(1866-09-27) The Lavecq Way
The Lavecq Way
Summary: The Gilded Lily and her little brother meet again, in the wee small hours, after narrowly missing one another at an entertainment given by Guillaume Tyres.
Date: Septebre 27th, 1866
Related: This one.
NPCs: {$npc}
Players:
Marguerite  Clovis  

The Lavecq Manse ~ Clovis's Chamber
See scene.
Septebre 27th, 1866

When the only son of the Lavecq household returns late and presumably sodden to the sole chamber reserved for him apart from that household's manifold feminine exigencies, he finds his door… ajar. His chests and his drawers turned out. His most personal boxes and bags and cases strewn everywhere. His bedding in even greater disarray than is his own custom, his few books and papers out of order, each piece of furniture shifted so the girls could look behind and beneath it, and both the secret floorboards prised up.

His sister and her maid, Nita, are searching the place.

In honour of delving into the unspeakable territory of a twenty-two-year-old boy's bedroom (it's impossible to think of Clovis as a man, he's a boy through and through) Marguerite has changed from the white and gold in which she was resplendent at the Tyres manse earlier in the evening into one of her simplest and most practical, though of course deliciously cut, red linen gowns: she has rolled up her sleeves and pinned up her hair and is setting about her inspection in no uncertain terms. She is wearing two bracelets she wasn't wearing when she came in. One is her own, reclaimed: the other she had never seen before. Certain other small objects deemed suspiciously beyond Clovis's remittance have been lined up along the washstand, or simply dropped into the depths of her pockets as she breathed out gasps of horror.

The courtesan's fervid researches are dissevered by a light but dignified cough. The young man stands framed in the threshold, the very dishevelment of his plain but cleanly cut garb somehow possessing a certain symmetry. "Hullo, Margie. I suppose you didn't apprise Mummy of this particular, peculiar little hobby of yours?" His voice cuts rather than quivers. Clovis is surely soused enough to be petulant, not yet to be altogether uncontrolled.

And as Nita effaces herself into the background, running her hands silently along the undersides of shelves, her mistress lifts blue-grey eyes cooled by determination to Clovis's undeniably handsome face. "Mother," she explains, "is looking round the sitting-room she has sometimes known you to use.

"I've turned a blind eye to certain of your habits this past year, Clovis, doubting I could cure you of them, and trusting to your extremely well-developed sense of self-preservation to carry you through — but it has failed you at last, my brother," and the Gilded Lily favours him with a tight-lipped smile as she takes hold of his pillow in both hands and methodically squeezes it from one side to the other side, from one end to the other end, her sensitive silken hands seeking anything therein which doesn't feel like a goose feather. "You've crossed a line with us tonight."

The youth looks disappointed, disillusioned, unentertained. "No need to hide, Nita. I doubt much will happen to startle you tonight, or surprise you, so very much," he rings out with false brightness, as if the servant is the main object of his attention in the house, let alone the room. Then, with a bold but somewhat overripe approximation of patience, Clovis turns back to his sister. Where her smile is one sort of reproach, a call to obedience, a declaration of stern punishment, his is another, the turning of the adder, the snapping of the cur. "Who was it who sold my catch, my hope of learnin', of advancement, the monks' book o' th'art? Who told me to "live on my wits", and made it quite clear she thought they lay only in my fingertips? Oh, sure, to some faint whishper, 'twas mama, but only because she'd given in to your nagging. You made me what you seem to call out now, and now you hamper it. It's you who scar the Lavecq way here, scarce less than I woulda done if you'd returned to find me washin' your silks in urine."

The pillow is tossed aside, admittedly harmlessly; Marguerite faces her brother in a pose not of injured innocence, but of injured sisterly love. "You had to get away from us for a time, to do something on your own account, to prove to yourself you could — as any man must. You heard what you wanted to hear, a hope of such quick and easy living as must appeal to anyone with your natural distaste for applying yourself, and your complete inability to be patient and harvest fruits tended over years. We had such hopes of you," she often speaks this way, as though he had two mothers rather than a mother and a sister, "and now— the questions you may consider we ought to have asked then we've forborne to ask since, for how could we not blame ourselves for not trying still harder than we did to find what was best for you—? Clovis…" And, coming nearer, she rests her hand tenderly upon his.

"We don't ask those questions," Marguerite repeats; "you speak of the Lavecq way, but you have never understood it — and whilst you still seek to find your own, we don't ask those questions. "But tonight…" She inhales through her perfect white nostrils. "Tonight you interfered in my business. The very business which has, all your life, fed you and clothed you and poured the finest wines down your throat; and which even now keeps a roof above your head whenever you require it. Mother and I don't expect you to settle to anything, we know you too well for that — and we shall always take care of you as best we can — but when you come between me and a client, when you claim to speak in my voice, and to extort money in my name… I'm sure you think you're very amusing, but you put me in a difficult position tonight.

