#tristram

Tristram being Tristram: No we gotta

Dinadan: Why though

Tristram: We're knights

Dinadan: Fine. jerk

Got tagged in writing shares by @willtheweaver and @gioia-writes-and-others ! Thank you!

Something a bit different this time. This may or may not be canon but if it is maybe I'll use it as a gothic-style frame story. This snippet is written from the POV of Tristan's sister Lenore's son, decades after the events of the story. I have this idea that he grows up to become a Victorian-era spiritualist. Here he's sought out the mansion Tristan and Lenore grew up in and is shown to what used to be Tristan's bedroom. I'm imagining this would take place somewhere around the 1880s.

I took it upon myself to travel into the region of the house my mother was reared in, and found it still standing, although much dilapidated. It is a girl’s school now, and I’m sorry to say not a very good one. I was greeted at the door by a frazzled and severe-looking dame, who led me through dreary halls bearing mere traces of former grandeur. The walls were laden with rotten molding, revealing remnants of old colorful paint under the poorly applied whitewash. Clusters of unfortunate waifs, ranging in age it seemed from five to fifteen, peered at me in wonder from shadowy doorways with big hungry eyes. The murmur of many little voices repeating verses by rote in monotone floated to my ears in one wider corridor. Finally my guide led me through a plain and splintering wooden door, which popped open from its casement with a violent rattle as if it hadn’t been touched in years, and up a narrow, winding stair. On the landing she fussed with her chatelaine until she found the right key, brown and rusty, and shoved it into the lock of the dark mass in front of us which evidently was a door. It skidded across the swollen boards of the floor beneath it and groaned. Through this portal we stepped into a large drafty gray room. Here, then. “Might I take a look around?” I asked the woman. “At your pleasure, sir,” she replied coldly and with obvious contempt. “The funny little things all think it’s haunted.” At this she raised her eyebrows meaningfully and abruptly left, closing the door behind her and leaving me alone in the abandoned chamber. I half expected to hear her lock the door behind her and find myself walled in alive.

Tagging: @wildgeraniumwrites, @gaslightwestern, @pluppsauthor, @dyoniawrites,

Tristram and Yseult

Artist: Sidney Harold Meteyard (English, 1868-1947)

Date: Exhibited 1907

Medium: Watercolour with bodycolour and tempera

Collection: Private Collection

Tristan and Iseult