View Full Version : Swansongs & Madrigals (Vignette)
Swansongs & Madrigals (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQF-XtANvcU)
2499
A short vignette introducing Ruby and Leopold Winchester's motivations for becoming involved with the Empire's war effort.
'Does he feint or strike in force?
Will he charge or ambuscade?
What is it checks his course?
Is he beaten or only delayed?
How long will the lull endure?
Is he retreating? Why?
Crawl to his camp and make sure--
That is the work for a spy!
(DRUMS)--_Fetch us our answer, spy!_
'Ride with him girth to girth
Wherever the Pale Horse wheels,
Wait on his councils, ear to earth,
And say what the dust reveals.
For the smoke of our torment rolls
Where the burning thousands lie;
What do we care for men's bodies or souls?
Bring us deliverance, spy!'
Rudyard Kipling.
Ruby was not amused, not in the least bit. The boat, as they said, had well and truly sailed. Port was empty, no crew on board, and no anchor to cast to the waves. It was one of those storm conjuring tempers that Mr Winchester had learnt very quickly to avoid. The candles on the dining table flickered in the breeze churned up by the poky house’s golden sable doors, and Mr Winchester reminded himself to learn another lesson concerning drafts even quicker than all the others he had to take on board as part of his on-going education to Ruby Winchester.
“I cannot believe you,” she snapped, tapping her fork against the edge of her Delmont etched glass, knowing full well the sound would grate down her husband’s spine like a clawed hand over jittery nerves. He shut the doors again, and closed out the cold night air.
She sighed.
“You promised to keep everything in order whilst I was gone, yet I come home to find the blinds half loose from their hinges, the housekeeper retired and half the patio missing to one of your god-forsaken and so called experiments.” Her lips pursed in time with his turn, and their eyes locked in a fiery exchange of egos.
The dining room was a simple affair, adorned only with brief glimpses of luxury and former splendour. It was a cube, an unconventional design for Scara Brae’s noble households, with a sable door leading to the garden on the east facing wall and large double door on the west leading to the hallway. Both were carved wood, covered in long faded gold-leaf that now resembled cheap bronze with smears of copper.
The epitaph on the outer door told the tale of the Winchesters and their arrival on the island two centuries ago, in case anyone still cared. Ruby’s evenings away from the troupe were invariably spent seated beneath the chandelier, counting the missing crystals which once hung from gleaming gold framework, talking with her husband about troubles of the day and the years when they’d been ‘happy’. Now all they did was argue, and make comments about the dirty cutlery and the fading portraits of their long dead relatives which lined every available piece of battered plaster.
“There have been,” he paused to sit and pull in his chair, buying himself a few precious seconds to mince his words, “certain developments that you should be made aware of, before you continue with your scorn.”
He picked up his knife and fork and held them both gingerly, as if he was weary of continuing his cooling pork. He’d noticed early on in their engagement that Ruby had eaten the vegetables, the potatoes, carrots and snap peas but left the somewhat turgid meat well alone. Longingly, he wished to himself that he hadn’t had to ‘retire’ their ageing housekeeper Rosie. He missed her whistling, nasal hair and her insistence on wearing a garish red and green apron that clashed with the décor in every room in the house.
“Am I going to want to throw this chop at you when you tell me?” She minced her words as she minced the pork in her mouth, indulging in the gravy that drowned out the leathery texture. She balanced her knife delicately between forefinger and thumb, as if she were going to throw it. Her smile on the other hand suggested she was employing a jest. Mr Winchester raised an eyebrow, a bushel of fur contemptuous of his wife’s dismissal.
Apparently, the severity of the climate in Scara Brae was worse than she had expected.
“You will want to throw the whole plate, and then some; times have become considerably harder on the island for everyone. I won’t suggest we have been hit harder than the common man, but the lower end of the noble echelons have been drained, and we have had to make sacrifices that have aggrieved me. Hard choices,” he took of his bowler hat, forgetting his manners, and leant back into the tall wing-back chair to rest his hands on his ever expanding waistline. He had let himself go in her absence, and no amount of love could hide the fact.
