#Catherine Darnay is a femme lesbian

[blackcur-rants]

Sylvia Jacqueline Carton dove her face into her bowl of noodles, greedily devouring every last inch of her meal with the intensity of a jackal going down on a piece of meat. Her face was absolutely getting messed up and dirty and would probably end up smelling stronger and more pungent than a figgy pudding at Christmas time, but Sylvia didn’t care. It tasted good and that was all that mattered.

And once the meal was finally finished, Sylvia groaned with satisfaction, for that was the most filling meal she had ever had in her entire life. Sylvia had not been poor growing up, in fact quite the opposite. Though being a poor orphan of mixed Irish and Chinese descent growing up in the middle of the rolling fields and tranquil village squares of rural Shropshire had had its difficulties for sure, Sylvia’s aunt Christina had always made sure she was fed and well-cared for as she occupied her strange life of living halfway being the scruffy, dirty village tomcat and the magnificent and noble honours student of the local school. Aunt Christina (the older twin sister of Sylvia’s father Peter Gerald Carton, a rather stout and peculiar but kind-hearted man who had raised Sylvia on his own for the most part after his Hong Kong-born wife Melissa Elaine Sima had died of bowel cancer when Sylvia was four years and three months old before dying himself in a freakish car accident when Sylvia was eight years and seven months old and leaving his sole child in his own sister’s care) had been the bartender at the local pub in their hometown of Upton Magna, and thus had been a master of cooking fabulous and wonderful feasts for her little niece even before she became the girl’s official guardian. As a result of growing up with all of this good food and drink in her life as a grieving and rather lonely but highly intelligent child, Sylvia had always turned to eating and drinking a nice meal or two whenever she was stressed out by something or other, which was honestly rather frequent in the profession where she worked.

“Wow” a friendly and well-meaning voice called out as Sylvia was finishing the last of her broth, “You really were super, super hungry in the aftermath of that case, weren’t you?”

Sylvia stopped for a while before accidentally spitting out all of her remaining broth all over poor Charles Jonathan Stryver’s face. Stryver was somewhat bemused at this turn of events and did nothing much other than just calmly and carefully pick up a towel and wipe the hot soup broth off of his face.

“Yeah, I was” Sylvia responded after not much time, “I don’t know. There was just…something about that woman that just…captured my imagination or something else in me in a way no one else ever has”.

“She does kind of look like you, to be quite honest” Stryver said at last as he finished wiping the last of the soup broth off of his face.

“Yes, I am aware of that” Sylvia said again, “but thank you for stating the obvious, Professor”.

It was true though. Catherine Elizabeth Darnay had gotten stuck inside of Sylvia Jacqueline Carton’s head and just refused to get out of there. There was just something about the way she laughed at some bad, cheesy joke or another, the way she had smiled when Sylvia had gotten her off the hook for whatever stupid, bullcrap charges had been hurled at her for her time as a Red Cross nurse serving in Iraq, as if caring for human life and well-being had made her somehow complicit in the atrocities of Saddam or Osama. There was not much that Sylvia knew about Catherine, only that she had been born in Algeria, the daughter of a French businessman and his Algerian wife, with both of her father and her maternal grandfather having some connection or another to the infamously awful Evremonde Industrial Manufacturing, one of the cruellest and most disgusting military industrial war crime-profiting criminal leagues in the whole entire world. Fortunately though, it seemed to Sylvia at least that Catherine was a good and kind and noble woman who had long since rejected the wicked ways of her vile family and had chosen to be good and kind and just to all of God’s children.

(It’s so funny how I’m for the most part an atheist and yet I still think of Cat Darnay as almost a woman of God Themselves. Must be Aunt Christina’s upbringing again or maybe iit was just being brought up in proximity to a church and having a vicar’s daughter for a first crush).

