June 10th, 1894 - Greyfields Winery, London

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The dinner party at Greyfields Winery was just getting started, but already promised an entertaining evening ahead. The hostess, Madame Bouchier, was a friend from Griffith's days in Paris. She was known to be a charming woman who kept an interesting circle and loved to entertain at her winery.

Today, an excellent string quartet played to welcome the arriving guests. Wine drinking and discussions had commenced, and now that the servants had finished setting the table, the guests were seated according to a little scheme that the hostess had come up with to avoid the same people sticking together all evening.

Samuel, who got separated from the old acquaintance he had been talking to, turned to his new table neighbor.
"Pleased to meet you, Mr. -", he looked at the little signs that indicated the seating arrangement. Don Juan Dempsey, it read. "Mr. Dempsey."
Samuel's brow furrowed slightly. That name was familiar to him. But where from?
He looked up at the man's face to see if that would give him a clue.

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Don Juan Dempsey

  

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Threadlog

These days Don Juan's invitations to balls were somewhat hit or miss — his reputation proceeded him enough that some of the more reputable hostesses didn't feel any qualms about excluding him from the guest list, though of course there were plenty more who didn't care to be particular, knowing they could hardly be blamed for the behavior of any given guest if they had fifty or a hundred people attending. But his social calendar was more often filled with dinner parties now — not because the hostesses of dinner parties were any less scrupulous about their guest lists, but simply because there were a good deal more of them. People tended to only throw one or two balls in a season, which meant they were limited in number; people had dinner every day, and it only took two guests to make it a party. The hostess tonight was someone he'd known for a long time — since his days on tour — so he was less guarded than usual (which was a feat; his usual was not particularly guarded at all).

The man seated next to him greeted him just as he was approaching his chair. "I'm sure you are," he returned with a wide grin. He offered a hand to shake but waved it away a second later without giving the man a chance to take it, having decided he didn't want to delay sitting long enough to shake hands (and seated handshakes were such an awkward angle). "I'm excellent company. Hopefully you can say the same. I'd rather not do all the work during dinner."

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Mr. Dempsey sat down and spoke with the swagger of a man who didn't need to be liked, but very much wanted to be perceived. Samuel, who felt no inclination to make himself amusing to the man, watched his profile critically.
Again, he looked at the card with his name.
There were several memories trying to surface in his mind.
—
He recalled reading a letter that had come in by owl to Griffith House, alerting him to the arrest of his brother, Gilbert. The second-born of the family had helped facilitate a duel between a Mr. Yaxley and a certain fugitive, Mr. Don Juan Dempsey, who had decided to alert the ministry instead of showing up to the fight.
Samuel remembered visiting Gilbert, who had been devastated. Sensitive, foolish Gilbert. He was a healer by trade. Gilbert said that he volunteered to be the second for his friend so he could be nearby, should Yaxley get injured.
Not only was the bail set to an amount that troubled the family quite a bit, but word had also already gotten out, and he was in the middle of courtship. The lady thought better of it.
Gilbert had been terribly attached to her, and it took him a long time get unhappily married to someone else.
—
That was years ago. People moved on and it seemed that the fugitive was back in town. However, Samuel had not forgotten.
He felt himself getting more cross by the second. Anger was one of his signature emotions, never far away.
"Worry not, I'll do my best not to bore you," he said tersely, ignoring the oxtail soup that appeared on their plates. "In fact, I believe we may have some connections in common."
Samuel leaned over close to the man and lowered his voice.
"Say, Mr. Dempsey, did you ever feel the need to flee the country quite suddenly?" he said in a tone as if he was exchanging pleasantries.

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Don Juan assumed the question was rhetorical. Everyone knew about the Yaxley incident. Some had forgotten, but this was far too pointed a question for him to assume Mr. Griffith was one of them. He sounded annoyed; maybe he was insulted at having been sat next to Don Juan at dinner. If that was the case Don Juan wasn't much bothered by it; he had more of a gripe with the hostess than he did with Don Juan.

