News on Cascade Hall

Arnold Carey

March 08, 2012 8:38 PM

News by Arnold Carey

OOC: A little fuzzy timed; this happens before the CATS. BIC:

Arnold was curious when a pair of owls from home approached him and Arthur, but not enough to look away from his breakfast longer than it took to untie the letter with his name on it and offer the bird a bit of bacon. His family wrote often, after all, through one member or another, and it was usually just congratulations, commiseration, or censure over recent events at school they’d heard about from him or Arthur, maybe some commentary on events they didn’t know about at home – nothing urgent, nothing he ought to let his fried eggs get cold to read at once. He put his letter beside his plate after the owl flew off and kept eating.

His twin was better at multitasking than he was, though, and paused only long enough to break the seal and shake open the letter before beginning to eat and read at the same time, frowning in concentration in a very familiar way. There had been a time when it hadn’t been, but one of the things Arthur had noticed very soon about Sonora was that their parents weren’t here to make him stop reading at the table, and he’d adapted with impressive speed. Arnold didn’t pay him any attention until suddenly, the fork his brother had been holding clattered against his ceramic plate. Then he looked up and Arthur’s face was the color of chalk.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked.

Wordlessly, Arthur shook his head. Before Arnold, suddenly very sure that he did not want to know what was going on, could force himself to come up with another response, or probably even think of one if he’d wanted, Arthur got up from the table and walked out of the Cascade Hall. Maybe he was just going back for a book he just needed to have, or to look something up in the library, or to throw up because his food wasn’t very good or else he had one of those headaches for reasons which had nothing to do with that letter, but Arnold found himself having trouble really believing that.

Reminding himself not to pani...il he knew who was dead, that he might still be wrong and no one be dead at all even as he felt completely sure it was Great-Great-Grandmother, he tore open his letter and read it, then sat back in his seat, thinking he ought to feel much more stunned than he really did.

After relief came and went, the thing his mind stuck on was how the letter wasn’t in his father’s handwriting. Anthony VII had signed it, and his seal had been on it, but Arnold was sure that Father hadn’t really written it. He knew his father’s handwriting, and that wasn’t it; the signature was sloppy, but still recognizable, but the rest had been penned by someone else. A woman, he would guess. One of his aunts, maybe? He didn’t think it was Grandmother.

It definitely wasn’t Mother, though. For one thing, he knew her handwriting, too, and for another, the letter was about his mother, mostly. About her being in the hospital because of an accident with a potion. She was going to be all right, but…Arnold thought about it for a second, and decided he understood why Arthur had so abruptly left, even if he would rather than his brother hadn’t. He knew he wasn’t going to really do either thing, but he felt like either being sick himself or crying, and if he’d thought that he might really do one or the other, he would have left the most public place in the whole school, too.

0 Arnold Carey News 181 Arnold Carey 1 5

Arthur Carey

March 22, 2012 10:47 PM

Reacting by Arthur Carey

It was, he knew, ridiculous, but as Arthur found an empty room and all but collapsed onto the first thing he saw which could be used as a seat, he found he could not help but think that it felt like the world was tilting off its proper course and was about to start spinning out of control away from them all. He felt, too, almost as though he were going to be sick; his hands, he noticed with a slight surprise which seemed far removed from him, were shaking a little. Everything seemed to just be spinning out of control – his control, anyway, and possibly even the family’s control, and that was what he cared about, what he needed in his life and was not having at the moment.

Deliberately, his jaw clenched, he gripped his hair in both hands and pulled hard. The pressure which was rapidly beginning to build at his temples did not alter, grew neither better nor worse, but after a moment, he was able to sit back and discover he could breathe evenly again, with a little effort. It was as if he had walked through a war zone, but he was in control of himself again, or at least very nearly so. He would be completely back in a moment, he was sure.

As that happened, true to his predictions, a little guilt began to creep into the mess in his head. He ought, he knew, to go back to find Arnold and make sure his brother was all right. It was too easy, though, to simply remain sitting on what, now that he looked at it, was really more of a…a…stepping stool, he thought it was called, he had an idea that there was another word, but he couldn’t call it to mind just now, and let a numbness so deep it was almost narcotic begin to settle over him as his pulse slowed, and so he continued to do it.

