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 Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2012 12:46 am
i. introduction............................ <ii. chosen....................................‹ iii. guardian.................................‹ iv. worldbuilding..........................‹ ♫ ♫ ♫ ♫ ♫
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Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2012 12:48 am
chosen name: colin byrne
age: 24
occupation: priest
history: colin's parents died when he was two in what can only be termed a freak accident with steam technology that nobody in the family was ever particularly keen to talk about. young colin was taken in by his aunt and uncle, who already had three children at the time, and would have three more well before colin was ready to foray into the world on his own. colin, unlike his clever but misguided parents, grew to be neither spectacular nor wise, and left an impression on absolutely nobody. he was the least of his cousins, teased for being unlucky, and always lagging behind, although still quite determinedly making the effort.
though his adopted family had affection for him, it was largely secondhand, and thus colin grew into a rather secondhand young man, nothing exciting or eyecatching about him. he did not so much enter the seminary as find himself swept into it, feeling he had few other options, for his talents, by the estimations of everybody, lay precisely nowhere. in fact, his best and perhaps only asset was diligence, and that tempered with faith, he found, was quite good enough for the church. religion was what he was best at, and only through sheer persistence, it was what came easiest to him, as the morals and parables gave him something to aspire to when he got little direction elsewhere. the family had little enough for him to do as they had six other children to keep track of, so his most lofty and noble goals came from his faith. colin was a rudderless young man, full of all the determination to make something of himself, and none of the skill or sense of what exactly he was going to make. the church provided beliefs for him to adopt and a direction for him to live by, as well as a sense of community that he felt he could more fully take part in- the idea of being the center of attention in a parish one day was no small incentive either. upon this model he became quite devout for perhaps more earthly reasons than was entirely noble, but for his diligence was assigned a parish very shortly after leaving the seminary. in allowing his faith to steer his life, he was well rewarded with prospects for his future.
unfortunately for colin, the parish he was assigned to was neither pleasant nor easy, a small and isolated village on the edge of the wardwood which was almost pagan still in its beliefs. full of superstitions and people who were not used to outsiders, colin found that he was written off as soft and gentrified, and he himself was appalled by some of the villagers' interpretations of faith. he found himself to be quite utterly alone, and his attempts to worm himself somehow into the society of his parishoners was quite futile. church services were nearly empty, and colin found that he simply did not know how to rouse even the few who would attend regularly, often the elderly or poor who wanted company or simply to get out of the cold. he began to feel especially useless and worse, to question his time at the seminary, thinking that perhaps he might have been better suited for something else after all, though he didn't know what. still, colin was in the situation that fate had cast him, and thus, like he dealt with everything, he dealt with his problems merely by being as stubborn about them as possible.
personality: colin byrne is an insecure young man, mediocre at almost everything he does. he is the definition of plain, his pluck being the only thing he has to commend him to an otherwise unimpressed world, and that deserts him easily enough as it is. determined to do well by anyone who sets their faith in him, he still doesn't have much faith in his own self. he takes most of his confidence from his religion, which has raised him, educated him, and then spat him into a seedy rural kip of a parish right on the brink of the wardwood. being surrounded by superstitious, unfriendly, almost pagan people has greatly depressed his spirits and made him feel both isolated and lonely. colin is used to living in a large and rowdy household, so living on his own for the first time, in a quiet place with few people is driving him quietly mad. he misses the chatter of human company and in his idle hours, often speaks to himself to imitate a personable atmosphere. he often invites people to the parish house, but has received more excuses than visitors. this isolation has caused colin to wonder why he chose to go to seminary, thinking that he wants to get married after all, that he doesn't know enough about his faith, that he doesn't have enough eloquence to convey his beliefs, and that, worst of all, these people will never respect him because he simply cannot command their attention. rather than consider leaving or adjusting his approach to faith, as a defensive mechanism, the more uncertain and depressed he feels, the more adamantly colin clings to his beliefs. socially, he's quiet and awkward, having been raised by his aunt and uncle in their large family and during that time left largely to his own devices, considered both quiet, unlucky, and a little strange by his six cousins. partially because of this, he is adamantly against superstition, and eager to debunk legends and tall tales, preferring the organized and protective mythology of the church to the mystery and myth of the old ways. he's a very practical young man, but an especially untalented one, with no knack for either social graces or strategy. thus, his parish has so far rejected him, and his multiple attempts to wheedle his way into their good graces have failed.
choosing: the first time colin entered the wardwood was to disprove a rumour started in his parish. one of the younger girls had been playing in the wardwood and thought she saw a malignant spirit- soon, none of his parishoners would enter, and whispers flew from ear to ear about their misfortune. colin found this to be ridiculous, as the livelihoods of some of the families in the village depended on the forest. he set out to find what the girl had seen and prove it to be a silly fancy once and for all, not least because her elder sister, one of the few people in the village who paid him much heed, had spoken to him of it in considerable concern. armed with nothing but a lantern and a rather large stick (in case), he entered the wardwood and soon found a dirty and torn sheet hanging from a low branch. he fished it down in exasperation, assuming that was what the girl had seen in the dark forest and intending to take it back to the village as proof. on the way back though, he got hideously lost and found a deer figure, which he took with him as well, supposing the girl might have dropped it in her flight and feeling a little more like he was expected to take it than he was really comfortable with. upon returning to the parish, he found that he was soon treated with more respect, but was shocked to find that it wasn't because of the sheet, but rather, the deer figurine he had so thoughtlessly taken with him. realizing that his parishoners thought he had participated in a pagan ritual, he quickly wrote it off as nonsense, and tried to give the deer figure to the girl who had first spoken to him about her younger sister, though she adamantly refused to take it. instead, she named it cara and told him that it was simply his problem now- he had gotten the acceptance he craved in the community, but at the cost of being seen to embrace that which he felt he had to strive against.
relationship with guardian: colin both loves and hates cara. to him, she is company, and company that is wholly his, which he's never had before. that he is her only family makes him feel needed rather than just needy, and that she is willing to listen to whatever he says makes him feel interesting instead of just average. she is also a crutch which he rather reluctantly leans on, for she is the real reason his community respects him at all, and he feels frustration that he must depend on her like that. her pagan origins also make him nervous and exacerbate the insecurities he already had with his faith when he came to his parish. he thinks that maybe if he can get along with cara, perhaps he could have gotten along with the girls his uncle had his sons visit, perhaps he could have settled down and had a family after all instead of wasting away in a nowhere parish with a damn pagan deer as his closest source of comfort. he also worries that if he was chosen, maybe his faith is the wrong one after all, or maybe it doesn't matter if he's always denied the old ways, since they seem to believe in him. she is a constant source of doubt for him even despite the company and comfort she provides him, and he feels resentment towards her that sometimes overwhelms his affections.
