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2018-12-13
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song: go and catch a falling star

Summary:

And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

At the age of twelve, Jack Robinson sells his coin collection and buys his first bicycle.

Notes:

my very first work in this fandom, and my very first work of fanfiction in a long time. any resemblance to works of fiction enjoyable or even vaguely readable is entirely coincidental.

in my defence, the wizard howl made me do it.

for celia, who started all of this.

Chapter 1: tell me where all past years are

Summary:

And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

At the age of twelve, Jack Robinson sells his coin collection and buys his first bicycle.

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.
--John Donne

 

"So, tell me, Jack, where did you collect your coins? Amongst the ruins of Ancient Greece? Or deep in the jungles of Patagonia?"

"I inherited my collection from Uncle Ted and sold it at the age of twelve so I could buy my first bicycle."

"Now, that's an adventure!"

"It was, it was. I rode further than I'd ever ridden before: through the uncharted wilds of North Richmond - "

" - Where even Captain Flint didn't dare to tread!"

"And where the pirate girls of Collingwood ruled the waves."

When Jack is ten years old, his uncle Ted passes away. The memorial service is a long and sombre thing, and Jack tries not to squirm against the old, smooth wood of the pews, the starch in the collar of his best Sunday clothes uncomfortably sticky against his neck in the cloying summer heat of the church. In Jack's memories, which are not at all like those of the lengthy and overwrought eulogies being delivered by elderly relatives he doesn't know very well, Uncle Ted was kind, a bit distant, a sort of soft chuckle of a man. He takes that memory, the softness, and stores it away in a quiet place in his mind and tries not to doze off during the homily.

Later, after the service and the quiet gathering at the cemetery where they laid Uncle Ted to rest and the reception, during which Jack and his cousins mill around uselessly in their best clothes, not allowed to play, whilst the men stare grimly into glasses of dark spirits and women hold each other and do not cry, there is a meeting in a solicitor's office for the reading of the will. It is a trim, grey sort of place, and Jack doesn't really understand why he has to be here amongst these adults, but his father told him to come, and he is not yet in the habit of arguing with his parents. He stands rigidly, hands locked behind his back, as though ready to recite for the schoolmaster; he knows of no other stance to hold in such company.

The solicitor is a dry, spare man with a thin, reedy voice. He cannot be older than his late thirties (Jack, for reasons he has never really cared to examine, often notices these things about people), but is already balding a little, his hair combed forward and laid down with care to hide the loss. He executes the will in a droning monotone, listing numerous bequests - Uncle Ted, who read Classics at Balliol before the Boer War, was a man of slightly more than modest means - until he gets to a collection of coins, to be left to Edward Robinson's nephew, John, because all young boys should have a treasure of their own. Jack, who has not been called John by almost anyone since the Matron attending his delivery asked what should be recorded on the birth certificate, starts slightly; he had not expected to have been included in the will at all. He feels his father's hand on his shoulder and wonders if he's supposed to say thank-you, but in the moment, his throat feels oddly dry, and he ends up just nodding his head slightly.

The coin collection, such as it is, ends up being mostly odds and ends Uncle Ted found during the war, plus a few more interesting rarities collected while he still lived in England, before he retired to the Antipodes to make a life here. Jack pores over each one, learning the intricacies of stamping and milling and metals, because he feels as though he should treat a dead relative's bequest as something important, and because he remembers, in that quiet and secret place in his mind, the kindness and the softness and is grateful for it. But like most healthy boys his age, Jack's greatest passions lie elsewhere. He spends most of his time, when he is not pressed into service around the house at his parents' orders or poring over schoolwork, outdoors: swimming and making rope swings over the river with the other boys; climbing trees to pilfer apples; making the most of Melbourne's feeble flurries of snow in the winter to wage snowball fights or build armies of tiny snow soldiers. His dream, as ten becomes eleven and his limbs become long and rangy with the beginnings of adolescence, is to buy a bicycle and train for the Tour de France. As eleven becomes twelve and his mother, clucking with disapproval at how quickly growing boys wear through their clothes, lets down the hems on yet another set of trousers, Jack retrieves the box of coins from where it has lain mostly untouched for the last year. He runs his fingers over each one of the collection and thinks of Uncle Ted and his soft chuckle and his kind eyes and wonders what kind of dreams he had when he was a boy, if he ever wanted anything more than an Oxford education and a quiet retirement in the colonies.

He sells the collection to an antiques dealer - he has no idea if he gets for it what it's really worth. He keeps one coin, a favourite: a crown piece, a memento of the war and of the old Transvaal Republic. It is hard for him to imagine his Uncle Ted as a soldier fighting the Boers in that far-away, foreign place. The coin is a reminder of all of the things he never knew and all of the things he wants to know about the world some day: foreign lands, strange peoples, wild adventures.

With the rest of the proceeds of the sale, he buys for himself his very first bicycle.

Abbotsford has been Jack's world for most of his life, with the exception of visits to family in Fitzroy. He is dimly aware, in the way that schoolboys are, of a world beyond: a world described in the verses he memorises and recites for the schoolmaster, Keats and Donne and Marlowe and Shakespeare. Damned kings and doomed lovers live and die on blasted heaths and in fair Verona, but Jack still dreams of the French countryside as he rides his bicycle down the narrow streets in the twilight after chores and schoolwork are done. He is fourteen, growing into long limbs, finally filling out with lean, ropy muscle and sinew, and with each pump of the pedals his world expands.

The rougher, pitted streets and alleyways of North Richmond should perhaps hold a little more fear for a boy alone on a shiny, carefully-maintained bike. But Jack, too lost in thought, too given to the rhythm of the pedals, the sweet burn of air in straining lungs, gives it no mind until he is forced to skid to a stop one chilly August afternoon before he collides into the girl who has just run into his path. She is a grubby, wild creature in patched, hand-me-down clothes: a worn calico dress that has seen better days, ragged petticoats meant for a shorter, younger girl. Her brown-black hair is cut choppily at her shoulders. She stares at him, blue-green eyes bright with exhilaration in her dirty face. She is clutching a basket of white peaches against her chest and breathing hard, as though she has run a great distance, which makes Jack think that the peaches are probably not hers.

"Whatcha starin' at?" she demands, her accent rough. She holds her shoulders back proudly, like a duchess. Jack is reminded of an aunt he almost never sees: a schoolmistress, regal and overbearing in featherbone corsets and crinolines, except that he is sure this girl in her worn boots and scabbed elbows has surely never been near a corset in her life.

Jack blinks. "I wasn't staring," he says finally. "You ran in front of me."

"I never did," the girl retorts. Collingwood, from the accent, Jack thinks with the observational part of his brain, and not Clifton Hill, either - really Collingwood, where you don't walk home alone at night. Though maybe this girl does. She continues, "I reckon you need to look where you're going."

Despite himself, Jack replies, "I thought I needed to stop staring."

This shuts the girl up for a second, but only for a second. "You're in the wrong part of town, smart-arse," she starts hotly, but whatever she was about to say next, she is interrupted by the arrival of friends, equally ragged and very out of breath - a boy and a younger girl, doubled over and panting heavily. Their eyes widen when they see her and the girl goes to her, clutching her sleeve and tugging.

"Phryne, we have to go!" the girl - blonde, pig-tailed - begs. "I saw a constable outside Mr Archer's shop, it's only a matter of time before he sets them onto us, and you know dad's already fit to be tied about the ruckus with the gang from over at Cooper's last week and - "

The brown-haired girl rolls her eyes, but Jack sees a flash of fear cross her features. It is gone in an instant and he wonders if he imagined it. "Dad can go and jump," she says, contriving to sound careless. "He's probably drunk, Janey, he won't even know where we are."

"Phryne, please - "

"All right, all right!" The girl - Phryne - gently disentangles her sleeve from the younger girl's grip. She is still holding the basket of peaches. She turns to the boy, who has been watching all of this unfold with rapt attention, and sighs. "C'mon, Janey, Raymond," she says, "we'd better scarper before that useless constable finds us and we all have to explain ourselves to the police - or worse, Dad." She says that last like it's a particularly bitter curse, and Jack, whose father has always treated him with a sort of rough affection, wonders about the brief look of fear and feels momentarily sick.

He realises he must be staring again, because the girl Phryne looks back at him, pokes her tongue out and says rudely, "Put your eyes back into your head before you lose them." She turns to leave with her friends, turns back, and adds, "And just because we didn't give you any trouble this time doesn't mean we won't next time."

Jack, who didn't realise he'd done anything to get himself into trouble, but who also slightly resents being told where he can and can't ride his bicycle by a girl about half his size, says mildly, "Who says you could if you wanted to?"

