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fiction

The MP Visits Saint Clare Part III – Gladys Williams’ Return

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“The MP Visits Saint Clare” continues

Earlier instalments:

Further particulars may be found in the Foreword.

This sequence draws from the Charrington Papers and the less officious corners of Saint Clare’s—those neat staff reports never meant to withstand scrutiny; the household logs written with a pointed, domestic hauteur; and the diaries, margins, and illicit notes in which the girls record rather more than their elders imagine. Some documents are respectably typed. Others arrive in the swift, unsteady cursive of someone writing under pressure, or in a place she very much oughtn’t be.

Readers are invited to take up the archivist’s task, and the investigator’s pleasure, of weighing the School’s polished accounts against the smudged, contradictory recollections of those who actually lived the day. Much will be implied. Little will be stated outright. And attentive readers may notice that Miss Gladys Williams’s file, though she left Saint Clare more than five years ago, has begun to grow again—curiously, and on no official authority whatsoever.

The archive remembers. And so, of course, does Inez.

Comments are warmly welcomed. While I enjoy seeing them on Bluesky and Twitter, those left here become part of the archive proper, where they may—quietly—shape what follows.

Foreword (From the Archivist):

Readers who have followed Part II will remember that Miss Gladys Williams arrived at Saint Clare already defeated by heat, hunger, and Mr. Charrington’s conversational style (which may be charitably described as “Hansard, but crosser”). What awaited her inside the administrative building was not respite but that most perilous of schoolgirl terrains: the dim corridor leading to the walnut-panelled study of the Head.

Few who have passed through those doors, whether with contraband in their pockets or mud on their gym-slips, ever forget the sensation. The smell of polish, the sense of one’s sins rising from the floorboards like mist, the dreadful awareness that one’s shoes are suddenly either too loud or too squeaky but never, alas, normal.

Gladys records here the brief march between the playing fields and that fateful door, her glossy heels clicking out a rhythm that suggests not so much “dignified adult woman” as “junior in a very great deal of trouble indeed.” It is one of the more revealing passages in the Charrington Papers: a moment when a grown woman discovers, to her horror, that the past can still catch her by the collar.

This instalment brings us only as far as the threshold. Beyond it, another witness. One who’s far calmer, far drier, and with far fewer personal grievances, will take up the tale. 

From Gladys Williams Diary

12 July 1955 continued

Yet there was no way for me to join the Saint Clare girls on the upper fields. Turning away from the bright, joyful noise, I faced the administrative building, every brick of it as unforgiving as I remembered

Here we stepped out of the light and into the dim hallway. That smell! Lavender wax polish, some sort of industrial cleaner, and somehow, beneath it all, a faint whiff of boiled cabbage.

The heat of the motor had wilted me utterly. My suit,  the darling black one with the tiny white polka-dots (quite of the moment!) .hung heavy and creased from the long ride, the fitted waist damp where I had leaned against the sticky leather. My little red hat, once crisp, now felt mashed and crooked against my hair, and my matching gloves clung unpleasantly to my fingers. Even my handbag seemed accusatory, its bright scarlet too bold in the dim corridor. Worst of all were the heels, high, glossy, and entirely unsuitable for school tiles. Theye struck the floor sharply with every step, announcing my approach like a metronome of doom. (more…)

fiction

The MP Visits Saint Clare Part II – The Road to Saint Clare

Posted on By Mija

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Banner of "How to Read Inez of the Upper iV"This sequence draws from the Charrington Papers and the less officious corners of Saint Clare’s—those neat staff reports never meant to withstand scrutiny; the household logs written with a pointed, domestic hauteur; and the diaries, margins, and illicit notes in which the girls record rather more than their elders imagine. Some documents are respectably typed. Others arrive in the swift, unsteady cursive of someone writing under pressure, or in a place she very much oughtn’t be.

Readers are invited to take up the archivist’s task, and the investigator’s pleasure, of weighing the School’s polished accounts against the smudged, contradictory recollections of those who actually lived the day. Much will be implied. Little will be stated outright. And attentive readers may notice that Miss Gladys Williams’s file, though she left Saint Clare more than five years ago, has begun to grow again—curiously, and on no official authority whatsoever.

The archive remembers. And so, of course, does Inez.

Comments are warmly welcomed. While I enjoy seeing them on Bluesky and Twitter, those left here become part of the archive proper, where they may—quietly—shape what follows.