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Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2012 1:15 am
guardian name: cara
personality: when named by the girl colin tried to give her totem to, cara was named in hopes she would be a friend. she has for the most part, met this wish, being a stalwart and attentive companion to colin and rarely straying from his side. she rests at the end of his bed, makes a mess traipsing through his house, and waits outside the church during sermons, as that's one place colin refuses to allow her to enter. however, her abstaining is no case of him imposing his will on her, much as he might like to think it is, but a choice cara has made to placate him. she does what she likes, and is a mischievous, if not affectionate spirit. childish but clever, she does mostly what she likes to please herself, and is quite possessive of colin- she prefers him to all other humans because he is not allowed to be married or ever have a family, which means he has plenty of time to devote to her. the most irritating thing about him is his faith, which seems to be a constant barrier between them and often makes him cross at her for the most insipid reasons. thus, she listens to everything he says about it very seriously so she might better fathom the nature of her competition for his attentions and better be able to combat it later. she loves colin, but does not much respect him and is sure that she knows better for him than he does for himself, finding him to be more cute than worthy of consideration. for that, she rarely communicates with him, as it only seems to upset him further, and allowing him to think that she is mostly just a particularly persistent deer suits her down to the ground.
whether colin is cross at her at the time or not, cara is always adored, as the villagers unilaterally love her. however, she does not care much for the villagers, as they take up colin's time. she especially dislikes the girls, and the more time a girl spends with colin, the more upset cara will be at the thought of them. quite ironically, it is the girl who named her who cara hates the most- cara wants nothing more than for that girl to leave for ever.
cara's childish haste often counterbalances her cleverness, and her impulses make her plans backfire on her often. she rarely thinks of consequences, like for instance, that the consequences of actually succeeding in getting colin to leave the priesthood would likely result in his eventual marriage. she works in the moment and mostly for what pleases her and is easy. thus, her moods and opinions are quite easily shifted, although she stubbornly sticks to fundamental basic decisions, like her choosing of colin over other sunderlanders. she's most pliant with details.
relationship with chosen: colin is her most amusing companion and dearest friend, although she views him more as a pet than a partner. she is quite determined to make his life revolve around her if at all possible, but chooses to present herself as just a deer rather than communicate with him too frequently, as communicating with him seems to only upset him, and he's more compliant if he thinks she's just an animal. cara has not quite taken the time to understand or respect colin, and does not quite realize just how much grief she causes him or that he actually resents her quite a bit. she fails to understand him, though she smothers him with attention and expects the same in return, as partners they are both sabotaging their relationship and ability to work together through mutual underestimation.
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Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2012 2:11 am
worldbuilding the parish of woodsend:
an out of the way village that is almost a remnant from centuries ago, woodsend is quiet, isolated, and surrounded by woods on two sides. the people there are highly superstitious and maintain many of the old ways, those who subscribe to more modern faiths often retaining many of the old traditions. the people of woodsend are harsh to outsiders, or at least highly exclusionary. if a passerby visits they will be polite, but if someone from outside, especially from a city moves there to stay, most of the people of woodsend will be cagey and defensive towards the unfamiliar face. a lot of stock is placed on who you're related to, not economically, but historically, and if people in woodsend don't know your father, they're less likely to trust you. woodsend relies on natural resources, foraging, forestry, hunting, and some light farming to sustain themselves, and the youth of the village rarely ever leave, both due to lack of means and peer pressure. the people of woodsend are generally healthy and hearty however, and within their community there is a fairly vibrant social atmosphere which centers around seasonal festivals, births, deaths, and marriages. every celebration or cause of mourning tends to involve the whole village, and everybody knows everybody else. people of woodsend tend to be trustworthy and trusting, enjoying an almost nonexistent crime rate and having little need for much law enforcement or even a proper jail. however, they are highly mistrustful of new things and people, and will often take to self-policing such things. institutions like the church are even considered to be fairly new in woodsend, when the one they have in the village was built 200 years hence. education in woodsend also tends to lag behind, not deficient in availability, but in currency, making it so that students in the village are parroting facts first established half a century ago. not many children in woodsend go to complete a higher education, and those that wish to learn more must read what books they can find after their primary school education is done. children are expected to do the work of their parents, and their children after them, so after the basics have been taught to students, they withdraw from school to learn a practical trade. the people of woodsend are diligent workers and judgmental of those who don't take up their parents' careers or pull their own weight. to temper the monotony of work, however, woodsendites often tell stories and legends, having a rich folklore largely drawn from nature, which their celebrations also usually center around. food and drink at festivals is almost all made or gathered by the village, as the village economy is incredibly insular, leaving room only for minor exports from more enterprising business-minded families. even that is beginning to fail though as woodsend is being left behind by the industrial era, and if they don't begin to catch up soon, they will have trouble remaining the strong and secure community they've always been.
