152 Fic: Fortune's Tennis Balls
Title Fortune’s Tennis Balls
Author Brutti ma Buoni
Rating PG13 (for language only)
Word Count 1200
Prompt 152 (Elizabethan/Jacobean Drama)
Characters/Pairing (if any) Spike, Darla, Drusilla
A/N: This is more a jigsaw than a fic - it’s a patchwork of play titles from lesser Jacobean and late-Elizabethan English drama. Sometimes we don’t even have the play anymore, only the title. They are amazing!
(Non-community note: There's a challenge at my journal if you’d like to guess/count the number of genuine play titles in this piece. ETA Challenge closed. See the answers here.)
Christmas comes but once a year. Bloody good thing. Gives one far too much time to think. Reminds me of the past, of Angelus, of my lost humanity. I’m in a damned odd mood today.
Remember what I was? Poetaster, that’s the word. Epicene, a dumb knight, prone to blurt out fancies chaste and noble, not one worth a bloody jot.
But is life better now? A changeling, I am, in our family of love. From poetaster to malcontent, weak life to living death, constantly in his shadow. I joined a masque of blackness; it closed over me, but I still can’t find my part to play.
Bloody Angelus. It was bad when he was here. It’s murder now he’s gone.
We’re visiting a new inn. Nothing special, nothing rich. Cupid and Psyche over the door told us wrong; there’s neither love nor wisdom here. That said, it’s plain the inn’s respectability masks sordid truth: we’re living in lust’s dominion, and I daresay a fair few have caught Cupid’s revenge in its frowsty rooms.
We’ve no real purpose in passing by. Aimless, we are. If this be not our fate (and I’m damned if I’ll accept it as such), we’re all fools to remain in this half-life-death.
A Spanish gypsy passes me with suspicion; staring up at our shaded window from filthy Ram Alley. She looks wan, ragged; no attraction there. Too much like those Romanian swine who caused our present misery. It’s a pity she’s a whore, too. Pox-ridden, I’ve no doubt, and I’ve lost my appetite for love-lies-bleeding. Someone else can eat that fetid flesh. Ah! In fact, there’s her client, the noble Spanish soldier; a captain, I think. He winks to see the beggar’s blush, the coxcomb.
Why did we come to Spain? We could have gone anywhere after China. I fancied the Americas, somewhere heady with gold and new growth. (Bit of luck it wasn’t San Francisco, obviously. Hate to think how many of our kind perished, forced into sunlight and merging into the flames as they fled.) But it feels like anywhere would be better than our pointless existence here. This sunny southern land reeks of failure still, of the Turk, and the Spanish moors’ tragedy. Their buildings evident everywhere, but they are gone, and the kingdom stinks of popery these days. The haughty Spanish Moor of old is a blind beggar of Alexandria now, and my old mum would writhe to see me under living the yoke of his Holiness, the Whore of Babylon (or so her Bible master taught).
Darla doesn’t see where we are, or doesn’t care, for sure. She secretly nurses the broken heart she still denies. The lady’s trial goes on indefinite, and makes her tedious as hell for her companions. Bereavement would be kinder. She paces nightly; grief keeps the "widow" waking, cursing, wailing. She hates where once she loved. Sometimes I know she doesn’t see even me; beauty in a trance, unfeeling. Why would she care where we are? She’s seen it all before, and many times.
I’ve been enquiring about our dear leader. I know her past, now, hard to credit. She once was a chaste maid in Cheapside, weaving silken ribbons - such a gentle craft for our proud, scornful lady! It lasted till she fell from grace with some passing London merchant (or was it a Welsh ambassador? The tales tangle now), one warm, seductive Bartholomew Fair’s night. She made love’s sacrifice, saw the witch of Edmonton, put an end to all thoughts of motherhood. Just another maid’s tragedy, though this maid had too much spirit to fall into shadow. Ended a Dutch courtesan, fleeing to the New World. Spent the eighteenth century an insatiate Countess, I believe, passing as human while she adored her power, wealth and beauty.
Now look at her. Picking up wenches from the streets for our pleasure. Her old life, reversed. Last night was a disappointment. Too thin, that girl, too delicate. A virgin martyr to the three of us. Her tears were stifled; and where’s the fun there? Give me a roaring girl or an honest whore any time; I’m a woman lover, not a woman hater. I don’t like to see them sob before they die. Contrast that with how my ladies see the female sex: women beware women, I say. Darla and Dru want tears almost more than blood, or so it sometimes seems.
