David Williams's Blog, page 11

New Carpet

Over the last week or so, I've been taking apart our basement.  Twenty five years ago, when we launched into the joy that is American homeownership, one of the very first things we did was replace the basement carpeting.
Our predecessors in the house had a sweet old dog, and, well, the basement smelled of elderly dog and mildew.  Out came the ratty old carpet, and in went brand new high traffic Berber, ready to face the challenges of our growing family.  Two boys grew to adulthood in that basement, tracking in the dirt and debris of life.  There were two decades of spilled wine and dropped plates of food and that one time my I tried to move a leaky chainsaw from the workroom to the yard.  We got a puppy of our own, who lived out her fourteen years of life almost entirely housetrained, except when she wasn't.   When she passed on, we got a new pup, whose whole life in shelters meant he wasn't quite clued in to what to do in a house.  He figured it out after a few haphazard months, at which point we looked at our carpet.
The "new" carpet looked, well, it looked worse after two decades than the one we'd inherited.  It was a ruin.
So we bit the bullet, wandering over to a nearby strip mall where a genial middle-aged Lebanese salesman with a smoke-graveled voice soft-sold us through the process.  
But to get that installed, everything needed to come out of the room, and that's where we keep most of our books.  Seven bookshelves laden with books, gathered over a lifetime.  Books from college courses, not touched since I was younger than my children.  Books that neither my wife nor I can remember reading.  Books neither of us liked.  Books so devoured by time...or my father-in-law's dog...that they were functionally unreadable.
On the other hand, there were magical books.  Brilliant novels.  Insightful nonfiction.  Children's books imbued with memories of little boys right before bedtime.  Books that belonged to my grandparents, some of which had notes written on slips of paper within, little echoes of voices long silent.
So for a week, I went through all of it. That which had value, we kept.  That which might have value to others, we donated.  That which was worthless, we discarded.  For the latter two categories, a quick check by the missus, to be sure I'd not consigned a beloved book of hers to oblivion.  Even with both eyes over all of it, there was a whole bunch of worthless stuff.  
Every single tome in that room was considered, reviewed, and sorted.  I dismantled every shelf.
Reflecting on that this last weekend as I recombobulated the recarpeted room, I found myself thinking about deconstruction with soft new carpet beneath my feet.
"Deconstruction," or so it's called in certain faith circles, describes the process of taking apart one's faith.  
Challenge every assumption!  Tear it all down!  In doing so, or so the argument goes, you'll end up with something that's more authentic.  Unless you're willing to abandon every presumption, you're not really deconstructing.  Embrace the utter uncertainty, and from the shadows of the unknown, a new and more genuine way of being will emerge.  So the argument has gone, ever since I first heard it many moons ago in my days amongst the Emergent tribe.
There's a certain logic to that, to the application of criticism to everything.   

But whenever I consider deconstruction as a methodology of the faithful, it falls short.  Forget everything you have learned, cries the Dismantler of All Things, and I say, no, I don't think I'm going to do that.  That's a fool's errand, quite literally.  There are hard-won truths that shouldn't be set aside, values that can't be cut away without savaging one's integrity as a person. Those truths, once discovered, aren't something you abandon.  You refine them, sure.  But you don't start from scratch, over and over again.  You don't pull the rug out from under yourself.
Take our basement, for obvious metaphoric example.   Change happened.  Hundreds of books vanished, along with old dead electronics and useless bricabrac.  Dust was cleaned from everything.  A table that served no purpose but to clutter up the space was moved into our storage area.  
But I didn't just toss everything away.  Every change was a considered choice.  And the process of change was measured against a clearly defined goal.  We love books, and want them in our life.  We like the way the space has come to be.  That's not to say that change shouldn't happen, but insofar as we are the agents of that change, it should reflect what matters to us.  It is a guided process.
With intention, our books and our home theater system went through a sorting and staging, everything placed just so.  When time came to reassemble the room, it came back together quickly and neatly, newer, better, and yet at the same time familiar.  
Whenever we change the place that we call home, we must do so with an end in mind.

What Lurks in the Hearts of Men

Last night, as darkness fell and the temperatures dipped into the upper forties, we changed our Thursday night routine a bit.  Typically, Thursday nights are when Mom comes over, has dinner, and we'll watch a movie together.  "Mom Movie Night" has been going since Dad died, and is a continuation of the movie night I'd do over at their place when I took a caregiving shift every Thursday.

