Search Results for 'varlet'
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Search Results
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In reply to: The Hoards of Sanctorum AD26
Helier watched Yvoise squinting at the bone through her screen, trying to decipher the “map” amidst the noxious fumes. He observed the scene with a detachment that surprised him.
The room was vibrating with tension, but for once, it wasn’t coming from Yvoise —it was directed at her. She was standing by the window, phone pressed to her ear, nodding furiously at some invisible bureaucrat on the other end.
“I am violently in agreement with you, Mr. Prufrock,” she was saying, her voice tight but diplomatic. “The olfactory output of Unit 26 is indeed non-compliant with the Olympus Park Clean Air protocols. We are… rectifying the asset.”
It was the “Kyber-Auditor” from the Business Park Administration. The new management had been cracking down lately, restricting their “unauthorized usage” of miracles and enforcing standard operating procedures.
It was all too much noise. Above the smell, which was screaming of decay rather than play, there was the frantic energy of it all. Mrs. Fennel’s panic, Yvoise’s spreadsheets, the looming threat of this “Varlet” from the Council. It was pure Negotium, the active denial of peace, waging war on the idle time of the Romans: Otium. The world was demanding relentlessly that they justify their existence with hygiene certificates, clean surfaces, and significantly fewer piled-up treasures, branding their sacred collections as mere “trip hazards.”
Helier gripped the bamboo handle of his umbrella —a sturdy, shepherd-style thing he had almost tossed into the ‘Charity Pile’ yesterday. He felt a sudden, fierce longing for Otium, a sacred pause where one simply is.
Earlier that morning, a delivery guy had held the elevator door for him with a foot, balancing a mountain of cardboard boxes. A simple, clumsy gesture of kindness amidst the clutter. It had stayed with Helier. It reminded him that you could be overloaded and still have grace. That moment of suspension, of courteous stillness in the middle of the rush, had been a tiny bubble of Otium.
They needed that bubble now. They needed to stop the clock.
Spirius, who had been hovering in the doorway, seemed to hear Helier’s thought.
“A map is useless if you pass out before you can follow it,” Spirius muttered. He stepped fully into the room, brandishing a heavy glass jar like a weapon. “We need a Containment of the Sins.”
“A what?” asked Cerenise, holding her nose.
“Of WHAT?!” asked Yvoise, raising an eyebrow while covering her mouthpiece.
“Sins…” Spirius said doubtfully, “…that should bring back some memories.”
He marched to the table. “Hold on to your halos…”
Yvoise pulled back, shielding her phone. “Wait! I haven’t finished cataloging the striations—”
“The bone will be visible through the glass, Yvoise. But the miasma must be paused.”
Spirius didn’t wait for a vote. He scooped the yellowed bone—and its mysterious map—into the jar. He didn’t recite a Latin prayer. He didn’t summon a lightning bolt. The Administration wouldn’t allow that kind of energy spike anyway. He just screwed the lid on tight, with one word.
“Oïton,” Spirius incanted.
To Helier’s ears, attuned to the drift of languages over centuries, it didn’t sound like a name anymore. It sounded like a desperate, corrupted invocation of the old Latin. Otium. The right to be left alone, fierce as a dragon guarding its sleep.
Psshitt.
It was the sound of a pressure valve releasing. Soft, pneumatic.
Instantly, the stench was cut off. Deleted. The air was neutral again, smelling only of old paper and the faint, metallic tang of Yvoise’s anxiety.
“It is done,” Spirius announced, holding up the jar. The bone rattled inside, harmless now, an archived file. The faint lines of the map were still visible against the glass, safe in their bubble of silence.
“Mr. Prufrock?” Yvoise said into the phone, her voice smooth as silk. “I think you’ll find the sensors are returning to normal parameters. Yes. Have a productive day.”
She hung up and slumped against the curtains, letting out a breath she seemed to have been holding since New Year’s Eve.
“Well,” Helier said, tapping his umbrella on the floorboards, feeling the tension drain from his shoulders. “That felt… cleansing.”
“If we could do that with the auditor, it would be a marvelous idea,” Cerenise agreed, eyeing the jar with renewed interest. “A spiritual purification. Now, Yvoise, hand me a magnifying glass. If we have restored our Otium, we might as well use it to see where this bone wants to take us.”
“A Novena, even,” Yvoise added, a mischievous glint returning to her eye. “Technically, we have ‘cleansed’ the house of the impurity. The Will didn’t explicitly say we had to throw away the good stuff. Just the… bad air.”
Helier smiled. It was a loophole, of course. A massive, gaping loophole. The threat of the Novena still hung over them like a storm cloud that hadn’t quite burst, and the mystery of the Varlet descendant was still unresolved. But for today, the audit was over. The hoard was safe.
“Oïton,” Helier repeated softly, testing the weight of the word. He looked at his umbrella. He wouldn’t need to open it. The storm had passed.
In reply to: The Hoards of Sanctorum AD26
Mrs. Fennel was beating the dust out of a rug with more violence than was strictly necessary. “Another bloody rug,” she moaned. “If I had a penny for every rug in this place, Boothroyd!”
She shook her head, then cursed, as a cascade of dust floated from her hair. “No idea which of them four picked this one up from god-knows-where, but they’re each as bad as the other.”
She paused to wipe her brow with a corner of her apron, wheezing slightly. “I’m telling you,” she whispered, peering at him conspiratorially, “it’s not just clutter anymore. It’s … REMAINS.”
Boothroyd looked up from a tray of seedlings, his brow furrowing. “Remains, Mrs. F?”
“Human remains!” she hissed, leaning in so close he could smell the peppermint gum on her breath. “A stinking, ancient bone in a plastic box, and Miss Cerenise acting like it’s a piece of the Crown Jewels. Then there’s Miss Yvoise, snapping photos on her fancy phone like she’s … I dunno … Sherlock Holmes or something. And the smell… dear lord, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.”
Boothroyd grunted, his gaze drifting toward the cellar door. “They do seem particularly out of control lately. My boots are still damp from that ridiculous boat business. I’m not sure they know which century they’re living in.”
“Anyway bone or no,” Mrs. Fennel huffed, “if that gentleman from the Council shows up, that Varlet fellow they’re on about, we’ll all be out on the street, mark my words!”
In reply to: The Hoards of Sanctorum AD26
The reek hit her with the force of a physical blow. Yvoise was sensitive to smell; for hundreds of years, Yvoise had cultivated the scent of library dust and dried wildflowers, a fragrance she believed to be the height of sophistication.
“Spirius,” she said at last. “The spiders are a symptom. This dreadful smell must surely be the manifestation of Austreberthe’s lingering ego. She always was a bit… pungent.”
Yvoise immediately felt guilty for speaking ill of the departed. “I’m so sorry,” she said, “that was not kind of me.” She was mostly annoyed at herself for not being able to comprehend Austreberthe’s choice to leave. She checked her smartwatch. Her ‘Conflict Resolution’ seminar was a lost cause; the group would have to resolve their own, dare she think it, rather petty tensions today. Of course, having the wisdom of hundreds of years’ experience does tend to give one a unique perspective.
“I think I overheard Cerenise say the Varlet descendant works in Gloucester?” Yvoise continued, her fingers tapping her phone. ”I’ve done a cross-reference on the municipal database and have found a Varlet who works for the Environmental Health Department.” She snorted. “Of course, the irony is, if that stench reaches the street… he won’t be coming for a family reunion; he’ll be coming with a condemnation order and a dumpster.”
The colour drained from Spirius’s face. Yvoise knew that the only thing a fellow hoarder feared more than fire was a man with a dumpster. “Don’t worry,” she said, kindly patting Spirius on the arm, “I was joking… I’m mostly, or nearly sure it won’t come to that.”
She pointed a manicured finger at the Topperware tower. “Be brave and open that top box. If there is a relic in there causing this stench, we need to neutralize it with vinegar immediately.”
Spirius reached out, his hand trembling as he gripped the lid of the highest container. As the lid clicked open, the frightful smell erupted into the room, a thick, dank smell of wet wool and lye soap. Spirius hastily set the container down and his hand flew to his nose.
“I believe it is her laundry,” he wheezed eventually. “I’m sure I saw a lace thingammy before I was overcome. Cerenise will surely want to know.”
“It’s a biohazard,” said Yvoise, as she quickly snapped some photos of it for her ‘Relics and Records’ files.
In reply to: The Hoards of Sanctorum AD26
“Bless you,” Helier offered, instinctively sliding the half-chewed pencil stub under a pile of National Geographics from 1978. He felt a flush of guilt, as if he’d been caught trying to steal a kid’s toy.
Cerenise rolled into the room, looking like a sorry pile of laundry. She was wrapped in three different shawls—one Paisley, one Tartan, and one that looked like a doily from a medieval altar. She held a lace handkerchief to her nose, trumpeting into it with a force that rattled the nearby display of thimbles.
“It’s not the damp,” she croaked, her voice an octave lower than usual. “It’s the cleanliness. Since Spirius fixed that pipe, the air is too… sterile. My immune system is in shock. It misses the spores.”
She eyed the spot where Helier had hidden the pencil. “You were thinking about it, weren’t you?”
“Thinking about what?” Helier feigned innocence, picking up a ceramic frog.
“The Novena,” she whispered the word like a curse. “I saw the look in your eye. The ‘maybe I don’t need this’ look. It’s the fever talking, Helier. Don’t give in. I almost threw away a button yesterday. A bakelite toggle from a 1930s duffel coat. I held it over the bin for a full minute.” She shuddered, pulling the shawls tighter. “Madness.”
“Pure madness,” Helier agreed, quickly retrieving the pencil stub and placing it prominently on the desk to prove his loyalty to the hoard. “We must stay strong. Now, surely you didn’t brave the drafty hallway just to discuss my potential apostasy?”
“I didn’t,” Cerenise sniffed, tucking the handkerchief into her sleeve. “I found him. Or at least, I found the thread.”
She wheeled closer, dropping a printout onto Helier’s knees. It was a genealogy chart, annotated with her elegant, spider-scrawl handwriting.
“Pierre Wenceslas Varlet,” she announced. “Born 1824. Brother to a last of the famously named Austreberthes — mortal ones, unsaintly, of course. Her lineage didn’t die out, Helier.”
Helier squinted at the paper. “Varlet? Sounds like a villain in one of Liz Tattler’s bodice-rippers. ‘The Vengeful Varlet of Venice’.“
“Focus, Helier. Look at the modern branch.” She pointed to the bottom of the page. “The name changed in the 1950s. Anglicized. And I think, if my research into the local council tax records—hacked via that delightful ‘incognito mode’ you showed me—is correct, the current ‘Varlet’ is closer than we think.”
“How close?”
“Gloucester close,” Cerenise said, her eyes gleaming with the thrill of the hunt, momentarily forgetting her flu. “And you’ll never guess where he works.”
In reply to: The Hoards of Sanctorum AD26
With a warm smile of approval, Cerenise tapped out the names and dates on her keyboard. So refreshing when people were original when naming the fruit of their loins, she thought. Some of the family trees she’d done for friends and clients had been a veritable cesspit of endlessly repeated Johns and Marys, Williams and Elizabeths. Despite suppressing a shudder when introduced to a modern human named River or Sky, or worse, the ridiculously creative spelling of a common name, some of the older examples of unusual names she found quite delightful. Especially, it had to be said, French ones.
Pierre Wenceslas Varlet born on the 28th of September, 1824 in Clenleu, Pas-de-Calais, brother of Austreberthe Varlet, born two years previously on the 8th of June. Wenceslas! What would you call Wenceslas for short? she mused. Wence?
“An ’twere not as good a deed as drink to turn true man and to leave these rogues, I am the veriest varlet that ever chewed with a tooth”.
A cautious knock at the door interrupted Cerenise’s mental meanderings.
“Enter,” she called, and Laddie Bentry sidled in looking sheepish.
“Ah, it’s you, the veriest varlet of number 26. Well, what is it? You look as though you accidentally dropped Helier’s trashy novel in the water butt.”
Taken aback by Cernice’s perspicacity, Laddie recoiled slightly and then squared his shoulders. “How did you know?” he asked.
“Oh just a lucky guess,” Cerenise replied breezily, tapping the side of her nose. “I suppose you want me to order you another copy from Amaflob before he notices? I’ll arrange for an express delivery. Keep an eye out for the delivery man”
Waving away his thanks, she picked up the old document on her desk that Yvoise had kindly provided, albeit reluctantly, and squinted at it. She could make out the name Austreberthe, but what did the rest say?
Cerenise dozed off, dreaming of the Folies Bergere. The atmosphere was exciting and convivial at first, escalating into an eruption of approval when the new act came on the stage. Cerenise felt the energy of the crowd but her attention was drawn to the flamboyant figure of a man dressed as one of the three kings of the Magi, and he was making his way over to her. Why, it was Lazuli Galore! What on earth was he doing here? And who was that dumpy overly made up woman in the blue dress, Godfreda, who had tagged along with them?
Another knock on the door wakened her and she called out “Come in!” in an irritable tone. She’d been having such fun in the dream. “Oh it’s you, oh good, the book has arrived.”
Laddie shifted his feet and replied, “Well yes, a Liz Tattler novel has arrived.”
“Oh, good, well be off with you then so I can get on with my work.”
“But it’s not The Vampires of Varna. It’s The Valedictorian Vampires of Valley View High.”
“Jolly good, I expect you’ll enjoy it,” Cerenise said, picking up the old document again and peering at it. Perceiving that Laddie had not yet exited the room, she looked up. “Helier won’t notice, those books are all the same. Now get off with you.”