The Love Letters of Grandmother Goose
The Love Letters of Grandmother Goose are a collection of the correspondence between Charlotte le Fay and Ivan Goose during their courtship in the Second Age of Eden. Sometimes sweet and sometimes salacious, the letters were never meant to be read by outside parties. And yet, in the year 263, following the coronation of the couple’s granddaughter Frieda Jacobs as the first Queen of Hearts, that’s just what happened.
Late that year, an unidentified thief pilfered the safe of family home near Covenant. Finding nothing else of value inside tiny vault, the burglar leaked one letter to the press in exchange for a healthy finder’s fee, then used the publicity that afforded him to sell off the rest to the highest bidder.
The queen’s advisors were scandalized—especially Albus Lepus, her Sage of Saltgate—but the queen and her grandmother found the whole affair quite amusing. Wonderlanders were too uptight, they reasoned, and if this was what it took to loosen them up, then so be it.
Purpose & Intentions
Charlotte’s purpose was to try and woo herself a bad boy by exaggerating her experience and talents in the bedroom. Ivan’s purpose, initially, was to convince the pretty girl pursuing him that she didn’t need to try so hard. After a while, however, he turned to egging her on—to seeing just how steamy she could get.
The answer was: pretty damned steamy. Steamy enough to make the handsome Lothario blush, stop reading to catch his breath, and then blush some more.
Steamy enough that, after six months, he asked her to marry him.
Background & History
Charlotte le Fay was a descendant of Marnie Miller, the first Queen Consort of Promiseland, through Miller’s first husband. As such, she was raised to be a prim and proper lady—and she was saddled with all of the expectations which came along with that role.
It was not a position she enjoyed.
There were expectations set upon the shoulders of Ivan Goose, as well. The only difference between him and his future wife as that he didn’t give a shit. A promiscuous libertine from the moment he came of age, he was disowned by his father and cut off from a family descended from not one, not two, but three of the famous woodland queens.
By the time Charlotte and Ivan met, at The Garden Gala in the year 204, the two were primed to catch each other’s attention. And when Charlotte returned to the cottage near Covenant and Ivan returned to his ramshackle apartment in Watersmeet, that’s when the letters began.
Content
The letters begin innocently enough, with Charlotte praising Ivan’s charm and his good looks, his moves on the ballroom floor and the way he told jokes—“laughing at yourself before you’d even reached the punchline” she wrote. But as soon as Charlotte sensed that Ivan might actually be interested in seeing her again, that’s when things took a turn toward the naughty.
Because she had not had any sexual experiences of her own at this point, Charlotte sought inspiration from others. She volunteered to housekeep at a brothel in Covenant in exchange for juicy stories from the girls who worked there. And it was these stories, she later admitted to Ivan, which inspired the tales she told in her early letters.
Of course, once Ivan encouraged her to go out and have some fun of her own—once he promised her that he wouldn’t think any less of her for it—Charlotte spent a summer partying her way through the Free Cities of Nunya. And after that, she had plenty of her own yarns to spin, yes sir.
It is after one of the letters from this period that Ivan proposed. The debaucherous night that Charlotte described having in The Dirty Burg one evening, the night she crossed The Line of Disgusting and left the last vestiges of her old self behind, was a night he wished he could have shared with her. And so, he said as much in his next missive, then he asked her to share all of her future adventures with him—or as many as she was willing to share.
The correspondence continues on from there, of course. It documents the tumultuous months of their engagement, then ends abruptly with the vows the letters they wrote to each other on the evening before their wedding. They didn’t seem to see the need in writing to each other after that, given that they were so rarely apart in the years that followed.
The 25th anniversary edition of the published letters features an epilogue of sorts: a letter which Charlotte wrote to Ivan after his death and left by his grave, a letter thought lost which turned up again, under mysterious circumstances, just in time for the publication of that celebratory volume.
This is weirdly adorable, I love it.
Yay! That's a great description and probably what I was going for without really have the words to describe it.