The MP Visits Saint Clare continues. The earlier parts are:

Context is in Foreword below.

The story of Inez de Vries unfolds through a constellation of documents—some official, drawn from the prim and unforgiving files of Saint Clare’s School for Girls; others more intimate, taken from the journals, letters, and scribbled notes of the girls themselves. Some will appear typed and orderly; others retain the texture of handwriting, rendered in a cursive-style font.

Readers are invited to step into the role of archivist, assembling the story from these traces, and imagining the lives that fill the gaps between pages—the tensions, the alliances, the secrets too dangerous to write down. Not everything will be explained. But Inez is watching. And she remembers.

Note: Comments are read and much appreciated. Much as I like reading them on Twitter and Bluesky, I love getting them here, and promise to respond. Moreover your ideas and reactions also join the archives, where they may quietly shape what comes next.

Foreword (From the Archivist)

Those who have read the entry for 11 July 1955 will recall that the day ended in no small amount of sulking, slammed doors, and the sort of tense household quiet that staff notice before anyone else. Indeed, Mrs Dorcas Fielding—Housekeeper of Birchwood Grange and long-suffering witness to Miss Gladys Williams’s moods—noted in her report that she was “glad to see the back of them both” when the party departed the next morning.

With that cheerful blessing, we arrive at 12 July, a date that would prove no gentler for anyone involved.

This first instalment follows Gladys’s own account of the journey from London to Saint Clare: the damp gloves, the Lyons tea, the spitefully packed hamper, and the slow, piercing recognition that she is returning not merely to a school but to the last place her life made any sense.

It is worth remembering, as the Rover crawls toward Oxford and tempers fray, that the true calamity of the day has not yet occurred. Gladys feels it coming—in the rustle of Gerald’s papers, in the heaviness of her own hunger, and in the sinking of her heart as the familiar silhouette of the school rises before her.

For now, though, it is enough to follow her into the motor just after nine o’clock, with Mrs Fielding watching from the doorway and thanking Providence that whatever awaits them in Wales will, at least, be elsewhere.

Gladys’s Diary

12 July, on the road to Saint Clare

We left London at nine sharp, Gerald, punctual as a firing squad, calling to me when I was still buttoning my gloves, so no breakfast nor even tea for me. St Alban’s was wrapped in mist, drizzle spotting the windscreen, my gloves clammy already. Gerald plonked himself down with his papers the instant we were in the Rover, and poor Fowler set off steady as a metronome. Judgment and disapproval rolling off Gerald like steam off a pudding. Every rustle of his notes made me feel like I’d committed a fresh crime.

By Oxford my stomach was ready to stage a mutiny. We stopped at Lyons Corner House, thank heaven,  though it was hardly salvation: tea weak as dishwater, buns hard enough to kill a pigeon, but at least something hot. Gerald read The Times while pointedly checking his watch every five minutes. Typical. I chewed gloomily and imagined eggs and bacon at the Dorchester.

I would have smoked to take the edge off, but that, too, is forbidden me. Gerald says I ought to “begin as I mean to go on”, since the Institute won’t allow cigarettes and I had better be quit of them now, mentioning that, given my changed allowance, I should refrain from setting money on fire. As if I were some horrid addict to be weaned, instead of a perfectly normal woman who likes a fag with her tea. What utter rot.

(more…)

fiction

The MP Visits Saint Clare: Part I – 8 – 12 July 1955

Posted on By Mija

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And we’re back in 1955. Sorry about the time traveling. We will get back to Ned and Honour soon.

Context is in Foreword below.

The story of Inez de Vries unfolds through a constellation of documents—some official, drawn from the prim and unforgiving files of Saint Clare’s School for Girls; others more intimate, taken from the journals, letters, and scribbled notes of the girls themselves. Some will appear typed and orderly; others retain the texture of handwriting, rendered in a cursive-style font.

Readers are invited to step into the role of archivist, assembling the story from these traces, and imagining the lives that fill the gaps between pages—the tensions, the alliances, the secrets too dangerous to write down. Not everything will be explained. But Inez is watching. And she remembers.

Note: Comments are read and much appreciated. Much as I like reading them on Twitter and Bluesky, I love getting them here, and promise to respond. Moreover your ideas and reactions also join the archives, where they may quietly shape what comes next..

