Rules: you will be given a word. Then you share one sentence/excerpt from your wip(s) that starts with each letter of your word.
I was tagged by @heartofstanding and I'll tag @itsa-me-cavaradossi, @oldshrewsburyian, and @ghostpoetics.
Your word is BOAT. I dunno why, just because.
My word was PEAR. Quoth @heartofstanding: "I would like to pretend it's a reference to Augustine but really it's because I was looking at a box of Pears soap." But hey, don't we need spiritual soap to scrub our souls clean of sin, as exemplified by Augustine's youthful fruity crimes?
ANYWAY. I cheated on the first sentence here and discounted a definite article. Also it's gross. On the plus side, Faustus says the elaborated theory of witchcraft is bullshit!
The papist inquisitors and the more credulous laypeople of all creeds tell lurid tales of witches' sabbaths, of wild naked revelry in the mountains, of blood sacrifice and diabolical orgies and obscene kisses to seal the unholy pact and ointments distilled from the rendered fat of unbaptized infants and tribes of clandestine sorcerers secretly gnawing at the heart of Christendom. The truth is more prosaic. Faustus has lain with a demon who wore his own face.
(untitled followup to not half so fair as thou which was mostly occasioned by me going "hey maybe I want to play around more with the whole master/servant thing?")
Even after ten years, there's something almost touchingly naive about Faustus in moments like these. His misguided affection for a demon has brought him to dizzying heights of idiocy; it gives Mephistopheles a feeling that he suspects is what heartburn would feel like, if he had a real digestive system. Or a heart.
(sexy consensual demonic possession fic; working title is Two Sickos, One Body but I'm gonna change it because it won't suit the tone of the whole fic. The line about heartburn is a tip of the hat to the Murnau film)
After the mass there is feasting, hours of it—pike with wine and ginger and lamprey in galantine; capons and pheasants; pork pies with eggs and prunes and chicken stewed with rice and almonds; roasted kid and roasted peacock; wild boar and venison with frumenty; coneys with onions and quails with bacon and pigeons with garlic and oysters in herbs and vinegar.
(from the novelthing, Richard and Anne's wedding. This goes on for like three more sentences because I really wanted to get my George R.R. Martin on)
Richard is quickly coming to mistrust beautiful days in June. Richard’s father had died in June, as well, and the weather had been nearly as beautiful then.
(also from the novelthing -- this passage is set immediately after the death of Edward III, so Richard has many terrible days in June ahead of him)
Have some imperial daddy issues from the novelthing!
(NB for the nitpickers among us: all references to medieval royal parenting have "by the standards of medieval royal parenting" attached; I know royal children were mostly raised by an army of caretakers but there's still variation within that paradigm. Richard II actually did have an unusually close relationship with his immediate family, for instance.)
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"Will you still be happy if it is a girl?" Anne says, her eyes suddenly wide. "Some fathers are not as concerned with their daughters. I hardly ever saw my father, when I was a child—he was much more concerned with his sons. I know they were his heirs, and Wenceslaus would be the next Emperor, but—" She swallows. "Sometimes I think it would have been nice. If I saw him more often."
This is the first time Richard has ever heard Anne say a word about her father that is less than reverent; usually, when she speaks of him, it is with the hushed awe you might have when talking about a conqueror or a saint. Perhaps, he realizes, that's because she rarely saw him as a father.
Richard's own father, in the years since his death, has become something of a stick to beat Richard with: the king they should have had, the great warrior, the terror of the French, whose name the nobles revere even while telling Richard it's too expensive to go to France, and then rebuke him for not going. Thomas, in particular, likes to imply that Richard’s father would find him a disappointment. But Richard knows better. He had known his father, and his father had loved him. He is sorry that Anne had not had that chance with her own father. Their children will never experience that regret.
@oldshrewsburyian tagged me in this and I love navel-gazing about my own writing. Of course all of this is in the context of my only really writing stuff for one fandom/set of characters but there are certainly multiple routes one could take with them and I definitely have recurring themes...
Spirituality, sexuality, and their intersections. My main characters, after all, are a polyamorous triad (they don't call themselves that obvs) consisting of two queer men and a woman who are varying levels of devout ranging from "very much and genuinely" to "has a lot of issues but is glad to have his partners in his corner." I've done a lot of work to make their (very healthy and loving) relationship feel grounded and believable in a very religious and also very sex-negative medieval culture without just making everything constant angst, and I think that's also helped me to incorporate the characters' religious beliefs more consistently throughout and to think about the issue in more depth.
