Cynical Derek Wonders Why Recent Fics Garner No Comments: Suspects Lack of Buttsex A Factor
Prologue: The Geschichtedorf Club
Please, please, please read the prologue first. I don't care what your personal feelings about prologues are, the story DOES NOT MAKE SENSE if you don't start at the fucking beginning.
Painted posters advertised "Magnificent Malvolio, man of magic", and four pairs of eyes examined them with the eager enthusiasm of young men out in a new town; or three did, and one feigned to.
"I doubt there is any kind of magnificence to be found for a penny," Brötchen remarked as they paid the brown-gummed and caged woman at the door, "but I am quite sure it is twice the magnificence to offered by a ha'penny."
"And yet only half the magnificence of tuppence," Bisley countered, and the three expressed their mirth with a smile, a guffaw, and a short sharp bark that seemed startled to find itself amused at all.
Of them, perhaps only Crumb knew how to extract magnificence from a penny of necessity, and the others were unimpressed by the shoddy attempts to cover the poverty of the place with shielded candles and flowers which had almost certainly been stolen; they were less impressed again by the dingy room studded with rough wooden chairs that purported to be the main auditorium, but the smell of greasepaint and tallow has its own magic and their gripes and grumbles soon gave way to a kind of impatient silence as all around them men and women of the lower orders fetched out their scratchings and sweets and knitting and other pastimes.
"I had no idea these places smelt so," Brötchen murmured to Sam, but the young Earl shushed him; a man in a tatty tailcoat of the sort that had been fashionable twenty years ago took to the stage. He had puffy, powdery cheeks and his chest strained against the coat's buttons so as to appear ready to burst at any moment.
The undergraduates and their neighbours were informed that prior to the climax of "thrillin' and breath-takin' feats the like of which you ain't never seen before" performed by the billed and apparently feted conjuror there would be a succession of humorous and amazin' acts, the first of which was a talking dog.
The canine was revealed to have a vocabulary no larger than "yes", "no", "rough", and "sausages" which, Bisley hissed, still made the creature more articulate and conversational than the college dean. Fortunately their scandalised involuntary laughter mingled perfectly with the raucous response to the little terrier's "rough" and hid among it like a tiger among the reeds.
"Now, of whom does that remind one?" Kurt muttered.
After the little dog and his stringy-looking master came a man dressed as a woman and a woman dressed as a man who sang a very silly love song and marched offstage arm in arm to rapturous boos and polite applause in almost equal half-measures; a final act of tumblers who tumbled very poorly (Sam thought he heard the crack of a joint and winced his sympathy) was rushed through, and the man in the tatty tailcoat was returned to announce the coming of the Magnificent Malvolio (a man who had clearly at least heard a little of Shakespeare, Sam observed, but his neighbours both educated and not shushed him) just as stomachs began to growl.
The Magnificent Malvolio affected to hail from the Americas (although his accent occasionally betrayed him as a native of Gloucestershire) and wore prodigious quantities of greasy cake which did not quite cover his obvious drunkard's nose and pox-dented cheeks; nor did his choking perfume adequately disguise the reek of gin about him. But his patter was proficient and his tricks most engaging; so much so that when he produced with a demure smile of genuine pride a dazed-looking and scruffy little white mouse from his ear all four undergraduates sat forwards in chorus and chirruped a mutual, "I wonder how he did that?"
It was a mantra uttered once more before the closing of the magician's act and consequently the penny theatre, and outside in the street as cabs rattled by Crumb cleared his throat; a silence overcame them and he said shyly, "How splendid it must be to make an audience roar like he did," his accent plucking at his vowels and shaming him to laconicity after a parting and wistful, "I wish I could."
"Laconicity is not a word in any tongue, madam," Max murmured, and the look upon Kurt's face said as eloquently as his tongue did not that Dr Severing was in no position to critique the vocabulary of the chanteuse, nor indeed anyone higher than a guttersnipe.
"How much more splendid to make grander roars from more throats, and more elevated throats at that," Bisley corrected, his eyes dancing with an ambitious fire, "with these parlour tricks. I wonder how he did it."
"I wonder too," Sam said uncomfortably, "how a mouse could fit in his ear."
"He didn't take it from his ear," said Bisley, and in his haste an accent quite unlike his usual slipped past his teeth. He had keen eyes and quick, sharp movements, his tongue dipping excitedly across his lips in an uncouth lick of anticipation, "he made it look as if he did." He adjusted then his hat and beamed about him. "I cannot speak for you, gentlemen, but I intend to learn how this was achieved, and then achieve it better."
