Fic: Five Pre-Raphaelite Muses Who Did Not Quite Pan Out (Desperate Romantics/Various, PG-13)
Title: Five Pre-Raphaelite Muses Who Did Not Quite Pan Out.
Author: Prochytes.
Fandom: Desperate Romantics/AtS/Torchwood/ Primeval/ Doctor Who/ Merlin (BBC).
Rating: PG-13.
Characters/Pairing: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Fred Walters (Desperate Romantics); Darla, Angelus (Angel); The Tarot Girl (Torchwood); Sarah Page, Abby Maitland (Primeval); Donna Noble (Doctor Who); Morgana (Merlin).
Disclaimer: The Beeb, Impossible Pictures, Mutant Enemy, and that harsh taskmaster, Real Life™, own the goods. Just visiting.
Summary: Lizzie Siddal was not the whole story. Some of the other chapters were life-threatening.
Word Count: 1623.
A/N: No significant spoilers. Gabriel is caught plagiarizing a couplet from Tennyson’s Locksley Hall.
1. Erato (Love Poetry)
There was a time, in the early days of the Brotherhood, when Gabriel was seized by an overmastering desire to paint an American. The Revolutions of ’48 were fresh in the popular consciousness; Out was once again the new In. Gabriel felt that nothing would represent in canvas and oils the lofty verities of Independence and Equality before God like some depicted daughter of Hesperia. A blonde one, for preference. With big tits.
Overmastering desires were, of course, part of the daily round where Gabriel was concerned. Fred did not always consider it prudent (or, indeed, legal) to indulge them. But there was no sense looking a gift horse in the mouth, and the young lady to whom he had found himself talking at this interminable Academy soiree certainly fitted the bill as a blonde American. With regard to Gabriel’s other stipulation, Fred had not yet permitted his eyes to descend in discovery, since the Yankee beauty was not unaccompanied. Her escort was large and Irish, a combination of traits which Fred found less than reassuring. He also did not seem to like Fred very much.
“Fred is a girl’s name,” the tall Irishman declared.
“Hush, my darling boy,” soothed the blonde woman. Her voice unsettled Fred, in its surfeit of honey-sweetness. It made him think of the child in Millais’s Bubbles, pulling the wings off flies. “Perhaps Mr. Walters’s clever friend would consent to paint us together.”
Her companion looked a little mollified. “A capital notion, Darla. After all,” he stroked the American’s cheek, in a manner more fitted to the Gardens than polite company, “no mere mirror can compass such a countenance.” His eyes roamed across the assembled throng, coming to rest where Gabriel was discoursing animatedly with Effie. “And this fellow revels with a comely crew. Some of them would make worthy additions to our number.”
Fred did not much like the sound of “our number”. He suspected that he might have fallen among Chartists. But he ploughed on doggedly, all the same: “Nor need you fear, madam, that your beauty would be smeared and obscured by careless brushwork, as in the work of our modern Academicians. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood sees Evasion, not the Sublime, in cloudy vagueness.”
“But do you not think, Mr. Walters, that some things are better left unclear?”
“The Brotherhood holds that even horror demands perfect clarity.”
“Their doctrines are most laudable, then.” The American woman smiled. “But how is such clarity achieved?”
Fred warmed to his theme. “Mr. Hunt and Mr. Millais have perfected a process. Thin glazes, madam, over a wet white background. In such fashion the brilliant colours of the Quattrocento are revived. It lends the work of the Brotherhood a certain… sparkle.”
“Sparkle?” The blonde frowned. “Your friends would have us sparkle?” She turned to her escort. “We are leaving, my sweet. Now.”
Fred, oddly relieved, watched the two of them depart, before reporting the failure of his mission to Gabriel.
“It is probably for the best, Fred.” Gabriel swigged the last of his champagne. “A woman like that would suck you dry. Do you happen to have some tin a man could borrow for a cab?”
2. Euterpe (Lyric Poetry)
“You wish me to sit for you,” the girl said.
Gabriel shut his mouth, disconcerted, then opened it again.
“My parents would raise no objection.” The girl (small, pale, huge dark eyes - perfect material for a spot of sentiment) turned a card on the table in front of her. “Both are long gone.”
Gabriel clutched gratefully at words which had not yet been taken out of his mouth. “I am sorry of it.”
“I am not. But I must decline your offer, all the same.” The girl shuffled her deck. “I depart, soon, for Cardiff. There is a gentleman I have to meet.”
“I see,” said Gabriel, who didn’t. He cast about for another topic. “Do you find destinies in your cards, little girl?”
“That is one word for it, I suppose.” The girl dealt again, and looked at the card the dealing had revealed. “The Magus. An adept, walker in worlds seen and unseen. The master of hidden knowledge and desire.”
