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| courtesy of deviantart.com |
This piece features two of my favourite characters to play with from The Brew; because every misadventuring hero ought to have the acerbic wit of a spinster aunt to keep him steady.
I wrote this quite a while ago, which is funny because between the visit to the seaside and the aunt being named 'Jasmine' - well, there's a lot of facts from present happenings that seem to have insinuated themselves into my past. I thought it fitting. This is part of the backstory, which may or may not affix itself to the beginning of the actual plot...
In England, people actually try to be brilliant at breakfast. That is so dreadful of them!
-Oscar Wilde-
Archie’s maternal
grandparents had belonged to that incredible class of people who possessed so
much practicality that they were able to conjure deeper impracticalities in a
moment than any sheerly impractical person might have managed in a lifetime. They
named their first daughter Charlotte, a name equipped with a sturdy sort of
sweetness very like its owner, and in that they could hardly have been anything
but sensible. She grew up to be a very pretty girl, with dark eyes that housed
the depths of the universe and a mass of dark hair that might have easily
overrun a few lesser galaxies. As soon as all was deemed judiciously proper,
she fell as decorously into love as anyone of her sex can be expected to, with
a wealthy, titled, landed man of few remarkable looks and many remarkable
stories. Of course, she really married him more for the stories and less for
the titles and land, but her parents never suspected such an impropriety. She
settled at his estate in Steeple, and they did not name their first and only
son “Archie,” but he soon acquired the nickname after he went to university.
The younger sister
(the very aunt towards whom Archie was now bound for a visit) had a very
different story. Her parents in their great quantities of practicality had
somehow decided that the name “Jasmine” was altogether right and fitting, and
so she had grown up with nicknames like “Jazz” and “Rasberries.” (The latter
might have been her own fault more than her name’s.) It was not that Jasmine was a bad name; it simply did
not suit her. Somehow, the large eyes and flowing hair escaped her, and the
flat, pale-brown tones of hair and eyes never blossomed into anything beyond a
passing stranger’s thought, “Well, she’s not bad to look at…” She was as different from her limpid name in
personality as in looks. Pigment was not entirely culpable for a perpetually
shrewish look in her eyes, and she had a way of hissing “men!” like a curse
word under her breath which eligibles of said sex found quite off-putting.
Jasmine Upton’s
fate was therefore sealed: a spinster and the favourite aunt. It did not matter
to Archie or to her that she was the only
aunt; both lived in full assurance that, had the former twenty aunts, it would
not have been otherwise. She lived in her family’s comfortable estate in the
wooded hills of North Chelsea, only a few hours’ ride from the northwest
seashores.
The prospect of
visiting the seaside was enough to delight the heart of any young man between
the ages of ten and thirty, much less one living in the middle of Chelsea’s
flatlands, but there existed a kinship between aunt and nephew deeper than a
boy’s love for running out of doors. Such a bond sprang not wholly out of the
lofty estimation of the aunt in the nephew’s eyes. Archie had somehow borrowed
her unremarkable looks in spite of being the son of her more striking sister,
and out of this came a maternal instinct towards her nephew on the spinster’s
part. What was more, she discovered early on that the lad was clever.
Their first
breakfast of this particular holiday together contained such familial
conversationalisms as characterized all their dealings.
“Darjeeling—”
“Please, Aunt, my
friends call me Archie.”
“Your friends—whom
I have yet to meet, I might point out, though I have run into one or two stupid
collegiate babes-in-arms who blithered on as if they might have some claim to
acquaintance with you—may call you what they will. I, as your aunt, have not the capacity to be so disagreeable, and
may call you ‘High Supreme Lord Darjeeling Falcon’ if I so please.”
Archie tried very
hard to look displeased and failed. He settled for stuffing his face with
marmalade and toast.
“Now, Darjeeling,
what will you do with yourself after you finish this six-year spell of trying
your wits in the company of dolts?”