Struggles with infertility. This is, again, part and parcel of the subject matter, as I'm dealing with historical figures whose childlessness was a major crisis in their lives and for the realm as a whole, but I've come back to it a lot especially in recent years and I kind of suspect this is a result of hitting my forties and still being single and kind of thinking about how I'll almost certainly never have kids and while this isn't a major source of angst in my life, it's something I do kinda turn over in my head once in a while (my attitude towards it was always "I'll worry about it if I ever meet anyone I'd actually want to start a family with"). The flip side of this is that I write a lot of fluffy or at least ultimately-ending-happily fics where Richard and Anne do manage to have some kids about whom I have lots of elaborate headcanons because I'm a dweeb.
Czech stuff. There's not a ton of fiction that has Anne of Bohemia as a major character but of the stuff that's out there, none of it really deals much with her home culture although it usually mentions that she was coming from the cultural center of Europe to the edge of it. Of course, the imperial court was a major locus for the International Gothic artistic movement but I do like to foreground Anne's Slavic heritage -- her father placed a lot of emphasis on his Bohemian ancestry, and also it's something unique that Anne and her entourage being to the English court. In general I want to emphasize that she comes from a specific cultural context that's generally been overlooked by English speakers, and that involves both giving some sense of her family as people with distinct personalities and also specific references to the literature, language, and culture of her homeland.
Medieval literature. I mean, obviously I also have a lot of direct references to English (and French) literature, music, culture, and so forth, because I'm a manuscript librarian with a Ph.D. in English literature so of course I do. (There are also a lot of manuscript references and I always forget that they would just call them books.) Although there's not as much Chaucer as you would expect, largely because I tend to modernize my quotes (the language is modern to them) and it's hard to do that to Chaucer.
Fluff. I think this is mostly a "since the pandemic" thing. In the present moment it feels like the preference in the teeny histories fandom is more for darker stuff so I do feel like I'm a bit out of touch, but idk, other than the novelthing which is pretty miserable that hasn't been where my heart is lately. Anyway they all die young and in upsetting ways so they should get to have a bit of a nice time first.
It looks like we're supposed to tag five people so I'm tagging @skeleton-richard, @themalhambird, @heartofstanding, @titleleaf, and @maplelantern :)
ok I want to try my luck again with the WIP word guess - kneel?
Now that's definitely a word that's going to show up frequently in a novel about Richard II, and so indeed it does! Putting some of it behind a readmore because there's a lot of sentences and a couple of them get a little blue. ;)
Richard feels his heart catch in his throat, and he kneels beside the bed.
There is a faldstool in front of him and he remembers he is supposed to kneel. He is helped down from the coronation chair (they have to remove the cushions first) and when he stands upright he is dizzy for a moment and his eyesight blurs around the edges. He kneels, slowly and carefully, on the faldstool as Archbishop Sudbury says one final set of prayers.
Richard kneels on the faldstool again, and as the archbishop intones “Coronet te Deus corona gloriae atque iusticiae…” he can barely hear it over the sound of his own heart thundering in his ears.
John of Gaunt, as the highest-ranking of all the nobles, goes first; he kneels at Richard’s feet and says, in a clear and even voice, “I, John of Lancaster, do become your liege man of life and limb and of earthly worship, and faith and truth I shall bear unto you, to live and die against all manner of folk.” His face is carefully expressionless.
The youngest person knighted today is his little cousin Edward, who is barely four years old and is guided to the dais by his father, the Earl of Cambridge. He gazes up at Richard with awestruck eyes and has to be nudged by his father to remember to kneel.
In the dark, he stumbles toward his prie-dieu—he could open the door and ask a servant for a candle, but he doesn’t feel like talking to anyone, even to order them around. He kneels clumsily; it is too dark to see his prayerbook.
“You are the King,” Archbishop Sudbury says. “I am your servant.” They kneel together, and Richard bows his head and closes his eyes as Sudbury intones: “Lord, watch over your servant Richard. Help him to lead wisely, and to do what is right. Grant peace once more to England. Forgive us our sins, and turn away your wrath.”
As soon as his feet touch the ground, the assembled company, as one, kneels.
He kneels in his oratory until it is late at night and his knees ache, praying to every saint he can think of, for the souls of the men who died today; for his own soul, if he has done the wrong thing; for guidance.
