Discomfiture and Discontent
by Nyohah

On some days it seemed to William that everyone had their bottles—his uncle's Irish port, Addison's absinthe, Addison's father's expensive French wine, the cheap beer sold at every pub, his mother's little bottle of cordial, which he'd only seen her use twice in ten years—whatever suited to taste and budget. Most of London lived in poverty, as drudges and harlots and thieves. For him, it was detestable enough merely to live in London, in his uncle's house, not quite far enough from the Thames to escape its reek, while his uncle lived in the fine if small country estate in Devon in which William had grown up and which should have been his.

As anyone, William had his bottle. Unlike most, he never drank from his. Regardless, he dipped into it daily—with his dipping pen. Perhaps it was silly of him to keep it, but it was key to the only outlet he had for the feelings that threatened to drag him further under, or, more recently, inflame his heart. Even more likely, it was silly of him to keep a bottle of ink separate from the one he used for letters or anything else, but the thought of the pure outpouring of his soul being even comparable to such mundane tasks as responses to invitations made him feel slightly ill.

William was frivolous and overly skittish—that's what his uncle said.

William had a weak constitution; too much of that in the family—that's what his aunt said.

William needed something—that's what he knew. His chances for financial independence had been ruined by the untimely death of his father and the unending illness of his mother, and he truly hadn't the justification to feel anything but gratitude toward his uncle. William's uncle had taken his father's estate several years after his death—he had no right, legally, but William could do nothing to resist. What wealth his family had besides their house had gone into medical care for his mother. William's uncle had taken in him and his family after his father's death, and seen that the children's educations were continued. His family was entirely dependent on his uncle, and his uncle was under no obligation to support them. What he wanted of theirs, he got, and he had always wanted his elder brother's house. Later, after he had taken his family to the house in Devon, and William had been forced to quit schooling at the University and take a job, his family was still dependent on his uncle. He provided them with a house and helped with the expenses of food, clothing, and servants that the wages for William's mind-numbingly tedious if not always boring job—stenography—were not sufficient to pay. What that truly meant was that William's uncle paid for almost everything, and not (William did not have to suspect, because his uncle made it painfully clear) through any love or selfless generosity, but rather, the intense need to keep up appearances.

Poetry was his escape from a world of pain, or at least, it was meant to be. He knew his poetry was scarcely worthy of notice by anyone else, but to him, it was dear—a cherished...something. It had begun late in his adolescence as an attempt to refocus on the good in the world, the beauty of nature and of the little things he had noticed outside the window in class as a boy that had awed him. It had been such little things that had kept him in wonder and somehow allowed him to possess an underlying, untouchable happiness even when everything else around him had seemed so cruel as to resemble some earthly re-creation of Hell. It had never tainted him, not until the times Afterward, when nothing outside his family had changed but he had—had ceased to be near-impervious to everything that continued, incognizant of the change, or uncaring, to try to smother him.

Every day he picked up his pen and tried to remind himself of all the reasons he had once been convinced—and undoubtedly rightly so—that his mere existence was a miracle and a gift, but until recently, it had invariably turned to feelings darker and unjustified, his writing becoming as fervent and effortless as the attempts at beauty had been pained and forced. When he took the time to fit the outpouring of feeling to meter it became impersonal, and he wondered how he had managed to write words for which even he couldn't understand the purpose and feeling. When he forsook structure and rhythm and rhyme, unleashing full depth of feeling, the result was more lunatic ramblings than either poetry or prose. The first only made him feel lost and distanced from himself; the second frightened him with its incoherence and malcontent. Both were tossed into the hearth immediately upon reading.

He had never been sure of what he had been trying to accomplish with his endless scribbling on the very feelings he had wished to escape, what it was that drew him back, against his will. He would have preferred to write things beautiful rather than disconcerting, but the moment he set his pen to paper with that purpose in mind, all words fled, and it was all he could do to remember that flowers had petals, and then only if his sister hadn't taken them all off. Yet, he could have produced volumes of haphazardly strewn together words on Why William Ashton-Rhodes Was Discontent—the first publication in history that not one person would care to read.

