"And Then As the Days Went Along..."
Aug. 30th, 2005 07:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psalm_onethirtyoneBah. I can't write. And this is more about Harbert and Harbert-in-Westmark than Harbert-and-Florian, but oh, well. He was meant for Rina, and this is what I get for playing with the OTP.
Somewhere Between
Harbert liked to explore. He has always liked to learn, always wanted to know more, but trapped in a boarding school in Boston, he'd been confined to books and lectures. He listened, he watched, but there wasn't enough to hear and see. This changed after the Island--on the Island he had learned to explore.
He was no longer a boy. He was a young man with a lovely pale face and amazing bright-coloured ideas. He had learned more than he had ever expected. He had learned how to survive. On the Island, he had lost three years of life with the rest of the world, had fallen out of step with it, had lost touch with what was happening, and instead discovered himself in a new kind of learning. There were no books on the Island, and the only lectures were Mister Smith's, which came with showing. When Mister Smith explained how to find their latitude and longitude, he worked as he spoke and did what he described. Harbert learned.
Now, back in the United States, he wanted to go on learning, and to learn by finding out things himself. He remembered identifying plants, making pottery, building furniture and the elevator, bringing back Ayrton. He had nearly died so many times. He had found so many things. Now, unable to stay on a farm in Iowa, he wanted to explore the world as he had explored Lincoln Island, by climbing the mountains and digging in the soil, wandering through the forests. He wanted to be attacked by the creatures.
So Harbert got his things together, bought train tickets and booked passages on ships, shook hands with Mister Smith and Mister Spilett, embraced Neb and Ayrton, and held on to Pencroff longer than he thought he would, partly because Pencroff wouldn't let go, and went to the station. The train took him to the harbours on the coast, and the ships took him across the ocean to Europe. And in Europe, Harbert Brown began truly to explore.
He took trains whenever possible (he had always loved trains, the feel of moving, looking out the window, the way he always stood up before they pulled into the station and couldn't help losing his balance), but carriages, too, sometimes rode horses, often walked, occasionally sailed, and, once or twice, sat on the back of someone's market wagon. In Spain, in the hottest part of summer, he stood watching at the Bonfires of Saint John, and a girl who laughed a beautiful castanet laugh and wore red and yellow coaxed him to jump over the fire with the children and young men. In France, he made his way through fields slowly, watching the ground, watching the sky, looking to see what people painted. He went to Paris, although he had never really liked cities, and went to museums there, spent hours. In Scotland, he climbed through old castles, got lost in lonely places, picked up stones on the shores of the lakes; in Ireland he walked above the cliffs on the west coast, one lone figure in a long blue corduroy coat, not even disturbing the birds. From Ireland he went to England and stayed longer than he had planned, because he could not leave Stonehenge, and when he had torn himself from Stonehenge, he could not leave Northumberland. When he finally did leave (it did not feel like leaving, it felt like tearing away), he returned to France and took a train into Belgium.
His first trouble began here. The train stopped somewhere that was not quite the place he was going to and not quite the place he had come from, needing repairs for something that would take days to make. Harbert was not sorry for the delay--the countryside from his window was beautiful and new, and he had half wished he could explore it, too. When the situation was explained to the passengers, that they were miles from the country's nearest city, that the men would have to walk there and buy supplies, for the aid of the train and for the riders, who would be hungry and cold soon, he asked to walk along. He would not come back to the train. He would find out about this place.
The conductor seemed to know it; Harbert had never heard of it.
"Westmark," the conductor said, and Harbert nodded, fascinated. Westmark was a wonderful thing to name any land, he thought. Westmark was the kind of name that sounded clear and storybookish, the name of a place that he would have liked to live in but liked even more to pass through, a place he would want to look at and wander about and press his nose against as though he were looking through a glass window at a display of books or pictures of wild animals. He wanted to find flowers in Westmark, and grasses. He wanted to know what the cities were like. The name felt safe and good and secret, a country that nobody outside it knew of except the people who worked the trains.
