Work Text:
1308, Plompton, North Yorkshire
The Clerk
Bored by the predictable rhythms of court and seeking purpose, England works. He makes an effort to do it. To immerse himself in the lives of his people. To understand them and live alongside them for a few years at a time. To fathom why he's here.
He can only stay in one place for so long because his unnaturally prolonged youth raises suspicions. He’d lingered in one place for too long before and been executed as a witch’s apprentice. When he’s working in the counties he moves every few years, once the parishioners start refusing to sit next to him in church and whispering in hushed tones whenever he passes.
He’d worked in the court itself and sometimes accompanies his kings and their families. He’d even squired for the Lionheart in Jerusalem, and King Richard had been one of the few to know him for what he truly was. Other times he had been sent away from the royal court to the monasteries as penance for what was clearly a punishment from God to remain eternally boyish, a squire unable to grow and become a man. The monks had diagnosed him with a surplus of blood and a lack of yellow bile, and had blood-let him to restore the balance.[1]
He settles in the service of a Yorkshire lord, whose chaplain and estate manager is a drunkard and a very poor example of the dignity of the clergy. Lord Plumpton delicately acknowledges these flaws while defending Father Geoffrey’s impeccable administration. Geoffrey knew his own land better than he did, Lord Plumpton declares. Upon beginning his work in the household, Arthur soon learns that what that actually meant is that Geoffrey overworks his staff of clerks and wardens to make up for his own shortfalls. He seems blind to his own failings when pontificating about the quality of the estate’s books.
Arthur rolls his neck and puts his quill down for a moment to massage his wrist, which is cramping up. He dares a look out the window to judge the height of the sun and the time of morning. He stretches and almost immediately the senior clerk William raps him across the shoulder with a birch cane.
“Heads down. All of these must be copied by midday.”
Arthur restrains the urge to grumble and reluctantly picks his quill back up to continue copying out the receipts of oats and barley. He wonders whether France works like this. His handwriting is neat but getting messier as he goes down the page. The morning’s bread and pottage feels like a long time ago.
Two other boys are working next to him, fresh from the monastery and their Latin classes. One of them shifts to replenish their quill but moves too fast too clumsily and knocks the whole bowl of gall ink across the table.
Arthur reacts quickly to upright it, but the damage is done. Thick dark gall spills across the folio he is working on and catches the edge of his sleeve. He swears loudly, which earns him another lash across the shoulder until William realises what has happened and directs his fury towards the culprit. The boy looks on the verge of tears as he promises to correct Arthur’s page for him and to collect more gall himself.
“Does that mean I can go and find supper?” Arthur asks hopefully.
William grumbles something about workshy youth and drops another bundle of receipts in front of him. “You can go when I say you can go. Work on these instead.”
In his new folio Arthur permits himself a small illustration of William with a foolish expression on his face, brandishing a birch cane with such vigour that his robe slips, leaving his bare arse cheeks exposed. Arthur hides it under his hand as he continues down the page and slips the finished folio into the stack of vellum, immortalising his vulgar illustration.[2] It doesn’t make his work go any quicker, but it does make him feel slightly better about it.
1437, Tamar Valley, Devonshire
The Wheelwright
After spending several years in France burning his countryside and pillaging his towns, England returns home, leaving Normandy in the capable hands of the duke of York. He has no reason to believe that Normandy will ever be wrenched from his grip. It’s his king’s ancestral right.
He’s stronger now, filling out into the body of a young man. He’s more restless too, now, like his growing industry is playing out in the increasing girth of his arms, the rushing of blood from his liver,[3] and the grumbling of his constantly hungry forge of a stomach.
And so, in a break from court and chancery because Henry VI is so feeble and stupid that England finds him impossibly annoying,[4] he picks up a trade.
Wheelwrighting is a complex enough trade that he must be apprenticed. He learns the different types of wood used for different parts of the wheel, elm for the central nave, oak for the spokes, ash or beech for the outer curved felloes. He learns how to treat each one, how it cracks or resists pressure, how best to cut it. He learns how to drive the spokes at an angle to absorb the bumps of the road. He learns mathematics and how to do basic geometry with chalk and string.[5]
Walter is a good teacher. He’s gentle but firm, making sure Arthur knows his place whilst also making sure that he is learning something valuable. Walter had originally taken his own son as an apprentice, but the boy had been arrayed for service to maintain the king’s siege engines. He’d succumbed in Normandy to dysentery, leaving Walter with no-one to take over his business. Arthur had presented himself as a young soldier returned from Rouen, deprived of his income and eager to learn, and Walter had taken him on and housed him.