At the Abbey, he makes an offering at the altar and then climbs up into the chapel of the Confessor, where he kneels in one of the alcoves at the shrine. They aren’t built for people who are particularly tall; Richard has to bow his head a little, although he supposes it’s appropriate, in the presence of the saint.
The man in question kneels. “Ralph Standissh, squire of the realm,” he says, “and your Highness’ servant ever.”
Robert kneels astride his thighs and begins unbuttoning his doublet and when Richard closes his eyes because even Robert’s lightest touch is more than he can bear, the afternoon sun shines blood-red through his eyelids.
“You are awful, Robin,” Richard says, bounding up to kneel astride Robert’s hips. “I hope you know that.”
Below him, the two bishops are leading Anne down the long nave through the choir to the altar, which has been prepared with a pile of carpets and cushions. Anne kneels down upon these, very carefully, her hair and her purple robes flowing around her.
“Is it?” Anne gives him a heavy-lidded smile, and then before he knows it he’s on his back and she’s bent over him, her hair falling about his face as she kneels astride his hips, making him instantly, painfully hard.
All three of them kneel, wide-eyed in the presence of the King, even if the King is dressed only in his shirt and robe. He should probably have held this off until he’s had a chance to get dressed properly, Richard reflects, but it’s too late now.
He is not certain how long he’s been at prayer when Anne comes in and kneels beside him. The room is warmer for her presence. She turns toward him, a little, and examines his face. Her own face is pink and blotchy, her nose red and her eyelids swollen—she must have heard the news by now.
When Henry and Mowbray come to greet them, they do not kneel, only look at one another and make an awkward half-bow, as if they’d instinctually recognized Richard as the King and then thought better of it.
Then they kneel before him as one, so fluid once again as to have been rehearsed, but the smug expressions don’t leave their faces for a moment, and Richard wants to be sick.
Bishop Arundel, in his capacity as Lord Chancellor, has to make the customary speech about the parliamentary agenda; they can remain on their knees until he’s finished. And if Bishop Arundel objects to his brother having to kneel at length, he can abbreviate his speech accordingly.
Surprisingly few uses of this term, given how much eating my characters tend to do, but then, they eat off of trenchers.
The rebels, they have heard, destroyed everything they could find, and threw it into the fire, along with one man who had tried to steal a silver plate.
As soon as he is out of sight of others, Richard can feel his hard-fought composure slip away, feel that hot, tight, prickly feeling in his temples. For a moment the world is red and he lashes out, shoving half-blind at the table at the foot of the bed, knocking it to the ground with a loud crash of clattering plate.
The next morning his horse had been seen wandering alone on the riverbank. Following it, the Appellants’ men had found his armor—breastplate, helmet, gauntlets—and his sword.
Forgot to post a Sunday snippet last week so here's a longish one for today. This is set fairly early on in Richard and Anne's marriage, after she's found out about Richard and Robert but also after they've begun working things out. I don't think I've posted it before, at least. I haven't been writing much lately because I've been completely caught up in job-hunting stuff.
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Richard hasn’t spent much time alone with Robert since Anne caught them together; he doesn’t want to break things off entirely, and he misses Robert terribly, but he doesn’t want to hurt Anne either, and Anne has not been very clear about her feelings regarding their continued association, even as friends and brothers-in-arms. The three of them have all spent time together, enjoying hunting and hawking and the occasional private supper, but with things still so unsettled, Richard and Robert have both been shy of one another.
Which is why it’s such a great surprise when Richard comes to pay Anne a visit in their private garden, which she has taken to very quickly and where she will sometimes relax after dinner, and finds her walking arm in arm with Robert while a few of her ladies trail behind them, their veils fluttering behind them in the warm breeze. One of them calls out something in their native language and motions to Anne, who takes Robert’s arm and turns him in Richard’s direction. Robert actually pales as he bows, but Anne is beaming as she curtsies.
“If it isn’t my two favorite people in the world!” Richard exclaims, taking Anne’s hand and kissing it. “I hope you haven’t frightened Robert too badly.”
Anne smiles up at Robert. “I think he will recover.” She offers her hand for him to kiss as well. “Will you, my lord of Oxford?”
Robert bows gallantly and raises it to his lips. “If your Highness bids me,” he says.
“I do, my lord,” Anne says. “Will you come hawking with us tomorrow? My lord of Cambridge and his lady gave me a new falcon, and my lord husband says you are skilled in falconry.”
