50 Shades of Brown

Indubitable Brown ("Doobie" to his public school form mates, Doobie doo, to his enemies) was the sole heir to the Brown fortune. Though several of his ancestors were better known (Charles "Charlie" Brown, the famous footballer, and "Capability" Brown, Queen Victoria's head gardener, come to mind, along with "Dirk" Brown, the infamous sky pirate, and "Sepia" Brown, the famous daguerreotype artist ) it was Veritable "Very" Brown's invention of the parachute flare launcher, the "Very Pistol" that made the family's 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, the Brown line had been sadly winnowed by misfortune; death in battle, laboratory incidents, lost duels and old age, leaving him the sole surviving Brown. Not one to rest on his laurels, or dally long on his fundament, Doobie, seeking ways to further increase his worth, purchased Babbage's patents on mechanical calculating engines, supplied that brilliant man with a fully equipped shop and assistants, and funded further research. The end result was Doobie's monopoly on the manufacture of the steam powered calculator, with all the advantages that entailed.

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 entirely smitten, and showered Anna with gifts, the most expensive of which was a "backtop" version of the calculating engine.

In this wonder of miniaturization and British manufacture, tiny steam pistons, controlled by valve actuating keys, drove the gear trains that formed the "brain" of the Calculating Engine. Output of the brain, operating through complex linkages, flipped miniature tiles ( one side black, one white) ranged tightly in a regular rows, forming letters 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.

By this time Anna had developed quite a following among young ladies of her set, and they vied to be included in her list of friends and acquaintances. 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 especially trained Engineer, (familiar with miniature mechanisms and the peculiarities of the Babbage engine) so as to keep it in finest of fettle, for the man carrying the coal to fire its small boiler, another to carry water, and for the platoons of runners to deliver telegrams) asked her to "Please be more concise, my dear".

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

Doobie won Anna, and in short order had taken both her innocence and her virtue (though I have some doubts, based on later events, that Anna had either if those ladylike endowments in any significant supply) Anna had insisted upon a quiet private wedding in the Brown family chapel, prior to sharing any of her "secret places" with Doobie, but from all accounts, they were happy together, and well matched in their peculiarities.

The two of them spent long hours in her boudoir, " the brown room", while he visited her her "secret places". Doobie had what he described as "peculiar tastes", and had little interest in the one of Anna's "secret places' associated with fathering a heir (much preferring another, tighter orifice) they spent most of their time together "hiding his tubeworm in her starfish' grotto"...as they playfully termed their activities..

When, inevitably, Doobie perished in an ecstatic paroxysm atop Anna, she inherited a prodigious fortune, and spent the rest of her long life supporting the arts; primarily in the form of patronage to a remarkably extensive pantheon of handsome young struggling painters, sculptors, and nubile young lady dancers.

Since Doobie counted coprophilia among his dubious "peculiar" tastes, 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 resembles remarkably that other shady novel of recent infamy... fifty shades (of Brown) and brim full of, shall we say... digestive byproducts.