His wife, Margaret, has a plump ruddy face and thick Saxon curls. She is an excellent cook and feeds him often. She compliments him for eating well, and after a year or so Arthur involuntarily starts to see her as a mother-figure, and she seems to think of him as a second son.
He attracts the attention of a girl named Cecily in the village, dark-haired and pretty, and he loses his virginity to her in the copse behind the vicarage. Her father approaches Walter with a proposition—after all, Arthur is set to inherit a good trade, but shortly after it turns out that Cecily is with child by one of the labourers on the church’s estate. Her father is displeased but consents to the marriage shortly after.
Eventually, the question of his age becomes impossible to ignore. He can stretch his stay a little longer now that he’s grown older. A teenage face that stubbornly refuses to sharpen raises less suspicion than a child who doesn’t grow at all in ten years. But Margaret points it out one day.
“You haven’t aged a day,” she says fondly over the table one evening, once Arthur has scraped his second bowl of pottage clean. He waits for the accusation, but nothing comes.
“He’s sapping the youth of me,” Walter grumbles. He’s greying at the temples now, and his back gives him trouble at the lathe.
He also learns smithing. He’s mesmerised by the roar of the bellows and the heat of the forge, and he can’t help but imagine plunging his hands into the molten metal. It reminds him of jelly, and he wants to eat it. He could. It would kill him and probably frighten the life out of Walter and Margaret. But he could.
Wheelwrights work with blacksmiths to forge short strips of iron—strakes—which are heated, shoed to the outside of the wheel with nails, and rapidly quenched in cold water to shrink and lock the wooden structure into place.
Arthur gets especially good at smithing. The repetitiveness of the work soothes a constantly buzzing part of his head. He can focus solely on the strip of metal, shaping it into a curve according to his need. He develops a slight stiffness in his right elbow where it takes the repetitive shock of the hammer strikes. He doesn’t know it then, but it will haunt him for the rest of his immortal life.
Walter dies in the winter of 1448. Arthur takes on his workshop and supports Margaret in her widowhood for a few months. But the wheel of fortune turns once more in France.
The new commander in France surrenders Maine, and France’s king prepares to retake all of Normandy. The duke of York starts making political manoeuvres in London and several of England’s coastal towns get badly raided by French pirates, leaving ugly burn marks on his ribs which he’d had to explain away as a foolish mistake at the forge.[6]
He didn’t think anybody knew he was in Devon, but in the spring of 1449 a small group of retainers of the duke of York arrives in the night with a letter from the duke. The duke is a shrewd man and had apparently seen enough of England to at least suspect what he was.[7] Return to France, his letter implores. Your departing has been followed only by ruin and woe.
The wheel of fate drags him back to war.
England abandons the little workshop in the valley that night and leaves behind anything he has that might be valuable. But he can’t leave Margaret a note because she can’t read.
1594, London
The Printer
After the defeat of the Spanish Armada England is soaring on a high with his seadogs. Finally, Europe would have to take him seriously. He’s grown now, a young man of stature who has commanded a ship in the royal fleet. He’s taken to keeping a stubble of facial hair, which has filled in properly, and he’s now tall enough to look France in the eye. And England is starting to reach out into the world.
His own counter-armada’s failure to free Lisbon from Spanish rule shortly after brings him crashing back down to earth. They get all the way to the walls of Lisbon before being completely repelled, and the promised uprising of the Portuguese against their Spanish masters never materialises. England waits for Portugal to show himself, to sneak out from the walls with a message of relief. Or with food, because he and his army had quickly started starving in the encampment. But he returns to England empty-handed, frustrated, and with no sign of Portugal to console himself. On the voyage back home—minus several dozen ships—he vents and scrawls and kicks apart his quarters and vows never to go back to the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal has clearly chosen which bed to lie in, made plush with plundered conquistador gold.[8]
Elizabeth had suggested—or insisted—that he take a break from the sea and remain in London. She’d said she couldn’t trust Drake or anyone else to properly advise her.