It's a fun little tradition, but every once in a while, it's good to mix it up.

Instead of a movie, we went old school.  In our hearth, the first fire of the season crackled away happily.  The wood, from a long dead chestnut oak, one I'd bucked and split and stacked myself back in February.  I'd worried that it might not have cured enough, but I needn't have...it lit instantly, and burned bright, casting warmth and flickering light into our living room.  Mom settled into a rocking chair near to the fire, a pleasure for old bones.

Our diversion for the evening was an episode of The Shadow, a classic radio-age drama from nearly a century ago, the one that begins with the voice of Orson Welles melodramatically intoning the catchphrase: Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?  The Shadow, of course, after which there's an evil laugh so utterly absurd you can't help but grin at it.

This being a product of America in the 1930s, it was sponsored by Clean Burning Blue Coal, the very finest Pennsylvania Anthracite.  Nothing, we hear, is more healthy for your family in winter than Clean Burning Blue Coal in your home furnace, available now from your local dealer.  Ah, America, how little ye have changed.

I've listened to old radio dramas before, and they're a very different creature from the entertainments of this era.  I enjoy movies, particularly those that involve visual artistry.  I enjoy gaming, too, again, particularly when games do something unique and brilliant.  But practical effects and CGI aren't quite as magical as that sense you start to get in the depths of a well crafted radio drama.

It's far less passive.  Through an admixture of sound effects and deftly directive writing, you find yourself gradually succumbing to a sense of place.  You're in that car, chasing the villains.  You're in that crypt, slowly filling with water.  I've often wondered about the impact of this sort of storytelling on the minds of a culture.  Our capacity for imagination is engaged as a partner, in the same way that it would have been around the fire in times primeval as the tribe's storyteller spun out another tale, in the same way that it is when we are deep in the thrall of a riproaring pageturner. 

If we are shown everything, I often wonder, does it impact our capacity to imagine?  We, who see and hear everything we want, who can disappear into virtual worlds crafted in intricate detail, which require nothing from us at all?  

Weighty questions, but last night, they were of less interest.  

Instead, we enjoyed the primal pleasures of a woodfire's warmth and the spell cast by a well told yarn.  

"They" Are Coming for Your Jobs

Con-men, pickpockets, and parlor magicians all have one significant thing in common: Distraction.
Distraction is what makes sleight of hand possible, as the magician subtly shifts your attention from the thing they're actually doing to the thing they want you to be seeing.  With your eyes and mind focused on one thing, you miss the card being moved, or the ball being palmed.  It's magic!  How delightful!
Pickpockets are a little less delightful, but the principle remains the same.  There's a bump against your shoulder, and a muttered excuse me, and you don't notice your phone or your wallet snicking out of your pocket.  Years back, a group of Gyp...sorry, Roma...kids tried that on me in Italy, but they were still learning, and the little hand that clumsily reached for my wallet only got a whack as a reward.  Pickpocketing's a dying art, I fear.
Con-men and scammers, though, are now everywhere, and they're far more successful at their trade.  The key, again, is to keep your mark distracted, off balance, and so focused on what you want them to focus on that they miss what you're actually doing.
Like, say, the three men above.  One is a casino magnate and reality television star.  Another is a private equity venture capitalist.  The third is a tech bro, and the richest man in the world.
They've been saying a whole lot about immigrants stealing jobs from Hard Working Americans, dirty violent immigrants with bad genetics, all here to take what rightfully belongs to Us.  "They" are the enemy, the thieves of our future.
But who is saying this?
The casino magnate and reality TV star?  
He's a master of the art of distraction.  "Fill the space with bullxxxx," as Steve Bannon described it, and .  Bad dirty lazy dark-skinned foreigners coming for your jobs!  Communist Fascist Marxists! His sketchy profiteering business ventures...NFTs, cheap Bibles, watches marked up 200%...would have once caused outrage, but not if that outrage is turned against migrant workers.
Who is saying this?
The private equity venture capitalist is claiming that immigrants are stealing jobs, and, notably, buying all of the houses that should otherwise go to Americans.  But the big trend, lately, is not for immigrants making minimum or subminimum wage as day laborers and farmworkers to somehow manage a $500,000 mortgage.  It's for private equity firms to snap up single family homes, which they then rent out at a premium.  But, hey, don't look at that!  
Who is saying this?
The Tech Bro and Richest Man in the World is pouring billions and billions into AI and robotics.  He's pitching a robot car, along with self-driving trucks and buses.  He's pitching androids.  To do what?  What are those for?  What is his vision? 
To replace Uber drivers, delivery drivers, and truck drivers.  To replace line workers and service workers and front desk clerks.  To replace forklift drivers and warehouse staff.  Because if you can lease a bot to do the work, why would you even need human beings?  You wouldn't.  It's part of the great shiny vision of the future, a future where the Workers of the World can't Unite because there's no more work left for them to do.
It's utterly, damnably obvious.  
If you're not distracted by the shine and sparkle in your eyes.

