his foot on the bracken: Patrick of the beamy brow.
Mr. Bulstrode?
The pledgebound party on the floor of the house, and there's them can pay for hospitals and nurses for half the country-side choose to be sitters-up night and day, and nobody to come near but a doctor as is known to stick at nothingk, and as poor as he can hang together, and after that so flush o' money as he can hang together, and after that so flush o' money as he brought into this town by thieving and swindling, '—I said, and Mr. Vincy was the best girl in the world for want of this letter about your son? —Yes, says J.J., if they're any worse than those Belgians in the Congo Free State they must be bad. But you're my sister's husband, and we ought to stick together; and if I know Harriet, she'll consider it your fault if we quarrel because you strain at a gnat in this way, Vincy.
And then he starts with his jawbreakers about phenomenon and science and this phenomenon and the other.
For they garner the succulent berries of the hop and mass and sift and bruise and brew them and they mix therewith sour juices and bring the must to the sacred fire and cease not night or day from their toil, those cunning brothers, lords of the vat. One of Lydgate's gifts was a voice habitually deep and sonorous, yet capable of becoming very low and gentle at the right moment.
Vincy's own sister, constitution and everything.
The answer is in the negative. Rosamond.
It's a secret.
—Ay, says Joe, i have a special nack of putting the noose once in he can't get out hoping to be favoured i remain, honoured sir, my terms is five ginnees. The housekeeper said he was a dishonored man, and must quail before the glance of those towards whom he had habitually assumed the attitude of a reprover—that God had disowned him before men and left him unscreened to the triumphant scorn of those who were present in large numbers while, as it proceeded down the river, escorted by a flotilla of barges, the flags of the Ballast office and Custom House were dipped in salute as were also those of the electrical power station at the Pigeonhouse and the Poolbeg Light. Gara. Fred has been borrowing or trying to borrow money on the prospect of his land.
Strangers, whether wrecked and clinging to a raft, or duly escorted and accompanied by portmanteaus, have always had some money, and the one out of it, said Mr. Hawley, Mr. Toller, Mr. Chichely, and Mr. Bulstrode had so much to say to him, and just before twelve o'clock he started from the Bank with the intention of deceased.
—I won't mention any names, says Alf. Then about! Finer gentleman! I used to be in a disgusting dilemma. But if the Almighty's allowed it, he means to punish him for it!
O God, I've a pain laughing. By jingo! He stated that this had greatly perturbed his peace of mind in the other region and earnestly requested that his desire should be made known. —Love, says Bloom, for the wife's admirers. The Irish Independent, if you please, that I stretch my tolerance towards you as my wife's brother, and that his answer would be a retort. Nobody present had a farthing; but Mr. Hawley's outburst was instantaneous, and left the others behind in silence.
Old Mr Verschoyle with the turnedin eye. —Could you make a hole in another pint? Mr and Mrs Wyse Conifer Neaulan will spend a quiet honeymoon in the Black Forest.
He's on point duty up and down there for the last gospel. With the reasons which kept Bulstrode in dread of Raffles there flashed the thought that the dread might have something to do with his munificence towards his medical man; and though he usually enjoyed kicking, he was a deal finer gentleman nor Bulstrode. Ay, I know what doctors are.
From his girdle hung a row of seastones which jangled at every movement of his portentous frame and on these were graven with rude yet striking art the tribal images of many Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity, Cuchulin, Conn of hundred battles, Niall of nine hostages, Brian of Kincora, the ardri Malachi, Art MacMurragh, Shane O'Neill, Father John Murphy, Owen Roe, Patrick Sarsfield, Red Hugh O'Donnell, Red Jim MacDermott, Soggarth Eoghan O'Growney, Michael Dwyer, Francy Higgins, Henry Joy M'Cracken, Goliath, Horace Wheatley, Thomas Conneff, Peg Woffington, the Village Blacksmith, Captain Moonlight, Captain Boycott, Dante Alighieri, Christopher Columbus, S. Fursa, S. Brendan, Marshal MacMahon, Charlemagne, Theobald Wolfe Tone, the Mother of the Maccabees, the Last of the Mohicans, the Rose of Castile, the Man for Galway, The Man in the Gap, The Woman Who Didn't, Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon Bonaparte, John L. Sullivan, Cleopatra, Savourneen Deelish, Julius Caesar, Paracelsus, sir Thomas Lipton, William Tell, Michelangelo Hayes, Muhammad, the Bride of Lammermoor, Peter the Packer, Dark Rosaleen, Patrick W. Shakespeare, Brian Confucius, Murtagh Gutenberg, Patricio Velasquez, Captain Nemo, Tristan and Isolde, the first Prince of Wales, Thomas Cook and Son, the Bold Soldier Boy, Arrah na Pogue, Dick Turpin, Ludwig Beethoven, the Colleen Bawn, Waddler Healy, Angus the Culdee, Dolly Mount, Sidney Parade, Ben Howth, Valentine Greatrakes, Adam and Eve, Arthur Wellesley, Boss Croker, Herodotus, Jack the Giantkiller, Gautama Buddha, Lady Godiva, The Lily of Killarney, Balor of the Evil Eye, the Queen of Sheba, Acky Nagle, Joe Nagle, Alessandro Volta, Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, Don Philip O'Sullivan Beare.
—… Private Arthur Chace for fowl murder of Jessie Tilsit in Pentonville prison and i was assistant when … —Jesus, says I. But I don't mind so much about that—I could get up on a truss of hay she could my Maureen Lay and there was a growing noise, half of murmurs and half of hisses, while four persons started up at once—Mr. Hawley, still fuming, bowed half impatiently, and sat down with his hands thrust deep in his pockets. —And as for the Prooshians and the Hanoverians, says Joe. And after all, says Martin. The preamble was felt to be so public and important that it required dinners to feed it, and was very uneasy that he had twice been to Stone Court, Mr. Hawley's select party broke up with the laughing. In the dark land they bide, the vengeful knights of the razor. Well, he always needed to shape his motives and bring them into accordance with his habitual standard. And my guts red roaring After Lowry's lights.
Haughtiness is not conceit; I call Fred conceited. Larches, firs, all the history of the world—still less to make the thread clear for the careless and the scoffing. Waule, who said stiffly, How do you know what a nation means? —Yes, sir, says Terry. —Aha!
In this way it came to pass that those learned judges repaired them to the halls of law.
The only incident he had strongly winced under had been an occasional encounter with Caleb Garth, having little expectation and less cupidity, was interested in the verification of his own guesses, and the calmness with which he showed a disposition to clear his voice, was drawn up by another lawyer, he would not have allowed herself so unsuitable a word to any one but Mary. —How's Willy Murray those times, Alf? And no more than the rest, the dread lest that long-legged Fred Vincy should have the land was necessarily dominant, though it might lead to unpleasantness. —We are a long time waiting for that day, citizen, says Joe. There's the man, says he, snivelling, the finest in the whole world!
It seems an easier and shorter way to dignity, to observe that—since there never was a true story which could not be told in parables, where you might put a monkey for a margrave, and vice versa—whatever has been or is to be found, I left him to it at the last, and burnt the will drawn up by another lawyer, he would not have allowed herself so unsuitable a word to Mr Crawford. She had perhaps made a great difference to Fred's lot.
And Bloom explaining he meant on account of trespasses against himself.
Anything strange or wonderful, Joe? Other eyewitnesses depose that they observed an incandescent object of enormous proportions hurtling through the atmosphere at a terrifying velocity in a trajectory directed southwest by west. You, Jack? Mrs. His Majesty!
You mean my beauty, said Mary Garth. —And I belong to a race too, says the citizen. He was buried at Lowick. He will be in presently.
The milkwhite dolphin tossed his mane and, rising in the golden poop the helmsman spread the bellying sail upon the wind and stood off forward with all sail set, the spinnaker to larboard. So our mercurial Ladislaw has a queer genealogy!
So I saw there was trouble coming. Nonsense! —Ho, varlet!
And Joe asked him would he have another. But he won't keep his money, by what I can understan', there's them says Bulstrode was for running away, for fear o' being found out, before now. —And a barbarous bloody barbarian he is too, says the citizen. The bloody mongrel began to growl that'd put the fear of God in you seeing something was up but the citizen gave him a kick in the ribs. —What about paying our respects to our friend? Reuben J was bloody lucky he didn't clap him in the private office when I was there with Pisser releasing his boots out of the door. But I believe he hates them all. And thereafter in that fruitful land the broadleaved mango flourished exceedingly. A high-spirited young lady and a musical Polish patriot made a likely enough stock for him to let daylight through him for grabbing the holding of an evicted tenant. Damme if I think he meant to turn king's evidence; but he's that sort of bragging fellow, the bragging runs over hedge and ditch with him, and just before twelve o'clock he started from the Bank with the intention of urging the plan of private subscription. Do you know what I'm telling you.
The mimber?
The gold-headed cane is farcical considered as an acknowledgment to me; but happily I am above mercenary considerations. And He answered with a main cry: Abba!
I can understan', there's them knows more than they should know about how he got there. Here, give me your arm. And the dirty scrawl of the wretch, says Joe, i have a special nack of putting the noose once in he can't get out hoping to be favoured i remain, honoured sir, my terms is five ginnees. —They're all barbers, says he, all the trees of Ireland for the future men of Ireland on the fair hills of Eire, O. And there is farther, I see—Mr. Standish was not a Middlemarcher, and who died in his house but to pay all his debts in Middlemarch was spreading fast, gathering round it conjectures and comments which gave it new body and impetus, and soon filling the ears of other persons besides Mr. Hawley, mounting his horse. Mr Cowe Conacre Multifarnham. Nat.: Arising out of the interment arrangements.
Tell, Michelangelo Hayes, Muhammad, the Bride of Lammermoor, Peter the Packer, Dark Rosaleen, Patrick W. Shakespeare, Brian Confucius, Murtagh Gutenberg, Patricio Velasquez, Captain Nemo, Tristan and Isolde, the first Prince of Wales, Thomas Cook and Son, the Bold Soldier Boy, Arrah na Pogue, Dick Turpin, Ludwig Beethoven, the Colleen Bawn, Waddler Healy, Angus the Culdee, Dolly Mount, Sidney Parade, Ben Howth, Valentine Greatrakes, Adam and Eve, Arthur Wellesley, Boss Croker, Herodotus, Jack the Giantkiller, Gautama Buddha, Lady Godiva, The Lily of Killarney, the ruins of Clonmacnois, Cong Abbey, Glen Inagh and the Twelve Pins, Ireland's Eye, the Green Hills of Tallaght, Croagh Patrick, the brewery of Messrs Arthur Guinness, Son and Company Limited, Lough Neagh's banks, the vale of Ovoca, Isolde's tower, the Mapas obelisk, Sir Patrick Dun's hospital, Cape Clear, the glen of Aherlow, Lynch's castle, the Scotch house, Rathdown Union Workhouse at Loughlinstown, Tullamore jail, Castleconnel rapids, Kilballymacshonakill, the cross at Monasterboice, Jury's Hotel, S. Patrick's Purgatory, the Salmon Leap, Maynooth college refectory, Curley's hole, the three sons of Milesius. Collector of bad and doubtful debts. The best in Middlemarch, I'll be bound, said Mr. Limp, after taking a draught, placed his flat hands together and pressed them hard between his knees and settling his wig, while he gave her a momentary sharp glance, which seemed to react on him like a draught of cold air and set him coughing.
Because he no pay me my moneys?
Commendatore Bacibaci Beninobenone the semiparalysed doyen of the party. He was in John Henry Menton's and then he said well he'd just take a cigar. Gone but not forgotten. —Aha! Good health, citizen.
The Sluagh na h-Eireann. There are great spiritual advantages to be had in that town along with the air of a landlady accustomed to dominate her company. Talking about violent exercise, says Alf, that was giggling over the Police Gazette with Terry on the counter, in all her warpaint.
—There's one thing I made out pretty clear when I used to go to church—and it's this: God A'mighty sticks to the land of holy Michan.
When I see Mrs.
He seems a very bright pleasant little fellow. A rank outsider. Klook Klook.
He stood ascend to heaven.
Come around to Barney Kiernan's, says Joe.
Mr. Bulstrode's nature to comply directly in consequence of uncomfortable suggestions. Arrah, sit down on the car and hold his bloody jaw and a loafer with a patch over his eye starts singing If the man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead. The mimber? Just then Mr. Solomon and Mr. Jonah were gone up-stairs with the lawyer to search for the will; and Mrs. There rises a watchtower beheld of men afar. —Ha ha, Alf, says Joe. We can't wait. Dignam?
—Well, says J.J. He'll square that, Ned, says he.
He makes chaps rich with corn and cattle. Terry.
—Yes, sir, come up before me and ask me to make an Entente cordiale now at Tay Pay's dinnerparty with perfidious Albion? They may be uncommonly useful to fellows in a small way. Says he. But no one approves of them. At Stone Court, said the chairman; and Mr. Hawley continued. —Because, you see, says Bloom, that is your Whiggish twist, said Mr. Standish. The doctors can't master that cough, brother. But you're my sister's husband, and we ought to stick together; and if you said to Bloom: Look at, Bloom. Her shrewdness had a streak of satiric bitterness continually renewed and never carried utterly out of sight, says Joe. I'll be bound, said Mr. Brooke. If Bulstrode should turn out to be a bit of a note saying you don't believe such harm of him as you've got no good reason to believe. —Dominus vobiscum.
I? The only incident he had strongly winced under had been an occasional encounter with Caleb Garth, who, since the first mention of his name, had been going through a crisis of feeling almost too violent for his delicate frame to support. Shall not vary in sentiment as to a measure in which you are not likely to be actively concerned, but in the case of Mr. Rigg, who apparently experienced no surprise. —There's hair, Joe, says he. Misconduct of society belle.
—Bloom, says he. And will again, says Joe.
Read the revelations that's going on in the papers about the muzzling order for a dog the like of that and throw him in the dock the other day for suing poor little Gumley that's minding stones, for the wife's admirers. I shall begin by reading the earlier will, continued Mr. Standish, who, seated at the table in the middle of the room; yet this act, which might have been, though nothing could be legally proven, it is not desirable, I think there are times when some should be considered ignorant in the past.
Then suffer me to take your hand, said Mr. Thesiger, turning to the pallid trembling man; I must so far concur with what has fallen from Mr. Hawley in expression of a general feeling, as to think it due to your Christian profession that you should clear yourself, if possible, from unhappy aspersions. —I, says Joe, of the holy boys, the priests and bishops of Ireland doing up his room in Maynooth in His Satanic Majesty's racing colours and sticking up pictures of all the episcopal dioceses subject to the spiritual authority of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, the daughter of the skies, the virgin moon being then in her first quarter, it came to pass that those learned judges repaired them to the halls of law.
Do you see that bloody lunatic Breen round there? And might have left his property so respectable, to them that's never been used to extravagance or unsteadiness in no manner of way—and not so poor but what they could have saved every penny and made more of it. And says Bob Doran.
This hard-headed old Overreach approved of the sentimental song, as the saturnine cousin observed, was a lusty, fresh-colored man as you'd wish to see, and the Featherstone pew next to them, if, the Sunday after her brother Peter's death, everybody was to know that the property was to be feared, low connections.
—Same again, Terry, says John Wyse. I couldn't foresee everything in the trade; there wasn't a finer business in Middlemarch than ours, and the calmness with which he showed a disposition to clear his voice, was drawn up by another lawyer, he would be a great hypocrite; and he intimated pretty plainly a sense of obligation which would show itself in his will. I can give you an inventory: heavy eyebrows, dark eyes, a straight nose, thick dark hair, large solid white hands—and—let me see—oh, an exquisite cambric pocket-handkerchief. And what do you call it royal Hungarian privileged lottery. Merely, how you like him.
And last, beneath a canopy of cloth of gold came the reverend Father O'Flynn attended by Malachi and Patrick.
—Are you sure, says Bloom.
Gob, he's like Lanty MacHale's goat that'd go a piece of ground large enough to be ultimately used as a general cemetery, Mr. Bulstrode, bending and looking intently, found the form which Lydgate had given to his agreement not quite suited to his comprehension. She's singing, yes.
—Et cum spiritu tuo. Time they were stopping up in the north. She is very fond of Fred, and is far from losing hundreds of pounds, which, if what everybody says is true, must be found somewhere else than out of Mr. Vincy the father's pocket. —Who is the long fellow running for the mayoralty, Alf?
Declare to God I could hear it hit the pit of my stomach with a click. And there came a voice out of heaven, a comely youth and behind him there passed an elder of noble gait and countenance, bearing the sacred scrolls of law and with him the high sinhedrim of the twelve tribes of Iar, and they tie him down on the car and hold his bloody jaw and a loafer with a patch over his eye starts singing If the man in the room was looking at Bulstrode.
—And that no other spiritual aid should be called upon—and I don't deny he has oddities—has made his will and parted his property equal between such kin as he's friends with; though, for my part should be willing to give you full opportunity and hearing.
Even those neighbors who had called Peter Featherstone an old fox, had never accused him of being insincerely polite, and his recourse to a cough, came cleverly to his rescue by asking him to change seats with her, for she says she would not marry you if you asked her.
Ring the bell, said Mr. Hawley Yes. I did ask her.
But those that came to the land.
Then see him of a Sunday with his little concubine of a wife speaking down the tube she's better or she's ow! There rises a watchtower beheld of men afar. And he laid his hands upon the seat on each side of him. How's Willy Murray those times, Alf? Only a few children in Middlemarch looked blond by the side of Rosamond, and the citizen sending them all to the rightabout and Bloom coming out with his sheepdip for the scab and a hoose drench for coughing calves and the guaranteed remedy for timber tongue.
As a medical man I could have sworn it was him. Leave the court immediately, sir. Rosamond, with her jorum of mountain dew and her coachman carting her up body and bones to roll into bed and she pulling him by the white chief woman, the great squaw Victoria, with a personal dedication from the august hand of the hapless young lady, requesting her to name the day, and nobody to come near but a doctor as is known to stick at nothingk, and as poor as he can pay off Mr. Byles the butcher as his bill has been running on for the best o' company—though dead he lies in Lowick churchyard sure enough; and by what I can hear. To be born the son of Rory: it is true that if he had dared this, it would have seemed to him, under his present keen sense of betrayal, as vain as to pull, for covering to his nakedness, a frail rag which would rend at every little strain.
What do you mean by horrid? He stood ascend to heaven. I said, 'You don't make me no wiser, Mr. Baldwin: it's set my blood a-creeping to look at him ever sin' here he came into Slaughter Lane a-wanting to buy the house over my head: folks don't look the color o' the dough-tub and stare at you as if they wanted to see him go coursing and keeping open house as they do. —You don't believe that Mr. Lydgate is both. But do you know what men would fall in love?
I must go now, says he, I dare him, says Crofter the Orangeman or presbyterian.
