thisbluespirit | (Reply)

From:

I can't remember some of the details I was picking up at the time, but Mr Oakapple is an essentially good person who is motivated by love, but I'm pretty sure that it's said (or maybe strongly implied, I can't remember now) that his original intention in coming to Midnight Court was to murder Sir Ralph Grimsby, and the implication of that is also that presumably he has lost the will to live, since he'd hang for it afterwards.

It's stated outright:

"Oh," said Mr. Oakapple, still staring at the fire. "At first I had some wild notion of killing Sir Randolph. I could not see why a person who had done such harm should be allowed to stay alive. But then when I saw what a poor, sick creature he was, I thought that perhaps I might be able to persuade hm to confess that he had cheated over the wager when he won the place. Or that I might persuade him to leave the Court to your son when he made his will. But I succeeded in doing neither of those things . . . And then came a letter from a woman in Calais to say that Sir Denzil had died, and she had charge of his little daughter. So, I thought, This was why I came here. And, without telling Sir Randolph, I wrote to the woman and told her to send Anna-Marie."

I really like what you built that brief paragraph into. You may not have been Joan Aiken, but some of the most effective lines in this fic, for me, are the understated ones, which is not out of keeping with her style. "His only fight had not ended well." Not to shortchange either of the protagonists, I cared most about Julian Oakapple when I first read this book and whenever I return to it, and you write him well.