Orthodoxies [In progress]

Monserrat

One week later.

Seven days. They say the Lord threw together this sad-sack world in just that time. The deepest oceans and the vast continents marooned in them. The vault of the sky and the furnace of molten rock at the earth's burning core. The sun and the moon and the innumerable stars. The birds and the beasts and everything that breathes and grows and crawls and lives and dies.

Man, and all his many predators.

--

Nothing has changed at the Meralta in those seven days, except for the second-run film in the dusty, rarely used balcony theater. From NavarIn to O Pagador de Promessas. After midnight, just barely, when the streets of the Red Light District are just beginning to fill up, with sorority sisters on pub crawls and hipsters seeking sex and donuts. With truck drivers and drug dealers, lawyers and insurance agents, prostitutes - professional and amateur, of every age, sex, build, and potential persuasion.

The Meralta is not a place for red-lit revelry. No one brings their bachelorette party here. The patrons are lone and furtive, seeking a different (or perhaps merely cheaper) solace than the men and women, boys and girls displaying themselves in the red-lit display windows elsewhere in the district might offer. An insipid looking man with a comb-over and a clip-on bow tie mumbles something to the (same) bored clerk, shoves a crumpled handful of change beneath the bars of the ticket-seller's cage, then disappears inside.

The same prostitute in the doorway of the downstairs theater. The same scent of stale popcorn hanging in the air, a faint but filmy suggestion of chemically enhanced butter-substance. The same dull flicker of dying bulbs in dim sconces. The same worn red velvet runners on the once-grand staircases leading to the upstairs balcony. The small theater.

O Pagador de Promessas has already started. The musical, murmurous cadence of Portugese is audible three-quarters of the way up the stairs. If he does not speak it, but speaks one of its Latinate cousins, the language has a sliding sort of familiarity - like the new scent of old blood. Perhaps, like the trash downstairs, this one runs on a continual loop. A constant circuit of Zé do Burro's pledge, promise and fall.

The doors are open again, expectant.

This time, however, he can see her from the entrance. She stands at the front of the aisle, one shoulder leaning against the cheap baffling meant to sound-proof the balcony theater, arms crossed and resting against her narrow torso, her elbows sharp, pale face lifted in profile, dark eyes moving faintly as she follows the movement of the oversized figures on the screen. Hair loose, tonight, dark and sleek, the faintest hint of curl to it.

Something in her stance says that she is aware of him when first his shadow crosses the threshold of the old theater. Before then, even. But her attention remains on the screen until he draws abreast of her. Only then does she turn, catch him with the edge of a smile like a hook.

"William." The hint of a smile smoked dark eyes. "I have decided that I am no longer in the mood for pious fools," - and the flash of something dangerous, some flare of temper, grasped and then thoroughly leashed. Mastered. "Will you walk with me, instead."

William

He is on time: not early, not late. He strolls to the Meralta via the same route he took last time: down the street as if he was a piece of the night-life -- not aimless but not part of any pack just yet. Tonight William is not dressed as Timothy Dalton in A License to Kill, but affects the casual chic of an actor who wears expensive clothing that fits him well, flirts with modern-day dandyism without discarding masculinity.

And there is the 'Ventrue,' her hair a sluice of darkness, the faintest hint of curl. He doesn't know her well enough to be surprised by the fact that she is not lounging, this time, and when he does come abreast of her, when she does turn to catch him with her hooked smile (fish-hook, open eye?), there is a millisecond, his blue eyes direct and curious, and then he smiles all brash and easy and golden. There is a point to it: not sharp, but as if there were a joke to be shared -- as though there might be a joke to be shared.

And then she wants to change the plan. Go, from this safe, vetted meeting-place to the open street, where anything can happen.

Nobody ever said the monster behind William's eyes wasn't adaptable.

"Yes, I think I will, as long as I can extract your solemn promise not to slap me if I try to hold your hand. The city at night, the stars; a man can be held accountable, but one hopes not by the five-fingered judge."

Energetic, William; and all that energy turned into Force of Personality; a certain rueful, but strong, assured way of speaking, his voice pitched low so it skims conspiracy without ever actually getting its toes wet.

Monserrat

Ahh. She is dressed rather differently tonight as well. Gone the short skirt, the impossibly high heels, that could double as weapons. Stillettos with toes of gold. Replaced with thick-soled, well-oiled boots, black leather, flat to the ground. The sort of boots one could run in. Fight in. Stomp a stranger's face to an unrecognizeable and pulpy mass of blood and bone in.

Jeans and a low-cut, spaghetti-strapped blouse the color of the sea at midnight, the latter beneath a vintage wool blazer, menswear, the subtle hint of a plaid or pinstripe beneath the nap of the wool.

In the millisecond as she turns to him, his blue eyes direct and curious, her own catch the light. Not of the religious fable unfolding in a constant drone of Portugese on the screen, but one of those guttering sconces that line the balcony In that moment, her own eyes are not merely dark, but a deep, humid, murky sort of green.

And then the charm - open, golden, engaging - she by contrast seems disengaged from it, but willing to cede him the space required, willing to indulge it and then be so indulged. That lashing suggestion of leashed anger dissipates. She allows it to dissipate, grits her teeth (the molars, grinding. Not the eyeteeth. Not the canines. Not the fangs), and it opens up, spreads through her, makes room.

"Then you have my pledge. My solemn promise, should you try to hold my hand, I will not slap you." Murmured. The hook returns to the edge of her smile here. Suggestion, perhaps, that she would do rather worse than a slap were she of a mind.

"Shall we." The loose tip of her head toward the lobby, the sweep of inky hair, and she begins to walk. Behind them, on the screen, the Brazilian police murder this weeks Christ stand-in on the steps of he church, and the crowd begins to fight over his corpse.

William

Shall we, she says, and they shall, as simple as that.

The door catches their (no) reflections, disperses them among light. William tears his ticket stub in two and tosses it into the trashcan which waits, squats, hulks, just outside the faded lion-glory of the Meralta's carpet. The first re-emergence into the night and the blue-eyed boy looks both ways, up and down the street, getting his barings, a faint line between his eyebrows, his eyes squinched. Ages gone, men lead: nations, rebellions, revolutions. Artistic movements, underworld politics, scientific discoveries. And dances. William might well be from an age where social cues were controlled by a lady, and Monserrat counts, even edged as she is now, even swallowing grit and anger, sharpness, her own hooks: a lady or a land-mine. He's curious to find out which.

And so. A second to let her pick the route. The second squandered, he'll tip his head and indicate the left. Flash of jaw, of adam's apple, golden stubble: Did he die with his beard on or like a boy, naked, waiting still to be somebody? His hands find his pockets and his shoulders lift, as if seeking warmth: tiny masquerades that have become second nature (as once they were first, for it was no masquerade), and then...

Frank, invitational: "Tell me about your week. Who happened to sour your appreciation of pious fools?"

Monserrat

Monserrat squanders no such seconds. Outside, the cool, crisp night air. Winter fading into spring. How many winters fading into how many springs, with the night sounds cast around them in an ancient whirl. They go east, down the block and she is swift and assured even now, when she works to keep her pace a measured amble. Scattered in front of the hash parlor, a quartet at least of young, stoned men stand smoking on the sidewalk. She takes pleasure in scattering them. In the way they dance like atoms on the head of a pin.

Fewer masquerades than he employs, out here, though she employs a few herself. Breathes in order to feel the cold air enter her lungs. Would perhaps unearth a cigarette were if colder, so that the smoke could stand in for the exhaled mist of human breath.

Doctrinaire Sabbat - oh that great unwashed rabble - howl at such affectations. Tear down the walls and rule in truth, they shout at each other. Less than children, worms who have not seen a single human lifetime's worth of stars and moonrises and murders.

"Hah." He asks about her week. She laughs aloud; utters the laughter as just one exclamation, but there is a skin of a sharp and genuine humor wrapped around the jagged edges of her voice. She is watching him aslant, the gleam of the streetlights against his golden stubble.

A moment's frank appraisal. She holds him steadily in the disc of her gaze, steadily enough that her pace slows as her dark eyes skim him up and down, and down and up, and one more time before some circuit turns, some lock clicks home, some decision is made and not to be regretted. "I recently learned of the death of a colleague."

Her own gaze is heavy, and heavily lashed, her eyes ringed with kohl. ANd her hair gleams blue-black in the darkness.

"A pen-pal. A correspondent. A scholar, of sorts. Condemned for his many heresies, or some such. Some trumped up, imaginary infraction against the proper social order."

Their pace has slowed, and her eyes remain on his face, cast slantwise. Ahead, the gleaming lights of a nightclub chasing neon against the dull and blasted sky. Stars pulse beyond, in the murky haze of a gathering fog, their brilliance blown out by the light pollution.

"Now you."She breaks off, cuts a glance away, and then back to him, steady now, as frank as he, though not precisely invitational. "I want an answer from you. Are you working for someone else. Or for yourself."

William

He makes some small sound in the back of his throat - resonant, deep, gleam-hint, neutral (fill in the blank [sympathy or interest or courtesy] - of acknowledgment when she mentions her colleage. The pen-pal. The correspondent. The scholar, of sorts. His regard is on her face, mostly; her eyes, as she speaks, but it sweeps once over her mouth and the skin of her throat, whether her body moves as she speaks, what sort of punctuation or lack there-of all that makes. "Good pen pals are difficult to find; my condolences on that point," he says, as if it were a natural thing to say.

Now you.

William's gaze drinks itself down. He still seems engaged; his eyes are still meeting hers, still easy enough doing so; maybe they go skyward for a second, as people's eyes will when they're thoughtful, when they're searching themselves -- but he knows himself well. His gaze drinks itself down, and though he seems so engaged, so present, there's a certain stillness -- a second in which he does not breathe when he should breathe, when he'd been playing the game 'til now -- that speaks of distance. Not, necessarily, from Monserrat: but wool-gathering, William, for a second.

"That's fair," he says, and then he appears to measure her before saying: "I'm working for myself."