"Why?" he asked mildly, sipping soup from his spoon. He had a passing thought to slurp it to further irritate the fellow, but his mother had raised him with better manners than that. "Are you expecting to be fleeing the country soon and in need of advise? I could certainly recommend some very nice restaurants in Spain."

And anyway, he didn't like to think of it so much as fleeing the country (for all he had described it as an exile during the ordeal); in hindsight he preferred to think of it as a voluntary continental excursion.

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"Not at all," he answered lightly. "I was deliberating whether I am speaking to the Mr. Dempsey who got my brother arrested. Gilbert Griffith that is, second to a Mr. Yaxley in a duel between the two of you."
Samuel now decided to pay some attention to the food, there was no use in letting it go cold. He and Mr. Dempsey were already seated, and Samuel did not intend to embarrass his hostess by causing a scene before the roast was even plated.
"I have to say -", he continued after sampling the oxtail soup, "- cowardice is a common enough fault of character to not surprise me, but why alert the authorities? Leaving the country would have sufficed."
He took another look at the other man's countenance. Darkness was setting in behind the windows and the candles at the table lit up. Illuminated in this way, Samuel suddenly felt sure that he knew him.
"We have met before, haven't we?" he asked, before he could stop himself.
A memory of a night in Paris crept up. Not at Madame Bouchiers, she did not attend events like that. It had been at the Palais of a man who belonged to the society of Nadir. The sort of invitation that was exchanged in secrecy.
He remembered sinking into a seat in a candlelit room that was descending into debauchery. The shine of the bodies around him blurred before his eyes because of the substance he had recently ingested, causing him to feel at the same time nauseous and elated. He had been in some state of undress. Beside him on the chaise was this man, all manners of inebriated. It had been him, Dempsey, he was sure of it. What else transpired that night, Samuel could scarcely recall.
The oxtail soup lost its appeal to him. He looked at the dinner fork intently, now avoiding the gaze of his neighbour. Would he remember? That would be most unwelcome.

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Threadlog

Oh, that Griffith. Of course he remembered Gilbert's name, but it wasn't so uncommon a surname that he'd immediately connected the dots on seeing this man's dinner placard. So he had a few more reasons to be annoyed during this conversation beyond just being displeased over the seating arrangement. Don Juan glanced briefly towards the hostess' seat at the table, wondering if she knew about the connection when she'd drawn up the seating plans. It could have gone either way; everyone remembered his name and Mrs. Yaxley's, but the supporting characters as it were hadn't been quite so infamous. She might have either never heard about Griffith's role in the ordeal or forgotten it. Or she might have known and remembered and sat them together just for the entertainment of it — he didn't know if she was the type, but it was the sort of thing he might do, so he could believe it of someone else.

"Oh, Gil, sure," Don Juan replied, as light and cheeky as though they'd been discussing card games with a mutual friend. It took him half a second to chew over the rest of what this Mr. Griffith — Gilbert's brother — had said, and decide which part he wanted to respond to, and in that time Griffith had what appeared to be an entirely unrelated question. Don Juan didn't recall having met him, but Don Juan met lots of people he didn't recall having met, so that didn't mean he hadn't. While the question seemed disconnected he hadn't ruled out the possibility of it being another trap, a setup to highlight one of his other alleged sins, so he was also not especially inclined to give a straight answer.

"If we'd met, you'd remember it," he offered with a vainglorious grin. He turned his attention to his soup for a second as though that was all he had to say on the subject, but turned it back to the other man before he'd had a chance to dip his spoon again. "Your brother told you he was Yaxley's second?" he asked. There was a glint in his eye and a curve to the corner of his lip, like he was enjoying a private joke.