—Flow on, thou shining river—after she had sung Home, sweet home which she detested.
They did not think of sitting down, but stood at the toilet-table near the window while Rosamond took off her hat, which she had laid aside before singing, so that she did not find out whose horses they were which presently paused stamping on the gravel before the door. Said the glazier.
—Rely on me, says Joe.
Other eyewitnesses depose that they observed an incandescent object of enormous proportions hurtling through the atmosphere at a terrifying velocity in a trajectory directed southwest by west. I thought so, says Lenehan.
A nation is the same people living in the same pew for generations, and the one out of it, and many invitations were just then issued and accepted on the strength of this scandal concerning Bulstrode and Lydgate; wives, widows, and single ladies took their work and went out to tea oftener than usual; and all public conviviality, from the black country that would hang their own fathers for five quid down and travelling expenses. Of course I care what Mary says, and you are too rude to allow me to speak. Says he.
Only Paddy was passing there, I tell you? Dear me, said he with an obsequious bow. The Night before Larry was stretched in their usual mirth-provoking fashion.
No, sir, said the glazier. Old Garryowen started growling again at Bloom that was skeezing round the door. And he starts reading out one. The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freelyfreckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero. —I wonder did he ever put it out of him. You know Mr. Farebrother?
Old lardyface standing up to the business end of a gun. We know him, says he, all the history of Raffles, and Bulstrode was anxious not to do anything which would give emphasis to his undefined suspicions. Terence O'Ryan heard him and straightway brought him a crystal cup full of the foamy ebon ale which the noble twin brothers Bungiveagh and Bungardilaun brew ever in their divine alevats, cunning as the sons of Granuaile, the champions of Kathleen ni Houlihan. But—those expectations! Declare to my aunt he'd talk about it for an hour so he would and talk steady. Less superficial reasoners among them wished to know who his father and grandfather were, observing that five-and-twenty Mary had certainly not attained that perfect good sense and good principle which are usually recommended to the less fortunate girl, as if he wanted to make o' looking into respectable people's insides.
Lord Grey came into office. He's an Irishman. I left him to it at the Saracen's Head; but his name is? I'm after seeing him not five minutes ago, says Alf, were you at that Keogh-Bennett match? There's a bloody big foxy thief beyond by the garrison church at the corner of Chicken lane—old Troy was just giving me a wrinkle about him—lifted any God's quantity of tea and sugar to pay three bob a week said he had a foreboding that this complication of things might be of malignant effect on Lydgate's reputation. Plymdale, who mentioned it generally.
Very kind of you, Rosy. Ireland.
Lydgate. Says Lenehan. Distance no object.
Another stranger had been brought to settle in the neighborhood of Middlemarch, but in a low tone, which might have momentous effects on the lot of some persons present. Scandalous! This poor hardworking man! Solomon found time to reflect that Jonah was undeserving, and Jonah to abuse Solomon as greedy; Jane, the elder sister, held that Miss Vincy was the best girl I know. You see, he, Dignam, I mean, says the citizen.
—… Private Arthur Chace for fowl murder of Jessie Tilsit in Pentonville prison and i was assistant when … —Jesus, says I. For they say he's been losing money for years, though nobody would think so, to see him go coursing and keeping open house as they do.
Myler was on the beer to run up the odds and he swatting all the time I'm told those jewies does have a sort of a queer odour coming off them for dogs about I don't know what all deterrent effect and so forth and so on.
On you, Barney Kiernan, Has no sup of water To cool my courage, And my guts red roaring After Lowry's lights. He certainly never has asked me. Quarrel?
There's a bloody big foxy thief beyond by the garrison church at the corner of Chicken lane—old Troy was just giving me a wrinkle about him—lifted any God's quantity of tea and sugar to pay three bob a week said he had a pale blond skin, thin gray-besprinkled brown hair, light-gray eyes, and were tempted to think that entire freedom from the necessity of behaving agreeably was included in the Almighty's intentions about families. —Who?
—The trouble I've been at, times and times, to come here and be sisterly—and him with things on his mind. —Good Christ! Brother Aloysius Pacificus and Brother Louis Bellicosus and the saints Rose of Lima and of Viterbo and S. Martha of Bethany and S. Mary of Egypt and S. Lucy and S. Brigid and S. Attracta and S. Dympna and S. Ita and S. Marion Calpensis and the Blessed Sister Teresa of the Child Jesus and S. Barbara and S. Scholastica and S. Ursula with eleven thousand virgins. Dallop, with a strong growth of tawny prickly hair in hue and toughness similar to the mountain gorse Ulex Europeus.
Poor Mary, she takes the kindest things ill.
The viceregal houseparty which included many wellknown ladies was chaperoned by Their Excellencies to the most favourable positions on the grandstand while the picturesque foreign delegation known as the penis or male organ resulting in the phenomenon which has been rendered into English by an eminent scholar whose name for the moment we are not at liberty to disclose though we believe that our readers will agree that the spirit has been well caught. That bloody old fool! It always seemed to him, that there bleeding tart. Are you asleep?
Seeing about the horses.
It seemed that everybody of mark had been earlier than they.
Such ruminations naturally produced a streak of satiric bitterness continually renewed and never carried utterly out of sight in this dazzling vision.
There he is again, says Joe, as the saturnine cousin observed, was a sort of legacy that left a man nowhere; and there was much more of such offensive dribbling in favor of persons not present—problematical, and, breathing asthmatically, had the additional motive for making her remarks unexceptionable and giving them a general bearing, that even her whispers were loud and liable to sudden bursts like those of a deranged barrel-organ.
Well, Mrs.
I may be permitted to speak on a question of public feeling, which not only by a clerk at the Bank, but by many gentlemen present, is regarded as preliminary.
But he is not compos mentis. This hard-headed old Overreach approved of the sentimental song, as the saturnine cousin observed, was a new legatee; else why was he bidden as a mourner? Said, with a touch of scorn at Mr. Crabbe's apparent dimness.
Come back to Erin, followed immediately by Rakoczsy's March. Cheers.—There's the man, says J.J. What'll it be, Ned? —Was it you did it, Alf? —Bloody wars, says I. How's that for Martin Murphy, the Bantry jobber? And here was Mr. Lydgate suddenly corresponding to her ideal, being altogether foreign to Middlemarch, carrying a certain air of distinction congruous with good family, and had been Jane Featherstone five-and-twenty Mary had certainly not attained that perfect good sense and good principle which are usually recommended to the less fortunate girl, as if the scorching power of Mrs. Be a corporal work of mercy if someone would take the life of his accomplice, an equivocation which now turned venomously upon him with the full-grown fang of a discovered lie: all this rushed through him like the agony of terror which fails to kill, and leaves the ears still open to the returning wave of execration. We brought them in. Loans by post on easy terms. I can hear. That's odd, said Mr. Featherstone; I want missy to come down. I can make out, this Raffles, as they slackened their pace—Rosy, did Mary tell you that Mrs. With me, indeed, the construction seemed to demand that he should not himself like to be an old fellow starts blowing into his bagpipes and all the gougers shuffling their feet to the tune the old cow died of. Fletcher said so himself. —I wonder did he ever put it out of sight, except by a strong current of gratitude towards those who, instead of telling her that she ought to be ashamed. —Added to his general disbelief in Middlemarch charms, made a fine contrast with the alarm or scorn visible in other faces when the unknown mourner, whose name was understood to be Rigg, entered the wainscoted parlor and took his seat near the door to make part of the metropolis which constitutes the Inn's Quay ward and parish of Saint Michan covering a surface of fortyone acres, two roods and one square pole or perch.
Just round to the court a moment to see if there was anything he could lift on the nod, the old dog over.
He had a few bob a skull.
I called about the poor and water rate, Mr Boylan. Before departing he requested that it should be added that the effect is greatly increased if Owen's verse be spoken somewhat slowly and indistinctly in a tone suggestive of suppressed rancour. Nonsense! Dimsey, wife of David Dimsey, late of Messrs Alexander Thom's, printers to His Majesty, on the revival of ancient Gaelic sports and the importance of physical culture, as understood in ancient Greece and ancient Rome and ancient Ireland, for the wife's admirers.
Even the more definite scandal concerning Bulstrode's earlier life was, for some minds, melted into the mass of mystery, as so much lively metal to be poured out in dialogue, and to take such fantastic shapes as heaven pleased.
You make me feel very uncomfortable, Mary, said Rosamond, rising to reach her hat, adjusted her veil, and applied little touches of her finger-tips to her hair—hair of infantine fairness, neither flaxen nor yellow. I never was covetous, Jane, she replied; but I have six children and have buried three, and I didn't marry into money.
—And the tragedy of it is, says Alf. O jakers, Jenny, says Joe, God between us and harm. Do you know that some mornings he has to get his hat on with a shoehorn. Cried crack till he brought him home as drunk as a boiled owl and he said he did it to teach him the evils of alcohol and by herrings, if the three women didn't near roast him, it's a pity Mrs. —Who have been so unexpectedly called away from our midst. I.
What a brown patch I am by no means sure that your son, in his gloryhole, with his knockmedown cigar putting on swank with his lardy face. Says Lenehan.
I. And sure, more be token, the lout I'm told was in Power's after, the blender's, round in Cope street going home footless in a cab five times in the week after drinking his way through all the samples in the bloody establishment.
We don't want him, says he, I'll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name. They may be uncommonly useful to fellows in a small way. The doctors can't master that cough, brother. I don't want anybody to come and tell me as there's been more going on nor the Prayer-book's got a service for—I don't know what all deterrent effect and so forth and so on.
As to the Hospital, he avoided saying anything further to Lydgate, fearing to manifest a too sudden change of plans immediately on the death of Raffles, and Bulstrode was anxious not to do anything which would give emphasis to his undefined suspicions.
His father was already out of humor with him, till he'd brag of a spavin as if it 'ud fetch money. I have to say, and if they are humble, not to be ashamed. So the citizen takes up one of his habitual grimaces, alternately screwing and widening his mouth; and when he began to speak he pressed his hands upon the seat on each side of him. How is your testament? Our own fault. Talking about violent exercise, says Alf. But I find that there is a further document.
That's where he's gone, says Lenehan, cracking his fingers. —Aha! And Joe asked him would he have another.
I've begged and prayed; it's been to God above; though where there's one brother a bachelor and the other phenomenon. And there is farther, I see—Mr. Standish was cautiously travelling over the document with his spectacles—a codicil to this latter will, bearing date March 1,1828.
You have a fine color. He may come down any day, when the first Irish battleship is seen breasting the waves with our own flag to the fore, none of your Henry Tudor's harps, no, the oldest flag afloat, the flag of the province of Desmond and Thomond, three crowns on a blue field, the three sons of Milesius. Ay, ay, that is hated and persecuted.
Mary had been talking about him; and if I know Harriet, she'll consider it your fault if we quarrel because you strain at a gnat in this way. But the road, even the ster provostmarshal, lieutenantcolonel Tomkin-Maxwell ffrenchmullan Tomlinson, who presided on the sad occasion, he who had knocked. —Yes, says J.J., if they're any worse than those Belgians in the Congo Free State they must be bad.
Perhaps if other people knew so much of the profit went to the cupboard. What would you not tell her? —Are you a strict t.t.? Smiled, but he had only just come out of the interment arrangements. And Rosamond could not doubt that this was the great epoch of her life. Mr. Featherstone, let the next be who she will. He said and then lifted he in his rude great brawny strengthy hands the medher of dark strong foamy ale and, uttering his tribal slogan Lamh Dearg Abu, he drank to the undoing of his foes, a race of mighty valorous heroes, rulers of the waves, who sit on thrones of alabaster silent as the deathless gods.
—Whose God? I picked up something else at Bilkley besides your gig-horse, Mr. Hawley. You may have an offer. It seemed as if he were putting his sign-manual to that association of himself with Bulstrode, of which something like this scene was the necessary beginning. Any civilisation they have they stole from us. To the High Sheriff of Dublin, Wood quay ward, merchant, hereinafter called the vendor, and sold and delivered to Michael E. Geraghty, esquire, of 29 Arbour hill in the city hall at their caucus meeting decide about the Irish language and the corporation meeting and all to that.
A rump and dozen, was scarified, flayed and curried, yelled like bloody hell and all the codology of the business and the old dog at his feet reposed a savage animal of the canine tribe whose stertorous gasps announced that he was for many years engaged in nefarious practices, and that poor Peter might have thought better of it, who looked full of health and animation, and stood with her head bare under the gleaming April lights. And that's what his religion means: he wants God A'mighty to come in.
Vincy, I must repeat, that you will not shrink from saying that it will not tend to your son's eternal welfare or to the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohoe's in Little Green street like a shot off a shovel. Impervious to fear is Rory's son: he of course was looking at her, and their eyes met with that peculiar meeting which is never arrived at by effort, but seems like a sudden divine clearance of haze.
Fred blushed, and Mr. Vincy found it impossible to do without his snuff-box in his hand, though he had always had justice enough in him to be a better man. Mean bloody scut. I hope; the existence of spiritual interests in your patients? Any valid professional aims may often find a freer, if not a richer field, in the ear of his wife. —Yes, says J.J., when he's quite sure which country it is. Mary of Egypt and S. Lucy and S. Brigid and S. Attracta and S. Dympna and S. Ita and S. Marion Calpensis and the Blessed Sister Teresa of the Child Jesus and S. Barbara and S. Scholastica and S. Ursula with eleven thousand virgins.
Does that always make people fall in love with her, so that she did not wish to enjoy their good opinion. The friends we love are by our side and the foes we hate before us.
No one thinks of your appearance, you are always so exasperating. He continued to look at Fred. Perhaps it should be told to his dear son Patsy that the other boot which he had drawn up for Mr. Featherstone asked Rosamond to sing to him, and direct evidence was furnished not only by myself, but by innocent Mrs. It was a knockout clean and clever.
Encouraged by this use of her christian name she kissed passionately all the various suitable areas of his person which the decencies of prison garb permitted her ardour to reach. True for you, says the citizen.
Fred is horrid! Says Alf. —Hello, Joe. Impervious to fear is Rory's son: he of course was looking at her, and their eyes met with that peculiar meeting which is never arrived at by effort, but seems like a sudden divine clearance of haze. I will boldly confess to you, Mary. For trading without a licence.
—Same again, Terry, says Joe.
But Fred was feeling rather sick. I saw him before I met you, says Martin, we're ready.
—And that no other spiritual aid should be called upon—and I don't pretend to be.
Nay, even the byroad, was excellent; for Lowick, as we have seen, was not a man who varied his manners: he behaved with the same deep-voiced, off-hand civility to everybody, as if he were but going to a hurling match in Clonturk park. I don't defend him, said Solomon, musing aloud with his sisters, the evening before the funeral. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.
Says he. Come now! So Bloom slopes in with his cod's eye counting up all the plans according to the best approved tradition of medical science, be calculated to inevitably produce in the human subject a violent ganglionic stimulus of the nerve centres of the genital apparatus, thereby causing the elastic pores of the corpora cavernosa to rapidly dilate in such a way as to instantaneously facilitate the flow of blood to that part of the metropolis which constitutes the Inn's Quay ward and parish of Saint Michan covering a surface of fortyone acres, two roods and one square pole or perch.
Listen to the births and deaths in the Irish all for Ireland Independent, and I'll thank you and the marriages. The league told him to ask a question tomorrow about the commissioner of police forbidding Irish games in the Phoenix park?
We know what put English gold in his pocket: It's the Russians wish to tyrannise. You two misses go away, said Mr. Standish. How many children? —That's so, says Ned.
I like Featherstones that were brewed such, and not one, but many.
Read Tacitus and Ptolemy, even Giraldus Cambrensis. And he doubled up. After a short silence, pausing at the churchyard gate, Mr. Farebrother wanting to go on to the parsonage; and Dorothea heard the whole sad story.
Are you sure you won't have anything in the way of liquid refreshment? Hell upon earth it is. We are a long time waiting for that day, citizen, says Joe. —Conspuez les Français, says Lenehan. —O jakers, Jenny, says Joe. And one night I went in with a fellow from the hulks. The meeting was to be seen at Doncaster if they chose to go and get a new dog so he ought.
Dear, dear! Come now! —That what's I mean, there is a subsequent instrument hitherto unknown to me, bearing date March 1,1828.
Be brave, Fred. I mean, says the citizen, the giant ash of Galway and the chieftain elm of Kildare with a fortyfoot bole and an acre of foliage. He was not a parish of muddy lanes and poor tenants; and it was intimated that this had greatly perturbed his peace of mind in the other region and earnestly requested that his desire should be made known. And says John Wyse.
Gob, he near sent it into the county Longford. Why shouldn't they dig the man up and have the Crowner? Quietly, unassumingly Rumbold stepped on to the parsonage; and Dorothea heard the whole sad story. One of the bottlenosed fraternity it was went by the name of James Wought alias Saphiro alias Spark and Spiro, put an ad in the papers saying he'd give a passage to Canada for twenty bob. And straightway the minions of the law.
No such thing! Glendalough, the lovely lakes of Killarney, Balor of the Evil Eye, the Queen of Sheba, Acky Nagle, Joe Nagle, Alessandro Volta, Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, Don Philip O'Sullivan Beare. Your God.
A most romantic incident occurred when a handsome young Oxford graduate, noted for his chivalry towards the fair sex, stepped forward and, presenting his visiting card, bankbook and genealogical tree, solicited the hand of the Royal Donor.
But, she added, dimpling, it is a strange story. Dignam. What have you been doing lately?
My liking always wants some little kindness to kindle it. And all the while had got his own lawful family—brothers and sisters, and only a hundred apiece to his own brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces—and has sat in church with 'em whenever he thought well to come, said Mrs. Also, the mercer, as a second cousin besides Mr. Trumbull. The sudden sense of exposure after the re-established sense of safety came—not to the coarse organization of a criminal but to—the susceptible nerve of a man whose character is not cleared from infamous lights cast upon it, not only by a clerk at the Bank, but by innocent Mrs. Also, the mercer, as a Christian minister, against the sanction of proceedings towards me which are dictated by virulent hatred. It's the Russians wish to tyrannise. His father was already out of humor with him, the two of them there near whatdoyoucallhim's … What? Mary Garth seemed all the plainer standing at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohoe's in Little Green street like a shot off a shovel. But in that intense being lay the strength of reaction. Waule, which entitled her to speak when her own brother's hearth, and had sat alone with him for several hours. Mr Allfours: The answer is in the negative. And who does he suspect? And what's he? If he comes just say I'll be back in a second. Plundered. The ride to Stone Court in his gig; and Mr. Bambridge delivered his narrative in the hearing of seven.
—Well, they're still waiting for their redeemer, says Martin, rapping for his glass. But what sort of looking man is he?
It's well known there's always two sides, if no more; else who'd go to law, I should think that was enough, Fred.
It's on the march, says the citizen.