He wanted, very much, he decided, to believe his father about the alleged potions accident which had put his mother in the hospital. He was going, he decided, to try very hard to believe it, no matte rhow many times he’d stayed with Mother while she worked and so learned how meticulous she was. If, though, he ever found something which proved to him, so that he had no doubt that he was right, that it had not been an accident, though, he also decided he was going to find the person behind it and kill them. No one was allowed to hurt his mother. He had, since he started to realize there were things about his family that were not good and were certainly not the things he had been told about his family, expected that someday people would do bad things to him, but not his mother.

He began to feel angry at the thought and tried to push it away, but before it worked, the door opened. He was on his feet at once, trying now to remind himself not to say anything he might regret later to anyone.

0 Arthur Carey Reacting 182 Arthur Carey 0 5

Jane Carey

March 25, 2012 4:35 PM

Checking on by Jane Carey

Early in the year, Jane had been sure to greet Theresa and Alexandra both as soon as she was sure which one of them was definitely which. They were, after all, natural allies in a sense, Carey girls in a family which often seemed to her to prize more masculine traits even more than society in general did – it had not escaped her notice that the only officially recognized matriarch in the entire family history was unmarried, childless, not very pleasant, and held a job normally reserved, in their world anyway, for men – and it was important to know as many other members of the family as she could anyway. Everyone was supposed to be seen supporting the idea of the family cooperating with itself, getting further and further away from the highly divided state they’d been in only ten or so years ago, and since she still hadn’t decided, if she got the choice, how she was going to deal with her extended network of relatives once she was married, building whatever small alliances she could was a way to keep her options open, too.

When all three of the South Carolinians received owls at once, then, she made a mental note to ask Theresa about it later. Before she could turn back to her breakfast of cereal and fruit, though, an owl landed in front of her, too. A frown creased her forehead as she took the letter and began to feel a little concerned, but she was kept from thinking anything too horrible had happened by the way Edmond and Alexandra didn’t receive any messages. If something momentous had happened, the death of someone very important or something like that, then Edmond might have found out before they announced it to her or the South Carolinians, but he would have told her, and Alexandra would have found out, too. She was very nearly a Carey, anyway, and, as Alexander’s only grandchild, fairly important, at least as long as her uncle Jack continued on without a son. Alexandra would have gotten a message, too, if something very important had happened.

Jane opened the envelope she’d been sent and found a short note in her father’s handwriting.

Lorraine and Cathryn Carey have been hospitalized, he’d written. The report is it was an accidental poisoning – a potion gone awry somehow. Your mother, rest her soul, did prove to us all how unexpectedly troubles can come upon us, but I imagine it will be a shock to those twins and their cousin. You ought to offer our formal sympathy and hopes for Lorraine’s quick recovery. Your brother should also speak with the twins, I suppose; tell him it was an accident with their mother. With my love, as always, your father, Rbt Carey. And the date he’d written it – yesterday – was beneath it, and the paper, as a quick charm revealed, had been enchanted against anyone attempting to add to it.

Well, she thought absently, behind sympathy for Arnold and Arthur and Cathryn’s son, this is interesting.

It was clear enough, after all, what the thing was about. The reference to her mother was, she thought, a dead giveaway, at least under the circumstances – she thought. It was possible to read it as an allusion for the benefit of anyone who intercepted the letter, but she didn’t think so. The emphasis on telling Edmond it had been an accident, instead of just writing to Edmond himself – she thought it was significant. If so, though, why was he telling her, specifically, and not Edmond? He wrote to them both at least every other day, it would not have been strange for him to do so.

Before she could think too much about it, though, a movement at the Aladren table caught her eye, and she looked up in time to see Arthur leaving suddenly. Folding up her letter, she picked up one last bit of pear, popped it into her mouth, and followed.

