Welcome to Charming, where swirling petticoats, the language of flowers, and old-fashioned duels are only the beginning of what is lying underneath…
After a magical attempt on her life in 1877, Queen Victoria launched a crusade against magic that, while tidied up by the Ministry of Magic, saw the Wizarding community exiled to Hogsmeade, previously little more than a crossroad near the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. In the years that have passed since, Hogsmeade has suffered plagues, fires, and Victorian hypocrisy but is still standing firm.
Thethe year is now 1895. It’s time to join us and immerse yourself in scandal and drama interlaced with magic both light and dark.
Complete a thread started and set every month for twelve consecutive months. Each thread must have at least ten posts, and at least three must be your own.
Did You Know?
Did you know? Jewelry of jet was the haute jewelry of the Victorian era. — Fallin
Don Juan drifted around the perimeter of the office twice before he found the right desk. He'd been expecting an office under the circumstances, so he'd been scanning the small print of the doors for the right name, but these were all editors (or so their door-titles professed; Don Juan didn't read the paper consistently enough to know all the names). Eventually he turned his attention to the sea of desks in the center of the room. When he found the right desk and surveyed the man seated behind it he realized his first two laps were a fool's errand; this was not the sort of man who would have an office. He didn't even have a particularly good suit. Don Juan was almost disappointed. He didn't really want to be here in the first place, but if he had to trudge down here at least the ordeal could have had a suitable degree of drama.
There wasn't even a chair at the desk. What was he meant to do, stand around with his hands in his pockets while giving his grand confessional tale?
He cleared his throat and waited for the fellow to look up. "Abernathy?" he asked (needlessly, he was sure; this desk wasn't tidy enough that anyone else would have been chomping at the bit to sit at it). "Don Juan Dempsey." He presumed that someone had written ahead to the reporter and that the announcement of his name would be enough to kickstart... whatever it was that was meant to happen next. Something that involved slightly more privacy?
Kieran looked up and blinked at the man, whose awkward turns-around-the-room he had been following without trying to make it obvious. He had covered politics for long enough to recognize most of the Minister's family, but Don Juan Dempsey had never been particularly politically relevant. He was more for social and gossip — duels and rakish behavior et cetera.
"Are you lost?" Kieran asked, leaning back in his chair and peering up at him.
Don Juan pursed his lips at the reporter and lowered his eyebrows. "Are you Abernathy?" he asked, meaning the question as an answer. If you are, I'm not lost, am I? He didn't understand why the question had been asked at all. Surely Abernathy had been waiting for him? There wasn't any chance that this actually was someone else, was there? No. Abernathy wasn't even an important reporter, judging by the state and position of his desk; not the sort of fellow who would have a secretary (or the male equivalent — what was the word for a male secretary, just assistant?) filling in while he was out to lunch of whatever. And it wasn't even lunch time, Don Juan didn't think — he thought it was rather an ungodly early hour to be conducting any business, but he was at least self-aware enough to know that his personal perception of appropriate times to start and end work was skewed.
"So, listen, I've got the story for you," he said with a shrug, again assuming Abernathy already knew which one he meant from some prior correspondence. Oz had told him this reporter specifically; it stood to reason that there had been some communication where he had briefed him on what to expect. "The treason. Espionage. Blackmail. However you're spinning it. Is this where you interview people? This desk?"
Kieran was still looking up at Dempsey — (it was strange to mentally refer to him as Dempsey, when the Minister was normally the only member of the family that Kieran even passively interacted with) — and carefully kept himself expressionles as the man went on. Blackmail, treason, espionage? Maybe this was something.
He pushed himself back from the desk. "No," he said, "Let's take the conference room."
He was going to have to use the interview as a method to figure out how Dempsey had decided on him as the relevant reporter; Kieran suspected Juliana was involved.
Don Juan nodded, then shifted his weight and crossed his arms while he waited for the reporter to rise and lead the way. He may have made two circuits of the place already, but he had no idea where anything was and he wasn't going to embarrass himself by wandering the wrong direction. When Abernathy was two steps ahead he followed. He'd expected the reporter to be taller; he didn't know why.
The conference room wasn't much better than Abernathy's desk in terms of fitting scenes for melodrama. It was bland, the furnishings pedestrian. At least it did have the benefit of a door, which Abernathy closed behind Don Juan. He took a critical glance around and then strode towards the room's sole window, envisioning that he would take station by it and peer out while he recounted the tale, but it only overlooked a nondescript alleyway. Nothing worth looking at. He turned, disappointed, and dropped into a seat at the conference table instead.
"How much of it do you already know?" he asked. He glanced towards the edges of the room, wondering if Abernathy would offer him a drink, but there didn't seem to be any kind of sidebar. Rather uncivilized, wasn't it? Surely they ought to have a little scotch around to steel people's nerves if they were recounting something particularly harrowing? Whatever. "I don't actually know what she told my brother."
Kieran grabbed his notebook and quill from his desk and led the way to the conference room; he plopped into the chair across from Dempsey and crossed his legs at the ankle. Some things were swiftly becoming clear to him — namely, that Dempsey thought he knew more about this situation than he actually did. Kieran tapped his quill against the notepad, deciding how best to approach this very swiftly.
