DrabbleWriMo 20: Obscure

[igenlode]

It was eighty miles to La Vergne. Eighty miles to ride, day and night, and he was a sick man.

Mud-spattered from head to foot, he half-fell into the hall; gasped out his warning to its recipient, who surveyed him pitilessly.

"Treachery, de Brencourt? Your speciality, no doubt!"

The words struck like a blow. He found a chair; clung on.

"Your safe-conduct is wastepaper, I tell you. You are going to your death. In God's name, why else would I have come?"

"I cannot pretend to guess." Ice-cold. "Your motives may be obscure, monsieur, but your deceit has failed — again."

---

The Duc de Trélan is not being quite as obtuse here as it might appear; in canon he concludes, after the retort "I cannot pretend to fathom the motives of a man so utterly false as you", "I am not to be frightened by talk of treachery into breaking my pledged word... You have failed this time also, Monsieur de Brencourt". If he refuses to turn up to the surrender, then the countryside will be ravaged in reprisal and it is his followers who will pay the price -- and it is this outcome which he suspects de Brencourt of trying to bring about by sowing deliberate falsehood. Of which they are both aware the Comte has a track record.

But the latter is really not in any physical or emotional state at this point to analyse the reasoning involved :-(

Comments

[watervole]

At first reading I thought - "Treachery, de Brencourt? Your speciality, no doubt!" - was spoken by the man gasping out the warning.

But it's nicely atmospheric. (and I'm not familiar with the setting)

[igenlode]

Yes, I spent a *lot* of time fiddling with the attributions on that one (not at all assisted by the fact that I am, by obstinate self-imposed convention, having de Brencourt as the unnamed default protagonist, and thus in this scene was trying to restrict the use of 'he' to refer to the protagonist only, since I have no means of 'switching back' once the pronoun has been referred elsewhere!)

I ended up relying on the fact that the sentence is being addressed *to* de Brencourt and therefore cannot be spoken *by* him. But the phrasing does sound all too much as if it is the 'warning' referred to in the paragraph above :-(

The other possibilities I went through all involved naming the recipient of the warning, which for some reason helps attribute the dialogue more definitely -- e.g. "gasped out his warning to the Marquis, who surveyed him pitilessly".

In canon, the actual warning is "Don't go to Vannes, de Kersaint! Don't go, for God's sake — there is treachery!"; he reverts back to the familiar nom de guerre by which they knew each other before the estrangement, so it would be more consistent to use 'the Marquis' rather than 'the Duc'. (Also, the latter turns out to look weird on the page in this context.) But flipping between Gaston's multiple identities gets very confusing, and without any space for explanation I wanted to avoid it. I used "the Marquis de Kersaint" in the previous chapter because it is that specific military commander who is being hunted, in his capacity as "The King's General in Finistère"...

The other alternative is to name him as "de Trélan" (or "de Kersaint") in the same fashion; "gasped out his warning to de Trélan, who surveyed him pitilessly". But "de Kersaint", as above, manages to 'look weird' and also sound wrong to my inner ear in this specific context -- I think because the actual *narrative* refers to "the Duc de Trélan" throughout; it's just the character's slip-up for that one line -- and yet I didn't want to use "de Trélan" on the grounds that this isn't what de Brencourt actually said. But maybe I should have :-(

As it was, I ended up going for the icy stare of the recipient who watched him come. But only after a lot of switching things about and agonizing...

(Also, doing a reduction of two pages of plot-pivotal dialogue into the space of sixty words while keeping it so far as possible true to the original is... an interesting exercise!)

[Edit: I suppose I could even go for "gasped out his warning to its recipient, who surveyed him pitilessly"?]

[watervole]

Complicated.

The truer one is the the source, the more obstacles. But I would never be untrue to the source - that is the top priority.

[igenlode]

I would never be untrue to the source - that is the top priority

An unfashionable view in fan-fiction, I feel :-(

(The endorsed approach seems to be pick-and-mix canon to fit the desired plot, and portray the characters how you feel they *ought* to have been, and anything else is 'gatekeeping'...)

In this case, the source could support pretty much any of those readings, depending on how you look at it; a name is a name (nom d'un nom!) and Gaston has more of them than anyone.
I think I will go for "to its recipient" (original reading, for my reference: "Mud-spattered from head to foot, he half-fell into the hall; gasped out his warning to the man who surveyed him pitilessly") and hope it doesn't reek too much of Burly Detective Syndrome.

There was a similar attribution problem with the last line of dialogue in the following drabble, where de Brencourt's response is preceded by an 'action beat' that references both of them but most obviously Valentine. It's just relying on the assumption that the speakers alternate, along with the content of what is said :-(