the faith:
based heavily upon christianity, naturism is an import from southern countries that began to permeate sunderland culture in medieval times. its name was altered when it came to sunderland to appeal to the naturalistic people already there, and it didn't really flourish until the old ways fell dormant. once they did, it gained many converts and a real foothold in sunderland society, enough to merit attention from the main branch of the church's head, known as the vox dei, who sent a sub vox to represent him in sunderland and establish a formal church. however, as its popularity grew, its tenets and customs began to change along with its name in an attempt to dovetail it in neatly with the already established pagan religions, and a general loosening and altering of moral and theological standards took place. by now, naturism is heavily criticised by the faith it came from, and many regard it as a separate religion entirely, although the split has not been confirmed by either the sub vox in sunderland or the vox dei abroad. naturists in cities and on the coast are more likely to practice naturism that is similar to its root faith, eternism, and those in rural or isolated areas practice a more pagan form of naturism. sunderland's upper crust of religious officiates are trying to avoid a schism within the faith by reforming religion to the standards of the main faith, but most of the practicioners of naturism in sunderland practice it as their ancestors did, vastly differently from the eternists abroad. it's not surprising to find a naturist church in most towns and villages, but depending on where you are in sunderland, the way the people of those places worship might be wholly alien.
originally known as eternism, and still known as eternism outside of sunderland, priests in heavily rural parishes do not have to wear full cassocks and often settle for black clothing and the clerical collar so that they can help their communities and navigate the countryside more easily. cassocks are still required for formal services, however. eternism also has a monastic tradition that has died out in sunderland, though not outside of it. both priests of eternism and naturism are expected to remain celibate, although priests who practice eternism under the name of naturism are more likely to disregard this and marry anyway, especially in isolated parishes. marriage within the clergy was more common in the past though, and as society gentrifies itself and stiffens its moral codes, enforcement of the rules in the naturist church has also become more strict. there has also been a strong movement to change naturism's name back to eternism, as the nomenclature shift was largely to appeal to a pagan society whose beliefs have waned in recent years. this movement is more supported in cities, but in the countryside there are still many pockets of naturist parishes who both believe in the old ways and have incorporated them into their faith, creating many flavours of naturism that the church has always reluctantly put up with but now seeks to somewhat attempt to crack down on with support of the growing sunderland upper class.
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Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2012 10:54 am
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Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2012 2:09 pm
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Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2012 2:11 pm
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Posted: Sun May 13, 2012 10:56 pm
It had been a quiet morning when Colin Byrne had arrived in Woodsend, but he managed to alert the village to his presence by disrupting a gaggle of geese.
As he tripped headlong into the seething throng, bewildered honks polluting the air, Colin had taken stock of his situation. A quiet man, described by nearly all his teachers at seminary as 'Diligent', 'Eager', and 'Keen', all words that meant approximately the same thing and were fill ins for actually complimentary remarks like 'talented'. And those little words, which had piled on top of each other term after term, had walled him up in this village, which had been called 'difficult' by Father Peterson, and what Father Peterson meant when he said 'difficult' was 'ruddy impossible'. Father Peterson called rugby a jolly good romp. If a murderous pile of thuggish young priests was his idea of a good time, Colin reflected, he was not looking forward to seeing 'difficult'.
Of course, rugby was different than parishes, but any boy who kept his ear to the ground in seminary knew what it meant. You didn't want a difficult parish. All the bright boys wanted one thing, and that was a comfortable city parish. Something in a nice urban neighbourhood, where everyone was polite and most were wealthy. Somewhere where you only had to shake the collection tray once, and you didn't have to pick vegetables out of it afterwards. Somewhere where the only ghost people believed in was the holy spirit. Difficult parishes were places where the church had already tried sending its bright boys to herald reform, and their failure left no other option but to give in and find someone too desperate or stupid to leave. Colin, muddy amidst the angry geese, was not sure which category he fell into. Perhaps both.
This was not his fault, he considered, but rather the circumstances of a neglectful childhood. Of course, with so many children, all but himself their own, his aunt and uncle had merely not made preparation for the day when Colin Byrne would have to function as an independent human being. All their effort went into their own natural-born children, and Colin had just sort of tagged along, like a loose thread on a coat-sleeve. When one was a loose thread on a coat-sleeve, the idea that God loves you, or at least had something in mind when he made you, was a potent elixir, and Colin had fallen for the dialogue easily. God was the father he aimed to impress, not his uncle, who drank alcohol made of potatoes and sweated too much. It was difficult to be a part of something bigger than Colin's family, but the church was expansive, and though it had plenty of nepotism, there had been considerably more chance that he might one day benefit from it, which was, in the end, all a man could really ask for.
Still, so far, all it had gotten him was geese.
A goose pecked at his ear, and he winced, leaping hastily to his feet and wading through them, alarmed when they hissed and gave chase, and then it was him and the flock, running through his new parish, looking for the parish house, or at least something he could hide behind. People were coming out of doors now, and appearing around corners, and he felt a swell of relief, which quickly turned to indignation, as no one seemed to be inclined to do anything more than watch. Left to provide his own salvation, he saw a house ahead which he thought had to be the parish house, and too late, he patted his pockets for the largish iron key he had been presented with when he had been given the duties of the Woodsend parish. Back with his luggage, stuck in the mud! And he wasn't exactly able to turn around unless at risk of life and limb. Hastily, he did a sharp turn and threw himself at the mercy of God, or fate, or whichever b*****d had sent him here because of his massive pluck.
Miraculously, a door opened for him, and God granted him passage into the threshold, the door was slammed shut by a benevolent hand, and immediately after, the thumps of a large flock of geese hitting oak could be heard behind it. Colin sank to the floor, catching his breath, and then his eyes traveled upward, along with a hastily thrust hand. "Father Colin Byrne," he heaved, until he saw the hem of a skirt and thrust himself upwards to give a hasty bow. "Your new priest." His face had gone red, because the girl was smiling, in a laughing-with-you-not-at-you way, but decidedly still a laughing kind of manner. So much for starting over as a bright boy. Colin supposed he would have to settle for being just keen forever.
"A pleasure to save you, Father Byrne," replied the girl, who was not unpretty, though Colin didn't like to dwell on it. That was easier said than done, as religion and keenness aside, he was still a twentysomething year old man. She dropped him a curtsey and he looked away nervously, shuffling his feet on the floor. "Dorothy Goodwyn."