It might be the truest thing he will ever say to her. Maybe once upon a time, a long, long time ago, there was a prince (our hero), and he lived in the day (which was bright), but did such deeds at night (as those who slept would quake to think on), and maybe then it was all for Some Thing, some Great Thing that was Yet To Come, that was to be Cherisehd and Protected. Something that lit a fire in his bones, that burnished his voice into the honey-whiskey thing it is today, the thing of power: and maybe then, that long time ago, maybe just maybe then he worked for somebody or something else. Maybe even now that all is mostly darkness and shade he still works for something that is only his because he has decided he will believe in it and because he has decided that it might as well be true:
But that's a fairytale, and when you say something is a fairytale in these modern nights, you're calling it a lie.

He has always worked for himself.

He grins at her. "As far as I'm aware."

Monserrat

As far as he knows.

Oh, this. This seems to please her. There is a glimmer of dark approval in her eyes, a certain unbending of her frame. That low hint of laughter that accompanied her earlier exclamation finds a sort of slow-burning, subvocal expression. A deliberate one, as all such sounds must be, in creatures who do not require oxygen for their continued existence. For whom respiration is now merely an artform, a frame that they inhabit to blend into the crowds of short-lived kine.

Monserrat offers William her arm, just so. Crooked. The gesture has a girlish feel to it. Can her perhaps imagine it – the quiet courtyard, the standing, radiant heat, the long shadows countersunk beneath the honeycombed gallery. The sound of water from a trickling fountain in the center, and two girls, dark-headed, crooked arm in crooked arm, tucked together and making a circuit of the velvet shadow and the scintillating sunlight. Whispering whatever paltry, wicked little secrets they might have to share. The sordid testimonials of an adolescent heart.

“Now, William,” their footfalls are soft, dampened by the night, the drifting mists, the shadows through which they stroll. Ahead a group of young women, drunk, gleaming with sweat spills from the nightclub on the corner. Billows open like a mobile, single-celled organism and contracts again, searching for shoes, keys, drinks, wraps, partners, cell phones and the way back home. They slice through them neatly, but her head is turned to follow the trajectory of one of the girls down the sidewalk, lingers, and then, finally returns to him. “ – we have discussed my week. Tell me of yours.”

William

Monserrat offers William her arm, just so. Crooked. A reward? William's grin has subsided in the natural course of things; he is no psychotic or addict, to grin and to grin, until one notices his grin is a skull's. Nope: He has the rhythm of a living man down pat -- the grin has subsided, but the remnants of it are in his opaque eyes, the lift of his eyebrows, the contours of his cheeks, the almost-faded twist of his mouth, which twists again -- crooked -- at Monserrat's gesture. He takes her arm, just so. Having taken it, he keeps it close. His clothing soaks up what borrowed heat he gives-off: the cold pale stars have secretly been burning all these nights, but William, who gives off the impression of dynamism or of vigor even when he is not in a passion over something, is secretly ice. He might have been a boy once who, when his cheek was touched, was told: you burn like a bonfire. Until one night: your skin as cold as winter -- come in. And maybe that was when he knew.

"Have we really, though?" William says, and the cadence might conjure up some other place briefly: some place more North Easterly or last Centuryish. He doesn't go so far as to lose his common-day television American accent. "I'd say it was more of a mention, though I'd be happy to discuss it in greater depth: I find rebels interesting -- and all proper heretics are transformed into rebels eventually." Thoughtful: and it seems perfectly sincere, this musing, as if it might take him away, though he shan't let it.

He smiles at her, something with the eyes that the flickering neon of a sign have limned in hallucinogenic amber; have darkened the blue to a near black; have gilded him as gold as a knight in an illuminated manuscript faced with Hellfire. "My week," he says, and directs their walk across the street. The traffic is in a lull. Somewhere nearby horns blare, the tipsy impatient to get somewhere else, impatient with those who are skulking from sidewalk to sidewalk, narrow black shadows. "No deaths, so you've one up on me there. A number of books, and librarians." His voice flattens on the word 'librarians,' and the name of that tone is dislike. "For the most part, I've been exploring, as happy with Seattle as a clam with a pearl. If you haven't taken one of the ghost tours, you're missing out."

What he's not saying is of course that some of his week has been spent inquiring after her. The blueblood who isn't. Monserrat, sired by a man of faith and conviction. What he's not saying is of course that some of his week has been spent setting up some insurance, contacting someone who might be able to follow her after this little meeting, discover what neighborhood she sleeps in, some scrap of information that'll let him excavate whatever false identity she's living under, and there-by excavate her true identity. What manner of beast he's working with.

What he's not saying is, of course, that he spent the week hanging out at Voodoo Donuts, and directing servants.

He did spend a lot of time with books. And Librarians.

Even recently arrived in a city, William is a good boy; he has already been working on their mutual project. He might even have something, but he's in no hurry to divulge: that vampiric patience -- a learned trait -- at work again.

Monserrat

Without her heels they are quite of a height, a matched pair, one might say, with a certain degree of humor. The kind of irony one inhabits rahter than breathes. The sun and his enshadowed sister - some dark, twinned star. She makes a noise - a back-of-throat - noise, when he corrects her. That her confession was more of a mention, musing over the progression from heretic to rebel, and back again. Her eyes are sharply focused on his profile in this moment, tracing the smooth cut of cheek, the gleam of his eyes beneath the amber glow of the few still-working streetlights. The ghastly slice of neon as they walk below a brothel's garish sign.

"And all rebellions turn static. Doctrinaire. Revolutionaries begin the endless, feverish search for counter-revolutionaries and create new orthodoxies of thought and belief. Once you have established a new orthodoxy, what do you create but new heretics, who will someday seize the terrible courage of their outsized convictions and take up arms against their father's gods.

"Rather like the life cycle of a moth, the endless rounds of creation and destruction. The burrowing blindness of the cocoon, the brief burst of brilliance as it emerges from gestation, only to end, ragged and terrible, circling some buzzing, ugly, electric, man-made fixture, imagining it the moon."

This is all briskly spoken, and though there is a keen edge to the words, her features remain dispassionate, quite nearly clinical. As if she herself had not lived and relived this monstrously vexing little cycle too many times to count.

"So you see, I do not find rebels interesting. I find them foolish and foolishly dangerous. I prefer a world without orthodoxies. God hardly requires our permission to be. It simply is."

--

She remains as close as he keeps her, but no closer. There's no ceding to this, just that lingering sense of girlish intimacy, the dark head tipped toward his own golden one, the settled, matching pace achieved without apparent thought.

He is happy with Seattle as a clam with a pearl.

"Are clams really happy with their pearls?" - she murmurs in response, challenging but not arch, beneath the drift of his voice.

Then at last, a low noise. This one of clotted bemusement at his endorsement of ghost tours.

"And did you see any ghosts, William?

"Do you have any to see?"

William

The glint of sound in the back of his throat which is now familiar: a chuckle arrested -- a vibration of sound that doesn't seek to become bright. The glint of it is enough -- like an almost-light on the edge of a sharp-thing, or on jewelry, ornament. "I applaud your metaphor, Monserrat, if not the implication behind it. Is there something unworthy or wrong with living out the life cycle of a moth? Why not say that rebellions are a first step?"

Caesura.

"Familiar with Dylan Thomas? The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, yadda yadda," and he speaks with one hand, sketching with great energy a line that means the rest of the poem, a hobbyist's enthusiasm. It's his voice that is arresting, however. His voice that is most alive. Engaged, as much in her reaction as the apparent hint of his beliefs. "And that's why I find rebels interesting, heretics as much so, and why -- " with an air of rue " -- while I might be moved to name some individual revolutionaries 'foolish' or 'foolishly dangerous' -- " and the rue disappears, swept as surely away as a thread of blood in a river " -- I'd, shucks, I'd feel like a heel for letting that get in the way of an interest. Have you ever found a place where you could live without orthodoxies?"

That last question is polite, but there's no malice and no edge buried in it: a matter-of-factness, as if she might very well have found some out-of-the-way village once upon a time and set-up her own cult of kine and taught them how to think. Or perhaps he's only thinking of a cult, or a club, a coterie of like-minded individuals, a controlled crowd beneath them all: Perhaps he's only wondering at her contentment. Making conversation.

And he always has an answer, a quip, at ready: that's as true as the sun is (and the languor it brings, entirely natural after so many years).

Are clams really happy with their pearls?

Angelic: "Oh, sure. Happy until some amateur pearl-diver comes around and pesters it."

Then: a cut of a look, a deepening of the shadow at one corner of his mouth. He rubs his hand across his jaw. Scritch-scratch, a faint sound.

"I rather think I might have."

