Dumas and Frans Hardy

Character Post 74: Dumas and Frans Hardy

Dumas and Frans Hardy were born to Pierre Hardy and his wife Philippa. After a difficult first pregnancy with her daughter Louise, Philippa hadn't wanted any more children, but the twins happened anyway. The babies were premature. As Philippa put it later, the twins' names were down to her husband, as she was too ill to think about such things at the time.

Dumas and Frans were mirror twins, and from the beginning were totally absorbed in their own small world. When they turned thirteen they had a brief period of conflict, but that soon passed. By the time they were in their early thirties they had still not, as their sister Louise put it, found anyone they liked better than themselves and one another. She always felt that the twins viewed her with tolerant fondness, but that wasn't quite the case. Far from objecting to their names, they did their best to live up to them by starting their own costume business (I-Identify) with bespoke costumes made in beautiful historical detail. They adopted costume themselves, and liked to appear at festivals and other events in character. One person observing them dubbed them The Cavalier and The Musketeer, which would have pleased them. Eventually their sister gave up trying to understand them and helped them out by sourcing the cloth and some of the upmarket costume jewellery they needed.

Because the twins preferred to live as a kind of mobile work of art, it was difficult for onlookers to know how to take them. Even Louise was baffled although she found out they valued her a lot more than she'd ever expected. Frans claimed to identify as straight with a lot of curves, while Dumas was gay with a lot of straights. Exactly what they meant by that is anyone's guess.