Rec from the Yuletide Collection
Jan. 8th, 2011 02:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thisbluespiritI've been reading my way through some more of Yuletide, and while I will post a second post of recs from this, here's one that might just now trump every previous fic as the best piece of fanfiction I've ever read (for the moment).
Now, in the meanwhile, with hearts raised on high by agelast
(12,848 words. Dido Twite, Simon, Bonnie Green.)
ON A GREY, STILL MORNING in January, more than a hundred years ago, through air of that chill crispness which tests the lungs and finds them wanting, four people stood at one end of a footbridge at the end of Willoughby Park and waved to three riding away. The sky was as dim as though it were evening; one had to have gotten up in the black dawn to know that it had been steadily lightening, and would grow a little lighter still. The three riders were the King and Prince of England and the Archbishop of Canterbury: 'but as we do not look the part,' the Archbishop had said, 'I think we shall be safe until we get to Cleydon-le-Marsh...'
I don't know who on my flist has read Joan Aiken's The Wolves of Willoughby Chase sequence, a crazy, wonderful alternative-history series, but her ill-health before her death prevented her giving it the ending she wanted, although she managed to write a short book to pave the way for it. This takes on the task of working the way to that ending. In short, this is the story, where after all these years, sea journeys, crazy Hanoverian plots, shipwrecks and lost heirs, that Dido and Simon work out their unsentimental yet previously impossible happy ending. It's so very well-written, and returns to Willoughby Chase (so we see Bonnie and Sylvia in passing, for the first time since Wolves), and the dialogue is so pitch-perfect, I can only quote it.
So, this is a tough sell (nearly 13,000 words of a very rare fandom!), but I want to rec it to anyone who's willing, just because, so snippets here, although I realise that the post-canon setting might be too much for a newcomer to swallow (though the author has done it enough in the style of the books that it should be readable):
Dido and Simon, unexpectedly meeting in the middle of the night:
'Oh! Hallo, brat,' said Simon.
'Hallo, Bakerloo,' said Dido, not wholly as with the joy of the lover beholding the beloved.
'What are you up to, this time of night?'
'Cup o' tea,' said Dido. 'What are you?'
'Thunderbolt woke me,' said Simon. 'Wanted to come in and spit up bones on my pillow. Do you know where the kitchens are? If you go though the next door over, Bonnie told me, you drop ten feet into the dungeons. I'll go with you, to haul you back up.'
Drabbit, blister, strike and blast it, thought Dido, alone in the dark kitchen, gnawing on the thin cold rim of a teacup with her elbows on the great rough block of the central table, kicking her heels against the rungs of her chair as the little blue fire of the spirit-lamp worked away on the kettle. Hang it, Simon, what could I have said?
***
The (very young, very new) King wants to choose a bride:
'A Queen!' said Dido. 'Ain't that kind of hasty? What do you want one for so soon?' She bit her tongue before she added that as far as she knew he had known a total of three girls in his life, herself being one of them. Oh, well, she thought, it's about time he picks up acquaintance of a couple more.
'Why not? My parents were married when they were twelve and thirteen, and they were very happy. I am making a list of all the world's princesses and the eligible girls of their courts, and I will invite them all one at a time, in alphabetical order, and when I find the nicest one I'll ask her.'
'I advise you to omit the Princess Jocandra of Finland,' said Simon, unable to stop himself.
'Yes, isn't she about nine feet tall?'
'Who have you been talking to?' said Simon severely, and a little guiltily. 'Six and three-quarters at the very most. And I don't mean leave her off because you don't think you'd like the way she looks – that's a terrible way to choose a Queen, if you want a litter you can marry a rabbit but if you want a wife for anything else you had better pick the cleverest one, if she'll have you – I mean leave her off because she'd probably chop you up and reassemble you to show she liked you.'
***
I want to quote all of this bit - Dido being offered a £2000 reward, but that would be silly, so:
Dido thought of Yorka on her pyre of spices, of the redheaded page under the ice, of Lord Herodsfoot's decayed-bird face. The row of severed fingers on the windowsill of Fogrum Hall. She could not conceive of money in relation to these things.
'All I ever done,' she said, 'is to be lucky, and to try to do things like they ought to be done.'
