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
Victor was at his wits' end after his confrontation with Christabel yesterday. He still wasn't entirely sure what had happened, but he knew that she had been confused when she'd left. She'd said his family would be rid of her, which seemed to imply that she thought anything he'd said during that interaction had been about her. He needed to explain himself, but he didn't know if waiting for her to come back was going to work. She might never come back. She would have been within her rights — their wedding vows had been till death do us part and by this point death had parted them. She had no real duty to him, nor he to her... but he couldn't in good conscious leave things as they had been yesterday.
Which meant he needed someone as an intercedent. He couldn't go to her without someone tagging along to operate the floo to and from — and he did not know whether her family would let him see her, anyway, or that she would let him speak. The other option was a letter, which seemed better, but he still needed someone to write it.
Jasper would have been a better candidate — even Oscar would have done in a pinch — but of course when he wanted them they were nowhere to be found. This was the trouble of having brothers with jobs when Victor had nothing to occupy his time all day. Fortunately he knew at least one of his siblings wouldn't have anything better to do with her time, because Beatrice never did anything.
"Bea," he declared, bursting through the wall of her room. "I need you to write a letter for me."
For a moment the only sound in the room was of The Romance of the Forest hitting the floor, her page lost then... "Gosh darn it Victor!" Bea huffed her tone that of a scream but her volume more of a normal spoken level. It felt like her heart was trying to force its way out of her chest with how fast it was beating. Ten months wasn't enough time to get used to that. There was no volume of time that would ever get her used to that! She stood and snatched her dressing robe from where it laid on the edge of her bed, shoving her arms in it as fast as possible to cover her nightgown before collected her book from the floor and tossed on the now vacated window seat.
"I understand you are a ghost, Victor, but that does not mean you can loose your grasp of manors! You cannot just barge into someone's room whenever the fancy arises! If you can't knock then find a servant to do so for you!"
Her request wasn't entirely unreasonable, but Victor had no time for such considerations. Well, fine, maybe he had the time — he had eternity, after all — but he didn't have the energy to stop and go floating around the house looking for a servant to pester. Besides, the Daphnel servants were too professional to be easily spotted in the house. Good help was hard to find — meaning good help made themselves hard to find more often than not. Servants weren't meant to be seen.
"Fine, fine," he said, though his tone made it clear he wasn't really promising anything. "But I need you to write a letter for me."
"I mean it Victor! she seethed, arms crossed and her fingers flexing as she clutched the fabric of her gown sleeves. "You might not view me highly but I still deserve your respect and that includes your respect for my personal space and privacy!" God forbid he'd walked - drifted? - in while she'd been changing or some manner of undress. He might be dead and her brother and she might not have a spine most days but she drew the line here. "I'll get the room warded if I have to!"
"Promise me you won't do it again - actually promise me, Victor, not those half-hollow words you are known for - and I'll write your letter! It seems to me here you are the one in this situation that actually needs something the least you can do is be polite."
Oh god, she could be infuriating when she wanted to be, couldn't she? He let out a huff of exasperation and gave an emphatic shrug, and would have responded except that some of her phrasing struck him.
"Is that — was that supposed to be a pun? Hollow words?" he asked, wrinkled his nose to indicate he did not find it particularly funny. "Really, Beatrice?"
She paused, nose pinched in confusion. A pun? What did he mean? She hadn't intended anything she'd said as a pun and wasn't sure what would be taken as one until he clarified with his next statement. Instead of apologizing, she huffed. And Victor called her sensitive! When she reacted it was because he brushed her off or insulted her! He was going to get worked up because she used the word hollow? What did she now need to change her whole vocabulary because her brother wanted her to tiptoe around the fact he was dead and a ghost? "No, it wasn't a pun. It was a fact. I would bet money on the fact you don't actually mean half of what you say. Therefore your words are hollow. They have no meaning."
Arms still crossed, she stalked across the room to her writing desk with no efforts to cover her displeasure. She'd have to get Paisley to accompany her to the ministry tomorrow (well Monday, being that tomorrow was a Sunday) to see about wards since clearly he wasn't going to take her demands seriously. It'd chip into her book money but it would be quite worth it to have a locked door actually mean something again. "To who and what do you want it to say?" Beatrice snipped, a flick of her wand - that had been left on the desk the night before - sending her quill floating, posed for words.