Aunt Jasmine did
not think much of the current academic system, but if that had ever bothered
Archie he had come to see things her way long since. He set his teacup down
carefully and fixed his aunt with a grave stare. “Thank you,” he said at last,
before returning to his breakfast.
She did not blink.
“You are welcome, of course, though I’ll thank you not to use my honest questions
as excuses for you to play the enigma.”
Archie hastened to explain. “Thank you for
asking me what I meant to do with myself. Most people ask what I mean to do
with my degree, and I feel as though it ought to be some great, malleable
substance, which I may turn into a grand sculpture or a set of new drains. But
the depths of my organs (especially during breakfast) instinctively inform me
that my degree will be little more than a piece of paper for service, and while
I’m a dab hand at paper hats and boats neither
of those will do very well for keeping my head or my toes dry – let alone my
belly full!”
“Really, Archie,
if one didn’t know you were so clever one would think you fearfully stupid. Not
that I’m certain there’s a vast difference, mind,” she added, giving him an
ironic look over her slanted spectacles. She gave him those looks every now and
then, the sort that made him wonder if she were not fully capable of turning
him into a toad on a whim. The speculation struck him as delightful rather than
frightful. “My sister is not clever enough to be less clever, and her late
husband—God rest his soul!—had the same problem, and consequentially you felt
bound to outclever them both. Now, if I
had had the raising of you—”
“My dear aunt, if
you had raised me, you would find me insufferable. I count it one of the better
parts of my life that you did not
have a hand in my upbringing; it has made us so much the better friends.”
His aunt
contemplated the notion at the bottom of her teacup. “True,” she conceded at
last. “I shan’t pry into your future. I leave it to you to rush in where angels
fear to tread. Only tell me you don’t mean to go on dwelling in a state of
academia indefinitely. Academics are like narcotics, or perhaps the plague. If
you didn’t mean to get out sooner rather than later, I should have to disown
you, which wouldn’t put you off
terribly, but it would inconvenience me tremendously. A fate worse than
death, really,” her face grew as grave as Archie had ever seen it before: “I
would have to rewrite my will. I can’t stand the sight of my lawyer, much less
the sound; he grows more portly and dead-eyed and monologue-bound by the
century – not that Tetley & Sons isn’t a good firm, or the most lucrative
in the country. All the same, I’m glad you
did not study law.”
Archie absorbed
the statement and then selected the least irrelevant of all its contents as the
subject of his next statement: “I believe I’m graduating with a Tetley. He
studies law and complains perpetually about working for his father’s firm.”
For perhaps the
first time in his acquaintance with his aunt, she looked extremely anxious. “I
hope you’re not particularly acquainted with the boy!”
“Acquainted, but
there is little soul-sharing between us.”
“That’s a mercy,
then, for he’s certain to be a bore after a year at his father’s firm. That is
why you must never tempt me to disown you, for I don’t care to summon my lawyer
to my side ‘til after my flesh really begins to decay. And then, Darjeeling, I
fear you will have to suffer his presence, though I warn you to spend no more
time with him beyond the reading of the will. I’ve tried to make it a sprightly
document, but Tetley Sr. could make anything a frightful bore, and those things
are catching!”
“Do you mean, Aunt
Upton, that after ten minutes’ conversation I might find myself portly and
over-fond of the sound of my own voice?”
“I am quite
certain the latter is already true,” his aunt gave him a glare, the same glare
she had found effective in her youth at withering the hopes and self-confidence
of at least fifteen careless young men at once. Her nephew, she noted with not
a little pride, seemed to find the strength of such ire supremely amusing.
Still, she rallied her disgruntlement enough to add, “I don’t think there’s
ever much a chance of your being portly; the proportions of your paternal line
saw to that. Still, life is full of uncertainties.”
The conversation
was laid to rest after that, most likely due to the fact that Archie made a
point of eating two or three times his usual amount of morning feed. This did
not escape the notice of the aunt, who decided that persistent valor in the
face of an impending danger was one of his better qualities. She braced herself
for an entertaining fortnight.