“Of course,” Robert says. “At his Highness’ pleasure.”
Richard smiles. “Always,” he says.
“If my lord will grant it,” Anne says, turning to Richard, “I will take my leave now—I would like to rest, and I have letters from petitioners to look over.”
“Of course,” Richard says. “I’ll see you at supper.”
“Come see me after?” Anne says, her eyes warmly hopeful, and Richard’s heart flutters.
“Whenever you wish,” he says.
Anne’s cheeks go just a little pink. She stands on tiptoe to kiss his cheek, and when Richard bends in, she whispers, “Try to behave yourselves.” But when Richard looks at her face again, she is smiling. “Good afternoon, my lord of Oxford,” she says, and sweeps out of the garden, her ladies behind her. Agnes gives Robert a wry smile and a pat on the arm on her way past, though if she means to flirt with him, Richard doesn’t think she’ll have much luck.
Robert, impervious to Agnes’ affections, sinks onto the stone bench nearby, his expression dazed. “What just happened?” he says.
“Don’t ask me,” Richard says. “I just got here. But I’d guess that Anne likes you.” He smiles. “It looks like at least one of her ladies likes you,” he adds, elbowing Robert hard enough to be teasing but softly enough to still be friendly.
“I didn’t notice,” Robert says. “About her ladies, anyway. But—Diccon, is she all right with us now? After everything?”
Richard’s cheeks flush a little. “Maybe?” he says. “I haven’t had the heart to ask her about the specifics. She was so hurt, Robin—she was afraid I’d never really loved her—”
“Well,” Robert says, “I hope I’ve set her straight for you. She seems like a bright girl, but if she can’t see what’s in front of her—I mean, you’ve talked about practically nothing else since she arrived.”
Richard covers Robert’s hand with his own. “That doesn’t mean I’ve stopped loving you,” he says. “I’ve loved you since before I even knew what that meant. That hasn’t changed, Robin. I asked Anne to trust me, before. I need you to trust me, too.”
“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” Robert says. “I just don’t know how long we can keep this up, now that you’re married. Or how long the Queen will tolerate it.”
“It will help if you get to know her better,” Richard says. “What did she tell you?”
“That she knew I’d lain with you,” Robert says. “I’m surprised she’d even heard that that was possible. Maybe she’s heard the Wycliffites grumbling about it. They seem to like her.”
Richard huffs a little, dislodging a pebble from the ground with his toe and watching it skitter across the garden path. “She could have learned about it from us, you know. And shut up about the Wycliffites. She’s not a heretic.”
“No, I suppose not,” Robert says.
“She just asked you about us, just like that?”
Robert smirks. “I mean, we didn’t get into the specifics of it. Though maybe she would have enjoyed knowing, who can say? But she wanted me to know that she knows, I think.” He looks down at his shoes, reaches down, plucks a daisy and sticks it in Richard’s hair. “She could destroy us, you know. Like your great-grandmother did to your great-grandfather. It’s not as though there aren’t people who’d want front-row seats if I ever got myself disemboweled. And yet—I don’t think she will.”
“Anne is nothing like my great-grandmother,” Richard says. “Nothing at all. I told you, back when we were first married: she wants to love you, as I do.”
“That’s exactly what she told me,” Robert says. “That I am beloved of you, and that through her love for you, she must also love me.” He shakes his head, baffled. “She’s not what I expected, Richard. I didn’t know wives could be quite like that.” He shrugs, then, and gives a little snort. “Mine certainly isn’t.”
Richard makes a little noise that’s meant to be a laugh but doesn’t get there. “How do you even know that?” he says. “When was the last time you talked to her?”
“It was—” Robert pauses. “A while ago? I don’t know. I don’t especially want to talk about it.”
He is the one who brought Philippa up in the first place, but Richard lets that pass. “I’m just saying,” he says. “Being married actually isn’t bad at all, you know. I’m sure you and Philippa could also work something out, while I work things out with Anne.” He nudges Robert again, grinning. “You know, before Agnes gets her hopes up too much.”
“What are you talking about?” Robert says.
“Anne’s lady-in-waiting—the blonde one, with freckles. I think she likes you.” Richard grins. “Clearly a woman of discriminating taste.” He leans over and kisses Robert, quickly, on the lips. “She can’t have you, though.”
Robert laughs. “I told you,” he says. “I’m a King’s man, through and through.”
