March 16th, 1890 — Evander Darrow's House

Alfred had been meaning to do some actual bonding with Charity ever since he had learned of her existence two months earlier. The conversation in the solicitor's office hadn't really offered him much of a chance to get to know her, after all, and she was the only thing he had left remaining of his sister. That was one of the things that had held him back from visiting, though, as well. He'd learned that his sister was dead several years ago, and had more or less finished grieving. How much would Charity remind him of a younger Evelina? Would spending time with her reopen old wounds?

That wasn't fair, though, because it wasn't Charity's fault if she was like her mother, and she didn't deserve to have less involvement with her family as a result of it. Besides, it wasn't as though Evander got to just opt out of seeing her if he didn't feel ready for it. She was living in his house, and he was, Merlin help him, presumably trying to play the role of a parent. If Evander could step up and handle that, Alfred had no excuse, really, for remaining distant.

The one other thing that had stopped him from visiting earlier was that he wasn't sure if she would want to see him. It wasn't as though they had any extant relationship to build on, and she hadn't seemed to be a particularly happy child when he'd met her (though, in fairness, she was quite obviously still grieving her father — and in denial about it, to boot). What if he showed up and she just made some polite excuse and turned him away?

Well, he'd just have to cross that bridge if he came to it, he supposed. He couldn't just sit at home and fret about it forever. Not when he didn't really have forever. After receiving the news about the curse on Friday, he'd started to look at things a little differently. He wasn't going to spend any more time just sitting around waiting for the Ministry to tell him what to do, for example. Merlin, what if he died next week and he'd spent the last month of his life just sitting around his flat!

He'd chosen a Monday strategically because he knew that Evander would be out of the house, and he had a feeling that Evander wouldn't be particularly thrilled about what he'd had planned for the day.

After flooing in, he'd been directed by the housekeeper to Charity's room, where he knocked lightly. "Er — hi," he called rather awkwardly through the door, not wanting to open it when he didn't know what she was up to inside. What did eight year olds even get up to? He wasn't sure. "It's your uncle. The other one."

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   Jupiter Smith

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Charity did not think herself like other girls her age. The family she'd moved in with following her father's death had daughters who loved to have tea parties and dress their dolls in frilly gowns sewn by their mother. Charity found no fun in that. It was hard to find fun in anything nowadays, in fact, but if there was one thing she both enjoyed and found useful, it was practicing her handwriting.

Thankfully Uncle Evander had taken it upon himself to hire a good and proper governess, who could be as comforting and motherly as she was stern and serious. Charity had weeks of studying to catch up on, but luckily she liked reading and writing so it didn't take much time. She had already filled eight pages with duplicates of her full name—Miss Charity Freesia Lloyd—by the time she was interrupted by a sudden rapping on her door.

To her surprise, it was not the housekeeper nor the maid nor her Uncle Evander himself, but rather the other one. She surprised even herself when a smile that reached her eyes found its place on her face. She had grown awfully lonesome during her afternoon routine, and what better to change the pace of things than her curly-haired uncle?

She dropped her quill, went to the door, and opened it without a moment of hesitation.

"You've come to see me. I was beginning to think you wouldn't," she said, staring up at him with raised brows. She noticed that he hadn't brought anything with him other than himself, which was good. She was sick of people bringing her stuff, especially when the gifts seemed to be their way of showing their remorse for her situation.

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Her comment stung slightly, though he was sure Charity hadn't intended it to. He really should have come earlier. It shouldn't take a threat of death to get him to actually engage with what little family he had left. "I know," he said with a frown. "I'm sorry, I was —" he was about to say busy, but that would have been a lie. Because of the machinations of the Ministry, February had been possibly his least-busy month since he'd returned to England. He could have lied to her, but he felt, for some reason, like she would see straight through it. Maybe that was something he'd heard about children in general, or maybe it was just a feeling he got about her, he wasn't sure. But he didn't want to start off the day by lying to her — and if she pressed him on it, he might be forced to tell her the truth, which would be even worse.

"... Distracted," he finished after a second's pause. The fact that his ship was cursed and the life of his crew was in danger had certainly been distracting, he could say that honestly. The news about himself was... well, distracting was too mild a term, but it would have to suffice. "But I'm here today. And I wanted to ask if you wanted to get out of the house for a few hours and do one of my favorite things."

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

'Distracted' was an interesting excuse to avoid visiting a relative, but Charity didn't think much beyond that. He was here now and was offering to take her out of the house for a few hours, which she ought to be grateful for.

"Please," she answered, nodding her head. Getting out of the house would be a good distraction; if she wrote her name another time, her handwriting might begin to suffer, which was not at all ideal. She turned and headed for her desk, where she grabbed her near-empty satchel before turning back to her uncle.

"Will I need anything? I have a few knuts on me, if it will help," she offered.

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Alfred couldn't help but smile at her response. What kind of an uncle would he be if he'd shown up with an outing planned and expected Charity to pitch in and cover the costs? It made him wonder, fleetingly, what her life had been like before she'd come to live with Evander. He'd never gotten the impression that Evelina or her husband had struggled with money, but it had been years between the last time he'd seen them and when Charity's father had ultimately passed away. A lot could have changed, and he would have been none the wiser. But surely, if something was really desperate, Evander would have known...?

That was, however, relying on Evander to be socially aware, and Alfred wasn't sure it was fair to put that expectation on him. Not that Alfred was doing much better, generally speaking — he hadn't even bothered to find out he'd had a niece, after all, until the fact had been presented to him at a solicitor's office.

