jsmn_kinkmeme | ☆ Round One!

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☆ Round One!

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Warnings for this part: brief mentions of prostitution, abortion, and Child ballad-style violence.

__

The first part was easy: she had done it before. Taking handsome men to bed was rather a pastime for Joan. Sometimes she was paid for the privilege, but more often not. She had clever hands and a cleverer wit to keep herself fed. What she did with the rest of her body was usually for her own enjoyment. And oh, she enjoyed him immensely, the handsome young man with hard eyes who kissed like a storm rolling over the moors. He laid her back as the wind laid down the gorse and heather and she minded it no more than the heather might. He stirred something in her, deeper than the flesh and meat. Something in the bone sang, or resounded like a bell, when he touched her.

Joan did not love him, because Joan loved no man more than she loved herself. But she liked him very much.

The second part was harder. She had not expected to see him again. Some weeks later he appeared on her doorstep. It was near to dawn, and he stayed until long after the sun had risen.

“Do you mean to have the child?” the man said. He was very solemn.

“It’s no child yet,” Joan said. “Must be less than the size of a walnut.” She’d had other men’s seed settle and take hold in her, but she never let it lay down roots to grow into something she might have to birth.

“Even so,” the man said.

“If I say no,” she said, “will it be like the old songs? Will you hold me captive until you might cut an heir out from my belly, and leave me to bleed for my betrayal?”

(Joan was no fool. She knew the man, her lover, was something more than just that. But she would not call him by any of his titles. Not now, when they most needed to be on equal terms.)

“No,” he said, after a pause. To consider the possibility, or to take offense that she would even suggest it. “But I would like it better if you did have our little babe.”

“Our, he says,” Joan said, turning from him. “And will you help me raise it, then? Will you abandon your own to settle with a friendless wretch?” She knew the answer before he gave it.

His answer was this: “I have done it before, but I cannot do it now. I must be out of the world for a little longer.”

“And what boon will you grant me?” Joan said. “What will you give me, if I let you weigh me down?”

“What would you have from me?” he said. His hard eyes were without pity, but without resentment. He had been brought up among a people who valued bargains such as this very highly.

“I would have your gifts for the child,” she said. Joan was no fool: to ask for herself might bring misfortune upon her. “Give him something of yourself.” His pale English skin, perhaps, to ease the way. Joan’s father had been a sailor from parts unknown and she was not so fair herself that it might escape notice. She doubted very much that her lover would give anything of true value to a natural child born of a woman of no consequence. But this, she thought, he might deign to give.

“He will have several,” the man said. “Some from birth, some as he grows, and one only when we meet.”

“Are you quite sure it’ll be a boy?” Joan said. She wasn’t sure she wanted him interfering on that particular point.

“Not quite sure, no,” the man said. “But I have my suspicions.”

Joan’s son was born in a rented room in bleak midwinter. He was plum-coloured and wailing and she liked him immediately. It was not a rush of maternal warmth, but rather a sense that they were both dissatisfied with their lot in life.

“What will you call him?” said the midwife. She thought Joan was a poor soldier’s widow. It seemed a prudent deception.

“John,” Joan said.

“For his father,” the midwife said, assuming.

“Yes,” Joan said. This was another prudent deception. The boy’s father might have been called John, by some people, but it was common knowledge that it was not really his name. In all honesty, Joan named her son for herself. John was as close as she could come to her own name that was suitable for a boy.

Joan knew herself to be ill-suited to motherhood, but she did her best. An honest living was quite beyond her abilities. John was no more or less demanding than other infants but he did surely make her life difficult. She trusted no one else with his care, and it was harder to lift anything of value with a babe in her arms who might start squalling at a moment’s notice. She couldn’t make any of her quick-change artistry work effectively with a child balanced on her hip. They lived scarce. Joan tried not to be angry with her son. Mainly, she was angry at his father.

In time, Joan adapted, as she always did. When he was old enough to understand, Joan made picking pockets a game. John took to it quickly, and no wonder, for wasn’t he Joan’s own boy? He taught the trade, in turn, to the motherless children of the street who were his only peers. But he didn’t teach it well, being young as he was, so Joan was obliged to teach them better. It began as a precaution. If they were caught, they might tattle on John. She couldn’t have that. But in short order she became a kind of step-mother to them all.

John was her only son. She never let him forget that. But if he called the rest of their little band his brothers and sisters, well. Who was she to argue? She, who knew the terrible loneliness that came of being a disreputable woman’s only blood kin. And she, who knew the difficulty that went along with being alone in the world, did not deny any child who sought her protection, so long as they might help the others. She nursed them in sickness and saw to it that there was a roof big enough to cover them all. Food was harder. Even so, she managed.

