A/N: This is my submission for the #softersideofneville challenge issued by @sirbeepsalot but I accept it doesn’t really meet that brief. I sat down and decided to write my head canons for Neville and this is what happened. Warnings for almost everything imaginable. I am rating it “R”. If you click on “read more” you are agreeing that you are old enough to read and consent to reading a story with dark, disturbing and triggering subject matter. If you are unsure and want further information before you read, you can PM me.
Thank you to @debramcg1106 for pre-reading and also to @choicesarehard for the picture edit that accompanies the story.
The Order of Things
In the Grand Hall of Fydelia, Neville waits underneath ornate chandeliers that glitter and cast diamond lights across mirrored walls and the table where he is seated.
His chair is dark wood, positioned so that he can see the hosts at their centre post.
In front of him are four forks, arranged from smallest to largest before they meet a round porcelain plate. The plate is flanked by four knives, arranged largest to smallest slightly in front of the glass for his white wine, the glass for his red wine and the glass for his water.
This is the order of things.
In all matters noble there are precise rules that must be followed. Cordonian protocol dictates that he must wear a ceremonial suit and tie. He rests politely while a butler places a napkin across his lap with a flourish, however he remains ready to stand and disregard it should a lady come or go.
This is the order of things.
At age fifteen Neville has attended many formal parties, but this is the first where he has been seated with his parents rather than in a small room reserved for children.
He has been practicing for this moment for as long as he can remember. His mother has told him he is a man now. He keeps his back straight – only common people slouch. His shoes are shined and there is a crisp white handkerchief that has been folded into a neat square and placed into the front pocket of his jacket.
Neville has paid close attention to every detail, and is certain that there is nothing he has overlooked, so he takes a moment, just a moment, to cast his eyes towards the girl at the centre table – scarcely a year younger than him with deep green eyes and long golden hair woven into a large braid that sits to one side of her face.
It is permissible to look at her to show respect. She is, after all, the jewel of Fydelia. Her aunt is the favoured mistress of the King and her parents are a Duke and Duchess in their own right and twice over by marriage. She is the bloom that will inherit the world, but he must not stare or let his eyes linger, for men from Cormery Isle who stare at jewels are often mistaken for thieves.
This is the order of things.
It is rumoured that family Vancoeur were once pirates- vagabonds that sailed the seas and plundered unprotected ships until they were grounded by sirens that called to them. Neville has scoured every inch of his family estate and never found anything to verify it, but he has also never found anything that proves otherwise. He always takes special care to traverse every foot of the island when he visits the old hag, Ursula, to fetch his mother’s special tea. Yet for all his efforts, he has uncovered nothing but sand and stone: weathered rocks on the shore that are smoothed by the ocean, but are not gems no matter how polished they seem. He puts them in a case, in a box, in his room, under the bed. These are precious keepsakes, small remembrances of his journeys. When he was young he liked to imagine that the shores of Cormery were host to buried treasure, but now, on the cusp of manhood, he shudders at any mention of his home’s colourful past. These are uncertain times where one’s title is their armour.
There is only one part of the evening where any kind of fraternising is allowed and Neville waits with perfected patience for the moment he is able to approach Madeleine. She spins out of the Crown Prince’s arms and he takes her into his own.
“Ooff,” she says giggling as Prince Leo’s twirl gives her more momentum than necessary. Her body jars against the young Lord. “Sorry.”
“Not at all Countess. It is I who should have been better positioned to receive you.” Neville speaks in the lowest baritone he can muster, but the last words still come out as a squeak. His voice, like the rest of him, is in transition. He is not a man but he is also no longer a boy and that has never been more apparent to him than in this moment where he folds Madeleine into his embrace and feels a warmth settle over him.
She smiles at him and he cannot help but return it and tighten his hold on her. He has read many idylls and legends about what it feels like to meet someone to whom your soul is connected, and he is certain that the unusual, almost desperate, sensation he has with her near to him is evidence of this very phenomenon.