She saw him go into a room and waited for a moment to give him time to compose himself, if necessary, then opened the door. He rounded on her immediately, and she held her hands up for a moment in a pacifying gesture, glad she’d stuck the paper in her pocket now. “I heard about your mother’s accident,” she said. “I was sorry to hear it. I wondered if you were all right when you left so suddenly.”

0 Jane Carey Checking on 160 Jane Carey 0 5

Arthur

March 25, 2012 4:37 PM

Responding by Arthur

If his Divination homework had included the assignment to guess who it might be who’d come walking through that door, Arthur thought he would, for once, have done poorly on graded work, because he would have listed quite a few names ahead of Jane’s. It was perfectly accurate to say that his relationship with the most distant relative he had at Sonora was cordial, perhaps even to say that it was marked by mutual respect, but it was not exactly what he would call close in the emotional way any more than it was in the blood one.

He did not consider that a slight. He knew his worth, and he knew hers, and they both knew that while he might be accorded slightly more status in the family as the blood brother of an heir than the adopted sister of one would, she was at least a little the better in the things that especially counted. Jane was more intelligent than he was, and yet she didn’t seem to suffer the inability to understand others which had made his life such an odd and often frustrating affair. People seemed to like Jane.

And anyway, he supposed it meant he was crazy, but he had gotten the feeling, at times, that though people liked Jane, she was really not truly intimate with anyone except perhaps her brother, and maybe not even him. He’d watched her closely and seen scarcely a hint in all that time of what her interior life might be like. She was very good at being what she was supposed to be.

He was not sure, then, whether to be surprised or not that she already knew what had happened to Mother, or at least a version of it, despite not being from South Carolina or even descended from anyone named Anthony. “Why d’you – “ he began harshly, but cut himself off, remembering about not being an idiot merely because he was upset about something. It was not a good practice; he would get nowhere in life if he did not completely break the habit of saying what was on his mind under stress. “I suppose Theresa told you?” he asked instead. He knew he had seen her speaking with Terry before, and he didn’t suppose his cousin would be a particularly expensive source of information, particularly when she was surprised. “They would tell her, too, Mother is her aunt.” He shook his head, trying to pull himself together. What he had been doing was not doing well. “I meant to say, thank you, I’m quite all right. Did you see my brother? I’m afraid I walked off on him very suddenly, I don’t think he’d read his letter yet when I did – er, left.” The thing which annoyed him about language was how fluid meaning could be; a sentence could be perfectly correct in the technical sense and then be misunderstood just due to some minor imprecision. It was maddening sometimes to wrestle with.

0 Arthur Responding 0 Arthur 0 5

Jane

March 25, 2012 4:39 PM

Lying by Jane

Jane didn’t flinch when Arthur started to snap at her, or show much surprise when he thought Theresa was responsible for her knowing what was going on. “I think they did,” she said, thinking of how she’d seen the Pecari girl get a letter, too. “I saw an owl go to her, too.” Which could have meant nothing, just as every other owl which had brought mail this morning had most likely meant nothing, or at least nothing relevant to this, but Jane had noticed that Theresa didn’t seem to get letters as often as she might have expected someone with such a large immediate family to.

She decided to leave it there, and leave aside the issue of how exactly she had found out unless he caught on to it. If she had been thinking completely, she would have phrased things so it sounded as though it had been Theresa who told the story without confirming it, but as it was, she could just try to avoid naming her source. There was nothing wrong with having heard it from her father, it was common for information to get passed around the family very quickly and only proper that she know this so she could properly express her sympathies, but she preferred to keep him and her brother sheltered as much as she could, keep them out of focus in any way she could. They were safer that way.

Ridiculous, of course, with Edmond being who he was and that necessarily making her father – and her, really, but she wasn’t so worried about that anymore – vulnerable, but that was how she felt. Emotions were seldom logical. It was one reason her own mother had so often counseled them toward using order and logic instead.

“I think I saw Edmond with him,” she lied when Arnold came up as Arthur tried to give her a better response than the one he really had at first. “But you don’t have to be proper, you know. We know a little about what it’s like – to have something happen to your mother.”