Foreword

From the Archivist

If the Prologue shows Miss Williams after a disastrous morning at the Institute, the present entry shows the three days that led to it—days filled with small offences, smaller triumphs, and domestic tensions that simmered steadily from the 8th to the 12th. Birchwood is not a large house, but it proves more than large enough for misadventure.

When last we left Miss Gladys Williams, it was the night of 11 July 1955, as she lay awake in a fury: raw from her first morning at the Domestic Institute, smarting under Gerald’s tight-lipped decrees, and dreading the next day’s return to Saint Clare School for Girls.

Before we press on to the events of the 12th (where the scenes in the Headmaster’s office still leave Miss Kelley wincing in her private journal), we must step back. Gladys’s bewildered anger in that entry did not spring from nowhere. It was the culmination of several small misadventures, misjudgments, and more than one melodrama by post.

Readers may wish to revisit:

The Elwood Files — the failed attempt to slip Inez’s letter past the school authorities.
The Lady and the Headmaster — in which Lady de Vries learns just enough to become dangerously perceptive.
The Secret Letters, Part I — where Gladys first involves herself in a correspondence she might have been wiser to avoid.
Melodrama by Post — ending in Clarissa’s own very revealing postscript.
Heard in the Charrington Household — Miss Gladys, hauled home from Scotland, is made to “answer for herself.”
Gladys in Trouble — Gerald’s formal terms, Gladys’s formal compliance, and the informal tears that followed.

Yet between her 7 July return and that prophetic line on the 11th — “Apparently 25 is still old enough to be spanked by circumstance” — lies a small but significant gap: three too-warm, sticky, uncomfortable days during which

  • Mrs Fielding’s patience was tested,
  • young Elsie was driven to tears (twice),
  • the milkman did not cometh,
  • the vicarage was pressed into service for stamps,
  • the Institute visit loomed like a thundercloud,
  • and Miss Gladys Williams of St Albans ricocheted between fury, sulks, and the sort of despair that leads a young woman to accuse, with more heat than prudence, a certain lady of having set the entire chain of events in motion.

The documents that follow: Mrs Fielding’s notes, Elsie Turner’s account, Gladys’s own private scribblings, and an unfortunately not-so-private letter, restore that missing chapter. Together, they illuminate why the 11th felt to Gladys like a trap snapping shut, and how the stage was set for the catastrophe of the following day.

For the most attentive readers, it may also be worth glancing back at the 1938 Honour’s Game series:

Connections grow clearer in hindsight, though none of the players in 1955 yet understand how far the past reaches into their present.

Some of the documents reproduced below are drawn from the Blue Room Archives at Saint Clare, specifically from the Lady Gwen de Vries papers and from the Charrington household files.

The Notes of Mrs Dorcas Fielding, Housekeeper
8 to 11 July 1955, St Albans

Friday, 8 July 1955

Since Mr Charrington and Miss Gladys came home yesterday, the house has been all upheaval. Miss Gladys stayed in her room most of the day, resting from her journey. Breakfast tray sent up at eight; returned at ten with only the toast disturbed. Luncheon laid in the dining room; untouched. At half past three she rang for tea and something sweet, then refused the scones as too dry.

Her untouched meals made me want to cry. It is a sin to waste good food.

Young Elsie Turner has been up and down the back stairs carrying trays that come back as full as they went up. I warned her not to show temper. It is not for us to say what a lady ought to eat. But I did begin reducing the portions. There is only so much that can be scraped into the pig bucket before it weighs on one’s conscience.

Mr Charrington kept to his study. He did not speak of Miss Gladys or ask whether she had come down to meals.

(more…)

correction corner A drawing of a stool placed neatly in the corner of a book-lined room.

Correction Corner 1

Posted on By Mija

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Hello Faithful Reader:

In keeping with and stealing I mean borrowing from the lexicon of Sips and Smacks (always a joy, current episode is with one of the Oasis Party organizers, do listen) I’ve cleared out the pile of laundry and popsicle sticks so Mija’s Room now has its own “Correction Corner” that I intend to keep empty. Here I intend to (weekly? monthly? who knows?) post edits made to posts or pages after they’ve gone public on the site.

Why do I need this?

Because the lovely reader (and author) Becca T. Riding of the Sore Is More blog is a super close reader. JAB, faithful reader and co-author isn’t far behind in the editor sweepstakes. Both of these readers are good at something I’m not: noticing detail. I appreciate such things and want to give them the credit and rewards they deserve.

