I dreamed I had been assigned the role of Frances, Queen of Clubs, in a reality television adaptation of a historical novel series. I was the betrothed of a Scottish laird in exile, and went to live in his family's manor north of London. It was near the village Olt, on the Olt River.
His mother greeted me when I arrived, and showed me my suite of rooms. My sitting room had shelves and shelves of books, and large picture windows facing west. It was sunset, and the sky I saw through the windows was flooded with amethyst clouds, flaming bright pink at the edges.
There was a door out onto a patio and dock that stretched out over the loch the house was built beside. There was a hatch that opened up over a fish trap. My only job, as the newest member of the household, was to take any fish out of the trap each evening, and behead and gut them and take them to the kitchen. My hostess showed me how to reach into the cold water, grab the three-foot long fish by the gills, and flip them out onto the dock. The hardest part was making sure they didn't slide back into the water after I'd cleaned them, or the loch monster would eat them up. The laird's younger sister, who had had the job before I showed up, promised to help me the first few evenings, until I had it down.
The next day the laird showed me around his lands. He rode a horse, but I walked. The sandy paths were soft and spongy, the land was marshy, and there were dark gray stretches of boggy quicksand. I told him I'd never stepped in quicksand before, and was curious how it felt, so he directed me to a nearby patch, and I stepped into it, then when I was done sinking, up to my knees, he pulled me out.
It started to rain, so we went inside. I took off my shoes in the back kitchen, because they were pretty muddy. He gave me a tour of the manor house then, and every room was carpeted in thick golden sheep skin, from sheep raised on their lands, that was unbelievably silky and warm under my bare feet, and so thick that I sank into it up to my ankles.
I decided I wanted to write a story about a young woman who moves from her flat in Bayswater, London, up to the village of Olt, to research and write about a mysterious woman who moved up to Olt from London to build a manor and become a recluse. I tried to google driving directions from Bayswater to Olt, to add verisimilitude, but my tablet kept thinking I meant "Old" instead of "Olt", and my google maps searches kept thinking I wanted Old Street, which gave dozens of hits about ten minutes from Bayswater, instead of the village, which was at least an hour and a half away.
I mentioned this to the family that evening, and they thought it might have something to do with the powerful matriarch three generations back, who had moved to Olt from London to become a recluse, built the manor, and made its lands and the village unplottable. They began talking about their family history and traditions, and all the strangest bits, like the newest person being in charge of the fish, stemmed from her. Also, they'd put me in her rooms.
I began to suspect there was some deep, adacanthic mystery attached to this woman. Adacanthic meant dark, eerie, maybe a little macabre, and steeped in the exotic romance of a bygone era. Basically it meant the same as gothic, but gothic was applied only to fiction, whereas adacanthic was used to describe only academically verifiable history.
I was pondering the etymology when I woke up, and I was convinced for a while that adacanthic was a real word.
No comments:
Post a Comment