Was Edmond’s birth mother even still alive? She had never really thought of that before. His other father had always been the figure who loomed up to cast a slight shadow of disruption on their family even before the world changed around them; his mother had been a figure as anonymous and unremarked upon as someone in the very background of an old photograph. Then, when Edmond was nine, they had said she was dead, but it had really been that her marriage to Alasdair had been dissolved, not that she had actually died. She didn’t even know if Edmond knew that, actually; she had only heard it by chance, listening to Father and Morgaine, and had never felt comfortable bringing the topic up with her brother. She did not like to remember Edmond’s other family.

0 Jane Lying 0 Jane 0 5

Arthur

March 25, 2012 4:40 PM

Speculating by Arthur

Arthur didn’t know if he believed Jane or not when she made it sound as though Theresa hadn’t told her, but he did know that he didn’t care. It was too much effort to care, never mind go through whatever he would need to go through to find out if it was a lie. He didn’t have the energy to spare right now to play the elaborate word games he’d need to engage in to even get a better idea about it all. So he simply nodded once, shortly, before changing the subject.

What she said next, though, surprised his so much that he looked at her in disbelief for a moment before doing what he supposed was about as likely as her being here in the first place: he laughed. “Yours is worse,” he said, conceding the point. “My mother is still alive.”

That was the important thing, he reminded himself. Mother was not dead. She was still alive. Whatever had happened to her had been noticed in time, had been treated in time, and Father said she was going to be all right. That everything was going to be all right.

It was a lie, of course – this one situation might, in the end, be all right, but there was no way that everything was going to be all right – but it was a pretty lie for a parent to tell, and Arthur felt a sort of gratitude to his father for telling it, just as he felt a sort of gratitude to Jane for coming here. She was kind, and his father loved him. That much, anyway, was all right – rationally, he thought, as well as instinctively, he knew it could turn around, that those things could become terrible, that they could somehow be what made things not be all right, but now it seemed all right.

“It’s just – difficult to process, really,” he said, with unusual honesty. “I always thought the only good thing about being a woman, of, of being a witch, would be the guarantee of safety, if you wanted it.” He glanced at her. “I mean no offense, cousin, but other than that, or if you didn’t always want to be safe, I don’t see how any of you can bear it.” He had always known his mother was not a very proper lady, and had assumed proper ladies were simply minded differently, really, but had then run across the problem of noticing that his great-great-grandmother was not unique in being a witch who had every right to be her husband’s partner as well as his hostess and was still a proper lady. Jane was another like her, and there were some others as well. He did not understand, though, how they managed if they did not have the great good luck to be like the Fourth and Belinda and be so well-matched that they were in love almost from the time they met. That was, he thought, rare.

0 Arthur Speculating 0 Arthur 0 5

Jane

March 25, 2012 4:41 PM

Advising by Jane

“That’s true,” Jane said calmly when Arthur pointed out that her situation was worse because her mother had actually died. “I’m glad your mother is still alive. I wouldn’t wish what happened to my mother on anyone.”

Except perhaps the person who had been behind what happened to her mother, anyway. No, definitely him. Him, she would like to visit every pain in the universe on. Him, she’d destroy without feeling, she was sure, even the tiniest bit bad about it. He had broken her father and brother and taken her mother. Perhaps she would, under some theories, suffer for it eventually herself, but she could not forgive that. She did not resent it anymore, at least most of the time, because he was dead and beyond her reach, but if he’d still been alive, she didn’t think she could have ever had any peace until she paid back to him at least a portion of what he had done to her and hers.

In general, though, the statement was true, and Arthur did not need to know what had really happened to her mother. So she let it stand.

He took her by surprise with his remark about women, and she laughed out loud, as much from the unexpectedness of it as finding it genuinely amusing. “We have our ways,” she said matter-of-factly, still smiling, and then she sobered. “You are right, though. It’s not easy to be a woman, especially in this world.” She fixed him with a level gaze. “You have to live under someone’s protection, and you aren’t safe anyway. So you do what you have to do and you make do. You find your ways. I don’t think it’s a bad idea for anyone.”