Phryne puts down the basket of peaches and starts towards him with a snarl, eyes narrowing, but her friends pull her back, murmuring urgently at her, and she huffs and rolls her eyes again and picks the peaches up, thrusting them at the unfortunate Raymond, and they leave together. She shoots a dark glance over her shoulder at Jack as they leave and he stares blandly back at her before turning to ride home. The sky has darkened while they've had their odd confrontation, and he should be getting back for dinner. As he rides, pumping methodically at the pedals, he wonders idly about a girl who steals white peaches and carries herself like a duchess in rags and tatters, but by the time he gets home, tired and sweaty and with just enough time to wash up for dinner, he has all but forgotten about her.

Notes:

this is, i think, the start of something. the donne poem has three verses and the plan is to write a chapter for each, with the later chapters taking place in jack and phryne's adulthoods. i hope you enjoyed this feeble attempt at a beginning. please feel free to inundate me with critique, which i most surely deserve, if only because i have never in my life written a sentence comprising fewer than three independent clauses.

the incident with the peaches is, of course, the one phryne mentions to jack in framed for murder. i couldn't resist. i have no idea if janey was alive for it or not, but i've chosen to believe that she was.

jack's uncle ted reading classics at oxford is entirely of my own invention, but i felt like a man who passed a coin collection onto his nephew had to have gotten it from somewhere. balliol is one of very many colleges at oxford that offers classics, and i chose it at random. most men of that generation would have fought in the one of the boer wars; until the great war, when people talked of 'the war', that was generally the one they meant. i chose a crown as the coin jack chose to keep because of all the coins minted by the afrikaner republics, it was minted in only one year, giving it a little rarity! jack, budding numismatist that he was, might have appreciated the novelty value.

Chapter 2: all strange wonders that befell thee

Summary:

And swear,
No where
Lives a woman true, and fair.

It's 1919, and Jack Robinson has a chance meeting with a stranger in Paris.

Notes:

i apologise in advance for my terrible french! a little was done with the aid of translation tools of various kinds, but most of it is my own, and i take full responsibility for any errors. feel free to heap corrections upon me.

on the other hand, any errors of formatting are entirely the fault of the archive. i have been into this chapter to fix the same problems with italics and blockquotes TWENTY TIMES. this way lies madness, i am sure of it. please forgive me and pay no attention to the screaming behind the curtain.

this chapter is for celia, but also for aradia, the dottie to my phryne, ever steadfast and true. may i never need to find out what i would do without you.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

Chapter Text

If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear,
No where
Lives a woman true, and fair.
--John Donne

"You're a different man these days, Jack. You've got your fight back."

"Probably just that lack of ambition."

"Or escaping a marriage that didn't suit you."

"It's war what didn't suit me."

It's the year 1919, and it feels like every Australian who ever fought in the Great War is living their absolute loudest in Paris. Jack Robinson, who has never lived his absolute loudest anywhere, understands the sentiment, understands being so surprised to be alive that every night without machine-gun fire and heavy shelling is a cause for celebration. But Rosie is in their little bungalow in Melbourne, her letters still too rare even now that the war is over, and he has lost too many of the friends that travelled with him here, getting sick over the side of the ship on the way and making ribald jokes about foreign women during the orientation presentations at the training camp in Cairo. Celebration seems like too much of a tall order, even now, even in Paris. He thinks about his dream, long-cherished, of riding in the Tour de France one day, of the bicycle resting against the side of his little house back at home. He does not think he could ever come back to this place again without imagining the fields strewn with dead, poppies swaying wildly between the bodies like blood-soaked grave markers.

Dreams, like the men who carry them, die hard and viciously, and nobody remembers them once they are gone.

Jack knows he should see the sights while he's here, bring something back to Rosie other than blood and suffering, so he drags himself doggedly out of bed most mornings and wanders aimlessly around the city. His French is barely good enough for him to beg directions from the locals, but he stumbles more-or-less by accident upon the Avenue des Champs-Élysées and gawks at the Arc de Triomphe for an hour or two. He takes a late lunch at a little cafe along the avenue, ordering off the menu in mangled French that he's sure marks him as a soldier, judging by the rolled eyes of the waitstaff, but he's too famished to care, and the soup is delicious, flavourful and steaming hot to ward off the brisk early spring chill. He tries to resist the urge to slurp it down, limiting himself to dignified spoonfuls, taking the time as he does to peruse the art along the walls. There's so much of it, and in so many styles - not that Jack is any kind of expert, though he has a mind to go and see the Mona Lisa at the Louvre Museum so that he can tell Rosie about it. He thinks she would like that.

