Chapter 217: Sir Rabbit

The next day was Saturday.

Richard woke up half an hour later than usual.

Last night's divination had drained him. [Sleep] left his mind clear upon waking, but his body stubbornly kept him in bed a while longer.

By the time he went downstairs, the kitchen was already bustling.

Evelyn, wearing her checkered apron, was on her tiptoes pulling a baking sheet out of the oven.

Arranged on the sheet was a row of rabbit-shaped gingerbread cookies. Every single one had a bulging round belly, their icing-drawn eyes dotted askew.

"Brother! You're finally up." She didn't even turn her head. "Hurry and be my taste tester, I just came up with a new recipe."

Richard leaned over to look at the tray of crooked-eyed rabbits.

"Why is this one... cross-eyed?"

"It's thinking," Evelyn said, moving the cross-eyed rabbit to the center of the tray.

"It's the smartest one of the litter. I gave him a knighthood. He's Mr. Rabbit."

"A gingerbread cookie gets a knighthood?"

"Why not? Just look at how scholarly his eyes are."

Richard picked up Mr. Rabbit and took a bite.

The spice of the ginger, the sweetness of the sugar, and the richness of the butter melted in his mouth, the edges baked to a perfect crisp.

"...Mhm, really good."

That bite of homemade sweetness was deeply comforting.

Evelyn's eyes immediately curved into happy crescents.

"Right? I swapped the white sugar for brown sugar this time, and added just a tiny bit of cinnamon measured out with those silver spoons Auntie gave us..."

She suddenly leaned in conspiratorially. "Brother, if we sold Mr. Rabbit, how many pence do you think he'd go for?"

"You're asking the wrong person. I don't even know how many cousins Mr. Rabbit has."

"He has eleven cousins."

Evelyn counted on her fingers.

"It's a pity one got burnt, so now there are ten. I renamed the burnt one the Fallen Rabbit Knight."

Richard laughed.

Margaret walked in from the living room carrying an empty teacup.

She looked at the two siblings laughing together, then at the tray of crooked-eyed rabbits, but didn't say a word.

By the time Richard came out of the kitchen, a bowl of oatmeal had already been set out for him.

"Eat your porridge before you have any more sweets," she said, setting the bowl on the table. "Nothing but sugar first thing in the morning will rot your teeth."

"I know, Mom."

Richard sat down and picked up the warm bowl of oatmeal.

Evelyn was still sorting her gingerbread rabbits into categories, muttering to herself.

Margaret sat nearby, prepping the vegetables for lunch while occasionally reminding her daughter that "too much cinnamon makes it bitter."

The snow outside had stopped. Faint, warm spring sunlight streamed in, falling on the tray of crooked-eyed gingerbread.

Richard ate his oatmeal spoonful by spoonful.

The things behind the veil had their own way of living.

The higher-ups placed their pieces on chessboards he couldn't see.

But this moment right now was more precious than anything else.

And precisely because of that, he needed to protect them well.

He finished the last bite of his oatmeal and reached for the Fallen Rabbit Knight.

"Hey... that one's burnt!" Evelyn slapped the back of his hand.

"The burnt ones taste better."

"I was keeping that one to study why it failed!"

"He died in the line of duty. It's time to lay him to rest."

Richard stuffed the charred gingerbread knight into his mouth, his expression deadpan.

"I'll see him off on his final journey."

Evelyn stomped her foot in indignation, while Margaret finally couldn't hold back and let out a low laugh.

After breakfast, Richard returned to his room.

He still had business to attend to this Saturday.

First was the tutoring session at the Dawn Family; second was his afternoon appointment in the Coleman Household backyard to administer that needle.

He first took inventory of the items he had received the night before.

Nemesis's Eagle Hook, Moon-Bathed Silk, and Silver Marrow Water.

He inspected the Eagle Hook with Spirit Vision again. Its ether was indeed bottomed out, incapable of yielding any points. But its amulet effect of "misidentification" ran perfectly parallel to the Silver Ring around his neck bearing Madam Marie's mark.

One made his Rank "unreadable," while the other made people "mistake him for a dead man."

Stacking the two together would make moving around outside much safer from now on.

Then there were the Ebony Box and Bronze Mirror traded from Ares, plus three soul-gnawer front canines and two shadow eater scales.

The canines and scales all carried ether radiation. Last night, he had separated them with oiled paper and sealed them individually in a Cloth Bag filled with salt.

Both were excellent spellcasting mediums.

He already had a few ideas and planned to forge them into equipment.