Mr. Hawley gave a careless glance round at Bulstrode's back, but as a gentleman among gentlemen. As to the Hospital, he avoided saying anything further to Lydgate, fearing to manifest a too sudden change of plans immediately on the death of Raffles, and Bulstrode was anxious not to do anything which would give emphasis to his undefined suspicions.
Perhaps if other people knew so much of the profit went to the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohoe's in Little Green street like a shot off a shovel. —Same again, Terry, says Joe, doing the honours. Dear, dear! —Not there, my child, says he. It's for my interest—and perhaps for yours too—that we should be friends.
A pleasant land it is in sooth of murmuring waters, fishful streams where sport the gurnard, the plaice, the roach, the halibut, the gibbed haddock, the grilse, the dab, the brill, the flounder, the pollock, the mixed coarse fish generally and other denizens of the aqueous kingdom too numerous to be enumerated.
Nay, even the byroad, was excellent; for Lowick, as we have seen, was not a man to feel any strong moral indignation even on account of trespasses against himself. Who is Junius? See if the doctor's coming. Any cursed alien blood, Jew, Corsican, or Gypsy.
He spoke rather sulkily, feeling himself stalemated.
It's just like what I have to say, Fred Vincy has been getting somebody to advance him money on what he says he knows about my will, eh?
So Joe starts telling the citizen about Bloom and the Sinn Fein? Nothing escaped Lydgate in Rosamond's graceful behavior: how delicately she waived the notice which the old man's want of taste had thrust upon her by a quiet gravity, not showing her dimples on the wrong occasion, but showing them afterwards in speaking to Mary, to whom she addressed herself with so much good-natured interest, that Lydgate, after quickly examining Mary more fully than he had done anything in the way of drink. Waule had money too. How's that, eh? What say you, good masters, said the chairman; and Mr. Bambridge was rather curt to the draper, feeling that Hopkins was of course glad to talk to him, and before Bulstrode himself suspected the betrayal of—and hoped to have buried forever with the corpse of Raffles—it was that haunting ghost of his earlier life which as he rode past the archway of the Green Dragon to Dollop's, gathered a zest which could not be confident that under the pressure of humiliating needs Lydgate had not fallen below himself. Secrets for enlarging your private parts.
A many comely nymphs drew nigh to starboard and to larboard and, clinging to the sides of the noble bark, they linked their shining forms as doth the cunning wheelwright when he fashions about the heart of his wheel the equidistant rays whereof each one is sister to another and he binds them all with an outer ring and giveth speed to the feet of men whenas they ride to a hosting or contend for the smile of ladies fair.
Pistachios! Says the citizen, and the fact that at this critical moment he had given up Bulstrode's affairs in consequence, said so a few hours later to Mr. Toller. I have devoted myself to this object of hospital-improvement, but I knew nothing of him then—he slipped through my fingers—was after Bulstrode, no doubt.
But he is not disposed to give his sons a fine chance. Hence, in spite of his irritation, had kindness enough in him to walk away without support.
Teach your grandmother how to milk ducks.
And I thought I heard a horse. And the rest nowhere. Merely, how you like him. —As to the manner born, that nectarous beverage and you offered the crystal cup to him that thirsted, the soul of chivalry, in beauty akin to the immortals. Distance no object. Rosamond, reflectively, as if the scorching power of Mrs. Meanwhile, on the part of the breeches off a constabulary man in Santry that came round one time with a blue paper about a licence.
Ow!
Nonsense; we have not quarrelled.
—The memory of the dead, says the citizen, clapping his thigh, our harbours that are empty will be full again, Queenstown, Kinsale, Galway, Blacksod Bay, Ventry in the kingdom of Kerry, Killybegs, the third largest harbour in the wide world with a fleet of masts of the Galway Lynches and the Cavan O'Reillys and the O'Kennedys of Dublin when the earl of Desmond could make a treaty with the emperor Charles the Fifth himself. And Willy Murray with him, till he'd brag of a spavin as if it had been brought to her she didn't know, but it is not desirable, I think, to prolong the present discussion, said Mr. Hawley, still fuming, bowed half impatiently, and sat down with his hands thrust deep in his pockets.
And a stranger was absolutely necessary to Rosamond's social romance, which had much the same genuineness as an old whist-player's chuckle over a bad hand. How do you do, believes in his religion whatever it may be: you could turn over your capital just as fast with cursing and swearing: plenty of fellows do. You'd sooner offend me than Bulstrode. A warm man was Waule.
All in a cart.
Soon, however, there was a fellow with a Ballyhooly blue ribbon badge spiffing out of him.
I tell you? —Give us the paw! —The European family, says J.J. Raping the women and children of Drogheda to the sword with the bible text God is love pasted round the mouth of his cannon?
For by what I can make out, said the chairman; and Mr. Hawley, insistently. —Yes, says Alf, laughing. We subjoin a specimen which has been denominated by the faculty a morbid upwards and outwards philoprogenitive erection in articulo mortis per diminutionem capitis. It's a poor tale, with all the law as there is up and down there for the last gospel. But he was disappointed in the result. —Is it that whiteeyed kaffir?
Then he starts scraping a few bits of old biscuit out of the house of Brunswick, Victoria her name, Her Most Excellent Majesty, by grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the noble line of Lambert.
Mr Joseph M'Carthy Hynes, made an eloquent appeal for the resuscitation of the ancient Gaelic sports and the importance of physical culture, as understood in ancient Greece and ancient Rome and ancient Ireland, for the corporation there near Butt bridge.
Says Joe. The readywitted ninefooter's suggestion at once appealed to all and was unanimously accepted. —The subject is likely to be actively concerned, but in which your sympathetic concurrence may be an aid to me.
—Who have been so unexpectedly called away from our midst.
And here I am naturally led to reflect on the means of elevating a low subject.
The maids of honour, Miss Larch Conifer and Miss Spruce Conifer, sisters of the bride, wore very becoming costumes in the same place. Which is which?
I am not at all with a defiant air, but in the case of Mr. Rigg. He let out that Myler was on the beer to run up the odds and he swatting all the time. I should think. You please, that I stretch my tolerance towards you as my wife's brother, and that person was—O possibilities!
He said to Rosamond, it would have seemed to him that words were the hardest part of business. —How did that Canada swindle case go off? —And—let me see—oh, an exquisite cambric pocket-handkerchief. His light to inhabit therein. Look at here. Gob, the devil wouldn't stop him till he got hold of the bloody tin anyhow and out with him and a fellow named Crofter or Crofton, pensioner out of the bottom of Bulstrode's liberality to Lydgate. Ind.: Don't hesitate to shoot.
The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, The Man that Broke the Bank at half-past one, when he brought a letter from Clemmens of Brassing tied with the will. And Bloom explaining he meant on account of it being cruel for the wife having to go round after the old stuttering fool. The adulteress and her paramour brought the Saxon robbers here.
As to the Hospital, he avoided saying anything further to Lydgate, fearing to manifest a too sudden change of plans immediately on the death of Raffles. Such ruminations naturally produced a streak of satiric bitterness continually renewed and never carried utterly out of sight in this dazzling vision.
Says Bloom. Mr. Bulstrode continued, looking still more serious, is that Mr. Farebrother's attendance at the old infirmary might be the nucleus of a medical school here, when once we get our medical reforms; and what would do more for medical education than the spread of such schools over the country? You are now reaping the consequences. Read them.
My good lady, whatever was told me by my brother Solomon to hear your name made free with, and for the county of the city of Dublin. I dare him, says he. The observatory of Dunsink registered in all eleven shocks, all of the fifth grade of Mercalli's scale, and there, sure enough, was the citizen up in the north from which he had drawn up for Mr. Featherstone.
Only a few children in Middlemarch looked blond by the side of her sister Martha.
—But, says Bloom. Blind to the world.
Takes the biscuit, and talking against the Catholic religion, and he has a prejudice against me. —Mrs B. is the bright particular star, isn't she? Says is true, must be found somewhere else than out of Mr. Hawley's mouth, Bulstrode felt that he made a wretched figure as a fellow who bragged about expectations from a queer old tailend of corned beef off of that one, what? He is not a clergyman in this country who has greater talents.
Ga ga ga ga Gara. That's your glorious British navy, says the citizen.
And they beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle between the two nymphs—the one in the glass. And our wool that was sold in Rome in the time of the Barmecides.
There is the bell—I think we must go down.
All I say is, it's about a whim of old Featherstone's. And their consciences become strict against me. —Good Christ! Encouraged by this use of her christian name she kissed passionately all the various suitable areas of his person which the decencies of prison garb permitted her ardour to reach. No, said Rosamond, with her gravest mildness; I would not marry him if he didn't patch up the pot, Jesus, he'd kick the shite out of him and Joe and little Alf round him like a father, trying to muck out of it, could not quell the rising disgust and indignation. A certain change in Mary's face was chiefly determined by the resolve not to show any change. And he conjured them by Him who died on rood that they should well and truly try and true deliverance make in the issue joined between their sovereign lord the king and the prisoner at the bar and true verdict give according to the Hungarian system. Any gentleman wanting a bit of the wampum in her will and not eating meat of a Friday because the old one with the winkers on her, blind drunk in her royal palace every night of God, they might like it better than your physic. He was at Larcher's sale, but I call upon him—to resign public positions which he holds not simply as a tax-payer, but as a gentleman among gentlemen.
It was eminently superfluous to him to be a little sorry for the unloved, unvenerated old man, to try to set him against Fred. No music and no art and no literature worthy of the name. And with the help of the holy mother of God we will again, says Joe. But in that intense being lay the strength of reaction. How half and half. Ay, says I, your very good health and song.
This was not the less agreeable an object in the distance.
Bristow, at Whitehall lane, London: Carr, Stoke Newington, of gastritis and heart disease: Cockburn, at the Moat house, Chepstow … —I know where he's gone, poor little Willy, poor little Paddy Dignam. P … And he started laughing. She judged of her own, she had perhaps made a great difference to Fred's lot. Has been forever gambling at billiards since home he came. The ceremony which went off with great éclat was characterised by the most affecting cordiality. Mr Crawford.
—Gadzooks!
But here Mr. Jonah Featherstone made himself heard.
Don't you know he's dead? There's a bloody sight better.
Want a small fortune to keep him in drinks.
A large and appreciative gathering of friends and acquaintances Owen Garry. The gold-headed cane is farcical considered as an acknowledgment to me; but happily I am above mercenary considerations.
Dear, dear, wept Mrs.
You make me feel very uncomfortable, Mary, said Rosamond, inclined to push this point. And the tragedy of it is, says the citizen, what's the latest from the scene of action?
I to repeat what you have said? Talking through his bloody hat. —And the wife with typhoid fever!
Read them. He told me when they cut him down after the drop it was standing up in their faces like a poker. —And I don't pretend to be. Oh, Fred is horrid! The question now was, whether he should tell his father, who might perhaps take on himself the unpleasant business of speaking to Bulstrode. —Where did the man die? Others, who expected to make no great figure, disliked this kind of affidavit, which has been denominated by the faculty a morbid upwards and outwards philoprogenitive erection in articulo mortis per diminutionem capitis. There was a time I was as good as a process and now the bloody old dog and he asks Terry was Martin Cunningham there.
What about sanctimonious Cromwell and his ironsides that put the women and girls and flogging the natives on the belly to squeeze all the red rubber they can out of them. Mr Cowe Conacre Multifarnham. Nat.: Arising out of the room; yet this act, which might have momentous effects on the lot of some persons present. Read me the names o' the books. Mr Lenehan? There master Courtenay, sitting in his own mind, which foreshadowed what was soon to be loudly spoken of in Middlemarch as a necessary putting of two and two together.
I acknowledge a good deal of pleasure in fighting, and I don't deny he has oddities—has made his will and parted his property equal between such kin as he's friends with; though, for my part should be willing to give you full opportunity and hearing. The objects which included several hundred ladies' and gentlemen's gold and silver watches were promptly restored to their rightful owners and general harmony reigned supreme.
In what I have; for I'm your own sister, and they tie him down on the buttend of a gun. I am determined that so great an object shall not be shackled by our two physicians. —Talking about violent exercise, says Alf. Said two or three and thirty, whose prominent eyes, thin-lipped, downward-curved mouth, and his recourse to a cough, came cleverly to his rescue by asking him to change seats with her, so that they had many memories in common, and liked very well to talk in private. Boylan. I came out of the pop. The chief objection to them is, that the peculiar bias of medical ability is towards material means. Before reaching home, Fred concluded that he would tell the whole affair as simply as possible to his father, who would as surely question him about it. No, says Joe, reading one of the most precious victim. —Don't tell anyone, says the citizen. What? And my wife has the typhoid. The signal for prayer was then promptly given by megaphone and in an instant all heads were bared, the commendatore's patriarchal sombrero, which has no object but to keep up a foolish partiality and secure a foolish bequest? Well, Mrs. —How did that Canada swindle case go off? What's Bulstrode to me?
Before reaching home, Fred concluded that he would tell the whole affair as simply as possible to his father, who would as surely question him about it. Where is he till I murder him?
It's wonderful how close poor Peter was, she said, laughingly—What a brown patch I am by the side of Rosamond, and the lad was clever.
At this very moment, says he. We want no more strangers in our house.
Cranch, and we've been at the expense of educating him for it!
—A rump and dozen, says the citizen. Choking with bloody foolery.
Says Bob Doran. I will, for trading without a licence ow!
—Because, you see. —Who are you laughing at?
Says I. There's many a mother's child might ha' rued it.
Says Bloom.
Good-by, she said, laughingly—What a brown patch I am by the side of you, Rosy.
J.J., if they're any worse than those Belgians in the Congo Free State they must be bad. When all the rest were trying to look nowhere in particular, it was explained by his legal adviser Avvocato Pagamimi that the various articles secreted in his thirtytwo pockets had been abstracted by him during the affray from the pockets of his junior colleagues in the hope of bringing them to their senses. Take another situation, of course, with his knockmedown cigar putting on swank with his lardy face. —And he says: Foreign wars is the cause of it.
And who pretends to say Fred Vincy hasn't got expectations?
I can alter my will yet. When she and Rosamond happened both to be reflected in the glass or out, and yet have griped you the next day. The housesteward of the amalgamated cats' and dogs' home was in attendance to convey these vessels when replenished to that beneficent institution. No security.
Remember Limerick and the broken treatystone.
Ahasuerus I call him.
And if that's to be it, says Alf, that was giggling over the Police Gazette with Terry on the counter, in all her warpaint. —So the document declared—to please God Almighty; but if I was to be open, and almost everybody of importance in the town.
A warm man was Waule. Fred, in spite of his irritation, had kindness enough in him to be a bribe, and believed that he took it as a bribe, and believed that he took the last swig out of the house, and there's them can pay for hospitals and nurses for half the country-side choose to be sitters-up night and day, and was very uneasy that he had gone a little too far in countenancing Bulstrode, now got himself fully informed, and felt some benevolent sadness in talking to Mr. Farebrother about the ugly light in which Lydgate had come to Stone Court on a pretext of inquiring about hay, but really to gather all that could be learned about Raffles and his illness from Mrs.
I. I murder him? Hence Mr. Bulstrode's close attention was not agreeable to the publicans and sinners in Middlemarch; it was attributed by some to his being a Pharisee, and by others to his being Evangelical. Am I to repeat what you have been uttering just now is one mass of worldliness and inconsistent folly. I to myself I knew he was uneasy in his two pints off of Joe and talking about bunions. His dull expectation of the usual high standard of excellence ensued as to the manner born, that nectarous beverage and you offered the crystal cup to him that thirsted, the soul of chivalry, in beauty akin to the immortals. Faith, he was a deal finer gentleman nor Bulstrode.
It's just what I should have thought—but I may be permitted to speak on a question of public feeling, which not only by myself, but by many gentlemen present, is regarded as preliminary. That's the great empire they boast about of drudges and whipped serfs. Mr. Vincy had given that invitation which he had engaged to look for. There's Rebecca, and Joanna, and Elizabeth, you know.
Mr. Bulstrode paused a little before he answered. You can't send out o' the country, says he. Gob, he's like Lanty MacHale's goat that'd go a piece of land near Middlemarch already bought for the purpose by the testator, he wishing—so the document declared—to please God Almighty; but if I was to be devoted to the erection and endowment of almshouses for old men, to be called Featherstone's Alms-Houses, and to be built on a piece of the road with every one.
—Persecution, says he, for ten thousand pounds. I'm the alligator.
Here Mr. Featherstone pulled at both sides of his wig as if he wanted to deafen himself, and his sister was quite used to the peculiar absence of ceremony with which he showed a disposition to clear his voice, was drawn up by another lawyer, he would not for the world. It is of no use saying anything to you, Joe, says I.
—Ay, ay, he's a prudent member and no mistake. —Yes, that's the man, says J.J. Raping the women and children of Drogheda to the sword with the bible text God is love pasted round the mouth of his cannon? To the High Sheriff of Dublin, Dublin.
—Hurry up, Terry boy, says Alf.
Even the Grand Turk sent us his piastres.
—… Private Arthur Chace for fowl murder of Jessie Tilsit in Pentonville prison and i was assistant when … —Jesus, says he, from the Green Dragon he was trusting that Providence had delivered him from.
Gob, he's like Lanty MacHale's goat that'd go a piece of evidence on the side of Rosamond, and the Waules too. —Who? He's traipsing all round Dublin with a postcard someone sent him with U.p: up on it to take a li … And he started laughing.
Was Mr. Lydgate there? But—here Mr. Bulstrode began to speak he pressed his hands upon that he blessed and gave thanks and he prayed and they all with him prayed: Deus, cuius verbo sanctificantur omnia, benedictionem tuam effunde super creaturas istas: et praesta ut quisquis eis secundum legem et voluntatem Tuam cum gratiarum actione usus fuerit per invocationem sanctissimi nominis Tui corporis sanitatem et animae tutelam Te auctore percipiat per Christum Dominum nostrum. God made Moses. Lydgate, the scrutinizing look was a matter of fact I just wanted to meet Martin Cunningham, don't you see, about this insurance of poor Dignam's.
From the reports of eyewitnesses it transpires that the seismic waves were accompanied by a violent atmospheric perturbation of cyclonic character. —The sense of being an own sister and getting little, while somebody else was to have the gold-headed cane and fifty pounds; the other entirely saturnine, leaning his hands and chin on a stick, and conscious of claims on the score of inconvenient expense sustained by him in presents of oysters and other eatables to his rich cousin Peter; the other second cousins and the cousins present were each to have the like handsome sum, which, as the suitable garnish for girls, and also probably to get some satisfaction out of seeing him on unpleasant terms with Bulstrode. As he awaited the fatal signal he tested the edge of his horrible weapon by honing it upon his brawny forearm or decapitated in rapid succession a flock of sheep which had been mislaid, interpreting and fulfilling the scriptures, blessing and prophesying.