Also, in a scene context, Mija loves1By “loves” I mean it hits EXACTLY on my kink buttons. More on that and my attraction to and love of pedants someday. being corrected.2My real-life self can get super defensive, arguing and sometimes becoming downright snappish. I’ve been working on this for years and am getting better, but it does sound like my academic self could use a bit of correction corner herself. One of the first stories Pablo wrote for is “Spelling,” which he based on “correcting” me for words I had misspelled in my early emails to him. Likewise, the story “Its” has Mija writing a line I still have running through my head “The possessive pronoun ‘its’ has no apostrophe.”

Also, as I’ve discovered working on fixing my stories on The Treehouse, (yes, it’s getting done, slowly) having a change log is a useful thing.

Why do you need this?

Because if you alert me to a needed correction (that is a mistake I’ve made), you can ask for a boon. What that boon might be is for you to decide, within reason.

Because some of you (ahem) have made mistakes in the comments and are annoyed by them (just so you know, they do not bother me a bit). You can ask me to make a correction to your text for you. The price? You “pay” with a boon for the blog. These can be insights, ideas, your own stories/fantasies about the characters.

Okay, so what have I done?

Links Page:

Added to Norse Cavalier‘s blog description to reflect my current favorite: an F/F story “The Business Woman and the Waitress.”

Story Changes:

“The MP Visits Saint Clare – Prologue – 11 July 1955“-

I changed the name of the Institute’s Head from Mrs Fielding to Mrs Perris. [Mrs Fielding is the Charrington’s housekeeper]

“Honor’s Game (Prologue through 3)” – Added the following text from the archivist:

From the Lady de Vries Collection, Blue Room Archives, Saint Clare’s School for Girls:
The papers presented here form part of what is now known as the Lady de Vries Collection. Though the correspondence was originally preserved among the private files of her husband, Edmund Alexander de Vries, 9th Earl of Darlington, its preservation and eventual deposit at Saint Clare’s are due to Lady Gwendolyn Randolph de Vries herself.

The exchange of initials — D. and H. — occurs throughout. Their precise origins are unclear; however, internal evidence suggests that these letters were both a private correspondence between husband and wife and, increasingly, a record of informal “exercises” undertaken by Lady de Vries during the late 1930s.

The editors have retained the original orthography and punctuation. A few later pencil notes in Lord Darlington’s hand are reproduced in grey type. Where the line between affection and assignment blurs, readers are invited to remember that the world beyond these pages was also shifting — toward war, secrecy, and a very different kind of education.

Let’s see how this goes!

  • 1
    By “loves” I mean it hits EXACTLY on my kink buttons. More on that and my attraction to and love of pedants someday.
  • 2
    My real-life self can get super defensive, arguing and sometimes becoming downright snappish. I’ve been working on this for years and am getting better, but it does sound like my academic self could use a bit of correction corner herself.

New Story: The Angel Ruston

Posted on By Mija

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#AdAstraWriMo – November 2025 Progress!

This hastily written story was inspired by a FaceTime conversation. As I sat in my uniform talking about rain and a research plan,  the face on the other side of the screen was illuminated such that it seemed to wear a halo.

Distracting. Because of course I kept thinking of guardian angels… and spanking. Of course.

The Angel of the North

I stood on tiptoe before the angry, red postbox, fighting to shove a stack of letters through the slot as they threatened to slide out of my grasp. One of them, the thick, unwise one I had written in a fit of 1AM tears, pleading, and righteousness, was wedged right in the middle, its edges tearing.

Already I knew it was a mistake. But the postbox was there, the letters already partway in, and, well, inertia is a powerful force.

(I am Entropy Girl, but that’s another story.)

As I shoved harder, someone behind me cleared his throat. The sound was the most polite, academic, schoolmasterly “ahem” I had ever heard.

I didn’t need to turn. I recognized the voice immediately.

But I turned anyway, my heart already thudding with anticipation and dread.

Despite the polite Britishness of Ruston’s gentle “ahem”, the sound always promised tears at bedtime.

Behind me a tall, faintly rumpled man, spectacles perched halfway down his disapproving nose, his greying hair illuminated in the fading light, stood watching me, his expression mild, eyes intense. I could just see his wings, yes, tucked neatly like an afterthought, the feathers in soft parchment colours, almost shadows against his white shirt. He carried his own oddly individual lighting, the sort that reminded me of the way at dusk a hilltop statue glows at sunset, embued with quiet, watchful authority. His gaze was that of a don who’d had to step out of a tutorial, now forced to deal with my nonsense personally.