Descending into Crazytown

 

As a boy, I found the Second World War endlessly fascinating.  I'd devour books on the subject, and found WWII aircraft endlessly fascinating.  

I mean, I still have a favorite aircraft, all these years later.  It's the P-38 Lightning, naturally, it being the fighter of choice of Richard Bong, the most successful ace of the war.  Twin engines meant greater survivability, it packed a heavy punch, and while it wasn't nimble, it could outclimb almost all of its adversaries.  Why do I still know all of this?  It's just in there.  All this stuff still bops around in my brain.

I remember, too, talking with my maternal grandfather about the war.  Grandfather was a mathematician, and in that capacity worked on the home front as part of the science-side of the war effort.  But his cousin died aboard the Arizona when it was sunk by Japanese planes at Pearl Harbor.  One summer, when visiting them down in Georgia, I asked him about the Germans.

I found Nazi Germany confusing when I was a boy, because while it had some really cool aircraft, it was also obviously and purely evil.  Every defining feature of evil was present: lies, brutality, horror, the desire to dominate, blame, bitterness, and a valorization of violence.  And yet Germans, insofar as I was aware of them in the late 1970s, weren't monsters.  They weren't inherently stupid people, and were often quite the opposite.  They made rock-solid cars.  They were our friends again.

My question, to my Grandfather: what happened?  How could a people who were really no different from us do such obviously horrific things?

His response came after some reflection.  "I think, honestly, that they all went crazy.  Really actually crazy."

Grandfather introduced me, then, to the idea of mass psychosis.  An entire group of human beings can become consumed by the same collective delusion.

Which, clearly, is where we are now.

We are in a place where vaccines are considered a Big Pharma Conspiracy.  Where crazy blatant racist lies against migrants legally in this country are spouted at the highest levels. Where an entire party is organized around a Big Lie.  "Truth" is no longer grounded in objective reality.  

And Lord, does that go deep.

There are rumblings about fluoride in water.  Talk of secret cabals controlling the weather is now acceptable political discourse.  The idea that we are being subjugated by chemtrails is taken as a topic of serious conversation.

I mean, fluoride?  WEATHER CONTROL?  CHEMTRAILS? 

These are markers of the vintage 20th century paranoid delusional, definitively, stereotypically so, the sort of thing you expect to hear That Guy talking about.  You know That Guy, the grizzled one six houses down, whose high-fenced yard is cluttered with old rusted hulks, who has ten bolts on his door and cameras everywhere, and who either looks at you furtively from behind his blinds or buttonholes you for a nice long wild-eyed harangue.

If this is what we're talking about as a people, seriously talking about, there's no question that a substantial portion of the population has kind of lost it.

And in this Republic, they're all voters.

Guess I should fasten my seatbelt, and put my chair and tray table in their locked and upright positions.

Trunk or Treat

I've always enjoyed Halloween.  Ever since I was a tiny person, it's been a favorite holiday, because, well, it's great.  Your house gets decorated, pumpkins are carved.  You get to dress up in a costume!  There's candy!  Also Candy!  And CANDY!

But there's something else, something deeper, a value in All Hallows Eve that pushes back against a decay in our culture.  It was present in my first Halloween, back in 1975, when I donned a cheap plastic Casper mask and trundled out into our neighborhood.  I was six, but my last four October 31sts had been spent in Kenya, where celebrating that day ain't a thing.  So this was all new, this American festival, and it didn't disappoint.  As dusk fell, our street was filled with kids, and with adults, with the laughter of neighbors reacquainting.  Older children bustled about in little self-governing collectives, as the adult were off having drinks with other adults.

With Mom and my little brother along, we went door to door in the growing darkness, our bags filling with candy.

A random neighbor with a pickup truck had filled his pickup with hay and haybales, and was offering impromptu hayrides up and down the main street of the neighborhood.  I was lifted up into the back with a dozen other children.  My brother, being four, was getting a little freaked out by all the hubbub, and didn't join me, so Mom stayed with him.  I whisked off into the evening with a truckbed full of children I didn't know, not a single one of us in a car seat, or even a seat.  The wind was brisk and cool, kids were laughing and showing off costumes, hollering at other trick or treaters, and bragging about their candy hauls, and it all felt like a little bit of a wild rumpus.

That's what Halloween, as a national festival, felt like.  It was and is a neighborly holiday, a time for children to meet other neighborhood children, and adults to meet the other adults who lived around them.  

As such, All Hallows Eve is anomalous and a little endangered, because in our anxious culture, we don't do slow and local well.  We don't know the people who inhabit the same space that we inhabit, as parental sociality is increasingly defined by planned children's activities, social media engagement, and our deepening and generalized distrust of the world.

Into that mess comes Trunk or Treat. 

 

It's a well-meaning thing, as most innovations are.  You go to a church, where the lot is filled with cars.  Maybe also a moonbounce.  Or a face painting station, if they're gettin' fancy.  It's at a more convenient time, it's contained, and it's safe, and there's very little walking involved.  You pull in, unload the becostumed progeny, and boom.  Done and did in time to get them to toddler taekwondo.  For the organizations sponsoring these events, it's ideal from a demographic standpoint.  Young! Families!  To tell the complete truth, it isn't necessarily terrible.  If you're country folk, it can be necessary, particularly where rural neighbors are at a great distance and it's a way to get together.

But if you can trick or treat, trunk or treat is socially inferior, by orders of magnitude.  It feels like a symptom of the loss of authentic neighborliness, which has been supplanted of late with synthetic, temporary, and inorganic substitutes.  It's a manifestation of consumer expectations and overscheduled childhoods.  It offers "safety" and convenience, but at the price of community.

Because who isn't at Trunk or Treat?  

Everyone who isn't a parent of small children.  

The elderly woman, living alone, whose family are distant.  Empty nesters missing their kids.  A house filled with recent migrants.  A young couple still awaiting their first child.  A queer couple.  These, as Sesame Street once put it, are the people in your neighborhood.  Do you know them?  Know their faces and voices?  More often than not, you don't.

"And who," a friend of mine once pointedly said, "is your neighbor?"  We honestly haven't a clue, in these days of madly rushing about.  We roar on by them, stressed and in traffic, already late to our next event.

It's a loss.

On Controlling the Weather

Of course they control the weather.  Everyone knows it, and it'd be a fool's errand to argue otherwise.

In that, I am entirely in agreement with the recent assertion made by Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.  She is utterly correct in her statement. "They" do control the weather.

It begs two questions, though.  Who are the "they" that control the weather, and how do they do it?   Fortunately, we know the answers to both of those questions.

They?  There is a "they," a vast global cabal.  That conspiracy goes all the way up to the highest levels, and it's one that includes a significant number of co-conspirators.  Powerful, wealthy individuals, corrupt politicians, multinational corporations, and state actors, all committed to directly causing events like the catastrophic damage to the American South.  I've got many fond memories of childhood visits to Georgia, where my grandparents lived and my Mom grew up, so I feel the damage in that state personally.  So who are "they?"  

Here, a slight aside.  When people whisper that a nebulous, nefarious "they" do this or "they" do that, typically what those people actually mean is: "I do this.  I do that."  As a pastor who has had the pleasure of dealing with toxic souls in the church, I understand this as a fundamental principle of human behavior.  So from that, there's a very simple answer:

They are Marjorie Taylor Greene.  

I'm reasonably sure that's not her pronoun choice, so I'll say, instead: She controls the weather.  Of course she does, and you'd have to be a fool to deny it. That comes with a significant caveat: She's not alone in doing so.  She speaks for hundreds of millions of other human beings who share her worldview, who are willfully working together to destroy towns, devastate farms, and tear homes from their foundations.

How, you may ask, do she and her co-conspirators do this?

Weather's a finicky thing, complex and chaotic and hard to direct.  But you can change the climate by acting broadly on the whole system.  If you want more powerful hurricanes and more terrible floods, you need to add energy and moisture to the entire ecosystem.  This requires an amount of power that's hard to produce, even with the use of space lasers, but scientists agree there's one way to do it.  

The most efficient way to do this is to add carbon to our atmosphere, which captures the energy of our sun, heating the entire world.  We've known this for decades, and the science is clear.  The warmer world that results from that action can be expected to produce more events like the ones that devastated countless tiny little hamlets nestled in the North Carolina woods and ruined the homes and harvests of countless Georgia farmers.

So, yes, Marjorie.  You're dead on.  Absolutely.

And please do stop.

The Sad Short Hymn of Heraclitan Christianity

I think all things are just a mess

And Jesus? Hey, it's your best guess

Every belief is just the same

Because who knows? It's all a game.

On Christ the Shifting Sand I Stand

All other ground is burble gasp

All other gasp

gasp burble gasp

Rain and Water

I have, over the past several years, often looked at the garden in my front yard and thought it might be nice to have a rain barrel or two.  They'd fit in neatly, right there by the carport, and could drink from the copious runoff of the gutter that runs across the entire front of our house.  Why use municipal water to water my garden, when it falls freely from the sky?  It seems such a modest and simple thing.

Historically, I live in a great place for a rain barrel.  We have our cycles of rainfall and our cycles of drought, but things lean towards a comfortable equilibrium in our portion of the Mid-Atlantic.  Rains come on the regular. 

Or rather, they did.  This last year was dry and unusually hot for much of the summer, so much so that every gardener I know struggled with yields, with heat-stunted plants and dust-dry earth.  I was more impacted by an unusually aggressive varmint season, as squirrels and chipmunks noshed on my tomatoes and apples, and deer blitzed their way through everything else.  At the height of a month-long drought, there's not much a rain barrel can do for you besides sit there looking sad.

Again, it's not that municipal water is all that pricey here in Virginia.  It runs clean and clear from the tap, utterly potable, all year long, at fractions of a penny per gallon.  It's so abundant and so inexpensive that we don't notice the miracle of it, a miracle that for much of human history was available only to the privileged few.  For a significant proportion of humanity, getting water takes a substantial effort, a sustained and physical effort that consumes much of life.  My family lived in Nigeria for a while, and potable water wasn't a given, even in a city of 2,000,000 people.  We Americans have forgotten how hard that can be.

But we can be reminded.

And there lies a reason to have a rain barrel that goes well beyond the pleasures of gardening, one recently surfaced by the unprecedented impacts Hurricane Helene has had throughout the American South.  Water provision systems have been completely destroyed by water, in the most desperate of ironies.  Even with the best possible efforts, these systems may take a while to repair.  When crises hit, which they will, having a hundred gallons or so of emergency use water sitting right next to your house becomes a godsend, in the way that all wisdom is a godsend.

Water for toilets.  Water for washing.  Water, with a little boiling and filtering, for drinking.  It's perhaps the most basic of our human needs, and one that may be tried and tested as the weather of our little world gets more unpredictable.

Maybe I should put rainbarrels on my Christmas list.

In the Shadow of Her Majesty, Postscript

 

Postscript

And so, dear reader, we have come to the end of the events that made my formerly quiet life of music and markswomanship a source of such broad and public interest.  I have endeavoured to make as thorough an explication as I am capable, and where my own faltering memory may have offered up lapses, errors of fact, or clumsily missed nuance, please do accept my humblest apologies.  Any fault on that front is solely my own, as I could not have asked for more able support from the editorial team at the Weekly Post, particularly the justifiably renowned Mme. LeClerc, whose insights into the language and gift for finding precisely the right turn of phrase are simply without parallel.  

During the course of the serialisation of this tale, I received many lovely letters of encouragement, numerous queries about speaking and musical engagements, and, finally, several specific requests for clarification from readers like yourself, especially as pertains to several matters left unresolved in the telling.  I desire such closure myself in my own reading, and find it most vexing when I find such loose ends left maddeningly dangling by the author.  They tease at my mind in a most irritating manner, and so, to the following fivefold requests, I am delighted to offer some succour from that frustration.