Navarin

Monserrat
There is a double-feature at the Meralta tonight - the old movie theater tucked away on an otherwise rather quiet street in the Red Light District. Quiet is relative here. There is a brothel across the way, redlights on in the picture windows, and a low-key hash parlour with the clever name, HASH PARLOUR written in soap on the window. The goods are hidden behind bamboo blinds, but there is light and music just inside. A long, narrow alley bisects the block and spills out behind the Meralta. The logo of a greasy spoon gleams in neon between the dark buildings, which sketch and skew strangely together at this hour of the night. The low throb of bass from the club a block away, the crowded shout of laughter as a group of co-eds spills out onto the sidewalk, debating whether to tramp down to the strip club, or try to find a cab with the persistently loopy logic of the well-intoxicated.
BARELY LEGAL: XXX has top billing, and the bored clerk in the glass ticket booth brilliant like with a sickly white flourescent flare hands out tickets to a semi-steady stream of seedy types without every asking which of the two movies offered his customers wish to see.
Nazarín is below BARELY LEGAL: XXX on the Marquee. They haven't the proper accent for the i, so it is capitalized. NazarIn in big block letter.
That is the movie William has been directed to see.
"Buy a ticket," she instructed into his voice mail. In a low voice made of smoke and whiskey. The smallest laugh. "I do not believe in charity."
William How will our hero appear, one wonders? There is the noise of a host of bikers who host as angels host understand: all fury and sound. Maybe he is one of them? But they pass by.
Here is a sleek town-car, its armored carapace inscrutable as it glides toward the quiet street and the Meralta, and the only thing that can be guessed about whoever is within is that they've got money. Maybe the person within is a gangster of the elegant savage school of gangsterism? But the town-car pauses only to allow a burly man to get out and purchase cigarettes, and it is clear after a moment that our hero is not in the car and is not the burly man. Maybe he is one of the young men who comes pouring out of the Has Parlour, their eyes pink, their smiles varying shades of out-of-their-minds? Maybe he's the one with torn jeans, paper-clips and safety pins thrust through the skin of his jaw -- a beard of wire. But no, they pass too. What about that man, over there? He almost looks as if he were dressed for a wedding or a black tie occasion and has been separated from his party, and his tuxedo has to be a few decades out of fashion -- thankfully for him a good suit never goes out of style, hmn? And it's just possible that there are movie nerds enough to recognize a simulcram of the suit Timothy Dalton's James Bond wore in A License to Kill.
He's strolling easily down the street toward the theater, and he even stops in front of it for a moment, eyes flickering over the marquee just in time for a rather wry movement of his mouth. Amusement, or something like it. Certainly amusement, the sort-of head-shakey amusement belonging to one who's just had one put over on him. He pats himself down as he approaches the window and taps two fingers imperiously against the glass of the ticket booth in order to recall that clerk's attention from a chatroom. "One for Barely Legal," he says, and he has our hero's voice. A voice that is the sort of somber people expect not to stay somber for long, as if behind that resonance there's a smile waiting in the wings -- there's some oratory, some compliment, some passionate avowal, just readying itself for its cue. Liveliness. His voice gives the impression that if you scratch him with your nail there's something essentially present there. Something forceful. Something to be remembered by. He is charismatic, our hero, or could be.
The bored ticket-taker couldn't be less helpful when he slides the ticket to BARELY LEGAL XXX over, and William could not be less interested in the life of a bored ticket-taker when he catches their eye and winks - giving the clerk cause to blink - and then takes the ticket and strolls into the lobby.
He doesn't bother with buying popcorn, though he does regard the candy with interest. He's fairly certain that particular candy bar was discontinued back in the 80s. He knows what time it is; and even so, he heads to the men's room, where he is abandoned to privacy until he emerges ten or so minutes later and walks into Nazarín.
Monserrat There are two theaters in the Meralta: downstairs and upstairs. The doors are propped open to Barely Legal, the several iterations of which (all appear to be the thirtieth of their name) are on constant streaming rotation in the downstairs theater. The air is redolent of popcorn and, shall we call them, secretions? - and a bored looking prostitute hangs out just inside the open doors, texting and snapping her gum. She herself seems barely legal, though in an infinitely more used-up way than the doe-eyed co-eds in brief flickering contrast on the screen.
She does not notice our hero, or anyone else. Not until they feel her up. Or shoot her up. One or the other will pull her away from her twitter feed and texting.
--
The Meralta was never a movie palace, but it did aspire to grandeur, once upon a time. Our hero has his choice of curving staircases opening off the lobby, leading up into darkness where the second theater shows the classic Mexican film.
Threadbare red velvet beneath his feet, and worn faux marble beneath his hand if it skims the bannister. A moment for the eyes to adjust to the too-dim sconces lining the walls; a view over the lobby, the clerk returning to his chat room, eyes glazed with the reflected light from his laptop window.
The dusty candy display, the filthy popcorn dispenser.
The doors here are open too, propped open. On the screen, in flickering black and white, a slim young girl wrapped in a headscarf staggers through an open square, while the handsome priest fingers his rosary and prays.
She is seated three rows up, arms open wide to either side, rather like Christ on the cross. One leg across the other, desultory, her dark head aslant, her eyes affixed to the screen as the prostitute climbs through the noble priest's shuttered windows until the scene changes.
Then and only then does she lift her dark eyes from the screen and settle them directly on him, finding him whereever he may be in the darkness. The edge of a half-smile, carved into a shapely mouth and a visage like marble.
"I am surprised you came." Her voice, in his presence, is lighter and brighter than when mechanized and digitized and compressed. There is no particular accent to it, but her words are too precise to be entirely American. "I confess it."
Call it the weight of age.
William He was not lost in the dark. William stood, looking up at the screen while the slim young girl wrapped in a headscarf staggered through an open square, while the handsome priest fingered his rosary and prayed, a figure cut out've the theatre's gloom by the light of the film. He patted his pockets with the unmistakable air of a man who was about to take out a cigarette case, unclasp it, and smoke. He is probably the sort of man who'd bend his golden head to the cigarette, the better to flick a cynical or laughing look up at the target of his next remark. But instead, he undid his bowtie as if he were one of those in the other theatre, preparing to squeeze some enjoyment out've - er - life. And William swept a look around the theater, of course. Saw the woman, desultory, dark, and casual as a mistress or an artist or an actress. Saw no one else.
But she did not react immediately. She did not so much as look at him, unless briefly. And William waited, with the kind of patience belonging to vampires, and turned his head back to the screen, standing at his ease in the front of the theatre. He is not a tall man, William, though he may once have been accounted tall, coming to only five feet and eight inches. It is a height that has never done him harm, and he seems perfectly capable of being taken by bemused absorption in Nazarín.
It's possible that he is remembering a time before film. It's possible, just, that he remembers long years before the movies, long years before the movies learned how to truly echo life in colour, and that the first time he saw a colour film the dessicated lump of cold red meat in his chest spasmed, and he thought: That's not how the sun looked. They've got it wrong. But the thought hadn't been as one with certainty as this man who looks forever-young usually contrives to appear. It's possible. But is it likely? Perhaps not.
Either way, once she speaks, he turns and offers Monserrat a smile directly. The film-light flickers through his hair like a halo, gives him a shadow-crown. The smile: Engaging boy, and encouraging: "Very good, if that's the least of your sins. I stand-by, ready to hear and offer absolution."
A swift stride or two, something leggy and energetic, forceful, brings him up the stairs and into her row, where-upon he offers the creature his hand.
Monserrat "Clever boy." The edge of her smile deepens, and finds some gleaming answer in her eyes as he offers her absolution, some facsimile of it. And climbs the steps with that same engagement, that same energy that animated his retort. "But I have already been blessed and absolved of all my once-and-future sins."
When he is half-way to her, she stands and stands and stands, not so much straightening as unfolding impossibly long limbs from their lazy arrangement in the threadbare velvet seats to something more alert. She was perhaps his height before she added rather casual four inch heels to the ensemble and now, therefore, towers above him as she holds out a slim white hand and a long white arm. Cool as the first kiss of winter, smooth as glass.
When he draws abreast of her, she takes the time and care - takes out the time and care - to look him up and down. Head to toe and toe to head and back again, lingering on his eyes, his feet, his hands in this order. There is a decided note of appreciation in the frank assessment of her gaze - the appreciation of a drover for a particularly fine pack mule, and no more.
"Monserrat," an earnest pressure of her palm to his. A certain grip. A show of strenght, and perhaps a test of the same. "I think that is all the name you will require."
William There is a sound in the back of his throat: the opening salvo of a chuckle -- a glint of sound that doesn't seek to become light or brightness or fire. The glint: that's enough, accompanied as it is by the deepening of his smile, the crooking of it into an asymmetrical thing. "Oh-ho? By who or by what?" His voice is stripped of challenge and shies away from mockery by dint of being rather dryly chiding -- inquiry sans fangs.
William is either too patient or too slowed down and well-used to taking his tithe of time to find anything odd or hackle-raising in the tone of Monserrat's appreciation: or perhaps he is a beatific creature -- an angel, of sorts, happy with existence for existence's sake, and easy in the moment. His gaze is to all appearances frank, if not precisely open. The blue eyes manage to just refrain from twinkling, though a twinkle warning has been generally issued. In the theatre, looking at the dark-haired kindred, her bloodline enshadowed, enshrouded, his eyes are an obfuscated blue. William does not take the four or so inches she tops him by in good part, but that's only because he doesn't seem to regard it. He adjusts any expectations he may have had about looking physically down on the monster before him and that is that. She presses his palm, and he squeezes her hand.
"I suspect that name suits you," says he. "Mine is William." He switches languages, then, from All-American American to Spanish, heavily influenced by Mexicans in California, to gauge by the accent. "Have you seen the film before?"
Monserrat "By myself first and foremost," a dry chiding, a dry return, her voice deepening with the crisp heat of a longstanding bemusement. There is the faintest pause. Deliberate, deliberative certainly, for the creature now beside him is nothing if not considered.
"I have always believed," settled back into the theater seats, she crosses one long, long leg over the other. Her tone is lightly conversational, as if they were discussing their favorite Superbowl commercials, or the ideal week to visit Disneyland. "you see," and lightly confidential, though in this tone serves curtain rather than mirror, masking whatever lies beneath all the more. " - that we are blessed rather than damned.
"And our sins forgiven, one and all."
--
"Mmm," a faint noise of acknowledgment when he remarks that her name sutis her. "Monserrat, of Clan Ventrue." She is in profile to him, the hook of her half-smile just visible in the flickering half-light. Smug enough that she expects him, when called to do so, to parrot the lie though perhaps not to believe in it. "A pleasure, William."
Then, her chin rising to the screen, she tips her head aslant to take in his accented Spanish. And nods, and replies in kind, "I have." Her own Spanish is European. With a Catalan lilt, should he have the ear for it. "Shall I tell you how it ends?"
William It is difficult to tell whether or not William waits for Monserrat to be seated out of an adherance to chivalry (ladies' first) or because the square-cut window to the projector room distracts him for a second and his eyes snag there. Either way: He takes a seat only a moment after she does. He takes the seat beside her as if they were friends or on a date and he pulls his suit-pants up with the tiny gesture of the habitually elegant and then slouches his spine against the faux-velvet faded tatter-red seatback. Synchronization, he crosses his leg too, ankle on his knee, long-fingered hand on his ankle, a ring to glint cold gold in the dark like a promise of things to come.

Monserrat, of Clan Ventrue. He huffs a chuckle, this one more fully realized than that which had glinted, sharp, in his throat before. Bright boy. Keep him around for eternity. That was somebody's idea. There are men who can chuckle and giggle and generally seem like idiots or hucksters. Then there are men like William, who, when they appear surprised into betraying amusement, seem only as if they're fully entering the conversation, sweeping the clouds away from it, making it real. "I wouldn't have pegged you for a blueblood," says he, as angelic as you'd ever please.
He's still speaking Spanish, and if his accent is Mexican, then he is fluent enough: "Don't, 'til I guess. The priest loses his faith and is ruined by women. Everybody and everything he loves turns on him. In the end, he's a broken man, and one wonders what - if anything - one was supposed to learn."

