Reginald Bottles, nephew of the Colonel, and one of several hopeful heirs of the Octopus House, rises from the window’s sill. He parts his forelocks and places each behind its respective ear with practiced ease and not a little affectation. His purpose in doing so lies forever beyond the understanding of men for he believes himself alone, unaware that we are watching from within shadow and upon light. He practices a sort of zen meditative meta-unconscious conscious grooming that has been referred to as "Primping of not Primping." Its effect on ladies in his presence is well documented.
He has spent the greater part of the afternoon watching the rain fall in the gardens beneath his bay windows. A semi-octagonal lounging chair had been placed there for these periods of deep thought and reverie. We join his internal monologue already in progress. His head is clearing slowly as he descends from the vaulted ceilings of his imagination.
"buttery drawbridge gate house oriel oilette revetted..."
The words come to me again, from the depths of some child’s fevered dream, but with the voice of a lady, delicious and only just within the threshold of hearing.
It has been raining all morning, and for the first time since I learned how to do it, I cannot make it stop. All the requisite mixings, incantations, and hand-wavings have been performed, but the rain keeps coming. The puddles in the yard are beginning to seek each other out. They are uniting slowly, concentrating their efforts. Smaller, more scattered pools are marching steadily down the courtyard's slight incline, away from the house. Thank heaven for little victories, I guess. I should be all right for a while longer. Technically I never asked them to go anywhere, I just tried to prevent their getting any larger.
In spite of the downpour, the smells from the patios are unmistakable--lunch is being prepared. Meals in this house are always a bit odd, even when the company isn't. That enigmatic fellow in the iridescent tuxedo seems to be a servant, but is only visible during meals. His influence is felt about the house, but I must confess I have never actually seen him, except with the trappings of a supper on his person. Trays and the like. Admittedly this is a rather expansive estate, but I have never seen (or not) a more uncanny presence (or lack).
As if summoned by the young aristocrat’s musings, a voice offered from the corridor,
"The midday meal will be served in slightly less than one hour, sir."
Reginald Bottles turned quickly, eager for a glimpse of the elusive manservant. Despite this effort, he detected only a slight movement at the base of the tapestry that covered the whole of the corridor wall. He also noticed an odor--the lingering scent of recently turned earth and manure. However, since his room was so near the stables, Bottles ignored it. He could not ignore the movement of the tapestry.
"That's odd." said bottles.
Ever the thinker, Bottles considered the oddity. The portion of the tapestry visible from his bedroom was ornately appointed with the image of a charging unicorn. Charging directly towards the bedroom, to be precise. This head-on view of a realistic, life-sized mythological creature stumped him momentarily--he had not noticed the wall hanging at all before. He stepped into the hallway to look at the entire piece.
"Odd indeed," he said, his teeth clacking the stem of his pipe, an elegant Meerschaum given to him by his uncle. Carved into the image of a seated man counting parcels of indeterminate content, the pipe arrived at Bottles’ home on the evening of his thirteenth birthday, prompting the birth of a lifelong smoker.
Bottles tilted his head a bit, stroked the lapel of his velvet dinner jacket for a moment, and began to stroll alongside the massive hanging. He trailed his fingernails along the various embroiderings as he walked, as if using the tapestry itself to scratch the itch it caused in his mind.
The ancient weave was rather troubling tableau of obviously agitated unicorns goring other, smaller unicorns while a series of dimmer, almost translucent, unicorns performed various unwholesome acts on their far-flung and grisly remains.
"Dirty pool, Colonel. Pornographic at the very least." Bottles was not pleased. A tapestry, or indeed any item of beauty, should contain, if any acts are to be portrayed, at least one scantily clad (preferably in linen) wetnurse who seems intent on scolding the viewer of the piece.
The tiniest sliver of guilt 1 pricked the already weary conscience of Sir Reginald Bottles as he stared at the spiral-horned abominations above him. Rather than assuage this guilt by looking away, Bottles determined to risk his bad eye, in the interest of future guilt assessment. Fearful of blinking, lest any gruesome detail remain hidden, Bottles attempted to extract every detail, grisly and otherwise, from the objet d'filth.
"I've almost an hour until lunch, after all." he thought.
As he continued his walk, the unicorns' activities became no less fervent, and the amounts of gore and contortion were rivaled only by the degree of ichor (shed only by mythological beings) in the borderwork. His investigations carried him slowly towards the second ballroom, down the grand staircase and eventually, onto the patio, where the others had already gathered for lunch.
1 Not the tiniest ever to appear anywhere, however. That belonged to a Dutchman by the name of Fund Aackard, who felt the tiniest piece of guilt ever experienced by a moral being after harboring a jealous thought concerning his brother's sliver of guilt, which until that moment had been the tiniest ever