Victor supposed this was his cue to shift his attention back to the problem at hand, but honestly Bea's rant about his lack of sincerity had left him seething. After everything he had done for her, she was going to throw a snit about his not taking an extra twenty minutes trying to get her goddamn attention by fetching a servant to knock first? It was her fault he couldn't knock in the first place!
"I wanted to send a letter to my god-damn wife and ask if she's still alive," he spat. "But since I can see this is terribly inconvenient for you I guess I'll handle it myself." And without waiting for a response, he stormed out through the closed door.
To see if Christabel was still alive? What in the world did that even mean? Surely they would have been informed if she'd died. She lived with them. She was about to question what he meant, prepared to ignore his tone, when he turned and left as abruptly as he'd come. For goodness sake. How was it that in the past two years she didn't think she'd ever gotten through one interaction with her brother without some sort of arguments? What had happened to them? They'd never been the best of friends but at least in the past they'd been able to coexist. They'd played card games. He consulted her on what to look for in a wife.
Sighing she rose from the chair, crossed her gown tighter, and followed after the ghost though she was slowed by having to actually open the door. She left it cracked, padding after Victor, her bare feet silent on the tile. "Victor. Please come back." She wasn't going to rescind what she said but she was worried about him after his last comment. They might not get along as well anymore but he had seemed stressed - more than normal - and she did still care.
Oh, now she had time for him. Victor huffed in exasperation. He was still livid over how cool her reaction had been. He was just existing, doing his best to get by, and she wanted to get her room warded to bar him from being able to talk to her. The fucking indignity!
Still petulant, Victor took a hard left turn and drifted directly through a wall, into the middle of Oscar's empty room. He didn't have any desire to be in Oscar's room, he just wanted to be away from Beatrice, and the fact that the door was another six feet further down the hall meant if she wanted to follow him it would have taken that much longer. He didn't really want to be around anyone right now, come to think of it — and apparently no one wanted him around, either, and him so much as starting a conversation was a massive inconvenience to his family, so maybe he'd just leave.
And yet somehow she'd been labeled the family drama queen when in reality it was clearly him. She groaned to herself as she caught the tail end of his form dip into Oscar's room without saying anything. She knew he wasn't asking Oscar to write it. Both he and Jasper had been called into work. She slowed, hesitating by the door. She didn't want to just burst in even if her brother wasn't here when she'd just been harping Victor about her own privacy. (Though clearly that lesson hadn't sunk in if Victor was still just as fine going in someone else's room without permission.)
"Victor, please, come out," Beatrice spoke, leaning against the wall beside the door. She didn't want to stand in front of the door, she'd experienced a ghost going through her before and it wasn't an experience she cared to repeat. "I never said that writing a letter was inconvenient. I asked you to respect my space. That is different. Now, what happened to Christabel that has you so worried?"
For once he was grateful for the fact that ghosts didn't make any sound with their movements. She wouldn't be able to tell if he was still in here or had drifted straight through another wall and into another part of the house, or even left the house entirely. That meant he could hover and wait to hear what she said without giving her the satisfaction of knowing he was hanging around to listen — that he cared what she had to say at all.
He wasn't sure what he'd been hoping for, but what she ended up saying was dissatisfying. God damn, she was still harping on about the damn door? The absolute nerve, when this whole fucking thing was her fault. And now he was in the middle of a crisis, Christabel was maybe-dead and maybe-a-ghost and definitely gone, and all Bea cared about was herself and her ability to wall herself off from the world. This was why she was never going to find a husband. He didn't know where she'd gotten the impression that she had a right to do whatever she pleased in life and never be bothered, but it had clearly been her attitude for some time. She resented even the smallest effort to try and get her to talk to anyone. She had probably decided to be a spinster when she was ten and was too stubborn to even consider any arguments to the contrary — and she had killed him, he had died, for nothing at all. She was never going to get any better. He might as well have raised the alarm and sent her to jail on New Year's, because she wasn't going to improve her life at all, she was just going to keep feeling self-righteous about her need for solitude at all times.
With an exasperated huff, he headed through the far wall of Oscar's room and out of the house.
![[Image: nK4mS23.png]](https://i.imgur.com/nK4mS23.png)