(no subject)
Jul. 20th, 2011 07:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quigonejinn1. As prep for writing Regency AU!First Class, I've been half-heartedly going through Georgette Heyers and sort of rolling my eyes at all of them until I blazed through These Old Shades. Which, well. Is not Regency, what with being set in the bad old dissolute Georgian days, is sort of rough and scrappy around the edges, and in comparison with the later books, definitely shows that Heyer improved as a writer. On the other hand, this is the plot summary from Wiki:
For extra bonus, OH GOD THIS IS MY TRASHY PLEASURE points, the Duke buys Leon for a diamond stickpin in the streets of Paris from a neglectful and abusive brother, takes Leon to attend on him gambling hells and brothels, and there is this one bit early on where Leon is giving the Duke lip, and the Duke calmly tells Leon that he'll have Leon whipped if Leon misbehaves. Leon also likes sitting with his cheek 'pon the Duke's knee. Of course, Leon turns out to be Leonie, but it's still delightful, and we'll always have the first 75 pages where it's the 1926 version of the FFnet story where Lucius Malfoy adopts Harry Potter.
Devil's Cub, the sequel, is better-written and perhaps even more squeal-inducing for girls weaned on Rhett Butler. I've got An Infamous Army and am working through that, but so far, it looks to be mostly Regency nonsense and less trashy, trashy European aristocracy behaving badly.
tl;dr: Being as they are basically as classy as the FFnet story where Lucuis Malfoy adopts Harry Potter, Georgette Heyer's raging Georgian romance novels are much more to my taste than her Regency ones.
2.
In order to follow Charles to school, Raven physically sets herself a few years younger than Charles, in the black clothes and white shirt of a page. She keeps the same coloring as Charles because it's easier to remember that way, the same soft eyes, but curly hair. Charles sort of looks at her for a moment when she does it, and Raven reaches a hand up to run through the curls.
"I like it," she says. "I’d like to be a boy for a while."
For five years, a little black shadow follows Charles around at school. It waits for him at the door along with the other pages. It wakes before dawn to shine his shoes, it sets out his bread and lessons and quills before bed, it takes his washing down to the laundry women, and it sits in the back of class with the other pages and listens and does not play at jacks or dice. Charles talks to Raven, mind-to-mind, during the lessons; she invites him into her mind to show him how silly the master looks, the error that she has spotted in the geometry proof written on the board, the classroom bully picking his nose when he thinks no-one is watching because he, too, is afraid of being teased. Raven trots behind him in the halls, carrying his books and his scarf and chattering back and forth with Charles about what they have learned together. Charles gives her first pick out of the hampers sent by the housekeeper at home and forbids her from fighting the other pages for his honor.
When Charles is twelve, he contracts fever, and there is fear for his life. He is kept separate from the other boys in one of the guest cottages, and the nurse comes in to find the page in the same bed, curled up around Charles with the blanket drawn around them both.
"I’m not afraid of a fever," the page says, fighting like a tiger not to be separated. "Let me go. He wants me to stay."
"Let her stay," Charles says. These are the first words he has said aloud in a week, and his voice is hoarse. His eyes are glazed; he can’t breathe very well, so he has to accompany the mental impulse with a hand-gesture. The nurse steps away despite the pronoun being wrong, too. When her back is turned, Raven sticks a blue tongue out, then turns back to Charles, worried, more than a little frightened, but on his behalf.
Raven cannot get sick: if he were born a two hundred years later, Henry McCoy would say something about surface proteins and membrane permeability and RNA replication, but he is not, and all Raven and Charles know is that Raven is never ill, never catches pneumonia, feels cold, but never freezes. Charles is beginning to suspect that Raven is much older than she looks even in her blue form, than she suspects herself; her memory for facts and second declensions is tack-sharp, but everything personal is stretched, elastic in the way to be expected for a shapeshifter. She has a muddled memory from when she was very young of bells ringing in the fall for a dead English king. George Augustus died in October twenty years before Charles was born.
After the nurse leaves, Raven settles back by Charles’s beside. She helps him sit up, fetches him a little water, slides her hand under the cover to hold. Charles’s throat is too raw for him to speak more than a few words at a time, and he is too tired to talk very much, mind-to-mind.
"If I were your sister, would they send me away?"
Maybe, Charles manages. He squeezes her hand. Maybe not. The light hurts my eyes.
Raven kisses him on the forehead, then blows out the candle.
“Which book do you want?”
Anything.
Raven lets her eyes go yellow, settles into the seat. She reads to him from Virgil, puts her hand under the covers for him to hold, and when Charles surfaces at Oxford after the death of his mother, his sister arrives a week later by carriage. Technically, she is his ward, not a sister, but she is also startlingly pretty. Blonde, round-cheeked, she is handed down from the carriage with a smile for Charles that lights up the street.
Her hair curls a little at the bottom.
The wealthy and powerful Duke of Avon buys a young boy, Leon, suspecting that the child is being mistreated by his older brother; the Duke is also struck by the boy's unusual colouring, which reminds him of his enemy's red hair and dark brows. Making the boy his page, the Duke wins the child's devotion, much to the amusement of his friends, who find the Duke forbidding, selfish, and sometimes cruel.CRUEL DUKE. BUYS BEAUTIFUL BOY WHO REMINDS HIM OF ENEMY. TRAINS HIM TO BE PAGE. SDFSDJF:LSDKJFSLDFKJ.
For extra bonus, OH GOD THIS IS MY TRASHY PLEASURE points, the Duke buys Leon for a diamond stickpin in the streets of Paris from a neglectful and abusive brother, takes Leon to attend on him gambling hells and brothels, and there is this one bit early on where Leon is giving the Duke lip, and the Duke calmly tells Leon that he'll have Leon whipped if Leon misbehaves. Leon also likes sitting with his cheek 'pon the Duke's knee. Of course, Leon turns out to be Leonie, but it's still delightful, and we'll always have the first 75 pages where it's the 1926 version of the FFnet story where Lucius Malfoy adopts Harry Potter.
Devil's Cub, the sequel, is better-written and perhaps even more squeal-inducing for girls weaned on Rhett Butler. I've got An Infamous Army and am working through that, but so far, it looks to be mostly Regency nonsense and less trashy, trashy European aristocracy behaving badly.
tl;dr: Being as they are basically as classy as the FFnet story where Lucuis Malfoy adopts Harry Potter, Georgette Heyer's raging Georgian romance novels are much more to my taste than her Regency ones.
2.
In order to follow Charles to school, Raven physically sets herself a few years younger than Charles, in the black clothes and white shirt of a page. She keeps the same coloring as Charles because it's easier to remember that way, the same soft eyes, but curly hair. Charles sort of looks at her for a moment when she does it, and Raven reaches a hand up to run through the curls.
"I like it," she says. "I’d like to be a boy for a while."
For five years, a little black shadow follows Charles around at school. It waits for him at the door along with the other pages. It wakes before dawn to shine his shoes, it sets out his bread and lessons and quills before bed, it takes his washing down to the laundry women, and it sits in the back of class with the other pages and listens and does not play at jacks or dice. Charles talks to Raven, mind-to-mind, during the lessons; she invites him into her mind to show him how silly the master looks, the error that she has spotted in the geometry proof written on the board, the classroom bully picking his nose when he thinks no-one is watching because he, too, is afraid of being teased. Raven trots behind him in the halls, carrying his books and his scarf and chattering back and forth with Charles about what they have learned together. Charles gives her first pick out of the hampers sent by the housekeeper at home and forbids her from fighting the other pages for his honor.
When Charles is twelve, he contracts fever, and there is fear for his life. He is kept separate from the other boys in one of the guest cottages, and the nurse comes in to find the page in the same bed, curled up around Charles with the blanket drawn around them both.
"I’m not afraid of a fever," the page says, fighting like a tiger not to be separated. "Let me go. He wants me to stay."
"Let her stay," Charles says. These are the first words he has said aloud in a week, and his voice is hoarse. His eyes are glazed; he can’t breathe very well, so he has to accompany the mental impulse with a hand-gesture. The nurse steps away despite the pronoun being wrong, too. When her back is turned, Raven sticks a blue tongue out, then turns back to Charles, worried, more than a little frightened, but on his behalf.
Raven cannot get sick: if he were born a two hundred years later, Henry McCoy would say something about surface proteins and membrane permeability and RNA replication, but he is not, and all Raven and Charles know is that Raven is never ill, never catches pneumonia, feels cold, but never freezes. Charles is beginning to suspect that Raven is much older than she looks even in her blue form, than she suspects herself; her memory for facts and second declensions is tack-sharp, but everything personal is stretched, elastic in the way to be expected for a shapeshifter. She has a muddled memory from when she was very young of bells ringing in the fall for a dead English king. George Augustus died in October twenty years before Charles was born.
After the nurse leaves, Raven settles back by Charles’s beside. She helps him sit up, fetches him a little water, slides her hand under the cover to hold. Charles’s throat is too raw for him to speak more than a few words at a time, and he is too tired to talk very much, mind-to-mind.
"If I were your sister, would they send me away?"
Maybe, Charles manages. He squeezes her hand. Maybe not. The light hurts my eyes.
Raven kisses him on the forehead, then blows out the candle.
“Which book do you want?”
Anything.
Raven lets her eyes go yellow, settles into the seat. She reads to him from Virgil, puts her hand under the covers for him to hold, and when Charles surfaces at Oxford after the death of his mother, his sister arrives a week later by carriage. Technically, she is his ward, not a sister, but she is also startlingly pretty. Blonde, round-cheeked, she is handed down from the carriage with a smile for Charles that lights up the street.
Her hair curls a little at the bottom.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-21 03:47 am (UTC)So that's a rec for you if you're ever inclined to read fics. It's amazingly researched, I was engrossed despite having never read the canon. I still have not.
I love that XMenFC fandom actually has stories about sibling relationships. I love the idea of Raven moving through social strata in the Regency because she can change appearances...
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-21 04:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-21 02:01 pm (UTC)An Infamous Army, which is set right before Waterloo, only really comes alive when the crazy, crazy-ass grand-daughter of
Lucius Malfoy and Harry Potterthe Duke and Leonie is eye-fucking every man in the room and thundering around on horses owned by skeevy Belgian nobles.