Clarification the First, posed by so many of you that I regret I cannot acknowledge each by name, had to do with the condition and well-being of my three dear servants:  Amanda, so cruelly wounded in the fall of the Town Carriage; Bertrand, cast in fragments when Caddigan dealt a mortal blow in the aforementioned fall, and; Ernest, who by my side proved himself so utterly indispensable, and who (or so my writing implied) fell before the weapon of a Caddiganite armoured trooper.  Amanda and Ernest have returned to House Montgomery following an extensive process of repair and restoration by the Royal Society, and I remain utterly convinced that no Lady of the Peerage has their equal in their service.  Bertrand, I regret to say, was so critically damaged that only a small portion of his remains were recovered; we fear that several of his mechanisms may yet be in the hands of our adversaries.

Clarification the Second, also presented by a large number of esteemed readers, regarded my continuing relationship with Sir Diego Cruz Campo, particularly following his recent knighting for services rendered to the Crown.  I consider him a trusted friend, and we have regular communication, most recently when I took the plight of the survivors from his anarchist settlement before the Ladies Aid Society.  Diego himself was an invited guest of the Society, and gave his own idiosyncratic recounting of their particular and pressing needs; the resultant minutes of that meeting were perhaps the most significantly edited in recent memory.

Clarification the Third, requested in no less than four separate letters submitted by Lady M. Jenkins of Asheville, similarly asked after Diego, but here rather more pointedly enquired about any lingering connection between Sir Diego and my headstrong sister Suzanna; there were, in my recounting, several instances that stirred speculation about some lingering interest between them.  I, too, am curious as to the precise nature of their ongoing correspondences, but neither Diego nor Suzanna seem eager to provide any but the most general details on the nature of their ongoing relationship.  I am, in the interests of lingering peace in House Montgomery, not particularly inclined to pry.  Lady Jenkins, please do desist in pursuing this matter further.

Clarification the Fourth, requested by Hyeonbuin Kim of Gyeonggi, pertained to my efforts at the mastery of Lizst’s maddening Etude.  To her quite particular question, no, I would not describe the results of my efforts as anything close to mastery; to an untrained ear, perhaps, it might seem that I am capable of a competent rendition, but I fear that remains rather far from the case.  I have of late been taking refuge in the far less taxing works of Satie, whose subtle, ethereal tonalities are proving a comfort following the rather wearying nature of my recent trials.  I have, it seems, rather less of an appetite for the dramatic than once I did, for reasons that should be apparent to any discerning reader.

Finally, clarification the Fifth, again requested by more readers than I can recount: No, I have not yet publicly announced the date for my nuptials with Stewart, but I can assure you that it shall not be long in coming.  Should this be a matter of lingering interest, please do trust that it shall be duly published in the society pages of the Weekly Post.

If you have a further query, one left unanswered here, I should be delighted to receive your correspondence and shall reply to the very best of my ability.  Please direct your footman to deliver your request, in writing only, please, to the following address:

Montgomery House

Attn: Lady in Waiting Jane 9.35

2 Fleet Street

Port Baltimore Redoubt

39.0515036,-77.2290168

And now, dear reader, I must bid you a demain.  I hope that you have found this tale to your satisfaction, and as your humble narrator, you have my undying gratitude for your diligent attentions and your sustained interest.

I have the honour to remain, dearest reader, your most humble and devoted servant,  

The Lady Rebecca Wexton-Hughes, Countess of Montgomery

God save the Queen!

In the Shadow of Her Majesty, Chapter Thirty Eight

Chapter Thirty Eight: A Monarch’s Gratitude

From outside the metal confines of the hangar there now came immense roarings and rushings, such a thundering tumultuous din that one scarce could bring oneself to think.  The very walls trembled and shook, and it was clear that mighty works were afoot without.

I felt, at that selfsame instant, the constraining shackle removed from my ankle, the infernal object not simply released but snapped as one might snap a twig of balsawood; I turned to see the bruised and battered face of Diego, whose electronic bonds had been loosed by Her Majesty when She asserted Her Royal authority over all devices in the room.  Next to him stood Suzanna, similarly freed of her bonds by Diego’s hand; so transfixed had I been at the power manifested by our Sovereign that I had not noted their liberation.

As I rose, my legs still unsteady, Suzanna flung her arms round about me in a great outpouring of heartfelt sisterly affection, and I of course reciprocated with similar depth of sentiment; together we embraced and wept with relief that Providence should have given us such a welcome reprieve.

