The Christmas Ball

 

                                

Without further ado, here for your reading pleasure is the story of a Christmas ball in London in and around 1860, peopled with characters, some of whom you know and some you don’t and others you may but vaguely remember and enjoy meeting again.

How do stories come to us? Some might have a gestation decades in the making. If the germ of this one has a beginning it may well be the dancing ghosts in the Orlando Disney’s Haunted Mansion that I think was at the time and certainly still is my favorite thing about all of those acres of annihilated ecosystem (speaking of ghosts). But that waltz, that vertiginous, Viennese waltz….to expose an impressionable and entirely too romantic child to such a thing at a young age! Surely a story would eventually come of it.

I once danced that very waltz, not on a snowy, English Yuletide, but one heavy, humid summer’s night under a full moon on the Savannah pier. Not that the moon explains it. Upon projecting this blog entry I was reminded that I also danced the pavane in a Sarasota nightclub and I remember doing some sort of moves of yore in the grand hall of Chenonceau one chilly and drear November afternoon. I have an entire history of this kind of nonsense behind me, a whole curriculum vitae of anachronistic dances in corners of places where time just might for a moment slip out of joint. 

And it was this kind of nonsense that slowly, eventually, developped into the story linked to above, "The Christmas Ball" which NewMyths kindly chose to publish for their December 2021 issue. 

Anyway do enjoy: here is your formal invitation!

(If I might allow myself to imagine that you would like to read more of my writing, Here is the link to "The Historian's Debt," another historical fantastique.)