Fifty Shades of Brown

Indubitable Brown ("Doobie" to his public school form mates, Dooobie doo, to his enemies) was,in 1843, the sole remaining heir to the Brown fortune . Though the names of several of his ancestors are more familiar (Charles "Charlie" Brown, the famous footballer and "Capability" Brown, Queen Victoria's head gardener are well known throughout the empire, as are "Dirk" Brown, the infamous sky pirate, and Sepia Brown, the daguerreotype portrait artist) it was Veritably "Very" Brown, who's invention of the hand held parachute flare launcher, the "Very Pistol" that made the families first fortune, through it's subsequent adoption by the British merchant marine and navy, as standard issue in all lifeboats and airships.

By the time Doobie reached his majority, his line had been sadly winnowed by misfortune; death in battle, laboratory incidents, and old age, leaving him the sole living Brown. Not one to rest on his laurels, or dally long on his fundament, Doobie, in seeking ways to further increase his worth, purchased Babbage's designs for mechanical calculating engines, supplied that brilliant man with a shop and assistants, and funded his further research. The end result was that Doobie owned the monopoly on the manufacture of the steam powered calculator, with all the advantages entailing from that position.

At about this time, Doobie met Annalevesia, a winsome young lady of good family ( but poor prospects) who came to his attention when she applied for a position in his employ. Doobie was smitten, and showered her with gifts, the most expensive of which was a "backtop" version of the Babbage calculating engine.

In this wonder of miniaturization and precision British manufacture, tiny steam pistons, put in motion by valve actuating keys, drove the gear trains that formed the "brain" of the Calculating Engine. Output of the brain , through complex linkages, flipped miniature tiles ( one side black, one white) ranged tightly in a regular rows, forming letters or numbers under the direction of the mechanical brain. Via a connection over the mysterious "aethernet", to a full size Babbage engine in a dedicated branch telegraph office, Annalevesia's every keystroke became, in minutes, a telegram ready to be delivered by runner to its intended recipient, from anywhere she wandered in the City.

I wasn't long before Anna had developed quite a following among young ladies of her age and social rank, for her sharp observations on the foibles of London's denizens, and the lot of them vied to be included in her group of friends. Doobie, seeing the cost of his gift mounting into the hundreds of pounds daily (wages for the servant who carried the Engine on his back, for the man carrying the coal to fire its small boiler, for another to carry water, plus an engineer to keep the engines delicate precision mechanisms in good fettle, as well as for the platoons of runners required to deliver telegrams) asked her to "Please be more concise, my dear".

Anna, clever girl, devised a hieroglyphic language composed of combined punctuation marks, arranged to look like tiny facial caricatures, and intended to convey emotions that would otherwise have required lengthy explication. Scrap book keeping was all the rage in Anna's set at the time, and since her friends all saved her missives, those leaves of their scrapbooks dedicated to Anna inevitably became "facebook pages".

Doobie won Anna, and in short order took both her innocence, and soon after, her virtue (though I have some doubt, based on later events, that Anna had either if those ladylike endowments in any significant supply) They spent long hours in her boudoir, " the brown room" where he repeatedly visited her "secret places". Doobie had what he described as "peculiar tastes", and as a result, had little interest in the one of Anna's "secret places" associated with producing a heir; so they spent most of their time together "hiding his tube worm in her starfish' grotto"...as they playfully termed their activities.

Some years later, when, inevitably, Doobie took his last breath in ecstatic paroxysm atop Anna, she inherited a prodigious fortune, and spent the remaining decades of her long life supporting the arts, primarily in the form of patronage to a remarkable pantheon of handsome young painters, musicians, and sculptors, along with an astonishing array of nubile young lady dancers.

Since among Doobies dubious tastes were both copraphagy and coprophilia, and by dying without heir he joined the ghosts of his forty nine ancestors, in haunting the Gothic pile of the family home as the last of his line, this brief history markedly resembles that other shady novel of recent infamy... fifty shades (of Brown) and brim full of, shall we say... digestive byproducts.