In a room overlooking the Little Julien Fountain, a group of children were holding a poetry recital competition.
They were clearly performing with great seriousness, but aside from the children's parents, no one truly cared about their recitations. After all, no matter how profoundly a child pretended to understand, they could not truly comprehend Macbeth.
"What did you think?" Richard Edgeworth asked.
"Very good," Georgiana said gravely. Just then, one child's performance came to an end, and she applauded along with everyone else, though her mind had already wandered elsewhere.
Phoebe had joined the Frog Choir. That pitch-dark dungeon actually had excellent acoustics; no one had noticed before, but after the start of this term, many people heard Mermaid songs echoing through the common room. With music like that, who needed a phonograph?
"Why is it black?" Pomona asked, looking at the dungeon's renovated walls.
"That's what the designer told me," Isabella Sidney said.
"You should fire him," Pomona said. Leaning close to the wall, she caught the scent of wine.
"This is a paint he made according to Ten Books on Architecture," Isabella said. "My father ordered it from France."
"Made with wine lees?" Pomona asked.
Isabella nodded. "And from a Bordeaux winery, at that."
Damn rich people.
Pomona grumbled inwardly and stopped commenting on the pitch-black walls.
Wine lees could actually be pressed a second time to make brandy. Though it tasted somewhat worse than brandy made directly, only people "thirsty" during Prohibition would probably drink it.
There was still plenty of pigment to extract from wine lees, which meant these apparently black walls were actually a very deep purple.
Vitruvius said that if high-quality wine lees were used, it could even imitate Indian blue, though the process was rather complicated. It was widely used in steam