Prometheus... Richard added a line to the "Character Profiles" section of his notebook:

Highly likely backed by an alchemical artisan of the Hearth Fire Tradition, and has ties to the New Continent.

Finished with the inventory, he packed his satchel and went out to wait for the Dawn Family carriage.

The post-snow air was incredibly crisp.

At the ends of the alley, a few neighborhood children were building a half-collapsed snowman.

An old coal peddler pushed his cart around the street corner, the wheels pressing shallow ruts into the thin snow.

By day, Briston showed its face of industry, smokestacks, and turning wheels.

Only at night, along the unnoticed old alleys, abandoned mines, and canal banks, did its other face slowly reveal itself.

At 9:30 AM, the Dawn Family carriage pulled up exactly on time at the mouth of the alley.

The driver pulled the carriage door open and tipped his head toward the interior.

The roads were slick after the snow, and the horse's hooves crunched sharply against the thin ice.

Charlotte greeted him at the door. Today she wore a plain gray woolen dress, her hair pinned up loosely.

"Tom is already waiting for you in the study," she said, stepping aside to let him in.

"As for the manuscript, the editor-in-chief has replied."

Richard wiped his snow boots clean on the porch mat and looked up.

"How did it go?"

"I'll tell you after the lesson." Charlotte uncharacteristically kept him in suspense. "It's good news, you could say."

Richard entered the study.

Tom was becoming increasingly obedient.

He sat at the desk with the two assignments Richard had left him spread out on the surface.

He had copied the eight endings of the second declension across three full lines. The handwriting was crooked, but there wasn't a single omission.

"Look, sir, I've memorized them all." The boy pushed the notebook over, puffing his chest out.

"insula, insulam, insulae..."

Richard scanned all the way down, stopping at the column for the ablative case.

"This insulā, you forgot the macron."

"It's just a little dash," Tom said, curling his lip.

"A little dash decides life and death." Richard took a pencil and added a horizontal stroke above the a.

"Without it, the island becomes the nominative case, turning 'on the island' into 'the island is'.

"When the Romans went to court, a single long or short vowel could dictate whether a will went to one side or the other."

Tom's eyes widened.

"Seriously?"

"Seriously." Richard opened the old textbook he had brought and pointed to a page.

"Cicero once fought a case for a man named Quinctius. The opposition latched onto the case of a specific word in a legal document.

"The ownership of an entire family estate hung in the balance, resting entirely on the vowel at the end of that word."

He didn't finish the rest of the story. In that lawsuit, Cicero ultimately forced the opposition to publicly retract their claim.

Language was a weapon, but the fatal thrust often lay outside the language itself.

That layer of meaning was still a bit too early for a twelve-year-old.

For today's main lesson, Richard taught the word persona. He slowly wrote it out on the desk.

"Take a guess. What did this word originally mean?"

Tom stared at the string of letters for a moment.

"Person? Personality?"

"Right. If you look it up in a dictionary today, those are pretty much the definitions you'll find."

Richard took a small notebook from his satchel, flipped to a blank page, and drew a simple oval.

He dotted two holes inside the oval and drew a horizontal line near the bottom.

It was an incredibly crude mask.

"This is the oldest meaning of persona."

"...A face?"

"A mask."

Richard tapped the two holes with the tip of his pencil.

"When ancient Romans performed plays on stage, they didn't have microphones, nor did they have the kind of sets that project sound in modern theaters.

"The actors needed to ensure the audience in the very last row could hear their voices.

"So they came up with a method. They wore masks made of wood or leather over their faces.

"The mouth section of the mask was purposely hollowed out into a shape resembling a funnel."

Richard drew a small outward-opening funnel on the horizontal line at the bottom of the oval.

"When an actor delivered their lines, the sound came from their throat, echoed inside the mask, and was then spat out through this funnel.

"The sound was gathered and amplified. Even the furthest row in the amphitheater could hear exactly what he was saying."

Tom's eyes slowly widened a fraction.

"Persona originally referred to this wooden mask that allowed sound to pass through.

"Later, the word was borrowed to describe the 'role' a person played on stage.

"After that, 'role' was borrowed to describe 'that version of oneself' a person played in everyday life.

"Finally, it was borrowed to describe the concept of a 'person' itself."

The boy's brain was slightly overloaded for a moment.

After a while, Tom asked a question.

"...Why did it start with a mask?"

"Think about it. The actor stands on stage wearing a mask."

Richard laid his pencil horizontally across the drawing of the mask.

"The real face beneath the mask is invisible to the audience below.

"What the audience hears is the voice spitting out from the funnel.