It was but a few days later that, early one morning, Sam all but fell over an excited-looking Bisley outside his set. Making no concession to Sam's attire or the hour or the strangeness of his visit, the young man greeted him peevishly, scrambling to his feet: "What kind of fellow isn't in his room at five in the morning? Have you been out on some wretched assignation with one of the town girls? They're all syphilitic, I warn you - "
"I have been doing no such thing," Sam said, colouring to the tips of his ears. He had hair the shade of summer hay and much the same weight, prone to flying away in every direction when it was not promenaded or dampened, and thus the flush in his cheeks suited him rather. "I have been rowing," Sam made a gesture towards his clothes, which were indeed suitable for little but this activity.
"I," Bisley cried as though it were his favourite word, "have been making some enquiries." He was blocking Sam's return to his set, his face aglow with the light of victory and discovery, rendering his quite ordinary features somehow reminiscent of Renaissance paintings. "And I believe I have found a man in London who can provide the primers we will require- "
"Require for what?" Sam could not pretend to have forgotten already the conversation following their visit to the penny theatre - indeed it had been circling in his thoughts ever since, to the detriment of his studies and his internal equilibrium - but this ill-timed non-sequitur took him quite by surprise.
"Conjuring, of course," Bisley said impatiently. His shoes had mud on the tips and his hair - as fine and thin and fly-away as Sam's that it might have been taken from the same head - stood a little askew. Sam began to wonder if the man had been to bed at all that night; there was a credible case against it. Bisley's expression changed but a little - enough to admit the glimmerings of a certain avaricious hope - and he added, "they are a penny a piece to buy. I came to ask if you wanted one."
"At this hour?" Sam asked, still all at sea.
"Actually at five, but you didn't answer," Bisley corrected.
His enthusiasm was however infectious and his almost girlishly intelligent face lit up with such a passion that Scam found it almost beyond his means - at least, beyond his will - to refuse the purchase. "I suppose I do want one," he said at last, trying to peer around the young man to his set's door. "Will you … would you let me into my rooms so I may fetch your penny?"
A week later the four gathered to peruse their investment (Sam noted that the printed price upon the thin paper was in fact a ha'penny and that Bisley for once paid for his own drink as they sat, but he did not feel this warranted a mention); Brötchen had taken to wearing a grey woollen scarf indoors "for his cold" and Sam found his attention drawn repeatedly not to this peculiarity, nor only to the lines in the primer which Bisley's fingers pointed out, but also to the fingers themselves - which were spidery and fast, with dirt packed incongruously under the nails.
Hardly the hallmark of a gentleman, but Bisley caught his eye with one sharp green look and Sam forgot to notice again, mired in a discomfort which grew to be almost physical as he tried to avoid being captured the same way twice.
"Perhaps this - " Brötchen tapped a sheet with his finger, smudging the cheap ink diagram of some basic coin vanish, " - course of education, of, er, of acquiring this skill, would be more easily accomplished if we strove to practice together, on each other?"
"A magicians' circle, you mean," Bisley agreed, for it seemed unlikely either Crumb or Sam would speak now, neither having shown yet much inclination towards loquacity or indeed forthrightness in their speech (although Sam kept quite a regular and detailed diary almost the equal of Pepys in compulsion if not quality it was not a habit he had divulged to his new companions; nor did he intend to). "That is just what I was thinking. A society of equals." He gave Sam an unexpectedly hard look at this, which the young Earl did not feel he could answer. Indeed, he had no inkling of how he was to respond at all.
Crumb cleared his throat. Already in their short acquaintance the young men were coming to know details and tics of each others' manner: Crumb tried to remove all obstruction to his speech before speaking, and kept his passages brief. By contrast Bisley's intercourse was florid and persistent, washing over all other words like a tide.
Crumb said, "College would frown on practice of magic," cutting away at the statement to leave the barest and bluntest core of meaning.
"There's hardly any call for the college to know about it," Bisley scoffed, and Brötchen seconded him eagerly, animated by the idea of secrecy, perhaps, as a boy might be at the notion of creating a clandestine club with his accomplices, the mere idea of exclusivity a lure in itself.
"A Secret Magicians' Circle cuts rather more of a dash, does it not?" he said, grinning quite childishly. Brötchen seemed, on the basis of their short acquaintance, to be the kind of man to whom the look of a thing might be almost more important than the content of it, or so it appeared to the politely unspoken mind of Sam Russell.