'Oh, Dido,' said Simon, who had, surprised, caught the shadow in her tone, and put out his hand to steady her, 'that is all that can be said for the best of us.'
***
I'll end with the flailing now. Normal service will be resumed, but I wanted to shout over this a lot, and also because the author has left it as unrated, which means it's coming up as Adult when you click on it on AO3, and it isn't - ignore that! (I happened to have seen the original request and knew that the recipient had specifically stated that explicit shippage in this fandom would make her head explode.)
It's so, so well-written - it isn't just the twelve year old in me who knows that nothing is right with the world if Simon and Dido can't make it work (because they are each other's home). (I promise.)
(Mind, erm, I don't think that's what Joan Aiken would have had in mind for Bonnie... although you never know.)
If you don't know what I'm on about, I recommend the books, whatever your age, because Wolves is an romp of a story and Dido Twite who becomes the series' heroine from Black Hearts in Battersea onwards, is one of the truly great characters of 20th C children's literature. Come the end, the AU history and weirdness was getting beyond me (and if it hadn ended with Midwinter Nightingale, as I thought for a moment it was going to, my heart would have been broken), but nobody writes like Joan Aiken. (It's weird because her adult books are nothing like as wonderful as her children's ones, with distinctive characters, an original style that begs to be read aloud, and her gift for fairy tales and the improbable being taken in the story's stride).
(The Wolves Sequence starts with the premise that the Channel Tunnel was built when it was first suggested (in the 18th C), and that the Hanoverians never became kings and queens of England and mainly involves terrible Hanoverian plots to get rid of the Stuart line - including a gun that can fire on St James's Palace from Nantucket (it won't do Nantucket much good, either), a pink whale, a stolen lake, and a plot to roll St Paul's Cathedral into the Thames (foiled by elephants tugging it back...) and so much more.)
Now, in the meanwhile, with hearts raised on high by agelast
(12,848 words. Dido Twite, Simon, Bonnie Green.)
ON A GREY, STILL MORNING in January, more than a hundred years ago, through air of that chill crispness which tests the lungs and finds them wanting, four people stood at one end of a footbridge at the end of Willoughby Park and waved to three riding away. The sky was as dim as though it were evening; one had to have gotten up in the black dawn to know that it had been steadily lightening, and would grow a little lighter still. The three riders were the King and Prince of England and the Archbishop of Canterbury: 'but as we do not look the part,' the Archbishop had said, 'I think we shall be safe until we get to Cleydon-le-Marsh...'
I don't know who on my flist has read Joan Aiken's The Wolves of Willoughby Chase sequence, a crazy, wonderful alternative-history series, but her ill-health before her death prevented her giving it the ending she wanted, although she managed to write a short book to pave the way for it. This takes on the task of working the way to that ending. In short, this is the story, where after all these years, sea journeys, crazy Hanoverian plots, shipwrecks and lost heirs, that Dido and Simon work out their unsentimental yet previously impossible happy ending. It's so very well-written, and returns to Willoughby Chase (so we see Bonnie and Sylvia in passing, for the first time since Wolves), and the dialogue is so pitch-perfect, I can only quote it.
So, this is a tough sell (nearly 13,000 words of a very rare fandom!), but I want to rec it to anyone who's willing, just because, so snippets here, although I realise that the post-canon setting might be too much for a newcomer to swallow (though the author has done it enough in the style of the books that it should be readable):
Dido and Simon, unexpectedly meeting in the middle of the night:
'Oh! Hallo, brat,' said Simon.
'Hallo, Bakerloo,' said Dido, not wholly as with the joy of the lover beholding the beloved.
'What are you up to, this time of night?'
'Cup o' tea,' said Dido. 'What are you?'
'Thunderbolt woke me,' said Simon. 'Wanted to come in and spit up bones on my pillow. Do you know where the kitchens are? If you go though the next door over, Bonnie told me, you drop ten feet into the dungeons. I'll go with you, to haul you back up.'
Drabbit, blister, strike and blast it, thought Dido, alone in the dark kitchen, gnawing on the thin cold rim of a teacup with her elbows on the great rough block of the central table, kicking her heels against the rungs of her chair as the little blue fire of the spirit-lamp worked away on the kettle. Hang it, Simon, what could I have said?