"Miss Goodwyn. Dorothy-"
"Dotty."
"Pardon?"
"No one calls me Dorothy, Father, it's Dotty."
"Dotty. Er. Miss Goodwyn."
"Father?" She was looking him in the eyes now and he wished she would stop. The geese were nearly preferable, at least they didn't make things awkward, just deadly. He adjusted his collar to remind himself of just how very keen he allegedly was and cleared his throat, looking helplessly out the window.
"Would you please help me fetch my key?"
It had been a quiet morning when Colin Byrne had arrived in Woodsend, but what with the still-present ominous honking of geese, an intrustion into a girl's house, and a suitcase and key left behind in the mud, the whole parish, and perhaps all of Sunderland was quite aware that Woodsend's new priest had arrived.
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Posted: Tue Mar 19, 2013 6:05 pm
Unusually for a man possessed of a parish described as "difficult" by minds more holy than his own, Colin Byrne found himself with an abundance of free time.
This was both a blessing and a curse, for it came at the expense of his sermons. Indeed, though he might spend days and nights composing them as best his plucky-but-decidedly-untalented mind could muster, no one would attend, even the elderly, who were generally quite keen on anything which might hint at eternal damnation. In fact, rather than the resistance that Colin had been dreading upon coming to Woodsend, the villagers rebuffed their new priest simply by paying him no mind at all. Oh, he had spoken to some in the street, rather vainly enquiring whether they might attend a service some time, tomorrow even, or Wednesday, or next week, and they always replied politely, but never actually showed up. A month had passed since his arrival, and the only solace in his failure was that not even the people who sent him here seemed to have had any expectation that he would be effectual in the slightest degree.
He supposed, perhaps, that what Woodsend needed, really needed, was some of the old fire and brimstone. Nothing got seats in pews like a show, and the kind of spittle and rage that the church now Officially Frowned Upon in this Age of Reason was always appealing to the sort of folk who lived in a village where nothing more exciting than cow-tipping could be expected on a Saturday night. However, even if the Church didn't Officially Frown Upon that kind of nonsense these days, there was no more ire in Colin than might be found in a sapling tree. One of the few particularly priestly qualities in him was his great patience, and it came more from a sort of ingratiating spinelessness than any Naturistic charity. The closest he could get to being properly upset was a mild sort of peevishness that might, at best, cause whosoever he directed it at to feel slightly uncomfortable. He was sure that if he directed that peevishness at the Great Corruptor, the Lord of Vanity, he would be very little effective in vanquishing his hold over Woodsend's parishoners. In fact, it seemed that Woodsend's parishoners were not the least bit concerned about eternal salvation, and much more concerned about questions of cow breeding and wood stacking and whether or not it would rain.
It did rain on the fourteenth, a fine June day, which suddenly turned dark and ominous near to sunset. Thick, soupy clouds rushed from the northeast almost without warning, for no breeze had blown all day, and the resulting torrent lasted all night and well into the morning. When Colin awoke, he found, to his great displeasure, that the only building that had been affected was the church, for the villagers, either through witchcraft or sheer bloodymindedness, had all managed to somehow both predict the sudden onslaught and prepare accordingly. Several of the church windows had shattered, and since no one was about to come to the sermon anyway, he supposed somewhat bitterly, he spent the rest of the morning sweeping up glass, speaking the lesson aloud anyway because he had worked all night on it, and he was keen, damn it all.
There was a slight, polite cough at the door, and he broke off in the middle of his discourse on the Great Flood to see a diminutive figure at the door, his horrible stammer identifying her for him in case his brain did not. "Dott- Doro- Miss Goodwyn!" he said, quickly putting the broom aside. "Have you come for the service?"
Miss Goodwyn looked around rather skeptically at the church, stepping over a shard of glass gingerly and pulling her shawl more tightly around her. "I'm sorry," she said, quite suddenly, "I didn't realize-"
"Didn't realize that the church was in a shambles?" suggested Colin brightly. "Ah well, never mind, many of our finest saints have often sermonized in worse places."
"You didn't know about the storm?" Doroth- Miss Goodwyn asked.
"No, I'm afraid I don't have the rural sensibility that you locals seem to do," remarked Colin, eager to pin her to listening about Naturism instead of about the thrice-cursed weather that seemed to be one of the only five topics of conversation that anybody in all of Woodsend had to offer.
"If I had known..." she replied hesitantly, biting her lip.
"Known about our Lord?" Colin muttered, with a tone tinging upon desperate.
"May I help you sweep?" asked Miss Goodwyn impetuously, grasping on the broom.
"Well, you've already saved me from geese last month, Miss Goodwyn, I hardly think..." Colin trailed off, then changed tack, "I mean, I would be delighted, but I am afraid that I'm not just sweeping! I'm in the middle of a sermon, you know! If you stay to help, you'll have to listen."
Even for Miss Goodwyn, the idea seemed to be almost repulsive, he noted glumly, for she bit her lip with great anxiety and cast her eyes hither and thither before nodding firmly and returning to her house for a broom. The great delay cause the service to end rather later than anticipated, but he supposed it was progress. One person in Woodsend had listened to half of a sermon by accident, and it was better than none at all on purpose.
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Posted: Tue Mar 19, 2013 6:51 pm
As June turned to July, Colin's luck turned with it. There were no more surprises with the weather, for it seemed that whatever sixth sense led the villagers to predict the weather with such eerie accuracy moved Miss Goodwyn as well, and before each of the three subsequent storms which racked Woodsend, she always arrived at the church to help prepare it for the onslaught. The windows had been fixed by a serious looking young man who had simply introduced himself as a friend of the Goodwyns, and Colin was finding that more people were at least speaking to him, though he suspected they were not going so far as to actually listen to what he said back to them.