One might argue that such frivolousness, in common with the great modern salons of the fin de siècle decadents and the like, was merely a reaction to the unnecessary strictures of that time, and that country, as our current festival of liberty is surely the result of both constriction and deprivations suffered before -
"One might well," Max said as he motioned to the one-armed waiter for more wine, "but one might also remember that one's audience have homes to go to and that they would like to do so before they die of old age."
"A condition which dogs our Doktor every second, the lengthening shadows of his life falling over the lines in his face," Kurt murmured, shifting his legs away in time to avoid a kick.
And so a secret magicians' circle was put forward among the new acquaintances as a certainty; the mere knowledge of binding secrecy had, of course, the curious side-effect of deepening their meagre intimacy into something more closely resembling friendship, as a shared secret always must. They were to study their primers and practice alone and meet in two days in order to share their achievements and illuminate the obstacles to their progress, a radical notion that Brötchen approved of: "If only all men could be persuaded to be so free with their knowledge, the fate of mankind might well be a little less shameful," he said with some delight.
"The pursuit of scientific discovery would be much hastened were faculties to cease competition and engage in cooperation and the free exchange of research," Sam agreed, taken with the idea as unexpectedly and suddenly as a child is taken with scarlet fever.
"No one would make any money," Bisley said with scorn and some impiety about his face, "and it would be a great tragedy; gentlemen, this is why our circle remains limited and our endeavour concealed." His sharp features set in an expression of quite unmistakeable imperiousness; that is to say, he looked upon his companions and made quite certain they knew what he meant by this.
The other young men were forced to concede that Bisley had a point, albeit a vulgar one.
Over the next two days it would be an indicator of character indeed to note who studied his primer most keenly, and who did not, who practised with tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth until the small hours, and who forgot about it all until he was almost asleep, who found his study taxed him and to whom the art of sleight of hand was so natural he surprised even himself; but alas my source did not furnish me with these details.
"What a tremendous oversight," Max yawned, his canines and tongue pinkly imitating those of some mustelid family creature, perhaps a weasel, as he made no move to cover his mouth, "my night shall be all the poorer for the absence of such urgently necessary detail."
What I do know is that, come the first convening of the magic circle, Brötchen wore a red cravat which may have been silk, Crumb had cut the back of his hand, Bisley had grown quite pale in the autumn light, and Sam's fellows at rowing were impressed with his prowess and speed of scull.
---END OF FIRST CHAPTER---
Please, please, please read the prologue first. I don't care what your personal feelings about prologues are, the story DOES NOT MAKE SENSE if you don't start at the fucking beginning.
Painted posters advertised "Magnificent Malvolio, man of magic", and four pairs of eyes examined them with the eager enthusiasm of young men out in a new town; or three did, and one feigned to.
"I doubt there is any kind of magnificence to be found for a penny," Brötchen remarked as they paid the brown-gummed and caged woman at the door, "but I am quite sure it is twice the magnificence to offered by a ha'penny."
"And yet only half the magnificence of tuppence," Bisley countered, and the three expressed their mirth with a smile, a guffaw, and a short sharp bark that seemed startled to find itself amused at all.
Of them, perhaps only Crumb knew how to extract magnificence from a penny of necessity, and the others were unimpressed by the shoddy attempts to cover the poverty of the place with shielded candles and flowers which had almost certainly been stolen; they were less impressed again by the dingy room studded with rough wooden chairs that purported to be the main auditorium, but the smell of greasepaint and tallow has its own magic and their gripes and grumbles soon gave way to a kind of impatient silence as all around them men and women of the lower orders fetched out their scratchings and sweets and knitting and other pastimes.
"I had no idea these places smelt so," Brötchen murmured to Sam, but the young Earl shushed him; a man in a tatty tailcoat of the sort that had been fashionable twenty years ago took to the stage. He had puffy, powdery cheeks and his chest strained against the coat's buttons so as to appear ready to burst at any moment.
The undergraduates and their neighbours were informed that prior to the climax of "thrillin' and breath-takin' feats the like of which you ain't never seen before" performed by the billed and apparently feted conjuror there would be a succession of humorous and amazin' acts, the first of which was a talking dog.
The canine was revealed to have a vocabulary no larger than "yes", "no", "rough", and "sausages" which, Bisley hissed, still made the creature more articulate and conversational than the college dean. Fortunately their scandalised involuntary laughter mingled perfectly with the raucous response to the little terrier's "rough" and hid among it like a tiger among the reeds.
"Now, of whom does that remind one?" Kurt muttered.