Diego stood near at hand, now goggling at the glory of our Sovereign through his swollen eyes.  It was, of course, that he had been utterly mistaken about the nature of Her Majesty, presuming understandably that we of the Peerage were governed by monarchs of flesh and blood.  Such a thought might seem laughable, but it is important to recall that humanity has for so much of our blighted history entrusted rulership to flawed and mortal flesh; the fruits of this foolishness are evident in the parade of tragedy that has swept up every culture since time immemorial.  

Her Highness is subject to none of the vagaries of human hubris, for She wants for nothing.  She does not hunger, nor does She thirst, She is not cast about willy nilly by desires for material possessions and the comforts thereof.  Her Regnant Power is not a social construct, but quite real and material, for Her thoughts are far higher than ours, and Her strength rests entirely in the power of Her Mind and Person.  Our Noble Regent needs neither sleep nor the distractions of carnal self indulgence, She knows no fear, She knows nothing that does not serve the purposes of the Crown, turning neither to the left nor to the right from Her Singular Purpose: Our Commonwealth.  We of the Peerage do not serve Her out of slavish obeisance, or out of some craven desire to curry favour, for She cares for that not a whit.

We serve our Queen because She is our Better, and we are grateful that She condescends to grace us with Her Beneficient Rule.

It is also of note that we do not, as a matter of course, oft mention the particulars of Her Eternal Nature; such observations are relevant to this tale, naturally, but otherwise are unseemly, poor form, and are rightly considered disrespectful of Her Royal Person.

As I whispered my thankfulness into Suzanna’s ear, I heard Diego’s voice hushed to an awed and surprisingly reverent mutter.

“Just. So. Full. Of xxxxing. Surprises.  Jesus.”

Glancing up, I saw that he watched with growing fascination, for Her Highness was now on the move, striding with great purpose towards the large main doors of the hangar, the long skirts of Her robe billowing about Her person like a velveted stormcloud; following behind Her in grim retinue were the Caddiganite armoured suits and their hapless charnel contents.

She arrived at the huge steel hangar doors, where with both of her hands She reached out and grasped the seam of the entrance and a support structure, and with a single motion tore the entire door from the rail that guided it; this was accomplished with seemingly as little effort as I might use tearing a sheaf of tissue paper.  The ruined door She then hurled outward with mighty force; it tumbled away as a leaf caught in a rising gale.  

Through the entrance was revealed the source of the tumult; the gathered might of the Crown had arrived.  

The sky was filled with the presence of the Admiralty’s warships, which seemed to my grateful eyes as numerous as the clouds in the sky, and whose devastating bombardment of the outer bulwarks of the base was yet still underway.  The airborne cavalry of the Royal Hussars roared close overhead, striking at anything foolish enough to peek out from shelter.  Though I could not yet at that moment see them, I would soon note the arrival of the Fusiliers, whose elegant and stoutly armoured forms were at that very moment pressing bodily towards us through multiple breaches in the Hammer’s failing defences.

At the unspoken order of their newfound Mistress, all but two of the far-cruder armoured suits fashioned by our foes then lumbered out to enter the fray, the remaining two took their positions at the gaping entrance of the hangar, standing guard lest any Caddiganite be mad enough to attempt to molest us further.  

Though fickle Fate had teased us most cruelly these last few days, now, finally and at last, victory was ours.

It was in that certain knowledge that I finally released Suzanna from my embrace, and leaving her in the company of Diego, turned to search the whereabouts of my intended.  Stewart was at that moment deeply focused, tending intently to some vital action upon the primitive touchscreen of a Caddiganite computing device; his long and slender form bent over it with the singular focus of his unique and estimable mind.  

I moved towards him with all eagerness, stepping with dainty care over the charred ruin of Barnes as I did so, and so rapt were Stewart’s attentions that it was not until I placed my hand upon his shoulder that he was broken from his trance-like absorption; he turned almost as if startled, his eyes in that first moment uncomprehending of my presence.

“Stewart,” I said, simply.

I was later to learn, for he so confided in me, that he had been using the Caddiganite device to glean what he could about the state of their technology; his distraction was a manifestation of diligence in the pursuit of knowledge that might in future sway our ongoing struggle against that growing threat.  Nothing less than that should have turned him from his profound concern for my person, and while a pettier soul might hold this against him, it only deepened my already near immeasurable respect.

