Name: Touched by Moonlight
Story: Starfall
Colors: Tourmaline #5 (silk/cotton)
Supplies and Styles: Eraser + Graffiti (11 Years of Rainbowfic – Space Month – Mir Challenge) + Silhouette + Life Drawing
Word Count: 1665
Rating: PG
Warnings: smoking; mentions of spiritualism/mediums/ghosts etc.; mention of period-typical racism in passing.
Notes: 1930s AU; Viyony Eseray/Leion Valerno (although I had to give them slightly different names for a real world setting.) I actually wrote this for the Mir Challenge, before I wrote the other one, but this is just a month for moon-themed stories anyway, it seems.
Summary: Leion’s terribly susceptible to moonlight.

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Leon made it out onto the terrace, where he breathed a sigh of relief and leant his head back against the cool brickwork of the house. Being paid for this was a compensation, but it didn’t make tonight’s company much more palatable. He fished about in his dinner jacket for a cigarette and matches. A cool night breeze played about his skin and hair, and the horrors of the overheated drawing room began to recede already.

He smoked the cigarette slowly, and gazed up at the moon, idly rating its efforts. Eight out of ten, he decided, because while solitude was far superior to the present company, a full moon this perfect had to lose a mark or two for lack of an ideal someone with which to share it.

It was at that moment that somebody else slipped out through the French windows; a slight figure in a long silk dress that seemed, quite impossibly, to be the exact same shade as the moon. Taken purely aesthetically, Leon couldn’t fault the addition: Vivien, Maurice Ferris’s fiancée. She was about twenty years younger than Maurice, beautiful, Indian, or at least half-Indian and therefore entirely unexpected in the stilted white-bread Ferris household.

Appearances were, alas, deceiving. Miss Vivien was an unapologetic gold-digger, who’d made no pretence of her reasons for agreeing to marry Maurice.

When the interloper failed to notice him, Leon lowered the cigarette, thin smoke trailing upward from it. He stifled an inward sigh, then raised his free hand and coughed.

Vivien jumped, and turned sharply towards him. “What are you doing lurking out here?”

“Couldn’t stick it in there for one more second,” said Leon. “Awful woman. Undoubted fake.”

Vivien rolled her eyes. “Well, of course.”

“You don’t buy into the occult – life after this and all that rot?”

“Not when someone like that is selling it.” She raised her gaze upwards, as if to study the moon, much as he had done earlier. In profile, in that light, she could have been some sort of ancient lunar goddess. Leon shifted his position against the wall and enjoyed the view. He liked this one much better than the shadowy Victorian garden.

She looked back at him, her forehead creasing. “I thought you were keen. Isn’t this partly your show?”

“Didn’t Maurice tell you?” Leon peeled himself off the wall and stubbed out the cigarette. “I’m here to catch her out. British Spiritualist Society paid me to give a report on whether or not she was genuine before they took an interest. They, ah, ironically, feel they’ve been looking too credulous in the press lately.”

She folded her arms against the chill in the air. “Paid? You’re a private detective of some kind?”

“Yes. Of some kind,” he agreed.

Her mouth curled in disdain. “Oh. Follow people’s husbands and wives about and all that?”

“Sometimes,” said Leon. “Other days it’s finding runaway daughters of lords, who usually have perfectly good reasons for not wanting to go home to Daddy.”

“Gosh. You must be popular.”

“I am, actually. Life and soul of every party.”

“Unless you’re there on business.”

Leon pulled down the corners of his mouth. “It’s a fair cop, guv’nor. You needn’t sound so superior, Miss, er, Miss –”

“Call me Vee.”

“I think the polite term for you would be mercenary baggage, wouldn’t it? We may well meet again, when I’m inevitably tailing you one day.”

A spark kindled in her eyes. She moved towards him, the breeze catching her as she turned slightly, white streams of silk and dark strands of hair shifting under its touch. Leon almost took a step back, but then she shivered and hugged her arms about her. He had to stop himself removing his jacket and offering it up, because that was what one did, but he also couldn’t halt mid-sneering and attempt gallantry.

“Inevitably?” she said. “You don’t know me very well, Mr Valerno.”

“I know Ferris. So, yes: inevitably. You don’t care for him. He’s twice your age. Even if you don’t start playing around, he’s the type who’ll assume you must be sooner or later. The first moment your account of your day doesn’t absolutely tally up, or you run into someone once too often in a few weeks.” Leon shrugged. “Of course, it won’t necessarily be me he’ll pay to do it. You’ve met me now. Not so discreet. I’ll just read about it all in the morning papers instead.”