As they walked, he tried desperately not to hold them back, but it was necessary that he stop at least twice every five minutes to put down his small suitcase and pick a leaf or sketch a caterpillar or identify the cirrus clouds. The conductor grew impatient with him, and Harbert lowered his beautiful dark eyes and hurried along, still surreptitiously trying to complete the sketch and make notes with the awkward suitcase under his arm again. Mister Spilett had taught him to use notebooks this way, how to hold a pencil lightly so that his lines were easily made and easily erased, so that what he saw would appear on the lined pages. The trouble was that Harbert was trying to draw the whole world, and it was too much for lined notebook paper.
The sky began to grow dark after a while. It was night when they reached the city, nine o'clock by somebody's big pocket-watch. The men debated staying or returning at once when everything had been purchased. Here Harbert left them. He thanked the conductor, lifted his suitcase, and went into the streets, staring around himself. His expression was not merely amazed; it was enraptured. He had seen cities before, he had been through Spain and France and Scotland, Ireland, England, but he had never been to Westmark. The buildings were wood and stone, the streets were cobblestoned, and one could see the stars right from where he was, right from between two tall apartments, between laundry lines stretched between the windows. He set his suitcase down and sat on it, looking up until he began to study the buildings again, until he fell asleep.
He was awoken by all the ordinary sounds of a place that is alive and full of people who go about their work. At once, he got up off the slightly dented suitcase, stretched, and began to explore. He had always been a little shy around people, so he didn't speak to anyone, but he looked at them, wrote about them, wrote about what they were doing, tried to draw them, kept even his worst sketches so he could remember what he was trying for. It was the first city Harbert had ever loved, and he loved it as devotedly as he had Lincoln Island, gone now, and Stonehenge, far away.
By midday it occurred to him suddenly that he was hungry, and he began looking for a place to eat, slowly, so he could read every sign and try to make copies of every storefront and café. He had left the part where people lived, and was wandering through the part where people worked and bought things, the part full of shops and establishments. Harbert had meant to find himself lunch, but a bookstore and a milliner's shop distracted him, and after that he went to look at stationery and paper. It was nearly three o'clock by the time he left the tiny store where an old man was selling flowers and entered the pawnshop. He had seen a table in the window laden with a shuffled pile of curling old papers covered with a scrawling script and a short stack of copperplate illustrations.
Inside, two men were talking. One was large and bald and heavily muscled; he looked as strong as Ayrton, and Harbert wasn't sure whether that would make him slightly afraid or slightly unafraid. The other man was tall and slender and had a curious, pockmarked face; wore a slightly wry expression and looked as if he knew things. Harbert always compared the people he met to the people he knew, and he decided this second man reminded him of Mister Smith. It made him smile.
A bell rang somewhere as the door shut slowly behind him, and the two men looked towards him at once.
"Well, that's enough for to-day, Ingo," the second man remarked, stepping back.
"Yes, sir," the first man said. He must own the pawnshop, Harbert thought. He stood in his shop with the slightly proprietary air of one who belongs to a place because it is his. The second man didn't really belong. He only seemed to because he had a firm, meant-to-be-here way of standing, but he would stand that way anywhere, Harbert was sure.
Harbert still smiled. "Excuse me. Those prints and papers in the window. Are they for sale?"
"They are." The pawnbroker looked at him steadily. Harbert put down his suitcase and rolled his blue coatsleeves up to his white elbows without meaning a thing, just trying to get them out of his way.
He was a young man now, but somehow he was still a boy. He had left the rest of the world for three years, and grown up on the Island, then lost another two years on the big farm in Iowa, an island in the middle of the state. He had survived a volcano, an explosion, and the loss of his home, but he had never known he had been cheated when buying something, because he trusted like a child. He had a family on the Island, a mismatched thrown-together family of Mister Smith and Mister Spilett, Neb, his beloved Pencroff, and Ayrton, whom he had found on Tabor Island and who had nearly killed him and then saved his life--but he had never made any friends, because he was happy with his family and even when he returned to the United States, forgot to be interested in people that way. Once or twice, someone had tried to be his friend, but he was pleasant, shyish, interested, asked all the wrong questions, talked excitedly about the mating habits of Merioptera brachytera, and had no idea that he was meant to try to remember the someone after they had parted.