He finds himself working in a printing shop, where his literacy and multilingualism is valuable. The work is monotonous, but he enjoys setting the type. Finely cast letters are kept in a two-tiered case and carefully arranged to be printed in mass quantities.[9] He learns what passes through bawdy London below the polished sycophancy of the court. Broadsides with ballads, satires, proclamations, executions, and firm moral advice. Caricatures of Spanish demons and counter-pamphlets from underground Catholics mocking the alleged virgin status of his Protestant queen with vulgar illustrations. Those he refuses to print, because God knows she would have his head on a spike several times over if she found out.
A man comes in one day with a printing order. He carries bundles of paper, with huge chunks of text scratched out and rewritten and a hand that slopes crookedly as if it were written in a great hurry while propped up or moving around.
“I’d like to print this play,” he says.
Arthur puts down the ink batons and wipes his stained hands down the front of his apron, surreptitiously turning over his day’s work of a stack of pages printed with a saucy ballad. New playhouses are popping up around London every few months, showing a weekly array of great tragedies, romances, comedies and electrifying historical dramas. Arthur can often find friends amongst strangers in the heaving, sweating crowds of eager audiences who bump elbows with him.
In the theatres the women are played by men—usually young men. He’d briefly been horizontally entangled with a young woman named Alice, who had rejected her past name and lived as a woman even outside of the confines of the playhouse. She’d put him face down behind the props in the tiring house and fucked him silly, although through rolled-back eyes Arthur had found himself thinking of Portugal the whole time.[10]
He clears his throat. “Just the one copy?”
“Oh no, I have need of at least three to give to the companies.”
Arthur raises an eyebrow but doesn’t question him and takes the sheaf of papers, clucking his tongue at the poor handwriting. They settle a price and at the end of his workday he settles down to read the first few pages.
He’s instantly captivated.
A Roman general returns from war, towing the Queen of the Goths and her sons as his prisoners. He rejects the imperial throne and kills his own son when he attempts to protect his sister from marrying the emperor. But his loyalty and his son’s tragic death is all for nought, as the emperor takes the general’s royal prisoner as his wife instead. The writing is captivating, and as he reads Arthur can imagine it playing out before his very eyes. At the end of Act 1 he flips the pages back eagerly to find the name of the playwright, scrawled meekly underneath the name of the company so small that he could almost miss it.[11]
The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus, William Shakespeare.[12]
1712, Massachusetts Bay
The Whaler
After the tumultuous years of the late 1600s and the restoration of his monarchy, England spends most of his time at sea. His face settles into his adult features, and he resigns himself begrudgingly to an eternity of unruly brows and being a hair shorter than France. He meets France again at sea, and Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, and the other European empires, in the constant battle for trade and colonies. During the Anglo-Dutch Wars Netherlands clips him in the throat with a fatal bullet.[13] When England resurrects his men see him as some kind of half-divine mercreature, dredged up from the bottom of the sea to terrorise the living. Their loyalty is unwavering afterwards.
But his fellow Europeans return to the continent sooner than he does, reluctant to give up his taste of freedom on open waters. He should go back. He knows this, having left Scotland in charge of the diplomacy and daily work of managing their new empire. Scuttling around the Caribbean is hardly the best use of his immortality.
Arthur serves under several captains of dubious quality and purpose. He becomes first-mate to one of the English piratical terrors of the Caribbean. For a couple of unlucky years after being imprisoned, branded for piracy, then pardoned, he serves merely as a deckhand on one of his queen’s ships.[14] It’s not so bad. He gets his share of the plunder of Spanish vessels. But he misses the luxury of his own quarters. Below decks his hammock is cramped and hangs suspended over a menagerie of chickens, homing pigeons, and unwelcome rats. His hammock neighbour is a young lad new to sea and his sleeping berth smells faintly of vomit after bouts of seasickness.
He spends a few years on a whaler, further north off the coast of Massachusetts. Whale-hunting was a lucrative business and the whole animal was valuable: the blubber for oil, the meat for consumption, the bones and teeth for tools, and the baleen for corsetry.[15] The whalers’ tie cloths around their mouths and noses when they render the fat, but the stench remains unbearable and sticks to skin and clothes. Arthur also puts his blacksmithing and carpentry skills to use and receives extra wages for his responsibility for the harpoon blades and the huge rendering pots. His right elbow gives him trouble.