Miss Goodwyn listened, more or less, and had been coming to the church more and more, to the point where Colin found he was spending most of his time there, for she flatly refused to come to the parish house, and would leave if no one was actually in the church to receive her. If she came, she came dreadfully early in the morning, and stayed not ten minutes some days, but the time she spent was slowly stretching, and he hoped that soon he could sit her down for a whole half hour. He had found that she stayed longer if he spoke of himself, and so he told her what little there was to tell very quickly, and in return, she had begun to complain to him of her sisters, which he idly supposed was the hobby of young women in small villages who must eventually set their minds to marrying. He found that he had to outthink Miss Goodwyn to preach to her, and it was unusually taxing to him, but not irritating in the slightest. A month had been a long time to go without speaking to anybody in earnest, and Colin had a religious turn of mind, not an eremitic one. He missed civilized conversation as much as anybody might, and Miss Goodwyn's curiosity about his home life gave him a vent for his own burgeoning homesickness that might otherwise have seemed too unseemly to speak of to a parishoner.
It was on one such morning, when Miss Goodwyn was flipping idly through a bible and he was speaking quite deadly cautious, lest he disrupt her from doing so, that he was able to make a breakthrough.
"Father," Miss Goodwyn asked lowering the bible slightly, "Have you ever married anybody before?"
"Ah, well, I joined the priesthood young," stammered Colin, and when Miss Goodwyn laughed, he felt his face flush indignantly. Miss Goodwyn never laughed maliciously, but laughed very frequently, and as a man who had found himself so frequently picked on in his youth, Colin had a great aversion to being laughed at in any way at all. "No, Miss Goodwyn! A priest cannot marry, for it would be providing a poor example to the community."
"So the community should not marry in the new doctrine, then?" asked Miss Goodwyn, now quite perplexed.
"N-no! The community should marry!" Colin rebuffed, now finding himself confused.
"But surely they would need a priest to marry them!" insisted Miss Goodwyn, and a ray of clarity hit him all of a sudden.
"Marry! Ah, no, Miss Goodwyn, this is my first parish, so I have not. But I am fully capable of marrying you to whomever you please!" He paused, and elaborated, "With the consent of both your guardians, of course."
"Oh, no!" exclaimed Miss Goodwyn, "It is my friend who wishes to be married."
"Then why have they not approached me themselves?" demanded Colin.
Miss Goodwyn bit her lip like she always did when she had something slightly unpleasant hidden secret, and Colin could fill in the blanks. "Perhaps they are too busy," he provided, and while Miss Goodwyn latched onto that explanation gratefully, by the flustering of her explanations, he knew that this was yet another thing that the villagers did not think him capable of doing. Marrying people! Every priest knew how to marry people! "I must admit, Miss Goodwyn," he announced, "I wasn't aware that anybody in this village had much interest in Naturism at all."
"Oh, well, everybody needs to be married by somebody, Father." Miss Goodwyn remarked lightly. "It's not fortunate if your marriage isn't blessed."
"So everybody gets married in the church?" Colin asked, contriving to sound as casual as possible.
"Oh yes," Miss Goodwyn replied obligingly.
"And about how many people attend these weddings?"
"Nearly everybody in the village, I would think," she reckoned.
"Well, Miss Goodwyn! I think that you've been here now for forty-five minutes, so I'm sure your mother or sister will be missing you, for you say they always seem to miss you so keenly even after just fifteen! I'm sure you would like to go see them, and please tell your friend that I would be delighted to knit their soul to anybody with adequate notice ahead of time. Please, take the bible, I have so many at home." He ushered her out, and then marched back to the parish house to plan.
He would prove himself to the people of Woodsend. He would marry any couple that asked him, and then some.
He would work all the sermons they had missed into the service.
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Posted: Mon Nov 11, 2013 11:45 pm
The wedding ceremony of Miss Goodwyn's friend (A Miss Fortunata Winchell) to a Mister Richard Whitson was an event which seemed like it would be a typical affair in every respect, but ended up going down in history as the longest wedding ever to take place in Woodsend.
This was not the fault of Miss Fortunata, Mister Richard, or any of the increasingly sleepy looking guests at the ceremony, but rather, of the priest's, who insisted upon making a five hour long speech leading up to the vows, which neither fire nor brimstone nor the desperate look upon the face of Dorothy Goodwyn could move him from. Even then, he would have gone on longer, five hours not being enough time to make up for over a month of sermons, but after speaking that long without rest or water, Colin was thirstier than he was vindictive, and ended up making up somewhat for the speech by reciting the quickest vows ever made in Woodsend. By the end of the ordeal, the newly-married Mrs. Fortunata Whitson looked as if she was about to have a fit, the parish looked somewhat dazed, and Miss Goodwyn was white and tight-lipped, though Colin had yet to notice, having rushed to find refreshment as soon as he was able. Soon after he found the refreshment, however, the Goodwyns found him.
He had never met Dorothy's family. She had always come to the church at odds hours of the day, alone, and had never stayed for long. It had never occurred to him to consider the strangeness of the arrangement, after all, he had been raised alongside so many children that it would have been impossible for all his female cousins to have been supervised regularly, and once he had struck out on his own, it had been for the decidedly male world of the seminary. However, seeing a gaggle of Dorothyesque women heading straight for him, Dorothy herself trailing miserably behind them, it struck him that she had not in fact sprung from the earth fully formed to help him tidy the church and save him from geese, but was actually a person with a completely separate life outside of their little meetings, a life that he must be largely irrelevant to and ignorant of. Certainly, she had complained to him about her sisters and spoken to him of her family during their visits, but he realized suddenly that until this moment, they had always seemed somewhat imaginary, defined more by their absence than her words.
But here they were, and at their head was a small woman who had to be the matriarch. Her height did not make her one jot less intimidating. She spoke out to him from across the room, and her voice, though she did not shout, carried.
"Father Byrne!"
"Mistress Goodwyn!" Colin shouted, because he was decidedly not blessed with the sort of voice that carried. "What a lovely day for a wedding, is it not?"
"It was, certainly," a younger Dorothyesque girl simpered, looking out the window, where the sun was setting already.
"It was a lovely wedding," Dorothy affirmed sternly, but she was interrupted by her mother.