"She told your brother very little," Kieran said, "I suppose she was trying to keep it vague for her own purposes. How would you describe her?"
Don Juan scoffed. "Delusional." That may have been a misstep; he perhaps should have played this closer to the chest, but he hadn't taken the time to think better of it. And maybe there wasn't any point, now, anyway. He'd been trying to put on a good show of nonchalance and innocence when he'd brought the matter up to his mother, so as not to make her suspicious... but Oz had told him to go confess everything to this reporter, and maybe it didn't much matter how it came out, in the end. He was going to have all the say in how it was written down, anyway.
"Do you mind if I smoke?" he asked, but didn't wait for an answer before fishing his cigarette case out of his pocket. He hung a cigarette between his lips as he replaced the case and begun searching his pockets for either a lighter or his wand. "She can't have told him much of the truth if she was trying to extort him. She tried to entrap me, and it didn't work out for her, and she's bitter about it."
A delusional woman, trying to entrap him — this was sounding less like a story and more like the sort of thing that Kieran expected rich men complained about at the club. He was carefully controlling his expression, so that he looked politely interested rather than medium-annoyed.
There had to be something to this, though — Juliana did not send him on pointless errands.
"So tell me the truth," Kieran requested, "The story, as you see it."
Don Juan thought he had already essentially covered the story as he saw it: delusional, entrapment. But Oz had sent him here with the admonishment to tell the reporter the truth, the whole story, and leave the spinning in his hands... so perhaps he'd better back up a bit.
"If you were to talk to her," he said, pausing to light his cigarette. "She would tell you I deceived her with an offer of marriage I wasn't in a position to follow up on, agreed to the marriage under false pretenses, committed bigamy, stole her virtue, and ruined her life." That was just about the gist of it, wasn't it? He wasn't sure there was anything else she could reasonably accuse him of — but ruining her life did cover a multitude of sins. "And now she's blackmailing the Minister of Magic for hush money, I suppose. I don't know; I asked her what she was doing in England and she wouldn't answer me, but Oz says she's threatened him."
Kieran hummed, scrawled down Dempsey's words, underlined bigamy. He was going to have to ask Juliana for more details about the blackmail component, here — or maybe talk to the Minister about it. He still was not sure how much more of a story he could get out of this; without more evidence, it was more fit for the pages of Witch Weekly, unless someone did go ahead and pay her.
"And how many of her claims are true?" Kieran asked.
Don Juan took a deep drag of his cigarette and leaned back in the chair, exuding a cockiness he had so perfected over the past few years that he might as well have patented it. He exhaled a cloud of cherry-scented smoke. "Well, I did steal her virtue," he said, unable to resist the urge to be cheeky. "And I'm sure she did think I would marry her, though that's only partly my fault."
The cigarette smoke smelled like cherries? He wasn't surprised to find that so much of Don Juan Dempsey felt like an affectation, but the fruit-scented smoke was a bit much for Kieran.
"Oh, that's a tale as old as time," Kieran said, mouth quirking up into a genuine half-smile. "'I thought he'd marry me,' classic for women who have met rakes. No offense." He cleared his throat. "So you stole her virtue, but that takes two. Did you ever actually propose to her?"
If Abernathy thought Don Juan was likely to be offended by being labeled a rake, he must not have heard very many of the rumors about him. Don Juan returned the smile with a shrug and took another drag of his cigarette.
"I speak terrible Spanish," he said by way of answer, in Spanish that indicated only the loosest understanding of grammatical gender. "Her brother surprised us in a garden. A lot of things were said. I understood a few of them." He looked rather unconcerned by the whole ordeal. He knew now that her family had emerged from that conversation under the impression that the two of them were engaged, but it had taken him several weeks after the incident to put that together. If he'd done anything in the garden scene to give them that impression, he didn't remember it. Certainly he hadn't done it intentionally.
Kieran didn't understand Spanish, so blinked, and then found himself smiling at Dempsey's eventual answer. If this was worth writing, Kieran could write it in an even-keeled enough way that the man came off sympathetic — which wouldn't do much damage to the other Dempsey, he hoped. "I'll be honest," he said, "This is much less scandalous than I expected." That wasn't to say it wasn't scandalous — just less dramatic than Kieran had expected.
"Oh dear. Have I disappointed you?" Don Juan asked with an expression of thoughtful disappointment which was entirely fabricated. Internally he was rather delighted by this pronouncement and the idea that he'd managed to both stick to Ozymandias' directive to tell the reporter only the truth and still managed to make himself come across as relatively sympathetic. He'd omitted some bits that would have seemed rather damning — the wedding night — but overall he'd hit the broad strokes of the affair fairly honestly. A dalliance, an engagement under duress, the confusion of the language barrier. She had expected to marry him and he had, of course, never expected to marry her. The bigamy accusation — they'd glanced over that one a bit, but if the reporter wasn't inclined to dig into it Don Juan wasn't going to bring it up again. This was an interview, not a Catholic confessional.
"Would you prefer I added another character or two? Maybe a murderer?" he teased lightly. He shrugged. "She evidently believed it was scandalous enough for blackmail. But my brother wasn't especially interested in paying for my indiscretions."
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