She pursed her lips, finishing off her mouthful with sluggish relish before setting her cutlery down onto her china plate. With the sort of motherly cross of arms she had been scolded with many a time herself, she set her elbows rebelliously onto the doily table cloth, splattered with apple sauce and bedecked with green sequin like peas and leant forwards just enough to apply pressure and threat to her words. “You would not know a hard choice if it slapped you in the face, Leopold.”
“Don’t belittle me, Ruby. Finances were dwindling before Valeena indicted the masses with heavy war tax and set about mass upheaval through all the walks of life in the city. How do you propose I avoid the law?” He plucked his wine glass, a tall, silver mounted goblet with excessive spiralling thorns about its base and a glut of deep merlot in its vessel and twirled it like a barrister of the vineyards. Its soft blackberry scent mixed bitterly with the twang of aggression and tension in the air, which sparked violently over the table and threatened to shatter the candle sticks and smash the crockery.
“I expect you to survive, not for me to return to staff losses, crumbling wall décor and a considerably reduced dowry.” For once, the second she said it, Ruby was bashful and shy, she bit her lip into a wrinkled expression of regret. “I’m sorry.”
Leopold downed the wine gingerly, surprised hiding his surprise and smile with the curl of his lips about the crystal. The aromatic liquid endorsed his sense of achievement; he seldom bested his wife in a game of wits and especially not at the heavily laden dinner table. She seemed to wear the table like armour, but now, over the pea vamplates, gravy boat pauldrons and roasted onion platters greaves, he could feel the wave of encroaching apology rolling unstoppably.
“Save your grief,” he offered as a peace token, knowing a man was always wrong in the eyes of a woman. He set the glass onto the tablecloth and spooned another ladle of carrot and yam mash onto his plate, spiced with black peppercorn and wild fennel.
“I am, though. I spoke out of turn without understanding the climate…” she paused for effect, hiding her own enjoyment. She picked up her cutlery and continued to cut through the pork chop before it chilled, and the sound of pewter on china broke the silence with sharp chinks in the armour of its mistress.
“Tell me, what laws has she introduced, what war?” Her time in Raiaera has sheltered her from one world, despite having enlightened her to the wonders of another. Finding your home ruined upon your return was a difficult ordeal for anyone, especially for someone who had given up so much to ensure tyrants and pedagogues of greed had not been able to devastate it.
Leopold took it upon himself to rekindle the memories of the last few weeks, disdainfully recalling the very words he had spoken to Rosie to inform her that she would no longer be required to serve the Winchester household, after many years of utterly loyal service. Her dedication had been more unwavering than Ruby’s pledge of service to the Prima Vista.
“War has come to Corone, or rather; the war in Corone has come to Scara Brae.” A flash of Empire, fire and regret wiped the smile from Ruby’s face. She remembered the moment Lysander, who had been Duffy, had fallen to the flames of the Empire’s greatest mage. “Valeena has been ‘forced’ to levy taxes to placate the Empire’s envoys and show support to its parent state.”
“Submissive? Valeena? I have spoken with the Queen many a time; she is anything but docile or beholden to another’s ideals. If she has levied taxes, it is under great pressure, if not outright threat.” With several last brutish cuts, she polished of her chop and started dicing the boiled potatoes with accurate, speedy severances of skin and buttery dressing.
“How much tax has she levied, exactly?” Leopold smiled, and took his glass into his confidence, empty, but full of sophistication and spurious glamour. It filled slowly, from an unknown source as he twirled it and admired the beauty of his own peculiar talents. It was a carbon copy of the merlot he had poured himself on the veranda, a mirror of the symmetry and perfection of the grape growers of Luthmor’s faerie glades. The wine seemed to sparkle like the wings of their owners.
