Armand’s First Letter. Amelia’s First Letter.

15 January 1022, Veronica’s College, Edenford

My dearest cousin Armand,

Dr. Peterson informs me that my studies in Old Cumbrian will be a great help to me when it comes time for me to tackle Hanonese. I have informed him that I have no intention of studying Hanonese, that I intend for Maximilian to make us rich through speculation in the funds (or more likely through continued investment in Tuppenny Wagons), and will therefore be able to hire a secretary to tackle Hanonese on my behalf.

He simply gave me a wry look and said something about fish to water and swans to lakes—for I am to inform you that he is a incorrigible flirt. By which I mean he flirts constantly, and as one who has studied theoretical works on the topic and wishes to learn the practice. I have had to give him repeated set downs, but he takes no notice.

Maximilian is amused rather angered. “I have seen his type before,” he told me several days ago. “Young, wholly invested in his subject, with no practical experience of womenfolk other than his mother and sisters, and awkward as a newborn pup chasing a carriage—he has no notion of how to go on once the carriage is caught, and no ability to catch it in the first place.”

My beloved is undoubtedly right, but nevertheless I have taken to avoiding enclosed spaces in Dr. Peterson’s company.

In my spare time between learning Old Cumbrian grammar and orthography, along with the peculiar runes with which Old Cumbrian adorns the common script, I have been accumulating Old Cumbrian word lists. Moreover, I have been scanning them for any words which appear to be cognate to “Ituria” or “Iturian”, or to the handful of other terms and names we have from the Ancients.

There is a special kind of book, I have now learned, called a concordance, that lists words alphabetically (or runically, I suppose) and lists the places they appear in the extant sources. No such work exists for Old Cumbrian (for that would make my work too easy); indeed, it is Dr. Peterson’s dream to publish the first one. He has given me access to copies of his notes, which are naturally incomplete; and, as I must be working through various Old Cumbrian texts anyway, keeping track of the words used and their locations is the least I can do in repayment for his help, yes?

Alas, yes.

The tricky bit is recording the locations. A scriptural concordance is straightforward: Holy Scripture was divided into chapter and verse in ancient times, and chapter and verse are familiar to anyone over the age of six. But many Old Cumbrian texts have no prescribed indexing scheme as yet, so one must be devised; or, if one has been devised (and Peterson has devised several for different texts), it might exist only as annotations on a hand-written copy. The few printed texts are in better shape, for they are all scholarly tomes, and devising an indexing scheme is part of producing such; but in some cases there are competing tomes, with slightly different transcriptions of the text and idiosyncratic numbering, and in some cases the scholar chose to get unreasonably fancy.

I find myself dreaming at night of trying to find my home through large, illegible blocks of text, attempting to navigate by marginal sequences of numbers, dots, and dashes that swim and shift drunkenly from line to line and page to page. I awake from these dreams fatigued but grateful.

Speaking of Tuppenny Wagons, your step-father has embarked on a new business venture. The Former’s Guild has contracted with a carriage-maker to provide the “underpinnings” for a line of floating carriages. Like your first wagons, they must be pulled by horses and can ascend no higher than any normal carriage; for, as Grandmaster Netherington-Coates says, his intended customers are a conservative lot. He hopes to woo them with his “cloud suspension”; later, he will see about removing the horses altogether.

He has experimented with light phaetons and curricles, but has learned that it is difficult to drive to the inch when the conveyance has no contact with the ground: the horses may turn swiftly but the carriage adjusts more slowly and several of his early efforts were smashed on the gate posts of The Elms in Wickshire. Now he is aiming at large, luxurious carriages, the sort that are drawn more sedately. He has also been working on a device that will allow the driver to guide the motion of the carriage by moving his knee from side to side—his knee, for of course his hands will be fully occupied with the leads.

Maximilian has invested a small sum of money in this endeavor; we have hopes that in time it will fund our peregrinations for many years to come!

Your studious and concordant cousin,

Amelia

Next letter.

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Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash