Re: Vauxhall Gardens
The warmth, a hot string burnt into the back of his eyelids like the maniac’s memory, is short-lived. Here are his witch hazel eyes, son of gypsies and jews, magic and mud, opening to look at the fiery circle lancing the clouds. He's roused of his reverie with the soft coo of the white dove, greeting him with a friendliness that he is unfamiliar with. There’s his chin, ever so slow in its descent, could’ve been a king in the wilderness, a prince in hell, lowering to the smaller woman to regard her height with the faintest of smiles. The eyes show it. The corners of his chapped lips. He does feel joy, as a grave in the ground might feel the vibration of life above it from time to time. A red line of an injury on the bottom lip shows, or perhaps from nervous gnawing? The fae fragrance of her invades his senses like any seelie’s glamour. Clean. Like a place he doesn’t belong. Sugar on his tongue. Treacle.
“Indeed.” he agrees, as custom, bending at the length of his torso so towering and yet a slender man, before coming back up straight. He does not carry the famished cheeks of the poor, the sunken light in his eyes like a star underwater, instead for this emptiness he carries in him he appears in good health. His cheeks pink, freckling more so from the hands of the sun leaving its mark.
“You must be Ms. Mina. The kindly one, as I pictured, a portrait pulled down from heaven’s gallery. Who has taken such deliberate care of me lil’ relic, how long I’ve not seen it.” and it lays there limp in her laced hand so neatly, that handkerchief, he can nearly feel the pressed corners strangling him. He wonders what would’ve become of it had he not made certain to keep it, before the previous owner was took too soon from this earth. He would’ve had nothing to remember her.