Dance Yrself Clean · Story 3 of 5 · About an hour
A very large, very quiet young lord, one birthday party, and a short cut through the most dangerous park in Lytton Borough.
Henry Wootten can’t say what he means. The words change shape on the way out of his mouth, so he speaks little and feels a great deal. His greatest friend, Sebastian Rocquefort, is still haunted by his father’s death, and Henry spends the day failing to write the letter that would help.
By night he’s buying a birthday present at a curio shop he has never seen before, putting up with two cruel antiques dealers, and cutting through the Bramble in a storm. It’s a comedy of manners with a fairy tale folded inside it: gaslit streets, clockwork, a stepmother for whom everything must be “all the rage,” and a bedtime story with no answer that Henry’s father used to tell.
Where · Lytton Borough: gaslight, fog, clockwork, and a wild park called the Bramble.
How it’s told · In the third person, close on Henry, over a single day and night.
“Never say in writing what one can say aloud,” his father often said, “And never aloud what one can say with a look.”
— All the Rage
The opening
Read an excerpt
Henry Wootten did not often think of his father. It was not a choice, not hard-won or a matter of self-discipline; it was only that those emotions were long gone, now memories of having had them. Henry knew that his greatest friend, Sebastian Rocquefort, was still troubled by dreams and terrors, sometimes, but he could never quite fashion a plan to remind Sebastian they’d experienced the same sadness, once upon a time.
It would be the height of cheek to say what he really believed, which is that the rituals of death — the wake, the funeral, the stone, the yearly remembrance — were the product of several thousand years of social evolution, and thus could be trusted to do their job. To help one, with the aid of generations of mankind gone by, to make the transition from bereavement to acceptance. To suggest such a thing to Sebastian would be to suggest that he had not mourned properly; in effect, blaming his own weakness or lack for the ghost that still haunted him. It would not be kindness, or in fellow feeling; it would be cruel. The thing he hated most to be.
Henry Wootten could never quite say aloud the things he wanted to say. They assumed a shape, on leaving his lips, that only rarely mimicked convincingly the thoughts and feelings he wished to share. In consequence he spoke little, and felt much. Those of his acquaintance who knew enough to notice this understood it meant that when he did speak, it was at great personal cost of effort, and thus worth a listen. Henry would not have agreed, really, if he’d known of this agreement; it would not have occurred to him to think it. Henry hated presumption almost as much as cruelty; doubly so, if the sin were his.
Henry’s stationary was ordered in lots from an engraver in Lytton Borough’s sister province, Paris’s 21st Arrondissement. His stepmother, the Lady Dowager Wootten, called it an extravagance for all the paper that he wasted, but never without kindness and a certain sort of pride. The Lady Wootten had come from uncertain provenance and, even when her devoted husband lived, took a special delight in her stepchildren’s luxuries. She doted on each of them, praising their brilliance covetously and basking in a reflected halo of which none were truly aware. And the crown jewel in her collection was her favorite, Henry, the youngest and the one with the least memories of Lord Wootten’s long-lost first wife. The Lady was the only mother he’d ever known, and he surmised that it was for this she loved him best.
The rest of All the Rage is in Dance Yrself Clean.
More from Jacob Clifton: Oldie, a novel in progress, published one chapter at a time.