He could remember every detail about the three years on the Island, but had trouble knowing what was going on in the world. News and newspapers were Mister Spilett's business. He loved the open country or forests or caves better than towns and cities. Something in him was innocent. His beautiful dark eyes, long-lashed, striking in his pale face, were good for trusting, were eyes that liked to trust.
He asked at once to buy the prints and papers. There was little room in his suitcase, but he didn't need three sets of clothing--he could sell one or give it away, and have more space. It would be a good deal more practical than trying to squash those wonderful things in so they might get hurt. Of course, his money no good here. It was still a good deal of it French money, and the pawnbroker told him bluntly that it was worthless to him.
Mister Smith had expected something like this would come up at some point. Harbert was also entrusted with a small quantity of the jewels from Prince Dakkar's box. He now unpinned them in their tiny cloth bag from the inside of the inside pocket on his corduroy coat, and retrieved a small sapphire.
The prints and papers were given at once, and Harbert knelt on the floor and began to shift the contents of his suitcase around, trying to make room for them. Along with his three sets of clothing and four pairs of stockings, there was a wild collage of leaves, flowers, rocks, jars of particular dirt, stone edges from the blocks in castle walls, the bones of certain animals, seeds, clays, feathers, scraps of fur, a number of books, and enough loose pages of notebook paper to fill a small folio. He put the newly acquired things in gently, on top of some sketches of Northumberland, and snapped the lid shut. Then he thanked the pawnbroker and left.
The second man, who had not stopped watching him since he came in, followed him out. A few buildings down the street, he caught up with Harbert, walking even with him.
"Hello, there."
"Hello, sir." Harbert turned curiously and stopped.
"You seem to be losing things." The man held out a few sheets of paper covered with sketches of the city.
Harbert smiled again. "Oh! I have been. Thank you." He paused. "Excuse me, sir, may I ask a question?"
"What's the question?"
"What's the name of this city?"
The man smiled slightly, too, and, like his face, it was wry and thoughtful. "Marianstat, for the time being."
"What do you mean, sir?"
"They're voting in a few weeks to decide whether to change it. It's an old name."
"Like Aquae Sulis. They changed Aquae Sulis into Bath," Harbert said, nodding. "May I ask your name, sir?"
"It seems to be Florian a good deal of the time. Florian will do."
"I'm Harbert Brown."
"Well, Master Brown, what are you doing in a city whose name you don't even know?"
"I'm learning."
"What are you learning?" His tone was light and questioning, ever so slightly challenging, and at the same time disarmingly pleasant. Harbert tilted his head and pulled a handful of sketches carefully out of his big pockets.
"I'm exploring. I want to find out as much as I can. I've been all across Europe, and Mister Spilett says that'll make a good education. Mister Smith says when I've learned enough for one journey I'll come home, but not for long. Pencroff just says I should come home quick. I think it's wonderful here, sir. I wish I had been able to bring Mister Spilett's photographical equipment, but I'm just as happy to draw it. I'll be sorry when I have to go." He couldn't help looking down at his sketches and sorting them quickly, looking for one of the shop with the flowers. "I might be able to come back, though. There are places I can't go back. There are lots of places like that, you know, and I imagine there must be for everyone. So perhaps one day I'll be able to come back here. I'd like that. I'm not sure whether I'd bring Pencroff with me or even Ayrton. I'm not sure whether Ayrton would feel safe enough to come. He doesn't like to be around a lot of people."
Florian paused for a long time before he said "Oh?", softly.
Harbert nodded and handed him the picture of the shop. "He's like an animal that's frightened of noise and busyness, and you guide it by putting your hand on its nose so it'll come along and trust you. People don't quite trust him at first, either, because of that. People like people to be steady."
"But evidently you trust him."