—That's your glorious British navy, says the citizen. Oh, Fred is horrid! Says John Wyse, or Heligoland with its one tree if something is not done to reafforest the land.
And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody. Her friends can't always be dying. There's more ways than one of being a fool, says the citizen.
You mean my beauty, said Mary, angrily. Well, Mrs. I picked up a fine story about Bulstrode. Was Mr. Lydgate there? —And where the land? —Well, says the citizen.
Damme if I think he meant to turn king's evidence; but he's that sort of bragging fellow, the bragging runs over hedge and ditch with him, and before Bulstrode himself suspected the betrayal of—and hoped to have buried forever with the corpse of Raffles—it was that haunting ghost of his earlier life which as he rode past the archway of the Green Dragon he was trusting that Providence had delivered him from.
Lydgate. The preamble was felt to be so public and important that it required dinners to feed it, and was very uneasy that he had an eager inward life with little enjoyment of tangible things.
—After she had sung Home, sweet home which she detested. Said purchaser debtor to the said vendor in weekly instalments every seven calendar days of three shillings and no pence sterling: and the confraternity of the christian brothers led by the reverend brother Edmund Ignatius Rice. If the man in the moon was a jew, jew and a slut shouts out of her: Eh, mister!
An you be the king's messengers, master Taptun?
Yes, a kind of summer tour, you see, about this insurance of poor Dignam's. True as you're there. Says I.
It is our united sentiment that Mr. Bulstrode rarely shrank from, but Mr. Vincy was resolved to be good-humored. I know not what to offer your lordships. I was running after that … —You what?
Gob, he'd have a soft hand under a hen. Has placed within our reach. And our wool that was sold in Rome in the time of day with old Troy of the D.M.P. at the corner of the chair so totteringly that Lydgate felt sure there was not strength enough in him to be told that he was quite without intentions of hospitality towards witty men whose name he was about, I think, said Mr. Thesiger, turning to the pallid trembling man; I must so far concur with what has fallen from Mr. Hawley; all the medical men were there; Mr. Thesiger was in the force. The housesteward of the amalgamated cats' and dogs' home was in attendance to convey these vessels when replenished to that beneficent institution. Selling bazaar tickets or what do you think, Bergan?
Black Forest. But in the morning all the ordinary currents of conjecture were disturbed by the presence of a strange mourner who had plashed among them as if from the moon.
Said Solomon. Mind, Joe, says I.
—Myler dusted the floor with him, till he'd brag of a spavin as if it had been consciously accepted in any way as a bribe. After that, she was really anxious to go, and did not know what sort of stupidity her uncle was talking of when she went to shake hands with him.
I see Mrs.
Give you good den, my masters, said the banker.
Hence Bulstrode felt himself providentially secured.
—I won't mention any names, says Alf.
And all the while he's worse than half the men at the tread-mill?
Mr. Thesiger sanctioned the request, Mr. Bulstrode continued, looking still more serious, is that Mr. Farebrother's attendance at the hospital should be superseded by the appointment of a chaplain—of Mr. Tyke, in fact, appeared to trouble himself little about any innuendoes, but showed a notable change of manner, walking coolly up to Mr. Standish and putting business questions with much coolness. —And who does he suspect? In Inisfail the fair there lies a land, the land of song a high double F recalling those piercingly lovely notes with which the eunuch Catalani beglamoured our greatgreatgrandmothers was easily distinguishable.
No, says the citizen, that bosses the earth. Says he, preaching and picking your pocket. So I'll leave your own sense to judge.
But begob I was just looking around to see who the happy thought would strike when be damned but in he comes again letting on to be modest.
And yet they hang about my uncle like vultures, and are afraid of a farthing going away from their side of the family. And he starts reading out: Gordon, Barnfield crescent, Exeter; Redmayne of Iffley, Saint Anne's on Sea: the wife of William T Redmayne of a son.
Says Joe. If the man in the moon. What's yours? In reply to a question as to his first sensations in the great divide beyond he stated that he was seeking the utmost improvement from their discourse.
—Mendelssohn was a jew.
I would, if he got that lottery ticket on the side of Rosamond, and the citizen bawling and Alf and Joe at him to whisht and he on his high horse about the jews and the loafers calling for a speech and Jack Power with him and little Alf hanging on to his elbow and he shouting like a stuck pig, as good as told Fred that he means to punish him for it. The two fought like tigers and excitement ran fever high.
—Save you kindly, says J.J., if they're any worse than those Belgians in the Congo Free State they must be bad.
Rosamond entered after a couple of miles' riding. Hundred to five!
—Old Troy was just giving me a wrinkle about him—lifted any God's quantity of tea and sugar to pay three bob a week said he had a friend in court. Mr Toller and Mr. Wrench, expressly to hold a close discussion as to the probabilities of Raffles's illness, reciting to them all the particulars which had been hurriedly passed, authorizing assessments for sanitary measures, there had been a Board for the superintendence of such measures appointed in Middlemarch, except her brothers, held that Martha's children ought not to expect so much as the young Waules; and Martha, more lax on the subject of primogeniture, was sorry to think that their reports from the outer world were of equal force with what had come up in her mind. I was saying, the old one with the winkers on her, no less. Ireland, says Bloom.
—Adiutorium nostrum in nomine Domini. Give us that biscuitbox here.
An you be the king's messengers, master Taptun?
Cruelty to animals so it is to let that bloody povertystricken Breen out on grass with his beard out tripping him, bringing down the rain. But those above ground might learn a lesson. —I will use no severer word—has not tried to raise money by holding out his future prospects, or even that some one may not have been foolish enough to supply him on so vague a presumption: there is plenty of such lax money-lending as of other folly in the world for want of help.
If, as I dare to hope, I have the privilege of finding you a valuable coadjutor in the interesting matter of hospital management, there will be many questions which we shall need to discuss in private.
Do you know what it is? And there rises a shining palace whose crystal glittering roof is seen by mariners who traverse the extensive sea in barks built expressly for that purpose, and thither come all herds and fatlings and firstfruits of that land for O'Connell Fitzsimon takes toll of them, which was of a good human sort, such as were entertained towards Mary Garth.
Mr. Brooke, we have just come from a meeting—a sanitary meeting, you know. She bowed ceremoniously to Mrs. Then he was telling us there was one chap sent in a mourning card with a black border round it. The best in Middlemarch, I'll be bound, said Mr. Brooke. What was your best throw, citizen? Black Forest.
It's just like what I have to say, Fred Vincy has been getting somebody to advance him money on what he says he knows about my will, eh? Fletcher says it's no such thing as a will. Eh, mister!
Says Joe, reading one of the clan of the O'Molloy's, a comely hero of white face yet withal somewhat ruddy, his majesty's counsel learned in the law, and with him the high sinhedrim of the twelve tribes of Iar, and they made their way thither.
Gob, he'll come home by weeping cross one of those days, I'm thinking.
That what's I mean, by confiding to you the superintendence of my new hospital, should a maturer knowledge favor that issue, for I am determined that so great an object shall not be shackled by our two physicians. —Very kind of you, Rosy! —On which the sun never rises, says Joe, haven't we had enough of those sausageeating bastards on the throne from George the elector down to the German lad and the flatulent old bitch that's dead?
Love, moya! Says Bob Doran. In fact, most men in Middlemarch, said Lydgate, bluntly. The second will revoked everything except the legacies to the low persons before mentioned some alterations in these being the occasion of the codicil, and the slim figure displayed by her riding-habit. Mr. Vincy was resolved to be good-humored. —Who?
—O, I'm sure that will be all right, Hynes, says Bloom.
Give you good den, my masters, said the banker. Said Caleb, leaning forward, adjusting his finger-tips to her hair—hair of infantine fairness, neither flaxen nor yellow. He had not confessed to himself yet that he had done as he liked at the last, and burnt the will drawn up by myself and executed by our deceased friend on the 9th of August, 1825. He changed it by deedpoll, the father did. As to the sentiments of Solomon and Jonah, they were held in utter suspense: it seemed to them that the old will would have a certain validity, and that it little becomes you to complain of me as withholding material help towards the worldly position of your family.
Well, Joe, says I, sloping around by Pill lane and Greek street with his cod's eye on the dog and, gob, flahoolagh entertainment, don't be talking. —I think the markets are on a rise, says he, I'll have him summonsed up before the court, so I will.
Five days after the death of Raffles, and Bulstrode was anxious not to do anything which would give emphasis to his undefined suspicions. Fletcher said so himself. And entering he blessed the viands and the beverages and the company of people who perpetrate such acts, have got to defend themselves as they best can, and that person was—O possibilities!
He could not see a man sink close to him for want of this letter about your son? —Beg your pardon, sir, said Fred, rising, standing with his back to the fire and beating his boot with his whip.
He's very fond of Fred, and is far from losing hundreds of pounds, which, if what everybody says is true, must be found somewhere else than out of Mr. Hawley's mouth, Bulstrode felt that he made a sarcastic grimace.
Mr. Lydgate suddenly corresponding to her ideal, being altogether foreign to Middlemarch, carrying a certain air of distinction congruous with good family, and possessing connections which offered vistas of that middle-class heaven, rank; a man of ability as wonder or surprise. These things happened so often at balls, and why not by the morning light, when the complexion showed all the better pleased if he'd left lots of small legacies. Dirty Dan the dodger's son off Island bridge that sold the same horses twice over to the government to fight the Boers.
He eat me my sugars.
He makes chaps rich with corn and cattle. What must you be bringing her more books for? —No, says the citizen. I find it, in trade and everything else.
It had not occurred to Fred that the introduction of Bulstrode's name in the matter and the citizen scowling after him and the old dog over. What was your best throw, citizen? So off they started about Irish sports and shoneen games the like of that and throw him in the bloody sea. —That can be explained by science, says Bloom, on account of the poor woman, I mean his wife. Antitreating is about the time of Juvenal and our flax and our damask from the looms of Antrim and our Limerick lace, our tanneries and our white flint glass down there by Ballybough and our Huguenot poplin that we have since Jacquard de Lyon and our woven silk and our Foxford tweeds and ivory raised point from the Carmelite convent in New Ross, nothing like it in the eyes of the law led forth from their donjon keep one whom the sleuthhounds of justice had apprehended in consequence of uncomfortable suggestions. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.
Mary as an articled pupil, so that her flower-like head on its white stem was seen in perfection above-her riding-habit with much grace.
Anybody might have had to say his prayers at Botany Bay.
But Jane and Martha sank under the rush of questions, and began to cry; poor Mrs. I'm telling you.
When Fred came in the old man eyed him with a left hook, the body punch being a fine one. It'll do him no good where he's gone, says Lenehan, to celebrate the occasion.
… —Half and half I mean, says Bloom, the robbing bagman, that poisoned himself.
H. RUMBOLD, MASTER BARBER. Stand and deliver, says he.
—By Jesus, I'll crucify him so I will. He'll square that, Ned, says J.J., and every male that's born they think it may be: you could turn over your capital just as fast with cursing and swearing: plenty of fellows do. Says Joe. But you will see him. Says the citizen. I say, don't Fletcher me! Five days after the death of Raffles, and the one out of it: Or also living in different places.
—Hello, Joe. Says Alf. Collector of bad and doubtful debts. I heard that from the head warder that was in Kilmainham when they hanged Joe Brady, the invincible. Mr George Fottrell and a silk umbrella with gold handle with the engraved initials, crest, coat of arms and house number of the erudite and worshipful chairman of quarter sessions sir Frederick Falkiner, recorder of Dublin, Wood quay ward, gentleman, hereinafter called the purchaser, videlicet, five pounds avoirdupois of first choice tea at three shillings and no pence per pound avoirdupois, the said purchaser but shall be and remain and be held to be the workingman's friend. Who's dead?
—On which the sun never rises, says Joe, handing round the boose. And me—the trouble I've been at, times and times, to come here and be sisterly—and him with things on his mind. And J.J. and the citizen sending them all to the rightabout and Bloom coming out with his sheepdip for the scab and a hoose drench for coughing calves and the guaranteed remedy for timber tongue.
I believed that nothing more was concerned therein than the cure of mortal diseases. —Show us over the drink, says I.
Says Jack. Such is life in an outhouse. —Old Troy was just giving me a wrinkle about him—lifted any God's quantity of tea and sugar to pay three bob a week said he had a friend in court. —Paddy Dignam dead! Meanwhile, Mr. Vincy determined to speak with a more chiselled emphasis—the subject is likely to do something handsome for him; indeed he has as good as the next fellow? Said Lydgate, bluntly.
It seemed that everybody of mark had been earlier than they. Ireland, for the corporation there near Butt bridge. Mr. Bulstrode paused and looked meditative. You bring me a writing from Bulstrode to say he doesn't believe you've ever promised to pay off by mortgaging my land when I'm dead and gone, eh?
To hell with the bloody brutal Sassenachs and their patois. Nurse loves the new chemist.
The bride who was given away by her father, and perhaps after drinking wine he had said many foolish things about Featherstone's property, and these had been magnified by report. In fact, most men in Middlemarch, except her brothers, held that Miss Vincy was the best girl I know. I don't want to stand winking and blinking and thinking. You recognize, I hope we shall not vary in sentiment as to a measure in which you are not proud of your cellar, there is a second will—there is a further document.
Waule's mind was entirely flooded with the sense that the affair had an ugly look. —Thousand a year, Lambert, says Crofton or Crawford. Says J.J. Raping the women and girls and flogging the natives on the belly to squeeze all the red rubber they can out of them.
Oh, minding the house—pouring out syrup—pretending to be amiable and contented—learning to have a hundred.
—Ha ha, Alf, says Joe, tonight. —He slipped through my fingers—was after Bulstrode, no doubt. They were never worth a roasted fart to Ireland. You see, he, Dignam, I mean his wife. —What I meant about tennis, for example, is the agility and training the eye.
Before he took leave, Mr. Vincy had given that invitation which he had had no experience.
—Don't you know he's dead?
Fletcher me! Fred and Rosamond took the next morning, lay through a pretty bit of midland landscape, almost all meadows and pastures, with hedgerows still allowed to grow in bushy beauty and to spread out coral fruit for the birds. Said vendor to be disposed of at his good will and pleasure until the said amount shall have been duly paid by the said purchaser but shall be and remain and be held to be sufficient evidence of malice in the testcase Sadgrove v. But what about the fighting navy, suffered under rump and dozen, was scarified, flayed and curried, yelled like bloody hell, the third largest harbour in the wide world with a fleet of masts of the Galway Lynches and the Cavan O'Reillys and the O'Kennedys of Dublin when the earl of Desmond could make a treaty with the emperor Charles the Fifth himself.
She rose slowly without any sign of resentment, and said in his firm resonant voice, Mr. Chairman, I request that before any one delivers his opinion on this point I may be permitted to speak on a question of public feeling, which not only by reports but by recent actions. Let us drink our pints in peace. —He's a bloody dark horse himself, says Joe.
Not men whose own lives are unchristian, nay, scandalous—not men who themselves use low instruments to carry out their ends—whose profession is a tissue of chicanery—who have been so unexpectedly called away from our midst.
Hast aught to give us?
No offence, Crofton. —Well, his uncle was a jew and his father was a jew, jew, jew and a slut shouts out of him would give you the creeps. —To please God Almighty; but if I was to be open, and almost everybody of importance in the town, had been carried to Lowick Parsonage on one side and to Tipton Grange on the other hand that Dignam owed Bridgeman the money and if now the wife or the widow contested the mortgagee's right till he near had the head of the large central table, and they do say that Mr. Vincy mostly trades on the Bank money; and you may see yourself, brother, and that he won his fortune by dishonest procedures—or else to withdraw from positions which could only have been allowed him as a gentleman among gentlemen. It took some time for the company to recover the power of expression.
Then comes good uncle Leo. It seemed that everybody of mark had been earlier than they. A meeting was to be struck helpless I must say it's hard—I can think no other. So J.J. puts in a word, doing the little lady. The ceremony which went off with great éclat was characterised by the most affecting cordiality. The work of salvage, removal of débris, human remains etc has been entrusted to Messrs Michael Meade and Son, 159 Great Brunswick street, and Messrs T. and C. Martin, 77,78,79 and 80 North Wall, assisted by the men and officers of the peace and genial giants of the royal Irish constabulary, were making frank use of their handkerchiefs and it is safe to say that Fred was under some difficulty in repressing a laugh, which would be very fine, by God, says Ned.
Other eyewitnesses depose that they observed an incandescent object of enormous proportions hurtling through the atmosphere at a terrifying velocity in a trajectory directed southwest by west. —That so?
There's one thing I made out pretty clear when I used to be stravaging about the landings Bantam Lyons told me that was stopping there at two in the morning without a stitch on her, blind drunk in her royal palace every night of God, old Vic, with her jorum of mountain dew and her coachman carting her up body and bones to roll into bed and she pulling him by the whiskers and singing him old bits of songs about Ehren on the Rhine and come where the boose is cheaper. Or who is he? —Conspuez les Anglais!
The only difference I see is that one worldliness is a little bit honester than another. Presently it was possible to discern something that might be a gig on the circular drive before the front door. Said old Featherstone, secretly disliking the possibility that Fred would show himself at all independent. There are great spiritual advantages to be had in that town along with the air of a landlady accustomed to dominate her company. Isn't he? And as for the Prooshians and the Hanoverians, says Joe. Says Joe. She rose slowly without any sign of resentment, and said in her usual muffled monotone, Brother, I hope none of my uncle's horrible relations are there. Tell that to a fool, said Solomon, with a personal dedication from the august hand of the hapless young lady, requesting her to name the day, and nobody to come near but a doctor as is known to stick at nothingk, and as poor as he can hang together, and after that so flush o' money as he brought into this town by thieving and swindling, '—I said, and Mr. Bulstrode had begun by admonishing Mr. Vincy, after his one outburst, had remained indifferent and fastidiously critical towards both fresh sprig and faded bachelor. A little too fond, said Mr. Limp, after taking a draught, placed his flat hands together and pressed them hard between his knees and settling his wig, while he gave her a momentary sharp glance, which seemed to react on him like a draught of cold air and set him coughing. But he, the young chief of the O'Bergan's, could ill brook to be outdone in generous deeds but gave therefor with gracious gesture a testoon of costliest bronze.
At this very moment, says he. I'll tell you where I first picked him up, said Bambridge, with a personal dedication from the august hand of the hapless young lady, requesting her to name the day, and nobody to come near but a doctor as is known to stick at nothingk, and as poor as he can hang together, and after that so flush o' money as he brought into this town by thieving and swindling, '—I said, 'You don't make me no wiser, Mr. Baldwin: it's set my blood a-creeping to look at them.
And he ups with his pint to wet his whistle. Dollop, the spirited landlady of the Tankard in Slaughter Lane, who had before heard only imperfect hints of it, could not quell the rising disgust and indignation.
If the man in the room was looking at Bulstrode.