***
The (very young, very new) King wants to choose a bride:
'A Queen!' said Dido. 'Ain't that kind of hasty? What do you want one for so soon?' She bit her tongue before she added that as far as she knew he had known a total of three girls in his life, herself being one of them. Oh, well, she thought, it's about time he picks up acquaintance of a couple more.
'Why not? My parents were married when they were twelve and thirteen, and they were very happy. I am making a list of all the world's princesses and the eligible girls of their courts, and I will invite them all one at a time, in alphabetical order, and when I find the nicest one I'll ask her.'
'I advise you to omit the Princess Jocandra of Finland,' said Simon, unable to stop himself.
'Yes, isn't she about nine feet tall?'
'Who have you been talking to?' said Simon severely, and a little guiltily. 'Six and three-quarters at the very most. And I don't mean leave her off because you don't think you'd like the way she looks – that's a terrible way to choose a Queen, if you want a litter you can marry a rabbit but if you want a wife for anything else you had better pick the cleverest one, if she'll have you – I mean leave her off because she'd probably chop you up and reassemble you to show she liked you.'
***
I want to quote all of this bit - Dido being offered a £2000 reward, but that would be silly, so:
Dido thought of Yorka on her pyre of spices, of the redheaded page under the ice, of Lord Herodsfoot's decayed-bird face. The row of severed fingers on the windowsill of Fogrum Hall. She could not conceive of money in relation to these things.
'All I ever done,' she said, 'is to be lucky, and to try to do things like they ought to be done.'
'Oh, Dido,' said Simon, who had, surprised, caught the shadow in her tone, and put out his hand to steady her, 'that is all that can be said for the best of us.'
***
I'll end with the flailing now. Normal service will be resumed, but I wanted to shout over this a lot, and also because the author has left it as unrated, which means it's coming up as Adult when you click on it on AO3, and it isn't - ignore that! (I happened to have seen the original request and knew that the recipient had specifically stated that explicit shippage in this fandom would make her head explode.)
It's so, so well-written - it isn't just the twelve year old in me who knows that nothing is right with the world if Simon and Dido can't make it work (because they are each other's home). (I promise.)
(Mind, erm, I don't think that's what Joan Aiken would have had in mind for Bonnie... although you never know.)
If you don't know what I'm on about, I recommend the books, whatever your age, because Wolves is an romp of a story and Dido Twite who becomes the series' heroine from Black Hearts in Battersea onwards, is one of the truly great characters of 20th C children's literature. Come the end, the AU history and weirdness was getting beyond me (and if it hadn ended with Midwinter Nightingale, as I thought for a moment it was going to, my heart would have been broken), but nobody writes like Joan Aiken. (It's weird because her adult books are nothing like as wonderful as her children's ones, with distinctive characters, an original style that begs to be read aloud, and her gift for fairy tales and the improbable being taken in the story's stride).
(The Wolves Sequence starts with the premise that the Channel Tunnel was built when it was first suggested (in the 18th C), and that the Hanoverians never became kings and queens of England and mainly involves terrible Hanoverian plots to get rid of the Stuart line - including a gun that can fire on St James's Palace from Nantucket (it won't do Nantucket much good, either), a pink whale, a stolen lake, and a plot to roll St Paul's Cathedral into the Thames (foiled by elephants tugging it back...) and so much more.)
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no subject
Date: 2011-01-09 01:40 am (UTC)I definitely enjoyed them, but for some reason all I recall is a confused medley of Simon's art classes, Dido's father(?) singing an AU version of "My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean", and the King (was it a Charles or a James?) having a raven on his shoulder.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-09 09:05 am (UTC)The main AU bit is the channel tunnel (which allows the wolves to arrive), and the Jacobites having continued to reign, rather than William and Mary, leading to dastardly plots from the Hanoverian Georges over the water. I very much like Nightbirds on the Nantucket and The Stolen Lake, too. Also Dido and Pa. The early ones are still my favourites, probably since there's about three of them (Is, Cold Shoulder Road & something else? Maybe it's only two...) that feature Dido's sister Is, rather than Dido. :-) And I can imagine going back to Wolves second would be odd. It does lead into the othes, but it does feel apart from the rest of the sequence in many ways.