Monserrat And she in turn forsakes the screen as he breathes out that chuckle, as the laugh finds deeper resonance somewhere in his throat and chest. Her eyes quick and dark upon his features, the only light within them the glimmer reflected from the screen. An encapsulation of the body of the work before them.
"Would you not." No implied query leavens the words themselves, and her voice is a careless decrescendo. "Perhaps that is why I am so often misunderstood."
Her attention remains on him now, unyielding to the pleasures of the screen. The dark sweep of the story, the endless humiliations and betrayals to which the saintly priest is subjected throughout his long road to perdition. Now comes the madwoman to set his home on fire.
"A fair guess. Men are always ruined by women. And the virtuous are beset on all sides by the world. Though perhaps the lesson is more evident than you imagine."
A well life well-lived," and still, and still, and still, dark eyes simmering on his angelic countenance. " - and a poor life badly lived end in much the same way."
The coil of her half-smile deepens. "Which is to say, the gallows. And faith be damned."
William "What, because you won't be pegged," says he, the golden remnants of that deep-throated chuckle hinted at yet, ruins surfacing in his tone: which is the equivalent of a shrug. "Well sure, that's an invitation to misunderstandings. Let's take a moment," and it is possible to imagine him malicious, though he has grown blander, "to bow our heads and pray for those who don't realize they've accepted the invitation, eh?"

His eyes flicker unwillingly from Monserrat when the madwoman comes to set the priest's home afire. That dessicated red muscle again: it does not spasm but only imagine it does, or did once. Gone with the Wind. Tara Burning, and how many lives were really lost when the Sunset Syndicate gave a private screening to kindred. How many were unprepared by the sudden wet blanket of flame that was not there: heat they could not feel: consumption they could only see. Then William turns his attentive gaze back to the woman, a faint smile on his lips, caught in his eyes, bestowed like a thundercloud or a star on his brow.
"How stark your assessment. Did your Sire teach you your inclination for this philosophy or did you spring fully formed from his brow?"
"But I must defend the easiness with which I reached my guess and disagree with you on one point." When she'd been in profile, when the line of her throat had been proffered just so, he'd studied it. Perhaps he'd thought: A waste, to find no pulse there, and no outlet for hunger but a cold one. "Men are sometimes ruined by their brothers."

Monserrat "There will be times to come, William," she returns, dark voice whetted now. A gleam of something well-honed beneath. A knife, a blade, a glittering scalpel, the edge slicing nearly, firmly into tissue beneath. " - when I think I shall not like your tongue.
"Not tonight," reassurance, this, some bemused simulacrum of it, and a sense of laughter deep and resonant swallowed back into her lungs, subsumed beneath her cold, pale skin. "Tonight you have amused me, and therefore I forgive all."
--
She has uncurled her long legs, now, planted both feet in their high heels solidly on the ground and leveraged herself up with the easy grace of a black swan gliding on some mirrored lake.
"My Sire was a man of great faith," slung across the back of her chair, a wrap of dark cashmere. She lifts it and slings it around her shoulders with evident ease, then dips low to retrieve one last belonging - a small leather clutch, black as sin. " - and little understanding.
"Call me self-made."
Standing straight now, she edges past him and begins to walk carefully down the steps. She says nothing more until she has nearly reached the side door, but then she turns, tugging on a leather glove.
"They are showing O Pagador de Promessas one week hence.
"You will join me. Won't you."
William He is on his feet when she stands. This time it is undoubtedly because of a chivalrous impulse, because he has been honed these many years into a courteous creature, and thus courtesy has become as a shadow is to a body. An action that requires a courteous reaction occurs; the courteous reaction is already occuring. He is on his feet when she stands, all leashed energy, enabled to offer his hand should her ballet of leaving give him a space to do so, and otherwise he stands inches shy of her in those heels and he is playing at ornament.
"I'm happy to hear it. And should the night come you find your forgiveness difficult to reach," says he, "tell me in words. I'll remind you that we are blessed."
When she passes, our hero -- for he is our hero, let us not forget -- reclaims his seat, though a different one, one arm slung over the back of the seat beside him, his head aslant. His is not a conscious echo, and his eyes are tracking Monserrat down the stairs. To the side-door. His eyes are on her glove. The pale hand disappearing within. He inhales and exhales: just like a real boy!

And says, "Bet on it. I'll see you then, Monserrat."

Murder Mosts Nights 3 BY HARV

"Did you hear?"

He sat up blearily from his place on the table, trying not to think about pain and its variety of definitions. The warbling haze of his eyesight settled on Mirabelle, who's delicate fingers were wrapped snugly about the edges of a paper, fresh off prints and presses. Fresh enough that she had ink staining her fingertips. Such tiny fingertips. Like the pinpoints of quills, touched at the nail with a faint tint of pviolet that he could never quite figure out how she managed to maintain. It matched the supple sheen that stained her lips, which rarely saw a smile or anything but the sardonic these days. Which, he decided right there and then, was a shame. He squinted, flushing tears from his eyes, which he wiped away with what he thought was where his index finger was, but instead seemed to be his wrist. Her bounty of red curls came into view, albeit briefly and he allowed himself a momentary wandering of sights toward the pert flash of pale, pale, palest breast that leaped out above her black leather bodice.

"Giancarlo?" He caught her eyes, side-long down her nose, head tilted aslant, neck curving with the motion to expose a delicate throat of careful cords and slightly open jaws. The pink of her lips pulled back from her teeth in a vague showing of ferality. "My Tits are for customers, Dear."

He grunted, swallowing around some lodged nugget in his throat, head already descending toward the table and the rather comfortable puddle of...something, he'd been using for a pillow. His eyes slipped shut, the light tickle of floating hair sending a hum past his throat and through his nasal cavity. It rippled his tiny pillow pond and he smiled almost dreamily.

"Giancarlo-" He winced slightly, which disrupted his ripples. He could feel her gaze settling on him then. The one thing about all good Harlots was their penchant for letting you know when you had their attention. Gaining yours was not so much a talent as it was expected and Mirabelle had a thousand different methods, not all of them pleasant, to gather up his attentions quite quickly. At this very moment, she was employing a rather patient stare that spoke more volumes than were coming out of her bodice.

He decided that today would be the day he would ignore such things. Defy the common rule and response. He feigned a soft snore into his puddle.

And for a few blissful seconds, it was the only sound available to his ears. Excepting of course, the various low-life mutterences from the surrounding patrons of the bar they were in. He had made it a point not to look at much when they had entered, simply told Mirabelle that he wanted someplace dark, dank and all together discontinuous with the remainder of civilization. She had found something called Il Resto Chioccia, in a part of Venice that he was fairly sure did not exist in any other state but when thoroughly drunk. Or engaged in business of a most lewd nature, as Mirabelle often was.

For those few precious seconds, however, he found he could think about nothing and know a sense of happiness.

"Giancarlo!" The shriek came about his ear, a feathering touch combined with a hell-piercing pitch and topped off with the clapping of that dainty hand into his puddle, the sharp inhale snorting long streams of stale beer into his nasal cavity, where it did it's level best to drown him over the span of a half minute. Mirabelle remained nearby, calmly returning her attentions to the paper in her hands, which she perused most fastidiously. Of the other patrons, none had been disturbed from their own stupors by her clarion.

He finally recovered enough to lean his elbows on the table, hands wrapped around the back of his head and ears hugged to his wrists. He groaned out something foul and, thankfully, unintelligible to which she offered a soft snort, the sort reserved for ladies.

"Welcome back. I'm quite sure whatever business you were hoping to pay for tonight, did not account sleep." He grumbled again, a little more coherently or...perhaps simply more heated. Enough at least to get her attention, which came very close to his tucked in arms, which only cinched tighter about his head at her proximity. She whispered. He heard her anyway. He hated that.

"Do you find yourself wondering sometimes about just what sort of life led you to this? How it is you came to preside over such a storm of Merda that would place you firmly at war with your own memories? At war and losing I might add, if your state of mind and body-" She slapped at the pouch of a gut he carried out front of him, not gently "-is any indication. Really, I had thought you might have found, in all these years, some better way of coping with your sad upkeep of a life.”

He kept his eyes closed and his arms where they were, listening to her breathing softly near the outside of his wrist. He gripped his molars to one another, as hard as he could, listening to the enamel grate by fractions of inches. It seemed to last forever, but only a moment later and she was leaning back in her chair, one leg over the other, the stretching groan of sashaying petticoats, cut just short of immodesty, drifting out across her thighs, tattered here or there for invitation’s sake. The paper was once more in her grasp and she returned to studying it’s writings with inquisitive attention.

He eventually came up for air, a loud gasping inhale that shot his eyes wide open. He blinked several times without recognition of his surroundings, before the blurry promise of the bar counter and the stout and sleeping mountain of a keeper and felt a sudden and powerful urge for a new drink.

Someone had gone and spilled his last one, rather unkindly, the excess dripping down the side of his face.

“Are you ready to hear the news then?”

He answered with a loud scraping of chair legs, pushed back along the floorboards. He near, threw himself to his feet, steadying with planted hands on the table they were sharing. The motion was repeated, throwing himself into forward motion in hopes of picking up enough momentum to strike the bar’s top-most fourth and fifth feet of height with arms across it, rather than into the thick oaken paneling that made up it’s lower First to Third feet.

He heard Mirabelle clear her throat, that oh so pleasant voice reaching out toward him even at a distance, tickling his ear as if she had followed along in his footsteps.

““Tragic are these times, we live in” says Arturo Mezzino, chief publisher and scribe for these our-” She paused, the paper ruffling sharply “-Chronicles of the Canal. “That we are chosen to receive such appalling description as transpired not a night ago.””

He struck the bar at some point around description, sprawling desperately as his momentum caught up to and surpassed his co-ordination. His arms and chin and neck caught most of the force, a spittle laced cough spraying the bar as he doubled up and over the wood, in search of his gag reflex and a working pair of lungs.