"Êtes-vous satisfait de votre repas, monsieur?" asks a stocky, moustached man in an apron - the chef or some such, Jack thinks - as he breaks crusty bread and dips it gingerly into the soup as he's observed other diners doing. He starts a little, dropping a chunk of bread into the soup, and blushes, splattering little drops of soup onto his clothes and the white tablecloth, and has to dab at his uniform shirt with his napkin, as though the worn brown cloth was pristine before. He looks up at the moustached man, who is bearing this very gauche display patiently, perhaps accustomed by now to uncultured foreigners coming into his cafe and spilling soup.

"Ah," Jack stammers, uncomfortably aware of his poor table manners and worse French. "Ah - um - oui, le repas est, ah, très bien, merci, monsieur." It's probably not correct in some way he doesn't understand, and he knows his accent gives him away (as if his army corps uniform didn't), but the man smiles genially and gives a little Gallic bow, graceful and gallant, and exclaims, "ah, magnifique! J'ai beaucoup bonheur, monsieur, pour le satisfaction de la faim grande est la belle chose, non?"

That is too much French for Jack, so he nods politely, mumbles a hasty "oui, monsieur" of agreement into his soup, and keeps eating, which he hopes will be enough to appease the excitable Frenchman. As he does, a young woman saunters into the cafe from off the street, just in time to catch the end of whatever the chef was so enthusiastically proclaiming. "Ah, Anatolé," she says, in an accent that is much better than Jack's, although she does not look French to him - English, maybe, with milky-pale skin stretched tight over high cheekbones and blue-green eyes that catch the fading afternoon light. "Arrêtez! Le soldat aura découragé son déjeuner. Il a...je ne sais quoi...un aspect maigre et affamé."  She smiles wickedly and looks him over in a way that Jack is not at all sure he likes, and then shares a laughing glance with the cafe owner."Celui-ci a besoin de plus nourriture!"

The owner laughs and spreads his hands, then smiles at Jack. "It must be as the Mademoiselle says," he says, this time in heavily-accented English. "For she is right, non? You have the look of one who is too long away from life. You must be, ah, comment dites-vous...brought back, with good food and good things, for the war has taken your spirit. Now, mangez, monsieur! The war is over, and you are alive. You must stay so."

Jack does not say any of the things that he is thinking - that he does not know if he really did survive the war or if the part of him that came back is just a homunculus, a shambling, inhuman thing that remembers how to walk and talk but not how to think or feel; that he is not sure that he deserves this, to eat soup in a cafe on the Champs-Élysées in the late afternoon sunlight when so many of his mates are dead and he can still hear them screaming; that he's trying to put into words what the Eiffel Tower looks like so that he can tell Rosie when he gets home, but he can't remember Rosie's face. He does not say any of those things. Instead, he finishes the dregs of his soup, which is going cold, soaking into the last of the bread, and when he looks up, the young woman who walked into the cafe before is sitting across from him at the table, studying him.

"You're Australian," she says in English. Her accent is strange - like the rich grammar school girls who used to ride in their parents' motorcars down the broad streets of the St Kilda Esplanade, far beyond where Jack ever explored, but with an edge of something rougher, like she came to money later in life and hasn't quite gotten used to it yet. And rich grammar school girls don't sit across from Jack Robinson in Parisian cafes after the Great War, surely, and not dressed in flimsy skirts, their dark hair worn in messy, carefree waves past their shoulders, the way the artists here wear it, their lips faded red with what must be last night's lipstick. Nor do they sport - and now a little chill runs down Jack's spine - the very faintest bruising in the shape of a handprint down the sides of their necks, like someone choked them recently.

She must have caught him staring, because for the first time, she looks a little self-conscious, and she shifts in a way that she tries to make look casual, re-arranging the scarf around her neck so the bruising is hidden. To cover the moment of awkwardness, Jack tries a smile and says, "Is my French really so bad that it gave me away?"

The young woman smiles at him, a wicked, knowing sort of smile, nothing at all like the demure, society smile Rosie would give a stranger in a cafe (if Rosie ever were to smile at a stranger in a cafe). "Well, yes," she says, "and also, this city is positively crawling with diggers in uniform right now, though not," she adds, pointedly staring at the insignia on his sleeve, "all that many sergeants." She flutters her eyelashes at him flirtatiously. "An officer and a gentleman?" she asks.

