| O, What a Fertile Morning! O, What A Dynastic Day! |
| Summary: | The well-known hymn of heads of houses upon discovering that… well, you know. It's basically always good news, one way or another. |
| Date: | Octobre 6th, 1866 |
| Related: | Takes place after this scene, and maybe some yoga, some deep breathing, some finding of one's inner peace… |
| NPCs: | {$npc} |
| Players: |
 |
Morning in Murias. The sort of bright, crisp autumn day which beckons to scions of House Quinn with an irresistible compulsion to be out and about, huntin' and shootin' and fishin' and ridin' round gettin' up to all sorts.
Not for Thadeus Quinn, however, that handsome young heir to his mother's house, the open air and the thrill of healthy exercise. He has been called onto an elderly Partharian carpet in that lady's rooms in Bellmoore Castle, which facing west as they do remain at this hour dim and cool and hushed. Every sound of a busily living castle seems deadened by tapestries from which the very colours have been leeched; his cousin Rosana's footsteps scarcely sound as she shows him into the presence of his mother, her knight, and makes herself scarce in accordance with orders previously lodged.
Two vast, sleek, powerful, pale-haired Elementi lounge before the cold fireplace, out of sheer inalterable habit. But apart from lifting their heads once apiece at the sound of footsteps without, and lowering them again when they catch the scent of Thadeus Quinn through the opening door, they pay him no heed. They were all puppies together, in a sense.
Between mother and son — a barrier or a shield? — stands the massive dark wooden bulk of the dining-table the Baroness has been using as a desk. Across its surface she has variously arranged the lap desk which accompanies her on her travels, an ink-pot and a tray of quills (one sorry specimen snapped in half in a moment of temper, but still lodged tidily with its fellows till it can be disposed of), a round pewter platter upon which still smoulders the ash of private correspondence just burned (for her fire hasn't been lit yet), papers coming in and papers going out, and at one end her pair of ornate Kentairish hand cannon, newly polished by Rosana's tireless hands till the wooden stocks gleam and the barrels shine. She sits halfway along on the farther side, changed by this hour from riding leathers into a clean pair of breeches and a well-made, copper-buttoned leather doublet. Her booted ankles are crossed out of sight and she has in one hand a sheet of parchment, which she affects for a minute or two more to be reading — a cheap trick, but it always works, doesn't it, leaving 'em alone with their own thoughts, not knowing how much longer they'll have to wait to be initiated into yours.
What she's really thinking of, with half an eye discreetly upon her heir over the top of that report on troop movements she finished reading before he came in, is how damnably good he looks these days. Over six foot, now that he's finally grown into those arms and legs he's been carrying about so long, and blessedly favouring her blood in his powerful build, his dark colouring, the strength of his jaw and his marvelous eyes… A year of her life well-spent, she has often thought, if this is the result; but in recent weeks her faith in him has for the first time been shaken. A disquieting undercurrent, deep down in her soul, which after his knight's second and more formal complaint to her she has no choice but to dredge up into the light. Sir Symeon couldn't get answers out of him. Surely Sir Gisela can do better.
That should do it. She lets the parchment drift down onto a pile of its fellows. Then she folds her hands on the edge of the table, lifts her eyes to Thadeus, and favours him with Sardonic Gaze No. 3. The one which assures the recipient that she has many matters on her mind and she is indeed troubled to find his among them. She is not angry, just disappointed.
"My time in Murias is measured in hours, not days," she reminds him quietly, as though her garb, her empty saddlebags in a pile by the door, the lines furrowing her brow, didn't provide him with sufficient inferences to draw. "And yet, whilst Her Grace requires my time, and Sir Xavier demands it, and the provisioning of my army is my concern above all — I am drawn away to attend to this inexplicable report I have had of you from Sir Symeon."
She refers of course to the exemplary knight, champion of battlefields as well as tourneys, who has undertaken her son's martial education during his service to House Arkanin. An unquestionably solid choice.
Thadeus eyes her. He bites his lower lip and, after a long hesitation, ventures, "… A report?" It's not as though he doesn't know, but he's reluctant to admit to anything till he knows what the charges are against him.