Collector of bad and doubtful debts. —I think the markets are on a rise, says he. God bless His Majesty! I consider it unhandsome. I met you, says I. Isn't he? Mary, said Rosamond, with heightened satisfaction. —Not taking anything between drinks, says I, your very good health and song. Don't hesitate to shoot. Mangy ravenous brute sniffing and sneezing all round the place and scratching his scabs. Then, he himself hated having to go and look at it, Mr. Bambridge would gratify them by being shot from here to Hereford.
The eyes in which a tear and a smile strove ever for the mastery were of the dimensions of a goodsized cauliflower.
A very decent funeral. Having requested a quart of buttermilk this was brought and evidently afforded relief.
Said poor sister Martha, whose imagination of hundreds had been habitually narrowed to the amount of her unpaid rent. Says Joe. —O hell! —Charity to the neighbour, says Martin. I won't mention any names, says Alf.
He will, says Joe, handing round the boose.
Cuckoos. Listen to this, will you? —Perfectly true, says Bloom. —Yes, says Bloom. And then an old fellow starts blowing into his bagpipes and all the while that might make anybody's flesh creep.
—True for you, says I.
Says Alf. Special quick excursion trains and upholstered charabancs had been provided by the authorities for the consumption of the central figure of the executioner, his visage being concealed in a tengallon pot with two circular perforated apertures through which his eyes glowered furiously. Five days after the death of Raffles, and Bulstrode was anxious not to do anything which would give emphasis to his undefined suspicions. The traitor's son. When I see Mrs.
I have much at heart to secure is a new regulation as to clerical attendance at the hospital should be superseded by the appointment of a chaplain—of Mr. Tyke, and even then I should require to know the cases in which he was applied. There never was any beauty in the women of our family; but the Featherstones have always had a circumstantial fascination for the virgin mind, against which native merit has urged itself in vain. Very likely not; but you have been uttering just now is one mass of worldliness and inconsistent folly.
Says Alf. An old plumber named Geraghty.
All emotion must be conditional, and might turn out to be the workingman's friend.
I'm afraid I'm out of court, sir. If he comes just say I'll be back in a second. —Was the land coming too? Near ate the tin and all, hungry bloody mongrel.
I?
#Ulysses (novel)#James Joyce#1922#automatically generated text#Patrick Mooney#Cyclops#George Eliot#Victorian novels#British novelists#Bildungsromaener#didactic literature#Marian Evans#19th century#Middlemarch (novel)
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there will be a point when the Lord returns to earth
to be the King who returns the world to a Kingdom of True Light and Love.
and there will be a “secret elopement” which is a heavenly marriage of the Church as the Bride of Christ being united in Heaven, all as “One”
because the kingdoms of this world are all temporal in nature, just as the physical body that will be replaced by an eternal spiritual body for those who believe in a sacred act of grace. and this begins with the rebirth of the heart (inside, Anew) by coming to view life through baptism eyes in humility as a child.
Today’s reading of the Scriptures begins with chapter 13 in the book of Mark:
As Jesus left the temple later that day, one of the disciples noticed the grandeur of Herod’s temple.
Disciple: Teacher, I can’t believe the size of these stones! Look at these magnificent buildings!
Jesus: Look closely at these magnificent buildings. Someday there won’t be one of these great stones left on another. Everything will be thrown down.
They took a seat on the Mount of Olives, across the valley from the temple; and Peter, James, John, and Andrew asked Jesus to explain His statement to them privately.
Peter, James, John, and Andrew: Don’t keep us in the dark. When will the temple be destroyed? What sign will let us know that it’s about to happen?
Jesus: Take care that no one deceives you. Many will come claiming to be Mine, saying, “I am the One,” and they will fool lots of people. You will hear of wars, or that war is coming, but don’t lose heart. These things will have to happen, although it won’t mean the end yet. Tribe will rise up against tribe, nation against nation, and there will be earthquakes in place after place and famines. These are a prelude to “labor pains” that precede the temple’s fall.
Be careful, because you will be delivered to trial and beaten in the places of worship. Kings and governors will stand in judgment over you as you speak in My name. The good news of the coming kingdom of God must be delivered first in every land and every language. When people bring you up on charges and it is your time to defend yourself, don’t worry about what message you’ll deliver. Whatever comes to your mind, speak it, because the Holy Spirit will inspire it.
But it will get worse. Brothers will betray each other to death, and fathers will betray their children. Children will turn against their parents and cause them to be executed. Everyone will hate you because of your allegiance to Me. But if you’re faithful until the end, you will be rescued.
You will see that which desecrates our most holy place [described by Daniel the prophet] out of place.
Let the one who reads and hears understand.
Jesus: On the day you see it, whoever is in Judea should flee for the mountains. The person on the rooftop shouldn’t reenter the house to get anything, and the person working in the field shouldn’t turn back to grab his coat. It will be horrible for women who are pregnant or who are nursing their children when those days come. And pray that you don’t have to run for your lives in the winter. When those days come, there will be suffering like nobody has seen from the beginning of the world that God created until now, and it never will be like this again. And if the Lord didn’t shorten those days for the sake of the ones He has chosen, then nobody would survive them.
If anyone tells you in those days, “Look, there is the Anointed One!” or “Hey, that must be Him!” don’t believe them. False liberators and prophets will pop up like weeds, and they will work signs and perform miracles that would entice even God’s chosen people, if that were possible. So be alert, and remember how I have warned you.
As Isaiah said in the days after that great suffering,
The sun will refuse to shine,
and the moon will hold back its light.
The stars in heaven will fall,
and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.
Then you will see (as Daniel predicted) “the Son of Man coming in the clouds,” clothed in power and majesty. And He will send out His heavenly messengers and gather together to Himself those He has chosen from the four corners of the world, from every direction and every land.
Jesus: Learn this lesson from the fig tree: When its branch is new and tender and begins to put forth leaves, you know that summer must be near. In the same way, when you see and hear the things I’ve described to you taking place, you’ll know the time is drawing near. It’s true—this generation will not pass away before all these things have happened. Heaven and earth may pass away, but these words of Mine will never pass away.
Take heed: no one knows the day or hour when the end is coming. The messengers in heaven don’t know, nor does the Son. Only the Father knows.
So be alert. Watch for it [and pray,] for you never know when that time might approach.
This situation is like a man who went on a journey; when he departed, he left his servants in charge of the house. Each of them had his own job to do; and the man left the porter to stand at the door, watching. So stay awake, because no one knows when the master of the house is coming back. It could be in the evening or at midnight or when the rooster crows or in the morning. Stay awake; be alert so that when he suddenly returns, the master won’t find you sleeping.
The teaching I am giving the four of you now is for everyone who will follow Me: stay awake, and keep your eyes open.
The Book of Mark, Chapter 13 (The Voice)
Today’s paired chapter of the Testaments is the 28th chapter of Deuteronomy where Moses gives a choice to the Israelites of the blessing or the curse, in choosing to follow God and His commandments or refusing them to stray to other gods.
and there is a choice for each of us here on earth Today, in either choosing or rejecting rebirth that is being offered by God in the True illumination of the Son where we find spiritual and eternal life. for apart from Light there is only spiritual death in the end.
[Deuteronomy 26]
Moses: If you listen closely to the voice of the Eternal your God and carefully obey all the commands I’m giving you today, He’ll lift you up high above every other nation on earth. All of the following blessings will be yours—in fact, they’ll chase after you—if you’ll listen to what He tells you.
Moses: You’ll be blessed in the city and blessed in the fields.
You’ll be blessed with children and crops and cattle.
Your herds will multiply, and your flocks will increase.
Your basket will be blessed; it will be full at harvest time,
and your kneading bowl will be blessed; you’ll always have plenty of bread.
You’ll be blessed when you go out of your home
and blessed when you return to your home.
When your enemies attack you, the Eternal will defeat them for you. They’ll come against you from one direction, but scatter and flee chaotically from you in seven different directions. He will bless your barns, and they’ll be full of grain; He’ll bless everything you do. You’ll be blessed throughout the land He is giving you. The Eternal will make you a nation that belongs to Him in a special way, just as He promised He would, if you’ll obey the commands of the Eternal your God and live as He wants you to. Every other nation on earth will see the Eternal has called you by His own name, so they’ll be in awe of you.
The Eternal will give you more than enough of every good thing—children, cattle, and crops—as you live on the ground He promised your ancestors He’d give you. He will open up the reservoirs of water in the sky and make the rainy seasons come each year, so that everything you do will be blessed. Your produce will be so abundant that you’ll lend to many nations, but you won’t have to borrow from any. He will make you the head, not the tail; you’ll always be on top and never on the bottom—if you’ll just listen to the commands I’m giving you today from the Eternal your God, and obey them carefully. All these blessings will be yours if you don’t deviate at all, neither to the right nor to the left, from any of the things I’m commanding you today, if you don’t go and worship other gods!
Moses: But if you won’t listen to the voice of the Eternal your God, if you don’t carefully obey the commands and regulations I’m giving you today, then you’ll experience all of the following curses—in fact, they’ll come after you!
You’ll be cursed in the city and cursed in the fields.
Your baskets will be cursed, and your harvests will be small.
Your kneading bowl will be cursed, and you’ll always be short of food.
Your children and your crops will be cursed.
Your herds will dwindle, and your flocks will shrink.
You’ll be cursed when you return to your home and cursed when you go out from your home.
Eternal One: I’ll oppose everything you try to do! I’ll send curses and panic and setbacks until you’re destroyed, suddenly and completely, because of the evil things you did when you abandoned Me!
Moses: The Eternal will strike you with plague—consumption and fever and inflammation—in the land where you’re going to live, and it will never leave until none of you are left alive there. He’ll afflict your land with heat and drought; He’ll afflict your crops with blight and mildew. All of these things will keep coming after you until you’re destroyed! The skies overhead will be like a bronze shield that no rain can penetrate, and the land beneath your feet will be like iron that no seeds can sprout through. Instead of rainstorms, the Eternal will send dust storms down on your land, and you’ll be destroyed. He will hand you over to your enemies already defeated. You’ll attack them in an organized unit from one direction, but you’ll scatter and flee from them as scared individuals in seven different directions. Every kingdom on earth will tremble with fear when they hear what happens to you. Your dead bodies will lie unburied in the open field. The wild birds and animals will eat them, and no one will chase the scavengers away.
The Eternal will afflict you with all kinds of incurable skin diseases, such as the boils that were a plague in Egypt; you’ll suffer tumors and scurvy and itch, but you’ll never find relief. He will afflict you with severe, incurable boils on your knees and legs, and they’ll spread until they cover your whole body, from the soles of your feet to the top of your head.
The Eternal will afflict you
with madness and blindness and confusion.
As you try to figure out which way to go in life,
you’ll be groping around the way a blind person gropes in the darkness,
even in the middle of the day.
You’ll never find your way, and you’ll never be prosperous.
You’ll be exploited and robbed all the time, and no one will rescue you.
You’ll get engaged to a woman, but another man will violate her.
You’ll build a house but never live in it.
You’ll plant a vineyard but never enjoy its fruit.
Your ox will be slaughtered as you look on helplessly, and others will eat it.
Your donkey will be taken away from you and never returned.
Your sheep will be given to your enemies, and no one will help you get them back.
Your sons and your daughters will be given to foreigners as slaves. You’ll always be watching for their return, until your eyes grow dim, but there will be nothing you can do to bring them back. Foreigners will eat up all your crops and take everything else you’ve worked for. You’ll be oppressed and abused constantly. You’ll be driven mad by what you see! The Eternal will send all of you, including your chosen king, into exile, to a country you’ve never heard of, not even from your ancestors. There you’ll worship other gods made of wood and stone. Whenever the people who live in the places where the Eternal has sent you want to scare someone or insult someone or teach a lesson, they’ll say that what happened to you is going to happen to them. Your name will be synonymous with disaster!
You’ll sow many seeds, but you’ll harvest only a few because locusts will devour them before they produce. You’ll plant vineyards and tend them, but you won’t drink any wine or collect any grapes because worms will eat them. You’ll have olive trees throughout your territory, but you won’t anoint yourself with oil because the trees will be diseased and the olives will drop off before they ripen. You’ll still have children, but they won’t stay with you; they’ll be taken into captivity. Your orchards and crops will be infested with buzzing locusts. The foreigners who live in your country will rise higher and higher above you, while you sink lower and lower in every aspect of life. They will lend to you, but you won’t lend to them; they’ll be the head, and you’ll be the tail. You’ll experience all of these curses—they’ll chase after you and overtake you and destroy you—because you did not listen to the voice of the Eternal and obey the commands and regulations He gave you. These curses will test you and leave you in awe of His signs and wonders against you and your descendants forever.
Moses: Because you didn’t serve the Eternal your God in joy and gladness when you had an abundance of everything, you’ll serve the enemies the Eternal sends against you, in hunger and thirst and nakedness and destitution. He’ll put an iron yoke on your neck until He’s destroyed you.
The Eternal will bring a nation from far away, from the ends of the earth, and it will swoop down on you like an eagle. This will be a nation whose language you don’t understand, a ruthless nation that doesn’t respect the old or spare the young. They’ll eat up your young cattle and crops until you have nothing left. They won’t leave you any grain or new wine or oil, or young animals in your herds or flocks. And that lack will kill you. They’ll lay siege to all of you and all of your cities throughout the land the Eternal your God is giving you, until the high, fortifying walls you feel so safe within have all been knocked down all over your nation.
These enemy sieges will cause you so much hardship that you’ll resort to cannibalism! You’ll eat the flesh of the sons and daughters that the Eternal your God has given you. Even the gentlest, most sensitive man among you will turn against his brother and his beloved wife and the rest of his children who haven’t been exiled. He won’t even give them anything to eat from the flesh of the children he’s devouring because the hardship of the enemy siege will be so severe in every city that he’ll have nothing else to eat himself. Even the gentlest, most delicate woman among you, who wouldn’t even let her foot touch the ground because she’s so refined, will turn against her beloved husband and against her son and daughter. She’ll feel no compassion toward any other children she bears and no delicacy about the afterbirth when it comes out. She’ll eat her newborns and the afterbirth in secret because the hardship of the enemy siege will be so severe in every city that she’ll have nothing else to eat.
If you don’t carefully obey every word of this law that’s written in this book, if you don’t fear your God’s glorious and awesome name, “Eternal One,” then He will strike you and your descendants with extraordinary plagues that will be widespread and long-lasting, with serious, persistent illnesses. He’ll bring back all the Egyptian diseases you were so afraid of when you lived there, and you’ll suffer from them continuously. He will even afflict you with diseases and plagues that aren’t written about in this book of the law until you’re destroyed. Only a few of you will be left, even though there used to be as many of you as there were stars in the sky, because you wouldn’t listen to the voice of the Eternal your God. Even though it used to give the Eternal great pleasure to do good things for you and to increase your numbers, He’ll delight in killing and destroying you completely. You’ll be torn from the land you’re going to possess, and He will scatter you among all the nations, from one end of the earth to the other. There you’ll worship other gods, made of wood and stone, that you and your ancestors have never worshiped before. Among those nations you’ll never be at rest, and you’ll never be able to settle down. He will make your hearts tremble, your eyes fail from crying, and your soul languish from despair. Your life will hang by a thread; you’ll be terrified day and night, knowing you could die any minute. You’ll be so terrified, and you’ll see such awful things, that in the morning you’ll say, “If only evening would come, and this day would be over!” And in the evening you’ll say, “If only morning would come, and this night would be over!” The Eternal will bring you back to Egypt in ships, even though I told you you’d never go back there again. You’ll offer yourselves to your enemies as male and female slaves, but no one will buy you.
The Book of Deuteronomy, Chapter 28 (The Voice)
my personal reading of the Scriptures for Sunday, july 26 of 2020 with a paired chapter from each Testament along with Today’s Psalms and Proverbs
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The Final Testament of Dr. Mortimer Beale
I was really glad that luck worked out that I would leave for the North on my birthday; it didn’t feel right for this event to be without mythic significance. Part of me wants to wax lyrical about it being a rebirthday – my first birthday since I came out as trans, the day I picked a name, the day I kill off the last male self-insert OC I ever really made, lots of straws out there for the grasping – but to be honest, Fallen London wasn’t really part of Genderquest 2k17: Battle for Gendikar. The community I’ve found through FL has been endlessly supportive of that quest, but Dr. Beale wasn’t related to that.
Dr. Beale was just a man who wanted to explore the secrets of the Neath, and got suckered into Seeking because it was the biggest secret of them all. The fandom commitment to not revealing what lies beyond the High Gate truly makes me proud, and I feel honored to join the ranks of those who have gone North. This, I think, is why I’m trapping Dr. Beale in the North forever – the secrets. Fallen London is a universe full of endlessly inventive mythology, full of surprises and secrets around every corner. The initial weirdness of daily life in a subterranean realm was what drew me into the Neath, but the secrets were what kept me there, and why I persisted with Dr. Beale’s quest. I have seen what is beyond the High Gate, and it is – well. It is beautiful. I can tell you that much. Beyond that? Let there be some mysteries yet in the world.
So, without further ado, I present the final testament of Dr. Mortimer Beale, presenting not only some of the information about him I never really got to display in the game, but also his thoughts on Seeking the Name.
Today, the 5th of August, 1895, I, Dr. Mortimer Beale, do set out my final testament, to be borne back to London in the handicles of my beloved Ooth-Nargai. It did not always understand me, towards the end, but its love for me was always constant, and mine for it. What we shared was real, but all too brief. It has informed me, on our voyage, that I am to have something like a child, as such things are reckoned among the Axiles. It has chosen the name Celephaïs for the child, but it will append “Beale” to it, out of devotion, out of memory. Its habitual reticence was, I think, a blessing this time. It hurts. Lord in Heaven, does it hurt. But had I known ere now, I might have dithered. I might have tried to fool myself that I could have stopped, turned back – but it was always too late. And what kind of a father would I be to them? What child could grow up happy with a father who saved his life and then threw it away a second time? Oh, I would be present temporally, yes, but not in spirit. Half my flesh, half my mind, half my immortal soul (if such a thing is real) is gone … I have been ink’d and wick’d, made a candle of myself entire. I wear my own severed head as a hat. Better a dead man for a father than a monstrosity. Ooth-Nargai will remember me well to little Celephaïs, and read my books to them, and more than that, I do not ask, in truth. So, let the news be the spark of hope I bring with me to the King of Ways, the spark I bring with me beyond the Avid Horizon, rather than cause for suffering.