"I've come now," she explains rather more grimly, "to see whether I recognise any of your little baubles as belonging to the guests at Master Tyres's party. Or to Master Tyres himself—! I wouldn't," and for a moment she simply closes her eyes, and speaks in a softening voice as she turns from him, "I wouldn't put even that past you, anymore. I don't know quite what I have done to fail you — I am truly sorry, for whatever it must have been — but I don't deserve this treatment from you, Clovis. I least of all."

You can soften a slow-worm in satin, but it'll still look fairly slimy. As Clovis begins to obey the habits of a lifetime and submit, accepting Marguerite's hand and sitting down quietly beside her amid the ruin of his prized and purloined inventory, he looks not more pleasant, nor more affectionate, just weaker, and, unusually for his formally, classically, misleadingly distinguished appearance, a mite uglier, too. "You're not making any sense, Marguerite. Even if I were to do such a thing, be so ungrateful to you and dear mother…well, you're here. You returned from the rizzle razzle before me. Your excitement at having a young man with a pinch of power for a suitor instead of some fishy tradesman has addled y'pretty head. Are you imagining I stole some diamond destined for your wedding ring from behind Billy Tyres's ear, then stole home to sneak it under my pillow before finding my self some more amusin' companions and potations? I thought y'guessed me better, after a certain long acquaintance. And now you've gone and spoilt everything I even pretend to own from less than no reason. You may look alright, sure, half up to Olimpia whatnot in the right light, but sometimes I wonder if the gilt on y'petals got through y'dainty ears and turned y'brains to bullion…"

His sister measures the chamber in a handful of rhythmic paces, skirts swaying, the mind behind that porcelain visage of hers still troubled — and then she returns to Clovis's disordered bed and perches next to him again, reclaiming his hand, every inch the beautiful and wounded creature who is melting his heart slowly, yet as surely as she does every other fellow's sooner or later. She gives him a sigh and a smile both, tokens of her willingness to be calmed in turn. "Since I looked in on Master Tyres's party I've been to another besides," she points out, reddened lips curving as she confesses to being so much in demand, "and then a late dinner with a friend — when I came in I half-expected to find you here before me, and when I didn't I thought you might well have been in and gone out again. All over town, as I was — that certainly is the Lavecq way! — and, of course… if I knew what you had here before, and then you did come in late… I'd know, wouldn't I, that whatever you had in your pockets was — quite new…?"

And there, surely, the elder Lavecq sibling has scored a point: she eyes Clovis, still smiling faintly, perhaps— inviting him to boast.

"Oh, it most certainly is," agrees Clovis with easing companionability. "I had a fair time of it too. Frightened a couple of Billy's hoods, enough to stand a drink to Malchio and Bym, you know, Bym, that one who was supposed to have the plague but turned out to be born with one n' a half legs and mighty quick fingers. Merry fellows." He relaxes further, lounging back onto the pallet's wreck, as if his sister's every syllable renders him sleepier, sleeker, safer and smugger. "'Fraid you'll find my pockets quite as empty as y'heart. Succesful evenin', sure, but a pretty liquid one…"

Long, tender, feminine fingers stroke Clovis's hair; Marguerite sighs, "Nita, open the bottle, won't you? We found your wine," she whispers over her well nigh supine brother, her tone tinged now with amusement, "and if you drank tonight at my admirer's expense, I think it's only fair of you to offer me a drop of it now at your own… Thank you, Nita." And the Lily affects to drink deeply from her brother's own cup, though in truth she scarcely wets her lips; and she offers it, half-full, not to its proper owner but to the thieving little wastrel presently standing in for such.

Pure as the love of wine can be, the last year or so has, alas, accustomed young Clovis to somewhat impure words and deeds, and he squints at the proffered cup after he tilts it, turning it a touch cautiously, considering its depths as if they hold redemption, escape, oblivion, all three…

"Oh, have you had enough?" teases Marguerite, lifting a shapely eyebrow at her brother; for she has no inkling of what his life has truly come to, or the perils he has begun to see even in a cup of wine offered by his sister.

And as Clovis's startled, elusive, pale eyes tear themselves from the unreadable profundity of the fine and jerk upwards towards his sister's comely face, they burgeon and gleam and droop with tears. "Yes," he gasps, but he knocks back the wine at last anyway in a single gulp, sobbing shamelessly afterwards into its last bloody dregs.

Suddenly the little brother who would weep in her arms in preference to their mother's, accustoming her early to a life of soothing away masculine pains, is looking up at Marguerite through the well-watered eyes of the grown brother who has learned to turn upon her. She sighs — she can't help herself; and she takes the cup out of his unresisting hand to give to Nita, waving the maid away with the same gesture. Then she slips a hand beneath his waist, the other under his opposite shoulder, gathering him into her astonishingly fragrant embrace. "Oh, Clovis," she sighs again, "oh, what a night, mmm…?"

(to be continued?)

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