“Rebecca,” he replied in a husky whisper, but after that utterance neither he nor I were of a mind to engage in our usual mode of conversation.  All around us was forgotten as we fell into one another’s arms, and for a timeless blissful interlude there was nothing in my world but Stewart, and nothing in his but me.  The two of us were oblivious to all but our love, as intimately entwined as those souls who forever in Dante’s Venusian purgatory dwell.  Suzanna tells me that our meeting was both embarrassingly adolescent and deliciously romantic; Diego’s comments to me afterwards on the subject were intended as encouragement, but they can neither be repeated in polite company nor do I believe they are physically possible.  

This might have gone on for a while longer, and I should not have regretted it, but Stewart pulled all of a sudden away, his face flushed with passion, his eyes raised and widening as they considered something above and behind me.  

“Rebecca,” he said, again, and I took from his tone that this was a request that I desist, which I did with a not inconsiderable reluctance.

I turned, still in his arms, my hand in his, and saw that behind us stood the Queen Herself, gazing down upon us with what could only be described as a whimsical bemusement.  As one, we bowed as best we could together, an unpracticed motion which surprised me with its grace.  

“Rise, my honoured servants,” came Her voice.  “It pleases Us to see a match so well made, Stewart MacDougall.  House Montgomery and the MacDougall bloodline seem to have become allies of a most…intimate…nature.”  Though Her perfect rubied lips did not move, one could hear the wry smile in the warmth of Her Majesty’s voice.  

With the very slightest condescension of Her alabaster countenance, She faced me now, eyes glowing with golden fire as She considered my humble person; though I had been at several affairs blessed with Our Sovereign’s presence, never before had I had the indescribable honour of a direct audience, and I gave a tremble quite involuntary.  

“You are Rebecca Wexton-Hughes, of the House Montgomery?”

“I…am, Your Highness.”

“You have done Us a tremendous service, Countess Montgomery.  We feel the recent loss of your dear Father the Earl most grievously, and We offer our profoundest sympathies.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty.”

“You must be, my Lady, well aware of the high sense We entertain of the great devotion which you have displayed to Us during this terrible and bloody affair, and We need hardly tell you how warm Our admiration is for your services, which are fully equal to those of Our Royal Society and the Admiralty, whose efforts you have had the privilege of facilitating in so capable a manner. At a moment of greatest danger to Our person, you have proven to Us your quality.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty.  I have merely done my duty, Your Majesty.”

“Your diligence is noted, Countess.  We are, therefore, anxious of marking Our feelings known with a token which We trust will be agreeable to you, and hereby shall grant you with this proclamation a Brooch Royal, one bearing the Saint George's Cross in red enamel and the royal cypher surmounted by a crown in diamonds; the inscription 'Blessed are the Dutiful' shall encircle the badge, which shall also bear the word 'Montgomery', the form and emblems of which shall commemorate your great and worthy work for the Crown these last several days, and which, We hope, you will wear as a mark of the high approbation of your Sovereign.” 

“Your Majesty.”  A Brooch Royal, I delighted, resting upon Mama’s dress!  Yet even in that moment, I stilled such selfish thoughts, for such was not the sort of tribute that one must crow and preen over, or take as anything other than what it was: a visible marker of the esteem of the Crown at a notable service performed.  

“It will also be a very great satisfaction to Us, when you return, at last, to a life more pleasant, that We might visit you at House Montgomery for two purposes: first, the formal presentation of said Brooch Royal, and second, to make the further acquaintance of one who has set so bright an example to our sex.  We shall assume that such will be amenable to you?”

“Nothing should give House Montgomery greater joy, Your Majesty.”

She gave the very faintest nod of acknowledgement, and with that, our audience was concluded.  The Queen had other demands upon her attentions, and rose to Her full height, turning to face the great gaping brightness of the hangar door, for to the rejoicing of all within the room, the very first of the Seventh Heavy Fusiliers had come into view.

As Her Majesty strode to welcome them, Her gracious figure occluded the light from without, and as I fell again into Stewart’s waiting arms, it was to us as welcome a comfort as the shadow cast by a passing cloud on a midsummer’s afternoon.

“Rebec…” Stewart began, but with a single index finger pressed gentle to his lips, I directly reminded him that I would rather resume our prior diversion; to this, he was wholly amenable; for a long and delightful while, neither of us was fool enough to sully the moment with the clatter of our words.

FIN


Postscript