Half the crew are American, and they’re good lads. He finds himself fatherly towards them, seeing a bit of Alfred in their mannerisms. He feels guilty sometimes, that he’s at sea raising someone else’s boys to be men while Alfred has been left in the care of governors and governesses, but not guilty enough to abandon his bachelor’s life on the open ocean.
They’re on dry land, Gloucester, Massachusetts, for a few days to sell their oil. Arthur spends most of his money in the first two nights on good beer, food, and company. On the third night, after an uproarious evening, he staggers and collapses into some stables where he passes out.
He’s woken the next morning by a bucket of saltwater to the face.
“Blast and hell I’ll string you up by your guts!” Arthur splutters before he’s even properly awake. Blinking the saltwater out of his eyes he sees one of the young American deckhands shadowed against the morning sun.
“Mornin’.” Thomas says unrepentantly.
Arthur groans and sits up to rub his eyes blearily, and his stomach rolls with nausea. An empty bottle clinks to his side.
“Cap’n says we’re to be back at ship by midday.”
He grunts again in lieu of a reply. Thomas pauses for a second, curious to see if he’ll spew his guts up, before sniffing loudly and leaving him to the dignity of stirring by himself.
He does vomit, a streak of yellow bile into the hay. The horses snort in annoyance.
“Bugger off,” Arthur moans, wiping the back of his mouth and waiting for his head to stop spinning. This feels like a new low for him, and he’s glad Alfred isn’t here to see it. He risks smelling himself. Pungent whale oil, salt, and layers of bodily sweat.
Almost certainly a new low.
He staggers to his feet, head throbbing, and vaults the stable fence. Only he misjudges it, clipping the top of the gate with his shin and dropping over the other side like a sack of potatoes into a puddle that reeks of fish guts.
Arthur drags himself back up, ignoring the two colonists watching him with amusement from across the road. He spits, tasting a combination of stomach acid, fish, and decay from a rotting molar at the back of his mouth that stubbornly refuses to heal.
He makes it back to the ship in time, but only just. The captain yells something at him, and several other deckhands who’d spent the night in various stables, ditches, or hedges, about having not cleaned themselves up. He orders a communal wash in the bay before they board.
Waking up with a pounding headache in the hull of the Mermaid, Arthur later learns from Thomas that he’d slipped bare arsed off the gangway at just the wrong angle to crack his skull open on a rock on the way down. It’s his most embarrassing death yet.
At least the death resets his teeth, and he runs his tongue over the new molar.
1880, rural Lincolnshire
The Farmhand
There’s a way of life that is slowly dying before England’s very eyes, and he doesn’t know how he feels about it yet. The fae in his sea and forests are quieter than they’ve ever been, stunned into hiding, and England is beginning to believe he’d imagined them entirely.
Farmers recruit only half the number of farmhands they used to; they only need half to bring the wheat harvest in. Replacing them, contractors travel farm to farm with their traction engines, towing a steam-powered threshing machine which can do the labour of a dozen men in a day. The stooks of wheat are pitchforked into the roaring threshing drum, which chews and spits grain into sacks and neat bundles of thrashed straw out the other end. The machine runs off a flywheel on the steam engine which is turned by the pressure of a huge steaming boiler, fed with coal that sends a black plume up the chimney into the sky.[16]
Arthur watches the engine creak into the field, sat on the ground and chewing pensively on his breakfast. The engine—Sylvia—is a beautiful thing, sleek and dark green and shining in the scorching August sun. The men and women around him mutter.
“Should pour sugar into the boiler. Stop her moving,” John grumbles, wizened and old enough to remember a time—like Arthur—before steam locomotion. There’s a murmur of assent from the other farmhands. Only half of the travelling group had found labour at this particular farm. The other ten or so men and women, trailing children behind them, had continued onwards looking for work.
“They’ll put engines to work ploughing next. You watch!” Henry declares, freshly turned eighteen but utterly sure of his own wisdom. His mother nods approvingly.
“We’ll all,” Edith points around the group with the earnest bluster of a preacher. “Be in the factories next summer, God help us.”