“My dear girl,” he said in a voice low, warm, but unmistakably reproachful, “you cannot possibly intend to post that.”

Too polite to point, he nodded at the incriminating envelope, the one I’d unconsciously tried to hide in the sandwich of more innocent bills and correspondence. It now stood out, glowing, if not red, then sunset pink.

Knowing I was lost I still tried to brazen it out. “It’s already sealed and stamped.”

Ruston sighed, beleaguered as only a male guardian angel who’s shepherded my communication for almost three decades can sigh. “Neither sealing nor stamping an imprudent letter renders it prudent, my dear, only harder to retrieve.”

(more…)

The Music of Discipline: Notes Toward a Sonic Saint Clare

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Author’s Note: 

Classroom with piano

This post started in another space as I tried to explain why I’m listening, over and over, to a playlist made especially for the Saint Clare world, how it’s constructed and why having it is important to the way I write and my ability to recapture the story’s moods. I’ve been using some version of this playlist (it started with Appalachian Spring  something I’ve listened to and has been a favorite for as long as I can remember) since I returned to Saint Clare this past summer. For me, specific music creates and guides headspace, especially when it comes to writing.  So this post has become a reflection on how music, for girls historically and for me personally, moves between structure and freedom, discipline as both enclosure and release.

So…

Imagine I’m standing at the gates of Saint Clare looking in. The key to entering is letting go of my academic voice and reclaiming and embracing Mija’s – one that’s curious, playful, and unhurried, that knows this is far more about the journey than the destination. This post is a kind of meta reflection, written as a map as I try to find a path back into the Saint Clare world, imagine it leading to a different sort of writing practice, one that can generate hundreds of thousands of words. Writing fiction at this scale isn’t only about research or structure – I’m terrible at structure. Instead it’s about mood, and sound. For me, that begins with an album or playlist that I play every time I want to be in that headspace. 1That much, the need connect specific music to specific writing, is also true for my larger pieces of academic writing These notes on music and discipline are about creating a state of calm focus, a rhythm. One where research and scholarship become texture for Saint Clare rather than, as they would with academic writing, constructing an argument. In this space, joy and rigor can share the same page – one, ideally, of discipline, structure, and pleasure.

These days when I think about the world of Saint Clare, I don’t begin with geography, plot, or even period. I begin with a sound. Not the bell (though there are bells enough in Saint Clare’s world) but a bow against a violin string — specifically my grandmother’s violin. The two told stories of how, when they first married (in the 1930s) she played for my grandfather in the evenings after dinner. While there was radio available, they didn’t have one yet. Nor any sort of record player. There was only the music she carried from her girlhood. She wasn’t especially musically gifted, though my grandfather claimed otherwise. Her father had been the true amateur musician, trained at Eton and Oxford, an organist and choir director who played faithfully for every parish he served. From him she inherited not virtuosity but devotion: the belief that to play faithfully, however simply, was a kind of gift and prayer.

Less than a hundred years ago that was what one did in the evenings: read aloud,  practice music, keep culture alive by hearing it, playing it, creating it physically, and sonically. The bow against string, the pause before the note — gestures of steadiness, civility, and attention. Then too, in this world, silence still had somewhere to sit. I think of that quiet, live music as a discipline, the same sort that, in my imagination, fills the corridors of Saint Clare’s School for Girls.  These gestures of steadiness, civility, and attention are precisely the point where structure meets possibility: the body obeys, but the mind has freedom and space to wander and imagine.

The Sound of Education

As I’ve said before, I’m not a visual person or thinker.  Saint Clare manifested in my head as voices, music, not by what I imagined seeing, but hearing. The hum of a slightly out-of-tune piano before morning prayers mingled with the crack of hockey sticks on frost. The girls’ school, I realised, wasn’t merely an institution; it was an instrument, an intergenerational sonic landscape.

Victorians would have approved. When writing about education, they treated young girls and young, unmarried women as if they were violins in need of constant tuning to a pitch of virtue writ large. Erasmus Darwin (a less famous Darwin, and quite enthusiastic about female education rather than beetles) proposed that girls could be improved through art and music.2 Darwin, Erasmus. A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education, in Boarding Schools. London: Gale and the British Library, 1797. Nearly a hundred years later, his theory is further refined with Isabella Tod, suggesting that a good education should teach girls “self-government.”3 Tod, Isabella M.S. “On the Education of Girls of the Middle Classes (1874).” In The Education Papers, 230–247. London: Routledge, 2013.  An attempt to depict these ideals inspire and resonate in at Saint Clare, where musical and moral instruction have echoed one another across decades. Change comes to Saint Clare slowly.