Joan did not quite love them, because she loved no child more than her own son. But she cared more for them than anyone else did.

The children did not need any nursemaid or family to know to ask for stories of the Raven King. They were Yorkshire born. The King’s birds roosted in the eaves; their likeness on tavern signs and as more respectable statuary. Her wild little band swore loyalty to him with every street oath they made. Joan knew as many stories of him, true and false alike, as anyone. She told them all and made some up beside. She sang them old ballads: the useful kind. The warning kind, about being carried off by fairies and wicked men, or betrayed by a lover, or killed by your own cruel sister (or brother, or mother). Only songs about dying on the gallows she did not sing.

And John asked about his father, as a matter of course. She never lied.

“Why didn’t he stay?” he asked, when he was feeling particularly brave.

“He had his own affairs to tend to, didn’t he?” Joan would say. “He’s a busy man, is your father. A vagabond.”

“Like us,” John would say. Repeated almost as a prayer. “Will I meet him?”

“I’m sure I couldn’t say,” Joan said. “I cannot tell the future.”

Once, and only once, John asked his mother if she missed his father. She had no answer for him. The ache in her bones was answer enough for herself.

Warnings for this part: mention of consensual sex between two underage people, an instance of a parent hitting a child, the death of children by sickness & violence.

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The children in her care grew older, and they grew unruly. They left and returned in fits and starts. John did not leave. He only turned sullen. When he was fourteen, she found that he had learned the way of a man with a maid. A girl of about his age, perhaps a year or so older, had instructed him quite thoroughly (so she heard him say).

“And what will you do if you’ve left her in difficulty?” Joan said, taking her son by the scruff of the neck and shaking him as she might a cat who hunted chickens instead of mice. “How would you provide for her, fool that you are, with no trade to your name?”

“I wouldn’t, I know how not to,” John protested. “But if I did, what of it? Didn’t my father do the same?” She struck him then. She had laid her hand to him before, when he was small, but never since he was old enough to know better.

“You’re not to follow his example,” she said. “Not in that.” Her son’s eyes grew hard, like his father’s had been. He wore a look of grim triumph. She had given him something much desired, long fought for, and she didn’t know what it was.

He went to sea the next week, and she did not try to stop him. Hadn’t she been even younger when she set out to make her own way? The thought did not stop her worrying. She went on, as she always did. Some of her little band she saw settled in apprenticeships, with futures stretching bright before them. Some went their own way. One (sharp little Maud) died of fever; two more (Harry and Jenny) she saw hanged. Joan was alone, miles travelled and years older, before she saw her son again.

He came off the ship weatherbeaten and with something a little cruel in his smile.

“Is that you, Black Joan?” he said to her, calling her by the name magistrates cursed, as if they were only old acquaintances and she had not nursed him at her breast.

“It is, John Childermass,” she said. That was an old joke: if asked for a family name, any of her little band would give Childermass. Joan had no family name to give them even if she had wanted to. So they named themselves for Holy Innocents’ Day, when in times gone by the children were given reign for a little while to roam wild and have the world to do their bidding.

“And how have you been?” John said. He was much taller than her, now, with hair hanging long and ragged around his face.

“I have been as I always am. And you?”

“I have been very differently,” he said. He went back with her to her lodgings and did not say much more on the matter. There were little stories about ports where he had docked, sights he had seen. Little trinkets to accompany them and illustrate. But no whole picture emerged from those pieces. Joan worried still more, with her son before her in the flesh but such a stranger to her. He seemed very like his father.

“I have been thinking,” John said very carefully, “about going into service.”

“Have you,” Joan said flatly. She was very tired.

“I might find opportunities there,” John said. He looked out the small window rather than at her. “To better myself.”

“As I didn’t, you mean,” Joan said. There was no venom or meanness in it. She was beginning to see her as her own dear boy saw her. It was not a pretty picture.

“I wasn’t made for your life,” John said, “or my father’s. I’ve tried -- ”

That set Joan’s heart to racing.

“Your father’s?” she said. She sounded frantic to her own ears. John looked over at her, surprized.

“He was a sailor, wasn’t he? You always said he went away because it was his business that took him, or something of the like.”

Joan’s own father was a sailor. Joan had known sailors of a decent sort. It was not, in itself, a bad profession, for all that it boasted as many bad men as any profession did. But Joan could not endorse what would be a very prudent deception. Not in this. She only shook her head. John came to stand beside her, and put his arm around her shoulders. She did not look up at him. She feared she might see pity in those hard dark eyes, and she knew she could not bear it.

