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
She had been supposed to meet with some up-and-coming virtuoso of a theatre director today; he had been going to fawn over her for hours; to dine with her; to engage her in a play. But she had arrived only to be told by his assistant that something more important had come up, and they hadn’t had her name down anyway.
It would be perfectly well of her to be offended by that - even though she had no reputation yet as an actress and a worrisome reputation otherwise - but Ester could make the most of moping, if she liked, and so, skirting through the streets until she found Judah playing at a usual haunt, she had listened to him play for a while and then badgered him into coming back to hers to keep her company.
Besides, he was a dear young thing and deserved to be well-looked after by someone, even if it were not his ungrateful family. He felt almost like a son to her. Strange, that she should so want to mother somebody when she had made so dreadful a mother before. So she had laid out a fine supper for them both, though they were settled on cushions on her bedroom floorboards rather than at the table, because Ester found the dining-room corner of her flat’s squashed sitting room rather too dreary for words. The evening light came through the window on this side of the building, and she felt much like she had as a girl, building fairy-princess forts with her bedsheets.
“Now if only life were good to us, Judah, you would be playing every night at the concert halls,” Ester declaimed grandly, offering him some more cheese, “and I would be on the stage.”
It was a down day for Judah. Many days, he could play and get quite a few sickles for his troubles but today he had netted a sad knut or two. It would add up, sure but it was hardly enough for him to justify the time he had spent entertaining the masses with his violin.
His spirits lifted when he spotted Ester in the crowd and it took only a little badgering for him to agree to pack up for the day and go off with her. Ester could always be counted on for a small nip and a drink. If it weren't for her, Judah was sometimes sure he would be in a ditch by now. Never mind the fact that he had been making his way before her. But London was a different ball park than Hogsmeade.
Judah was comfortably nestled against a cushion, his long braids falling a little loose around his shoulders. "Instead I play my fingers red for a couple of knuts," he said as he took a bit of cheese and broke it into smaller bits to nibble at. "I wonder what your life as an actress known world-wide would have been like? If we had a theater of our own, we could allow for all the vagabonds of the world to be performers." But such things required money.
Wasn’t it grand, truly, to have such an assortment of acquaintances, friends from all walks of life? Her days before, from sheltered Shropshire as a girl to her married life in Irvingly, had been so cloistered and refined that there was almost nothing left of life in them. Judah’s life had been even finer than hers once, Ester knew, but she could also tell that he had found constraints in it all the same.
And whatever the limitations of their lives now, at least one could be entirely sure they weren’t lonely. She frowned at the mention of his poor raw fingers, but smiled wide at his musings. “Now, there’s no sense in would have been,” she chastised, rapping him teasingly on the wrist with a cracker, “our lives aren’t quite over with yet! There’s still plenty of time for things to change. One never knows what’s just around the corner. We could be on the way up by tomorrow.” (Merlin, she dearly hoped he didn’t think her old and wilted and wasted. She thought she might die at the very thought.) She sighed at his thought, though; how wonderful it would be to have a whole theatre, and creative freedom to boot! Perhaps she should write a play of her own.
"That's true. We are young yet," he said in agreement as he took up another cracker and nibbled at it. He was only twenty-four, after all. And truthfully, he had no idea how old Ester was but she didn't seem all that old and was most definitely still sought after by men. "Imagine it, my dear Ester. You, world famous! All the important people knowing your name." His friends name in shining lights would be quite the sight, indeed. Especially given her current... career.
“You especially,” she teased lightly, still smiling at him. He was particularly young, though no longer as sheltered or as predictable as most men his age were. No, Judah was rather more of a puzzle. (But a pretty one, of course. He certainly might model, if he liked.)
“World famous, I do like the ring of that,” Ester added, tucking a stockingless leg underneath her more comfortably. She cared less about important people in themselves, although she had no objection to them having heard of her. (She suspected many an “important” gentleman in society had seen her face before. They were also generally predictable, as people went.) “What else do you dream of, Judah?” He had always struck her as a free spirit, an adventurous soul.
"And we shall be young forever," Judah said with a cheerful grin. Certainly, he was oddly a lot more free in poverty than he had been among the trappings of wealth. Even if it did take a bit of getting used to.
"I should like to be a composer one day," he shared for most of his dreams related to music in some way.