"You are new to Woodsend, of course, Father Byrne, so you wouldn't realize it, but here in our village, it is traditional to have the ceremony early in the day, and then spend the remainder hosting our own rural celebrations. The previous priest assigned to us was perfectly obliging in this respect."
The cheek! To tell him how to do his job when no one but Dorothy had even been at half a service before he crammed several of them into this wedding ceremony! Colin's back stiffened, and for one indignant moment he forgot his good nature. "Of course," he retorted, as civilly as possible, "I'm afraid that I just saw the pews so full and I was simply possessed by such wonderful zeal for the faith that all of my unheard sermons merely burst forth like water from a dam."
"A miracle," said Mistress Goodwyn primly, "The likes of which we cannot expect to be blessed by again in this lifetime."
Colin blustered onwards before his natural state of spinelessness could reassert itself. "Oh, I don't know," he said casually. "I've heard that the butcher's son has proposed to the miller's daughter, and if they get married in a month, who knows what the miracle of true love may inspire from the Lord?"
"A short thanks giving, perhaps," suggested Dorothy desperately.
"Perhaps," Colin replied noncommittally.
Dorothy's mother's dark eyes flickered over Colin's face for a few moments. "The Lord certainly works in mysterious ways," she agreed, then pursed her lips and looked out the window. "My word, the sun's almost set. We'd better prepare the festivities. Girls?"
All but two of the girls turned around, Dorothy and a sister that looked to be slightly younger than her. Colin realized with a start that he knew her name, it must be Beatrix, who was forever stealing Dorothy's ribbons and had hidden a kitten under her bed, and jumped off the cottage roof when she was ten. This girl looked at him in a way he felt was meant to imitate the mother that had just left, and remarked, "It was lovely weather for the wedding."
Dorothy bit her lip and turned to Colin, her face, always readable, said Why did you do that?. He wanted to defend himself, but she had not said anything to give him cause to. Coughing anxiously, he said, "I suppose I might see you at church tomorrow, Miss Goodwyn?"
She shook her head. "No, Father," she replied clearly. "I'm afraid I have plans."
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Posted: Tue Nov 12, 2013 10:44 am
By the next morning, patience and humility and spinelessness had returned to Colin Byrne, and left him feeling like a drunk after a hard night.
Why had he sermonized for five hours? At someone's wedding? And why had he said those things to Mistress Goodwyn? And why had he felt proud of himself after, as if he hadn't just given the entire parish even more reasons to despise him, including Dorothy Goodwyn herself? He had thought before the wedding that she might find the sermon funny at least, smile her irritating little self-satisfied smile, and laugh after the ceremony as she told him how dreadfully keen he was, but could he please not do it again. The fact that even she had seemed horrified was the worst part of the ordeal, he thought grimly as he massaged his temples in the stark light of morning. Woodsend was terrible, a pit, a backwater, but Dorothy's good-natured tolerance of him had been the one sop to his diligence and keenness for the priesthood that he had been able to enjoy.
He had let her down, he realized, and it was surprising how sick that made him feel. She wasn't a particularly interesting girl, and even during her shortest visits in the morning, they sometimes had barely anything to speak about. She didn't even seem to care much about naturism, because every time he attempted to steer her 'round to discussing it, she veered them off track, and she continually burdened him with stories about her family that he couldn't possibly be expected to care about. But she laughed when he spoke, and she came every morning, and despite the fact that in the city, where there were people teeming from the rafters, they would have been nothing more than another face in a crowd to each other at best, she was important here simply because she was there and she listened and nobody else would. Colin supposed that at one point, he must have been important to his parents, but after they died, he had not been particularly important to anybody, and he was clearly not important to Woodsend. But somehow, he had been important enough to Dorothy for her to come and sit awkwardly next to him every day, and he had ended up causing her grief.
What made it worse was that, true to her word, Dorothy did not arrive at the church at all that morning, though he showed up earlier than he ought to, and stayed long past the point it became clear that there would be no one at the sermon but the mice and spiders. Eventually, he sat down in a pew, and simply looked up at the ceiling, talking to himself, or God, for want of any other sort of audience. He got through the sermon he had been planning, and then, for want of another occupation, related to God the state of the parish house (appalling), the weather for the last week (fair), and the incident that had happened on Wednesday in the market with Mister White's donkey (amusing). Having done the best he could to carry on the one sided conversation, he thought the he was owed some kind of contribution from God, or at least an explanation for how he had ended up in Woodsend despite his overabundance of keenness and underabundance of good fortune. "I need help, please!" he demanded at the rafters. "I can't deal with this on my own!"
Nothing happened. He wasn't sure what he had been expecting to begin with. Some of his peers at the seminary had spoken to God, but the rest of them, him included, had teased them or avoided them. There was something a bit weird about it, even for priests, something loopy and silly, but also worrisome. Talking to invisible spirits felt too much like the Old Ways for comfort. Wasn't this an age of logic and reason? Sure, saints were all well and good, but they had been ages ago, and now priests were supposed to be a cheerful bastion of reassurance and modernity, salvation was clean, tidy, and decent. People didn't come to church to hear the same sorts of mutterings and ramblings that the local hedge-witch might spout over some cauldron. It was backwards, he and his peers had all agreed, to demand revelations and miracles from God. Revelations and miracles were unsettling and mystical, and it was time for society to put such things behind them.
And he had agreed! But a little over a month in the woods, and here he was, talking to God in a pew because, what, his single not-quite-parishioner had decided not to show up this morning? Because he felt stupid about yesterday, so he might as well humiliate himself more? This was the slippery slope. One day you preach for five hours at a wedding, the next day you'd be wandering about the woods like a hermit, having visions. He needed help, all right, but from the diocese, not God. Portents!
He got up to do something useful, and as he did, there was a billowing cloud of wood splinters, dust, and spiders, as one of the roof beams crashed onto the floor.