Perhaps seeing how ridiculous such feelings were on paper only proved how ridiculous it was to have them. He had no right to be so ill tempered, even on paper; moreover, his descriptions were absurd and thereby, those feelings easily banished.

This never worked. Maybe it was the other way. If he could find the perfect words to express his torment, perhaps he really could expunge it onto paper. But how was he to describe it?

Life was a fog. It was struggling to climb a peak in order to see which direction to take, and upon finally reaching it after much toil, realizing only that he needed to go every way at once. It was wanting to go, but having to stay, wanting to stay, but having to go.

It was all of these and none of these, and the lack of answer had had him chained to his desk, a dipping pen, and a little bottle of ink, waiting for the answer to pull itself from the abyss. If it had, he thought he could have returned to beauty with the energy he'd had for misery.

It turned out all he really needed was a bit of inspiration, and it came in the form of Cecily Addams.

His sister's high-pitched giggles rang from the parlor, and with a slight jump and, he felt likely, a slight involuntary grimace, he placed the bottle whose cool glass he had been rolling nervously in his hands—his mother's bottle—back in its hiding place in the vase that matched her finest china that they never had occasion to use anymore.

It was not that he didn't like his sister. On the contrary, he adored her, but it was the source of her mirth that made him cringe. She was sitting on the sofa, clutching a sheet of paper and, by the time he entered, engaged in fits of laughter interspersed with little snorts that were so severe she was threatened to be suffocated by her corset. If this was the reaction of his sister, who he was fairly certain had as much fondness for him as he did for her, he could scarcely hope anyone else's reaction to be more favorable (expect perhaps Miss Weston's, as she would just hand it back to him without a word and with that blank expression she had managed to develop for times when the only appropriate response would have been unseemly). Granted, it was surely sacrilegious how his sister delved into Austen for the sole purpose of mocking her masterpieces, so perhaps expecting a girl with so little appreciation for romance to appreciate his love poetry was an error of judgment. He stepped forward and snatched it from her. She collapsed into an odd angle, gasping in laughter, and he had to help her sit up properly so she could breathe.

He read the poem again. It wasn't so awful, certainly better than what he had produced pre-ardor, pre-inspiration—pre-Cecily. He carefully folded it with the others and placed them in his pocket.

His sister wiped her eyes and struggled to remain sober. "It was lovely. Quite entertaining." She succumbed to another fit of giggles and bit the back of her hand to stop herself.

"I thank you for your compliments, Morgan," he answered, carefully filling the fountain pen he never bothered to use at home because he didn't want to risk the frequent leakage. "You always manage to lie so very sweetly."

"And I thank you for yours, William. Keep it up and I shall surely be spoilt." She smiled, and then with sudden eagerness said, "Maybe you ought to show it to mother. She'd have a better appreciation for it than I, and I hear she's up this evening, and it's not even Sunday. That's very good for her. You don't suppose she's getting better, do you?"

"I need to be going. But you go and see her, if she is up. And she has to be getting better, doesn't she? If she's not getting worse?"

Morgan was oddly silent for a moment as he gathered his overcoat. As he started to leave, she murmured, "Cook's new girl says mother isn't ill at all."

"Don't listen to Cook's girl. She's hasn't been here a month. If mother were able to be out of bed more often, she would be. I'm sorry, Morgan, but I have to go."

"Have fun. Dance with someone—besides Miss Addams—and don't," she choked on a nearly stifled laugh, "let anyone read your poetry."

He sighed at her and left the room.

The nameless terrier ("We can't name it or it won't leave!" Morgan insisted.) was sleeping in front of the door and had to be physically dragged out of the way. The butler was nowhere to be seen. All was ordinary in his house.

"Oh! William!" Morgan hung out the door. "I forgot to tell you—Aunt came by this afternoon while you were at work. She and our cousins are in town."

Merciful God in Heaven.

