Sweet Little Lovely: A Gothic Romance

The door of the stately Longhorn home stood open to the balmy evening, spilling forth the smooth sounds of music and polite revelries and casting out a warm amber into the blues and purples of the summer dusk. And within, Marvelous stood tall and confident and walked about with smiles for familiar old friends. More than a few young ladies met him with eyes that sparkled shyly of romantic dreams and a lingering hint of sad resignation. Yet sweeping his gaze across the grand foyer, crowded about with mingling youths, Mr. and Mrs. Longhorn watching and conversing with the other chaperones on the second floor gallery, he could find nary a hint of Little Lovely.

Suddenly, he felt a weight fall across his back, one that smelled heavily of perfumes and ruffled with thin summer fabrics.

“Marvelous, I've been waiting for you all evening!”

His eyes rolled at the musical yet biting voice. “Good evening, Ginger,” he said with barely restrained disappointment. “Would you kindly remove yourself from my person?”

She circled about to his face. Her short auburn mane bobbing as she turned her head away, she watched him from the corner of her painted eyes with a hurt pout evident upon her mouth.

“Don't you feel unforgivably rude leaving a lady to fend for herself among such a terribly uncouth group of colts?” she asked, a poorly concealed smirk twisting her lips. “But, I'm sure I could be convinced to forgive you if you should offer … oh, maybe a dance or two.”

“I'm afraid that price is a bit too high,” he said as he stepped aside. “I'll try to console myself of the pain of your resentment.”

She followed at his shoulder as he strode through the masses of partygoers, her light, brown dress flowing about her legs and looking almost childish compared to the rich and colorful outfits of the other girls, dressed to the nines in their frills and flounces. “Oh come on, Marv, what's so special about her anyway?” It was, after all, common knowledge that Marvelous was interested in only one particular mare. “Any of the girls here would be just as good, wouldn't they?” she asked while obviously referring to herself.

He replied slowly and thoughtfully, a tired sigh in his voice. “I am sorry, Ginger. It's just a bit difficult, after all, to find any particular interest in the same girls you've known ever since you were a foal.”

“Well they don't have any difficulty finding an interest in you, you know.”

“Ginger,” he replied shortly, “I think I've made myself perfectly clear.”

She frowned as he left her behind – and as an afterthought, she defiantly stuck out her tongue at the back of his frustratingly handsome head.

He passed from the foyer into the small parlor to the side, the music softly fading to be replaced by quiet conversations of ponies who wished for a bit of seclusion and recess from the clamor. It was there that his eyes finally rested on the unmistakable golden locks of his esteemed young lady. She stood, thoroughly alone, at the window, looking out with an equal mix of anxiety and melancholy.

She noted his eager approach with a start before her face flashed with recognition and happiness.

“Good evening, M-Marvelous,” she greeted as she rubbed her hooves shyly upon the floor.

“Good evening indeed. My evening has just become significantly better, in fact. But, Little Lovely,” he said seriously, “I must say, it doesn't seem that you're having a very good time at all.”

“I was, um, waiting for you.” She turned back to the window now and again, her voice quiet and somber. “It seems that everypony here already knows each other. It leaves me with a certain feeling that I'd be imposing.”

He lifted her chin and looked into her ghostly gray eyes with a cheerful smile. “Well, that just won't do. If you would like, I'd be happy to introduce you to everyone.”

“I ….” She hesitated. She looked about the room, taking careful note of all the happy ponies chatting with the old friends they'd known for so many years. “I think that might be … nice.”

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

The fading sounds of quiet conversation distantly behind them, Marvelous and Little Lovely stood together in the meager gardens of the old plantation house, watching as the fireflies blinked lime colored starlight over the long moon-shadows.

"Thank you for everything, Marvelous." Her voice was soft, melodious as the hum of a violin over the discordant chirps of the crickets. The sound brought to his mind the fresh thought of their recent hours together, the way her quiet, stuttering mumbles had eventually given way to laughter and lightness at his own persistent coaxing.

"Well, I'm happy you've enjoyed your night," he returned. "And you see? Everyone loved meeting you, as I knew quite well they would."

"I loved meeting them, too. It's been such a long time since I've had f-friends I'd feared I'd up-and forgotten some crucial bit." She looked away, her smile still sitting gleefully in its place. "But now, it's rather exciting to think of the sorts of things we could all do together. I'd like to imagine I'll be invited to tea someday or maybe even a trip into the city to see the shops with the other girls."