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Samuel was quite dissatisfied with all the answers he was getting from Mr. Dempsey.
He watched his mouth twist into a grin, but it was of no substance. Dempsey had not let his mask slip so far. Neither his face nor his voice gave away with any certainty if he did not remember meeting in Paris, or if he did in fact remember and was alluding to something Samuel could not recall. His own memory was regretfully very muddied after a certain point. Concerning.
The topic turned back to Gilbert's arrest.
“Yes,” he said coldly. “That is what he told me. Why do you ask?”

All around them, the dinner party continued as if nothing was the matter.
It was time for the entrée and platters with several different types of vol-au-vent appeared on the table. The house elves must be hard at work tonight.

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Don Juan chuckled. He picked his fork up and poked gingerly at the meat on his plate as though feeling a bruise, but didn't dig into it just yet. "That's not how I remember it," he said, tone light and airy, almost teasing. He had never realized Gil had lied to his family about his role in the duel before. It was a delightful little morsel to have stumbled upon; tastier than the vol-au-vent promised to be.

He might not have been so cheeky about this had it come up in another context. He didn't have any ill will towards Gilbert Griffith and he did feel at least a little bad for accidentally getting him arrested. It would have cost him nothing to keep this particular secret, if it had been kept five years already. On the other hand, Mr. Not-Gilbert Griffith was being a bit of an ass; Don Juan was looking forward to watching his expression when the news hit.

"Maybe I've got it backwards," he offered, tone openly mirthful now. "I wasn't actually there, after all."

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“You remember him being your second, is what you mean to say?”
Samuels fork with a piece of the vol-au-vent came to a halt halfway. His angular face often appeared mask-like, but a series of microexpressions could be spotted around his eyes and mouth now, as he beheld this new piece of information.
He went from disbelief to uncertainty rather quickly. He felt very displeased, although not solely at Don Juan, for once.
Had Gilbert lied to him to get him to pay the bail?

He looked up and he met Mr. Dempsey's gaze straight on for the first time this evening. His eyes were alive with mischievous delight. They were animated, open. They invited him to do something rash.
Samuel sharpened his concentration to a point and directed it at the black center of these eyes and pierced into Don Juan's mind.
Impressions flashed by, but Samuel was not here to take a look around. He cut through the layers to the emotions that were running beneath it all, looking for a hint of the lie, for malice and deceit. He found nothing.
Samuel was good at legilimency by pure force, but he had never gotten the hang of sneaking around in a stranger's mind unnoticed. His presence would be felt, he realized. Like a strike to the head.

Abruptly he pulled himself back and broke eye contact.
Looking down at the table, he lowered his fork. The piece of vol-au-vent was on it still. Samuel had done something terribly rude, by the rules of magical society. If his neighbor was to admonish or even challenge him, he would be within his rights.
“You might not have it backwards after all,” he conceded.

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   Don Juan Dempsey

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Something changed in Griffith's eyes, and then something happened inside Don Juan's head. He had taken all sorts of mind-altering drugs and potions throughout his life, but nothing had given this sort of sensation. He was used to thoughts and feelings being dulled, pleasantly rounded; this intrusion made his thoughts feel sharper. He didn't like it, and he liked even less the feeling that he wasn't in control of what he was thinking about — the whole business of the duel rose to the surface as insistent and unappealing as a dead fish floating to the surface of still waters. Don Juan didn't think he'd ever been on the receiving end of legilimency before — not that he knew of, anyway — but it wasn't difficult to piece together that was what had just happened. Particularly given how guilty and abashed Griffith looked when he finished.

Don Juan stared at the intruder for a long moment. His expression suggested he was trying to decide how to respond; mouth drawn into a thoughtful frown, eyebrows furrowed. He slowed rotated his fork in his free hand.

"You should stay out of there," he eventually said, turning his gaze back to his plate and stabbing a piece of food a bit more aggressively than was required. "Probably won't like what you see."

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   Samuel Griffith

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Using legilimency, one could not pick a specific memory to see; it was more like casting a wide net and hoping the right thing would be in there. Memories were located according to emotions involved.
What Samuel had seen besides the duel were some brief flashes of a life that did not shock him at all. Quite the opposite, it made him more sympathetic. His own anger flattened out to vague disappointment about his older brother Gil, who bore a lot more responsibility for his dilemma than he had let on.