Arthur says nothing, knowing he had watched the first steam locomotive whistle into Darlington with awe and anticipation. It had seemed like the natural development of things. Goods, letters, and people could now cross his lands in a day instead of a month. Markets had exploded, production capabilities had soared, and the empire has more money than it knows what to do with.
But the poor have stayed poor. And the jobs are disappearing.
There are currently no demands on his time from Europe. His ambassadors have made peace with Russia over Central Asia, the British Raj has never been stronger, and the empire runs on the effort of companies and governors without his having to be there. It had seemed a romantic prospect, to retreat to his countryside for a few years and live the rural idyll as a wandering hire.[17]
But he’s been roused from the hazy fogginess of medicinal opium and the silken luxury of London to be hit with a heavy dose of reality.
Sylvia’s wheels are wedged up, and the engine-driver stokes the demanding firebox. Commands are shouted and the farmhands begin the long day of feeding the threshing machine. Arthur is tasked with the heavy work of pitchforking stooks of wheat over his head from the rick into the machine, passed to him by the younger lads bringing in the stooks from the field. The fly-belts whip past inches away from his feet. He’s quickly sweating like pig iron, and the work is backbreaking. Harder than he remembers. And that’s with the strength of an empire behind him. Lord knows how his fellow hand John still has enough strength in his old bones to pitchfork for hours on end.
His stomach is snarling ferociously at him by the time the sun reaches midday, and lunch is cooked in the engine’s firebox. The engine-driver cracks eggs and puts rashers of bacon on the shovel and holds it over the coal fire. They emerge over-cooked, bubbling and soot-blackened, but to a hungry man it tastes like the best thing on earth over a wedge of bread and cheese. They’re replenished with beer, watered down enough that he’s not at risk of carelessly losing a toe or a finger to the belts, before it’s back to work. He reaches the bottom of the rick towards mid-afternoon, wobbling precariously in his hob-nailed shoes over the metal struts. The thresher belches out the last few sacks of grain, and Arthur helps them haul the last of the harvest onto the dray.
“Not bad,” Arthur says when they’re finished, leaning heavily on his pitchfork and looking out across the field as he waits for his legs to stop shaking.
John grunts. “Too fast.” He glares scornfully at the threshing machine.
They march up the hill to the farmhouse, singing harvest songs as they go. After a night of revelry fuelled by beer and a rich harvest meal of ham hock, pork jowl, cheeses, jams, honey, breads, and a strawberry and cream cake baked by the farmer’s wife, the company looks to move on with their wages to the next farm.
Arthur ends up shoulder to shoulder with Henry, who’s taken to following him around. He asks for more tales of Arthur’s soldiery as they walk. He’d half-fumbled a lie to the group after someone had asked about the bullet scar that he’d gotten at Yorktown over his belly, and now Henry wonders whether he should sign up to the army to travel and see the world. Arthur discourages him as strongly as he can.
+1 France’s POV
1953, The Needles, Isle-of-Wight
The Lighthouse Keeper
After the war, France finds him at the edge of his isles.
Stacks of books, rutters, and nautical maps teeter on every surface, spilling loose pages scrawled with notes out at the corners. A huge fresnel lens leans innocuously against the wall gathering dust, and a box divider is mounted over it containing shells and pebbles—basalt, chert, and dolerite. Each little specimen is neatly labelled in blue biro on yellowing tabs of paper in England’s hand. Several hooks have been screwed into the ceiling from which are suspended a dozen brass oil lamps, mismatched oars bundled like matchsticks, round turquoise glass floats in worn rope nets, and a lobster pot filled with various items of tidewrack and flotsam. The sofa is a deep salmon pink, scattered with knitted throws and pillows and sagging with age, comfortable like an old jumper. A rag rug covers most of the floor.
France steps over a pile of boxes closer to the desk to examine the crumbling corkboard. The little brass pins droop under the weight of photographs of ships and dunes, ticket stubs for the foot ferry, printed shipping forecasts, maps of sand bars, and a faded yellowing photograph of Arthur himself stood in a sand lagoon. He’s squinting against the sun from underneath a flat brimmed straw hat, with a loose open shirt and trousers damp with saltwater rolled up to his knees. He’s holding a ledger and a woven box that France recognises as one used to capture, measure, and release sea urchins and shellfish. The sea was a still white line behind him. He looks completely at ease, caught suspended in time.