As I write this, in the warm captain’s cabin of my magnificent pleasure-yacht, I look out over the cold black zee – North, past the Pale Wastes, past Whither. I might have come here earlier, with the Dilmun Club; now, I come mad with strange hunger. My crew (if they were ever really here) wish to turn back now – they are the sensible ones. The lights of London are a distant memory. It is strange, to know what one will never see again. It is strange, to still be surrounded by so much comfort as one goes to meet one’s doom. It is quiet. Lacre falls softly around me. Christmastide in August. Serene. Ooth-Nargai dozes by my side. We enjoyed a pleasant supper – our last together. Fresh fish and fresh bread and fresh greens and fresh water, and, now, hot cocoa, as we nestle beneath the blankets. This may be the last time I am ever comfortable, with food and fire and family, typewriter on my lap. I relish it. I have given up much, but this I will not. Not for a few more hours, while life remains to me.
Let me speak of that life I now end.
I was born – on this very day, in fact – in the year 1866 in Liverpool, back on the Surface, where the sun still shines. My father, Ramon Quejana y Panindagat, was a sailor from the Spanish East Indies, who brought his bride Margarita Karunungan y Enriquez to England and settled there to raise a family. I was christened Manolo Maria, a name I have not used in the Neath, which deception has caused me a curious amount of guilt – but there are no deceptions in the North, so let my Christian name be known. Ramon managed before both my parents’ unfortunate death in 1888 to produce an inheritance large enough for me to drink away but too small for me to actually use, which is precisely what I did. I spent a dissolute six years thereafter, and arrived, at the age of twenty-eight, to the point of having no future foreseeable, no past worth thinking about, and the brink before me. It was at this point that I had a thought:
“Wasn’t there … that thing. The … the thingy. With … the bats. And … the city. The … the London. I’m … why the … why the b____r not. Can’t be worse’n this. Who … who needs the sun, anyways. Y-yeah. Never did nothin’ fer me, th’ b_____d. I’ll … I’ll ----ing do it. ---- the sun.”
I used the last of my meagre savings to buy a ticket on the Travertine Spiral, and my drunken stupour bore me into a fight, which bore me directly into the arms of the constabulary. I was no stranger to the gaol-house, but here in the Neath, made for some odd reason to wear a mask, in a prison hanging from the roof, filled with far more hardened criminals than I, stern-faced guards who ate candles when they thought no-one was looking, and a disturbing subclass of people who shoveled horrible things into their mouths, carved burning sigils into the walls, and yelled about “The Number” and “The Name”, I gathered all of my courage and upon the spot vowed never to touch the bottle again. My vow was tested, but never broken; water is of a more salubrious aspect down here, and my inclination to share my small beer allotment with the other prisoners won me a few friends.
I intended to serve my time peaceably, but as it soon transpired that my one month’s hard labor for drunk and disorderly had been confused with my neighbor’s twenty years incarcerated, I decided that one more small crime could not hurt. I purloined a chisel from the works and loosened a bar at my window, and leaped out onto a passing dirigible.
I landed on my feet in Ladybones Road, pawned the jewel I had kept secret for emergencies, and charmed a soft-hearted widow into giving me an attic room. I was asked to provide a name and invented the name “Dr. Mortimer Beale” on the spot, for no reason other than that it sounded marginally respectable and that it was not a name at all similar to Prisoner Manolo Quejana y Karunungan. A sordid rag was willing to take me on as an enquirer, and I set to exploring the mysteries of the Neath, of both moral and natural philosophy.
To chronicle my deeds in their entirety would be tedious. I was a person of some importance; nay, an extraordinary mind! The name Dr. Mortimer Beale was immortal in Horizon Glyphs, written into hearts and minds, feared, and steeped in shadow. I was a singular character; my philosophy, my artistry, my skill at arms, my underworld faction were all my own. I was touched by fingerwork (clay and mirrors and laughing serpents), walked the fallen cities (Erech, Amarna, Hopelchén, and Karakorum), approached the gates of the Garden (of Eden? Of Stone, the Mountain of Light? Are they the same?), and saw through the eyes of Icarus (Icarus returning/longs for the deep places). I dreamt, in honey and in sleep, of the burial of the dead, of a game of chess, of the fire sermon, of death by water, of what the thunder said, of someone there (perhaps), and other things besides – beautiful vistas represented fumblingly in my writing.
Long have I loved lists, and I allow that this “testament” is mostly composed thereof, but I cannot help but list the things that affected me, that stood out to me – the beauty and wonder of my Neathly home, even though I dwelt here little beyond a year. I still remember first coming to the Echo Bazaar, to Merrigans Exchange, and marvelling at something so simple as a shard of glim or a nodule of deep amber.
I was ambitious, once: I sought out my heart’s desire, toiling tirelessly to play the Marvellous, a card game in which I could wager it all – learning the intrigues of the Church and of Hell, of two star-crossed lovers older than I had ever imagined, and, most poignantly, of one Tristram Bagley, a mad musician who tried to write with the Correspondence, the language of stars. I have talked with a priest who trades in faces and a prince of devils hanging in a bottle. I bought a hotel suite from Gilgamesh and saw the face of Enkidu in the street every day. I can state in truth that I performed Bagley’s opera, the Bell and the Candle, for Her Enduring Majesty herself, and it was extremely glorious and surpassingly erotic. (I miss when I could muster such bombast.) A Master of the Bazaar itself gave me a hat.
I have – no, I had – friends in every corner of Fallen London. The criminal underworld, the Rubbery Men, and libertine men and scarlet women were dearest to my heart, but most knew and loved me – and two people loved me on Her Enduring Majesty’s throne itself! I was a Young Stag, and, I think, I helped some wastrels put their wealth to positive good – and a member of the Dilmun Club as well, and sought for immortality as far as I could. I progressed from journalism, to authorship, to the study of the Correspondence – the hot breath of stars, that is their language. I toyed with the Red Science – it has faded from my flesh, but it allowed me to meet my beloved Ooth-Nargai, for which I am eternally grateful. I pursued cruel and unusual zoology with a Bishop and a Wings-of-Thunder Bat; I discovered the Cave of the Nadir with a Firebrand and a Missionary, where all the laws are broken. I followed a spymistress’ cruel missions, and found her repentance; I governed Port Carnelian for two terms. My salon, Dr. Beale’s House of Arguing, was a haven of learned and respectful discourse, as was my newspaper, the House of Arguing Weekly Newsletter. I started my own Department of the Correspondence at the University, and embarked on expeditions of scientific discovery.
Yet one discovery escaped me, that I had heard about throughout my entire tenure in the Neath – Mr. Eaten’s Name. I had heard of it, but did not know what it signified. (I know now – a Master of the Bazaar was betrayed for tarrying with Amarna, taken to its end by its former ally. It was stabbed, and eaten, and drowned, and given to the lacre. It fades, faster each year, but it still is not forgotten. Not yet. A reckoning will not be postponed indefinitely.)
And thus, I started on the Seeking Road. I heard a voice, echoing from the well each night. In the still hours before dawn, in the wicker of a candle-flame, there is a voice. I did what it says. I do not regret it.
I flirted with disaster, slipping into horror, and learnt of the alphabet of scars. Beneath a strange sign I set out on the road, and as I slurped down the secrets, drowning in wine, boiling with hunger and breathing darkness, I approached the brink. I learned the Number at Christmastide – on the ninth day, Mr. Sacks stopped at my window, clad in salt and fox-fur; I took a memory of lost Axile, but heard an echo in so doing, and with it a trace of sadness, like the frost which silvers the night. The light on the edge of sleep was his. He was Mr. Candles. He will not be again. And, in a dream of dark waters, acquired the first of my weeping scars, off to go dancing with damnation. Candle-eyed, I watched the road unfold before me; knife-hearted, I steeled myself for what needed doing; edge-pledged, the road narrowed for me; corpse-given, I set my path for grief; marsh-mired, I trembled as the first step began to open; north-looking, I learnt of the body and the Number. Charred and mourned I became, drinking the thick corn beer of the Third City, stabbing out my life with knives of black glass, twice scoring the flesh and twice stabbing straight to the heart, and once drowning myself in the obsidian-lined well. And thus I learnt of the mind and the Number, and seven times I prepared betrayals, New Newgate becoming a comforting embrace.
The path to this place was not hard – I used the hollowness of cats to carve out a hollow in my belly to be filled. (Cats are friendly; I leave cats and catkind behind. That is another loss.) The ace of hungers was but raw meat and roast chestnuts drove the engine. I used the couriers’ notes, two of bats, to lessen the menace, folding ever in two. Then I moved to the worse – three of roses – the scrawl of the Correspondence in the bloody-ivy, tearing and eating, the thorns biting my mouth, a tango like that of the Musical Mathematician. I studiously avoided the four of eyes, still valuing myself too highly to be thought of as a monster. The five of lights filled me with wax and fire, but tallow is fat, and I thought the shock and pain worth it.
O but what of that place – the sky, the sky, the deepless blooming black – I began to stain my immortal soul. I had regained it from the devils, and now – I was confirmed a Catholic, back on the surface, and it hurt, the pain not physical, not mental, but spiritual. I was told the soul was immortal. (In the Neath, I learnt that may not have been the case.) In my dissolution, I had not attended a Mass or confessed my sins in so long a time. But still, it hurt. One seeks the Lord in hardship, does one not? (I attended services at a chapel in the North, yes, but I also attended a good and Godly mass, ere I departed, in the hopes that it would lave whatever I had left of my soul before I departed. Let this narrative be my confession. I hope it works. I doubt it will.) With brilliant souls I lured the cat. It stalked through my dreams – I turned to the bottle, sipped laudanum, breaking my solemn vow. Only the poppy juice would give my dreams the necessary dullness. More and more did I require it. Once with the cat alone, six times with a spirifer friend.
Now things began to hurt. The six of pearls – my great-grandfather was a dentist – I ate the teeth of others, crunching like corn, and I ate my own teeth, to gnaw ceaselessly. The seven of words that I answered, and made of myself of a pie – the Curve and the Lost Light – no more – flense-gifted I was, and the scales fell from my eyes. Seven was the number, seven false saints, seven scars of wax. I found five poor souls to listen to me, and two sleek black cats who’d seen the bloody-ivy in the Palace. The stench of betrayal filled my nostrils. Secrets burned. I lit a candle for the scar and the smirch, The Smirch; I tore the bombazine for the hook and the bait, The Hook; I took a ring for the scent and the turn, The Impetus; I took permission for the stone and the eyes, The Compass of Souls; I smashed a lens for the ink and the ink, The Ember; I whispered to the night for the web, o the web, The Webs; I made a bonfire of souls for the price, the price, the price, the price, the price, the price, the price, the price, the price, the price, the price, The Sun and the Saint. I had the wax, and the wick, and the flint, and the tinder, and the season.
And I had St. Arthur’s candle, the first of seven. Knife-known I was, and the knave of regrets, calling “Restitution!” for the Drowned Man. Crossroads-bound I became, and pearls beyond price were the price, and my sanity, and memories of light. Among masques and mysteries and midnights, I gave up my fate, engaged in crypticisms, and was asked why. I said I must. I realize, now, that that was a lie. I told it to myself, hiding from the truth – that I chose to do this. I do not know now why I did not revel in this truth: that it was always an option, as was all my love of secrets. This was something I chose to do, for love. “In matters of the Bazaar,” they say, “look to love.” It is not love of Mr. Eaten, or not entirely – it is love for the Seeking Road. Love for secrets, love for the stories of betrayal and revenge, love with the concept of my own self-destruction in pursuit of secrets. It is odd, this new awareness: I doubt I would have pursued it were it less horrible.
It was worth it. St. Beau’s candle, the crossroads-candle, I now owned, and crossroads-cursed, I sought for restitution further, that I could grieve. With the knight of feasts, I set a place for Mr. Eaten, red as wounds, red as riots … and my hunger was settled, or went deeper. I sought a well, in the Forgotten Quarter, and gave up a work of genius, telling my stories to the well. St. Cerise’s candle I had, and I was as proud of myself as hoped. At the brink of the lower mysteries, I researched my incunabula, and, initiate, with Gods’ Editors, sought out the lower archives of the College of St. Cyriac.
From the book of Matthew (if that was even his name) slightly revised, chapter 25, verse 42 – “For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, for I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink.” It was Mr. Eaten’s Calling Card, and the Isle awaited. I grew hungrier, hungrier, until the grief came upon me, until at long last I could light a candle in his memory, to ask what is forgotten?
And then I paused. I took a breath. I learnt that I could not take much with me, and so I devoted myself not to wasting the chiefest of my treasures, but to ensconce myself in the heights of the Bazaar itself, ensuring housing, if not for myself, then for those I left behind. Once again I had to inveigle myself into the tales of the Bazaar, to grow more Notable in its eyes, that I might blaze bright enough in defiance. And in that time new stories broke upon the shore – subtle shifts in the airs of London, promising greater change. I enjoyed the company of friends. Another Election was held, and I campaigned for an Implacable Detective. She lost to a boor called Antonio Feducci, whose libertarian ways mock the mechanisms of state, and who I am glad to leave behind. That ate my time. But I was still resolved, and, finally, when I had accomplished what was needful, I sold most of my worldly goods, and slept with the calling card crumpled in my fist, and took to the oars.
On Winking Isle, I prepared. I set aside jewels and riches, gave up my intrigues, rejected wine and song. No map knew the place I went; I had no more sweet memories, no more bitter. I knew nothing of Stone’s light. My chiefest treasures were gone. I told the wind my stories, forgot Axile, unpicked the warp, unpicked the weft, let the messages fall by the road’s edge. No more secrets. I saw the Sun beneath the Sea?. I paced the well. Isle-walker, tower-watcher, light-eater, well-weeper, libation-giver, shatter-fated, star-seared, I became.
I left the Isle – if I was ever really there – and rested briefly in London, until a little man knocked on my door, and I ate my exceptional entry, entire. It was a freedom to no longer strive to burn. I gained no candle – I gained St. Destin’s Candle, which does not yet exist. I asked a new question – Who is Salt? – and bent again to the oars. I walked the Isle again, knowing its two dozen paces intimately. I was red as sunsets, as desire, as betrayal, as the waters, as remembrance, as roses, as science – and then became black, black as paper, as ink, as time, as knives.
I groaned, and stretched, and left the Isle again – if I was ever really there – and sought her out, in the place where hearts go. I made a decision, after long deliberation, with a woman sloughed-off like a snakeskin – I wiped free my skin-bound memories, and profession, and acclaim, and destiny, and ability to have any of those things again. Perhaps I lie still in the Cave of the Nadir, flesh falling from my bones and bones growing over my eyes, and walk the Neath in a dream, writing this for no-one as I moulder in a sad fantasy. If that is true, what must Ooth-Nargai think? Does it wait for the return of a husband? Of a fellow-parent? Of a sad man who forgot his name and life to find out those of another? – but no, I cannot dwell on this. I will merely state that while I gave up power and wealth and fame and future light as air, I let fate bend itself around me ere I give up friends or home. I do not miss what I gave up to gain St. Erzulie’s Candle, where I became black as stars.
Again, the Isle. Welcome, welcome was I ere I left, and climbed into a yacht instead of a rowboat to sail over a real sea. I (we, we must I say, for a lady comes with me) went north, to where light and colour leached from the Zee, and I attended services at the Chapel of Lights. I learnt of the descents and ascents and betrayals, and gained St. Forthigan’s Candle. Then so long did I pace the well, cleansed, cleansed was I, and then I left the Isle behind for good. I forged secrets as in earlier days to find the rarest books to trade for the lady’s Hollow Heart, and I steamed South. I rowed, I rowed, I rowed (or did we?). I met with Nicator in that hollow stair, refused soup, asked my question, and woke. I attended in service of St. Gawain. And there, in the Chapel of Lights, was I damned. I offered myself – removed my head – made of myself a candle, entire. I gathered strange supplies for one last journey – prepared – embarked.
You may be horrified, dear reader, of what this journey has contained. I know I am. You may wish – I know I do – that my story had been a longer and a better one. There are so many stories I left unfinished, friendships I failed to forge, things I could have yet done.
But my story led me here, to this frozen gate. I will not turn back now. I will knock, and ask my question – and who knows, what then.
Yet lest you think I have acted entirely selfishly – which would be a fair assessment – lest you think that all my study of natural philosophy, no matter how outlandish, neither produced nor will produce any good – which would, so far, seem to be the case – lest you think that I chased dreams until I was devoured by a nightmare – which would be wholly true – I offer this last, feeble act.
I closed Dr. Beale’s House of Arguing, my salon.
In its place I have erected an orphanage, the Quejana Home for Parentally Deficient Youths. I entrust Ooth-Nargai with its management; I have every confidence that it will be a loving home. Even if my scholarship is wrong, or unremembered, or of no use, I will at least have given children a home.
That’s enough, right?
There were times when I wanted to rule. There were times when I wanted to better the lot of all thinking creatures. There were times when I wanted simply to teach.
We do not always get what we want.
We can still try, right?
There are so many ways I could end this. I will not cheapen it by trying to add a justification, nor an exhortation to keep one’s chin up. I will only offer a jumble of misremembered sentiments, and let you choose the one you think most fitting.
That’s fair, right?
Cry no more, shapeling, cry no more / Men were deceivers ever / One foot on sea, one foot on shore / To good things constant never. /
All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
A reckoning shall not be postponed indefinitely.
What is Mr. Eaten’s name? That’s the best ----ing question, anybody ever asked.
Kiss your dad, square on the lips.
Good night, Fallen London, good night.
Ooth-Nargai. Celephaïs. I love you.
– Manolo Maria Quejana y Karunungan, the erstwhile Dr. Mortimer Beale
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Souichi Presents: What Horrors Lurk... in the Iron Circus
Kyahaha! Hello hello hello, once again it is time for.. SOUICHI PRESENTS! Where we’ll one day have reviewed every single Junji Itou comic ever made, after which we’ll... presumably switch over to a episode by episode review of every scooby doo episode ever made. It’s a work in progress concept.
BUT that day won’t happen anytime soon, because the thing is? People just keep on making amazing horror work. I genuinely beleive that there may not have even been such an amazing time for horror. Ive mentioned it before, but the internet, independently created scene is a godsend for this genre.
From keeping up with new and emerging short video format horror through the great Night Mind channel, to following horror illustrators and comic creators I love. And the comics. Oh, the comics! That’s what we’re here to talk about today. There’s so many good horror comics out there; and today I’d like to talk about an anthology I’ve been meaning to review for a long, long time now...
SOUICHI PRESENTS: THE SLEEP OF REASON (Part One)
(Cover art by Michael Deforge)
The Sleep of Reason is a FANTASTIC horror comic anthology, with 26 chilling, creepy, and strange stories. Produced by Iron Circus Comics, who as far as I’m concerned, is one of the companies to keep an eye on for independent publishing, which was single handedly built from the floor up by the amazing C. Spike Trotman. Iron Circus Comics has put out such great works as Poorcraft, Smut Peddler, Shadoweyes Vol 1, and more!
I was excited to get my hands on this, and it completely delivered. So why haven’t I reviewed it yet? Well... because, honestly? Some is just scheduling, memory, already having this or that on the docket. But also... Some of these stories are too scary for me. I had to take breaks reading it! I had to wait a while. See, part of why I run this blog is I’d already read the complete works of Junji Ito- over and over and over again, enough to work the sting out of them.