I am lucky that Dempsey is not reacting more aggressively to this, Samuel thought. He would not have liked to explain to Madame Bouchier why he was committing hostile acts of magical mind-penetration over entrée at her dinner table.
“I was getting ahead of myself,” he said and resumed eating. “I shouldn’t have.”
For Samuel Griffith, this was remarkably close to a proper apology.
“There is nothing in there that would shock me,” he said. It was the truth and it was also meant to signal to Mr. Dempsey that he was not intending to air out any of his mind's contents.
Don Juan Dempsey seemed to be about a decade younger than himself. In his early 30s in Paris, Samuel had concerned himself with little else than harnessing more power and chasing pleasures that grew in depravity, the more desensitized he became. It was hypocritical of himself to put all blame on Dempsey for being a mess, that was every young mans perogative. Gil was an idiot to get involved in this. How much trouble was this business about a married woman and her horned husband really worth to Samuel?

It would be some time until the main course was served.
“Care to join me for a cigarette? I’m heading to the smoking room,” Samuel said and stood up.

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Nothing in there that would shock him, Griffith said. That wasn't exactly a response to Don Juan's comment — there was plenty to be overseen and disliked without bringing shock into the equation. He supposed perhaps nothing about his life would shock someone, given his reputation — if anything they probably imagined some of his antics even worse than they had been in reality — but there was plenty to dislike. Don Juan himself disliked being privy to his thoughts some days, and he had more experience with it than anyone else could be expected to.

He wondered exactly what Griffith had seen. Don Juan had felt the intrusion, but he wasn't familiar enough with this process to know much more about it than that. He'd never admitted the reason he'd suddenly decided to write law enforcement instead of showing up to his duel, with so little warning he hadn't even been able to tip off his second. When people asked he'd been flippant and dismissive about it, until they were frustrated enough to stop asking — and of course he'd spent most of the following months out of the country, where the people he met with on the day to day didn't know his history and he had leisure to carefully compose the responses to any inquiries he received through post. So he'd never had to produce a real reason — he wondered now if Mr. Griffith had seen or felt the fear. During his affair with Elfrieda they'd painted themselves as tragic heroes; star-crossed lovers standing strong against the circumstances that tried to separate them. When he'd agreed to the duel he had been of the same mind — it was almost welcome to have this sort of crescendo to the storyline. But when it came right down to it — when he had to wake up the face the reality that he might end the day bleeding out in an ignominious field and no one would even have known what it was he died for — he hadn't had the mettle to be a tragic hero after all.

He didn't like to think about it. He tried not to think about it — but no one had ever been poking around in his head before without his consent, so he didn't know. He hoped Griffith hadn't seen that.

The invitation to join him didn't seem like a real question to Don Juan. He didn't know how he could have refused, when it was so clearly meant as a way to extend the conversation into a space beyond the dinner table. He wasn't sure he wanted to talk to Griffith in more depth at the moment, but not knowing exactly what he had or hadn't gleaned from Don Juan's private thoughts it seemed unwise to refuse the offer. At least Griffith looked a little less irate now; the chances that Don Juan was being asked away from the table in order to be punched in the face seemed to have lessened slightly.

"Cigarette, sure," he agreed, pushing back from the table. He followed the older man to the smoking room, where he busied himself with his own cigarette case, not waiting for the other man to offer one and not making an offer himself. He leaned up against one of the sideboards on the wall of the smoking room and glanced at Griffith with his lower lip pushed out and one eyebrow raised: Well?