The love poetry was a new endeavor, the pinnacle of a recaptured appreciation for beauty that had, with its passion, relegated his misery to the depths of the nearly forgotten. As he had often heard that the night was darkest before the dawn, so did his transformation of spirit come in a time when he had thought despair had settled in so deep it could never be uprooted.

A friend with whom he'd gone to school in Devon had come to the city on an extended holiday. Having no job or responsibilities, his life was one extended holiday after another. William had once been quite close to Addison Seachris, who still lived on a large estate with his rich family, so when he had received the invitation to his first party in London, his spirits had lifted. He remembered fondly endless conversations about ridiculous nothings and all the times they had been very nearly daring and not quite gotten themselves into a lot of trouble on the Seachris estate, on William's father's estate, and later—and least frequently—at his uncle's house. All they'd ever really managed to do was get themselves soundly thrashed by William's pair of brutish cousins, vex their friend, the normally meek Vivian Weston, into screaming at them, and run the Seachris family's governess to exhaustion when she should have been looking after the five younger Seachris children.

When William brought up the antics of their childhood as a means of reacquaintance, Addison had said that he felt rather contrite about that now that he was an adult, as the woman had "truly not been awful, as most women are." However, it had been among the very few and infrequent things he had said to William, at any of his parties—or, for that matter, since their friendship had waned at the beginning of adulthood. And for the other guests at the parties, merely knowing that William had a job was enough to generate contempt. Ridicule came effortlessly when someone who had known him at the University remembered his 'bloody awful' poetry.

He had decided to ignore any further invitations when Cecily Addams had arrived at his house one evening (the butler, oddly and thankfully, actually in position to admit her), wanting him to take her to Addison's party. Her family had owned a summer home in the village in which he had grown up, and now she was also visiting London. Addison thought she was insensitive, self-centered, and ill-mannered, had always been, and would always be, not realizing, of course, that he was very nearly as insensitive, self-centered, and ill-mannered, had always been, and would always be. As it had been Addison's principle to be as overbearingly rude to her as possible for more than ten years, when she had arrived at a previous party, he'd had his butler turn her out. Remembering William as Addison's closest friend from the time she had known them both, she turned to him to get her in, and he, having always been a tad too fond of her for Addison's approval, had immediately agreed.

His appearance with Cecily in tow had been enough for a comment from Addison as he poured himself another drink ("Why did you bring her here?"), but not enough to keep his attention long enough to listen for a reply. William didn't expect anything more to come of it. She'd gotten what she wanted, and she would thus ignore him like everyone else.

Then she danced with him. And then she spoke to him, and not only during their dance. He listened, of course—he'd always listened to every word, even when he hadn't the slightest idea what she was talking about, not being privy to the nuances and import of female social behavior. That hadn't changed in the years since he'd seen her. What had changed was that for the first time, Cecily listened to him. His remarks were few and almost unintelligible at times in their babbling, as her presence stifled his planned words and made his speech almost as unstructured as the uncadenced 'poetry' he had always burned in distress. Then she would smile at him, seeming to understand not just what he stumbled through saying, but that there was an intelligence behind what he had said that hadn't actually been apparent in his words.

Her smile reminded him of summer, when the apples that he would later steal from her family's orchard had just begun to grow, far from the grime of the city. She was the sunshine and a carefree breeze, her soul unburdened by the toils of the world. He was happy for the first time in years, apart from the moments caused by something silly and innocuous said by his sister, and it was all due to the lovely Cecily Addams. She was beautiful and perfect, and he adored her; what more could she ask?

All optimism aside, he wasn't stupid. He knew the only reason she had initiated the contact was because she wanted admittance to a grand social event. Nor did he miss that her attention to him doubled whenever Addison was around. Usually, he wasn't, which was odd both because they were his parties that William endured for the sake of seeing Cecily and because he was typically quite extroverted. When he was around, he was usually in a corner with a drink talking to one of his sisters or a particular young lieutenant with whom he seemed to have become friends. Addison did stare when she showered so much of her attention on William, and not happily, so perhaps her efforts were not entirely in vain.