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Posted: Mon Jan 06, 2014 10:31 pm
The builder had come to look at the roof beam not the next day, but the week after it fell. He was busy, he said, although Colin did not for one moment believe that there were enough mending jobs in Woodsend to keep a builder occupied for so long. The whole village looked small enough to have been erected from scratch in less time than that.
Still, the builder had come at last, which was more than he could say of Dorothy Goodwyn, whose absence continually nagged at him. The builder was the same man who had come to fix the windows after the storm that blew Dorothy into his life, the "friend of the Goodwyns", and while he was telling Colin why the roof beam had fallen (structural instability, termites, wood-wear), Colin was putting his not-terribly-clever-but-awfully-keen mind to the task of devising a way to enquire after her. It was his job, he reminded himself hastily. She was, technically, unofficially, his only regular parishioner.
"Terrible bad luck, though," finished the builder, and Colin looked up absently.
"What? Oh, yes."
The builder squinted. "Aren't you the one who did the Whitson wedding?"
"Yes," As if there was another priest in the village, although it didn't take a stretch of the imagination to assume that the people of Woodsend didn't much bother to differentiate between one priest and another. For all Colin knew, he could be waylaid by a bandit, killed, and impersonated, yet parish life would go on completely unperturbed.
"Oh." The builder seemed to contemplate this while eyeing the destruction left by the roof beam, and concluded with. "Hope y'don't have anything else happen to you."
"Yes. What?"
"Anything else, like. I'd be worried about it if I were you."
"Worried about what?" Colin demanded impatiently. It was difficult to try to find an opening to ask about Dorothy when the man he was trying to ask wasn't even making sense.
"Angerin' the hedge witch," the builder replied implacably. "You know," A vague gesture was made at the roof beam. "I didn't think you had the balls."
"I don't, I mean, I of course-" Colin stopped himself to collect his thoughts. Concerns about Dorothy briefly fled to the back of his mind. "I don't believe in the Old Ways. That," he gestured at the roof beam, "Is just bad luck. You said it was going to happen sooner or later anyway."
"Happened sooner though," said the implacable builder.
"Look, I appreciate the, uh, the warning, but I hardly think that Mistress Whitson is a hedge witch."
The builder frowned. "T'isn't Mistress Whitson, Father," he corrected patiently.
Colin smiled grimly. "Good, I'm glad that we're in agreement, then." That had taken less convincing than he thought, at least. If only the rest of Woodsend was so agreeable.
"'Tis Mistress Goodwyn."
Colin stared. "I beg your pardon?" he croaked quietly. "Dorothy...?"
"No, Father. Mistress Goodwyn. Tho' they say the whole lot of them have the gift. It runs in the family, you know."
"No it doesn't," Colin said absentmindedly, wishing he had paid more attention to Dorothy's constant jabber about her sisters all of a sudden. "It's not real." He staggered quietly to the fallen roof beam and sat down on it heavily. He felt thick and slow and slightly betrayed.
"Does Dor-- Miss Goodwyn believe it is?"
"'Course she does, Father," the builder said roughly. "Her family built this town up with that magic of theirs."
"Of course she does," Colin repeated hollowly. He should have known better. Woodsend was a Problem Parish. There was no such thing as an ally in a place like Woodsend, just the occasional distractingly pretty spy. Damn it all! This was what happened when keen young priests got dropped into backwater parishes. And even through the stifling fog of keenness, he could see what the so-called hedge witch had intended for him. Dorothy had been obvious enough with all her talk of marriages. Get a pretty girl to turn the young seminarian's head, and then get the villagers not to say anything, and he wouldn't have any moral authority over them any longer. If they had managed to pull it off, he wouldn't even have been aware that they had planned it.
His hands balled very loosely into fists. Maybe God had been looking out for him after all on the day of Mistress Whitson's wedding. Keenness didn't pay huge dividends, but at least it was finally serving a purpose.
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Posted: Tue Jan 07, 2014 10:30 am
There was not a lot to do in the parish, and thus, plenty of time to think about Miss Goodwyn's betrayal.
Colin was not a bright boy, but he was imaginative enough when it came to reconstructing the parts of other peoples' lives that he was not privy to, as any orphan who spent any time whatsoever dwelling upon the lives of their dead parents must be. With ample time to consider the position that her relations put her in, Colin had turned her from his fondly considered only parishioner into an Eve mixed with Judas by the end of the week. As she grew more dastardly in his mind, so too did she grow prettier, until by the following Tuesday, the mildly attractive reality became the sort of figure that launched ships and inspired wooden horses. With not enough priestly occupations to occupy his waking hours, the occupation of demonizing Dorothy was his primary project, and soon he cherished this new image of her as a nemesis as much-vaunted fact.
But as with all things both holy and heathen, the truth of the matter was decidedly less glamorous than the notion that his enemies had set out to seduce him, and though some part of Colin recognized this (in the first place, the act would make Mistress Goodwyn his mother in law, and he did not think that she would risk that inconvenience merely to undermine him), the fact of the matter was he had become close to Miss Goodwyn through boredom, and in her absence, hating her was an equally acceptable amusement. Perhaps most importantly, it meant he did not need to feel at all ashamed about the events of the Whitson wedding, which had, until the builder revealed Dorothy's family history, lingered at the back of his mind like an unfriendly poltergeist, the sort of which the church highly frowned upon believing in. In fact, it was really quite liberating to hate Dorothy, for it meant that he needn't feel guilty about despising everybody in the blasted village, apart from the fact that they were technically his parishioners, whose devotion and souls he was responsible for. He was surprised he had not considered trying to hate Dorothy sooner.
Once he thought it, there was no unthinking it, and for a moment after the vindicating circular logic brought him there, he paused.
He hated everyone in the parish. It was true, now that he had reason to feel that Dorothy had betrayed him. There was not a soul amongst him that he would want to meet in heaven, let alone drag to heaven behind him. Was this the attitude of a good priest, even in a problem parish? Surely it was better to write to the diocese and beg them to send someone even thicker and less keen than he so as to utilize what little assets he had in a modest parish that would at least benefit from his guidance. Or at least someone pliable enough to bend to the whims of the local hedge witch without putting up too much of a struggle. Woodsend was a small parish- a very small parish, a kip even. What did it matter if one very small parish was not in line with the great Naturist reform agenda, save for the fact that at current it was his parish?