"He's very quiet. He saved my life." Harbert laughed. "I think everybody has saved my life, though, one time or another. Things are always trying to eat me."
"And where do you come from that is capable of hosting numerous creatures large enough to eat a boy?"
"I come from America, but that was when we were on Lincoln Island." For a moment, he touched the rolled-up sleeves of his coat shyly, and then said suddenly,-- "I'm not a boy, sir. I'm twenty years old. I may be Pencroff's lad, but that's not the same."
"You are exceptionally innocent for someone twenty years old, and twenty years old is an innocent age."
"I don't believe I'm innocent, either, not in the way you mean. Ayrton is quiet the way he is because he was a criminal, and I found him when he was mad and he tried to kill me. Mister Smith brought him back and now he's my second father. When I was a boy, my father and mother both died. When I was at school, the other boys tried to get me into fights because I like to study and read and when I wouldn't fight, they hit me. I've never told Pencroff, because he'd want to do something, and it's no good doing something now, is it? But I've always been afraid it was my fault for being the odd one out. I've been to Richmond during the Civil War, and on Lincoln Island, besides the jaguars, there were pirates, and the pirates shot me--" He trembled, but--he didn't understand it at all--he couldn't stop talking, and he had never said any of those things before, not to Pencroff or Mister Smith or anyone. Florian, who had grey eyes and who reminded him of Mister Smith, was listening to him, and Harbert trusted him. He wasn't quite sure of why (except that Florian was like Mister Smith), but he did trust him, and he suddenly realised he wanted someone to know, although that wasn't quite right either... "They shot me, sir, and I nearly died that time, too. Pencroff was so afraid. I never wanted him to be afraid like that, I didn't realise how much he loved me--and I had nightmares. I caught a fever from being shot, even after Mister Spilett took out the bullet and bandaged the wound. I had nightmares and dreams and I was hot all the time, and everyone was afraid, I think, and I don't think I'm innocent the way you think I am. I just don't know how to behave around people much, except for Mister Smith and Ayrton and Pencroff and Mister Spilett and Neb, and--that's all, sir," he said, quieting at once. His eyes were a little blurred, and he blinked quickly. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to--"
Florian took his hand and pressed it very slightly, the way Mister Smith did. "And I'm sorry, too, Master Brown. I seem to have forgotten not to rely on my eyes only in my old age."
"I'm still--I'm afraid of being ill," Harbert whispered. He needed to explain, because he was still blinking back a few tears. His sleeves were coming unrolled and slipping down his arms. "I'm afraid of what I dreamed."
"So am I," Florian said.
They were both quiet, then, and then Harbert began to put his sketches back into the pockets of his coat. Florian hesitated a moment, and spoke.
"I apologise again. I hope you learn a great deal while you're exploring, and that you'll forgive me for my particularly presumptuous behaviour. You're a good many things, but not innocent the way I intended it. I can see that."
"It's all right. Thank you, sir."
Florian smiled, light and wry and thoughtful.
Harbert smiled too, wider, sweeter, and his dark eyes were warm, and more beautiful than usual. Florian hesitated again, shook his head.
"I'll let you go on your way, then. Luck be with you, Master Brown."
"You, too. Good-bye."
They shook hands, just as Mister Smith had before Harbert left.
He looked back over his shoulder, though, and waved before he disappeared into a new shop. Florian raised his hand. When Harbert came back out again, he was gone.
Somewhere Between
Harbert liked to explore. He has always liked to learn, always wanted to know more, but trapped in a boarding school in Boston, he'd been confined to books and lectures. He listened, he watched, but there wasn't enough to hear and see. This changed after the Island--on the Island he had learned to explore.
He was no longer a boy. He was a young man with a lovely pale face and amazing bright-coloured ideas. He had learned more than he had ever expected. He had learned how to survive. On the Island, he had lost three years of life with the rest of the world, had fallen out of step with it, had lost touch with what was happening, and instead discovered himself in a new kind of learning. There were no books on the Island, and the only lectures were Mister Smith's, which came with showing. When Mister Smith explained how to find their latitude and longitude, he worked as he spoke and did what he described. Harbert learned.
Now, back in the United States, he wanted to go on learning, and to learn by finding out things himself. He remembered identifying plants, making pottery, building furniture and the elevator, bringing back Ayrton. He had nearly died so many times. He had found so many things. Now, unable to stay on a farm in Iowa, he wanted to explore the world as he had explored Lincoln Island, by climbing the mountains and digging in the soil, wandering through the forests. He wanted to be attacked by the creatures.
So Harbert got his things together, bought train tickets and booked passages on ships, shook hands with Mister Smith and Mister Spilett, embraced Neb and Ayrton, and held on to Pencroff longer than he thought he would, partly because Pencroff wouldn't let go, and went to the station. The train took him to the harbours on the coast, and the ships took him across the ocean to Europe. And in Europe, Harbert Brown began truly to explore.
He took trains whenever possible (he had always loved trains, the feel of moving, looking out the window, the way he always stood up before they pulled into the station and couldn't help losing his balance), but carriages, too, sometimes rode horses, often walked, occasionally sailed, and, once or twice, sat on the back of someone's market wagon. In Spain, in the hottest part of summer, he stood watching at the Bonfires of Saint John, and a girl who laughed a beautiful castanet laugh and wore red and yellow coaxed him to jump over the fire with the children and young men. In France, he made his way through fields slowly, watching the ground, watching the sky, looking to see what people painted. He went to Paris, although he had never really liked cities, and went to museums there, spent hours. In Scotland, he climbed through old castles, got lost in lonely places, picked up stones on the shores of the lakes; in Ireland he walked above the cliffs on the west coast, one lone figure in a long blue corduroy coat, not even disturbing the birds. From Ireland he went to England and stayed longer than he had planned, because he could not leave Stonehenge, and when he had torn himself from Stonehenge, he could not leave Northumberland. When he finally did leave (it did not feel like leaving, it felt like tearing away), he returned to France and took a train into Belgium.
His first trouble began here. The train stopped somewhere that was not quite the place he was going to and not quite the place he had come from, needing repairs for something that would take days to make. Harbert was not sorry for the delay--the countryside from his window was beautiful and new, and he had half wished he could explore it, too. When the situation was explained to the passengers, that they were miles from the country's nearest city, that the men would have to walk there and buy supplies, for the aid of the train and for the riders, who would be hungry and cold soon, he asked to walk along. He would not come back to the train. He would find out about this place.
The conductor seemed to know it; Harbert had never heard of it.
"Westmark," the conductor said, and Harbert nodded, fascinated. Westmark was a wonderful thing to name any land, he thought. Westmark was the kind of name that sounded clear and storybookish, the name of a place that he would have liked to live in but liked even more to pass through, a place he would want to look at and wander about and press his nose against as though he were looking through a glass window at a display of books or pictures of wild animals. He wanted to find flowers in Westmark, and grasses. He wanted to know what the cities were like. The name felt safe and good and secret, a country that nobody outside it knew of except the people who worked the trains.
As they walked, he tried desperately not to hold them back, but it was necessary that he stop at least twice every five minutes to put down his small suitcase and pick a leaf or sketch a caterpillar or identify the cirrus clouds. The conductor grew impatient with him, and Harbert lowered his beautiful dark eyes and hurried along, still surreptitiously trying to complete the sketch and make notes with the awkward suitcase under his arm again. Mister Spilett had taught him to use notebooks this way, how to hold a pencil lightly so that his lines were easily made and easily erased, so that what he saw would appear on the lined pages. The trouble was that Harbert was trying to draw the whole world, and it was too much for lined notebook paper.
The sky began to grow dark after a while. It was night when they reached the city, nine o'clock by somebody's big pocket-watch. The men debated staying or returning at once when everything had been purchased. Here Harbert left them. He thanked the conductor, lifted his suitcase, and went into the streets, staring around himself. His expression was not merely amazed; it was enraptured. He had seen cities before, he had been through Spain and France and Scotland, Ireland, England, but he had never been to Westmark. The buildings were wood and stone, the streets were cobblestoned, and one could see the stars right from where he was, right from between two tall apartments, between laundry lines stretched between the windows. He set his suitcase down and sat on it, looking up until he began to study the buildings again, until he fell asleep.
He was awoken by all the ordinary sounds of a place that is alive and full of people who go about their work. At once, he got up off the slightly dented suitcase, stretched, and began to explore. He had always been a little shy around people, so he didn't speak to anyone, but he looked at them, wrote about them, wrote about what they were doing, tried to draw them, kept even his worst sketches so he could remember what he was trying for. It was the first city Harbert had ever loved, and he loved it as devotedly as he had Lincoln Island, gone now, and Stonehenge, far away.
By midday it occurred to him suddenly that he was hungry, and he began looking for a place to eat, slowly, so he could read every sign and try to make copies of every storefront and café. He had left the part where people lived, and was wandering through the part where people worked and bought things, the part full of shops and establishments. Harbert had meant to find himself lunch, but a bookstore and a milliner's shop distracted him, and after that he went to look at stationery and paper. It was nearly three o'clock by the time he left the tiny store where an old man was selling flowers and entered the pawnshop. He had seen a table in the window laden with a shuffled pile of curling old papers covered with a scrawling script and a short stack of copperplate illustrations.
Inside, two men were talking. One was large and bald and heavily muscled; he looked as strong as Ayrton, and Harbert wasn't sure whether that would make him slightly afraid or slightly unafraid. The other man was tall and slender and had a curious, pockmarked face; wore a slightly wry expression and looked as if he knew things. Harbert always compared the people he met to the people he knew, and he decided this second man reminded him of Mister Smith. It made him smile.
A bell rang somewhere as the door shut slowly behind him, and the two men looked towards him at once.
"Well, that's enough for to-day, Ingo," the second man remarked, stepping back.
"Yes, sir," the first man said. He must own the pawnshop, Harbert thought. He stood in his shop with the slightly proprietary air of one who belongs to a place because it is his. The second man didn't really belong. He only seemed to because he had a firm, meant-to-be-here way of standing, but he would stand that way anywhere, Harbert was sure.
Harbert still smiled. "Excuse me. Those prints and papers in the window. Are they for sale?"
"They are." The pawnbroker looked at him steadily. Harbert put down his suitcase and rolled his blue coatsleeves up to his white elbows without meaning a thing, just trying to get them out of his way.
He was a young man now, but somehow he was still a boy. He had left the rest of the world for three years, and grown up on the Island, then lost another two years on the big farm in Iowa, an island in the middle of the state. He had survived a volcano, an explosion, and the loss of his home, but he had never known he had been cheated when buying something, because he trusted like a child. He had a family on the Island, a mismatched thrown-together family of Mister Smith and Mister Spilett, Neb, his beloved Pencroff, and Ayrton, whom he had found on Tabor Island and who had nearly killed him and then saved his life--but he had never made any friends, because he was happy with his family and even when he returned to the United States, forgot to be interested in people that way. Once or twice, someone had tried to be his friend, but he was pleasant, shyish, interested, asked all the wrong questions, talked excitedly about the mating habits of Merioptera brachytera, and had no idea that he was meant to try to remember the someone after they had parted.
He could remember every detail about the three years on the Island, but had trouble knowing what was going on in the world. News and newspapers were Mister Spilett's business. He loved the open country or forests or caves better than towns and cities. Something in him was innocent. His beautiful dark eyes, long-lashed, striking in his pale face, were good for trusting, were eyes that liked to trust.
He asked at once to buy the prints and papers. There was little room in his suitcase, but he didn't need three sets of clothing--he could sell one or give it away, and have more space. It would be a good deal more practical than trying to squash those wonderful things in so they might get hurt. Of course, his money no good here. It was still a good deal of it French money, and the pawnbroker told him bluntly that it was worthless to him.