But Cecily listened to him, and that had become a rare occurrence, as only his sister ever seemed to. (Not even his servants listened to him all the time, as they were aware of who was really in charge of his household and that he lived across the country in a much larger, nicer house that he'd graciously taken off his nephew's hands.) And her attention to him wasn't only when Addison was near, not always. It had to mean something, and he couldn't help but think she would be good for him, if only she would actually see him. Even in revenge she was brighter than the brightest of his days before their reacquaintance.

Her concept of revenge was to host a party, and invite the two eldest Miss Seachrises and the middle Mr. Seachris, but not Addison, and everyone who had been at Addison's parties except Addison, and everyone of the proper age with whom she had ever conversed except Addison Seachris. She thought, of course, that it would be an inexcusable slight, when in truth it would have taken the entire British navy threatening him to make him willingly put himself in her presence.

It being Cecily's party made no change in the behavior of the guests. Entering, he kept his head low as he pushed his way past the few who acknowledged him in any way—he had found over the years that in social situations it was often preferable to be ignored.

"Good evening, Mr. Rhodes," said a gentleman.

He mumbled the automatic correction. "Ashton-Rhodes."

"He looks tired," a lady said, a shade too loudly, to her companions, the gentleman and lady with narrower feet. Directly to him, she said, "Too much work, Mr. Rhodes?"

"Ashton-Rhodes."

"He looks a little pale," the other lady said in the same manner as the first, with the addition of a snort she couldn't quite manage to suppress. Then, "Are you ill, Mr. Rhodes?"

"He's been ill all his life, just like his mother," said the gentleman, without the pretense of speaking softly.

"My mother's perfectly well, thank you." And far superior to anything you have hopes of being, so how dare you think you have the right to even mention her, let alone in such a disparaging manner. The retort was, as always, unsaid. It was better to be ignored.

He escaped them, crossing to the far side of the room, where—he hoped—he could sit in peace. He'd found that when writing near Cecily, especially when he could see her across the room, in utter grace at a social situation, his sense of her vitality wasn't diminished, and her liveliness seeped into him, making it all the easier to write. He'd learned early how to block out the world and lose himself in something more inviting and personal than the crowd, and this particular situation was no different.

He'd always had a particular fascination with words. He remembered naming and ordering pebbles he threw in the pond after his favorites, which changed constantly. Vivian would point out that it was absurd for him to order them when he insisted it wasn't based on favoritism because none of them had a thing to do with any of the others. There could be no logical order. But for him, meaning had never been the point. Neither had the spatial arrangement of letters. Vivian had always been tragically bound to facts, when all that mattered was how they sounded, how they felt. That was how he had ordered them—when he was done they simply fit, although she would never have agreed. His methods had always been much too capricious for her. To find these words, he used to read the dictionary, aloud to himself, until Addison had kindly made it clear that neither reading the dictionary nor reading aloud to oneself was the normal sort of behavior he should foster if he wished to gain acceptance.

Which made it all the more frustrating that he could never find the word to suit his needs.

He was startled to notice a tray of hors d'oeuvres before him. He looked up to see the waiter looking at him expectantly.

"Oh, quickly!" he said. "I am the very spirit of vexation. What's another word for 'gleaming'? It's a perfectly perfect word as many words go, but the bother is nothing rhymes, you see."

And to see the all-too-familiar look of condescension on a servant's face was perhaps the ultimate insult. One didn't ask the servants for advice—he'd known that once, hadn't he?

Cecily descended the staircase then, glowing as she smiled at her guests, as some of them came forward to greet her with genuine amiability, truly pleased by her presence. They were those he didn't recognize from Addison's parties—her actual friends? He felt the sudden need to go to her, to ensure that here, in her environment, she wouldn't begin to ignore him. He scribbled down the lines he had been running through his head and hurried toward her.

The action around her had decreased; she now stood in a much smaller crowd, and all the better for him—most people affected him more adversely than Cecily. He would ask to speak to her, she'd be only too happy to speak with him, no one else would pay him any attention except to throw him haughty glances, and all would be well unless—

"Ah! William!"