He was not good at discerning the nefarious schemes of the heathen masses, judging by how long he had let Dorothy work on him, but he was quite good, he fancied, at groveling. The idea was tempting, and he sat down at his writing desk drafting a few letters before crumpling them and leaning back in his chair. He was quite good at groveling, he supposed, but in a casual, personal sort of way, where he could yelp out his pleas and then gauge the response at once. The suspense of a letter was too much to bear, and Woodsend's mail was dreadfully unreliable to begin with.
A goose honked outside his window, and he was suddenly inspired to spend another fruitless half an hour trying to work up a good grovel regardless. This was interrupted not by a deafening sense of spineless futility, but by a knock on the door. Getting up carefully, he cracked the door open and peeked through, wary that the aforementioned geese might have developed a new attack method. Instead he found Dorothy the traitor, looking much less like the seductive Jezebel he had built up in his mind, and much more like the slight but not unpretty girl she actually was. She seemed almost as surprised to see him as he was to see her, though she was the one who had knocked, and for a moment he thought of simply closing the door, but spinelessness once again asserted itself over him, and he found himself inviting her in.
She looked one way, then the other, nervous as ever she had been, and said, "Father, I looked for you in the church."
"Well, I don't live there, you know," he rebuffed, with a bit too much forced joviality.
"Well, yes, but is it not time for the evening service?"
He startled, had lost track of time, he realized, but she hadn't. Despite having never stayed very long at the parish and only in the mornings, she had maybe been listening to more of his talking than he thought. He softened towards her momentarily, and once he realized, attempted to collect his anger and focus it again properly. Nemesis! But it was impossible to reconcile the Dorothy standing in front of him, associated with almost all of the tolerable moments he had passed in Woodsend, with the phantom his shock had conjured into his mind.
"Did you want to come to the evening service?" he blustered, unsure of what else to say, since she had never expressed any interest before.
"Is it very much like the morning service?" asked Dorothy.
"Emptier," replied Colin somewhat more decisively.
Dorothy Goodwyn pretended to think. "I suppose that I will just have to adjust."
"I think this evening service might be a little less empty than usual."
He had tried his hardest to hate Dorothy, but it was simply not in his nature to wish for solitude, and whether or not she was a spying hedge witch, she was all he had at present. Besides, of course, the threat of geese.
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Posted: Wed Jan 08, 2014 9:09 am
While it was clear that Miss Goodwyn had not actually sought him out due to any sudden interest in the Naturist faith, she was at least letting Colin say his sermon properly, with a minimum of fidgeting. It was apparent that she was trying to make up to him for something, although what it could be was anyone's guess. Certainly, there were things to make up for on both sides, if he considered their situation fairly, but if she had a particular grievance in mind, she did not signify it.
Only after the sermon was he able to glean any sort of clues as to the nature of her disappearance for several weeks or her sudden reappearance, as they returned quite comfortably to the routine they had both become accustomed to. She immediately looked around the church for something to do, and after a few minutes of awkward and silent dusting, she began to talk, hesitantly at first, but soon she became as animated as ever. There were more complaints about her sisters, which he tried harder to listen to now that it transpired that all the sisters were thought to be hedge-witches, but all of her family news seemed to be much like his own cousins' little arguments, nothing particularly magical or alarming about them. Beatrix was getting things all her own way as usual, being the youngest and her mother's favourite, and Violet was lording over all of them quite unconcernedly, and Charity was still poorly named as ever. He had absently considered that if it came to her talking of her family he might be able to broach the subject of their supposed magical powers at that juncture, but there was no opening for him to seize which was subtle enough not to cause alarm. If all Dorothy's family were hedge-witches, they were much more normal than he had been led to believe at seminary.
Of course, he reminded himself, it could all be a ruse. Nemesis. But even if it was a ruse, Dorothy seemed to be so little favoured by her mother in the stories that she told him that it was difficult to believe that her mother would set her at the task of distracting him. Or perhaps it was the fact that she was not her mother's favourite that made her ideal for the task. Colin knew what it was like to feel hungry for parental attention, certainly. If that was the case, he could almost feel bad for her.
Almost.
"...yourself, Father Byrne?" finished Dorothy.
"What?" Colin was aroused from stewing in his own suspicions by the sound of his name and looked up guiltily. Dorothy smiled that irritating faintly amused grin of hers, which almost made it seem as if they had last seen each other yesterday, and there had been no aberrance in their acquaintance at all.
"And yourself? How have you been since last we met?"
"Terrible," Colin replied honestly. He had been isolated too long to endure the pleasant lying which society required. "I've been hounded by misfortune everywhere I go. The geese, especially, are keenly interested in renewing my acquaintance."
Dorothy paused, and the moment of normalcy passed. A flash of guilt appeared on her face, and even though she was clearly trying to show nothing, her expressions were quite plainly readable. "Oh my," she said slowly. "But perhaps you have had at least one stroke of good fortune?"
Colin demurred. Even trying earnestly to recall something, it was true that everything which could have gone wrong the past few weeks had gleefully done so.
"Perhaps something so small and brief that you might not have thought of it," coaxed Dorothy, but Colin could not satisfy her with a positive answer. The only even marginally pleasant thing that had happened to him in the past few weeks was her return, and considering the circumstances, he wasn't quite sure he considered that to be good fortune. He almost wanted to invent something, though, for she drew back slightly and looked positively miserable.
"I have always been unlucky, since birth, you know," he hazarded, but it did nothing to help.
"I am sorry for that," she said quietly, and seemingly sincerely. "I had hoped--" She bit her lip and dusted a little faster in silence before remarking upon the lateness of the hour and departing.
Colin, unsure of what to make of her outburst, sat down heavily in a pew and attempted to find sense in the senseless parish he was stuck in.
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