Of Noble Family

 

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For my brother

Dr. Stephen K. Harrison

aka Apeface

 

Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody not greatly in fault themselves to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.

—
JANE AUSTEN
,
Mansfield Park

 

One

Cherubs and Monsters

The presence of an infant in any gathering offers all the substance for conversation one might require. In some instances, the child's behaviour might occasion a desire to leave the room, but it will still provide something to discuss, even if it is only the infant's volume of squalling. In other circumstances, the conversation might turn to which parent the child most resembles.

In the case of Jane's new nephew, their current visitor, Herr Scholes, appeared content to make faces at the infant upon his knee. The celebrated glamourist widened his eyes, rounded his mouth into a circle, and made the most ridiculous noise. The whole of his expression was at odds with his reputation as one of the great glamourists of the ages.

Young Tom giggled in response and waved his plump fists. Even under a lace cap, the richness of the infant's red curls was apparent.

“Oh, what a
Rotschopf
you are. Like one of Rubens's
Cherubinen
, eh?”

At that, Tom's gaze drifted from the elderly glamourist's face, as if he were watching something that attracted him. Every infant Jane had known stared as Tom did, seeming to fix upon random patterns in the air. Yet, if one switched one's vision to the ether, the object of the infant's fascination would be clear. Loose strands of natural glamour floated in front of Tom.

Jane glanced across the room to where her husband, Sir David Vincent, sat by the window, with a faint smile warming his features as he watched Herr Scholes play with their nephew. During the four months they had been in residence in Vienna, Vincent had taken the opportunity to refresh his acquaintance with his old mentor, Herr Scholes. Their time in the city had led to a softening in Vincent, who seemed to have shed layers of disquiet. His blue coat of superfine hung to advantage on his broad shoulders. Once the strong line of Vincent's jaw had seemed incapable of anything more than disdain. Now, he was captivated with Tom to the point of offering to watch the boy while Jane's sister and her husband made calls. Truly, Jane thought that Vincent might even be pleased that Tom's nanny had been taken with an ague.

“There.” Vincent sat forward as Tom snatched at the empty air in front of Herr Scholes. “He is reaching for the glamour.”

“Love, he simply has not yet learned to distinguish between the corporeal world and the ether.”

“But he is forward for his age, is he not? To reach at only two months?”

Jane laughed at her husband. “Melody was reaching for glamour threads at least this young. Likely sooner, though it is hard to tell before they begin to acquire some coordination.”

Herr Scholes wrinkled his nose at the little boy. “Lady Vincent, would you be so kind as to indulge us both with a little glamour? My hands are rather full.”

“Of course.”

When Jane had first met Herr Scholes, she had been too intimidated by his reputation to perform glamour in front of him without a great deal of persuasion. But he had been so generous with his attention that Jane soon lost her fear. Seeing him make faces at Melody's baby only endeared him to her further.

She let her gaze shift to view the ether and pulled forth a fold of glamour, twisting the ray of light into a simple red ball, which she bounced between her hands. It took so little effort that her heart barely sped at all. Tom's gaze followed the arc of the ball with lively curiosity. Jane bent the strands that created the illusory ball so that it came closer to the infant. He snatched at it as it swung by, frowning as his hand passed through it.

“Very good, my little man.” Herr Scholes nodded with mock seriousness. “Now. Will you keep the ball moving, but alter the threads so that it is not in the visible spectrum? Let us see if he reaches for it then.”

“Give me but a moment…” Jane let her own vision shift from the corporeal world into the second sight of the ether and loosened the strings of light that made up the red ball. She let them slacken into nether-red, the area of the spectrum below visible sight. In her own second sight, the strands of glamour glowed. They stretched out of the ether, wrapped around her hand and twisted into the shape of a ball. Her view of the corporeal world was little more than a dim, grey perception of the room.

Still, she could see Tom clearly enough to know that he, too, watched a ball that was no longer visible to normal sight.

“Ha!” Vincent clapped his hand upon his knee. “Surely this is exceptional.”

“Yes. Yes. He is exceptional.” She could not help but laugh at her husband.