"You don't need anything," he told her as he moved out of the doorway, making room for her to follow. "We're going sailing. Have you ever been before?"

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Charity frowned at his reassurance and decided that she ought to bring them anyways. She never knew when she'd come across a man selling peanuts or sweet apples out on the streets. She loved sweet apples. She slung her satchel around her shoulders and patted the front pocket to ensure she hadn't been mistaken.

Her thoughts of peanuts and apples were disrupted by her Uncle's announcement. They were going sailing. "You mean... on a boat? I didn't think they allowed little girls on sailboats; I might fly right off," she protested, her brows furrowing as a look of concern overtook her face.

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Fly right off? Alfred's expression was half amused, half befuddled. "Why would you do that?" he asked earnestly as he headed for Evander's floo. Was she worried about going too fast? Afraid the wind would catch her dress and it would billow out like a parachute and pull her overboard? Or had she maybe heard someone say that it was bad luck to have women aboard ships and taken it too closely to heart? Alfred was still a traditionalist in that regard, in that he was always a bit suspicious of women embarking his vessel for any purpose other than being passengers, but it hardly applied to casual sailing for fun. It was taught as a pastime, after all, right up there with horseback riding for some English ladies — though generally not for the sort that he'd grown up around, truthfully.

He wasn't worried about anything bad happening to her during their little adventure, or else he wouldn't have invited her along on such a trip in the first place, but he was fairly curious to hear what she was worried about. Not so much because he thought there was any possible credence to it, but just because it would give him some insight into the way her mind worked, and the whole point of this was to get to know her, after all.

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

Charity looked up at her uncle, concerned that she'd said something wrong—or worse, something embarrassing. Was she being silly? Or could he, a man who did boats for a living, possibly not understand the risk? From what she'd gathered, neither of her uncles had very much experience with small girls, so it was entirely possible that he had never even heard of the risks!

"Well," she started, taking a moment to pause and gather her thoughts so she might make some sense, "In my storybooks, the man sailing always has to hold onto the ropes to make sure he isn't blown away, and even then he seems to be struggling. Look at me," she said, putting her hand to her head as if measuring her height. "I will certainly be blown away in the air. I'm not a very good swimmer, either," she confessed.

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   J. Alfred Darrow

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Alfred smiled at her explanation. "We'll have to work on the swimming another time," he said with a chuckle. Assuming he had another time, that was. He was a strong swimmer himself, and wouldn't mind teaching her, but he didn't actually own an 'appropriate' bathing suit, and he wasn't sure if she did, either. If he thought Evander wasn't going to approve of sailing, he certainly wasn't going to take his niece swimming in her underthings.

"The boats where we're going have seats," he explained. "And I promise not to go so fast that the wind blows you away."

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

She could not deny that her worries still lingered in the back of her mind, but Uncle Alfred's reassurances did relax her to an extent. She even managed a smile, pleased to hear that she'd be able to sit down safely. And if she did get blown away? It seemed her uncle knew how to swim.

"Alright, you've convinced me," she said. She blew out the candle on her desk and headed towards him and the door. She wasn't sure who she could later tell that she'd gone sailing, but she would surely find someone; it wasn't every day little girls got to go sailing. "To the boatyard. Ship-landing. What's it called again?"

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Alfred chuckled. "Well, the place we're going now is the Sanditon Resort," he explained. "The owner is a friend of mine, and I fixed up some of the sailboats there when I first got back to England, so he lets me take them out whenever I like." Whenever I like might have been a slight exaggeration; it probably depended a good deal on how busy the resort was. Alfred knew better than to show up and take business away from the Fudges, though, and it was unlikely that anyone was renting the sailboats in early March, much less a significant number of them.

"He's got a weather charm up around the Resort that makes it always nice and sunny, and the wind just right for sailing," he continued. "So it's a good place to learn. But if you go sailing somewhere else, they're usually called docks."

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER

The Sanditon Resort. The name conjured an image of a beachfront colony with a lot of small houses and fishornamentation. Then again, Charity had never been to a resort and had no idea what to expect, but she hoped it was as grand and entertaining as she hoped. "I've seen ads for it in the paper before," she admitted, "but I've never been there. Is it very magical? Will it take very long to get there?"

Charity stepped outside her bedroom door and clutched her back to her chest. She wondered if they'd be sailing so fast that her bag might fly into the water. She didn't know very much about boats, but the sailboats in her books were often small and without much space to move. She wondered if Uncle Alfred had accounted for that as well!

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"Very magical," Alfred agreed with a sage nod, and indeed it was, from the perspective of someone who had never visited before. The sirens and the weather charms and the little zoo might have become commonplace for him through his stay there and then his frequent visits following, but they weren't exactly things you found on the streets of Irvingly, or in most areas of London. He hoped she liked it as much as he thought she would.

"It'll only take a minute. We're going by floo," he said as he guided her towards the fireplace in the parlor. It occurred to him that he wasn't sure whether Charity had ever traveled by floo before, and the last thing he wanted to do was go losing his niece if she got nervous and said the wrong address at the last minute.

"Here. We'll go together," he offered, taking a pinch of floo powder and reaching for her hand before striding forward into the fireplace. A puff of powder and a roar of green, and away they went — off on the first, and hopefully not the last, adventure.

  

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MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER