Unearned Luck | Alexis Hall
UNEARNED LUCK
By
ALEXIS HALL
Ah, but it may be that you are unfamiliar with that tale, or with the equally diverting one involving Miss Mitchelmore’s cousins, the dashing soldier, and the Queen of the Fairies that took place a year later.
Well, I’m on a bit of a tight wordcount here so I’ll give you what I believe the mortals of your age call the ‘tldr version.’
My name is Robin. I’m a fairy. I collect stories for my Lord who will definitely let me back into his kingdom any day now.
The lady who this tale concerns is a petty player in my other works (please buy them, reader, I don’t do this for my health), but you need know nothing of them to enjoy this narrative.
This narrative which, I shall add, is one hundred percent true, and in no way embellished.
We join Miss Penworthy now in the bedroom of her friend – and much to Miss Penworthy’s disappoint ment that word is not being used in the Sappho-and-her-friend sense – Miss Lysistrata Bickle at the Bickle family home of New Tintagel.
It is close to and named for the original castle, which you can see on a good day from the front porch.
The land and the building cost a fortune, but the Bickles – being new money and old romantics – are prone to such indulgences.
“Do you know, Lizzie,” said Miss Penworthy, peering out of the window into the sunset, “I swear there’s a bear in the garden.”
Any other lady, confronted with such an observation, would probably have replied “don’t be silly Erica, there are no bears in Cornwall.” But Miss Bickle was not any other lady, so instead she replied, “What colour?”
“White.”
Setting down her copy of Mansfield Park, and the sheaf of papers on which she had been composing her own original story in which Fanny Price ran away to sea and became a pirate, Miss Bickle rose and drifted to the window.
I drifted beside her and, since the window was large enough for two and not three, I adopted the form of a dust-mote and settled on the sill for a better view.
Sure enough, there on the lawn stood a large, white bear.
“What do you think it wants?” asked Miss Bickle, a note of wonder in her voice that suggested she could only imagine it wanting marvellous things.
“Fish?” suggested Miss Penworthy. “Or then I suppose it’s a polar bear so… penguins?”
“Nothing so dull, surely.” Miss Bickle’s face fell for a moment then rose again like a backwards Rome. “Perhaps he’s here to take one of us as his bride.”
Miss Penworthy was well accustomed to her friend’s whimsies and, being no fool, knew that she did indeed live in a world where such things happened sometimes. Still, it seemed a patently absurd idea. “It’s a bear, Lizzie.”
“A mysterious bear,” corrected Miss Bickle. “In a place where by rights no bear should be.”
As they watched, the bear approached the house.
And then they heard a thumping at the door and then – because mysterious symbolic animals are all very well, but certain social niceties must be maintained regardless – a few moments later, Miss Bickle’s maid (I would characterise her better in a longer narrative but for now just accept that the lower orders are irrelevant to this story) came into the bedroom and said, “If it please you, miss, there’s a bear downstairs saying as it’d like to marry you. ”
* * *
The Bickles had chosen to receive the bear in the room they called ‘The Green Parlour’. I will leave the colour scheme as an exercise for the reader.
“Lizzie” – Mr Bickle, who was artfully reclining on a chaise longue, didn’t quite have the energy to unartfully derecline to greet the ladies – “queerest thing, this bear wants to marry you.”
Elbowing Miss Penworthy in the ribs, Miss Bickle murmured an I told you so.
“Give me your daughter,” said the bear in a voice that was surprisingly gentle given how ursine it was, “and I shall make you as rich as you are now poor.”
The Bickles looked at each other.
“Bit of a thing there,” said Mrs Bickle, who was lounging on a different chaise longue from her husband and giving him a tremendous run for his money, artful-wise, “you see we’re actually not all that poor, in point of fact.” Her face fell. “Not even a little bit.”
Her husband adopted a thoughtful posture that he normally reserved for the works of Shelley. “I suppose we could be poor in spirit?”
If anything, this shocked his wife more than the gargantuan carnivore sitting in the green parlour. “Oh no, that can’t be. I’m sure we have oodles of spirit. Why, you composed a fine sonnet only this morning.”
Mr Bickle nodded solemnly. “Very true.” He turned his attention to the bear, which was waiting patiently next to an armchair. “I think you might be looking for something a bit more” – he made a vague, wavey gesture – “peasant-ey?”
“I have come to find a bride,” said the bear. “And I have come here.”
I’d been following Miss Bickle and Miss Penworthy for some months in the hope they’d do some thing interesting or dangerous.