He is not sure how, but their faces inch closer, even as no words are spoken. They are looking, drowning in each other, her own eyes wide and startled as they glide around the ballroom, avoiding the sections in the dance where partners are traditionally swapped.
They fast approach the segment in the Fydelian Waltz that Neville has always found most off-putting: the part where lips are supposed to meet. However, just as he realises it’s not the worst of choreographed actions and leans himself forward, his arms are wrenched from Madeleine and he is pulled into an antechamber by the man of the manor.
“Are you mad boy?” Godfrey stands over him, thunderous and red-faced. “How can you even cast eyes at her?”
Neville licks his lips. He knows Madeleine is a cut – or ten- above him, but he is unprepared for this direct and damning observation.
“I’m sorry sir,” he says, voice thick and clumsy. His first proper party and he has offended the host.
Godfrey glances back to Madeleine who has been swept back into the Crown Prince’s hold. “No matter,” he says finally, adjusting his cufflinks. He pauses as his gaze rakes over Neville. “You favour your mother.” He places a hand at Neville’s shoulder before squeezing firmly. “That’s always best.”
Neville swallows heavily and then the Countess of Cormery is at his side.
“Neville?” His mother’s voice is high and panicky. “What’s happening?” She looks from Neville to Godfrey and in the silence that follows a whole conversation occurs wordlessly above his head.
Godfrey moves to speak, but instead clears his throat, shifting his weight from side to side. “Your son is feeling poorly and it might be best if you left.”
His mother stiffens. “Yes of course. My son and I shan’t trouble you further.”
The Earl of Cormery materialises next to them. “What is the meaning of all this?”
The other three people in the antechamber pause.
“Neville feels unwell, and we need to leave,” his mother says. There is an edge to her voice that he has never heard before.
His father purses his lips, his huge bulk towering over them all and for a moment Neville wonders if he will show the whole world who he is in private. “I’ll send for the driver,” he announces, and Neville lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding.
It is only later, when they are on the ship headed for Cormery that his father comes to his cabin.
“You seem well,” the Earl observes as he unbuckles his belt.
“I am much improved,” Neville offers, still confused as to why he has been taken for ill.
“Kneel at your desk,” his father commands.
Neville slides to the floor, hands placed against the fine mahogany. He learned a long time ago not to ask about his transgressions when the strap was in play.
“What did Duke Karlington say to you tonight?”
Neville is truly at a loss as he bows his body forward. “Nothing. He asked only why I danced with Madeleine.”
Thwack. The first hit is always the hardest. Neville braces himself because the first is never the last.
Thwack.Thwack.Thwack. The belt breaks his shirt and his flesh, but he bites back the screams that fight to be heard.
“Foolish boy, never understanding your place.” The blows come heavy and fast and Neville loses count after twenty. He can smell blood and piss but he fights not to cry. ‘Your mother used to stare at Fydelia like it held something for her too.” Thwack.Thwack.Thwack. “But they’ll never look twice at us, never see us as equals.” Thwack.Thwack.Thwack. “That’s the way things are.”
Neville groans, body breaking under the lashes and the sound only spurs his father on.
“My bastards can take a hundred lashes without flinching and somehow my true son is the runt of the litter,” his father seethes as Neville collapses, spent and sobbing.
“Get up,” the Earl hisses, but Neville cannot stand, cannot move. He is past exhaustion, past his limits. He hears the thunder of his father’s footfall back up the galley and then there is crashing and the sound of glass breaking and his mother is screaming.
He tries to go to her. Tries to use his fingers to find purchase on the floorboards and crawl forward, but he is useless. This small movement takes the very last he has to offer and the world fades from view.
When he finally comes to, dawn is breaking and the ship is docking at Cormery. They are bundled into a carriage, his mother even less able to walk than he can, and they are taken back to the estate.
She asks him to get her tea, hips swivelling as if they are not properly connected to her body, but this time he cannot go. He has lost too much blood and she is too ruined to care for his wounds. She hobbles back to her bed, but not before Neville takes in her purpled flesh and the imprint of his father’s signet ring on her cheek.
