Waffles: a Tale of Sauce and Intrigue

One Drop in the Sea

Have you ever read something that changed the trajectory of your life? Well, William Farquhar had. Let me tell you about it.

It all started on a rainy afternoon in 1819. Farquhar had watched wistfully, his storm-gray eyes unmoving, as one drop of rain after another penetrated the wet sludgy pool that his balcony overlooked. He had taken his tea and a book of Keats' poems outside for inspiration.

The poetry of Keats. The volume now cast in the colonel's hands had been the same one found in Shelley's coat after his body was discovered adrift in waters so far from his homeland. Will I survive my fate? William sometimes wondered. It seemed interminably morbid.

"...liam? William!" rang a voice in the distance. Froglike, Farquhar gawped at the sound. It sounded surreal. Had this all been but a distant dream..? Like... his favourite composition ending?

Reality hit him hard when his shoulder suffered the slings and arrows of a heavy touch. A maidservant had walked in with mail.

"Becky! Talk a bit in the future, will you?"

"Your eyes were so vacant, Sir; I feared that my voice would recall from its inscrutable depths a torrent of disgraceful emotions. I had wished to do my duty with the quietness of the morning mist, then slip away into unbeing like the morning mist too. But it is of my utmost relief that the waters of your soul are untroubled, not distorted with passion."

"Was that last one ripped off from Oscar Wilde?"

"I am uninformed as to the exacting identity of this gay gentleman. He sounds like somebody from Victoria's time, rather than ours. It also sounds like he would write that to a lover from prison."

"Forget I said that. I can't have you knowing I'm a time traveller."

Farquhar extended a red-clad hand and grinned like a cat from cheshire. Freed from his earlier gloom, he was now as incandescent as the light on his lovely bald head. "Well then, if it's a red seal with a seal on it, it's the arch-swine Raffles! He's Byron's champion, god save the man. Regardless. Give it, maidy."

The letter passed from one glove to another. Farquhar opened it with his butter knife, then frowned reproachfully as the sauce got onto the paper.

The black cat Bram bounded onto his lap.

He began that fateful reading that would alter his life forever, for better or for worse.