Dying for love
Excerpt from Flight of the Clockwork Angels:
Two centuries later I held on to the curl. It was all I had. The lightest breeze would scatter the soft baby hair like dandelion seeds on the breeze. This ancient bell tower was once a refuge and the place I met my lover away from prying eyes. It was also where I died.Tielo always had a romantic imagination. After all, he was an aristocrat not an assassin. Officially, it was Tielo's workroom where he constructed his artefacts. It was decades since any child of his family had needed to work, but the Justi were known to be eccentric. He told me 'work' started as an affectation to annoy his parents, but then he found that once he started he didn't know how to stop. Rebellion fizzled out in the face of society's indifference. So long as he merely played at 'art' and fulfilled his social obligations, no one cared if he spent his time working as a gentleman artificer. Though Tielo knew he was a genius, it would never have been acceptable for him to claim the credit for his own work. He resented having to sell his designs through an intermediary. It made him angry and reckless.His family had given him the run of this old tower and no one ever came here but us. Although he'd painted me and cast my image in bronze, 'my little Engels' he called them, neither of us ever pretended that when I stripped for him it was ever about the art. The art came later. Usually much later, and often when I was long gone back to my grandfather's house and the political world where we were rivals and enemies. Officially he was painting my portrait. We were young and naive then and believed the cover story was effective. Of course 'everyone' knew about us, and drunk on love neither of us cared to remember that we'd been thrown together—sacrificial lambs on the altar of our families' ambition. I thought I could have it all. I thought I could die for love. That I'd die without him.
Flight of the Clockwork Angels is available from Silver Publishing and Amazon
I discovered this amazing image of a mourning angel on wiki commons
Mourning angel at the churchyard of San Miniato al Monte (Firenze) in Firenze, Italy.Photo by Mark Voorendt, April 2001.
Two centuries later I held on to the curl. It was all I had. The lightest breeze would scatter the soft baby hair like dandelion seeds on the breeze. This ancient bell tower was once a refuge and the place I met my lover away from prying eyes. It was also where I died.Tielo always had a romantic imagination. After all, he was an aristocrat not an assassin. Officially, it was Tielo's workroom where he constructed his artefacts. It was decades since any child of his family had needed to work, but the Justi were known to be eccentric. He told me 'work' started as an affectation to annoy his parents, but then he found that once he started he didn't know how to stop. Rebellion fizzled out in the face of society's indifference. So long as he merely played at 'art' and fulfilled his social obligations, no one cared if he spent his time working as a gentleman artificer. Though Tielo knew he was a genius, it would never have been acceptable for him to claim the credit for his own work. He resented having to sell his designs through an intermediary. It made him angry and reckless.His family had given him the run of this old tower and no one ever came here but us. Although he'd painted me and cast my image in bronze, 'my little Engels' he called them, neither of us ever pretended that when I stripped for him it was ever about the art. The art came later. Usually much later, and often when I was long gone back to my grandfather's house and the political world where we were rivals and enemies. Officially he was painting my portrait. We were young and naive then and believed the cover story was effective. Of course 'everyone' knew about us, and drunk on love neither of us cared to remember that we'd been thrown together—sacrificial lambs on the altar of our families' ambition. I thought I could have it all. I thought I could die for love. That I'd die without him.
Flight of the Clockwork Angels is available from Silver Publishing and Amazon
I discovered this amazing image of a mourning angel on wiki commons
Mourning angel at the churchyard of San Miniato al Monte (Firenze) in Firenze, Italy.Photo by Mark Voorendt, April 2001.
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