"I'm sure you'll get on splendidly."

They slipped into a long, comfortable silence. When he turned to her, perhaps to make a comment regarding the music or how Maple Toffee had commented so positively on her dress, he found himself frozen. Her cheeks, her neck – her white coat in the bright light of the moon shone like the blue of snow on a winter's night.

He, being thus transfixed, was unable to speak.

"I think my favorite part of the n-night was … being with you, Marvelous."

Their eyes met, and Marvelous found his heart gripped, and cursed himself when he felt a sudden unfamiliar absence of charm and confidence. His heart beat feverishly as he took her hooves, and he smiled an uneasy, nervous smile.

"Your … your hooves are cold," he said awkwardly. They both shared a quiet laugh.

"Little Lovely, I would very much like to … that is, could I see you again, after tonight?"

Her eyes shimmered with such happiness that words could scarcely hope to express it all. So she just quietly replied "I'd like that very much."

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Not many days hence found Marvelous once more falling into the rut of routine and simplicity, and so he listened with carefully concealed boredom to the meandering tale woven by his elder sister, a story which was excessive in detail and wholly unnecessary as everyone in the family had been aware of the plans for quite some time; apparently she and Golden Silence had finally convinced the mayor to consider their plans for a public library. While Marvelous could honestly say that he was pleased for the two of them, his patience was waning in the little room, the drooping sun adding its heat to the cramped and crowded kitchen already warmed by the fading embers of the stove at his back.

His father smiled across the supper table. “You mean to tell me that Golden actually spoke the the mayor himself?” he asked. “What'd you have to do? Yank his tail to get his mouth to move? A bit of peanut butter on the gums?”

“Oh, daddy. Why, I'll have you know that Golden is actually quite eloquent given the right circumstances.” Her husband smiled at her side, his head drooping shyly from the unexpected attention, a comical sight as always and terribly unsuited to his naturally large and imposing frame.

“I'm sure. Still, it's nice to have someone in the family with some ambition.” He turned with a playful smirk to Grand. “A little drive now and then would be nice around here.”

Grand merely waved away the veiled accusation, his mouth still stuffed with food. “I'm perfectly ambitious, father. It just takes a different form is all.”

“Oh?”

“Of course. I have to leave a good social impression, after all, if I'm ever going to find a fitting wife.”

Marvelous could scarcely contain his snide laughter as his brother extolled his social graces while sputtering bits of food upon the table. “Come now, Grand,” he said, “a 'fitting' wife for you? I daresay you'll be hard pressed to find a sufficiently lazy mare in the entire county.” His sister laughed behind her hoof, and his mother sent him an admonishing glare, though her disapproval was clearly forced over a lingering smile at the corner of her lips.

Grand was unimpressed. “Before you comment on anyone else's laziness, maybe you should lift a hoof in real work for once instead of puttering about with your toys all day.” He grinned maliciously. “Though I suppose you would be an expert on mares, seeing how you're so much like one yourself. When I find a bride, perhaps you'd like to give her some advice on styling her mane for our wedding?”

“I look forward to meeting her. I suppose you'll find a girl who will appreciate your looks – a nice blind mare perhaps.”

“Hmph! So says the pony who's courting the cripple.”

Marvelous sat for countless angry heartbeats, his eyes down and his ears unhearing even as the quiet was cut with the scraping of silver upon plate.

“Marvelous,” came the voice of his sister as she hastily rose from the table, “I've been meaning to bring up some preserves from the cellar, but there's just so much old junk down there that it's become too hard to get around. I wonder if you'd help me?”

Giving a quick glance at his brother, who sat withered and shamefaced at his side, Marvelous followed her to the corner of the kitchen where the entrance to the cellar stood, a dull door of planks set upon aged hinges. It squeaked and groaned behind them as she shut it gently, immediately lighting the passage with a spark from her horn. “Don't pay any mind to Grand.” Her quiet voice sounded oddly close in the tiny passage. “Little Lovely really is a fine girl.”

With a nod and a sigh, he resolved to leave the incident behind him, counting it just another example of his elder brother's rather distasteful character.

“I do need your help though, as it happens,” she said as she continued downward on dusty brick steps. “There's simply too much trash piled up down here. Daddy really could stand to be more careful.”

