May 16th, 1888 - Yaxley Home, Wellingtonshire
Gregory Yaxley

Yeah, draw the line up
Don't take no more time up, yeah
Make your mind up
I need you to make your mind up, yeah
-Halsey

Phoebe had heard about the Season Opener to be held at the Sanditon over that coming weekend and she was bound and determined to go. With or without her husband. Preferably without but she felt she had to at least talk to him about it. Hopefully he'd simply ignore her, as he often did, and not pay any attention to her disappearance over the weekend. After all, it wasn't as if it would be the first time she was gone for an entire weekend. And if he didn't go with her, perhaps she'd see if Theseus needed a break from his own spouse.

After being dressed for the day by her maid, she found her way down to the dining room to partake of a very light breakfast, if it could even be deemed as such. She was actually quite surprised to see her husband sitting at the table with the paper, or something, she couldn't really be bothered to see what it was that he actually had. It could have been a catalog of naked women for all she knew.

With a small plate of mostly fruit and a pastry, she settled in at the table before long. Blue eyes glanced to the man who had yet to even acknowledge her existence in the room. "Gregory," she said simply, still watching him to see if his name being said even registered to him. It didn't. Damned fool, she thought to herself, eyes narrowing slightly into a glare in his general direction. "Gregory," she said again, this time a little more loudly and forceful. Nothing. She had to wonder if perhaps he was partially deaf as well as stupid. He couldn't speak normally like a proper gentleman after all.

"Gregory!" she all but yelled this time, "I'm talking to you. Are you really that daft as to not acknowledge your wife?" Oh how she hoped he'd fall down the stairs and just break his neck or something. The world would truly be much better off without him.

---

  

He had been working on the letter since about ten to six; the latest post he had gotten from Miss Baudelaire (or, rather, B.) had captured his imagination and curiosity to the point that the already-restless sleeper had gotten barely any slumber that night. As with most things in his life, he didn’t really think much of it; he had survived on less sleep as a student, after all.

Still, the man had to admit to himself that writing his response put him in a trance almost like sleep and, from his experience, almost twice as pleasant. Writing, he found, was much easier than talking, for you could correct your mistakes as long as you had time, parchment, and ink (three things, in other words, that the heir to the Yaxleys had in spades). It was not as if it was completely effortless—the concentration it required to pluck his racing thoughts out of the mess that was his mind and place them onto paper without misspellings and tangents was yet significant, and more than once in the past two hours he had to scrap the whole letter and start again—but the intellectual stimulation had lit a fire in him...

“Ah, ah—“ At his wife’s near-shout, his hand tilts and blots the page with a large stain. “Yes, Phoebe?” By this point, he was less angry and more tired. “I’m rather busy...at the moment.”

  

Phoebe regarded her husband with a mixture of incredulity and anger. He was busy. What in Merlin's beard could he possibly be too busy with than to listen to his own wife? One, she thought to herself, that was far better to look at than whatever it was he was so focused on. He was beyond working with, clearly.

"Gregory," she continued again but still leveled a glare in his direction, "The Sanditon is having its Season Opener this weekend. I'd like to go." There was no asking him if she could go. She'g long since gotten beyond asking him to do anything. He rarely paid attention to the things she did, after all, so why should he even have a say in whether she did something or not?

---

  

Gregory–whether out of stubborn pureblood pride or sure truth–was of the opinion that he wasn’t stupid, even if the rest of the world seemed to think so. Even a moron, however, he thought to himself as he stifled a sigh, beginning to crumple his umpteenth ruined letter, would pick up on the pure venom in his darling wife’s voice. She was, once again, angry at him, her imbecile of a husband.

(It might have strung more if he didn’t feel a similar way.)

He let the silence go on longer than it needed to, instead mopping up the spilt ink with the wad of parchment in his hand. “Well–well…I see,” he finally replied once the tabletop was rudimentarily clean. Now, where was his wand...? “Then I hope you…have a rather great–or lovely, I mean–time.”

  

Phoebe didn't take her piercing blue gaze off of her imbecile of a husband even if he didn't have a clue she was watching him. Why he bothered to clean the mess, she didn't understand. That was why they had servants, wasn't it? Regardless, he was doing an awful job of it and then when he did open his mouth to speak to her again, he once more sounded even more like the idiot she thought he was.