(more…)

  • 1
    That much, the need connect specific music to specific writing, is also true for my larger pieces of academic writing
  • 2
    Darwin, Erasmus. A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education, in Boarding Schools. London: Gale and the British Library, 1797.
  • 3
    Tod, Isabella M.S. “On the Education of Girls of the Middle Classes (1874).” In The Education Papers, 230–247. London: Routledge, 2013.

Announcing 2025 Michealmas Term at Saint Clare

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It’s Michaelmas Term at Saint Clare: #AdAstraWriMo begins at midnight.

Once again, the gates of Saint Clare School for Girls creak open.

The crest still gleams with its public motto: Ad Astra, To the Stars, but those who know the place remember the stitched-in version, the one learned by heart and not by rote:

Per Disciplinam et Lacrimas, Ad Astra – Through discipline and tears, to the stars.

Tomorrow, November, the eleventh month begins and, with it, writers globally again attempt the 50 000-word challenge. This year, I’m returning to Saint Clare not to start something new, but to bring everything home: the stories, the notes, the fragments that have accumulated since the first tale was written back in 1999.

At last, my new Scrivener project now holds the entire school – the dormitories, the prefects’ room, the staff meetings that go on far too long, and, most importantly, the archives. Throughout the month of November I’ll be migrating, revising, and writing new pages for Inez of the Upper IV (Summer Term 1955) – and, in another wing of the imagination, finishing the Honour and Ned series, their stories set some twenty years earlier.

It’s not exactly NaNoWriMo, and not quite rebellion either.
Think of it as a special Michaelmas term: attendance required, results to be determined.

Fifty thousand words will (hopefully) follow – some new, some rediscovered, all part of the same ledger.

The Old Girls return and the inkpots are full once more.

The term begins tomorrow. I’ll be in my study, writing, counting words, and organizing, and in the school’s library, procrastinating via exhaustive research.

If you want to follow along: everything will be filed under#AdAstraWriMo.

discipline

Honour’s Game, Part 3 – December 1938 – January 1939

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The story of Inez de Vries’s experiences in the summer of 1955 unfolds through a series of documents – some official, pulled from the prim and unforgiving files of Saint Clare’s School for Girls; others are more intimate, drawn from the journals, letters, and scribbled notes of the girls themselves. Some will appear typed and orderly; others will retain the texture of handwriting, rendered in a cursive-style font. Readers are invited to step into the role of archivist, assembling the story from these traces, and imagining the lives that fill the gaps between pages—the tensions, the alliances, the secrets too dangerous to write down. Not everything will be explained.

But Inez watches. And remembers.

This story takes readers back to 1938 and tells the story of Inez’s parents, especially Lady Gwendolyn “Honour” de Vries, a St. Clare Old Girl who notices far more than most people realize.

Note: Comments are read and much appreciated. Much as I like reading them on Twitter and Bluesky, I love getting them here and promise to respond. Moreover your responses and ideas are included in the archives and may shift and change the story’s evolution. Also, the observant reader may notice Honour has a new font. I hope it’s more readable. 

Having trouble with the handwriting? Try the plain text version. 

Greystone Abbey, January 1939

If you’ve followed Honour this far – through her first lesson, her first report, and her first taste of consequence – you’ll know how easily a game of observation can become something else.
The new year finds her far from Belgravia, shut in by rain and flooded fields, testing both her wit and her husband’s patience. The guests have gone; Darlington’s lessons continue.

This story follows:

Honour’s Lesson

Honour’s Game – Prologue

Honour’s Game – Part 1

Honour’s Game – Part 2

You might want to read them first. 

Part Three

From the Archivist

From the Lady de Vries Collection, Blue Room Archives, Saint Clare’s School for Girls

The papers presented here form part of what is now known as the Lady de Vries Collection. Though the correspondence was originally preserved among the private files of her husband, Edmund Alexander de Vries, 9th Earl of Darlington, its preservation and eventual deposit at Saint Clare’s are due to Lady Gwendolyn Randolph de Vries herself.