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   Samuel Griffith

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The smoking room was quiet; all the other guests were at the dinner table. It was a beautiful room adorned with dark wood paneling and large windows. Samuel opened one of them and then leaned against the windowsill opposite Don Juan.
He took out his cigarette case and seemed to deliberate a while over which one to choose, while the thoughts and impressions inside of him rearranged themselves. Feeling quite amused with the situation now, he chose and set the case open on the sideboard, an indirect offer. He got them from his old friend at A. Sundran Tobacco & Herbals, true artisans in his opinion, and they were not the appropriate choice for every occasion, but here they would do. The smoke upon lighting it smelled faintly like cedarwood and pine. There were different varieties in there. His tended to make his body feel slightly unreal and his perceptions sharpened.

Mr. Dempsey was sticking to his own and looked tense, which Samuel could understand, he supposed.
“You must be cross with me for my intrusion.”
Samuel pondered what he had learned about the circumstances surrounding the duel. His first stab at the matter had been correct, even if he had deduced it from a false set of information. Cowardice lay at the core of this story. Dempsey had avoided an answer to that comment early in the conversation. There was shame there.
“I do not suppose that you want to challenge me to a duel for retribution,” he said and smiled slightly. There was no scorn or malice in his voice.
“It was very rude of me to enter your mind in that manner, although it gave me some much-appreciated clarity regarding my brother Gilbert's role. I imagine that he is of little concern to you, but he means a great deal to me.”

There was a little pause while Samuel pondered if he should even bring up Mrs. Yaxley. Her countenance had stood out in the memories in remarkable clarity, and he had been very surprised to recognize and be acquainted with her. The hidden atelier was not even far from here. He had sat under the gaze of those sad blue eyes mere weeks ago. It makes sense now that she evaded every one of my attempts to know her better, he thought.
“Regarding Mrs. Yaxley, I always thought they had taken her away to a country house with little society, to prevent further harm to her and the family's reputation. It seems I was mistaken. Now I know that I met her not long ago, although she conceals her identity nowadays,” he said and watched Don Juan's reaction very carefully.

At this point, he was not sure if the man was capable of more feeling in the matter than being very sorry for himself alone. If he sensed that to be the case, he owed it to the mysterious woman to keep her secrets and spare her any further pain.

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Cross with him. Don Juan wasn't sure that was the right word, cross, but he wasn't sure of a better one. He did feel queer — exposed and uncertain. He certainly wouldn't welcome an intrusion like that again. Was he angry at Griffith? Maybe — maybe not. He wasn't afraid of him, that was certain. He felt — melancholy was probably the best word for it, but he didn't know if that had anything to do with Griffith, or whether it was only a product of the memories Griffith had been trudging through. When he talked about it — he tried to avoid talking about it at all except in vague intimations, but given that everyone knew some version of the story it was sometimes inevitable that he would be asked direct questions about it — he tried to be glib and bombastic, but that was more a shield to prevent the conversation from turning too reflective. He had done enough reflecting on his sins on his own time; he didn't want to drag it through all his social interactions for the next decade as well. But now that Griffith had been in his mind, now that he had seen the way things really were, there seemed to be little reason to pretend.

"I didn't mean for Gil to get arrested," he offered, though he was sure it wasn't much of a consolation. It didn't really matter what Don Juan's intentions had been, but hearing I imagine he is of little concern to you Don Juan did feel he ought to offer some slight rebuttal. He and Gilbert had been friends before the duel, though obviously they had not been on particularly good terms since then. Gilbert Griffith had volunteered to stand with him in what might have been his final hour; Don Juan couldn't treat that lightly, however he talked about it. He hesitated, holding his cigarette and considering whether to say more. He could have explained that up until the very morning of the duel he had been meaning to go through with it, which was why he'd never told Gilbert not to go. He could have described the moment in which he'd decided to report it instead... but there was a chance Griffith already knew, so why bother?

Then the conversation turned, and Don Juan bristled. He kept his cigarette where it was, ember slowly advancing towards the edge of his fingers where he held it. Don Juan had assumed much the same, if he were being honest. He hadn't seen Elfie since he'd left the country after the duel — since he had summarily ruined her life. He hadn't expected to see her in society, at least not for a good long while, but he had expected to maybe run across her somewhere out and about in magical England. That their paths hadn't crossed meant either that she had been sent away, or she was intentionally avoiding him — and since the latter was well within her rights given everything that had happened, he had avoided looking into the issue any further than that.

"Whatever you've got in mind, you leave her out of it," he said in a low tone. "She's paid her dues." If she was concealing her identity in order to have a little more freedom in society, freedom from the stigma that he had saddled her with, he wished her the very best it — and he could not stomach the thought that perhaps she was about to lose even that, and it would once again be his fault. His memories that had given her away and ripped off the feeble shroud of anonymity she'd been able to weave over the past five years.

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“Got in mind?”
Samuel arched his eyebrows and lit his second cigarette. What would it be to him to expose her identity to wider society?
No, that was the last thing he had been thinking about.
It interested him, though, that Dempsey's first impulse was to threaten him to protect her. That finally said something more profound about his character than the glib retorts he had handed out so generously over dinner.

“I am thinking about nothing of the sort. Her identity is safe with me although she has to be careful - her work is turning into a sought-after commodity.”

He pulled a leather-bound notebook out of the pocket of his jacket. In the book, he kept a folded piece of paper. He unfolded it and handed the pencil and charcoal sketch to Dempsey.
“She was kind enough to gift this to me upon my request when I visited her atelier to sit for a portrait. Quite the secretive spot,” he recounted in a light, conversational tone.

“I was taken aback, at first. The painting strays from the conventions of the genre. As you can see in the sketch, she drew my likeness with this harsh expression. It conveys anger, it does not flatter. It was certainly not the face I wore to the sitting.”

Samuel paused and took note of Don Juan's reaction. Did he pay close attention to the sketch? He might notice that she had noted the address of her atelier in very small letters in the bottom right corner, next to the date on which he shall return for the next sitting. He might not notice, if he was disinclined to be attentive to fine details.

“It grew on me though. Now I think I was seen with more accuracy than I thought.”

Samuel fell quiet and kept smoking.
He pondered the question of why he was choosing to reveal all this information about Mrs. Yaxley to Don Juan. What had he done to deserve it? Had something Samuel had seen or felt on the inside of Dempsey's obstinate skull connected to his own emotions? To prompt him to care for their story?
Or maybe it was the mysterious painter who he felt for. She was sad. Loneliness hung around her like a dense fog.

Samuel extended his open hand, silently asking Dempsey to hand back the sketch.

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Don Juan took the sketch when offered, though at first he didn't know what he was meant to see in it. It was a good likeness, despite the unconventional attitude. If all he had to judge was the sketch he might have thought she had done well to develop her artistic talent in this way, but coupled with Griffith's description of the sitting and his own knowledge of her character it made a more sombre character study. The young women he'd met years ago had been too optimistic, too romantic to have created a portrait like the one he was handed. His first reaction was a self-flagellating one: a symptom of how I ruined her. But could he really take all the credit for such a transformation? He had been older than her, but they had both been young; he'd had his own idealistic notions of the world from which he had since been disabused. Whether age had worn them both down or whether they had ruined each other, in the end the result was the same; he doubted he would know her if their paths crossed again, at least not in the sense that he had known her when they parted. The idea hurt, but why should it? He hadn't spoken to her in years; it was foolish to let himself miss her now. He was not any more or less alone than he had been at the start of tonight's dinner party, and yet he felt it more.

He handed the portrait back when beckoned and set about the business of shaking himself back to reality. He swallowed, shifted his weight, adjusted his hold on his cigarette, raised it halfway to his lips. "Talented," he pronounced in a hollow tone. "Why share it?" If Griffith hadn't been bringing Elfrieda up as a threat to expose her, then Don Juan wasn't sure what his endgame was. He could have only wanted to see Don Juan squirm, but he doubted that — Griffith had seen inside his head only a few moments ago, so he probably had gotten his fill of Don Juan's squirming thoughts exposed to open air already. So why bring it up?

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