The heat of the kitchen, the scents of spice and vinegar and manifold wafting odors which brought to mind old, nostalgic comforts and half remembered childhood conversations were set awash by the frigid, empty air that settled heavily beneath the old home.

The nearly silent taps of their hooves upon the heavy brick began to resonate as they stepped from the wooden walls of the passage into the cavity of the cellar itself. Immediately, their view was beset by the tall, splintering form of a bookcase, looming indifferently over the entranceway.

“You see?” Splendid asked with a clear smirk in her voice.

Through the slats of the shelf and upon the stacks of disorganized detritus piled throughout the room, his sister's horn cut harsh, hard swaths of golden light and left behind long shadows of unpierced blackness. The far corners of the chamber were left untouched, leaving the appearance of empty, darkened doorways that stood open and whispered the familiar anxiety that's so often encountered in the dark of one’s own home.

His sister spoke as they shuffled along the slim path left between the stacks of crates and broken half-forms of old furniture. “Marvelous ...” she said as he followed, “you understand that I do like Little Lovely.…”

“Yes?”

“But, well, I am a bit afraid for the two of you.” Her voice took on a solemn tone, almost apologetic, or perhaps with a hint of pity. “I worry about her sickness, Marvelous.”

He shook his head unconsciously as he shifted aside a dusty steamer trunk. “Well there's nothing to worry about,” he replied simply – even defiantly. “I know it may not be easy for the two of us. I don't want a wife just for housework or what have you, not like some colts around here.”

A smile grew upon his lips. “It seems that recently, I simply can't imagine living even one day without her.”

Splendid remained silent, leaving no further words to betray her still somber thoughts.

They came at a shuffling pace to their goal, the claustrophobic hallway of junk very abruptly ending in a dusty tool chest, behind which sat a meager shelf of jars – sugar syrups, jellies, and their mother's preserves stored since before the last year's fall.

“Well, here we are,” she said. “I think we can move this to the side and squeeze through. You get on that side, and I'll push from here.”

With heavy scrapes upon the old brick floor, they jostled and heaved the old chest aside. His sister looked over the old jars with glib satisfaction. “The bottom shelf, just as I thought.”

As she lifted her preserves, Marvelous found himself rather uncomfortably pressed between the old chest and the solid wall of the cellar. He began to extricate himself with careful haste, lest he find himself buried beneath the heavy weights of the stacked boxes about his shoulders. He struggled, finally making his way from the wall, when he felt his back hoof strike upon something solid, to be quickly followed by the rolling “tink” of heavy glass and the feel of some strange, sticky muck on the bottom of his back hoof.

A distasteful groan rose to his throat as he dug about in the blackness behind the crate and found, as he expected, the round form of an old jar, displaced from its proper position upon the shelf and its lid lost at some point in the past.

He lifted it into the light, the clear amber within showing its contents to be honey, though he couldn't remember when last they'd occasioned to use honey for anything, his mother being more particularly fond of brown sugar.

His eyes stayed fixed on the old jar, fastened to a curious shadow that seemed to fall upon it. He soon realized that what he'd taken for a shadow was, in fact, some sort of dark object suspended within. He lifted it to his face, turning it about this way and that as he squinted at the contents, and as it happened to catch the light in just the right way, the shape finally came into clarity.

He gave a start, only just able to keep the jar aloft as he found himself staring at the gray form of a mouse.

It sat motionless, floating dead in the honey, its paws lax, its big, black eyes open just a bit, leaving it with a rather sleepy sort of look.

Splendid had taken notice of his sudden stillness and peered in over his shoulder. “Is that a mouse?”

“Mm hm,” he intoned. “Disgusting. But I have to wonder, just how long has this old jar been here anyway?” He began turning the jar about. “From the looks of him, I'd say our little friend hasn't been here very long at all.”

“Actually, it may have been quite a bit longer than you'd think,” she said, taking the tone of the practiced student of medicine. “Honey is a preservative, after all.”

He hummed. “Really?”

“It's quite useful for treating wounds, in fact. It prevents infections. More to the point,” she added, “I believe that some ancient civilizations had even used it as an embalming agent. It's entirely possible this little mouse has been in there for, oh, a few years or more.”