There's no need for Gisela to refer to any of the sheets of parchment lying before her. It's all too horribly seared into her mind. "That you've been sleepy and inattentive on duty; that your chores have not always been accomplished; that when you're wanted you're as likely to be asleep as waiting upon his call. What's more, with all who enter and leave Bellmoore under particular scrutiny at present it was laughably simple to discover that you, Thadeus, have absented yourself in the early hours of the morning on no fewer than four occasions this past month, claiming Sir Symeon's business — whereas in fact he had no knowledge of your absence and was three nights past astonished to find you not in your bed when he called." She lifts an eyebrow. "Where, might one inquire…?"
Her son swallows heavily. "I went down into the city," he admits.
"You… went down into the city," Gisela drawls.
"Yessir," Thadeus confesses, reverting to the military vocabulary so much more a part of the Quinn household than the ordinary endearments of parent and child. He swallows hard. "I concluded it was my duty to go."
It's pathetic, watching his Adam's apple bob about like that as he stands alone before the tribunal. Nonetheless his mother remains unappeased. "And why," she inquires coolly, "did you so conclude?"
One of the few benefits to being sixteen or seventeen years old, Thadeus Quinn has found, is being heard out rather than summarily dismissed. He swallows again, grimaces unconsciously, and risks all by trying maternal patience just a wee bit further than he has tried it thus far merely by existing. "May I start at— with how it all began?"
"I wish you would," drawls the Baroness, "for I'm at a loss to understand what has become of the fine son I believed I had raised."
It stings — how it stings! "I wanted to tell you," he bursts out, "but Virginia made me give my word…"
Oh, it's a girl. There we go. Here we are. Where we were bound to end up one day. "… The beginning," sighs Gisela Quinn a moment later. Her chair creaks as she leans back in it, her arms folded across her leather-doubleted chest. A stance and an expression suggesting that, while the heir to House Quinn remains on probation, the massed ranks of the judge, the jury, and the executioner have stayed their verdicts till he's said his piece. They all appear suddenly exhausted, and old beyond their years.
It's jolly well crunch time now. And so instead of telling it slowly, sensibly, logically, from the very beginning, exactly as he'd meant to after he was finally given permission during a whispered interchange through an open window the other night, the altogether overwhelmed heir to House Quinn just burbles, "Well, she's awfully… That is, I quite— like her, sir, and… And she's— that is— I mean, it's my—" There it goes, bobbing again. "It's mine," he explains.
From this stew of awkward adolescent verbiage — good God, we're Quinns, we don't do the sensitive chats — his mother extracts the one truly relevant inference. "She's with child…?" she inquires slowly. Behind a forehead creased by time and weather, thoughts previously unthinkable begin to melt and collide.
Thadeus still can't say it, but he nods. A lot.
"Yours?"
"Mine."
A wealthy, good-looking boy, the heir to a barony— "You're absolutely certain?" Gisela inquires, in a low, heavy voice, because it is her duty to ask the difficult questions.
Thadeus looks pained. "Mother."
"A young man in your position, Thadeus—"
"… I know," he admits, his eyes scraping the carpet. Present evidence notwithstanding he wasn't brought up stupid. There's a shift from one foot to the other. "But she's not like that, Mother," he promises earnestly, "it wasn't like that. We didn't mean to, we didn't. Only, we'd— well, we'd…" Done other things. "And it just…" Sort of happened. "And her sister'd told her," a tone of cheated incredulity enters his voice, and his gaze finally finds his mother's again, as though imploring her to see it his way, to understand that he's not totally culpable, "that it was safe the first time, that it couldn't happen, so we didn't think just once—"
At that both baronial eyebrows go up. "The first time—?" she inquires in a tone to match his. Though what it is she can't believe — dear me, what a selection she's just been offered. It would be difficult to pick only one.
Her son can only nod and try not to shuffle his feet.
She can't help but add, "Once?"
Her son can only look at her and redden about his ears.
It's a challenge worthy of her powers as a head of house, a commanding officer, and a mother of three, to refrain from either laughing out loud, or clapping him on the back and telling him he's magnificent. He has been disobedient. He has been negligent. He has been reckless. He has incurred the displeasure of his knight. But how to be appropriately stern and reproving, when the words bubbling up and on the verge of ringing forth range from: "Bloody well done, that man!" to "Uncle Gaufrid would be so proud!"—? How to react, when one's son has grown up overnight, and one — busy with one's own affairs, one's own love affairs, one's fief, one's lieges, and one's war — simply missed every single sign of it?