His father grins rakishly when Neville’s hunger finally outweighs pain and he makes his way down to attend dinner three days later.
“Women know you really care for them when you give them your mark, son.”
He spits in Neville’s soup. Not because he needs to spit, but because he can.
Neville does not have the energy to hate or to protest. Instead he eats his soup and dreams of the day when he will be Earl, when he will have a wife who will bend to his will and break underneath his belt. He will make a noose out of the diadem of Cormery and she will wear his mark. He will get sons – many sons - upon her and they will take women who will wear their mark. They will all, they will all, they will all wear his mark.
This is the order of things.
Neville recovers in the weeks that follow, slowly but surely. Flesh rebinds itself and eventually he finds the strength to dote on his mother who has grown pale and sickly.
“You need to go to Ursula,” his mother croaks. “You need to tell her I couldn’t take the tea when I needed it.”
Her eyes are more frightened than the nights where his father rampages, and Neville scurries off to find Urusla, through the woods and up the hills to the small house he has visited regularly for as long as he can remember. When he arrives he recites his mother’s words and Ursula nods once, stopping at her wardrobe to retrieve her coat and bringing the coat hanger with her.
Ursula barricades herself in his mother’s chambers but he sees the servants removing crimson sheets and his mother dies a week later.
Neville does not cry at her funeral. Boys should never cry, especially nobles.
This is the order of things.
His father takes another wife – for what is an Earl without a woman? She is a slender creature, only a few years older than Neville with long legs that he pretends not to notice, even when his father regales him with stories of how easily they part. By the following winter, shrieks fill the grand halls.
Neville has a brother.
***
When Neville is eighteen the Earl takes him to Amsterdam, to a door with a red light where a soft women with freckles on her nose opens her legs and makes a man out of him for a hundred Euro. Her flaxen hair is not quite the right shade, but if he squints he can pretend and when he is not pretending he closes his eyes. His time inside of her is short and he cannot hold her like he wants to because his father takes his turn as soon as they are finished.
Instead, Neville waits in her cramped kitchen as he hears his father, rutting inside the woman that has taken his innocence, all the while realising that the scent that stems from her kettle: ginger, cinnamon and thistle, is the same as the potion that he carried all his life from Ursula’s cabin to his mother.
He flirts with feeling anger. He flirts with feeling betrayal, but when the visit is done he feels nothing at all.
This is the order of things.
***
The years that follow are long and lonely. Neville is educated at the best universities that Europe can offer. He plays polo. He masters the sword. He swims. He has the correct name and the right pedigree. He is admitted to the finest gentlemen’s clubs in Cordonia, France and beyond… and yet… when the season comes to attend the Royal Court, to go to balls and fuck debutants as Crown Prince Leo sets out to choose a bride, Neville abstains.
“Just as well,” his father tells him. “Better not to go than be thrown out again with your tail between your legs.”
For someone who is not there, he follows the social season with unimaginable zeal. He readsTrend magazine. He watches the news from his stately parlour.
The more he sees, the more his heart sinks. She leads from the outset, never anything short of perfect: an answer for every question, a question for every diplomat.
He is not surprised when Leo proposes to Madeleine. What man can resist a sun that burns so bright?
She will be Queen and he will pay his obeisances.
This is the order of things.
She is too good for the Prince - of course – but titles allow a man to reach for the stars. Neville does not bat an eyelid when the Crown prince continues to be the consummate playboy. The higher your rank, the less the rules of the world you inhabit apply to you. They allow you to gallivant around Europe and be seen with different women, but to his great surprise, Leo’s travels take him away from Court, away from Cordonia and away from his station altogether. The man who has everything abdicates, and his younger brother becomes the heir to the throne.
When he learns that Madeleine has returned to Fydelia he locks himself in his room and takes a pen and paper and writes the reasons why he is no longer a poor match. He is a scholar and an athlete. He will be an Earl. Can an Earl secure a pearl?