“When he starts folding glamour, then we may call him exceptional. Until then, he is merely interested.” Herr Scholes crossed his eyes for the boy. “And adorable! To give you better understanding, my daughter's second child was working glamour the week before he was delivered.”

“Surely not.” Jane was so astonished that her vision snapped back to the corporeal plane. “That cannot have been safe for the mother or child.”

“And how do you tell a baby to stop working glamour? Hm? It never lasted long enough to be a concern, but was quite astonishing.” He winked at Jane. “I should not be surprised if you experienced a similar spectacle some day.”

Vincent cleared his throat. “Are you sure it was not a prank? Recall M. Chastain's flood?”

“Oh, that was clever. But no. This is a genuine, though rare, event. Your pranks, on the other hand, were far from rare.”

It was unnecessary, but Jane was nevertheless grateful for Vincent's consideration. Her miscarriage was far enough in the past that remembrances of their childless state did not provoke the sharp pain it once had. Her nephew did much to soothe her, as did the reminder that with infants came a long list of messes that were kept in check by only the presence of a nanny. Still, it was awkward that everyone expected her and Vincent to have children by now. Three years they had been married, while Melody and Alastar had been wed little more than a year and had Tom to show for their time.

Jane let the glamour she was holding unravel back into the ether. “Did you say pranks? You must imagine my curiosity at my husband's exploits. Pray, do not keep me in suspense.”

Herr Scholes gave a little chuckle. “Oh ho! Well should you pray. Your husband is one of the most devilish—”

Again, Vincent cleared his throat. “I suspect I shall regret this topic.”

“I was only going to tell Lady Vincent about the fishpond.”

“Ah—Um.” Vincent's blush was most becoming.

Jane asked, all innocence, “Fishpond?”

Her husband shifted in his seat and rubbed his brown curls into an even more riotous mess. “I may have been caught while attempting a bit of subterfuge.”

“Three times! I thought he would never learn. I had only three rules, and one of them was that my pupils must be in the house by midnight.”

“You said it was so that your housekeeper did not need to wait up to let us in. I did not make her wait, did I?”

“Only because you were opening a window and stealing out of it. He left a ladder by the window, Lady Vincent, masked by a glamural, so he could come and go at his leisure. And I do need to give him credit: it was a very pretty illusion. This was before he had developed the
Sph
è
re Obscurcie
, so he had needed to weave a glamural with all the details of the view that would have been visible if the ladder had not been present.”

“It was not terribly complicated, being against a stucco wall.”

“If it had not been so nicely done, I would have noticed it sooner. Now, the window was not so high, but there was a small ornamental fishpond next to the house, and he used the ladder to span it. The first time, I simply removed the ladder.”

“I was practised at slipping out, so I slid my legs out the window, trusting the ladder was there, lost my balance, and landed in the pond.”

“Woke the house with his swearing!”

“It was cold.”

“You were embarrassed, and the anger came from that.”

Vincent rubbed the back of his neck and gave a dry grimace. “Shall I hold Tom for you? Perhaps he needs changing.” Her usually gruff husband appeared to be an embarrassed schoolboy. Given his height and the breadth of his shoulders, it was an incongruous expression, rather like one might expect from a chagrined bear. He adjusted the cuffs of his coat, a blush still high on his cheeks.

“Tom is perfectly content where he is.” The glamourist tapped the infant's nose with his forefinger. “Are you not, my boy?”

Tom gurgled with delight, offering no escape for Vincent.

“The second time, he lifted part of the glamour that was masking the ladder and looked before stepping out. But…”

With a pained chuckle, Vincent took up the next section. “But he had placed a second glamour beneath the first to show a ladder there. It was not. Mind you, the illusion was brilliant. The support structure was woven so that it looked like drifting bits of natural glamour. We had not yet begun to study Wohlreich's treatise on opticks and the possible uses of poorfire threads as anchor points in glamurals. I had not known the etymology of poorfire until then, and find it quite fascinating. Did you know it was a corruption of ‘porphyry,' after rocks the color of the shellfish blood that the ancient Greeks used to dye their gowns purple?”