Mister Smith had expected something like this would come up at some point. Harbert was also entrusted with a small quantity of the jewels from Prince Dakkar's box. He now unpinned them in their tiny cloth bag from the inside of the inside pocket on his corduroy coat, and retrieved a small sapphire.
The prints and papers were given at once, and Harbert knelt on the floor and began to shift the contents of his suitcase around, trying to make room for them. Along with his three sets of clothing and four pairs of stockings, there was a wild collage of leaves, flowers, rocks, jars of particular dirt, stone edges from the blocks in castle walls, the bones of certain animals, seeds, clays, feathers, scraps of fur, a number of books, and enough loose pages of notebook paper to fill a small folio. He put the newly acquired things in gently, on top of some sketches of Northumberland, and snapped the lid shut. Then he thanked the pawnbroker and left.
The second man, who had not stopped watching him since he came in, followed him out. A few buildings down the street, he caught up with Harbert, walking even with him.
"Hello, there."
"Hello, sir." Harbert turned curiously and stopped.
"You seem to be losing things." The man held out a few sheets of paper covered with sketches of the city.
Harbert smiled again. "Oh! I have been. Thank you." He paused. "Excuse me, sir, may I ask a question?"
"What's the question?"
"What's the name of this city?"
The man smiled slightly, too, and, like his face, it was wry and thoughtful. "Marianstat, for the time being."
"What do you mean, sir?"
"They're voting in a few weeks to decide whether to change it. It's an old name."
"Like Aquae Sulis. They changed Aquae Sulis into Bath," Harbert said, nodding. "May I ask your name, sir?"
"It seems to be Florian a good deal of the time. Florian will do."
"I'm Harbert Brown."
"Well, Master Brown, what are you doing in a city whose name you don't even know?"
"I'm learning."
"What are you learning?" His tone was light and questioning, ever so slightly challenging, and at the same time disarmingly pleasant. Harbert tilted his head and pulled a handful of sketches carefully out of his big pockets.
"I'm exploring. I want to find out as much as I can. I've been all across Europe, and Mister Spilett says that'll make a good education. Mister Smith says when I've learned enough for one journey I'll come home, but not for long. Pencroff just says I should come home quick. I think it's wonderful here, sir. I wish I had been able to bring Mister Spilett's photographical equipment, but I'm just as happy to draw it. I'll be sorry when I have to go." He couldn't help looking down at his sketches and sorting them quickly, looking for one of the shop with the flowers. "I might be able to come back, though. There are places I can't go back. There are lots of places like that, you know, and I imagine there must be for everyone. So perhaps one day I'll be able to come back here. I'd like that. I'm not sure whether I'd bring Pencroff with me or even Ayrton. I'm not sure whether Ayrton would feel safe enough to come. He doesn't like to be around a lot of people."
Florian paused for a long time before he said "Oh?", softly.
Harbert nodded and handed him the picture of the shop. "He's like an animal that's frightened of noise and busyness, and you guide it by putting your hand on its nose so it'll come along and trust you. People don't quite trust him at first, either, because of that. People like people to be steady."
"But evidently you trust him."
"He's very quiet. He saved my life." Harbert laughed. "I think everybody has saved my life, though, one time or another. Things are always trying to eat me."
"And where do you come from that is capable of hosting numerous creatures large enough to eat a boy?"
"I come from America, but that was when we were on Lincoln Island." For a moment, he touched the rolled-up sleeves of his coat shyly, and then said suddenly,-- "I'm not a boy, sir. I'm twenty years old. I may be Pencroff's lad, but that's not the same."
"You are exceptionally innocent for someone twenty years old, and twenty years old is an innocent age."