“”The Family Eisler of Austrian descent, around Steiermark, found themselves born of what could only be the Devil’s very own hand. Some call foul magics and others claim the Untested Sciences as the culprit, but the tragic shortening of Sir Bernhardt Eisler of the Aus-...Aues-”...I’m beginning to think our would be occupiers came up with a language so vastly difficult, as to ward off any would be conquerors who could not realize it was a Country. “-...Some Austrian Military presence I don’t care to try and pronounce any longer, remains a mystery even at this time. What is known are the strange and haunting calamity that bled through our Fair streets within the City, rousing many from the night’s ablutions to find a temporary lunacy plaguing the lanes and bridges. Normal citizenry were turned to hysteric animals and the Constabulary were called nearly to a man, to apprehend and calm much of the seemingly unhinged collective that had witnessed Sir Eisler’s unpleasant demise.”

He didn’t remember ordering anything over Mirabelle’s description and voice but at some point, a tankard was set into place between his out-stretched arms, his eyes bleeding open to regard the mountain of a Barkeep who was staring at him with one good eye and a tongue prodding the inside of one cheek. He made a note to burp an .apology and began the long interlude to pick himself back up and prepare for the return trip. This would take some care as the contents of the mug were precious and spilling would not be acceptable.

He heard the door creak open as more bodies shuffled in from the afternoon sun, a cluster of voices suddenly muted and dull under Mirabelle’s continuing description.

“”The Doctorate and Apothecarian Guild have been put on standing notice by the Austrian Dignity, putting to rights all those minds present at the unfortunate event who suffered visual trauma” Hah! How much you want to wager the only minds on that list are those within the Aut-community. “Meanwhile, the hunt continues for those witnesses as yet to be apprehended for consideration and assistance-” Now isn’t that just tragic to hear, Giancarlo?”

He climbed to a standing position, both hands wrapped around the heavy tankard, his gaze finding the frothy surface and then- Aha! Lightning! He put a hand over the top of the Tankard, grinning at the genius of it. The voices by the door and the boots they belonged to, were moving through the bar now, loudly and with purpose. Heavy set steps, the sort of authority one wore on a belt and a vest.

“Giancarlo.”

He grunted, nodding his swaying thanks to the Barkeep.

“Have you been paying attention to what I’ve been saying?”

He soured his expression with his back still turned, slightly fearful of her reaction should she catch it, though he had no way of knowing if she possessed some feminine method of identification even without line of sight-

“I can see you in the mirror, Giancarlo. Hardly charming.”

He winced and cursed (‘Merda’) beneath his breath, tonguing around the inside of his sticky mouth (when was the last time he had any water?) before allowing a sigh to escape. He looked up into the mirror to give Mirabelle a rather frank sort of stare, only to discover she was no longer alone at their table.

The men around her wore the livery of the Military collective of Austria. Occupiers one and all, each bearing a waxed moustache to keep with the times, each slightly different in colour or thickness than his fellows. Their garments were long sleeveless coats, trimmed gold and colour a naval blue, while the simple rectangularly askew hats atop their heads spoke of an authority he couldn’t quite get up the muster to respect. He did a quick check of their numbers (four at the back, two on either side of Mirabelle, one standing out and directly up front) and found that they’d brought enough of a compliment to be expecting trouble and a Lieutenant alongside who’s sour expression said this was less a duty and more of a punishment for some mishap or other.

“Signore Giancarlo Baptiste Luardo?”

He grunted at the mirror, their reflections doing much to peel away whatever authoritative airs they may have wanted to present. Mirabelle piped in with a casual tug of one of the nearby soldiers. He watched the man glance down, catching a full eyed view down the generous and perfectly positioned fulsome of her pushed up cleavage, while she spoke in some low husk.

“That’s Bernado, Dear.” A pause from her, eyes casting glances without a hint of a curled lip, toward the Soldier’s nethers and back. “And your accent is atrocious.”

Who, thankfully, did not understand what she was saying and took cues more from her flirtatious expressions and gestures, than anything else. His veneer of professional militancy cracked just slightly, a brow perking and a slight flicker of a smile coming to one corner of his lips.

He repressed the urge to roll his eyes, least the Lieutenant’s reflection suddenly become firm. Well...firmer, than it happened to be. He cleared his throat, leaning forward against the bar, mug hovering before his jaw, a sudden stability creeping into his movements as the cold hand of sobriety found it’s way into his brain and tongue. He wasn’t sure if that was a gift or curse, but felt no need to dissuade the reflex.

“Sono interessata a ciò che la comunità Austriaca ha richiamato i problemi con questo o qualsiasi altro giorno fino alla fine della mia sospensione, signore.” He drained half of the mug he’d been given, glancing at the Barkeep as he did, who was gauging him in return, rubbery lips puffed out in a slightly confused and fearful frown.

The Austrian Lieutenant stood at stiff attention, not bothering to speak. His soldiers glanced at one another absently, then back to their commanding officer. He took another sip of the beer, licking froth from off his moustache, sucking on the tips to get at each drop. He heard Mirabelle offer a sigh and repressed a smirk.

“I believe what Signore Bernado is trying to say, Gentleman? Is Er ist auf Urlaub. So lassen ihn allein.”

To which he finally turned around to stare quizzically, brow furrowed, lips peeled back in a slight smile of surprised. Mirabelle turned her attention toward him, one well sculpted brow perked, the newspaper on the table before her, hands primly set one over the other, to touch those dainty fingertips to the table. She fluttered her lashes with expert ease.

“A lady needs to know many languages, if she’s to assure all men of their adequacies, Giancarlo.”

It was the Lieutenant’s turn to clear his throat, with none of the put on airs of accident. A purely attention grabbing gesture, that had him step forward smartly, hard heeled boots clacking against the floorboards. Their uniforms were stiff, their attire, entirely ceremonial and though fit for duty, he imagined it would make them poor runners. A man could play hide and seek with them for ages in Venice’s tight corridors.

The Lieutenant thrust out a hand, within it, a neatly folded piece of parchment with an Austrian Seal on it’s lip. He reached out gingerly to pluck it from the Lieutenant’s hand, a wariness creeping into his system, even as the tinkling silver of Mirabelle’s laughter, hardly humoured or humourous, drifted in with a guess.
“Methinks, Giancarlo, my love of loves, your vacation is over.”

He pulled back the seal, to flip the page open, the stationary mark of Paulo Marzetti, Chief of Venice’s Constabulary and his Commanding Officer within the immediate vicinity leaping out to at him before word one of anything. It told him all he needed to know, but did the Lieutenant the courtesy of reading it through.

His head was shaking and his smile was gone by the time he got to the end of the page, Mirabelle’s laughter suddenly growing in volume until she was teetering in her chair, proud bosom capturing the attention of no less than four of the six men who walked through the doors. He ignored her, folding the letter over and slipping it into one ragged pant pocket.

The Lieutenant glanced at his face, scrutinizing for some sign of trouble or concern before, with some hidden glimpse of satisfaction, he turned on his heel and marched toward the door without another word, his soldiers dragged in his wake by the chain of authority attached to each. Several lingered a little longer on Mirabelle’s breasts, but eventually, the pair were left to the Bar again. By themselves, it would seem, as most of the other patrons had decided to flee rather than face down the Austrians themselves.

“My Poor Giancarlo. Just when you believe you are free to obliterate yourself? They go asking you to be proper again.”

He sneered across at her. That brought a fresh round of lush mirth.

“Fanculo!”

Murder most Nights 2 BY ME

"Was it you?"

His voice behind her ear. His hands at her waist. The high-ceilinged room lost in shadow. Gas lights turned low in the sconce by the door, and the red-orange glow of a slowly dying fire in the antique grate. The wood smoked for hours before the damp was burned out of it, so the air smelled of soot and bitter myrrh and crushed styrax of sacred incense, and cut through with the sweet, woody musk of ambergris and and artemnesia still clinging to her sweat-damp hair.

"Tighter." She watched the moonlight move across the waters, the dull flicker of lights on Giudecca. Through the half-shaded Arabesque windows, the hum of the city's turbines a low and constant drone. Took a deep breath and braced herself to feel the familiar bite of the metal stays into her skin. "You have to lace them more tightly than that."

Just before sunset the rains had cleared away. Sunlight washed across the horizon as the clouds swept west. The pollution from the belching smokestacks of Mestre on and Malcontenta and Porto Marghera, on the mainland to the east, washed out by the constant rains, and so the sky was briefly clear. The peaks of the Alps visible in the distance capped with snow. The jagged evening light, that living, rose-window glow that enveloped the city gave way to this: a rare, clear, autumnal night. The moon riding the gently rocking waters of the lagoon.

"You Anglish women. You won't be able to breathe."

"We don't breathe. Far too vulgar. We just sip the air."

His laughter was quiet, his voice low. "Let me unlace them." Insinuating, just behind her ear. He wore no more than a dressing gown, the red robes of office strewn across the fainting couch. "Stay the night."

There were lights in the Redentore. Burning through the clerestory of the San Giacomo. And it struck her then that he did not mean Kitty Bridlington, but instead the family in the Campo of St. Ives. The husband. The girl. The atomized in the air. The responsive knot in her stomach uncoiled, then. Inappropriate laughter lodged itself in the back of her throat. She took one breath, then another, to swallow it back, voicelessly.

He took this for invitation. Wrapped his hands around her waist, and bent to lay a gentle kiss on the curve of her bare shoulder. "Well?"

"Don't you have souls of the dead to pray for?" Aspersion in her tone.

"I'm in private contemplation tonight. The wonders of mortality. The fragility of mankind." Mouth drifting along her bare skin; voice a low hum. "Was it you? If it was you, you should confess to me." His hands tightened at her waist, and he pulled her back, against him.

She did not yield.

"The stays, Galaxio."

Nor did he.

"Take the sacrament. Let me pry the iron nails of mortal sin from your tender soul. Save you from the flames of hell." Insistent. "The husband. The child, murdered at prayer."

"Your god, would she really listen to you? Look at all the vows you've shattered this eve alone."

"Your god, too. Converso."