A free spirit, and what an optimist. Ester was delighted by this: so many people she had known in her ‘old life’, as she called it, had been so determined to be realists, to be dull and staid and grey. They looked at her new life like that, too, realistically saw it a fall. But Judah understood better than they that it wasn’t a fall at all, not when there were so many positives from this freedom, more than the flaws of poverty and living amongst lowlifes. The lowlifes were more fun than anyone gave them credit for, and poverty wouldn’t last.
Young Mr. Holt might gain back a fortune if he became the next Beethoven, who knew. “I bet you saw every opera and orchestra in the city when you were young,” Ester said dreamily, picturing Judah younger, in the sort of upper-class family where his parents had probably educated him in everything, had hoped to help fulfil all his dreams. Perhaps he found the old days still too painful to talk about, she wasn’t sure, but Ester had never had a filter, so she kept asking questions anyway. “Were you a real musical prodigy, even as a boy?”
"Not every one of them but I did go often enough," Judah confirmed. It had been stuffy and he had been expected to sit still. Which had been difficult when he longed to be the one performing. Which wasn't the thing to do for upper class boys but his parents had enjoyed touting him out to perform for dinnercompany.
"I suppose some might have considered me as such," Judah said modestly. "I had promise but ironically I have a lot more freedom playing now then I did then."
“Oh petal, I’m sure you were,” Ester echoed, some! Psht! He was probably being humble. A rare quality in a gentleman - but then he had never seemed keen on taking her to bed, either, so she fancied he had more than one oddity in character. Not that she begrudged him that. He was too young for her anyway.
“And without the freedom all creativity is quite terribly stifled, don’t you find?” she added, and here was a truth she lived by. Art was never meant to be produced or consumed in restraint. She threw the next question out with a deceptive casualness, absently tossing a grape up in the air and catching it in her hand again (although perhaps she had imagined it going higher than it had; her hand-eye coordination was often... compromised). This was a little more taboo, not something she talked about often. “Is there anything about your old life that you miss?”
"Very much so," Judah said in agreement with a smile. His lessons had been rigid when his personal musical style called for being able to do as he liked on his violin, unknowingly coming up with new melodies simply because he 'liked how it sounded'. He thought for a moment when she asked if there was anything he missed about his old life. "Having luxuries and staff, I suppose," he said. Going to bed in a large, soft bed was a boon for anyone and he had enjoyed the eye candy that could sometimes be found within the staff ranks. Which had been his downfall in the end but it had been fun.
Ester sighed in understanding at his answer. At least about having staff - she couldn’t deny that she missed having a cook and a maid to pull up rugs and dust the place - but even then, Judah’s former life was a far cry from her own ordinary pre-existence. She didn’t know that she had had anything in hers that she could term a true luxury, anyway. A husband, a son? A comfortable home?
In truth, she was quite comfortable here, dingy wallpaper that these rooms had.
“Noble sacrifices for your art,” Ester remarked, but there was a knowing look in her eye, that naturally the art was not anything to do with the reasons for which he had left (or lost) his former life. No, no, she knew he had been disowned; there were deeper issues than stifled creativity.
"Ah, but if only that were all," Judah sighed, quite certain that Ester must have guessed that he had sacrificed nothing. He had them ripped away from him, more like. "But I do not want to be gloomy; I much prefer to take things as they come now that I must live this way and make the best of it." It was what kept him jovial and content. It was not like he could change things.
“Quite right,” Ester said, in a somewhat inflated tone, as if Judah were preaching high philosophy. “There’s no room for melancholia here, I simply could not bear it,” she said, pasting a broad smile to her face, her best catlike grin. “And you could not be unhappy with your lot, for now you have met me,” she teased, and then languidly pulled herself to her feet, to rummage in a drawer.
“But if you are ever in need of a little nudge towards bliss, you can always come to me,” she murmured, producing a bottle of gin and then comparing a medicine bottle of laudanum and one of wine of coca in her hands, trying to decide which high she fancied to ease any shadow of misery and pain lurking outside the door.
She inclined her head at Judah in idle offering. “Can I tempt you to anything?”
"That is quite true," Judah said in fond agreement. That and he kind of had a raging boner for a certain someone in their group. Which is why someone should take The Artist. He was infinitely a lot better off than he had been when he had been struggling on his own.
He watched as she produced a bottle of gin and other things. "I won't say no to a bit of gin."
“Always the right answer, petal,” Ester said with an easy smile, as she tapped the bottle of laudanum for as a reminder to herself for later when she couldn’t sleep, and began pouring out the gin for now.
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