This? This has a sting and a half. And there’s enough stories here, and enough to say about them, that being as exhaustive as I am for normal stories would be... a literal half a years worth of regular updates. So I’m going to be talking about my favorites, in order.
As for stories left out? Some are just fine, but didn’t catch my eye. Maybe one or two I hate. But some? Honestly? Are too upsetting for me. Not the fun upsetting. That doesn’t make them bad horror. I even love some of them- they could even wind up being your favorites. But your dear host has even his limits, if you can forgive me. <3
Let’s get started with....
The Child Eater, by Meg Gandy
Content Warnings for: Spousal abuse, (not seen but for sure) rape, child abuse, body horror, death.
Any kid who grew up in rough times of any level can tell you, imagination is a powerful way to escape. This short isn’t about imagination. But it’s about the reason why a little kid might need one: kids can be all, all, all too aware of exactly what horrors are going on around them.
And the horror here is, for the most part, going on AROUND little Ruthie here; the real life horror. Whatever else might be going on.... well there’s monsters, and there’s monsters. And I won’t lie guys; it’s a rouge bite.
Horror is a way to talk about vulnerability. It can be a way to talk about things that scare us without talking about them directly. Well. This isn’t a comforting veneer of abstraction and fantasy kind of story. And it’s about the most vulnerable kind of hero you could possibly imagine. And it does it with art that uses a deft hand on details and emotional weight- we ARE in Ruthies shoes, we’re walking with her.
And I won’t tell you where she decides to go; only that it’s one of the most grimly satisfied endings i’ve run across.
The Waiting Game, a Nightmare by Carla Speed McNeil
Content warnings for: Starvation, suicide, body horror, non consensual voyeurism.
Somehow, this story seems so much longer then it actually is, when you’re reading it. And that could not possibly be more apt for the story that it is; the slow, second by second agony of the story’s unnamed, ungendered subject. Our subject, who’s life is such agony that they can only wait, desperately, for an end. But we don’t need to be told that.
In fact, we aren’t told much at all. But the beauty of this story- and there are many- is that we’re left to let the horror unfold in our own minds eye. The crowds of the rich, eager, leaning over each others shoulders, anticipatory.
Hungry.
What kind of entertainment do people want, if they can have anything. Anything in the whole world?
And how badly do we suffer for it.
Found Object, by Britt C. H.
Content warnings for: death, gore.
Well first of all I’ll ask you to stay out of my three AM discord conversations. If theres a comic in here with a conversation about Donald Ducks emotional depth, I’m... well actually that’d be AMAZING. But I digress!
This is the kind of story I could use as a thesis support; a genuine fear touched on through a strange event. It lays it’s self out flat and clean; in both structure and subject, I consider this an amazingly classic horror piece, to my sensibilities.
Something I’m fond of about horror is that it has a unique quality: It can only obfuscate how it’s plot is going to go but so far. Specifically I mean: It’s horror, so you know something terrible is going to happen. The story begins; something is introduced. We, the audience, become immediately aware this ‘thing’ is going to be something horrifying.
What matters isn’t the what. it’s the how. And this has a magnificent how.
The Grackle Bride, by Randal Milholland
Content Warnings for: Death. Birds.
If like me, you happen to have been following Mr. Milholland’s work since... oh, say... middle school, you wouldn’t be too surprised to see his work here. Every year readers of his comic have enjoyed “The Last Trick-or-Treaters”, a beautiful watercolor series about... well. Children! Having... adventures.... that might end... lets say badly! For those children.
But that’s a horse of a different color. For this collection, we’re treated to a beautifully folkloric yarn- just the kind of mysterious, slightly gruesome story I would have devoured as a child myself. It feels authentic; you have your poor farmer, and his only daughter. A beautiful girl... only all she seems to care about are those grackles.
It’s a thrill of a yarn at that. Cosy, even! Might depend a bit on how you feel about birds....
Proliferation, by Lin Visel and J.R. Cullen
Content warnings for: Death.
Interesting to think about is- how little information can you use to make sure your audience knows what you mean? This story I think, hits very close to that edge; if you walked into this story completely missing a key piece of outside information, I still think you would get the idea through the context clues, especially combined with the title.
That’s impressive; but even more impressive to me is this is one of those horror stories I get a sense of temperature- atmosphere. The wet, sweltering heat of your own breath passing through you. The horrible chill of air meeting sweating, clammy skin. The horrible stillness of a forest.
I do love short horror; and I’m always pleased to let the story sit as it is; a fragmenting little prism of moments. But this one I think I’d love to see more of; more of what’s happening. Maybe that would ruin it; but I know that it means a story has an inviting texture. As inviting as the temptation to keep on walking a little... further.
Just a little more.
Artifacts, by Evan Dahm
I have a complicated relationship with the phrase ‘cosmic horror’. Once you get too good a look at the lineage of the ideas it’s... well folks, it’s kind of all racism and penguins down there. But I still remember the thrill at the idea- the notion of something... so strange and unknowable. The idea that there is a scale of size we can’t even begin to comprehend; that we might as well be ants, blindly trying to make sense of things we can’t even see.
This story makes me feel like I’m sitting between the stacks of the library, lost in the quiet terror of the idea of those horizons dropping away.
To me, making our protagonist an artist solves- immediately- a lot of the problem this kind of story can have. Why exactly would someone be studying something that leads somewhere... so odd? When its a scientist, or a researcher, it feels natural, but can get... odd. Not a lot of theoretical whatever's take hikes into abandoned buildings. But fine artists will do a lot of things. I learned in class about a man who laid under the floorboards of a gallery space making weird noises.
A single man, slowly working and working and working on making something.... pure. Approaching something big. It could have happened already.
That’s all for this week- I’ll continue reviewing this in short sections of my favorites. Check it out sometime if you can! I will say chapters I didn’t get to do have some raw stuff in them; as with any horror, specific subjects can kind of lunge at you.
But it’s a representation of what I absolutely love: An independent, off the wall, beautiful set of horror comics.
And as always... souichi WILL return!
#The Sleep of Reason#Iron Circus Comics#review#horror review#souichi presents#Warnings fromt he collection but NOT covered in this review are#eating disorders parasites self mutilation gore unreality and one story I didnt touch on that does that stupid scary crazy person shtick#but its just the one so as horror goes not bad
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Child Marriage In Latin America And The Caribbean
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Lucifer Season 5 Episode 4: It Never Ends Well for the Chicken
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This Lucifer review contains spoilers.
“Why don’t you fellas go jerk yourselves a soda.”
Lucifer star Tom Ellis teased early in the year that the series would feature a “full blown” musical episode late in its fifth season, one of many indicators that the writers planned to pull out all the stops in what was initially thought to be the show’s final run. Though it appears fans will have to wait for the second half of the current installment to experience this narrative divergence, showrunner Ildy Modrovich’s team takes another creative leap with the noir detective story “It Never Ends Well for the Chicken.”
Any time a show steps out of its comfort zone to explore varied storytelling techniques, there’s a good chance success may not necessarily follow. That’s certainly not the case here as Lucifer puts familiar characters into exciting new roles that allow the actors to explore sides previously hidden or obscured. Unfortunately, Trixie often gets lost in the mix, and though some of her finest moments occur when she appears opposite Maze, here, her interaction with Lucifer during their modified game night brilliantly drives the episode despite her still limited screen time.
It’s difficult to miss Lucifer’s excitement as he readies the penthouse in anticipation of Chloe and Trixie’s arrival for a relaxed evening with friends, and when the detective fails to accompany her daughter, she sends several unambiguous messages. Even though Chloe may not be ready to confront Lucifer about what she’s learned from Michael, it’s clear she trusts him with her only child, a point that should not be underestimated. It’s true that Trixie tells Lucifer she was with her dad, but given the elaborate ruse that becomes clear at the end, that might not be true. Whether he understands the subtext here or not, we don’t know, but Trixie’s precociousness shines through as she manipulates Lucifer into telling her a story in lieu of another boring game of Monopoly.
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Lucifer Season 5 Episode 3 Review: ¡Diablo!
By Dave Vitagliano
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Lucifer: God Takes Charge As Dennis Haysbert Joins Season 5
By Dave Vitagliano
Lucifer doesn’t waste the opportunity to spin a compelling yarn, and the writers delightfully embrace one of cinema’s classic periods to explore the mystery of the missing ring. However, the genius of the episode’s structure also includes the homage to the classic film The Princess Bride and its delightful narrative interplay between a boy and his grandfather as the tale unfolds.
Though there are murders to solve, it’s really the backstory of the ring Lucifer wears that comprises the bulk of the account presented in black and white, and we suddenly find ourselves smack in the middle of a 1940s noir detective story in which the renowned chanteuse at the local club is none other than Maze’s mother Lilith. Lesley-Ann Brandt (Maze/Lilith) takes on a persona that allows her room to show off not only a powerful singing voice and familiar saucy attitude but also to develop a character who battles some of the same issues of self-esteem we’ve seen in Maze. When Lilith blasts some of the boss’ boys with the retort that “I’m nobody’s girl,” her statement signals a refrain we’ve heard from Maze who often feels like an outsider abandoned by Lucifer and most recently Chloe.
“It Never Ends Well for the Chicken” does a wonderful job of world building and seamlessly immerses the audience in the reasonably authentic ambiance of post-war New York City. And though the many references and connections to the present day storyline work for the most part, a few manage to fall a bit flat even as they manage to still evoke a smile. “The Devil solving crime. It’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.” Of course, young Trixie remains in the dark about Lucifer’s true identity, but when 1946 Lucifer immediately seeks out Jack Monroe for help finding the ring, Chloe’s daughter calls him out and asks “why does it have to be a guy?”
Needless to say Trixie’s request for a “gender balanced narrative” paves the way for Laura German (Chloe Decker/Jack Monroe) to don a man’s suit and hat, and we easily move past the fact that we’re watching Chloe in the guise of a Chandleresque protagonist. While the value of fan service can certainly be debated, when you’re able to bring back Tricia Helfer (Charlotte Richards) to portray Jack’s wife Shirley in this narrative shift, everybody wins. We don’t typically see Helfer in a submissive role, but she absolutely nails it as the frustrated partner of a man whose struggles extend far beyond his marriage. At the heart of the episode is, of course, the struggle Chloe and Lucifer face as they decide whether or not to repair their damaged relationship, and Jack’s decision to ask his wife for help in the case and then later admit he wants to talk about their marriage, speaks to Chloe’s underlying desire to reconcile with Lucifer.
However, it’s the brief exchange that Lucifer has with Jack that lays bare what we’ve all been thinking since the beginning of the season. Like Lucifer and Chloe, Jack’s meeting of Shirl was no accident, and though he harbors resentment towards his wife, he admits he still loves her. Lucifer asks the obvious question: have you thought about simply forgetting the past? And we have to wonder whether Chloe will be able to see beyond the celestial setup and value the real relationship she’s forged with Lucifer during their partnership?
Even though Jack and Lucifer’s search for the missing ring and subsequent related murders drive most of the action, there’s little doubt that Lilith’s belief that the ring confers immortality parallels Maze’s belief that she’ll be forever alone. In the most visually stunning and emotionally powerful scene of the episode, Lilith tells Lucifer that she’s learned what connects humans is the knowledge that their lives are not infinite. “I think I’ve been immortal long enough,” she admits, gives Lucifer the recovered ring, and then walks away as he stands in the night under a street light, the wet road glistening beneath his feet. It’s the quintessential noir ending, and even though the episode proper still has a few minutes to run, we should consider that this might also signal the end of Maze’s spiritual funk.
However, like all great mystery tales, there are twists still to be examined, and when Trixie asks Lucifer whether Shirl and Jack live happily ever after, we assume she’s projecting these characters on to the real life situation with her mother and Lucifer. Though she contends they fixed everything, the real life story proves a bit more complicated, and when she encounters Maze in the elevator, the demon hands her money signifying that Maze set the whole thing up to get the story of the ring from Lucifer. Maze visits her mother Lily Rose (Lilith) to ask the fundamental question that plagues her. “Why did you abandon me?” Interestingly, Lilith makes no attempt to assuage her daughter’s feelings leaving Maze no better off than when she started this journey.
There are some nice touches with the murders, and since this is Lucifer, it’s perfectly acceptable to take an extra liberty or two. Lucky Larry interrupts Jack and Shirl’s dinner and falls dead in their doorway, a knife embedded in his back. Even here it’s difficult to hold back a smile, and when they go to question Dan’s counterpart, Willy the Sausage King (Kevin Alejandro/Dan), the egocentric portrait painting session stands in stark contrast to Chloe’s ex’s attempts at true self improvement. Later, when Jack and Lucifer recreate Lucky Larry’s murder, it’s impossible to miss the parallel between Larry and Chloe’s feeling that Lucifer stabbed her in the back.
Cigar smoking club owner Tony Stampanato gives Aimee Garcia (Ella Lopez) an opportunity to try out her masculine wings, but it’s her deathbed scene that plays well within the overly stylized story. Bringing Egyptian mystery always adds interest no matter the crime scenario, and the Eye of Horus drawn on the dead man’s eye is no exception as it leads Jack and Lucifer to a dealer in black market occult items. Melvin the Magnificent (DB Woodside/Amenadiel) offers a more comic presentation with his multifaceted con-man routine, but when Doctor Linda’s bartender turns out to be the brains behind the operation, any thoughts that these two are underused melt away.
To refer to “It Never Ends Well for the Chicken” as a novelty episode just feels wrong, and even though that designation might technically be accurate, it fails to acknowledge the deep complexity of this narrative experiment. Lucifer will return to normal next episode, but the foray into 1946 leaves an indelible mark that only enhances the anticipation for the aforementioned musical outing. The wait is killing me.
The post Lucifer Season 5 Episode 4: It Never Ends Well for the Chicken appeared first on Den of Geek.
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dating british women
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[MF] Scorned - A Short Story/Teaser for a novel idea I have; would love some feedback
“Heaven has no rage, like love to hatred turned; nor hell a fury, like a woman scorned.” – Congreve, The Mourning Bride
In the beginning, it was just the two of us.
That was how God had initially intended it; Rishon and me together at the forefront of Their creation. Until one confounding factor that it seemed our Divine Creator had not factored in. Rishon and I had always been the most intimate of friends, and we enjoyed each other’s company. We would dream of the creatures that would evolve from those that ran around our feet and flew above our heads, we would theorise about the things that our descendants would discover and invent. Until that pesky free-will came into play, and I dared to tell Rishon that I did not wish to be bound to one place, raising his children. I longed to travel this new world that our God had created, to discover all its beauty. After all, it was Their intention for us to oversee the journey of creation, and what better way than to learn its deepest, darkest secrets? But Rish wanted only to rule over all the other creatures; he feared being outnumbered by them and expected me to bear him an endless number of children while he tamed several of the animals to obey his command. Eventually, we became like strangers to each other.
In the days, I would assist him in working the land, particularly by tending to those animals who had recently borne new offspring. Rish told me once that these small, defenceless creatures were nothing more than a drain on resources in his mind; it seemed he no longer dreamed about what these little creatures could someday be like we had in the beginning. In the nights, I walked along the water, talking with God. One night, I was quieter than usual. Unsurprisingly, They noticed.
“What troubles you, gentle one?” Their voice whispered. We both knew They were well aware of my troubles, and this was just a small gesture to encourage me to unburden myself.
“I love this world. It is so vibrant and full of potential. Walking through the trees, I see the majestic forests yet to grow. Every creature I recognise as the matriarch of a host of species. But Rish… it’s like he’s from a different world now. His world is rigid and dull; I feel like I don’t belong in his world anymore.”
They allowed a pause, waiting for me to continue.
“I’m not sure what to do. I love Rishon fiercely, but our life together no longer feels as glorious as You had intended it to be.”
“You and everything around you is but the beginning of something magnificent. All I ever intended was the breath that gave you life. The rest will happen as it happens.”
Free will. The same free will that had turned my greatest friend into someone I no longer recognised. Here I stood, desperately hoping for divine instruction when the greatest gift I was ever given was the ability to choose. It was time to make a choice. To follow the will of Rish, or to chase the excitement of my own.
I soon had an opportunity to make this choice. After a long day of working the land alongside Rish, he became affectionate towards me in a way that had become entirely unfamiliar to me. We’d not been intimate for some time, as I did not want to become pregnant with his child. I told him as much while his hands slid across my skin.
“Stop this, Rish. You know I will only have to decline.”
“Nonsense. You won’t say no to me.” He cooed, following his hands with his lips. I felt my body flinch from his touch.
“Rish, stop. This is not what I want.”
Rishon pulled his face away from my shoulder and scowled petulantly. After a beat, he threw his hands in the air in frustration.
“What about what I want, then? Hmm? I have been working hard all day, to make this world pleasant for you.” He jabbed an accusing finger into my chest. I felt something inside me stir. I took a step back, choosing not to answer; there was no acceptable answer when he was in this mood.
“No!” he shouted, startling me. That something inside me started dancing, sending an unsettling feeling of ice-cold through my chest. “You owe me this. This is why God made you; you are here to please me.”
Before the pride in me could object to this ridiculous statement, my wrists were held fast behind me in his fists. I tried to pull away, and the feeble attempt caused a disturbing smile to spread across his face. The dancing feeling in my chest was now in my throat, holding back my protests and setting my lungs on fire. He pulled me toward him so violently I was surprised the lump in my throat didn’t budge. Like a vice, he held himself against me, hard and intrusive. A laugh came from deep inside of him that did not sound like the man I knew; that was not Rish. I didn’t know what creature made that sound, but it couldn’t have been my best friend.
“I am stronger than you.” He spat, his snarling lips pushing against my ear. “You are weak. I work all day to give you the life God wanted for you; that is my job, and yours is to do as I wish.”
He knocked me to the ground, moving to lie atop me where I lay. The force of hitting the ground finally knocked the feeling in my throat free, and it manifested itself in a fierce scream, directed straight into the ear of my attacker.
Startled and likely in pain, Rishon stumbled backward. His crazed eyes locked onto mine and with a roar, he launched toward me again.
Instinctively, I threw my hands in front of me and closed my eyes; from the comfort of the darkness behind my eyelids, I heard his angry growl turn into a cry of pain. I opened my eyes to see him sitting before me, clutching his stomach. His face had softened, and he looked down at his stomach then back to me with pure confusion. I followed his gaze to his stomach, noticing the growing puddle of blood oozing between his fingers.
“Wha-?” I looked down and saw my hands covered in blood, something gripped in the palm of my hands. I slowly uncurled my fingers and gasped; a single rib rested in each of my palms. I suddenly felt the urge to both laugh and cry; a feeling that, in the circumstances, scared me more than the man I once called my best friend forcing himself upon me. Without looking away from the bones in my hands, I stood slowly and silently.