Weeks pass as he contemplates and eventually he charters a boat to the mainland. When he arrives at Fydelia he is greeted warmly although the woman he has come to see is not in residence. It is the new heir who is choosing a bride and once again Madeleine has offered herself.
It is unsavoury – the papers all agree – to attempt to wed a man who might have been a brother, but once again she wins them over with words and with wit. There is no better choice in all the land. Even Prince Liam – who like the Crown Prince before him is wont to bed loose foreigners – cannot ignore it.
Once again Madeleine will be a bride and once again Neville accepts the rightness of it. This time when a diamond ring is placed on her finger, it is placed there by a King. There is no higher power to take a special flower. Neville sends gifts and congratulations.
This is the order of things.
She calls upon him, on the tour to celebrate her betrothal, and he answers like the men of Cormery have always answered the call of beautiful women, breaking themselves across the rocks that are licked by the Cordonian Sea.
When he first sees her at Applewood all the breath leaves his body. The images on magazines and television have not done her justice.
In youth he knew the rosebud and now he sees the rose; in her rightful place, beside the former Queen whose crown she will soon wear.
It takes only minutes to learn the lay of the land, to see that the King longs for his American harlot and does not value the emerald on his arm. It is unfathomable to Neville that any man could be so foolish, to not see the artfulness of every word breathed by his fiancé, to not look upon her and burst into flames.
He will want her until his body is nothing but ashes.
He soon realises that he is there to be a match for another. It is both an insult and a compliment. He tells Lady Lee that she is radiant and while, not untrue, she will never, ever ever, burn as bright as the sun. He says all the right things, makes all the appropriate non-promises, but can he marry the lady in waiting to the woman who holds his heart?
He begins to understand why the American might return to Court. It is a comfort to be around the things you love, even if they remain out of reach.
As the engagement tour continues, Neville begins to worry for the sun. The American and the King only grow bolder in their affections and for the first time in his life, Neville witnesses an eclipse.
The King casts Madeleine aside after the American is cleared of scandal and made a duchess. Like others, he attends the Homecoming ball and waits for an announcement that never comes.
There is an attack. There are bullets and bandits and when the dust settles, the new Duchess is engaged to a common man: Drake Walker.
He tries to talk to Madeleine about it, but she has no words for him or anyone else. He cannot fault her silence, or the anger he suspects simmers underneath it. Neville himself has been spurned many times, but always, always for a man that has a better claim.
In one swift moment an American whore and a common Cordonian defy the very fabric of the universe. Why is Madeleine weeping in her room when the King is not even marrying the woman she has been discarded for?
He can only watch for so long, the rage festering when he finds himself at functions where two simple people flaunt the love that has destroyed everyone around them.
The King is impotent, bruised and broken.
Madeleine is rebuilt, not as royalty but as a servant - a public relations specialist - and Neville aches for her, for what she has lost… for what they have all lost observing the conventions that brash Americans do not respect.
He holds his tongue for as long as he can, but it is when the Duchess and her beau are dancing, dancing like dancing is easy, dancing as if dances don’t break hearts, that he snaps.
He issues a challenge. He has fenced at tournaments at Versailles and Alsace. He will break Drake Walker and he will show Madeleine and the world that all that they have suffered, all that they have endured, is not for naught.
He hears Madeleine encourage Drake, winning will be a public relations victory, and that only adds to the fire in his soul. Doesn’t she realise that his sword is her shield? Their loss is her victory.
The fight begins. Steel clashes against steel and he has an immediate advantage, the common man ducking his volley of blows. He tells the would-be Duke what his flaw is: his complete and utter lack of respect – but that only seems to spur him on.
Drake announces to the world that Neville is not his better and Neville draws first blood in the wake of the insult. Neville’s hatred for this impudent scoundrel, this man who has cuckolded his King and shown no deference to those that govern him makes him unsteady on his feet.
In all of the other matches he has fought, there have been agreed parameters. This man observes none of them. He is brute strength and brazenness. For a moment, Neville can see his father in the broad shoulders that flex when he parries and come at him over and over and over again.