Resting on a scavenged oyster shell a pipe has been abandoned by its owner, gently smouldering and filling the room with vanilla and rum tendrils.
Arthur bustles across the room with a piping hot kettle whistling cheerfully off the stove. He plonks a tin mug down on the table and fills it with hot tea. Then wraps a tea towel around the pot and untucks a rectangular tin from under his arm, pinging off the lid with his thumb and thrusting it in front of his face.
“Bischih?” His words are muffled around half a biscuit sticking out of his mouth.
France takes one to be civil, but it feels like a piece of dry masonry in his hand, dusted with a spartan layer of sugar crystals. He nibbles on a corner, thinking of rich cream mille-feuille, as Arthur pours himself a mug and gestures for France to sit down. He does so and Arthur slides into the chair opposite him, rummaging around in the tin to select another seemingly identical biscuit. Satisfied with his choice, he dunks it in his tea and France takes the cue to follow suit for the sake of his teeth.
“So, how’d you find me?” Arthur asks. His voice is so startlingly jovial that France just looks at him for a moment.
There are no dark circles under his eyes like France is used to, and that habit of his to be constantly looking around the room, alert for any danger, is completely absent. His facial hair has been allowed to grow out again, though meticulously trimmed for someone who might be going weeks at a time without seeing another soul. He’s put a bit of weight back on—a miraculous feat given the quality of the contents of his biscuit tin, which sits well on his frame and fills out his belly enough to press gently against his belt buckle. He looked like a man completely at peace, leaning backwards in his chair with his mug cradled against his sternum.
For a second it makes France irrationally angry. Nobody would know from looking at him that Arthur bears on his shoulders centuries of human passion and agony. Nobody would know what his hands have done even within the last century. The blood on his ledger. In this lonely tower Arthur has built a perfect oblivious cocoon at the edge of his rugged isles, hidden from war and empire.
France studies Arthur for any tell that his peace is an act, for a strain in his jaw or a crease between his thick brows, but he sees nothing. He has the ugly desire to shake Arthur out of the bubble he’d built, to pluck him like a pupa from his cocoon and pinch him until he struggles.
“Alasdair told me.” He finally says, fishing the biscuit out of his tea. He does not attempt to disguise his look of disgust as he bites down on bland mush.
Arthur chuckles fondly, a rare show of open affection, and scoffs his own biscuit with relish. “And how did he find out?”
France shrugs. “There’s not much you can hide from each other.”
Arthur grunts in agreement. They fall into silence as Arthur digs around selectively in his tin for a third identical biscuit.
“Did you see the colony on your way over?”
France blinks. “Who?”
“The birds.” Arthur says patiently, as if it were obvious. “There are a couple o’ dozen pairs of cormorants up on the cliffs,” he gestures out the little window. “You can see them from the ferry.”
“Oh. No…No I didn’t see the birds, England.”
Arthur finishes his biscuit then brushes the crumbs from down his front. He stands and rummages noisily in one of the drawers of his desk until he retrieves a pair of heavy black binoculars. He goes to the window, humming the few steps. He puts the binoculars up to his eyes, adjusting the focus for a few moments before making a noise of satisfaction in his throat.
“There. Come see them.”
With no good reason to refuse France pushes his chair out and steps behind him. In a different decade such a move might have earned a flinch or at least a step away. But now, Arthur steps into his space and holds the binoculars up for him in the right position. France gently takes them and squints down the lens. As promised, a flock of sleek black birds are scattered through the cliff face, preening each other and flapping in a seemingly endless wave of oscillating movement. France had half-expected not to see them, a figment of Arthur’s lonely imagination. While he looks Arthur bustles across the room. He returns with his forgotten pipe, puffing like a forge bellows to encourage the embers to rekindle. He blows out a cloud of oak and vanilla smoke.
“Pretty, aren’t they?”
France nods in agreement helplessly and hands the binoculars back. “You can’t often see them nesting like that from land,” he manages.
“There’s lots you can only see from out here.”
France looks at England for further elaboration on such a cryptic statement, but he doesn’t offer any, scrunching his thick brows as he peers down the binoculars at the colony.
“Do you see much?” He prompts, returning to his seat at the table, and after a moment Arthur joins him, setting the binoculars down on the table and digging for a fourth biscuit.