“All households that are members of the Guilds-man Circle have suffered an increment of ten per cent, and must offer their immediate savings for the support of the Empire, or men and trappings of equal value. All those in the Nyquist Pantheon, the very richest of the houses must offer thirty per cent. We, at the bottom, newly joined to the Circle offered our meagre banking and the ten per cent came from the walls.”
Ruby lifted her eyebrow with wry contention and glanced at the once splendorous golden doors and the etched, moulded mural that sat on the south facing wall. It once depicted a lion fighting a dragon, each limb and tooth extruding from the plaster with frightening reality. Now, it was nothing more than a faded relic of once proud but humble household, tattered flakes of gold draped over dull sand like peeling skin left out in the sun too long.
She sighed, and turned back to her husband with a docile expression of understanding.
Three nibbles of the remnants of pork stuck in between her teeth and she was ready to continue. “Very well, I apologise for doubting you.”
Leopold drank from his glass, letting the wine dribble down his chin in a messy but satisfying gulp. He set it down on the table then wiped the excess away with his lavish sleeve. He wore his jacket over his dinner waistcoat, a gold satin and padded affair stitched with floral petals and accompanied by silver buttons. His bowler hat hid his messy, lion like mane of hair and set the shadow onto his heavy beard nicely, a peculiar amount of layers for an indoor occasion, but understandable given the temperature in the house. Ruby had noticed the heating system was down the moment she’d set foot in the house.
“It is not a question of doubting, it is understandable that you’re frustrated about things, but we have to make do with our new circumstance.”
“By all means,” she poked at the potato and pilled in several chunks, instantly enjoying the creamy texture and hint of lion mint in the butter. Leopold had seemingly read Rosie’s cook book before she’d left, or hidden a new kitchen mistress in the scullery to make her think he’d had an exegesis of form. Her lips moistly worked their way around her food, lingering on the possibility of continuing a sentence and teetering Leopold’s nerves on a knife’s edge. She swallowed, “but something must be done about Valeena, if she is being pressured, we cannot allow Scara Brae to become Corone’s subsidiary coffer.”
Leopold knew full well what she meant, and nodded in agreement as he picked up his cutlery and continued with his cooled dinner. They had started with fish and cream sauce nearly two hours ago, but conversation had interjected every course with a healthy delay. He consciously reworked the third course and the desert to allow for the late hour and the difficulty in cooking orange duck sauce after two bottles of deep vintage. His heavy chops worked over time to polish off the last of his pork before moving to the long, crunchy runner beans. Like a grazing cow, he mowed through them as they both contemplated the next best move.
““She is a dreary, talentless witch, but that’s the exact reason I respect her,” Ruby said to break the ice. She smiled as Leopold spluttered and nearly choked on his food.
“Ruby, my dear beloved, I do hope you doesn’t speak to the queen like that in person?”
She waved his accusations away with delicate fingers and picked up her own glass to saviour the merlot still breathing in the crystal. It washed down the heavy glut of the butter nicely.
“I doesn’t, my noble sir, doesn’t at all,” they broke into childish giggling as their natural accents broke through the decorum of the dinner table, smashing the plaster from the walls and rattling the wide array of serving dishes, terracotta platters and eccentric amounts of cutlery for every occasion on the once bright white doyley. When the chime and chorus of their outbreak died down, they both set their glasses back onto the table and continued chipping away at their main course in polite silence.
“I think,” he set his cutlery down when his plate was mostly empty, leaving a few select props to poke and distract himself with should the conversation die again,” that it would be prudent for us to test the political waters of this so called aid.”
Ruby settled her sullen gaze on her husband’s innocent eyes, and wondered just how innocent they really were. He had a magnificent mind for money, though his hair brained schemes had only lined the walls with gold, and not so much their pockets. She tucked her hair behind her eyes and sat up straight, her spine clicking and grating as she did so. She felt the need to compose herself, as if his words had inspired obedience in her.
