At first he is sure she is teasing him, this mundane failed spy in a room of immortals and great men. But he looks again, and her reassurance, her encouragement, is real. He blushes at the sentiment. It is very hard to keep believing his self-hatred with this muse in his ear.
He smiles modestly. “Thank you, Mademoiselle, I am greatly touched by your appreciation. To have been a nobody for so long, and then to have become the son of perhaps the greatest inventor of this age (which, I think, can feel like being a different kind of nobody)... I forget that…” what was it he forgot? That he had uncovered Milverton? That Mina changed the entire course of her life for him? That Nemo had chosen to adopt him? That it was due to his connection to both Mina and Nemo that they were able to make amends, and Tres Poenitentes was formed? That he was an equal crewman on the Nautilus, and that his friends and family did not pity him, but rather wanted him there.
In the company of Mlle. Delavigne, all the rash doubts that had bubbled up during his conversation Mr Marley seemed rather silly now. Realising he had trailed off, he cleared his throat.
“Forgive me, I forget myself.” He smoothed his scarf with nervous hands.
Mlle. Delavigne continues to speak happily, a babbling brook and a warm hug all at once. The word family, as she says it, is a breakfast in warm currents, around the heavy wooden table, elbow-to-elbow, Mina, Lando, Pierre, Conseil, Janni, Hira, and Nemo, each helping themselves to smoked fishes and seaweeds, fresh fruits, hearty bread, and curried blubber. And Hawley would do what he would always do in warm climes, and take a single piece of the curried blubber, heat it on a toasting fork, and spread it on his toast like butter, whilst Janni teased him for being so uncultured to not eat it properly (“like a cold cut!”) and he insisted that this way his toast had what tasted like a spiced arrowroot butter on it, which he preferred, and the room smelled of breakfast and the sea and kept tobacco, and he felt at home. The Mademoiselle was certainly a muse, to convey all that warmth and joy in a single word.
Her excitement for her companion was a little startling. Not knowing what he was looking for, Hawley instinctively looked around too. However, his old Latin education gave him a hint, he thought.
“Absolutely! I should like very much to meet your… grandfather?” he said, hesitant, lest his translation was awry.
"Recall yourself and those you love often— it will much remedy this spectre of malaise." Eloise tilts forward and shares her wisdom with almost conspiratorial mischief, a beam dancing across her freckled features as her waist-length plait slips from her shoulder and swings like a weighted pendulum between them.
Drawing herself upright once more and returning her hair to her back with a flick of her silk-adorned hand, she subsequently cannot help but chuckle sweetly in response to M. Griffin's honest attempt to identify her companion.
"You interpret things most exactly, but not so correctly." Ah, how the language of Rome had endured through the ages— she should hardly be surprised, though any hint of bitterness buried in ages past drowns within the sanguine folds of her present inebriation.
Thus without further remark does she return her gaze to the crowd, furrowing her tender brow until at last her complexion brightens with the magnitude of a sun newly risen. There. 'Neath the vast wall-mounted work depicting the splendour of Venus amid the luscious crash of waves, surrounded by loyal naiads and tritons lovingly rendered beneath the paintbrush stroke of Boucher.
"Avi!" She calls over the crowns a few bobbing heads without the slightest pinch of embarrassment, waving her arm high in the air to catch her companion's attention— perhaps draw him from the wall he had otherwise attached himself to, bring him into the focal crossroads of all this light and music a little more.
@victoriautmorse (Avitus)
