Ephemera & Tales

for samcdermott65, who's resolution was Lose 20 lbs. Curb the wine consumption or eliminate it all together. Eat healthier.

*****

Mark stretched out, languorous and heavy-limbed, coming so gradually awake that he wasn't sure if he was still dreaming. They'd collapsed together in the recovery coma of le petite mort, so the gas lights were still casting their gilded glow over the scene: Mark's dark wooden floors strewn with discarded garments, his own leg, thrown over the side of the mahogany framed day-bed, the muscle-shaded back of the beautiful young man who was sprawling across Mark's lap.

Oh yes, the New Year was off to a sterling start! ( Read more... )

for cicirossi - mist, train, loyal

The whole school had been caught up in excitement about Christmas and the upcoming break for what felt like forever. At least now he was in the upper school he didn't have so share a dorm with eleven Christmas-enthused whispering teenagers. Just one, very determined, fellow student, who's absence was most of the reason Christian wasn't looking forward to the three weeks holiday. Lucian was – Lucian had won his heart, spun dreams between them, accepted Christian's adulation, and taught him un-thought-of pleasures, all in the brief weeks since he had joined the student body.

Lucian was currently on the train winding its way across the mist-soaked moors, back towards Sheffield and then London and his family and his other life. Christian was alone in their room, writing formal letters to distant cousins and looking forward to Christmas spent with the Head and his prim un-welcoming wife not at all.
Lucian had spoken of parties, of dinners and theatre and dancing till after midnight every night for a week. Of débutantes and elegant dresses and silk stocking and silkier skin above them. He'd spoken of these things, eyes dancing and a smirk pulling at his kiss-swollen lips, and when Christian had gone silent, looked away, Lucian had caught his hand and promised, expansive and ebullient, punctuated by kisses and touches that made Christian gasp, that of course he would be loyal, faithful, true to what they had found. That the girls were for show, the parties expected as much as anticipated, and that his heart would stay within the four bare walls of their room, wherever his body may roam.

Cup, Curl, Capture and a cup - for my own Friday challege.

***** ***** ******


Assuredly, no job that leaves a man coming home at cock-crow each morning could ever be quite civilised. Still, the ladies he worked for were good mistresses, and the work suited Caleb far better than any other he had held before. His ladies allowed him to use his size and strength without assuming that with it came bloodlust or anger. Bessie called him her gentle giant and from anyone else it would be patronising, but from the queen of the house it became something to make him colour with quiet happiness.

( Read more... )

The housemistress kept them quartered very close, most like to save on coals. Two to a bed, and six beds in narrow pairs in each low ceilinged room. It was not so very different to the way things had been at home for him. At least here there was a pair of blankets each, and lamp oil enough not to bicker over it.

The constant closeness kept his mouth closed and his hands closer still, balled in his blankets the better to keep his secret. He watched though, as they stripped and washed and dressed. Listened to their teasing and their gossip.

( Read more... )

She cried in the night. The treasonous criminal, convicted and condemned for plotting against their Queen and threatening her very life, cried soft hopeless tears when the lamp in her cell was extinguished. The sound of it tugged at Pel’s heartstrings.

The girl was hardly more than a child, perhaps fourteen summers old at the most, thin and gawky like a colt still. Pel told herself firmly as she walked the short distance between cell and chamber that no amount of wide green eyes and freckled cheekbones could testify innocence. It was right that the girl should weep after her betrayal.

As the slow hours of the night turned though, it became harder to hold the prisoner’s guilt up as a ward against the memories. Memories of her first summer’s love, of tumbling skin on skin in the swimming pools with a girl who looked so much like Pel’s traitor charge. Carlean, her name was, all long limbs and slight elegant curves, tangled blond hair and talented hands that had made Pel squirm and beg.

Carlean had never been one for tears. No, she was all laughter and life, moans and gasps and screaming that brought her sisters out in the thunder to see that their youngest sibling wasn’t murdered but instead was lying in the hayloft, face buried in Pel’s shoulder, body quaking with laughter for the blushes and the fuss.

No tears. Not when her mother took a strap to her for the fright, not when Pel kissed those red marks in teenage benediction, not when Pel and her family packed up and moved along the trader’s road in the cool dawn of the next morning.

And yet she cried, and Pel’s heart softened.

It was for her own rest, Pel told herself, that she fixed a short candle stub to glow and gutter by the bars of the cell door, she told herself. For her own comfort that she did the same the next night and the next, through the slow rotation of the seven-day span laid down by the laws between condemnation and death.

It was for her own rest, she told herself, on the final night when not even the butter soft light could keep the hitching panic from her prisoner’s breath; for her own comfort that she turned the heavy key in the lock, set the door ajar and entered. For her own comfort she took the thin body in her arms, and purely for her own selfish desires that she kissed those chapped lips, and smoothed her hands over the tangled hair and smudged skin.

In the thin dawn light, it was for her queen that Pel mixed and measured the poisoned juices, and for her unhappy conscience that she sweetened it with honey. But it was for her heart’s sorrow that she mixed a second dose.

Under the chill gaze of the queen and the three white robed judges, it was for her duty that she held the clear glass to the traitor’s mouth, and for her dignity that she let the breath leave that young body with not a word to comfort it’s passing.

But it was for her own memories and for love that Pel took her dose, unsweetened bitter gall, and lit the last quarter inch of candle in her rooms.

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Originally posted 15th August 2003