“Oh loads. The sea fairies come in with the tide looking for molluscs. There’s a few kelpie that sometimes stray down too, but they don’t hang around for long—it’s too warm here.”
France rolls his eyes. “I did worry that you might be going mad by yourself.”
“Hmm,” Arthur seems remarkably blasé about the possibility of losing his mind, taking a bite of biscuit.
France sighs, exasperated. “What on earth are you doing out here?” He snaps finally. “It is damp and remote and lonely and your biscuits are shit.”
It’s staggering that Arthur doesn’t rise to the bait and spit an insult back at him, only chewing pensively.
France leans across the table to rest a hand against the back of his forehead. “Are you unwell?”
“Never been better. Get off me.” And there’s a hint of annoyance now, as Arthur bats away his overreaching hand.
“Answer me then.”
Arthur leans back in his chair. “I’m working. Some of us actually try to rather than swan around on…” He gestures broadly. “Government funds all day.”
France remembers the pain of occupation, and de Gaulle’s insistence that he retire for a few years to heal. “That’s unfair, England.”
Arthur exhales in a snort, rolling his eyes, but in the gap of conversation nudges the biscuit tin towards him in apology. France doesn’t want another, but he takes the olive branch anyway. How tame they’ve become. Arthur huffs his pipe again. The scientists are starting to say that it’s poor for one’s health, and that smokers’ lungs turn black with tar over time. That is no concern for them though, and after a deep lungful Arthur graciously holds it out for France to take.
“What are you here for?” Arthur asks, deflecting. There was an unspoken threat. Are you here to make my life difficult? France inhales deeply on the pipe, rolling the tobacco over his tongue.
In all fairness, France isn’t sure. Scotland had been prepared to travel south himself before France insisted he go in his place to check England had not fallen into some postwar stupor. England is frustratingly magnetic to him, and he to England.
He’d been expecting to find someone in denial, bitter and angry. Not, whatever this is.
“Is it possible that I could be here just because I wanted to see you?” That was more vulnerability than they usually admitted to each other.
“Well, as you can see. I’m fine.” A slight blush.
“Are you hiding?”
“I don’t hide.”
France raises an eyebrow.
Arthur sighs, sensing he can’t wriggle out of the conversation. If for no other reason than that they are stranded on a rock with no company for a couple of nautical miles.
“I’m just getting away from it all for a bit. Working out,” he pauses, embarrassed. “Working out what I should be doing.”
That France can sympathise with. He has no idea where his new role lies now. The war has proven that humans are more than capable of mass nationalism on a scale that renders the literal personification of their land superfluous. Perhaps humanity has outgrown the need for such blunt metaphors.
He looks around the room again and sees it with fresh eyes. The haphazard stacks of books, scrawled notes, binoculars and measuring equipment, catalogued specimens, scattered half-finished objects and tools set down with intention.
England is learning as much as he can about the world around him that has nothing to do with nations, politics, or economies. Finding a purpose. That is how he is coping.
And the lighthouse beams out every night into the Atlantic under Arthur’s patient daily guardianship. A flare sent out into the world—I’m still here, hello, stay safe.
It’s not much, and it’s barely a drop in the ocean if what Arthur is searching for is penance. But it’s honest work, none the less.
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Historical Notes:
[1] The medieval belief system was that the body was made up of four ‘humours’ of blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Each humour corresponded to certain characteristics—hot, cold, dry and wet—certain seasons, and certain temperaments, and medieval medicine often centred correcting the humoral balance of the body. If you were ginger-haired, for example, you had lots of yellow bile and were considered fiery-tempered, which could be corrected by eating cooling foods such as salad greens. Yellow bile was also associated with virility, manhood, and the season of summer, whereas blood was associated with the springtime and with youth and childhood. So, logically, a person who couldn’t age properly must have had too much blood.
[2] These little medieval doodles appear all over manuscripts all the time. Although some were evidently included deliberately and were richly decorated with expensive pigments in psalters and chronicles, some are quite clearly the doodles of bored clerks stuck doing a monotonous job.
[3] Medieval medicine maintained that blood was produced in the liver, and that blood ebbed and flowed in the body like a tide rather than as a circulatory system.