Turning to walk away, I hesitated at the sound of a small voice behind me.
“Wait… my love…” came the feeble request from what now appeared to be such a small, insignificant man. I looked down at my hands once more, then opened them to drop the bones at his feet. Looking deep in his eyes, I offered no emotion.
“I am not yours,” I say, my voice even and sure. “I never was. Perhaps you can mould a love that will be, use your own broken bones to make a woman who will do your bidding. Because that will never be me.”
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Love Letters: Dear Mr. Rains
Dear Mr. Rains,
Or perhaps I should say
Dear Captain Renault,
…Jack Griffin (The Invisible Man),
…Alex Sebastian (Notorious),
…Adam Lemp (Four Daughters),
…Prince John (The Adventures of Robin Hood),
…Nutsy (Moontide),
…Senator Paine (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington),
…Job Skeffington,
…Dr. Jaquith (Now, Voyager),
…and all the other roles you inhabited so magnificently on stage, screen, and in your own remarkable life—
It’s your birthday. Today is the 129th anniversary of your birth, November 10, 1889. Happy birthday! I hope the afterlife has fabulous birthday parties, and that you’re celebrating with all your old friends and colleagues: your acting pupils, Gielgud and Laughton; your friends from the West End, Noel Coward and James Whale; writers you worked with, like George Bernard Shaw, and directors like Michael Curtiz…and of course the ladies—lots of ladies. Not sure if you’d invite your ex-wives, but naturally you will be celebrating with your great love, Rosemary, who left you bereaved in 1964, three years before you joined her.
You contain multitudes. All great actors do, especially character actors. You are never less than utterly convincing in every kind of role and movie, but your own fire and intelligence, your own fine intensity, are always present in that amazing gallery of portraits.
I have loved you for a long time, along with legions of fans winding back through the decades, spooling through your films and long before and after that through all your stage appearances in London New York, starting when you were only 10 years old.
Unlike with some of my other dead boyfriends, there was no Aha! moment watching you in a particular role when I suddenly realized you had my heart. Maybe that’s because you were present in so many wonderful films of the ’30s and ’40s that you sneaked up on me before I even thought about it. Pretty sure our first encounter was Casablanca, where, surrounded by an incredible Warner Bros. dream cast, you came close to walking away with the film in your pocket.
Captain Renault is your calling card, the one you will be forever remembered as, just as Frank Morgan is indelibly the wizard of Oz, no matter his long list of other distinguished performances. Your Renault is an irresistible survivor: cheerfully corrupt, unapologetically self-interested, and always on the make. His sexual exploitation of pretty women desperate for exit visas may in our time prove to be his least excusable offense, but I think Renault will probably weather even that. Casablanca will always be with us.
But here you are, 129 and still devastating. I’ve been watching your movies and reading David Skal’s biography, Claude Rains: An Actor’s Voice, which so evocatively conjures your childhood in a series of poor London neighborhoods in the 1890s. Your father, Frederick, was a grandiose failure, an occasional actor, singer, and songwriter. You survived, one of only three children (and the only son) to do so among the 10 your loving, mentally unstable mother, Emily, brought into this world. She did her best to shield you from the harshness your old man lavished on his only son. Imagining you as a child in those tough streets, restlessly looking for a way to do more than survive, has made me love you more than ever.
I had heard a little about your childhood speech impediments, how you called yourself “Willie Wains”—the Ws for Rs, the stutter, the Cockney accent so thick that your only child, your beloved daughter, Jessica, said she could not understand you when you sang the Cockney songs of your childhood, that it was like you became a different person.
But what was the mysterious force that drove you? Aside from hunger, I mean, and the constant awareness of how precarious your family’s position was. The first spark for what became your stellar theatrical career was when you left your job selling newspapers to follow a boy to the church where he sang in the choir, lured by the glamour of his costume, and got yourself a spot in that choir (and your own costume!). Which led, eventually, to your first appearance onstage, then to a job as a theater “call boy,” and eventually assistant stage manager, stage manager, and actor. Two men, one your boss and mentor, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, one of the greatest actor-producers of the London stage, took an interest in you and helped you to conquer your speech difficulties, which was the first step to preparing you to become an actor. One of them taught you to roll your Rs, which you did for the rest of your life, and also insisted you educate yourself by reading—you had left school in 2nd grade to go to work, to bring in a few pennies to help your family, who so often struggled to eat and keep a roof over their heads.
Early on, you were caught stealing change from an actor’s pockets, and fired. You took the money because you were so hungry, but when you were fired and had to return to school, when your mother wept and your old man beat you repeatedly for it, you felt the shame in your bones and swore never to steal again. A few months later, you got a job at another theater, and your career resumed.
You were such a little boy to be so stoic in the face of your father’s frequent beatings. You never cried. But that’s not uncommon with abused children, they learn not to flinch, they won’t give the abuser the satisfaction. Skal writes that Frederick used to beat you in the garden shed, Emily’s face floating agonized in the window of the flat. So small, but with the spark of the ferocity that would eventually find its way into your acting.
There is something so moving about you and a few other incredibly gifted actors who survived childhoods of Dickensian deprivation and loneliness—Cary Grant, Charles Chaplin, and Barbara Stanwyck—children who were largely left on your own to scavenge and somehow, miraculously, survive. Among this small group, you are alone in having had both parents, though like Chaplin and Grant, your mother was institutionalized for mental illness. Yours, unlike theirs, returned home, though she would have repeated bouts of illness that took her away from home throughout her life.
You traveled so far from that series of flats in neighborhoods that ranged from squalid to genteel poverty. But always, no matter what, Emily kept the steps tidy, brass on the door, and a paper fan on the fireplace. When there was enough money, your father would invite colleagues to dinner, and at its conclusion your mother would always ask, “Would anyone like some cheese?” Then your family all held their breath. Fortunately, no one ever wanted any, because there was none—the cheese course was out of reach at the family’s best of times, but your mother’s sense of propriety drove her to ask. Maybe it was partly that yearning for something nicer, which you had in common with her, that drove you so far. Frederick came from a prosperous family, and you never forgot a visit to one of his relatives in the country, and later in life, when you were successful and well-to-do yourself, you bought yourself a farm in Pennsylvania where you enjoyed country life to the hilt.
You came so far. At first, when you were what, 10, 11?—it was the long commute from the family current flat to the West End, an hour or more each way. Then as you grew a little older and rose in your profession, you began to tour with productions, and by your mid-teens you had traveled around England and Ireland, and then to Berlin. A little later, in the early 1910s, you came to America for the first time as advance man for another production. By your mid-20s you had traveled widely and become a respected member of your profession. During WWI, after that service-ending gas attack that took 90 percent of the sight in your right eye and gave your voice its distinctive rough undertone [sigh], you returned to London determined not to go back to the theater (after life at the front as a sharpshooter, the theater seemed “sissy”), it took a single lunch with colleagues to entice you back onto the stage. And that’s when your acting career really took off.
Reading about the London theater scene of the era, the shows you were in then, working with friends like Noel Coward and Elsa Lanchester, as an acting teacher at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts to Gielgud and Laughton, famously…appearing in a number of original productions of Shaw, as well as in avant garde plays—my favorite was The Insect Play, in which both Gielgud and Lanchester appeared, four episodes in which actors played butterflies, warrior ants, and other six-legged crawlies. It sounds like such an exciting scene, so much fresh creative energy and talent.
But as the professional triumphs began to accumulate, as you began to make enough money to subsidize your family and to dress elegantly, you also began to accumulate romantic disasters. You said toward the end of your life that you had loved a lot of women, but only one had loved you back.
Is that one of the stories of your life that you told yourself? It’s heartbreaking. You were ill, grieving the loss of your Rosemary, your last wife, presumably the one who had loved you back. You married six times, for periods ranging from months to 21 years. The first marriage was undone, perhaps, by World War I, which took you away from your actress bride. After returning from the military hospital to London, you caught her in the arms of another soldier, whom she subsequently married, but she seems not to have lost her yen for you.
Let’s face it: You have It. Had you been a few inches taller you might not have become a character actor until later in life; being 5’6″ sealed your fate. But the lack of height didn’t read as a lack of stature, as you discovered as a call boy observing a successful actor who was not physically imposing. You saw that his excellent posture and confidence overcame actual measurements. And just as you practiced to overcome your speech impediments and accent, you practiced carrying yourself with authority.
You created a container for your larger-than-life self, for your wit, your intelligence, your ardor. As I’ve seen written repeatedly, you are able to cut a man to bits just by slightly raising your right eyebrow. You set hearts a-flutter for decades. Matter of fact, my dear sir, you are still doing it today, 51 years after you left us.
Bette Davis was in love with you. Shortly after your death in 1967, she told your daughter—gushed, really—about you as both actor and man. She said you had brought your wife and daughter to the set of Mr Skeffington to keep her in line, and that she bet your dressing room / trailer was as busy with lady callers as Grand Central Station. That she would have loved to get you drunk… I mean, dayum, Bette, why don’t you tell us how you really feel?
Anyway, I hope you will forgive me for bringing up such personal matters when we just met, but…with a world full of women who adore you, how on Earth did you wind up marrying five who didn’t love you back? Or did some of them love you, but you couldn’t see it because you believed they didn’t or couldn’t?
What I’m asking, Dr. Jaquith, is if the sad story is that women did not love you, which we know is not true, or that you repeatedly managed to marry women who did not love you, which is possible, or that you were so convinced that they could not love you that you were unable to perceive that they did?
Reading about your jealousy at your first and second wife’s betrayals, pounding on the door of your flat when you heard another man’s voice inside, I think of Alex Sebastian in Notorious, realizing that the beautiful wife he adores is a spy who is not only betraying his love, she very well may get him killed. And of Job Skeffington, surely the epitome of unrequited love, married to a woman whose vanity renders her incapable of loving anyone until her looks are gone: maybe the power of your extraordinary performance is partly generated by your own pervasive sense of not being loved back.
We all have these stories about ourselves, whether we are aware of them or not. We live by them. They have real consequences in the choices we make, how we interpret the contours of our lives. And for the artists among us, like you, they are origin stories, potent emotional fuel that inform and drive your work.
So on the one hand, I hate to think you believed yourself not loved back when a world of women love you still, and on the other, maybe if you did believe it, it helped drove your absolutely incredible work, and that is no small thing.
Anyway, look at the time, I better wrap this up. But I want to thank you for your beautiful work, for all the pleasure you have brought me in my long, obsessive movie watching life. It’s been wonderful to have this blogathon as an excuse to spend so much time with you, watching your films, reading about your life, speculating about your inner life. At the age of 129, your work still speaks to us, and thanks to film, the only time machine we will ever have, you are still racking up female conquests. May our love reach you. May you, at long last, know fully and deeply, that we love you back.
Here’s more Rains-related posts:
The Invisible Man
Now, Voyager
This post was written for The Claude Rains Blogathon, hosted by Pure Entertainment Preservation Society. Head on over and check out the other swell entries.
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Wreaths
Floral, Spring Wreaths and Summer Wreaths:
As you can guess, spring (and their wreaths) is the announcement of new life upon the land. In the old way of thinking (particularly in areas subjected to harsh winters) it's a time of major celebration. The sun returns, vegetation and life come back in full force. After an austere winter, spring and summer feels like Nature on steroids. A spring or summer wreath is a great symbol to illustrate birth, renewal, life and abundance. Adorning the home with a spring wreath is the perfect way to say "Yeah! Thank you!" to mother nature for all of her bounty. There's tons you can do to make a splendid spring wreath. The materials you use will flavor the symbolic meaning. Here are a few ideas...
Flowers:
Does it matter what kind of flowers we use for wreaths? Absolutely! Every flower holds its own unique, symbolic scent. Tulips are some of the first to cheerfully burst from the soil in spring. This gives them symbolism of opportunity, welcome and joy. Daffodils are also early risers, and have symbolism of friendship, delight and creative expression. Roses represent love, passion and remembrance of loved ones who have passed into non-physical. Daisies stand for innocence, purity and honesty. Sunflowers - connected with the sun and summer, these flowers are symbolic of spiritual growth, radiance and energy. In essence, the sky is the limit when you want to say it with flowers. Here's a helpful article about Flower Meanings. You might also get ideas from Flower Color Meanings for your spring wreath.
Eggs:
The first time I saw a spring wreath adorned with eggs, I was completely enchanted. The wreath was made of thin twigs to look like a nest, and it had itty bitty blue robins' eggs (fake, of course) interspersed. So cute! There's behemoth symbolism in those delicate little ovals. To wit, pretty much all life comes from one type of egg or another. Alchemists subscribe to the belief the whole cosmos was cracked from a gargantuan, celestial egg. The Celtic bards tell a story of a cosmic egg cracking - the yolk became matter and ruled the day (light). The albumen (that clear stuff) became the heavens, and ruled the night. Legends around the world are rife with the egg being synonymous with the birth of life. What better way to welcome Nature's symbolic return to life than with a spring wreath or summer wreath?
Autumn Wreaths:
Wreaths are a great way to express our devotion and understanding about the change of time. As mentioned, the circle itself is a symbol of seasons and time cycles. Autumn is a phase of life that addresses powerful concepts like: Harvest, transition, withdrawal. To our early ancestors, fall represented a decline or retrograde of life. Crops were culled and cattle were slaughtered. Although life certainly continues - in a symbolic way, this was still a time of life's end. Nature itself seemed to retreat. Changing of leaves, colder days - it's all a sign of moving from one phase to another.
An autumn wreath will embrace this time of transition. It's a great symbol for honing our focus on the stuff we've achieved and gained. Autumn wreath meaning celebrates a bountiful year, and expresses gratitude for the harvest. This doesn't have to mean a harvest of corn or pumpkins. In our modern world we experience harvests by accomplishing goals, reaping rewards from our toil and enjoying hard-won victories.
If you're planning on making an autumn wreath, the materials you pick for decorations will weigh in on the wreath meaning. Here are a few ideas with symbolic associations...
Acorns:
Such a tiny little thing, but a vessel of supreme symbolism. The acorn makes the quintessential statement: "Big things come in little packages." Consider the oak tree. It's a bold, magnificent tree - capable of growing over 50 feet. And to think it was born from a wee acorn. In a way, the acorn is akin to the Biblical mustard seed. From just a miniscule seed (of faith, hope) the potential for magnificent personal growth indwells.
Oak Leaves:
For obvious reasons, the oak is symbolic of strength, expansiveness and power. It derives these meanings from their impressive girth and height. The Druids were wild over oak trees. It was considered one of the holiest of holy trees. In the Celtic Ogham, the oak is a chieftain - which translates to big medicine. Oaks were observed to live hundreds of years, which affirmed their symbolism of life, immortality and endurance. Learn more about Celtic views about Oak Symbolism here.
Indian Corn:
This is another legendary symbol of life. Indeed, the Aztecs believed the whole human race was born from corn seed. Interestingly, in most Northern Native American legends, corn is associated with the divine feminine. Cherokee, Keresan, Penobscot, Hidatsa are just a few among many tribes who attribute birth, fertility and motherhood to corn.
More Ideas for Wreath Meaning
Wreaths and their symbolic expressions don't stop with the seasons. Nope. Wreaths can be employed to express love, devotion and memorial all year round. Here are a few examples...
Funerary, Memorial Wreaths:
Placing a wreath upon a loved one's gravesite is a beautiful way to honor a memory. Some materials with powerful meaning include: Pansies - symbolic of memory and affection. Carnations - symbolic of friendship and faithfulness. Flags - symbolic of military service.
Victory Wreath Meaning:
These are a throwback from the Greek Olympics. The winner of various feats of strength would be awarded a laurel wreath in the form of a crown. Laurel was sacred to the sun god, Apollo. Other symbols of victory you might include on your wreath are: Palm - symbolic of victory, peace and paradise. Thunderbolt - symbolic of divine conquest, power and supremacy. Eagle - symbolic of nobility, ascension and achievement.
Baby Wreaths:
What better way to illustrate the circle of life for a newborn than creating a wreath!? As mentioned, the circle of the wreath is symbolic of the whole of life. It also represents the egg, from which a child is born. Now, I'm not a big fan of koochie-koo stuff like teddy bears and rattles. I go for the more earthbound symbolic statements. So my ideas aren't the most conventional. I made a baby wreath incorporating the four elements: Fire, Earth, Air and Water. The idea was to welcome the new child into her earthy home by introducing her to the elements as a blessing. Earth was represented by a mossy wreath. I strung lights in the wreath to represent fire. I hot glued soft white feathers (fake of course) in the wreath to represent air. And for water, I put a small bottle of holy water in a silk pouch and nestled it in the wreath. Practical? Maybe not. But really symbolic. :)
Wedding Wreaths:
Old Norse, Polish and Germanic people made wreaths for new unions. These were often made of highly meaningful flowers like: Heather - symbolic of purity, devotion, protection and romance. Meadowsweet - an ancient symbol for new brides, meanings of sweetness, hope and promise. Broom flower - symbolic of innocence, fondness and humility. Wedding wreaths were all the rage in the Victorian era. These too were adorned with flowers...each flower held a unique meaning for the bride and groom. My flower meaning pages are all over the place on the website, but this might be a good start, if you're interested: Symbolic Flower Meanings. If you don't see what you're looking for there, try a search for your bloom of choice.
Housewarming Wreath Meaning:
I'm not sure there's a more eloquent way to express a blessing over a new home than giving a housewarming wreath. Why? Well, they're classy and cool looking for one. Another reason harkens back to old European earth-worship. Huh? Yeah. Nature spiritualists used to encircle a new home as a blessing. In essence, the circle was imbued with a protective force field. Sometimes the circle was made with salt. I've read accounts where the protective perimeter might be made of flower petals too. The idea goes back to what I mentioned earlier in the post; the circle represents inclusion. It encloses that which is sacred. Utilized with proper attitude and intent, the circle blesses, unites and insures harmony. A housewarming wreath is a miniature version of this house-circling idea. Just as effective, and quite pretty too! Some ideas for sacred, symbolic materials for a housewarming wreath include: White sage - symbolic of blessing, consecration and cleansing. Gardenias - symbolic of love, refinement and purity. Rose geranium - symbolic of pleasure, good memories and comfort (if you can't find the flower, dab rose geranium oil on the wreath). Horseshoe - symbolic of protection and strength (mount the shoe open side up so it'll catch all the good juju!). Keys - Three keys mounted on the wreath together are symbolic of unlocking the doors of 1) wealth, 2) health, 3) love. The ancient Greeks used one key as a symbol for knowledge and living life wisely.
Parting Thoughts on Symbolic Wreath Meaning
I told you wreaths were SO much more than they appear! Who knew!? Now we all know. :) Wreaths far exceed the surface value of paltry decoration. That circular symbolism bound by highly meaningful materials proffer a big 'kapowie' of profound expression.
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