“Will you tell me now, mother?” John said very softly. She could not recall him ever calling her ‘mother.’ Ma, when he was very young, and then just Joan.

“I told you when you were a little mite of a thing,” Joan said, and it was not a lie. Hadn’t she told stories of his father when the other children begged for tales of adventure? Hadn’t she sung of battles his father had won, and lost? “All the better for you if you don’t remember.”

Her son drew back from her. When she had collected herself enough to face him again, having dashed an unshed tear from her eye, he had several slips of paper laid out on the table by the fire.

“What are you doing?”

“Finding out on my own,” John said. He wore a look of intense concentration.

“And will you tell me how?”

He looked up at her, uncertain. She knew him then as she had not at the docks. Here was her own dear boy after all, for all that he had suffered and learned.

“I copied out a deck of cards. Le tarot de Marseille.” His mouth wrapped clumsily around the foreign words. Even so, he seemed to expect that she would know what this was. She did not. “It’s for card games, sometimes. But not only that. If you know how to read them, and how to ask the right questions, you can learn things.” His mouth quirked in a half-smile. She saw now that it was less cruel than cynical. Critical. “Questions are harder.”

“Magic, then,” Joan said. Her breath seemed stopped in her throat.

“If you like,” John said.

“Have you asked about your father already?” Joan said.

“I hadn’t found the right question.” Three little paper scraps, mismatched. Joan could not make them out -- nor, apparently, could John. “Still haven’t.”

“Will you ask it something for me?” Joan said. “Will you ask it how I might die?”

“We have years yet to ask,” John said. His voice had gone low and rough.

“Even so, John. If we should part for years again…” she trailed off. She did not like to think of it, but most days now she could not help it. The business of survival was not enough of a distraction. She was not young enough to be distracted by pleasure, and the time for her to be distracted by the needs of others had passed. The dark moods came and she went on, she prayed for guidance when it settled heavy around her shoulders. It was just the getting older that did it, she thought.

John set out three new bits of paper and turned them over. He studied them. Joan studied him. “Not on the gallows,” he said finally. “But maybe not a natural death.” He looked at her, stricken. “Is there something I don’t know?”

“You know me as well as you ever did,” she said. He rose and embraced her. She felt very small.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” John said.

Warning for this part: implied assumption of suicide

__

Joan got a letter from her son, and was obliged to ask her landlady to read it to her. Her necessary deceptions had grown more elaborate. Her landlady, a certain Mrs Pleasance of York, was a respectable woman with a tenderness toward the respectable sort of sad cases, so Joan became a poor widow whose husband’s family had neglected her and her son because of her low birth. Birth aside, one gentleman’s wife might certainly rent to another gentleman’s widow. Joan exercised her cleverness more than her hands, these days. She chose her marks more carefully and only lifted what she knew could be fenced for a good sum. Mrs Pleasance thought that her twice-weekly excursions were to a solicitor, and always received her upon her return with the utmost sympathy.

On one such say (when Joan had just sold an old Flemish clock for enough to keep her settled for another few weeks), Mrs Pleasance greeted her with a particularly jolly smile and a sealed note. Joan admitted with a certain false shame that she herself could not read. (It was true, she was unlettered. But she did not harbor any particular shame. It had not been a part of the life she lived. That was all.)

Dear Joan, (so the letter began)

I have learnt much and mean to learn still more. This work is different and would suit you very ill but I do not mind it.

I hope to visit you at Christmas if I get leave. Mrs Allen (that is the housekeeper) does not like me well but the master of the house does not mind me.

If this is not writ correctly then I hope someone will say so to you, so you may say so to me.

Your very lettered son,
John

Christmas seemed a very long way off. Months away, but each month seemed to stretch into a year, for all the effort it took to keep on.

“Will you write back?” she said. “Only to send him my regard, and ask if he will stay through the twenty-eighth? That is a very particular date, for us.” Mrs Pleasance looked at her with yet more tender sympathy. Perhaps she thought that Joan had lost a child in infancy -- some did mourn their own babes along with the holy martyrs on that day.

“Of course, my dear, of course,” Mrs Pleasance said. “You look so very tired. Will you take a dram of ginger wine? My husband is partial to it as a curative.” Joan seldom saw Mr Pleasance. He always seemed to be feeling poorly, so she doubted he knew much about effective cures.

“No, thank you,” Joan said. “But I may turn in early, if it’s all the same to you.”

“I’m sure I don’t mind a jot,” Mrs Pleasance said affectionately.

Joan went to her own room closed the door. She brushed out her long dark hair before the little mirror, and washed with water from the basin that stood below it. She blew out her candles, one by one.