Ha! Now, there’s a beauty, the very woman for us - proper contrast to last night’s thin gruel. Plump and rosy, the sun’s darling: the fair maid of the inn, bless her curvy warmth; offering food, wine or what you will. We’ll have her tonight, I think. She has wit, without money, and will take her chances; be anything we desire. Better that she dies now, gloriously with us, than waste her youthful beauty. She’d only swoon, hopeless, for some Spanish curate, or else a humorous lieutenant, who’ll play the mad lover after the custom of the country. And a false one, no doubt: he’d make a lover’s progress, have her to wife for a month, then drop the maid in the mill and make off with some faithful shepherdess. I’ve known such men, but I’ll never be one.
We don’t choose men for sport, now, or rarely. A Bristol merchant passing through, a little French lawyer (chewy and dry), or once a noble gentleman angry with his elder brother (who’d an honest man’s fortune and would be any woman’s prize). But women for choice. I’ll never lose the wonder of women, best of all, of women pleased. My woman, the other in my double marriage. My Drusilla now, not his. My beloved, my queen, my salvation.
But not all mine. She is bereaved of Angelus too; competes with a lover’s melancholy that drives her apart from Darla more each day. Drusilla sits, turning the cards, day in, day out. She’s a pilgrim to the cardboard shrine; a prophetess seeking a future that pleases. The Emperor, the Tower, Alchemist, the Satyr, the Devil, playing their mad men’s morris, never pleasing my beloved. The Devil is an ass, I say. What’s the news from hell? She tuts, hushes, hides the cards.
My Drusilla dreams of following her Daddy. She’d have us on a wild goose chase, taking a sea voyage to follow love’s pilgrimage. We, her faithful friends, know she’d end, hopeless and saddened. She believes she’d end an island princess, laughing in sunlight; some ambition for a night walker like her.
It’s as well he’s gone, you know. Not one to fawn over the powerful, nor play the loyal subject indefinitely. I wouldn’t have stood Angelus long. I could have been a traitor to our little family; a Catiline or Sejanus, overmighty and power-seeking. We’d have fought in the end, if the gypsies hadn’t taken him. What a fight that would have been - a royal combat, fought over trash. Now, without his presence, I’m king (and no king), hollowly victorious.
God, I wish I could find love’s cure. We tumble, Drusilla, Darla, Angelus in his absence, me in my presence, four plays in one yet never cohering. Without him, we’re a triplicity of cuckolds, lovers all untrue to one another.
Enough maundering. (Anyone would think I was William still.) Eastward ho. Maybe France will be kinder. I fancy May day in Paris.
~~~~~
Author Brutti ma Buoni
Rating PG13 (for language only)
Word Count 1200
Prompt 152 (Elizabethan/Jacobean Drama)
Characters/Pairing (if any) Spike, Darla, Drusilla
A/N: This is more a jigsaw than a fic - it’s a patchwork of play titles from lesser Jacobean and late-Elizabethan English drama. Sometimes we don’t even have the play anymore, only the title. They are amazing!
(Non-community note: There's a challenge at my journal if you’d like to guess/count the number of genuine play titles in this piece. ETA Challenge closed. See the answers here.)
Christmas comes but once a year. Bloody good thing. Gives one far too much time to think. Reminds me of the past, of Angelus, of my lost humanity. I’m in a damned odd mood today.
Remember what I was? Poetaster, that’s the word. Epicene, a dumb knight, prone to blurt out fancies chaste and noble, not one worth a bloody jot.
But is life better now? A changeling, I am, in our family of love. From poetaster to malcontent, weak life to living death, constantly in his shadow. I joined a masque of blackness; it closed over me, but I still can’t find my part to play.
Bloody Angelus. It was bad when he was here. It’s murder now he’s gone.
We’re visiting a new inn. Nothing special, nothing rich. Cupid and Psyche over the door told us wrong; there’s neither love nor wisdom here. That said, it’s plain the inn’s respectability masks sordid truth: we’re living in lust’s dominion, and I daresay a fair few have caught Cupid’s revenge in its frowsty rooms.
We’ve no real purpose in passing by. Aimless, we are. If this be not our fate (and I’m damned if I’ll accept it as such), we’re all fools to remain in this half-life-death.
A Spanish gypsy passes me with suspicion; staring up at our shaded window from filthy Ram Alley. She looks wan, ragged; no attraction there. Too much like those Romanian swine who caused our present misery. It’s a pity she’s a whore, too. Pox-ridden, I’ve no doubt, and I’ve lost my appetite for love-lies-bleeding. Someone else can eat that fetid flesh. Ah! In fact, there’s her client, the noble Spanish soldier; a captain, I think. He winks to see the beggar’s blush, the coxcomb.