Jack Robinson, married man, who has never flirted with a woman in his life, finds that he is smiling back despite himself. "An NCO waiting to be sent home, and extremely lost in a city where he doesn't speak the language," he replies. "You may have heard my attempts at French. I was going to try to find the Louvre so I could tell my wife I'd seen the Mona Lisa - " inwardly he winces - did he just tell this woman he had a wife? (why does he care if this woman knows he has a wife?) - "but I'm not all that confident in my ability to get directions out of the locals. I found the Arc de Triomphe mostly by accident."

"Oh, it's not that hard. Fifty percent Latin, fifty percent gargling," the woman replies airily. She waves a hand and the owner - she called him Anatolé - brings them both a tumbler of something richly amber-coloured. She lifts her class to him in a toast. "Salut," she says. "To the war. May we never again see its equal."

"Mademoiselle," Jack says, not lifting his glass, "I don't even know your name, and it cannot be later than four in the afternoon."

The mademoiselle in question is already draining her glass. "This time last year, Paris was being shelled and I was driving an ambulance through the Somme," she says. "I never thought I would ever see home again, let alone drink cognac with a handsome stranger in a cafe. Live a little, Sergeant. There was a time when we thought we might never live again."

Jack remembers the Somme. It's a compelling argument. He raises the glass and drinks. The brandy burns on the way down, but it's pleasant. It feels like life, somehow: like all the things he thought he wasn't sure he'd be able to bring back with him.

"Are you Australian too?" he finds himself asking as he stares into his glass.

She shrugs, a curiously French kind of shrug, like she belongs in this place with the cognac and the artwork on the walls. "Perhaps," she replies. "I suppose I'm English now. My family is, both sides, but they moved to Australia and they met there. But they moved back before the war, and then Father inherited and now..." she trails off, staring past Jack and into the distance. "There are a lot of painful memories in Australia," she says finally. "I'm not sure I could ever go back there. But I don't know if I want to go back to England, either." She shrugs again. "Paris is home enough for now. I have work, and there is life here. So much life." She closes her eyes and breathes in deeply, her lips slightly parted, her chest rising and falling under the coat she never bothered to take off. It is slipping from her shoulders, and Jack is suddenly very aware that the blouse underneath it is quite as flimsy as her skirts. He drains the rest of his cognac in one gulp and stands.

"I should return to my lodgings," he says, suddenly awkward, suddenly wondering to himself why this conversation with a strange woman didn't feel awkward before. "Thank you, ah, for the company. And for rescuing me from my bad French."

The woman's eyes flicker open and she looks up at him, faintly surprised. "You won't stay?" she asks. "Anatolé opens the cafe to artists after closing, there's no rush to leave - "

Jack takes in the art on the walls again - models painted in various states of déshabillé, some of them young and dark-haired and milky-pale and lovely like the woman currently staring at him, blue-green eyes bright and wide and wicked - and wonders what exactly it is that she does for work. He can feel himself turning red from the hair on his head to the tips of his toes. "I really would like to see the Louvre tomorrow," he says by way of apology. "And it's a long way back to my lodgings. I should be on my way. But thank you for the invitation, all the same." He bows awkwardly, says his thank-yous in more mangled French to the cafe staff, and manages to extricate himself. He swears he can hear the young woman's laughter, high and clear and full of reckless abandon, carrying behind him on the breeze.

The Mona Lisa is smaller than he's expecting. He tells Rosie about it when he gets home anyway, and she listens politely, looking impressed at all the right moments, just as she does at his stories of the Eiffel Tower and the Musée d'Orsay and the catacombs. He sometimes wishes he could tell her about the other things - machine-guns and mustard gas and men screaming for their mothers as they died - but he is home now. He is home and he is alive.

Everything is going to be better.

 

Notes:

wouldn't jack remember meeting phryne in paris? well, maybe, but maybe not - she wasn't exactly the phryne we know and love now, and 1918 (or 1919 - this is set in march, about a year after the somme, when paris was in fact being shelled!) was a long time ago, even relatively speaking. a chance meeting in a cafe (which i have set on the champs-élysées, an area famous for its cafes and artsy types) might not necessarily have stuck in his mind, especially if he never got the woman's name.

these days, the arc de triomphe is where the tour de france finishes! i desperately wanted to include that in the story, but in 1919, while the tour finished in paris (and may have even finished down the champs-élysées), i couldn't find anything conclusive about it finishing with a ride under the arc. alas, history has no regard for narrative.

young phryne fisher tells anatolé that young jack has - in my very bad french - a "lean and hungry" look. i absolutely could not resist.