“I greet thee, Lord, and bid thee welcome to my heart,” Joan said to the darkness. She said this nearly every night, now, and knew better than to expect any answer. Still she spoke. “Our John’s writing me letters now. Must come from your side of the family. One of the gifts you gave him. I don’t think I’d take to it half so well.”

Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness enough now to see, so she shut them. It wouldn’t do to imagine a shadow moving differently in the little mirror.

“Did you see him when he went abroad, I wonder? I thought it might have been you, gave him those cards.”

There was a tree in the courtyard near to her window and sometimes the rustling of leaves sounded more like the beating of wings. Joan paid it no mind. She had grown very used to paying such things no mind. She spoke softly as she felt her way to her bed in the corner, and as she crawled under her quilt. She talked herself halfway into sleep.

“I do not know that I’ll live to see him again, sometimes. Our John.”

“You are not so old,” the darkness said.

“He says he’ll come to see me. But he’s his own man now. No need for his ma, nothing tying him to me,” Joan went on. “He did well without me for years at sea.”

“Not so well,” the darkness said.

“I wouldn’t know,” Joan says, too near to dreaming to remember not to respond directly. “He keeps himself to himself. Got that from both of us, no doubt.”

“No doubt,” the darkness said. Then, rather suddenly: “Are you afraid of me, Joan?”

“Everyone with sense is afraid of you,” Joan said. She kept her eyes tightly shut. “But I’m not so afraid that I want you to stay away.”

“Would you have me stay, if I could?” the darkness said. Joan felt the gentlest of pressure at her hairline, her temple, the inside of her wrist. A quick caress, or the press of dry lips.

“No,” Joan said decisively, drifting toward wakefulness.

“And would you come away with me, if I asked?”

“But why would you ask?” Joan said. Suddenly it was a great effort to keep her eyes closed. She covered them with her hands, to be safe. “I have nothing left to give that you might want.”

“You do not know what it is I want,” the darkness said, “because you do not know what it is I lack. You have given me yourself, in more ways than one, and if I wanted to keep you near me, and safe --”

“--as a stone in your pocket?” Joan said, smiling. Long-fingered hands twined with her own and drew them away from her face. “I might go,” she conceded, opening her eyes. “If you asked me very nicely.”

He asked her very nicely indeed, until her bones were singing with it.

And they went away together.

__

Mrs Pleasance wrote to John Childermass at Hurtfew Abbey but it was not merely to send regards or ask for the specifics of his visit. It was rather a long and confusing letter, seeming at once to suggest that his mother had left of her own accord, met with some foul play from her (fictitious) late husband’s (equally fictitious) family, and been carried off to the Other Lands by forces unknown. John considered the first of these possibilities to be the most likely.

Months went by, then years. When he had cause to visit York, he called on Mrs Pleasance.

“Did she come back?” he asked. “For what she had left?”

“No,” Mrs Pleasance said with some surprize. “You never visited or wrote back, so I thought you had found her.” He could only shake his head. “I hope you don’t think I was remiss in not sending you her things. She never had much --”

“Thank you,” John said. “Goodbye.”

He thought of his mother’s low spirits. He thought of the only time he read the cards for her. l’Impératrice, inverted: a mother turned against herself? There were other readings. But he thought he would not find her.

Liked this tremendously, so much going on and such intricate detail with brilliant references to canon. Both Black Joan and John Uskglass emerge as such fleshed-out characters. A true pearl. Applause from the prompter.

This was sad and lovely. Was really good to see Black Joan fleshed out, and I loved the little scenes with John Uskglass. And the little glimpses of a younger Childermass were perfect. Really excellent!

Oh, my god, I love this, in all its bitterness cut with sparks of humor and affection.

It does so much, with such quick turns of phrase ("You know me as well as you ever did"/"That’s what I’m afraid of," and "Questions are harder," and the kinds of ballads that are useful, and the entire last exchange between Joan and the Raven King).

This is incredibly moving and beautiful. I love the character you gave to Black Joan and her relationship with the Raven King. This feels like it could be a part of canon.

This was quite beautiful!

that was a fantastic humanizing portrait of black joan. great job. <3

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☆ Round One!

FILL: "Our John" 1/4

FILL: "Our John" 2/4

FILL: "Our John" 3/4

FILL: "Our John" 4/4

Re: FILL: "Our John" 4/4

Re: FILL: "Our John" 4/4

Re: FILL: "Our John" 4/4

Re: FILL: "Our John" 4/4

Re: FILL: "Our John" 4/4

Re: FILL: "Our John" 4/4