"No." Her tone crisp and clear. "It was not me." Kitty Bridlington's dead blue eyes in the back of her mind. The distorted, bloated corpse surfacing in the blue-green waters of the canal. The wretched, hollow stare of her husband when the Garda called upon him to name her before a magistrate, the sweet scent of decay heavy in the air of that paneled room.

"I do wonder if the girl was really murdered. Or perhaps instead transported somewhere. Still, is this a suspicion you are actually entertaining, Gallo? Do you really believe me capable of cold-blooded murder."

"Mmph." His low laughter, wry, hands slipping from her waist to find the laces of her stays. "Not really. Or, should I say: Only in service to a cause."

Murder Most Nights BY HARV

The air overlooking the canals was something vaguely unpleasant. A mixture of tars, tepid waters, sloshing perfumes and the stink that came off the end of day Markets when the food, unsold, was disposed of. Custodian Sweepers moved through the marketplaces, collecting the organics of the various vendors and pushing them into the Mangiare-Carro (Most of the English within Venice simply dubbed them the Goblin Wagons), which was simply a large box of black tar, thick wooden beams of ash and a half dozen brass feed tubes, gunked and stained by the various black remnants of ages old produce. It's wheels were banded iron and each was built with the sturdy utility of an armoured Siege-engine.

(A fact supported by all the populations of Venice, since the early times of this dubious invention, saw the make of a much lighter and much more decay susceptible vehicle, each of which had the penchant for bursting open on a hot day like some gaseous-plugged corpse, fouling a good four blocks of laneway and alley with the ripened stench of it's innards. Policia had been forced to evacuate whole sections of the City in some circumstances, for fear of mass fainting spells among the population, incapable of breathing beyond their own out-turned stomachs and clogged airways)

He often found himself resisting the urge to spit off the edge of the Belfry's stonework, just to cleanse his pallet. Not out of some noble sense of propriety, but more for the possibility of discovery.

Assassination, afterall was hardly a work supportive of anything but secrecy.

His fingers, draped in fine leather gloves, ran across the delicate fixture of the object they had given him. A fine piece of artifice, the likes of which had yet to make the shores of the public eye or mind. It had been assembled in a half dozen different European cities, the power-source developed and appropriated from some American institute with an unhealthy obsession and attitude toward the Weather. He had yet to hear much more about the Technology he was now holding and quietly clamped down on a budding giddiness to put it to use. Still, professional courtesy and reflex kept him still and quiet in the dark of the Belfry, overlooking many of the broad blocks and walkways of the Plaza below;

The markets stretched in a half-hundred different directions, from the very base of the Church he had been occupying for the last three days, all the way into the higher plumbed areas where the palazzo's made their homes and the rich and well-off fancied themselves safe from the depravities and debauchery of the less fortunate or mindless. One could walk the length of a hillside's down-slope and see the none-to-gradual decline of the architecture from it's archaic wonder of ruins and well aged demesnes to it's lower heights, where steam gouted from the sides of buildings, staining the walls of their neighbours in peeling grout and shifty mortar. The dampness beyond Fastol Avenue hung so thickly in the air, that the fluidic cough was a common ailment among the population. Mornings could be heralded as much by the mucus filled cough of a hundred waking souls as it could be by the Cock's crowing.

The distant sun was beginning it's easy descent for the day, gleaming reds and pungent oranges, diluted against the grainy press of clouds, beneath which had been broken by a momentary clarity to the far West, where the Oceans began to peel away from the land and sported a vast unknown quality even in these unenlightened times. He cradled his newly acquired contraption closely to his chest, feeling the weight of it settle firmly against one hip. The Stock was made from a light wood that nonetheless, dug into his side. He could feel the density of the metal inside the smoothed wood, a pressure that made the long length of the piece, rear-heavy but then he remembered the twitchy fellow with the spindly hair and the eyes too wide to sleep mentioning something about the Current Dynamo embedded in the stock being what's going to keep him on the right side of the weapon's reaction.

He felt more then heard something shift below his feet, the ancient stonework of the Belfry subject to subtle and heavy motions. The steam engines littering much of Venice's underbelly and structural framework had a strangely tectonic mimicry that shook his bones on occasion, depending on which part of the city he found himself in. He felt a vague cringe in his guts at the thought of all that pent up pressure, one day, shaking Venice to pieces and sending it crashing into the river but it was his vague unease versus a thousand Austrian opinions and Italian artificers over a few hundred years. He didn't blame the population for choosing to believe the latter.

He felt the Tower shiver, the bell behind him creaking suddenly on a timber thick enough to dwarf the width of his shoulders and resisted the urge to turn and look at it. Dusk was approaching and with it the wandering footfalls of the evening mass would begin to fill the deserted markets, eagerly seeking out the communion blessing at the Church's front doors. The clergymen were often the doddering, forgetful and well-aged, bringing their sense of peace and goodwill senility to those who might listen to their ancient and stutter filled ramblings about a true Faith, beyond Austrian Rule, Purity of the Self and Somnambulist Hypnotism (Austrian nobility had brought with them a disturbing amount of Sleep doctors, who specialized in expelling the threat of disease and psychosis from their patients, VIA sleep induced psychotropic states of stress and will reduction; this often involved lengthy sessions of blacked out fever dreams at the hands of questionably sane MDs incapable of speaking outside of their native tongues. Still, the practice's popularity could not be denied).

Many of the nobility partook of these moments, deigning to escape the cloistered confines of their proper world, to pay homage and faithful tribute to Saint-Ives of Blunders who presided over these very grounds; a Saint of Impeccable taste, Saint-Ives had been a devout Catholic some seven hundred years ago, who, in his fervour to find God amongst the clouds, enough that he walked off an unfinished bridge and drowned while staring at some clouds. Prayers and tribute were paid, many for the guidance to seek God in all things, but mostly to ward against accidents, stubbed toes and potential mis-steps in etiquette'd conversation.

He felt the building shiver again, the coiled rope twitching slightly, a wound tongue jutting from the broad mouth of the iron bell that fed to the curtained station below. Come the failing of the last rays of the Sun, the rope would be plucked at by a young balded cloister child and the bell rung to announce the beginnings of the Sermon proper. Most of the mass knew the requisite times and it was often a hotly contested effort to be the first ones to arrive who did not seem rushed in the process. Often times, furiously calm patrons could be seen flooding the streets for nearly half a league, marching with the deliberately tense slowness of the faithfully competitive. No few communions were heralded by the odd tension of a mob approaching the large banded doors of the church, however eerily silent it was. The torchlight and candles didn't help any to dis-spell that image.

With the inevitable presence of many of the nobility, fresh from Austrian Borders marking the frontlines by way of station, presence and sheer gadfly eagerness.

He reached into a side pouch, plucking out several sections of soft wax, the malleable white gel pasted generously over either ear until the volume of his surroundings and the power of the distant winds off the water, were a muffled whisper lost somewhere by the edge of his earlobes. He tilted his head, yawning slightly to pop some of the pressure that had gathered, resisting the urge to plug his nose and mouth to blow it out. The discomfort was minimal and he was already beginning to catch sight of several torches in the distance, winding their way solemnly through the carved out guts of Venice's many bridges, walkways and lanes.

He brought the weapon up, setting it's coiled barrel on the edge of the stonework, being sure to place the hardened resin rubber against the mortar to ensure none of the metal made contact. The spiralled copper was near as long as his arm and the assortment of wires attached to it were so prolific, he had trouble deciphering the solid shape of the coil beneath them all, wrapped snugly around where the copper filaments fit into neat little grooves concentrically filed all along the strange 'barrel', while their opposite ends fit into a sooty black set of rings that jutted at regular intervals over the revolutions of the coil; one every five rungs, all the way back to the weapon's base, where one hand gripped a secondary resin-rubber grip, thick and heavy with internal windings and coglinks. He paid careful attention to the strange jutting bulbs atop the resin chamber he was holding, slanted out like a pair of pointed rabbits ears, their interior filaments as thin as hair fibre, as frail looking as a stand of powder.

The Torchlight below was beginning to seep through the various openings that led into the market-square, emptied of all but these patrons to Saint-Ives who shuffled into place alongside one another with predictable familiarity. No few of the less fortunate halted their progress briefly as the veiled and stately looking individuals, some in military dress, others in the finest of Austrian Fashions (which were somewhere between a laced carnival motif and the rebel flag for a bloody coup) and many others yet dressed in the traditional whites and reds of Faith that had been the tradition for decades among the Italian families, who still had some place within the occupied streets. Candles could be seen, gripped in the hands and ornate holders of several family collectives, the bonneted and capped children clutching their parents hands with the earnest unease of disquiet.

He took several steadying breaths, settling into a crouched position that was comfortable, ignoring the creak of his aging bones and the flush of fluids that locked his left knee into place. It would be painful getting back up and he silently released the grip of tension in his jaws, eyes slipping shut in anticipation-

Clang!

Came the bell's toll, a rumble behind him that concussive broke against his cloaked shoulders and spine. He felt his heart hum in response, a quickening that drove the breath out of his lungs and sucked it right back in again a moment later. He flicked the indented switch, a tiny tear-shaped bit of metal that clacked against it's metal alcove, hard enough to reverberate in the pinched fingers of his grip around the resin-stand. The air suddenly whined to life around his head and he felt the pressure gather under his jaws, unbidden this time, his ears thrumming as the captured pressure behind the wax grew to it's own concussive balloon. Quite suddenly the discomfort had become a dull ache that was spreading from some nebulous pinpricked spot somewhere in his brain, outward.

Below, the great doors of the Church, fit snug into the darkened trench of the dull masonry blocks that made up the foundation and walls, swung wide, showering the cobbles ahead of them with a wavering orange light. Faint wisps of white smoke, poured out and pooled on the cobbled stretch of the market square and sent a tremble of order through the gathered numbers in the crowd of worship. A neat semi-circle formed amongst the noble ranks, which went nearly two bodies deep, children thrust up front of their parents, held before well-tailored cuffs of gold and embroidered brown or laced gloves of candy-stripe pink and white.