His eldest cousin was between him and Cecily. He stopped, sunk, and turned to face Roderick in all his cursed, titanic size.

"Favor us with your opinion. What do you make of this rash of disappearances sweeping through our town? Animals or thieves?"

Cecily was well within in earshot, and he needed her respect. He needed her to see him as a man, not a boy jumping at shadows in his uncle's house. There was only one thing to do. He shot up his chin and met his cousin's eyes. "I prefer not to think of such dark, ugly business at all. That's what the police are for." He looked to Cecily, certain such base topics could not be suited to her tastes, either. She looked away, perhaps embarrassed by her guests. "I prefer placing my energies into creating things of beauty," he said for her, but before he could gauge her reaction, his cousin spoke, surprisingly unangered.

"I see. Well, don't withhold, William." Roderick then ripped his thing of beauty from his hands.

"Rescue us from a dreary topic," said the lady previously conversing with Roderick.

"Careful!" William snapped.

Roderick gave him a look that communicated merely pain—not Roderick's.

"The inks are still wet," he said quietly. "Please, it's not finished."

"Don't be shy," Roderick said, and he read it, more loudly than the situation deserved and with a mockingly pompous air. He got through three lines of it, before he stopped with a laugh. "Effulgent?"

It was a nice word; he was rather fond of it.

Everyone else laughed as well, except Cecily, who only looked upset and moved away—upset that they'd hurt him.

Assailed with a fit of confidence, he reclaimed his poem and fled. Behind him, he heard that he continued to serve as fodder for ridiculing conversation, their very favorite kind. Something about their wretched moniker for him, and his cousin expressing a preference of impalement by railroad spikes to poetry by William 'the Bloody'.

In a perfect world...

But perhaps perfection was right before him—Cecily, distressed, waiting...?

He needed to leave. He had trouble thinking of anything at all, but if he had ever known anything, he knew he needed to leave. And for once, as he rushed past all the other guests, no one bothered him. Perhaps in tears as he was, they felt their work was finally finished. William Ashton-Rhodes had finally been humiliated beyond all meaning of the word; now they could have the pleasure of making up a new word to describe the state they had created. He should be honored.

He should be grateful they didn't laugh.

Or perhaps they did, but the nightmare that was her words, imbued with all her sudden mortification, ringing mercilessly through his head rendered him unable to hear, and as he could not conceivably look anywhere but at the floor, he didn't see the mirth on their faces.

The door was opened as he reached it, and he started, seeing someone on the other side.

Addison's shoes.

It was all too much.

"William?" Addison sounded, finally, caring. "What's happened?"

William pushed him out of the way, refusing to acknowledge him.

"Is it your mother?"

He heard Addison's footsteps back down the stairs.

"Your sister?"

The voice was fading now.

"William!"

He stifled his tears when he realized he was lost and wiped his nose on his upper arm. Bits of paper fluttered down from the mess he was holding, the remains of the paper he'd taken with him to the party—it didn't matter that all but one page was blank. He was never wasting his God-given mind, heart, and soul on such a thing as paltry as poetry again. He wouldn't miss it either, not the unutterable agony of trying to find words to describe that which was beyond words, not the humiliation of being thought less of for simply doing his best to illuminate that which was so beautiful it shouldn't need illumination. It was shameful of the others to harbor such fascinations with calamity and malevolence. If any of them had ever known what it was to be the victim of them, they would have learned to appreciate the beauty of what they had never touched. But to them, disaster was spilling a drink on one's evening clothes. Malice was spilling a drink on someone else's evening clothes.

He dropped the rest of the shreds of paper, watching through tear-blurred eyes as they coalesced into one amorphous spot of white quickly soiled by the muddy street. He should have wiped his eyes, but he doubted it would have been to much avail. He feared the world would be forever out of focus, and then he realized that for him it had rather always been.

He still wouldn't know where he was, anyway.