"Yes," she said with a smile, "I'm sure I'll have a lovely time. And surely you'll quite enjoy the quiet and solitude with your...maps." Not that it was ever very loud in the house. She often left whenever she had the chance to rather than be stuck in his boring company.

---

  

She was actually smiling?

Gregory was not an impish man by any means; in fact he was downright disapproving of practical jokes and leg-pulling. He also, genuinely, couldn’t care less about whatever or why Phoebe did things, as long as it didn’t besmirch the Yaxley name. Whether that was considered weakness in a man, he did not know, and once again he didn’t consider it terribly important as long as she didn’t resort to harpy-like screeching (which, he knew from past experience, was a level of shrillness she could still reach) or outright slandering him with her girl-friends. Yet he had noticed, for whatever reason, that every once in a while his tolerance for her, already low, would go past mere avoidance and into…well, he wouldn’t call it maliciousness, persay. More…a reaction.

(In other words, trollery.)

Scourgify, he thought, waving his wand over the remnants of the stain; when he finally speaks again, it is with a voice as mild as milk. “I wouldn’t–I wouldn’t describe Sanditon…as quiet, persay, but–but you, err, know more than I in that regard. Regardless, when do we, well, depart?”

  

Phoebe couldn't help but to smirk with pride as he referred to her as knowing more. It was, perhaps, the most intelligent thing he'd managed to say to her in quite some time. But then he ruined it when he said we. The look of pride instantly fell from her face and she visibly blanched at the very idea of spending a weekend with him at the Sanditon. She clearly hadn't expected him to want to go.

"We?" she questioned with a furrowed brow, "I would have thought you had more important things to do than go off to the resort." After all, he made many excuses for such a thing whenever she mentioned attending any other events.

---

  

He didn’t deign to look at her, lest he begin to smile and give his little game away; at the moment, hearing her surprise was enough to soothe his surfaced devilish streak…but only somewhat. “Well, can you–well, name these…‘better things to do’?” Before she can respond, he continued. “Rhetorical–rhetorical, of course, but I…have been yet to properly explore, and–well, map–the area.” And then, the perfect picture of meek and tentative: “Perhaps…I may even–err, ask to let me…accompany–accompany you, as you certainly are well-versed…in that regard.”

  

Perhaps, for once in Phoebe's life, she'd been struck speechless. Her imbecile of a husband had managed to get her speechless. It infuriated her. And, perhaps worse, embarrassed her. She took in a deep breath as she regarded him with nothing short of pure hatred and when she finally spoke, there was a whole other level of venom to her voice.

"Your maps," she said with a shrug, trying to sound as sure of herself as she normally was, "And I'm fairly certain you can handle exploring the Sanditon on your own. You certainly don't need my assistance there." Frankly put, she didn't want to escort him around and do such boring things with her stupid husband.

---

  

“My–my maps,” Gregory agreed, tone amiable–less a bezoar to her poison than a poltergeist to…well, her humanity. “Well, thank you…for saying–saying so, and, err, giving the, well, noble subject of–of cartography…such respect. I did not know you had it in you–I mean, rather, well, you held it…in such high regard.”

A pause in his steady stream of words as, seemingly out of sudden impulse, he ducked his head and reached beside him for a fresh sheet of parchment. Now, what was he telling Miss Baudelaire again…? “Although–well, you make…a fair point; perhaps your constitution won’t–won’t stand up to such exertions.” With the most minute tilt of his head, he gave Phoebe a meek look. “I shall simply, well, have to ask you, err, your…opinions after an initial mapping.”

  

Phoebe rolled her eyes at her dolt of a husband. He'd clearly misunderstood her meaning in regards to the maps. She had simply been trying to make a point for him to stay home and not hinder her on her small vacation but clearly that had backfired. Maps were boring. And stupid. Pointless, really. But clearly her husband thought different, making him even more of an annoyance to her.

"I'm sure there is someone better suited to give you an opinion on your maps, Gregory," she said, her voice going back to its normal icy coolness, "Someone that actually cares." She'd been nice enough for long enough so she saw no reason to continue with that facade. He'd already ruined the weekend she'd hoped to have, after all.

She pushed away from her seat then, her breakfast hardly touched. "I shall speak with Mrs. Lewiston and see to it she gets everything prepared. We'll leave first thing Saturday morning," she said, leaving no room for argument on the matter. If he was going to go with her, he'd be going on her terms and when she wanted.

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