White Knight

I finally got round to proof-reading/editing this; it was actually complete at the end of April, *before* I even started on What's in a Name, but with the rush to complete the competition entry in time plus the knowledge that there was next to no potential audience for Colette-fic, I didn't have much motivation to work on it. (Plus the dispiriting discovery that the script of the film had apparently used large chunks of the original dialogue verbatim...)

I'm still not quite certain if the irony of the title works better -- or, rather, is more apparent -- if I use "White Knight" or "The White Knight", but I tried it with 'The' and it didn't look quite right, so I'm going back to "White Knight" for now. And at 5,500 words I think it will work as a rather long one-shot... even if "If I Were Vicomte" has *four* chapters in that same length!

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White Knight

World-weary Gaston Lachaille sees himself as perfectly positioned to offer a solution to Gigi’s situation. He misjudges things in more ways than one.

When Gaston Lachaille had returned at length to Paris, still nursing his wounded amour-propre and the cuckold’s horns bestowed upon him by the perfidious Liane, it was to find Gigi dressed up like an organ-grinder’s monkey.

He had not, in that first moment, been able to imagine what old Madame Alvarez could conceivably have had in mind to allow it. The contrast between the scapegrace urchin he remembered and the gawky adolescent plucking at the collar of her new-found finery had been too great for anything but an almost physical recoil. ( Read more... )

Pink daisy plague

Weirdly, I discovered that not only did all my pink Swan River daisies all wilt at once, but the one I gave away *also* wilted at about the same time, despite being potted up into different compost in a different location under different conditions (while the blue ones that I gave away are flourishing, just as my blue Swan River daisies are). So it's extremely odd; it's as if they germinated with some kind of time-bomb inside them. Perhaps it was simply quite exceptionally hot that day, and that variety copes less well with the heat... but they haven't actually died. They are just looking constantly sick.

Meanwhile the replacement pink Swan River seed that I planted four days ago appears to be germinating already (no sign of the others, though).

( Tomatoes )