In the end she can't restrain herself. She puts an end to their pregnant (ahem) pause by harping upon that same inevitable theme, that fretful thought which must poison the mind of many a parent of a young son. "… Are you sure, Thadeus? There's no doubt in your mind?"
His blush gets underway in earnest, creeping forth from its base camp at the tops of his ears to conquer territory all the way down under his collar. "Y-you said, Mother, that— that when— I mean— when a girl— when she— that there's—"
Thus, a nightmarish flashback to the single worst fishing trip of Gisela Quinn's life.
Her daughter, she delegated to her own mother. But her son? No father, no uncles, and such a bootless brace of cousins— what else could she have done, but try to put him straight about a few of the facts of life? But to relive it again, here and now? Her hand shoots up and her gaze veers away. "Yes, yes," she says hastily, bringing her eyes back to his face even as she curses herself for not going into even more ghastly, squirmish, misery-begetting detail when she had the chance. Before she let him loose upon the world, with his broad shoulders and his pretty face and his title and his expectations and his thundering adolescent passions. "I see what you mean. And she's otherwise—?" She hesitates. What to ask a boy about his young friend in this sort of situation? She settles for, "What are her people like?"
"Uh. D'you remember," he attempts, "when I sent you that reel of green ribbon…?"
Gisela's brow furrows slightly. She lifts a hand, gesturing for him to go on.
"And the… the gloves," he swallows. The pale-pink gloves with small, perfect pearl buttons. "For Vivona…?" Oh, yes, they both recollect that parcel. "And— and— the length of purple silk, for Aunt Felicia…"
The pieces fall into place. Gisela shuts her eyes for as long as she dares. Oh, One's balls. That was all rather suspicious, actually.
"I remember thinking," she manages, eyes open again, with the shattered ghost of a smile, "that I must be sending you too grand a remittance, if you had enough over for such fripperies. I suppose I understand now what you were really buying with that coin. A chance to speak with her?"
More enthusiastic nodding. That's just how it was. Every single female of his acquaintance, most of them Quinns, got presents from that shop. There are others still hidden under his mattress that he was at a loss to know where to lodge more permanently, and he's had many a jagged and uncomfortable night for their sake. LOVE DEMANDS SACRIFICES. "I wanted to tell you, but…"
"How long have you known?"
"Just since we came back from Four Corners, sir. She— she knew before, but she didn't know how to get a message to me. Nobody else knows, just the two of us. Three, now," Thadeus adds hastily. "I told her we had to tell you, sir, I told her you'd— you'd be pleased…" How his eyes beg for it to be so! "—But she was frightened, sir." He hesitates. He adds another quick, "Sir," in case it might possibly be accepted in mitigation.
"Her parents don't know?" the Baroness clarifies — and, taking the answer from her son's grimace and the angle of his head (he needs a haircut, she notes absently, not for the first time this morning), she moves on to, "How far along is she?" When he looks blank: "How many months?"
"Twenty-ninth of Avril," he utters immediately. A red-letter day in his young life, one can only presume. He's probably carved the numbers into something, along with her initials and his and a heart with an arrow through it.
"And they are," Baroness Quinn manages, swallowing heavily, "good people, with… a shop…?"
Her tall, dark, gorgeous, wealthy, rippling, musclebound heir can only nod.
And then, of course, she can only nod. Shit. Of course. He's done the job, hasn't he. It's his nature. It's his destiny. One bless him. (If there is a One.) If only it were a better time, a better place, to bring a new life into the world… But when is it ever that way? It happens when it happens. And all one can do is to be glad of the joy amidst the carnage.
"Well," she offers, rather practically, "some of what you say is true… you didn't think. And you'll be a father soon. In only a few months." Deep breath, from the incipient grandmother. "What are you going to do about it?"
"Whatever's right," he insists. And then deflates, losing at least two inches of his impressive stature. "I don't know yet."
"… Thad," his mother sighs. "Come here."
And she rises to her feet, and gathers him into what can't be called an embrace because it is, very frankly, a hug. Her hand reaches up to ruffle his hair, to pull him down till she can leave a hard kiss upon his forehead.
"We'll look after her. Them. I promise you that."