Chapter Text
To Beatrice:
The most beautiful lilies are far too often picked long before they ought to be.
It was quite out of the ordinary that the three children were at Briny Beach. Going to the beach is, of course, not an uncommon occurrence, when the weather permits. What was so atypical about these three children standing on the beach on this particular day was that the weather absolutely did not permit. Gray clouds hung from the sky like light fixtures doing a very poor job of being light fixtures, not only because they were blocking light rather than emitting it but also because light fixtures generally do not shed drops of water, and if they do, one should generally consult with one's electrician and demand either a refund or an umbrella suitable for indoor use.
It should go without saying that the children themselves were also out of the ordinary.
Violet Baudelaire was not like many other girls her age for a variety of reasons. Klaus Baudelaire, also occasionally known as Klara, was not like other children of any age for a similar variety of reasons and some different ones. And Sunny Baudelaire was so unlike any baby I have ever made the acquaintance of that I could likely fill many books writing about the youngest Baudelaire alone.
Violet was an inventor, which is an uncommon but enriching occupation for a fourteen-year-old. She enjoyed problem solving, a habit which had been encouraged in her for as long as she could remember and possibly before she could remember. Violet approached every problem in her path with calm rationality. She was not afraid to consider every possibility, even the ones she did not like.
At the moment this tragic and unlikely story commences, Violet was experimenting with electricity, which is very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very dangerous for anyone except qualified professionals who have undergone a great deal of training and know the difference between chandeliers and cumulonimbus clouds. Violet was not an electrician, but she knew a great deal about the difference between voltage and wattage, statistics on lightning-related fatalities, conductivity, and salt water.
Violet's curly black hair was tied back with a dark purple ribbon her mother had given her as a twelfth birthday gift. Of course it was a silly thought, but Violet seemed to actually think better when her hair was not in her eyes. There was no real way to test this feeling empirically, because there were simply too many variables that may have been influencing the way Violet was thinking, and her hair ribbon was just one of them. For all the Baudelaire ingenuity, some things could simply not be tested. Violet was willing to let it slide just this once, because she liked the ribbon regardless of whether it enhanced her brainpower. Violet's mother was also an inventor, a fact which I often think about when I am presumably alone on the roof of my astronomer friend's conservatory. It is easy to dismiss some things that cannot be tested, like the effectiveness of hair ribbons on cognitive functions, but very, very difficult and painful to dismiss others, like the effects of a single article of a tea set on the emotional state of a disagreeable group of people.
I will not reproduce the exact nature of Violet's electrical experiments here because my editor would likely drop to their knees, sobbing and begging me to cease printing this litany of misfortune and irrational happenstances before anyone else was hurt, which would be very sensible of them by any standards. In fact, you, my dear reader, should stop reading immediately and imagine the eldest Baudelaire child coming to a scientifically sound and personally pleasing conclusion in her experiments and leading her siblings home from their rainy-day picnic at the beach, instead of learning of the true and frustrating events to follow.
While Violet was conducting very, very, very, very, [...] very dangerous experiments, her brother Klaus (or perhaps her sister Klara; Violet had been in too much of a hurry to get to the beach before it started to rain and had forgotten to ask, which was something she usually made sure to do) was making the acquaintance of several tide pool creatures. Klaus (he was Klaus and not Klara at the moment) loved to read and had recently done rather a lot of reading about the various invertebrate that lived in Briny Beach, but he was also of the opinion that there was nothing about a contemporary that could be read that couldn't also be personally verified and improved upon.
If it was not completely obvious, Klaus had also done great deal of reading about pretty much everything other conceivable subject, from gender studies to a variety of Zulu traditional dances, and from the production of apple butter to the history of legumes in North America. Some people would and often did argue that very many of the subjects Klaus read about were inappropriate for a twelve-year-old boy, and Klaus would respond that he was not always a twelve-year-old boy, sometimes she was a twelve-year-old girl, which usually shut people up long enough for Klaus (or Klara) to finish his (or her) book. Sometimes Klaus also liked to conceive of himself as a being entirely free of societal notions of gender, but that usually went right over people's heads.
Klaus would much rather have been home in his parents' astoundingly large library in one of the similarly large and comfortable chairs studying things like clownfish and parthenogenetic lizards, but he would have to make due with the local fauna. The tide pool he was currently examining was home to several bivalves, at least one sea urchin, and one spiky thing that might have been a sea urchin but might also have been a waterlogged chestnut, and those creatures and tree nuts were quite interesting in their own right.
Sunny Baudelaire was sitting on a picnic blanket to avoid getting sandy, biting a piece of petrified driftwood. Sunny was not very old and did not have interests quite as specialized as the other two Baudelaires. What Sunny did have was a set of teeth that would have sent almost any dentist on Earth running for their security blanket, except perhaps for my acquaintance Dr. Charles, who, according to my limited research on dentists, would likely have smiled knowingly and handed Sunny a solid brass teething ring. Because Sunny was still only a baby, no one was really sure exactly what Sunny would grow up to become, so for convenience's sake usually referred to the child as though Sunny were female. She was too young to really understand the concept of pronouns but did not seem to be overly distressed by this.
Unbeknownst to all three Baudelaire children, as they passed the dreary day picnicking, inventing, researching, and biting things on Briny Beach, something dreadful had happened elsewhere. Many awful things happen every day, and most people go about their business perfectly unaware of all the terrible things that are happening in the world, which is usually sensible because there are many things that one person cannot immediately change by their own power.
I must pause to tell you that good and evil are not really universally objective, a phrase which here means 'are mostly a muddy gray color instead of the sharply divided black and white most people think they are'. Many very intelligent people have bickered for a number of years and have come to several displeasing conclusions about something called the human condition, which, although it sounds like something you may come down with if you stay out in the rain too long or ingest something past its expiration date, is really not all that bad after all.
There are, of course, noble people and ignoble people. There are people who adore cocktail peanuts and people who do not care much for them and even people who are allergic to them and would very much prefer to avoid them for their own safety. There are people who make good decisions and people who make bad decisions. There are women who steal precious tableware and women who cannot understand why some women decide to steal precious tableware, even after so many years of sleepless nights.
I have a great many upstanding and moral witnesses who can attest that he dreadful thing that happened at the Baudelaires' home was the sad and unnecessary result of true evil, and an equal number of likewise credible witnesses who argue that what happened was certainly necessary and perhaps even good. These two groups of people may well argue on the subject until the Sun begins to expand and finds itself unable one morning to fuse hydrogen into helium and says to itself, "I'm afraid it's time for me to leave," just as I said to Beatrice on that night so many years ago, although I must make it perfectly clear that I was not fusing hydrogen into helium at the time, contrary to some reports about the evening.
Dear reader, no one is really sure whether or not there are good people and evil people. I hope you will pause to consider the facts it is my sworn duty to report to you and I hope you will draw conclusions where lack of information and a poisoned library card have forced me to leave these pages blank. I will leave it to you, should you make the unwise choice to keep reading this first miserable volume of the Baudelaires' story, to decide whether or not the Baudelaire fire, like so many other fires, was put into motion for the greater good or merely one person's mistaken definition of good.