The Careys (carey_quintet) wrote in weddedto_sonora, @ 2011-01-13 14:34:00 |
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Current mood: | curious |
The Bibliophilic Approach
“This is an interesting list,” Julia said finally, raising her eyes from the parchment her son had just handed her. “Is there a story behind it?”
Edmond smiled, the way he did when he felt awkward about a question and wished to evade it a little. “Not as such,” he said. “It’s just…a topic I find I have an interest in, and our library doesn’t have the things I need in it.” Julia nodded, accepting his judgment on that. She had, once, when he was just beginning to grasp independent research, suggested that he just might not have looked enough in their library, only to find out that he could take her to any title she named in the room with no more than a moment’s hesitation, and had, in fact, gone through all they had on the subject. Since then, she had questioned whether or not he needed a resource he was requesting, but not whether or not it could be substituted with something they already had. “I drew the title list from the notes and bibliographies of what we have, and I think I picked the best ones, but if you have other suggestions, I’m happy to change it.”
“I can’t say the topic is one I know a great deal about,” Julia said. There was something slightly off about admitting to her fifteen-year-old that she didn’t know everything, but it wasn’t as bad as it had been when he was seven or eight and might have actually believed her if she’d claimed to. Introducing him to the concept that adults were fallible back then had been necessary, though; he’d all but worshiped her for introducing him to learning after his biological father had let the beginnings of his education go to the dogs, and while she’d enjoyed being worshipped, it would have backfired badly when he reached the stage he was currently in and started questioning things. He could be bull-headed, when he wanted to be…
Natural, of course. He was her and Robert’s son, but even a casual glance at their family would allow any man off the street to point out which member of it shared little, if any, blood with the rest, and his failure to know when to surrender and see reason was the reason Alasdair was going to die alone and powerless, a broken shell of himself, on a remote island somewhere. Julia had strongly suggested to Thomas, on more than one occasion, that they speed up that process – the man’s brain would have been a national resource, if Eileen hadn’t done such an excellent job of warping it, and who knew how Edmond would react if Alasdair somehow escaped and showed up, offering his youngest child both pretended affection and access to more knowledge? – but the old man seemed content to take Morgaine’s word for it that her father would die soon on his own.
Julia, for her part, was convinced that Morgaine was playing them. She had said Alasdair would be dead within six months of his exile even with her treatment – apparently the only medical aid Alasdair would accept – but it had been over a year, and the reports were that he was still very much alive. Ill, yes, but alive, and as long as he was alive, he was capable of doing something rash. Going out in a blaze of some desperate glory, for instance, and taking them all with him, or at least permanently scarring her son. She had tried to find out where he was, to finish the job herself if Thomas wouldn’t, but he continued to elude her. All she could do was pray that he died sooner rather than later, before Edmond could discover that he was still alive.
“Do you think Robert would?” Edmond asked. “I don’t want to engage another tutor for next year until I see how well I can handle the work for CATS, and it’s not an academic interest, it’s like the herbology…”
“I wondered about that,” Julia admitted. “Jane told me you borrowed one of her books on the language of flowers, and that you were reading all kinds of things from the library about it.”
“It’s interesting,” he said. “And I haven’t completely ruled out Healing as a post-RATS option, so it’s potentially useful.”
“Of course,” Julia said.
In truth, she was of two minds about that option. On one hand, it might suit him. Edmond was capable of being reasonably personable without completely losing his objectivity, which would be a useful quality in a Healer, he was physically strong, which, regrettably, could also be a useful quality in a Healer, and he was certainly intelligent enough to complete the course of study. It was also a highly respectable, even honorable, field. On the other hand, however, his interest might be indicative of a growing attachment to Morgaine, which was the last thing she wanted. She had always seen Georgia appropriating the North Carolina properties and assets over Andrew’s prematurely dead body, but the timing had been terrible, and there was now almost no way she could move against Morgaine until after Edmond’s education was complete, complicating things considerably. He had seemed disturbed by Gwenhwyfar’s death, and she had been nothing but a pretty story to him, the lead figure in a tragedy, struck down in the prime of her life and immediately after her redemption. Someone he knew would upset him badly; if he came to actually love his surviving sister before she died….
It was a pity that the only reliable time travel the various research organizations of the world had ever seen fit to make even vaguely public only went back in time a few hours.
There was nothing she could do about the past, though, and the moment wasn’t about the future. It was about Edmond’s reading material.
She wasn’t surprised that Edmond had come to her with a new interest he wanted to research – the odd thing would have been if he’d gone an entire summer without wanting new books about some obscure topic which had caught his fancy; their house library had grown considerably since she and Robert began encouraging the children to spend the stipend Thomas gave them on pursuing their interests – but the interest itself had come from out of nowhere. He’d always expressed distaste for ethics and philosophy, but most of the books on the list he’d come prepared to her door with fell into those categories. The two on medical ethics, she could understand because of Morgaine, but since when had he been prone to thinking about the nature of intelligence and excellence? It was a reasonably popular discipline, but not one she had done much to introduce the children to. It was enough for her that they were excellent without stressing the mechanics of it too much.
There was also the matter of time. He was a fast reader, and comprehended well, but he took longer when he was just getting into a new subject, so there was no way he’d finish these books by the end of summer. They would spill over into the school year. Of course, she thought he had likely been working at a fifth year level for some time, but it was better to play to the side of caution with these things, so no tutor. As for the content…It made her uneasy, but she had studied adolescent development enough to know that this was, to an extent, normal. Most fifteen-year-old boys would form overly-simplified opinions based on persuasive wireless hosts and sports stars, not complete a research project to determine what their views would be, but that was because he’d been raised to be better than that.
He had also been raised to learn as much as possible, so he would think it very strange if she closed a line of inquiry down entirely. And while he was a good boy, he was also fifteen, so he might very well just go off and do research on his own at Sonora, or use his stipend to order books behind her back once he was there. Just to see what it was that she didn’t want him to know. And who knew where that might go.
She did not want to be remembered as the mother of a dark lord who’d become one because she wouldn’t let him study philosophy, and he’d gone from studying that without her permission to learning the Dark Arts, all because she’d originally raised him to be a proper pureblood but had it somehow backfire on her to turn him into an academic.
Besides, if she couldn’t manipulate a fifteen-year-old into interpreting said philosophy the way she wanted him to, she really did not need to be playing the game she had dedicated most of her adult life to. Edmond was more intelligent than she was, in the sense of having an ability to learn and possibly even in some areas of knowledge, but at this point, she still knew more than he did about the world. Experience did count for something.
“I suppose we can manage this,” she said, indicating his list. “You’ll just need to be careful to keep up with your studies.”
“Of course,” Edmond said, sounding slightly surprised that she had bothered with the warning. Of course he would keep up with his studies. Of course he would not fail. Great Merlin, she could not let that trait get out of control. “Thank you.”