0 Jane Advising 0 Jane 0 5

Arthur

March 25, 2012 4:42 PM

Asking by Arthur

Arthur found himself intrigued, meeting her eyes – darker than his, he noticed; though they were so distantly related that it was only the matter of last names which would make society frown too pointedly at them marrying, had they been minded to do so, they did not look dissimilar, and she could have passed for Theresa’s somewhat less pretty older sister, but her eyes were darker than theirs – as directly as she met his. He didn’t know if she was trying to distract him or not, but if so, then she was succeeding. He could even see how this could apply to the situation, really, in its own way. “What?” he asked, almost challenging her. “You never think of anything more? Doing more than you ought to, more than your place – of being something?”

He had a feeling, somehow, that they were not discussing what it seemed like they were discussing – that this conversation was important, somehow, in some way he didn’t understand right now but needed to keep in mind as they talked, because he would later. Had she come to have it, or was it just chance? That was the thing about her, it was hard to separate honesty from superior art – or at least he thought it was.

He did not, after all, know her as such; he only knew what he thought about her, which was, he had to admit, based at least a little on the idea no one could be the way she seemed for real all the time. Most people, in what he had observed over the years, were not all the time, but then, most people did not look very much like he thought he did most of the time, either. He was not sure about that; he would like to observe himself from someone else’s body sometime, to see how he looked and acted in the eyes of other people, but that wasn’t possible.

What was possible, he believed – he had to believe, really; he didn’t know what he would do without the idea to turn to on the bad days – was to do something more than the family thought he had been born to do. He didn’t know how, or when, or even what, but he knew he could. He could not just be a third son, a nobody, just an anonymous no one who made some minor connection for the family and perhaps opened a door into a business or reported on what was going on in one so the family could take best advantage of this. He was a set of eyes and ears; he had a brain. So did Jane – they both had remarkable brains, actually, by all accounts he’d heard – and it was a pity she was a girl and stuck where she was, but he did not have to make do. He could try, someday, somehow, to be someone.

0 Arthur Asking 0 Arthur 0 5

Jane

March 25, 2012 4:43 PM

Answering by Jane

Jane considered Arthur for a moment, not blinking any more than he did. She wondered why he would say these things to her. That he would think them was perfectly natural, even more natural than the way she thought very similar ones sometimes, it was always difficult to be the child who was of the least importance in a household, but why say it? She barely even mentioned that she was sometimes less than content to Edmond; certainly she never said more than she had to Arthur just now, that it was sometimes difficult to be a lady, but that she found ways to enjoy herself and pursue her interests without breaking propriety. It would have been one thing, she supposed, if they were close cousins, but they barely knew each other aside from passing in hallways or the library and working together a few times in classes.

Perhaps, though, he was just upset about his mother. That was understandable. She had said and done things after her mother died that still shamed her to think about, and this was not as bad as that. She could keep the confidence for him. It was just his luck that she was the kind that would do that, instead of one of the members of their family who would use it against him somehow, somewhere down the line – or worse, one of the ones who really cared about the family and would feel obliged to report unseemly ambition. She was just herself, though.

“It’s like I said, Arthur,” she said finally, very pleasantly, she thought. “We all have our ways to handle things. I’m content with my situation.”

For now. The future was something she couldn’t really speculate about yet. She had been pleased by her engagement to Jethro because she knew he would most likely treat her as well as he knew how and let her read, but she knew that managing day-to-day life as a pureblood woman in America with her own household was going to be a bit more complicated than that. Her family life had not really prepared her for it, either; the family she had grown up with had been a little unusual in several ways because of circumstances beyond their control. Still, though, she would find a way to handle it, whatever it was. She really believed that now. Whatever came, she would find a way to survive it. One way or another.

“You ought to take a little longer to compose yourself and then go have some tea,” she said with a gentle smile. “And then write your mother a nice letter. I’m sure you’ll feel so much better then.”

0 Jane Answering 0 Jane 0 5