mostly for coffee_and_ink, and other Peter Dickinson fans on my

[truepenny]

I dreamed a Peter Dickinson novel last night. The title was The Height of Breithbury (breith is pronounced like breath, but it is definitely spelled breith), and it was a King and Joker sort of novel, where it's an alternate history but worked so beautifully seamlessly that it feels like it isn't. (Not like Sleep and His Brother where the fantasy element is so subtle and so pervasive that you almost can't see it.) Definitely a 20th century setting, and I think the world was one in which the Saxon and Norman nobility of England had somehow continued to exist side-by-side--not without strife, mind you, but co-existent. There was a character named something like Melkfen or Melfken, who was the Trickster-figure. There was a Saxon nobleman obsessed with horses--v. tweedy and with a military mustache. And I think it was his daughter who had the lower-middle-class boyfriend. There was also an academic of the most pompous and irritating variety, who used his students' awe of him to leverage visits to their well-to-do families.

I can't remember the plot. But it was Peter Dickinson all the way down.