The censor smoke gave way to kindly, bent and corrugated priests, decked in the white robes and red mantles of the Church, swinging the false gold chains and orbs with slow and deliberate strokes, pink tongues tucked in concentration, between teeth and lips, while the man upfront, his head decorated by a the symbolic hat of Saint-Ives, a pair of white cloth fronds, frilled at their tips, spread as if in offering to either side, the humped shoulders of each depicting a shrug of helplessness and harmless mercy. The priests spread out, with slow methodical steps to gather at the fringes of the crowd, the censors continuing to swing as they reached out free hands to grasp and clasp with those arms and hands that reached out toward them, seeking comfort and reassurance.

The pressure was beginning to flood his senses and his lips had been driven back from his teeth, gritted as they were molar to molar with the rising cord of his neck and spine. The weapon hummed in his hands, oddly still even under the pressure of the tolling bell behind him, with it's concussions of regularity driving new tremors through him. He fit the Stock to his shoulder and settled his chin on the upraised stirrup that sighted one eye down the length of sooty rings until his gaze was focused on the crowd below. He turned slightly in place, hunching one shoulder until a muscle spasm locked it down next to his ear. The ache had become a throb and he snorted an exhaled blast to relieve some of the tension. It returned all too quickly.

The head clergyman stopped before the gathering, a mere few feet away, raising his hands out to either side with a patting motion demanding silence. The wave of kindly authority spread with the help of the nobility, who's nudging elbows and over-the-shoulder glares at the less fortunate, flooded obedience in the agitated number still looking for recognition from the Faith. Soon enough, torches were raised high and the assembled were at a hush he thought only capable before Queens and Kings. Reverence had it's power, it would seem.

The priest garbled something he couldn't hear, not over anything, least of all the wax in his ears keeping the worst of the pressure and tolling at bay. He knew, for the presence of a small family stepped forward at some unseen sign. The woman wore a demure hat that bent upward on either wide brim's side, Tied in place by a broad scarlet scarf, which bobbed at the top of the hat, her dress the frilled pink and red of hemmed sin, trimming the edge of a glittering white he swore was worth the lives of at least a dozen or more in the crowds. The man was a stately sort, sporting a broad moustache that eliminated nearly the entire lower half of his face behind it's enunciation proclamation of business and solemnity. His hair was a waved partition to either side of his head. His collar was high, depicting the pair of golden symbols too distant to make out but could not be anything else but a military designation. His white jacket over dark brown pants, was resplendently sophisticated or might have been had the garish gold of his cuffs not been the ruination. Lastly, was the young slip of a thing, clutched at the shoulders by her father's large, brutish hands. She wore a dress similar to her mother's, with white stockings and a pair of slippers one might be tempted to call dainty. Her hair was brought up into a neat pony tail and braided down one shoulder, while her face turned up in an obvious mask of courage hiding a looming fear of the wrinkled creature standing infront of her and her family.

He sighted down the coiled barrel, over the edge of the hundred and one filaments attached to it and past the slender cross at the tip of the coil which, he swore, sparked quite suddenly. The tension was growing toward an unbearable level and he could not unhinge his jaw from it's current grit. His knee was beginning to buckle and all noise had been replaced by a dull roar.

The Priest bent forward to receive the family and they in turn looked as if they might bow to their knees, the Mother taking a brief moment to spread something infront of them, that the dirt of the market floor not soil any of them in the benediction.

He exhaled through his teeth and flicked the tear-shaped switch once again, the clack profoundly audible or...perhaps that was simply his relief:

The weapon discharged, though his indication came not from the piece in his grip but from the sudden, almost explosive swoop of released tension, flooding down his limbs, through his muscles and into the contraption which hummed under his grip with the subtle and gentle sibilancy of a poised snake. Some sort of warped distortion ricochetted through the centre of the oddly spiralled barrel and struck the tip before vanish in the open air before the Belfry. It took a second for something to happen and then, calamity struck it's chord with the next Bell Toll.

The Family was halfway to the ground, when the man suddenly seized in place. Bolt upright, he seemed to tremble in his uniform, which suddenly took on the appearance of flexed stiffness, as if a space had suddenly been created between his flesh and it's cloth. The little girl and the Mother turned as one and backed away from him with horrified alarm, while the crowd's concentrative faith was sent a tremor by the disturbance in the air; as if the palpable quality of this moment had reached out to all, even those without eyes on the front of the procession.

The priest's head was bowed forward, his eyes more than likely closed for he did not move or shift place. The military man's moustache flexed and bristled, sprouting outward on a reddened face, while his hair climbed upward with a life of it's own, the orderly wave turning into a frazzled mess that sought to escape into the night air.

Someone nearby was screaming. A sound that was joined by several others.

He felt something in his chest grow erratic for a few moments, could not fathom that it was his own heart in the aftermath of an adrenal exhale. He tried to calm his body, leaning forward against the ledge of stone slightly, the weapon swinging into his lap, still and calm once more. His gaze found the scene below, rapt and attentive.

The Man was raising his limbs with some measure of fierce difficulty, spittle flecking his lips and his eyes bulging in their sockets. His face was the colour of pale pomegranate and he stumbled to the left a few paces, almost colliding with his daughter who shrieked in response and turned to dash toward the far end of the Semi-circle. The man's wife made a move forward, shouting something in their Native Austrian, dropping the candle she'd been clutching as she moved to chase the young thing. The Husband's hands reached out toward his Wife, while the Priest finished whatever benediction he'd been murmuring about and raised his head.

That's when the dropped candle slid under the Husband's foot and sent him pitching backward, his hand snagged in the ribbon binding his wife's hat into an upturned curve. His wife reached up toward her hair, exposed and bundled atop her head, shrieking anew. The Priest gave a confused shiver and the Military Man fell backward with a strangled groan, striking the ground with a concussive thud.

A thud that suddenly turned into a wet sploosh that sent a spray of arterial red, flecked white and burst pink up and outward, across the crowd for a good thirty feet in all directions. The wife was painted a rich smear of Scarlet Husband and the Priest layered thickly by the sudden detonation. Their stunned silence infected the crowd which stared at one another in muted but rapidly growing shock.

A few precious heartbeats passed and then-

Clang!

The Bell tolled again and Calamity returned with a rich clarity. The Wife began to scream, uncontrollable and triggered the same in the crowd, which wavered, buckled and broke in a hundred different directions, this great moving mass that clogged the alleys and lanes and streets with moving, breaking and crashing bodies that left no few trampled in it's wake. Torches were dropped and sent pin-wheeling through the air while the howling insanity of the mob spilled out into the city to share and infect the grisly news with every Inn, Bar and neighbour's window passed. Lights were already beginning to strike the distant streets of the Constabulary even as the market emptied of all but the dead, dying and catatonic.

He just sat there for a time, staring, ignoring the throbbing pain in his knee and the distinctly hollowed out sensation in his skull and chest. He tried to swallow a few times and managed on the sixth. Then he sucked in a slow breath that was meant to calm and steady and, with shaking hands, began to carefully take apart the various sections of the weapon, his grip inside the gloves having turned his knuckles white, as if his own blood feared his fingers and what havoc they might unleash next. He reached up to dig the wax from his ears as best he could, flicking the remains against the wall, before blowing out the rest with plugged nose and closed mouth.

Whistles were sounding in the distance now. He could hear the disorder rousing the city from it's early evening home-life. All at once, reflex took over and he creaked to his feet, wincing with the flare of pain that bounced through his knee. The components were tucked safely into their travelling, the segments locked and folded together. He began to drag it toward the nearby window and the six foot drop down to the Bailey roof.

Behind him, down in the square, a woman dripped and screamed in the street. They would dub her clinically insane and after several weeks of attempted therapies, lock her away.

And of the young girl, there would be no sign.

A Job Done. His employers would be pleased. He had earned his sovereigns, which was good. He'd need them to drown the hollow that had been left behind.

A discovery 4 - BY HARV

George had been patient thus far.

In situations like these, he often let Harmon take the lead, if only because his genteel upbringing (of which George was forbidden to call Shenanigans on) provided them with a certain edge to moments such as these, attempting to push their way through the gatehouse and it's brow-perked, stuck-up, flush-faced, shell-scalped, nose-shaving Troubadour seeking a certain level of comatose courtesy from them. The footman had been offered little more than a few pence and some charmingly appropriate words of confusing, long-winded and nebulous report, Harmon speaking loudly and often to the young fellow and marching without cease through the gates and his supposed guard. He had no doubt the young Boy was more than happy to leave them to the Butler they were now standing in front of, confident Mr. Shambottom (who's name was not quite that pronunciation as he had been adamant in telling Harmon upon introductions being shared, but Harmon seemed incapable of lifting off his accented Essex tongue) had the wherewithal, determination and strength of character to see to the disheveled Ruffians trying to barge into the Society.

Mr Shambottom’s stalwart regard was matched only by the fierceness of his gaze and the resolute belief that he could simply glare away all problems and situations of ill-repute. George firmly believed that Mr. Shambottom firmly believed that a stiff lip and a waxed moustache glare, could send the War home should it ever come knocking at Italy’s borders. So when Harmon sauntered up with a tip of his short brimmed, tall stacked hat (a refuse find, dusted with perfume and patched with skills George wasn’t entirely certain where Harmon had discovered) and a ‘Good Morrow!’ there was a very brief scrutiny and a none too subtle dance of the aging old butler’s eyes across them both. The entirety of which lasted a full ten seconds before, with an imperious clearing of his throat, Mr Shambottom declared with a throated mum of monosyllabic distinction.

“No.”

At which point Harmon did his best impression of shock and outrage, flailing hands covered in the richest of white satins (or what might have been, had they not been through a bar fight, a deck fight and three months worth of travel best left to the place where forgotten memories go to drink) and bulging eyes not a slight bit reddened by their lack of sleep and fast approaching sobriety.

To which Mr. Shambottom seemed entirely immune, weathering the spectacle from Harmon and George’s own rapidly dwindling features, which bristled into an unidentifiable mask of facial hair whenever his temper was in danger of being lost. Many had claimed when George’s face vanished entirely, whole legions were bound to suffer for it.