He becomes aware of the sounds around him, all cheering for Drake to beat him, not just his wench, but the Duchess of Lythikos and the King.
People that should be loyal to him. People that should observe the order of things.
As Neville stands above Drake, ready to deliver a fatal blow, the commoner socks him the jaw and he loses both his rapier and the upper hand. In the blink of an eye, a blade is pressed at his throat and he feels it drawing blood from him as Walker asserts his control.
He is out manoeuvred and outnumbered. He yields to save his life, only to realise that his existence has been rendered completely meaningless. His objections to using fists in a fight of foils is met with laughter and the last thing that he sees before he retreats is the contempt in Madeleine’s eyes.
He attends the wedding – not because he wants to, but because he knows that if he runs away now he will never be able to return - but as soon as the festivities are over, he retreats to Cormery. His brother is sick and it is convenient to focus on that rather than the dissolution of the world as he knows it.
His return turns out to be timely. What his brother needs most is blood and marrow and any brother, even a half-brother, is best placed to give it.
Neville offers himself up willingly, to be meaningful, to be needed, but doctors frown at him and exchange whispers.
In the end what his brother requires is sourced from his father, a now elderly man whose body pays the ultimate price.
As the Earl’s skin weathers and his lips go blue, they gather around him, holding vigil in the small hospital in the mainland. Rashad arrives and Neville is overwhelmed to see his peer.
“Thank you for coming,” he whispers.
The heir to Domvallier furrows his brow. “I’m here on business, friend.”
Neville is too weary to understand what this means and they are all banished as Rashad visits with his father. The last rites are administered and the Earl takes his final breath.
Neville does not know how to feel about this death. It is honourable, for his brother grows stronger every day, and yet he does not love the man who raised him. A great weight is lifted, but it is soon replaced by a truth that is equally heavy.
“Your father asked me to amend his will,” Rashad tells Neville as they sit outside the hospital.
“He did?” Neville is still wearing the same brown suit he donned the day before. The one that Lady Lee once mocked.
“He did.” Rashad confirms. “Only a biological child can succeed him.” He pauses. “Your tests show you have no genetic markers in common with your brother… but your father did.”
There is a long silence while Neville weighs this new information. “He isn’t my father?” Rashad has the good sense not to say anything. “Who is?”
Rashad shrugs. “You would be in a better position to say than I.”
In the weeks that follow, Neville filters every piece of information he has ever received against Rashad’s words and reaches the inescapable conclusion that it is not being an Earl that has been taken from him, but something higher altogether.
He attends the funeral, as he must, but he sits at the back, deferring to his once brother and stepmother.
He is Neville with no name, with nothing and no one: cast off of Cordonia from Cormery Isle.
Permatags (let me know if you want to be added or removed): @debramcg1106 @fullbeaumonty @blackcoffee85 @stopforamoment @tmarie82 @riseandshinelittleblossom @bhavf @vickypoochoices @choicesthot @akrenich @choicesarehard @lovehugsandcandy @coffeebeandragon @kendrasgue @pixelsandkink @mfackenthal
This story tags (people who expressed interest in the sneak peek): @frugalchoicer @bobasheebaby @boneandfur @octobereighth @navigatorholmes
“This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970) xv.
Last week was the anniversary of the installation of #TheOrderofThings @thewilsonchelt 2017. I was prompted by images of the preview popping up in my social media memories Co-curated by #andrewbick #jonathanparsons and me, we are collaborating again on Analysis, Disruption, System - a publication and exhibition @sksoest in 2023 1. #installation of @akdolven ‘Teenagers Lifting the Sky’ My #painting Siscicily on the table 2. @artistjaypee :-) 3. @andrewmbick taking a call during the installation of his work from the OGVDS/GW series https://www.instagram.com/p/CoErPbMoLpo/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
my book #theorderofthings will be shown as part of the #neverendingstories exhibition at @kunstmuseumwolfsburg from the 29th of october. designed by @dja_dj edited by @marksandersartconsultancy — great to know that this monograph still resonates, even 16 years after its initial publication .