[4] Henry VI had some kind of ailment that made him prone to episodes of confusion, melancholy, and even catatonia. It is almost impossible to retroactively diagnose someone, but it might have been some form of schizophrenia passed down from his French grandfather Charles VI. Take England’s language here as representative of the contemporary descriptions of Henry VI, rather than as a representation of the author’s perspective.
[5] Information taken from the Worshipful Company of Wheelwrights: https://wheelwrights.org/making-a-wheel/
[6] As England starts losing in the Hundred Years War domestic pressures mount and the year 1450 sees the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses, which had been brewing since the surrender of Maine in March 1448. The duke of York in particular saw the mismanagement of France as a matter of national embarrassment and the fault of the king’s close councillors. Throughout the 1450s he led the ‘Yorkist’ faction against the court faction (the ‘Lancastrians’) to seize control of the by-then virtually incapacitated King Henry VI.
[7] I find the Richard the 3rd duke of York fascinating and having studied him I think he’s a good candidate to have realised what England was. I don’t have an exhaustive list, but I think I’d also put Alfred the Great, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard the Lionheart (aforementioned), Edward the Black Prince, and Joan of Arc in there for the Middle Ages. And later Elizabeth I.
[8] Spain claimed Portugal by royal inheritance in 1580, unifying the Iberian Peninsula into a Catholic power-block that dominated Europe and South America over the next few decades. After the fortuitous defeat of the Spanish Armada and its attempt to invade Protestant England in 1588, Elizabeth I launched a counter-armada to destroy the Spanish fleet and liberate England’s old ally. Only the mission was a mismanaged disaster, and the English fleet had to scurry back to England hungry, half-dead, and severely depleted. The English had bargained on Lisbon revolting against their Spanish masters to throw open the gates of the city, but the Portuguese distrusted the English Protestants more than their fellow Catholics of Spain. Portugal would not be free of Spanish overrule until the end of the Portuguese Restoration War in 1668.
[9] This is where we get the modern English ‘upper and lower case’, which originally meant quite literally which case you got the letters from to print with.
[10] Take that British terfs. Binary gender norms were very much present in Elizabethan society, but the theatre offered a space for these boundaries to be deliberately blurred as women were banned from being actresses, meaning that all female parts were played by men. As well as drag, trans men and women have always existed in premodern societies. The British Library recently exhibited the court records from 1394 of a woman named Eleanor Rykener, a sex worker who we would now recognise as someone living as a trans woman.
[11] Elizabethan plays were the property of the company that performed it, not the playwrights themselves.
[12] The first Shakespearean quarto to be published, in 1594. There is one surviving copy, printed by a man named John Danter, so this is purely an alternate timeline where Arthur is the first printer.
[13] The First, Second, and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars, fought almost entirely at sea between the Netherlands and Great Britain in the late seventeenth century over their North American colonial interests.
[14] As in Queen Anne.
[15] Whaling was a huge industry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, leading to catastrophic declines in the population.
[16] Following the development of steam-powered locomotion for passenger movement—i.e. the steam railway, smaller traction engines exploded onto the Victorian market in the mid-to-late nineteenth-century. These engines were intended to be driven from farm-to-farm to power threshing machines (which was the most labour-intensive part of the wheat harvest). Stationery engines were also developed to drive sawmills and other traditionally hand-powered equipment, which obviously impacted local rural economies and forced farmhands and rural labourers into cities to look for work, often in factories. Here is a demonstration of a steam traction engine at work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bY-GhwE-_PA.
[17] The Victorians quite heavily romanticised rural living and the English countryside. Even at the time there was a sense of awareness that industrialisation was killing an older way of life, and organised environmental protection groups started to emerge to prevent the encroachment of railways, mining, and other projects on areas of perceived natural beauty such as the Lake District. As for the British Empire, it was pretty much at its zenith in the late nineteenth-century: the so-called Pax Britannica (and Arthur is not immune to this propaganda of the British peace-bringing mission). I see Arthur’s role in this the same way as any man in this period involved in the imperial project, as one cog in a much larger human enterprise. He has businesses and occasionally serves in the army but his personal relationships to imperial colonies might have actually been fairly minimal, bearing in mind that he could only be in so many places at once (the Anglosphere being the exception). He benefits from the wealth of the empire without having to really see a lot of it happen. Arthur must carry some burden of responsibility for his part, but ultimately human greed would have driven imperial expansion with or without his physical presence.