The possibility that one of them would marry a bear was exceeding my wildest expectations, and the possibility that they might refuse at the first fence was a source of profoundest frustration to me.
Unfortunately, I had no way to influence proceedings, so I took my frustration out on Mr Bickle by turning into a gnat and biting him.
“If it helps,” said Miss Penworthy, raising a hand, “I’m quite poor. I mean, relatively speaking.”
“She has hardly any servants,” explained Miss Bickle, helpfully. “And her sister is married to a clergyman. Not a very well-connected clergyman either.”
The bear gave a great slow blink of its great dark eyes. “That doesn’t sound… very very poor.”
“Well, I suppose it’s sort of relative?” suggested Miss Penworthy with a shrug. “I’m a lot poorer than Lizzie but probably quite a lot richer than a servant or a labourer.” She thought for a moment. “Or a tenant farmer. Or a washerwoman, a publican, a lamplighter, most shopkeepers…”
“Gosh.” Miss Bickle’s eyes grew wide. “When you put it like that it seems like both society and the economy are remarkably unequal.”
Mr Bickle frowned. “Well, sort of, I suppose. But I’m sure that the servants, labourers, tenant farmers, washerwomen, publicans, lamplighters and shopkeepers are all far richer in spirit than even we are. So it all balances out in the end.”
“I’m sure they would write remarkable poetry,” added Mrs Bickle. “If they had the time.”
“And if somebody’d teach us to write,” added the under-characterised maid, who had been following this entire discourse in silence. “Perhaps through some system of publicly-funded education.”
The bear turned its attention, briefly, to the maid. “Do you want to be my bride?”
“Already married.”
“Ah.” It turned its attention back to Miss Penworthy. “Then we return to you. Come with me and I shall make your family as rich as they are now” – it paused – “comfortable relative to the general population but diminished relative to their immediate peers.”
Mr Bickle swung himself into a sitting position, which he did only when matters were very, very serious indeed. “Now hang on, Erica’s father isn’t here, and I fear he’d have rather a lot to say about it if his daughter came to visit us and got carried off by a bear without our consulting him.”
“Oh, but Papa!” Miss Bickle, a highly experienced hands-tobosom-clapper, clapped her hands to her bosom. “That’s a beastly thing to say. Surely Erica must follow her heart irrespective of her father’s wishes on the matter?”
In any other household, this would not have been a compelling argument. Leaving aside the fact that a young girl’s right to decide her own marital fate was hardly a given in the era, there was also the… bear of it all to consider.
But the Bickles were not any other household.
“You’re right!” declared Mrs Bickle, who managed to sit up and swoon in a single well-practised motion. “The yearnings of the soul cannot be gainsaid.”
This sentiment earned enthusiastic agreement from Mr Bickle. “Very well then, Erica. Do you wish to marry this bear?”
And to my utter delight, Miss Penworthy said: “Yes.”
* * *
“You are certain,” Miss Bickle asked her companion as she packed her bag to go, “that you definitely want to do this?” I had, by this stage, been observing Miss Bickle on and off for well over a year and this was the most tediously sensible I had ever seen her.
“I am,” lied Miss Penworthy.
“But what of your dream to meet an affluent, beautiful, older-but-not-inappropriately-old lady with a title of her own and spend the rest of your life as her pampered love puppet?”
At that, Miss Penworthy sighed the death of a dream. “My father is demanding I marry. I fear my window for finding an older-but-not-inappropriately-old lady with a title of her own who will let me spend the rest of my life as her pampered love puppet is closing.”
“So you’re going to marry a bear?”
“Well, it’s that or a man,” Miss Penworthy pointed out. “And in honesty I find the latter prospect more galling.”
Silently, Miss Bickle helped her friend into her pelisse and smoothed out the wrinkles from the sleeves. When that was done, she took her by the hands and said, “Well. Then you must follow your heart. And I hope you shall have a great adventure.”
Privately, Miss Penworthy hoped the same.
Although she shared many traits with Miss Bickle – a fondness for literature, a still greater fondness for flights of fancy, and a tremendous willingness to defy social convention if she thought she’d get away with it – she was also aware of the differences between them.
The Bickles may have been of poor stock, but Lysistrata Bickle was heiress to a fortune in tin, and that allowed her tremendous licence to dwell in one days and maybes.
The Penworthys, by contrast, were a family of good name and little fortune, and the hour when Miss Penworthy would need to secure her future at the cost of her present was fast approaching.