Love Birds

Chapter 1

The Matchmaker and the Parrot

Maurice Heartman Cicero wore a small, dark mustache that curled like punctuation above his pointed goatee – an exclamation at the end of a carefully composed face.

He was not born in a metropolis, nor had he spent more than a fortnight within its hallowed, hectic confines. In truth, Maurice hailed from a modest island town off the coast – a place of windswept docks, salted fruit, and storm-heavy skies. Fish were bartered at sunrise. Oranges ripened in humble baskets. The moon, when full, hung like a pearl over the ocean, drawing in tides and restless dreams alike.

Still, Maurice had found – quite shrewdly that the appearance of urbanity served him well. Cosmopolitan trappings lent him both allure and authority. And if they also helped with the occasional pleasurable pursuit? Well. A gentleman rarely comments on such things.

Of course, Maurice was not his true name.

He had been born Albert Heartman – a name more suited, he always thought, to a man who sold bacon, or perhaps oversaw the king’s tithings in a dusty back office where love was weighed by the pound and taxed accordingly.

It did not, decidedly, conjure the mysterious air of a romantic alchemist.

And so, he became Maurice. Dressed in dark silks and resplendent waistcoats, adorned with gold chains and silver rings, his black leather boots rising boldly to the calf, he looked every inch the seasoned traveler. He carried himself with the air of a man who had danced with duchesses, debated with poets, and once – only once, drunk absinthe with a duke and lived to tell the tale.

The disguises we wear, Maurice often mused, are not always born of deception. Sometimes they spring from a quiet longing to express something more truthful than our given selves – something aspirational, or archetypal. Not always form, fashion, or faith—but practicality.

In the small cities and seaside towns he frequented, Maurice’s exotic edge gave him credibility – especially among Mothers with unwed daughters and urgent hopes. The name opened doors. The boots sealed deals. The parrot, of course, did the rest.

And at heart – beneath the silk, the moniker, the practiced bow – Albert Heartman, alias Maurice Handsome Cicero, was an honest man. He merely understood the need for theater. He was not above orchestrating the ambiance, nor enhancing the experience of the stage called life.

He had been called a charlatan, a fraud, a conjurer of nonsense – and worse. These protests, however, came from a narrow slice of his clientele: those few dissatisfied, disillusioned souls who had arrived already dishonest, not with Maurice, but with themselves.

Affairs of the heart, after all, are rarely straightforward. They are mercurial, impossible to guarantee, and frequently quite upsetting. If not disorienting, they are at least inconvenient. Maurice never promised miracles. In truth, he never promised anything at all.

It was the parrot who was the wonder.