Yesteryear

It has often been speculated what occupied Sir Edmund during the time spanning his arrival at Moulde Hall and Tricknee’s return. There are no surviving letters or records of his activities, and therefore the fanciful and exotic opinions of any number of besotted poets and educators fill music halls and taverns, even today.

One thing is known, thanks to a single letter written by Lady Lambly Chopshire II, which contains an off-hand comment to her cousin that the windows in Moulde Hall remained uncharacteristically dark long into the hours of the night. This letter, being from a lady of property, is far more respected as a source than the folk-tales that say the gas-lights of Moulde Hall burned brightly in the windows for a full week. Folk stories are, after all, notoriously common.

Another thing that is known for certain is that the man who called early in the morning the following day was not Tricknee Rotledge.

When Enga explained the visitor was not his distant relative, Edmund sorted through every possibility in his head as to who could be calling on him so early in the morning, only two days after Matron’s death. He recounted later in one of his few surviving diaries that he was ashamed at his surprise when he discovered who it was.

It was the next morning. Edmund was certain of it. He had slept, he was positive of that too. Not because he had dreamed; he hadn’t dreamed once in his whole life. He had, however, learned to recognize the clues, such as stretches of time that he did not remember or the sudden arrival of sunlight through his windows.

Nevertheless, he did not feel rested nor prepared for a new day. He hadn’t slept in his bed for over five years. It was frighteningly familiar, even after so long a time. The sunlight struggling through the black cloud of smog that hung over Brackenburg felt different on his skin.

He knew time had passed, but he couldn’t feel the difference. Now, he was awake and staring at the blank piece of paper in his hand.

He had written it — or rather, not written it — during the night. His routine of sleeping with pen and paper in hand had produced nothing. Not a word, not a letter, not even a strange cryptic sketch for him to puzzle over until he deciphered what his slumbering mind was telling him.

First he had lost his poetry, then his nightly writings…was he even Edmund anymore?

Edmund was an orphan from birth, as was fashionable at the time.

For centuries, the upper classes had been enamored with Blood. Lineages were tracked from the present day back thousands of years, through kings, queens, and prostitutes, creating macabre nets of sex and death. Marriages, affairs, and old midwives running through darkened forests with illegitimate heirs in their arms were marked like game sightings in books passed down from generation to generation with more reverence than any holy text. It was as good a way as any of keeping score.

To be an adopted orphan was to circumvent this web entirely.

Now, with Edmund at a ripe old age of eighteen, the pendulum had swung the other way. After years of obsession over heraldry, ancestry, and exactly what shade of blue your blood was, the mystery of not knowing one’s parentage was intriguing; and while money and power held their own fascinations, what was far more important to the perpetually ennuied upper-classes at the time was intrigue.

Bit by bit, the gentry were becoming more accepting of variety. After all, some of their most amusing peers had some embarrassment or other in their family tree. The Landed Classes could handle being common, they couldn’t handle being boring.

The traditional diversion had been war, but the Great War had spoiled all that — it wasn’t as much fun to send young men and women into battle when they came home again, broken in body and spirit — so, the landed gentry began searching for other amusements. Impropriety, once feared and criminalized in the lower classes, became lauded as fascinating eccentricity. Madhouses changed from prisons to safaris. The brutal and cruel were applauded for their creativity. Shock begat awe, and the malaise of the upper-class eroded away once more.

It was an interesting time to be alive, so of course Matron had died.

The third book of the Edmund Moulde quadrilogy was fun to write. I enjoyed coming up with all the little world-creative details, creating a world that was as much about fun little things as it was about people. All in all, while I can’t seem to ever allow myself a sense of satisfaction with my work, I can at least nowadays see some virtue in it. But all good things must come to an end, and so on Monday I will begin posting my final book in the Edmund Quadrilogy: The Last Days of Yesteryear.