Chapter Three – The Second Ball."I do hope you enjoyed that dance move, Captain Arbury," Lady Montagu cooed in what she hoped was a confident and convincing manner, "for I would never have dared such a display if I had not been in your capable hands for that first bit. It is not a style I get the opportunity to practice often, I must confess; it does require a chandelier to execute, and I've never liked them anyway, wouldn't you agree?"
”Oh, I declare!” declared Captain Arbury, immediately feeling rather foolish at such a strong and out of place expression of sentiment, one that might be fit for the battlefield but certainly was not proper for a chandelier-strewn murder scene,
”I have the most fervent loathing of chandeliers, such that it is difficult to put into words. I once brushed against a chandelier by the merest of accidents and frothed at the mouth for a week. I... I shall not speak further of this, for it is rather distressing.”...The beautiful captain took on a determined brooding expression, and he gazed at the wall behind Lady Montagu's shoulder as if lost in a painful reverie, as if being taken on an unwelcome journey bound in a horse and carriage through the dead of night to the site of a long-forgotten hideously brutal beating, of which one still bears the disfiguring physical scars but of which one had cleansed away the emotional general unpleasantness of it all.
Just then the ensemble, briefly, began to play, a charming but inconsequential little waltz by the Frenchman Henri Lenu.
Captain Arbury likes you slightly more!She walks over to Mr Garret Pinkerton-Smyth, waggling her not unnoticeable tail feathers.
In the immediate silence following the horrendous declaration of Lady Meyerschmidt-Crikeyton’s most frightful murder, Miss Charlotte Fantail, both appalled but also very much relieved not to have met a similar fate, which she had not been aware was such a regular occurrence at human balls, began to notice things in the room in a heightened state of perception, which she would later put down to her unexpected near-death experience. The thing she noticed most was the rather splendidly-built human specimen floating about the throng of men in a delightful white dancing jacket. Mr Pinkerton-Smyth, for it was he, seemed of an indeterminate age, and was striking in his greasy blonde hair, with large eyes perfectly off-setting his normal size.
Little was known of this handsome man to our courageous band of pigeonladies: it was rumoured that he had an irrational hatred of arson, and was as adept at dancing as he was firm and muscular to the touch; Charlotte’s heart fairly fluttered as she breathed towards him. She had rarely felt so aflutter, in fact: surely this was a gentleman worth the effort of approaching, so she did.
"
I don't believe we've had the pleasure, good sir. Would you care to dance?"
...Unknown to Miss Fantail, Pinkerton-Smyth had to draw in a breath, a breath of prejudice, in fact, and hold back his initial reaction – yet this was an easy thing to do, for his initial reaction was somewhat overruled by another, baser and, perhaps, more primal reaction.
This young pigeonlady before him was beautiful; no matter what he thought about her pigeonhood, his own state of being a man, an Englishman, no less, could not deny that she was of an extraordinary beauty.
”I would be privileged to enjoy the next dance with you, miss…?””Miss Fantail, sir, at your service.””Honoured, Miss Fantail, if I can call you thus,” and he held out his hand to lead her onto the floor, just as the band struck up a lively but not particularly profound waltz that to Charlotte’s ear was as great and angelic as anything she had heard hithertofore.
…The dancing was, unfortunately, brief, but not entirely as inconsequential as the music to which they danced. It was true that Mr Pinkerton-Smyth was a rather accomplished dancer; he led Charlotte with an expertise that warmed something deep within her, brought a mild blush to her cheek, a slight rush to her little ladybrain and, as they span and whirled, she could not help but remark that his reputation for being firm and muscular to the touch was very much deserved.
Mr Pinkerton-Smyth likes you slightly more!...Let us DANCE.
