(no subject)

[lark_in_flight]

"Papa!" The voice which sounds through the opening front door is a young woman's, light and sweet and eager. The voice's owner follows in a billow of skirts, glancing back over her shoulder into a homey little hallway as she calls to someone unseen. "Papa, are you quite ready?"

She turns her head -- and falters in astonishment as she crosses the threshold, and her boots hit the Milliways floorboards.

"Papa...?" Her hand falls away from the doorknob, and it swings delicately closed behind her.

She's a young woman of perhaps sixteen or seventeen, her rosy face framed by delicate ringlets escaping from a silk-covered bonnet. Her dress is of blue wool, sloping down at the shoulders, puffed out wide at the sleeves and gathering again at the wrists, her skirts a bell over layers of petticoats, a warm shawl wrapped about her shoulders, gloves on her small hands, a basket over one arm, small boots just visible -- in other words, the height of dainty femininity for 1832, and doubtless extremely impractical and peculiar to the eyes of most of Milliways' patrons.

Welcome to Milliways, Cosette.

Comments

[witchfinder_general]

Father Harman opens the door again.

There is a windowless, featureless, evenly lit blue corridor on the other side, with some wooden doors, very plain, all closed.

"That is where I come from."

[lark_in_flight]

"Oh!" Cosette peers at it with great interest. "What a strange hallway. Is that in London?"

She knows she's dreaming for certain now. She was fairly sure before, but now she knows it; nothing in the world is lit the way that hallway is.

[witchfinder_general]

"It is," Father Harman says. "It's the building where my office is."

[lark_in_flight]

"Then it's your church?"

What peculiar scenery her dream has given that church. Well, these things happen in dreams.

[witchfinder_general]

"No, my office -- I have no congregation of my own, except the hodge-podge little one, here," Father Harman says.

[lark_in_flight]

Well, there are priests with other duties.

Cosette casts him an interested, inquiring glance at that last, though she doesn't ask aloud.

[witchfinder_general]

"There's people here who can't go home and miss practising their faith," Father Harman says. "For them I opened a little chapel room upstairs and read mass on Sundays. I can't leave them in the lurch, can I?"

[lark_in_flight]

Cosette smiles, bright and open.

"That's good of you, father. Of course you can't. That's very good. Those poor people must appreciate it very much."

Exiles, she thinks -- well, figments of her imagination as well, but let us set that detail aside.

[witchfinder_general]

"There's not that many here; most people are probably agnostics," Father Harman says. "But I'm glad to do something for the few people who have faith and do care."