After the little dog and his stringy-looking master came a man dressed as a woman and a woman dressed as a man who sang a very silly love song and marched offstage arm in arm to rapturous boos and polite applause in almost equal half-measures; a final act of tumblers who tumbled very poorly (Sam thought he heard the crack of a joint and winced his sympathy) was rushed through, and the man in the tatty tailcoat was returned to announce the coming of the Magnificent Malvolio (a man who had clearly at least heard a little of Shakespeare, Sam observed, but his neighbours both educated and not shushed him) just as stomachs began to growl.
The Magnificent Malvolio affected to hail from the Americas (although his accent occasionally betrayed him as a native of Gloucestershire) and wore prodigious quantities of greasy cake which did not quite cover his obvious drunkard's nose and pox-dented cheeks; nor did his choking perfume adequately disguise the reek of gin about him. But his patter was proficient and his tricks most engaging; so much so that when he produced with a demure smile of genuine pride a dazed-looking and scruffy little white mouse from his ear all four undergraduates sat forwards in chorus and chirruped a mutual, "I wonder how he did that?"
It was a mantra uttered once more before the closing of the magician's act and consequently the penny theatre, and outside in the street as cabs rattled by Crumb cleared his throat; a silence overcame them and he said shyly, "How splendid it must be to make an audience roar like he did," his accent plucking at his vowels and shaming him to laconicity after a parting and wistful, "I wish I could."
"Laconicity is not a word in any tongue, madam," Max murmured, and the look upon Kurt's face said as eloquently as his tongue did not that Dr Severing was in no position to critique the vocabulary of the chanteuse, nor indeed anyone higher than a guttersnipe.
"How much more splendid to make grander roars from more throats, and more elevated throats at that," Bisley corrected, his eyes dancing with an ambitious fire, "with these parlour tricks. I wonder how he did it."
"I wonder too," Sam said uncomfortably, "how a mouse could fit in his ear."
"He didn't take it from his ear," said Bisley, and in his haste an accent quite unlike his usual slipped past his teeth. He had keen eyes and quick, sharp movements, his tongue dipping excitedly across his lips in an uncouth lick of anticipation, "he made it look as if he did." He adjusted then his hat and beamed about him. "I cannot speak for you, gentlemen, but I intend to learn how this was achieved, and then achieve it better."
It was but a few days later that, early one morning, Sam all but fell over an excited-looking Bisley outside his set. Making no concession to Sam's attire or the hour or the strangeness of his visit, the young man greeted him peevishly, scrambling to his feet: "What kind of fellow isn't in his room at five in the morning? Have you been out on some wretched assignation with one of the town girls? They're all syphilitic, I warn you - "
"I have been doing no such thing," Sam said, colouring to the tips of his ears. He had hair the shade of summer hay and much the same weight, prone to flying away in every direction when it was not promenaded or dampened, and thus the flush in his cheeks suited him rather. "I have been rowing," Sam made a gesture towards his clothes, which were indeed suitable for little but this activity.
"I," Bisley cried as though it were his favourite word, "have been making some enquiries." He was blocking Sam's return to his set, his face aglow with the light of victory and discovery, rendering his quite ordinary features somehow reminiscent of Renaissance paintings. "And I believe I have found a man in London who can provide the primers we will require- "
"Require for what?" Sam could not pretend to have forgotten already the conversation following their visit to the penny theatre - indeed it had been circling in his thoughts ever since, to the detriment of his studies and his internal equilibrium - but this ill-timed non-sequitur took him quite by surprise.
"Conjuring, of course," Bisley said impatiently. His shoes had mud on the tips and his hair - as fine and thin and fly-away as Sam's that it might have been taken from the same head - stood a little askew. Sam began to wonder if the man had been to bed at all that night; there was a credible case against it. Bisley's expression changed but a little - enough to admit the glimmerings of a certain avaricious hope - and he added, "they are a penny a piece to buy. I came to ask if you wanted one."
"At this hour?" Sam asked, still all at sea.
"Actually at five, but you didn't answer," Bisley corrected.
His enthusiasm was however infectious and his almost girlishly intelligent face lit up with such a passion that Scam found it almost beyond his means - at least, beyond his will - to refuse the purchase. "I suppose I do want one," he said at last, trying to peer around the young man to his set's door. "Will you … would you let me into my rooms so I may fetch your penny?"
A week later the four gathered to peruse their investment (Sam noted that the printed price upon the thin paper was in fact a ha'penny and that Bisley for once paid for his own drink as they sat, but he did not feel this warranted a mention); Brötchen had taken to wearing a grey woollen scarf indoors "for his cold" and Sam found his attention drawn repeatedly not to this peculiarity, nor only to the lines in the primer which Bisley's fingers pointed out, but also to the fingers themselves - which were spidery and fast, with dirt packed incongruously under the nails.
Hardly the hallmark of a gentleman, but Bisley caught his eye with one sharp green look and Sam forgot to notice again, mired in a discomfort which grew to be almost physical as he tried to avoid being captured the same way twice.
"Perhaps this - " Brötchen tapped a sheet with his finger, smudging the cheap ink diagram of some basic coin vanish, " - course of education, of, er, of acquiring this skill, would be more easily accomplished if we strove to practice together, on each other?"
"A magicians' circle, you mean," Bisley agreed, for it seemed unlikely either Crumb or Sam would speak now, neither having shown yet much inclination towards loquacity or indeed forthrightness in their speech (although Sam kept quite a regular and detailed diary almost the equal of Pepys in compulsion if not quality it was not a habit he had divulged to his new companions; nor did he intend to). "That is just what I was thinking. A society of equals." He gave Sam an unexpectedly hard look at this, which the young Earl did not feel he could answer. Indeed, he had no inkling of how he was to respond at all.
Crumb cleared his throat. Already in their short acquaintance the young men were coming to know details and tics of each others' manner: Crumb tried to remove all obstruction to his speech before speaking, and kept his passages brief. By contrast Bisley's intercourse was florid and persistent, washing over all other words like a tide.
Crumb said, "College would frown on practice of magic," cutting away at the statement to leave the barest and bluntest core of meaning.
"There's hardly any call for the college to know about it," Bisley scoffed, and Brötchen seconded him eagerly, animated by the idea of secrecy, perhaps, as a boy might be at the notion of creating a clandestine club with his accomplices, the mere idea of exclusivity a lure in itself.
"A Secret Magicians' Circle cuts rather more of a dash, does it not?" he said, grinning quite childishly. Brötchen seemed, on the basis of their short acquaintance, to be the kind of man to whom the look of a thing might be almost more important than the content of it, or so it appeared to the politely unspoken mind of Sam Russell.
One might argue that such frivolousness, in common with the great modern salons of the fin de siècle decadents and the like, was merely a reaction to the unnecessary strictures of that time, and that country, as our current festival of liberty is surely the result of both constriction and deprivations suffered before -
"One might well," Max said as he motioned to the one-armed waiter for more wine, "but one might also remember that one's audience have homes to go to and that they would like to do so before they die of old age."
"A condition which dogs our Doktor every second, the lengthening shadows of his life falling over the lines in his face," Kurt murmured, shifting his legs away in time to avoid a kick.
And so a secret magicians' circle was put forward among the new acquaintances as a certainty; the mere knowledge of binding secrecy had, of course, the curious side-effect of deepening their meagre intimacy into something more closely resembling friendship, as a shared secret always must. They were to study their primers and practice alone and meet in two days in order to share their achievements and illuminate the obstacles to their progress, a radical notion that Brötchen approved of: "If only all men could be persuaded to be so free with their knowledge, the fate of mankind might well be a little less shameful," he said with some delight.
"The pursuit of scientific discovery would be much hastened were faculties to cease competition and engage in cooperation and the free exchange of research," Sam agreed, taken with the idea as unexpectedly and suddenly as a child is taken with scarlet fever.
"No one would make any money," Bisley said with scorn and some impiety about his face, "and it would be a great tragedy; gentlemen, this is why our circle remains limited and our endeavour concealed." His sharp features set in an expression of quite unmistakeable imperiousness; that is to say, he looked upon his companions and made quite certain they knew what he meant by this.
The other young men were forced to concede that Bisley had a point, albeit a vulgar one.
Over the next two days it would be an indicator of character indeed to note who studied his primer most keenly, and who did not, who practised with tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth until the small hours, and who forgot about it all until he was almost asleep, who found his study taxed him and to whom the art of sleight of hand was so natural he surprised even himself; but alas my source did not furnish me with these details.
"What a tremendous oversight," Max yawned, his canines and tongue pinkly imitating those of some mustelid family creature, perhaps a weasel, as he made no move to cover his mouth, "my night shall be all the poorer for the absence of such urgently necessary detail."
What I do know is that, come the first convening of the magic circle, Brötchen wore a red cravat which may have been silk, Crumb had cut the back of his hand, Bisley had grown quite pale in the autumn light, and Sam's fellows at rowing were impressed with his prowess and speed of scull.
---END OF FIRST CHAPTER---