It would be several minutes of this dual fusillade, as the pair ended the entire thing looming over the stoic butler who continued to remain robustly calm in the face of them, before the chamber door leaning into the Palazzo, would creep open from afar and a woman would stand upon the chipped stone steps with the expectancy of the perturbed.
At which point, Mr. Shambottom, or whatever pronunciation was proper, turned to regard this new blockade and offered the clearing of his throat once more to the pair, who glanced up once at the woman too distant to detail and then back to the Butler as he spoke in that same breathy murmur.

“Mrs. Hogsbender will see you, apparently.”

And that was number two.

The third was the Woman. Hogsbender the Round. Hogsbender the broad. Hogsbender, the Redoubt, the Bastion, the Bitch bull of the Society house and many others that she would later be known and called by Harmon over a half dozen pints and those? Just the few he would remember the following morning. The young Tavern Woman they have acquainted themselves with upon first arrival would regale them neatly of Harmon’s sermon of prose entitled “Hogsbender; Enemy to the Unfairest Gender”.

She sat within her sitting room, a creature fond of dens and cozies. A Mother Bear, a Clucking Hen, a Vicious Ape and mountains to feed small nations of young nips, a fact Harmon sought to mention almost out of the gate. The response with something icy and a demure reassurance that The Hogsbender’s personal lives were quite beyond the ken of courteous and polite conversation.

The interview would devolve from there. Casual wit was thrown back and forth between a viper’s tongue in Harmon and the scalding pot of Mrs. Hogsbender, trading mentions of decor, garments and the inevitable deductions of proper education in each other’s speech that often came from the Highly Sociable. All performed with the most polite of airs, airs that had George curling smaller and smaller in his standing place, for fear that sitting might break the brittle staves and supports of the ancient relics that Mrs. Hogsbender kept around her sitting room walls. Decorative at best.

At one point, her bi-spectacled gaze found George and glanced up at the flopping hat that danced down one side of his head, her neatly trimmed brow perking over slightly plump cheeks and a primly set mouth. George’s eyes nearly vanished into his brow and moustache meeting and with great reluctance and a rumble of incoherent english, reached up to pull the hat off and crush it between his hands, the spraggledee reach of his wisping hair, circling a bald spot, given a cursory glance.

About as long as the glance at the maligned ear that had been hidden beneath with it’s strangely crooked point at either end. Mrs. Hogsbender’s brow rose a fraction higher, something both Harmon and George would comment to one another about in startled shock and relieved camaraderie (“I’ve not seen a woman look so questioning about so little in all my life” “I know, roit?!”) though she, perhaps wisely, did not comment on the fact and returned to berating Harmon about his choice of coloured dress and how inappropriately brilliant it was, no doubt serving as the sign post for their early carnivaling efforts amidst the circuses of England.
The Footman enters toward the height of the situation, a hammer fisted George bundled together in bristling anger, bellowing a

“Now see ‘ere!”

And leveling an accusatory finger, the size of Mrs. Hogsbender’s wrist, toward the unmoved woman. The footman is hesitant and seemingly shaken, as Harmon, twig and slim and dandy of a creature, Harmon, is the only thing standing between them and the brutish George, satin gloves pushing into the stout body of his fellow, a firm voice and eye cast up into George’s face as the pair argue over just what sort of manners could be taught with a proper switch and the right arse.

At which point, Mrs. Hogsbender had received her message and the Footman was gratefully sent on his way. The pair would freeze in place, locked in grips around each other’s vests and jackets, to stare at Mrs. Hogsbender as she offered a cleared throat and a vaguely displeased mention of the Lady wanting their company and attention.

To which Harmon had replied with the most careful of pleasantries, smoothing down his clothing and releasing George to offer Mrs. Hogsbender a stately bow and a

“Most kind, Madam, most kind.”

A discovery 3 - BY ME

The Ladies' Perambulation society is housed in an old palazzo of a long-since fallen first family, with one grand, water-logged facade facing the blue-green waters of a narrow canal and the other brooding over a narrow courtyard the opened into one of the little squares - the little campos that stud the city.

One other genuine palazzo - this one far more decayed than the Ladies' own - braces the square, along with a warren of other buildings, and of course one of the cities' ubiquitous chapels, dedicated to the martyr-saint Liliane, rose windows and terracotta rooftile and quite directly in the middle of the little campo - an elegant stone founting, the bronze-patina'd central figure a most realistic expression of Liliane's martyrdom, her body a bristling explosion of enemy spears, arching outward from the central spine, face turned to heaven, frame near-naked.

In eminently baroque style, the water falls not from the buckets she is carrying, but from the wounds themselves. Trickling down the glistening bronze surfaces to collect in the marble basin, which glows golden in sunlight and blue-white in gaslight and merely dark on these long, gloomy autumn days full of shiftless clouds and pouring rain.

So here, this slumping palazzo, half-way to glory, half-way to ruin, on a gloomy afternoon with a cold wind from the Adriatic beginning to kick up choppy little waves even in the narrowest and most protected of the city's canals, arabesque windows in rust red and deep purple wrapped in wilting black bunting that looks rather as if someone loosed a haberdasher's 'prentice boy on the home of his rival, the bunting - draped about the windows sometime in the days since the discovery of the [how does one say body in polite company?] shell of their countrywoman, drowned in the canals - bedraggled from the torrential autumnal rains. The windowboxes, with their cheerful array of pansies, have been covered over with fine black netting.

The smallest plaque, slowly weathered bronze, bolted into the cracked Venetian plaster on the pillasters framing the wrought-iron gate:

The Ladies'
Perambulation
Society
-

No one is walking today. Not with the familiar brisk steps and hushing murmur of petticoats, the bracing straightforward style the Ladies have adopted, as if the side streets and listing alleys, the labyrinthine backstreets and hidden cul-de-sacs of Venice were the no more frightening than some country Lane in Sussex, the mid-day sun in the sky, the farmers in the fields, the word of bees a humming buzz amidst the blooming hedgerows. There, in gloomy Angleland, one dreams of sun-drenched Italia. Peeling back the layers of whale-boned corsets and heavy fushine silks, the waves of tuille in exchange for some cotton nothing, not much more - perhaps even less - than an undergarment, sun setting on the Apinine hills while the rhythmic music of scythes cut through golden fields bisected by Roman roads shaded by stone pines planted - perhaps - by some long-dead, barely dressed Legionnaire himself.

And here, in romantic, water-logged Italia, one remains as Anglish as ever. So it seems.

Still - the square is deserted, where normally there might be a half-dozen women walking arm and arm around the square, determinedly not looking directly at the naked breasts of poor martyred Liliane and the water trickling down her transfixed frame.

Just a slip of a girl, with the sort of prettiness like to turn mousy as soon as she opens her mouth, shrouded in an impractical velvet cloak, followed by a mustachioed gondolier with drooping eyes and the rolling gait of someone born to water rather than dry(ish) land.

-

George - or more specifically Harmon, must talk his way past a trio of gatekeepers before the pair first set eyes on one of the ubiquitous ladies. First, a supercilious footman, who appears to be no more than a local boy dressed up in some old velvet livery and given a powdered wig from a half-century ago to add some gravitas to his appearance. Then, a slit-eyed and even more supercilious butler all in black, his receding hair shellacked to a hardness that might well protect him from missles on the battlefield, or at least from bricks tossed from behind a barricade. Barrel-chested, with a wide cumberbun and an elaborately tied cravat and no less than four timepieces on his person, each of which he consults in succession as his snears his way through their interview before he at last passes them off to Mrs. Hogsbender, the aptly named housekeeper.

Mrs. Hogsbender.

Here, at last, is an obstacle worthy of their time. For all the pomp and polish of the footman and the butler, both were easier to sap than the two-foot walls around a pleasure palace. Mrs. Hogsbender, though is a redoubtable, formidable woman, with a shelf of a bosom and a black bombazine dress like a mainsail and the brisk efficiency of the doyenne of a great house, never mind that the staff of the Society numbers no more than four or five, and half those on loan from milady's own establishment. She receives them in her sitting room belowstairs, which faces the canal proper, perhaps a half-storey above water level. The room is papered in elaborate rose damask, though there is something seamed about the application, as if it had been rescued from elsewhere before being installed here. Papered in rose damask, stuffed full of dark, heavy furniture, pine most-like, though painted and stained to have the look of dark, heavy mahoganies, the shelves positively stuffed with bric-a-brac of all sorts.

Porcelain birds and mechanical ladies, the sort that plink out the latest Viennese waltzes while stuttering above a table's surface, starched crinolines stiff and yellowing with age. Autonomic thread-winders and an old-fashioned pair of "knitting hands" clacking away at a straight line of garter stitch. Water clocks and embroidery stools and wind-up tea kettles and fine memorial pottery to commemorate the Queen's this or the Crown Prince's that or Nelson's Victory At Sea crowded up 'gainst dark little daguerrotypes of a stiff lipped man with bristling sideburns long enough that he might have combed them up and over his gleaming bald pate. Or braided them, in imitation of one of those Fierce Merican Natives that were all en vogue amongst the bluestockings.

Mr. Hogsbender, that. And all of thise, all of it wrapped about with silk or paper roses, padded with embroided rose-laden pillows, framed with dried rose petals, and Mrs. Hogsbender, all in gleaming back, perched with improbable daintiness on an elegant stool in the midst of it all frowning at them over the edge of a pair of half-spectacles gone blind with light, clucking doubtfully, inserting questions about their cleanliness and the potential for Parasites About Their Persons (which seem less personal than general. The woman Abhors a Parasite), clearly quite ready to send them off with a brisk "I am sure that madam needn't be bothered - "

When the door opens and the close confines of the room (which smells of roses, not the fresh sort, but the cloying overapplication of rosewater, as in a room where a wake is being held, and the undertaker has soaked the curtains in it in an effort to cover over the unfortunate effluvia of the recently deceased. Heavy enough that not even the brisk scent of freshly brewed tea does more than cut a lazy line of scent through the miasma) are sliced open by the re-appearance of the supercilious footman in his absurd wig, which slides forward nearly to his eyebrows as he bends to murmur something in Mrs. Hogsbender's ear and -

she looks up, mouth curling as if she had just caught wiff of the rotten potential undergirding that sweet-rose scent. "Well." Clipped and closed, the tone. "It seems that my lady is in."

Mouth pressed together around the words, the frozen expression souring by the merest degree.

"And will see you, after all."