"T-that's... that's honourable," said Miss Alessa Thain to her companion, Miss Arcy,
"Where we come from, we'd break and examine the scene for… well, to honour her passing."”Really? Oh. Tremendous,” said Miss Arcy, a little distractedly, holding Miss Thain’s wingtip as the pair proceeded to the dance floor before adding a dainty,
”I say.”She said
I say with the spirit of a true Englishwoman; a higher type of woman who loves nothing more than to say
I say, and, often, to say it in the most heartfelt manner; but it was soon evident that on this occasion her heart was not quite in it: as the musicians started on their waltz, a rather insistent but drab piece that had terribly little to recommend it, thought Alessa, it seemed to her that poor Miss Arcy did not seem to be entirely in the moment, and seemed to dance as if her mind were elsewhere, perhaps shot back to the recent past by the shock of nearby bloodshed, perhaps wallowing once more in the strange sadness humans seemed to feel when their close relations have pistol cleaning accidents in lonely and deserted woodland. This led to a stilted performance from the young lady, and it was impossible for Miss Thain – not what one might consider a leading light in the art of pigeondancing herself, she would be the first to admit – to enter into a deep and dance-filled trance of motion, and light, and sound whilst entertaining the thought at the back of her mind that Miss Arcy was, perhaps, not quite enjoying the experience.
It was not that the human was actively not-enjoying it, but, Alessa thought, in a flash of perception, that she was finding the experience a dull one; no; that she was finding the very act of breathing, or twirling, of being alive, a flat, grey, joyless experience: as if she would rather not be.
...And so, when the music of a sudden stopped, abrupt and perturbing, disappointed as she was Alessa was not upset, and was in a way contented that the dance was over, and that she had to bear Miss Arcy’s grief no longer.
Action: Convince everyone I'm totally innocent of the crime I might apparently have committed. Surely a gentleman will comfort my distress!
"Oh, oui, oh, horrible!" cooed Dame De Oiseau, in a particularly outrageous accent that she hoped might be found somewhat alluring by the more adventurous human menfolk in the ballroom,
"Oh, I feel so fainted..."She was about to claim, with total conviction, that it was not she that had been in the library, murdering her poor hostess – it was probably some other, even
more foreign, or possibly simply poor, type, and that she herself, indeed, had been almost as terribly wounded by having been made to witness such a terrible thing as the violently mangled corpse of such a beloved (although, it had often been remarked, somewhat backward in the area of domestic decoration) ladypigeon, when she totally convinced none other than herself, and promptly fainted with distress.
...The band, who had until now been playing a rather whimsical yet fraught little waltz, immediately stopped; as one the entire ballroom turned to where Dame Diane lay splayed on the floor, collapsed in a pile of canapés expressing some variation or other on the theme of the noble tomato – a magnificently proportioned local delicacy since the disaster that was so rarely alluded to; and then, when the poor ladypigeon recovered her wits and hopped nimbly yet confusedly to her feet, the nearby ensemble of ladies – both human and pigeon – as one shrieked, with a deafening piercing shriek that might wake the dead, or deafen a pelican or, as they used to say in Limoges before the Great Dying, thought Dame Diane, curdle yoghurt.
”Blood!” wailed the assembled ladyfolk,
”Blood! Murder! Catastrophe! Simply awful! What... What a terrible terrible waste!”And, indeed, it was: for not only was the band stopped in full waltzian flow, but Dame Diane De Oiseau's dress was, it appeared to be the case,
ruined. From beak to toe she was covered in the despondent remnants of tomato-based canapé.
She looked down the length of her breast, and joined several other young ladies in commendably fainting upon the floor.
Seeing that a young lady's dress had been horrendously set upon by a staining foodstuff, the musicians looked amongst themselves, unsure of whether it would be correct or not to continue, and in the mumbling semi-silence our heroic ladypigeons took the chance, or not, as the case may be, to interrogate their chosen humanfolks at slightly greater depth – although some, of course, merely mulled about, waiting for the breath of music to breathe life once more into them, to illuminate the night with its light and waftful joy, and to lead their minds astray, far from the frightful events of the evening until then.
This is my personal reminder since each turn takes... a month: Dwarmin: you will get double approval/dislike scores for the remainder of this chapter to make up for your absence in the first one. You can also take an extra action during the week (you’ll see what I mean when it gets to it) and choose 3 NPCs you would like to have attempted attitude-improving with. List them in order of preference (i.e. the one you’d most like to like you first) and I will apply a complex algorithm to determine what happens to each.
Author
Topic: Pigeons & Prejudice: Definitely deceased. (Read 23196 times)