The exchange of initials — D. and H. — occurs throughout. Their precise origins are unclear; however, internal evidence suggests that these letters were both a private correspondence between husband and wife and, increasingly, a record of informal “exercises” undertaken by Lady de Vries during the late 1930s.

The editors have retained the original orthography and punctuation. A few later pencil notes in Lord Darlington’s hand are reproduced in grey type. Where the line between affection and assignment blurs, readers are invited to remember that the world beyond these pages was also shifting — toward war, secrecy, and a very different kind of education.

Recovered documents: December 1938 – January 1939

The following entries belong to that first winter at Greystone Abbey, when the young Countess was learning that discipline can be an intimacy of its own. The surviving pages are marked in her hand and his — neat pencil corrections threading through her typed reports. Both of them writing in their fountain penned script. What began in London drawing rooms now turns domestic, quieter and more perilous.

In these documents, the young Lady Honour de Vries continues working to master her husband’s “exercises”—tasks meant to discipline her curiosity and temper her impulsiveness. Yet what began as a private game of observation now reaches beyond the drawing room. A tea in Chester Square leads to the American Embassy at Grosvenor Square, and the world of polite conversation begins to tremble with rumours of the coming war.

Through reports, annotations, and private diaries, we see the gradual shaping of a partnership: his precision against her wit, his restraint against her appetite for understanding. Honour still writes to please him—but she is also beginning to see, to listen, and to turn the rules of his game to her own advantage.

The tone remains domestic, almost playful. Yet under its surface, something colder and more intricate begins to form.

Note: Comments are read and much appreciated. Much as I enjoy seeing them on Twitter and Bluesky, I especially love receiving them here and promise to respond. Your observations and ideas are entered into the Saint Clare archives and may subtly shift the story’s evolution.

(more…)

discipline

Honour’s Game – Part 2 – November – December 1938

Posted on By Mija

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The story of Inez de Vries’s experiences in the summer of 1955 unfolds through a series of documents—some official, pulled from the prim and unforgiving files of Saint Clare’s School for Girls; others are more intimate, drawn from the journals, letters, and scribbled notes of the girls themselves. Some will appear typed and orderly; others will retain the texture of handwriting, rendered in a cursive-style font. Readers are invited to step into the role of archivist, assembling the story from these traces, and imagining the lives that fill the gaps between pages—the tensions, the alliances, the secrets too dangerous to write down. Not everything will be explained.

But Inez is watching. And she remembers.

This story goes back to 1938 and tells the story of Inez’s parents, especially Lady Gwendolyn “Honour” deVries, a St. Clare Old Girl who notices far more than most people realize.

Note: Comments are read and much appreciated. Much as I like reading them on Twitter and Bluesky, I love getting them here and promise to respond. Moreover your responses and ideas are included in the archives and may shift and change the story’s evolution.

Having trouble with the handwriting? Try the plain text version.

This story follows:

Honour’s Lesson

Honour’s Game – Prologue

Honour’s Game – Part 1

You might want to read them first. 

From The Archivist: 

From the Lady de Vries Collection, Blue Room Archives, Saint Clare’s School for Girls

The papers presented here form part of what is now known as the Lady de Vries Collection. Though the correspondence was originally preserved among the private files of her husband, Edmund Alexander de Vries, 9th Earl of Darlington, its preservation and eventual deposit at Saint Clare’s are due to Lady Gwendolyn Randolph de Vries herself.

The exchange of initials — D. and H. — occurs throughout. Their precise origins are unclear; however, internal evidence suggests that these letters were both a private correspondence between husband and wife and, increasingly, a record of informal “exercises” undertaken by Lady de Vries during the late 1930s.

The editors have retained the original orthography and punctuation. A few later pencil notes in Lord Darlington’s hand are reproduced in grey type. Where the line between affection and assignment blurs, readers are invited to remember that the world beyond these pages was also shifting — toward war, secrecy, and a very different kind of education.

Introduction

The archive continues.

In these documents, the young Lady Honour de Vries begins to master her husband’s “exercises”—tasks meant to discipline her curiosity and temper her impulsiveness. Yet what began as a private game of observation now reaches beyond the drawing room. A tea in Chester Square leads to the American Embassy at Grosvenor Square, and the world of polite conversation begins to tremble with rumours of the coming war.

Through reports, annotations, and private diaries, we see the gradual shaping of a partnership: his precision against her wit, his restraint against her appetite for understanding. Honour still writes to please him—but she is also beginning to see, to listen, and to turn the rules of his game to her own advantage.