"But where does the voice come from?"

"...From the throat."

"Whose throat?"

"...The actor's own."

"So?"

Richard looked at the boy.

"The mask doesn't speak on its own. It's the person beneath the mask using it to amplify their own voice.

"But the audience in the stands only remembers the mask, not the person beneath it."

Tom silently repeated those words to himself.

"...So is a persona ultimately the mask, or the person beneath it?"

Richard smiled.

"You've hit the nail on the head.

"For two thousand years, everyone who has studied this word has argued over that exact question.

"But personally, I think the reason a person is who they are is that they possess both the voice projected from the funnel, and the face hidden beneath it that refuses to be heard by anyone."

A trace of bewilderment slowly surfaced on Tom's face.

Richard slid the small notebook with the crude mask drawing across the desk to Tom.

"Take this page with you after class. Find a box and keep it safe.

"When you turn thirty, dig it out and take a look at it again.

"Tell me then whether, in your eyes, persona is the mask, the face, or the entirety of both combined."

"...Thirty? I still have eighteen years to go."

"I can wait."

When the lesson ended, Charlotte saw him to the door as usual.

Today she had something extra in her hands—a folded copy of the Northern Literary Review.

"Your piece." She handed the magazine over, flipping to the middle page.

"It's already been published. It's the headline piece in the 'Young Pens' column."

Richard took it and skimmed the page.

The perspective of the washerwomen; the people coughing up blood represented by Burns (under a pseudonym); the hidden thread of the "less eligibility principle" in the poor relief system... It was all there. Not a single word had been cut. It was published under his own name.

"The payment is one pound," Charlotte added. "The editor-in-chief approved it. That's the absolute ceiling for a prose piece."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me just yet." She closed the magazine but didn't let go immediately.

"The editor-in-chief called me personally yesterday. He specifically asked who wrote this piece."

Richard waited for her to continue.

"He said..." Charlotte weighed her words carefully.

"This piece has 'a chilling draft suppressed underneath it.' In all his years as an editor, this is the first time an essay about laborers and washerwomen has made the back of his neck tighten."

Richard's fingertips paused on the magazine's cover.

A chill. A chill again. Charlotte had said the exact same thing after she read it.

"He likes it, but he has his misgivings."

Charlotte spoke very slowly.

"He said that once this gets published, there will likely be people over at the Poor Relief Committee and among the owners of the Western Suburbs mines who won't be comfortable reading it.

You didn't name names, you didn't chant slogans, you didn't offer a single formula for reform... Article 34 of the Albion Publishing Act can't touch you.

But the more you write like this, the more resentment you'll draw."

"What would they resent me for?"

"For making people 'see' it."

Charlotte shoved the magazine back into his hands.

"An owner can ignore a thousand people like that dying on the docks, but he can't ignore a piece of writing that makes the entire city's readers feel a tightness in the back of their necks.

"You took that chill they pretend not to see and shoved it right under people's noses."

She stood firmly on the porch steps, the white mist of her breath dispersing in the cold air.

"The editor-in-chief asked me to pass on a message. He said, 'This kid has a future, but a future is something that can sometimes be a signboard, and other times, a target.'"

Richard rolled the magazine up and tucked it into his satchel.

He thought of the Star Card Mrs. MacNeil had drawn that night.

The woman kneeling half-upright by the water's edge, pouring the pitcher of water in her hands back into the river. The water returned to the river, leaving her hands empty.

It had been published, and the effect was excellent, but after publication, a price would have to be paid.

Right now, a corner of that price's outline had surfaced.

People were starting to remember his name, and not in a very friendly manner.

"I understand." He nodded to Charlotte. "I'll hide it a little deeper when I write in the future."

"Don't hide it too deep." Charlotte waved her hand.

"If you hide it too deep, you won't be able to express the meaning. You'll have to gauge that balance yourself."

She turned and went back inside the house.

Richard stood at the bottom of the steps, weighing the rolled-up magazine in his hand.

A one-pound payment, plus a name that might catch the eye of the admissions offices of a few liberal arts colleges in the Imperial Capital;

A chill that tightened the backs of people's necks, along with a few unnamed owners who were already beginning to feel displeasure toward him.

Whether this trade was worth it or not was still impossible to calculate at the moment.

...

After lunch, he went to the Coleman Household.

Coleman had swept the section of snow by the wall into a corner, clearing out an empty space for practice.

"Still doing the needle today?" He rolled up his cuffs, exposing his left forearm.

"We are." Richard took out the long box of Silver Needles.