Why did we come to Spain? We could have gone anywhere after China. I fancied the Americas, somewhere heady with gold and new growth. (Bit of luck it wasn’t San Francisco, obviously. Hate to think how many of our kind perished, forced into sunlight and merging into the flames as they fled.) But it feels like anywhere would be better than our pointless existence here. This sunny southern land reeks of failure still, of the Turk, and the Spanish moors’ tragedy. Their buildings evident everywhere, but they are gone, and the kingdom stinks of popery these days. The haughty Spanish Moor of old is a blind beggar of Alexandria now, and my old mum would writhe to see me under living the yoke of his Holiness, the Whore of Babylon (or so her Bible master taught).
Darla doesn’t see where we are, or doesn’t care, for sure. She secretly nurses the broken heart she still denies. The lady’s trial goes on indefinite, and makes her tedious as hell for her companions. Bereavement would be kinder. She paces nightly; grief keeps the "widow" waking, cursing, wailing. She hates where once she loved. Sometimes I know she doesn’t see even me; beauty in a trance, unfeeling. Why would she care where we are? She’s seen it all before, and many times.
I’ve been enquiring about our dear leader. I know her past, now, hard to credit. She once was a chaste maid in Cheapside, weaving silken ribbons - such a gentle craft for our proud, scornful lady! It lasted till she fell from grace with some passing London merchant (or was it a Welsh ambassador? The tales tangle now), one warm, seductive Bartholomew Fair’s night. She made love’s sacrifice, saw the witch of Edmonton, put an end to all thoughts of motherhood. Just another maid’s tragedy, though this maid had too much spirit to fall into shadow. Ended a Dutch courtesan, fleeing to the New World. Spent the eighteenth century an insatiate Countess, I believe, passing as human while she adored her power, wealth and beauty.
Now look at her. Picking up wenches from the streets for our pleasure. Her old life, reversed. Last night was a disappointment. Too thin, that girl, too delicate. A virgin martyr to the three of us. Her tears were stifled; and where’s the fun there? Give me a roaring girl or an honest whore any time; I’m a woman lover, not a woman hater. I don’t like to see them sob before they die. Contrast that with how my ladies see the female sex: women beware women, I say. Darla and Dru want tears almost more than blood, or so it sometimes seems.
Ha! Now, there’s a beauty, the very woman for us - proper contrast to last night’s thin gruel. Plump and rosy, the sun’s darling: the fair maid of the inn, bless her curvy warmth; offering food, wine or what you will. We’ll have her tonight, I think. She has wit, without money, and will take her chances; be anything we desire. Better that she dies now, gloriously with us, than waste her youthful beauty. She’d only swoon, hopeless, for some Spanish curate, or else a humorous lieutenant, who’ll play the mad lover after the custom of the country. And a false one, no doubt: he’d make a lover’s progress, have her to wife for a month, then drop the maid in the mill and make off with some faithful shepherdess. I’ve known such men, but I’ll never be one.
We don’t choose men for sport, now, or rarely. A Bristol merchant passing through, a little French lawyer (chewy and dry), or once a noble gentleman angry with his elder brother (who’d an honest man’s fortune and would be any woman’s prize). But women for choice. I’ll never lose the wonder of women, best of all, of women pleased. My woman, the other in my double marriage. My Drusilla now, not his. My beloved, my queen, my salvation.
But not all mine. She is bereaved of Angelus too; competes with a lover’s melancholy that drives her apart from Darla more each day. Drusilla sits, turning the cards, day in, day out. She’s a pilgrim to the cardboard shrine; a prophetess seeking a future that pleases. The Emperor, the Tower, Alchemist, the Satyr, the Devil, playing their mad men’s morris, never pleasing my beloved. The Devil is an ass, I say. What’s the news from hell? She tuts, hushes, hides the cards.
My Drusilla dreams of following her Daddy. She’d have us on a wild goose chase, taking a sea voyage to follow love’s pilgrimage. We, her faithful friends, know she’d end, hopeless and saddened. She believes she’d end an island princess, laughing in sunlight; some ambition for a night walker like her.
It’s as well he’s gone, you know. Not one to fawn over the powerful, nor play the loyal subject indefinitely. I wouldn’t have stood Angelus long. I could have been a traitor to our little family; a Catiline or Sejanus, overmighty and power-seeking. We’d have fought in the end, if the gypsies hadn’t taken him. What a fight that would have been - a royal combat, fought over trash. Now, without his presence, I’m king (and no king), hollowly victorious.
God, I wish I could find love’s cure. We tumble, Drusilla, Darla, Angelus in his absence, me in my presence, four plays in one yet never cohering. Without him, we’re a triplicity of cuckolds, lovers all untrue to one another.
Enough maundering. (Anyone would think I was William still.) Eastward ho. Maybe France will be kinder. I fancy May day in Paris.
~~~~~