The tone remains domestic, almost playful. Yet under its surface, something colder and more intricate begins to form.

Note: Comments are read and much appreciated. Much as I enjoy seeing them on Twitter and Bluesky, I especially love receiving them here and promise to respond. Your observations and ideas are entered into the Saint Clare archives and may subtly shift the story’s evolution.

Having trouble with the handwriting? Try the plain-text version below.

Part Two

From: The Blue Room Collection, Saint Clare’s School for Girls
Recovered documents: November–December 1938

 

Exercise — 20 November 1938

You are to attend Mrs. Allerton’s tea tomorrow afternoon. Treat it as a continuation of your previous exercise.

Instructions:

    • Keep your gloves on at all times.
    • Decline the cakes; they are dreadful, and you think better on an empty stomach.
    • Smile when spoken to, but answer only when asked. Listen for what is not said. Women talk freely when they believe you bored.
    • Write it afterwards, while the voices are still fresh.
    • Keep the tone measured, not arch.
    • Distinguish what you know from what you think you know.

Deliver your report to Darlington on the same evening. Late papers will be penalised.

You do not want to be a naughty girl, my Honour.

(more…)

fiction

Honour’s Game Part I – November 1938

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The story of Inez de Vries’s experiences in the summer of 1955 unfolds through a series of documents – some official, pulled from the prim and unforgiving files of Saint Clare’s School for Girls; others are more intimate, drawn from the journals, letters, and scribbled notes of the girls themselves. Some will appear typed and orderly; others will retain the texture of handwriting, rendered in a cursive-style font. Readers are invited to step into the role of archivist, assembling the story from these traces, and imagining the lives that fill the gaps between pages – the tensions, the alliances, the secrets too dangerous to write down. Not everything will be explained.

But Inez is watching. And she remembers.

This story goes back to 1938 and tells the story of Inez’s parents, especially Lady Gwendolyn “Honour” deVries, a St. Clare Old Girl who notices far more than most people realize.

Note: Comments are read and much appreciated. Much as I like reading them on Twitter and Bluesky, I love getting them here and promise to respond. Moreover your responses and ideas are included in the archives and may shift and change the story’s evolution.

Having trouble with the handwriting? Try the plain text version.

Introduction

This tale follows Honour’s Lesson, where Lady Gwendolyn Randolph de Vries — Honour — first tested the patience of her new husband, Edmund Alexander de Vries, 9th Earl of Darlington. Like that earlier story, it begins in a more traditional narrative mode, borrowing the cadence of Regency romance. Yet here a new element enters: the reports of a bride still half a schoolgirl, too quick with her laughter, too eager for her husband’s notice, and learning how his sternness might be turned into intimacy. What she believes to be a private game of observation will, in time, shape far more than she imagines.

Though not set at Saint Clare’s, its themes are familiar: discipline, secrecy, defiance — threads that are woven through the school itself.

From The Archivist: 

From the Lady de Vries Collection, Blue Room Archives, Saint Clare’s School for Girls)

The papers presented here form part of what is now known as the Lady de Vries Collection. Though the correspondence was originally preserved among the private files of her husband, Edmund Alexander de Vries, 9th Earl of Darlington, its preservation and eventual deposit at Saint Clare’s are due to Lady Gwendolyn Randolph de Vries herself.

The exchange of initials — D. and H. — occurs throughout. Their precise origins are unclear; however, internal evidence suggests that these letters were both a private correspondence between husband and wife and, increasingly, a record of informal “exercises” undertaken by Lady de Vries during the late 1930s.

The editors have retained the original orthography and punctuation. A few later pencil notes in Lord Darlington’s hand are reproduced in grey type. Where the line between affection and assignment blurs, readers are invited to remember that the world beyond these pages was also shifting — toward war, secrecy, and a very different kind of education.

Part One

If you haven’t read the Prologue yet, you should. 

Note from D. –

11 November 1938

Honour,

You are attending Lady Fenton’s gathering tomorrow. Treat it as exercise.

– Sit where you are seen, not where you are heard.
– One glass of champagne, no more.
– Listen more than you speak. Note what is certain, and what you only suppose.
– Write it after, neatly, as if for school.

Report due upon return, as soon as possible. Marks for observation, not embroidery. Late submissions will not be entertained, .  

 

D.

 

(more…)

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