Gabriel smiled. “He sounds like my sort of fellow.”
“Unless he is inverted.” The girl picked up the card. “Then he denotes a mountebank, a charlatan, and a cheat.”
Gabriel’s smile disappeared. “I place no faith in such tokens, child. Mine is the honest creed of human perfectibility. As I have sometimes felt moved to express it: ‘I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see; Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.’”
“Mr. Tennyson, perhaps, saw such a vision.” The child smiled thinly at Gabriel’s discomfiture. “I do not.”
Between the girl’s slight fingers, The Magus flipped up and down.
3. Clio (History)
“We really haven’t got time for this, Sarah,” the spiky-haired urchin hissed.
The bronzed woman at her side looked, to Gabriel’s eyes, the very embodiment of lovely irresolution. (The Sacrifice of Andromeda, perhaps? But classical themes had grown so hackneyed. And who in this day and age could credit the menace of a scaly beast?) “Hold on a minute, Abby. You’re the Rossetti? The painter?”
Gabriel shrugged. “Call me ‘painter’; call me ‘poet’; call me ‘devil’ if you must; but call me at least a man who knows beauty when he sees it.”
Sarah blushed. The girl called Abby, who was evidently stronger than that meagre frame suggested, started hauling her by main force down the street. “Come on, Sarah. Connor’s waiting by the… by the way out. Honestly, I might have known there was a reason your ‘rescue-plan’ was so involved. You treat the past like it’s Madame Tussauds with erections.”
Sarah flashed an apologetic smile over her shoulder at Gabriel. She struggled half-heartedly against Abby’s grip, but the smaller woman bore her forward regardless. The two soon disappeared from view amongst the crowd, still arguing like Sibylline fishwives.
“At least I didn’t start a fistfight with Boudica.”
“The snooty cow was so asking for it.”
4. Urania (Astronomy)
It was easy, on occasion, to forget that the favoured idioms of the Brotherhood did not always travel well. And even easier to be reminded.
“‘Stunner’?” It transpired that the buxom redhead who had caught Gabriel’s eye boasted an equally impressive pair of lungs. Gabriel already found himself leaning backwards. “Did you just call me a ‘stunner’, sunshine?”
Gabriel blinked. “My apologies, madam. I intended no disrespe…”
“Of course you didn’t. In Pervert World, it’s every girl’s dream to be mistaken for some floozy flashing her Bristols on Page Three. Do I look like it’s the summit of my life’s ambition to be tomorrow’s chip wrapping, pal?”
Gabriel continued to back away. “Erm….”
“Space-Man is in for such an earful when he gets back from that big Exhibition he was banging on about. ‘Stay here, Donna, and enjoy yourself.’ Well, maybe he enjoys strange men who can’t work out what a comb’s for coming on to him in pubs. But some of us have standards.”
Gabriel thought he glimpsed a chink of light. “You already have a protector, it seems. Of course, had I known that you and he were…”
“THERE IS NO ‘HIM AND ME’. How many times do I have to point out to random strangers that we’re not an item? He’s a stick insect in a suit, for Christ’s sake. Although at least someone told him about hair gel.”
Gabriel discovered, to his unutterable relief, that he had backed his way to a door, and fled forthwith into the night. For three weeks he sought out no further women. Maniac believed he had found Jesus.
5. Calliope (Epic Poetry)
This is the story of how Dante Gabriel Rossetti once painted a woman with snow for skin and grass for eyes and plaited night for hair. It is a story well worth telling. It is worth telling because it never happened.
He found her in the Gardens, where she sat, alone, on the riverbank. She listened quietly to his proposal - though it might better be described as a plea. Then she told him how she would consent to be painted.
Let there be a scene of Camelot, she said. Let it contain Arthur and Merlin, Guinevere and Morgaine. But you shall not paint them as they were in latter days, weighed down by robes and armour and their fame. You shall paint them as they were in the beginning: young and free.
Even Merlin? the painter asked.
Especially Merlin, she said.
You, then, would be Le Fay?
It seemed that this name displeased her. But she nodded, all the same.
Now they were in his studio. (How did they return there? The question has no meaning. We do not interrogate the blank spaces on the walls, between which the pictures hang.) He painted. Every brush-stroke was history unmade.
When the work was done, she looked at it, and sighed.
Does it not please you? he asked.
It is a masterpiece, she said. The canvas you were born to fashion. The greatest picture you never painted.
I do not understand, he said.
There are rules which even such as I must follow, she replied. They will not suffer this picture to remain. I shall take it with me, when I depart.
She sighed again. For a moment, her eyes were no longer green.
And you shall forget you ever painted it.
This is the story of how Dante Gabriel Rossetti once painted a woman with snow for skin and grass for eyes and plaited night for hair. It is a story well worth telling. It is worth telling because it never happened.
FINIS