“You are going to have to explain yourself Leopold.”
“What if,” he picked up his glass and waved it as a rhetorical gesture of questioning, it caught the candlelight from the chandelier and shone radiantly, “we were to offer our services to the recent call for aid amongst the refugees in Radasanth.”
“By ‘refugees’ you of course would be meaning the arriving elves?”
“Yes rather, the refugees from another war swamping the battlegrounds of another.”
“You can’t possibly expect me to abide by the Empire’s utilisation of impoverished, frightened people as soldiers, can you?” She almost lost her appetite.
Leopold shook his head, a stoic rebuttal with beard and beaten brow. He tapped his free hand fingers on the table edge, and savoured a sip of the merlot to whet his appetite and sharpen his tongue on the whetstone of table etiquette and civil conversation. His green eyes shone in the limelight as he arrived at the correct phrase to use, and he leant into the table’s flickering centrepiece for dramatic effect.
“We use it as cover, to find out what the Empire is up to, and of course, to buy ourselves some leverage with the Queen’s Court.”
Ruby was not always the brightest candle in the candlestick, but she was right on the ball with her husband’s suggestion. She craned her neck left and right to sweep away the lethargy of a long evening at a table and smiled. It was a devilish, childish smile, the sort that went with doing something wrong when you knew the consequences would be dire. A flash of red, a gleaming white row of pearl teeth flashed later and she pushed her plate away from her corset, a satisfactory meal eaten and a sign that she was ready for him to serve desert.
“Spies, you mean?” Her grin was sardonic, but intellectually well placed to meet her husband’s grin. Spies are exactly what Leopold meant, but the intonation in her words didn’t settle well in his stuffed stomach and pant lining.
“I think we can safely say that we are bound to a new frontier of enjoyment in our relationship – we can call it a bonding exercise,” he smiled, and their mutual chuckles drifted up to the chandelier and went up further still through the rickety floorboards of the Winchester Mansion.
Ruby liked the idea of being a spy very much, more than she let on to Leopold, and more than her lady-like glamour would allow her to let on. Truth be told, she was itching, begging, pining for a reason to fight, ever since Lucian had been defeated, she’d needed a purpose, a reason to go on. To free Scara Brae from its political vice whilst restoring her name and their home to life, could she pass that opportunity up? Well, you just had to, didn’t you? This could be a swansong or a blossoming cantor for the madrigals in the garden, either way, it promised to be worthy of a verse or two in a playwright’s hand somewhere in the world.
Silence Sei
08-07-11, 09:09 PM
Here we go!
Story: 6. The story was pretty decent, a tale of deceit and service to the Empire for ulterior motives. It just didn't strike out and grab my attention as I felt it should have.
Strategy: 7. The dinner which was the whole basis for the thread was a well placed area to have this conversation. Lots of things for Ruby to throw a tantrum with.
Setting: 8. I enjoyed the dinner table, and the way you described your 'props'. It was very well done, but a few things more could have been done with it.
Continuity: 8. You did well not only describing Corones plight via dialogue, but also its effect on Scara Brae. It's also a nice segway into your participation in The Refugees.
Interaction: 9. All the dialogue was belivable, the only misstep seemed to be Ruby's sudden submission and apology to Leopold. That took me off guard.
Character: 7.
Creativity: 7. Making the whole setting be at the dinner table was pretty cool.
Mechanics: 7 Some slip ups like that double quotation in your last post cost you here. Because of the shortness of the thread, the categories on the rubric have a harder hitting effect than most, so you need to be more careful if you plan on doing any more of these 'under ten' threads.
Clarity: 6. I could understand what you were writing for the most part, though some of the eating/drinking caused me to have a double look.
Wildcard: 8.
Total: 73/100
Ruby La Roux gets 500 exp, 40 GP.
Powered by vBulletin® Version 4.2.5 Copyright © 2024 vBulletin Solutions Inc. All rights reserved.