Of course, it was not to be. Catherine was already deeply, deeply in love with another person, a local nurse from Bloomsbury named Lucine Manette, who was said to be as beautiful and intelligent as they were also gentle and kind and loving. It was said in almost all of London’s finest queer circles that they were the hottest and most eligible panromantic bisexual in all of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. And yet they had never married at all, for they were most prominently invested in taking care of their father Alexandre, a journalist who had attempted to blow the whistle on American war crimes in the first Gulf War and had been imprisoned on Riker’s Island for eighteen years until Lucine had successfully smuggled him out of New York to London in 2011. Sylvia sweated a little and rubbed her left hand through the jet black buzzcut that was her recently cut hair at the thought of both Catherine and Lucine, whose beautiful performances of the feminine gender made Sylvia feel even more than usual like she was the butchest butch who ever butched. Of course, Sylvia was not the super-butch lesbian that either she or her compatriots sometimes imagined her as being. Of course, she had very much been the village tomboy when she was little, always more comfortable running around in tattered jeans and light white t-shirts with a freckled smile on her face as she sat by herself with a book under the old ash trees that made up the forests around her home village of Upton Magna than trying to be a pretty little girl laughing and giggling with the other village children. However, she had never held more “girly” things in all that much contempt. In fact, she had loved the brave and headstrong young women she saw in her childhood princess movies and classic novels even as most of them had worn dresses rather than pants and ended up with hot boys rather than with other beautiful girls. In fact, for most of her childhood, Sylvia had dreamed of moving to the city to find a beautiful, strong woman to take her up into her arms and spirit her away into a new life of wonder and love…only to come to London and find that all of the eligible and beautiful queer women had been taken and she herself was left all alone. And that, sadly, was when her heart had started to turn as cold and bitter as a winter snowstorm, and when she had begun to harden herself to the idea of love and companionship and had resigned herself to the fate of being alone and fairly miserable with only her mentor Professor Charles Jonathan Stryver and her books and Hakkasan food to keep her company through her darkest times.

However, no sooner than Sylvia Jacqueline Carton started on the depths of these musings when she saw none other than Catherine Darnay and Lucine Sophia Manette coming into the Hakkasan and sitting down together on a date. Sylvia was rather reluctant to be seen by them for fear of embarrassing herself in front of both these supremely lovely and most excellent individuals. So instead of even trying to sit in the same vague vicinity as both of these beloveds, Sylvia Jacqueline Carton bolted straight up from the table and ran to the bathroom to gather her thoughts as she stared into the mirror. Once there, Sylvia Carton plopped herself down onto the toilet and tried desperately not to scream loudly at the top of her lungs as she held her head tightly between her hands. Part of her just wanted to quiet down and head silently home through a way that nobody else could see until she could flop down upon her bed and let the tidal wave of emotions ride all over her until she could fall asleep at last…and meanwhile, another part of her just wanted to strip off all of her clothes then and there and scream naked into a mirror until she passed out at last and had to be carried home by Stryver…until she then remembered that the London autumns were, to put it very bluntly, not the warmest and most pleasant experiences in the world, and she decided that being able to get home calmly and quickly was a much, much better thing than being carried home in her birthday suit by her old professor. And so it was that, once the pounding in her ears had died down into a barely audible crawl and once her heart had ceased pounding and settled down into a quiet yet still constantly eternal vibration that kept the human body alive for as long as it could, the lawyer known as Sylvia Jacqueline Carton finally exited the bathrooms of this humble London Hakkasan and reentered into the world of normal conversation.

However, when Sylvia Carton reentered into said world of normal conversation, the conversation that was wholly surrounding her was anything but normal, to put it very, very bluntly. For there was on the restaurant TV screen at the moment a special presentation from the BBC about how national hero John Arthur Barsad had been caught trying to play hanky panky with Jeremiah Isaac Cruncher, a local bank teller for Tellson’s Bank. And one must know, dearest reader, that when your narrator refers to “hanky panky”, they are in fact referring to a massive blow job that Mister Cruncher administered to Mister Barsad and which Mister Barsad had decided to record on video and had accidentally posted to his Facebook account and which was now going viral across the nation.

(And possibly the world, if we’re being quite honest)