The elderly scholars show Bass a play in which their youthful encounters with the Countess are described. We learn how Felkior lost his sight and why they refuse to let Bass ask the Countess for help.
Scholars’ theme: “Shall I strive with words to move” by John Dowland.
Young rakes’ theme: “If My Complaints Could Passions Move” by John Dowland.
Countess’s theme: “April is in my Mistress’ Face” by Thomas Morley.
Outro bracketed by: “The Witches’ Dance” by an anonymous English composer.
All performed by Jon Sayles and used by his kind permission.
When I was writing this part, I thought, how can I do a flashback to give backstory to over 20 years before, when practically the whole thing is being told through Bass’s diary? My solution was that the old men wrote a play, years ago, which tells the story of their tangles with the Countess – a play which they have never dared make public for fear of her vengeance.
I have a fondness for the theme that I used for the young rakes (Felkior and Tamas as young men); I studied it in music at high school. The first verse, which is all I remember hearing, goes like this:
If my complaints could passions move,
Or make Love see wherein I suffer wrong:
My passions were enough to prove,
That my despairs had govern’d me too long.
O Love, I live and die in thee,
Thy grief in my deep sighs still speaks:
Thy wounds do freshly bleed in me,
My heart for thy unkindness breaks:
Yet thou dost hope when I despair,
And when I hope, thou mak’st me hope in vain.
Thou say’st thou canst my harms repair,
Yet for redress, thou let’st me still complain.
There’s a second verse, I now discover, which is also quite apt:
Can Love be rich, and yet I want?
Is Love my judge, and yet I am condemn’d?
Thou plenty hast, yet me dost scant:
Thou made a God, and yet thy power contemn’d.
That I do live, it is thy power:
That I desire it is thy worth:
If Love doth make men’s lives too sour,
Let me not love, nor live henceforth.
Die shall my hopes, but not my faith,
That you that of my fall may hearers be
May here despair, which truly saith,
I was more true to Love than Love to me.
Mike Reeves-McMillan lives in Auckland, New Zealand, the setting of his Auckland Allies contemporary urban fantasy series; and also in his head, where the weather is more reliable, and there are a lot more wizards. He also writes the Gryphon Clerks series (steampunk/magepunk), the Hand of the Trickster series (sword-and-sorcery heist capers), and short stories which have appeared in venues such as Compelling Science Fiction and Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores.
