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
It was a cyclical problem; initially Victor had been avoiding a particular sort of conversation, but the longer he stayed away from home the more he dreaded any conversation on returning home. Once he'd been gone long enough for it to have been noteworthy there were only two routes that conversation could take. Option A: whoever greeted him would be frantically wondering where he had been, and he'd have to explain himself, and he wouldn't have any explanations he actually wanted to admit to. Option B (the worse one, which only grew more dreadful the longer he was gone): they wouldn't have been concerned at all. By a week out Victor was sure they would have noticed, but he was not entirely sure that they would care.
Much as he was dreading it, he had eventually managed to convince himself that whatever awaited was less dreadful than the prospect of spending a dozen years or so drifting aimlessly over the Atlantic Ocean, which seemed the best alternative if he really wanted to avoid everyone. So home he went.
He drifted in through the front door without taking any pains to announce himself, then at the first sign of a living being launched into a question: "Has someone already sent Christabel's things to the Dempsey Estate?" Victor didn't know what his family had pieced together or been told about the events of last week, but hopefully they'd figured out enough to know her things needed to be sent on. If Christabel was here, aiming to argue or to reconcile, that was a whole other level of conversation that he hadn't emotionally prepared for — he might do better to turn and float right back through the door.
Oscar was trying to figure out how to make ice sculptures in the parlor, which was creating a lot of problems (puddles on the floor) because despite his best magical efforts, the ice kept melting. He hadn't done anything about the puddles yet, but had a feeling that the maids were going to be furious at him until the next time he decided to get flowers for them.
He dropped one of his carving tools when he saw Victor. "You could have left a note," Oscar whined, passive-aggressively. Victor was an adult, obviously, but he did live (float) here, so it had been rather alarming when he disappeared without any notice. What if he'd gotten stuck in one of those ghost-mirrors?
Oscar had not yet bothered to answer the question about the Wife.
Oscar had ignored what he'd said and whined about a perceived slight, precisely as Beatrice had done during Victor's last interaction with his family. This was not an auspicious start to his return home.
"I couldn't have, actually," he returned in an abrupt tone. "Incorporeal," he said, and waved an arm through the nearest bit of furniture as though this needed to be demonstrated — as though Oscar had forgotten. Maybe he had. Maybe they all routinely forgot about what Victor was dealing with. You could have left a note, you ought to knock, et cetera.
"If her things are still here we ought to send them out first thing," he continued, hoping that Oscar ignoring his question had been a sign at least that Christabel hadn't tried to come back.
"Then make the staff do it," Oscar said, whining again, "I thought you got stuck somewhere." Surely incorporeal people could still be stuck somewhere? Based on all of his curse breaking experience, Oscar thought this was possible. A large piece of ice fell off of his block and onto the floor, where it started melting.
"Oh, she got all her stuff," Oscar said, airy. "It was rather inconvenient for the footmen." (He had no idea if it was inconvenient for the footmen, it just felt like it may have been. Oscar was currently eyeing Christabel's room as a potential Curiosity Room.)
Oh, but Victor's return was an opportunity for gossip!
"What happened with you two anyways?" he asked, turning to his brother.
Victor narrowed his eyes at the ice sculpture Oscar was working on. "You thought I was stuck," he repeated, tone dry. He didn't know if Oscar was lying (or at least stretching the truth) just to try and make him feel guilty, or if this — making ice sculptures in the living room — was actually representative of his family's crisis response mechanisms if something were to happen to him. Oscar had always been a bit hapless, so if it was just him who'd thought something bad had happened then maybe this would have been expected, but if Jasper or his mother had thought he was stuck somewhere would they have left Oscar to his ice sculptures in the parlor?
Victor didn't really have the mental energy to dig into this question, though he wasn't sure the pivot to talking about what had happened between him and Christabel was likely to be any less exhausting. "She saw an opportunity elsewhere," he said with a shrug.
Oscar wasn't sure what he'd done to deserve Victor's tone; he was not his brother's keeper.
He abandoned his ice sculpture entirely and turned to Victor at the mention of other opportunities. "Isn't she too mourn-y to remarry?" he asked. It was inappropriate, after all — not that Oscar cared much, but everyone else presumably would. "Well. I'm sorry for your loss?" He could not tell if Victor was broken-up about it; how much had he liked being dead-and-married?
The possibility of Christabel marrying someone else had not occurred to him until Oscar mentioned it, and he did not entirely like the way the thought made him feel. It was his own fault, for phrasing his response that way — in hindsight it was no surprise at all that Oscar had interpreted it that way, though it wasn't how Victor had meant it. It seemed to him that Christabel had simply realized that the things she had gained from their marriage — a chance to make herself the center of attention, to have everyone fretting and fussing over her feelings — could be better achieved by leaving him than by staying. But there was no reason to expect that this would last, either; her family would shelter her now, but eventually they would move on with their own lives and stop paying so much attention to her, and what would she do then? Maybe she would remarry. The idea made him — not jealous, not angry, but tired. He imagined drifting out somewhere over the ocean, waiting them all out and only coming back to hover over dry land again once everyone who was tedious was dead, but he knew he didn't have the grit to go through with it. (Maybe in that way, he and Christabel had been well-matched after all; maybe the thing they chiefly had in common was a lack of resolution).
"It's not really my business," he said with a shrug, sounding about as hollow as he looked. "I just hope if she does anything scandalous she holds off until Bea is married."
Oscar wanted to be flippant, but Victor already looked so defeated that he didn't want to further bury him. His first thought, you really still think Bea's going to get married?, was far too mean to verbalize to someone who had faked his death for Bea. "Sorry about Christabel," Oscar offered after a beat. He didn't sound as if he meant it, but he did want to say it.
Oscar was sorry about Christabel. Victor shrugged diffidently. He supposed he was sorry, too, but he was also annoyed at how events had played out. People were going to think he had been cruel to her, or neglected her, maybe... or they were going to think that she had simply gotten bored of him and decided to move on to someone with a pulse. None of that really seemed like an accurate picture of what had happened, but he didn't know what he could actually tell people instead that they might believe.
"You know, I thought I knew all the things to look for in a wife," he remarked. "Now I'm starting to think our father had the right idea."
Oscar laughed at Victor's comment. "What, always puttering abroad?" he asked. He looked at the now mostly-melted ice sculpture, and frowned at it — it was not at all coming out the way he had hoped.
Victor shook his head, though he didn't think 'puttering abroad' was necessarily the worst way to spend one's time, either. They'd gotten ferried around to enough foreign countries as children, and he had fond-ish memories of it. Oscar probably had fewer; by the time he'd been born Victor was gearing up for Hogwarts and they had been more or less settled in England, at least until their father grew restless again.
"No," he said. "Just — opting out of all this and doing whatever he fancied." All this being England, being society, being expectations, being responsibilities, being family duties — all of the things that Victor had devoted his adult life to, in other words.
Oscar made a hrm sound in his throat. "I'm sure there's downsides to that, too," he said, a shockingly thoughtful statement. (He wanted to do whatever he wanted, but also he had no particular right to inherit things, but whining about that to Victor seemed insensitive.) "But I'll keep it in mind when I get married."