Splashing filth on his good shoes and refusing to care, he shuffled over to a bale of hay. As he sat he began to feel unnaturally calm, almost numb, his only feeling, barely registering, that of his thumb rubbing at his index finger. How ridiculous of Miss Addams to claim that he was beneath her when her father was a whoring drunk who never did a thing for his daughters but jeopardize their chances of marrying a title. What good were slightly superior breeding and vastly superior income if they came at the expense of character? He was intelligent, courteous, certainly had better manners than she did, and there was a little black smear of ink on his finger that absolutely would not rub off.

He felt he was going to be violently ill, but managed to only begin sniffling again.

He pulled folded sheets from his pocket, the finest poems he'd ever written. They were, truthfully, bloody awful, all of them. How could he be surprised that everyone laughed? Miss Weston would have laughed, and she's always been sympathetic toward him. His mother, his mother of Before, would have laughed, and he remembered her as the most mannerly woman in the world.

He had the very violent urge to throw his bottle of ink to the cobblestones and crush the glass into sand underfoot. And his mother's bottle of cordial. And his glasses. But he didn't have any of these things with him, except his glasses, but he needed those. He contented himself with shredding more paper.

He needed to go home. He couldn't crush his bottle because that was a later expense avoided, but he could check to see if his mother really was up, lose himself in the library, keep his cousins from his sister, and forget all the nonsense of the night.

Nothing would change because nothing needed to change, and feeling otherwise made him the most ungrateful person in the world.

Everything changed that night anyway.

Drusilla had come for him, Cynthian and all at once terrifying, alluring, and intoxicating. He had been right to have feared her, but wrong when he thought she was anything as common as the thieves and prostitutes he had heard prosecuted daily in court. He had also been right to let her take him. She had been the first to understand who he was. She had been the only one to seek him and the only to offer him what he wanted. She had taken him from a world of scathing morality and shown him the beauty, the freedom, the pleasure of the dark, a concept his Victorian self would have balked at.

But William the Bloody died, got shagged, and learned to shout. End of story.

Or so he said to himself to explain the change he'd undergone—not a topic he cared to dwell on.

It wasn't until decades after his death that he realized what he had gained instantly in it that made it so much easier, and that it was not Drusilla.

Absolute clarity.

It had hit him as he watched reactions in New York as the stock market crashed—he could not be lost in the chaos of despair because their worries were no longer his. There was no muddling of purpose caused by a concern for damage to others, no finances to stress over, no society to please or suffer endless metaphysical torture.

This was existence as it was meant to be. Simple, exhilarating, and without the pain caused by senseless mores. If he wanted, he took. He killed when he had to; he killed when he wanted to. He did as he pleased.

He had decided immediately upon his realization that no force in the universe could ever make him revert to the other way—the human way—and its endless complications.

But in time, he did anyway.

Thank Heaven! The crisis—
The danger, is past,
And the lingering illness,
Is over at last—,
And the fever called "Living"
Is conquered at last.

The sickness—the nausea—
The pitiless pain—
Have ceased with the fever
That maddened my brain—
With the fever called "Living"
That burned in my brain.

And oh! of all tortures
That torture the worst
Has abated—the terrible
Torture of thirst
For the naphthaline river
Of Passion accurst:—
I have drank of a water
That quenches all thirst:—

She tenderly kissed me,
She fondly caressed,
And then I fell gently
To sleep on her breast—
Deeply to sleep
From the heaven of her breast.

When the light was extinguished,
She covered me warm,
And she prayed to the angels
To keep me from harm—
To the queen of the angels
To shield me from harm.

And I lie so composedly,
Now, in my bed,
(Knowing her love)
That you fancy me dead—
And I rest so contentedly,
Now, in my bed,
(With her love at my breast)
That you fancy me dead—
That you shudder to look at me,
Thinking me dead:—

But my heart it is brighter
Than all of the many
Stars in the sky,
For it sparkles with Annie—
It glows with the light
Of the love of my Annie—
With the thought of the light
Of the eyes of my Annie.

- Edgar Allan Poe, For Annie