"I don't believe I'm innocent, either, not in the way you mean. Ayrton is quiet the way he is because he was a criminal, and I found him when he was mad and he tried to kill me. Mister Smith brought him back and now he's my second father. When I was a boy, my father and mother both died. When I was at school, the other boys tried to get me into fights because I like to study and read and when I wouldn't fight, they hit me. I've never told Pencroff, because he'd want to do something, and it's no good doing something now, is it? But I've always been afraid it was my fault for being the odd one out. I've been to Richmond during the Civil War, and on Lincoln Island, besides the jaguars, there were pirates, and the pirates shot me--" He trembled, but--he didn't understand it at all--he couldn't stop talking, and he had never said any of those things before, not to Pencroff or Mister Smith or anyone. Florian, who had grey eyes and who reminded him of Mister Smith, was listening to him, and Harbert trusted him. He wasn't quite sure of why (except that Florian was like Mister Smith), but he did trust him, and he suddenly realised he wanted someone to know, although that wasn't quite right either... "They shot me, sir, and I nearly died that time, too. Pencroff was so afraid. I never wanted him to be afraid like that, I didn't realise how much he loved me--and I had nightmares. I caught a fever from being shot, even after Mister Spilett took out the bullet and bandaged the wound. I had nightmares and dreams and I was hot all the time, and everyone was afraid, I think, and I don't think I'm innocent the way you think I am. I just don't know how to behave around people much, except for Mister Smith and Ayrton and Pencroff and Mister Spilett and Neb, and--that's all, sir," he said, quieting at once. His eyes were a little blurred, and he blinked quickly. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to--"
Florian took his hand and pressed it very slightly, the way Mister Smith did. "And I'm sorry, too, Master Brown. I seem to have forgotten not to rely on my eyes only in my old age."
"I'm still--I'm afraid of being ill," Harbert whispered. He needed to explain, because he was still blinking back a few tears. His sleeves were coming unrolled and slipping down his arms. "I'm afraid of what I dreamed."
"So am I," Florian said.
They were both quiet, then, and then Harbert began to put his sketches back into the pockets of his coat. Florian hesitated a moment, and spoke.
"I apologise again. I hope you learn a great deal while you're exploring, and that you'll forgive me for my particularly presumptuous behaviour. You're a good many things, but not innocent the way I intended it. I can see that."
"It's all right. Thank you, sir."
Florian smiled, light and wry and thoughtful.
Harbert smiled too, wider, sweeter, and his dark eyes were warm, and more beautiful than usual. Florian hesitated again, shook his head.
"I'll let you go on your way, then. Luck be with you, Master Brown."
"You, too. Good-bye."
They shook hands, just as Mister Smith had before Harbert left.
He looked back over his shoulder, though, and waved before he disappeared into a new shop. Florian raised his hand. When Harbert came back out again, he was gone.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-30 11:55 pm (UTC)I didn't know you wrote Westmark stuff! Actually I prob did, but I associated you with Les Mis more than anything else.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-31 01:11 am (UTC)Oh, yes. I write rather more than I ought, in fact. Amusingly enough, I haven't written anything with LM in ages.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-31 12:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-31 01:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-31 12:12 am (UTC)I'm disappointed that Rina didn't even manage a cameo, mind you. XD But Harbert is beautiful, a beautiful boy. And it's altogether an enchanting and wide-eyed story, just like he is - that's your strength, a quiet, pleased, trusting joy in little storymoments - and what is it with trains stopping in Westmark? XD
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-31 01:47 am (UTC)I'll write Paris/London next year, after I've actually been there.
Rina is dead by now, though. Is post Beggar Queen story. Otherwise she would have been up to her elbows in there-ness. But eee. Yay. Harbert is the loveliest child, though, such a brave boy. He's just that way, and I can't even spoil him if I try. :D But thank you, thank you so much. ^___^ And at least it didn't stop at the station, mm?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-31 12:46 am (UTC)*flailflailsquee* I love how Harbert rambles here, and how much Florian draws out of him simply by listening. Oh, SQUEE. *flailflail*
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-31 01:53 am (UTC)Harbert, I think, would rather like to tell someone these things that he can't tell everybody else because they'll worry (like him at school) or they'll already technically 'know' without really knowing. Like the jaguars and pirates. Someone who will listen is always such a wonderful thing.
^___^ Thank you so much.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-31 10:16 pm (UTC)*snuggles!* You're welcome!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-01 02:33 am (UTC)^_____^
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-31 03:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-31 03:16 am (UTC)