Vee turned her head away. “Do excuse me. I came out here for some fresh air – but I see I had better go for a walk if I want any.”

Leon watched her walk down the garden path, the white of her dress catching the moonlight amidst the deep wells of shadows of laburnum bushes, tree branches and other hazards of an overgrown garden. Vee shivered under them. Leon cursed under his breath, and ran after her.

“Here,” he said, pulling off his dinner jacket and draping it around her shoulders. “I’m sorry. The marriage thing is just so damned last century. Why do it? Even if the family firm is going under, that’s your father’s business – you shouldn’t have to make a martyr of yourself.”

Vee started and lifted her head. Her hands went up to grip his jacket in time to stop it sliding off. “There’s no need,” she said. “Now you’ll be cold, instead.”

“Nonsense,” Leon said. “I’ve still got far too many layers on, whereas you –” The corner of his mouth lifted as he studied her at close quarters. “Well, you seem to be wearing some sort of concoction of pure spun moonlight. Charming, but unsuitable for walks in the dark.”

Vee’s brows closed. “Honestly, Mr Valerno, is this your usual method with women? Insult them, indulge in misplaced chivalry, and finally resort to flattery?”

“I, er, well.” Leon tried to reach into his pocket for another cigarette, but she was the one wearing his coat, leaving him off balance and without much to do with himself. He shrugged. “Not actually flattery at any rate. And, no, thank you. I’m usually quite suave – you wouldn’t believe – but the thing is, moonlight goes to my head. I’m extremely susceptible.”

She bit back amusement, which for a moment, he mistakenly took as an encouraging sign. “How inconvenient for you, especially in your line of work. You must get awfully confused climbing up to first floor windows on nights like this – do you start reciting the balcony scene instead of taking photographs?”

“Why the hell are you marrying that bastard?”

Vee stopped dead and stared out into the gloomy suburban garden. “What happens to the business affects the whole of Eskdale. And there aren’t many people like Maurice who’d agree to marry me despite everything.” She gestured at her face.

“Rubbish,” said Leon, even though he knew perfectly well what she meant. Not that she was the only Anglo-Indian running around the country, of course, but throw in some failing family business in Yorkshire and, charming as she undoubtedly was in outline, plenty of men would baulk at the combination.

She sighed. “The water board want to buy the estate and flood the valley to make a reservoir.”

“Water’s a good thing,” said Leon. “I’m all for it. Let ‘em.”

“There’s a tenth century church.”

Leon moved ahead of her to bar her path. “Then tell some historical preservation society about it! The laws haven’t changed enough to make it worth you marrying some cold devil like Ferris.”

“You’re not thinking of the people – of keeping them in employment,” she said, “and possibly work for you, or someone like you, if your predictions come true.”

His face creased, as he walked alongside her back towards the terrace. “Balderdash,” he said. “Hogwash, too. Your concern in case your humble tenants wind up being subject to the Means Test is admirable, but a trifle patronising, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t!”

“Well, it is. And anyway – just don’t do it.”

Vee stopped, staring up at him, and then laughed. “What is it to you? You’ve spoken to me properly for all of five minutes, and you didn’t seem to like me for at least three and a half of them.”

“You’re enchanting by moonlight,” Leon said. “Unaccountable, but there it is. Don’t do it.”

She ignored him, moving onwards and putting a hand on the handle of the French window. “I suppose I have to go back inside.”

“Don’t do that, either.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “Even if I don’t, you must, or you won’t get paid.”

“Dratted woman. If she’s a real medium, I’ll go find my hat and eat it. All my hats.”

Vee held up a hand. “I’ll go in first. You give me a few minutes – if Maurice is as suspicious as you say, I’d rather not alarm him already.”

“Oh, what a marvellous idea,” said Leon, catching hold of her elbow, but when she glared up at him, he sobered, and then let go with a tiny shrug. “Well. Better give me my jacket back,” he murmured, before helping her out of it.

Vee hesitated, and then, unwillingly, said, “Thank you. I think.”

“Go on, go back in. Once more unto the breach –”

Vee shook her head at his idiocy. “Yes. What a dreadful woman. All that playacting and flannel about the uncanny presence in the drawing room, which is perfectly free of any such thing. And then she sat there all the way through dinner and never took any notice of the horrid atmosphere in the dining room. I could hardly eat my soup, let alone the main course. If she was really psychic, she’d know that. It’s like spiders made out of ice crawling all over you every time.”

With that, she slipped back inside, and left him standing alone on the patio, holding his jacket in his arms.

“Good God,” said Leon. “And I thought I was the one touched by moonlight!”