Marvelous gave a snort as he cast the jar one last disapproving glance and thought that the whole thing seemed like nothing more than a waste of perfectly good honey.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

The primary weights turn the center wheel pinion, and the center wheel drives the going train. The center wheel arbor is connected to the cannon pinion, which couples and decouples the minute wheel. The minute wheel turns the minute hand and then the hour hand via a precise twelve-to-one reduction.

A second weight drives the striking train, marking each hour according to –

"Well, what do you think, Marvelous?"

Marvelous turned with a start, his overly attentive nature betraying him and once more leaving him in a somewhat embarrassing state. "Hm? Oh, yes, it's quite nice, sir."

Mr. Carver's clocks were certainly "nice." Quite remarkable, in fact, and no less so for their peculiar abundance. There were, in this room alone, no less than half-a-dozen, each one splendidly and intricately fashioned, stained, inlaid, pieced together, and woven about with silver filigree. He noted a table clock of polished ebony crafted as a stunning representation of a noblecolt's chateau, each individual window and door carved and placed in perfect scale, and a cuckoo-clock which bore a bird of such miraculous detail one would swear that, in his amazing artistry, he had somehow created a living bird from the same material upon which it was perched.

So pervasive was the fruit of Mr. Carver's craft that the scent of fresh wood was inescapable. Marvelous found himself nearly overpowered at the potent odors of cedar, pine, and cherry woods, and the slightly bitter touch of chemicals and drying paint.

Yet, his attentions once more captured by the clocks, he did feel a bit distressed. He couldn't shake the knowledge of a number of slight imperfections, not in their form so much as in their mechanisms – an uneven tick here, an improperly weighted pendulum there, each one ever so slightly flawed. He would perhaps mention it some other time.

The shaky clattering of china marking her arrival, Little Lovely stepped into the room from the kitchen, carrying in her mouth a large silver tray upon which sat a simple white tea service. She gently placed it on the small table that sat in the center of the room.

Mr. Carver greeted his daughter with a warm smile. "Thank you, dear." As the two proceeded to join her at the table, he turned ever so slightly in Marvelous' direction. "You know," he said, "I wish that more young fellows could be like you, Marvelous. You've got a good head on your shoulders, and quite an eye for fine craftsmanship, if I do say so myself."

Marvelous stirred his tea about, dropping in a cube of sugar before taking a sip. "It's very kind of you to say so. I would be lying if I didn't confess a certain appreciation for beautiful things." Little Lovely looked away, a small smile playing upon her lips as he cast a sly glance in her direction.

"As it happens," he said, returning his cup to his saucer, "you've reminded me of an important matter, Mr. Carver." Gently placing his tea upon the table, he turned, and with slow and careful motions, lifted a small brown pouch from his saddlebags. Little Lovely and her father watched intently as, with a crinkle of tissue paper and a delicate tinkle of porcelain, he drew from the bag a fine, white teacup, its thin walls and handle woven about with flowering golden vines.

"T-that's the one I –"

"A gift," he said, delicately placing it down before her. "It was just as I said, a very simple repair."

She turned it about in her hooves, never lifting it far from the table. Each tiny fragment had been perfectly restored, and not a single crack could be seen on the glistening surface. "It's as good as new," he added.

But Little Lovely shook her head. "No."

"No?"

"Before it w-was just a cup. It was very pretty, of course. But-but this one … this is the one that you made." Her eyes, lifted with some effort away from the pristine glimmer of her gift, seemed to almost glimmer themselves as they fell once more on Marvelous. "This one is so much better than the other."

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

The two of them strolled together along the path separating Mr. Carver's field from the neighboring farm. Long, twisting waves blew across the prairie grasses, greens and browns and flecks of wildflower color all swaying beneath the sleepy afternoon clouds.

Little Lovely closed her eyes and lifted her face into the breeze. "It feels good, doesn't it?" Her golden mane was dancing in the wind, a flowing river glowing against the horizon. "Being alive, I mean."

He felt the wind pressing against every inch of his skin, heard its gentle flow in his ears. As he breathed, he realized that he could feel the beat of his heart.

She turned her eyes to him – her eyes that were like pale reflections of the soft silver sky.

He tasted her kiss, a startling sweetness on his lips; he felt the spark that lit in his belly and he smelled the delicate, flowery perfume that rose from her skin and mixed with the summer air.