Sangria 7, Peach 2 [Divide and Rule]
Title: betrayal is a cancer (let it eat your soul)
Author: lost_spook
Story: Heroes of the Revolution (Divide & Rule)
Flavor(s): Peach #2 (the moment you’ve been waiting for); Sangria #7 (They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm)
Toppings/Extras: Gummy Bunnies (also for hc_bingo square “atonement”).
Rating: Teen/Mature
Word Count: 2445
Notes: (1924, 1935, 1942, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1958), 1961; Edward Iveson, Julia Graves, Emily Iveson, Elizabeth Iveson, Marie Werner, Amyas Harding. (References to suicide, suicidal ideation. I’m sorry, revisiting this yet again, but I think this fills in a lot of stuff I’m not sure was clear before.)
Summary: Edward Iveson, and betrayal.
***
<<1924>>
Edward sits on the back doorstep, arms around his knees and stares out at the garden, trying to pretend he’s not scared. Mother said she’d be back before too long, but it already feels like hours and hours, and there’s no sign of her yet. He hasn’t had any dinner and it’s starting to get dark. If it weren’t for Mother, he thinks, he’d run away.
He drags himself up and hammers on the door yet again. “Mr Taylor!” Surely, he thinks, even if Mr Taylor won’t let him in, Jennings will. He’ll glare at him and be mean, but he won’t keep him locked out here. No one but Mr Taylor would do that.
But nobody answers and after a while longer, Edward gives up; leaning back against the against the cold bricks of the wall, shivering and beginning to wonder if it’s possible to die out here in the night, if maybe he’ll freeze or starve still sitting on the back doorstep. He’s old enough to know that’s probably impossible but logic doesn’t seem very convincing in the face of the ever encroaching dark.
When Mother arrives, she ushers him in with her. She doesn’t say much, but he can tell she’s angry from the way her face tightens, the way she moves. He sits in the kitchen, rapidly warming up and kicking his feet against the chair as he awaits the sandwich she’s making for him. As he eats it, he listens with satisfaction to her shouting at Mr Taylor in the study. Make him go away, he wills her. Take us away.
The next morning, however, he hears her talking to his aunt on the telephone as he’s coming down the stairs and, forgetful of not eavesdropping, sits down halfway in sick dismay.
“He can’t stay here, not after this,” Mother says and Edward, half a flight above her, knows she means him. “If you meant what you said, then I’ll have to take you up on it. You can still have him for the summer?”
Suddenly there’s so much to be done and so many people in the way. Edward understands now something of what Julia means when she complains about other people in the house, but he’s Foreign Secretary. There’s no way to make them leave.
Today, it bothers him as it never has before: he fears one of the secretaries will read his mind, or the security detail will search his desk and find out his secrets.
More importantly, they’re getting in the way of what he has to do. So many things, so little time. Every last heartbeat suddenly so important. International affairs barely matter at all; they shrink into insignificance while the small things expand to encompass everything.
He steals time from the Bulgarian Foreign Minister to find his daughter, to say goodnight.
“After tomorrow,” he says, giving what warning he can, “I shall be away.”
“Again?”
“Again.” He brushes a hand against her cheek. “For a long while, I’m afraid.”
Emily screws up her face. “Daddy, when will you stop being very important?”
“Soon,” he says. “Soon.” He kisses her goodnight as if it’s an ordinary day, and leaves.
<<1938 >>
Edward stands in the doorway, finding his heartbeat sounding loudly in his ears as he waits.
When Marie opens it, she smiles.
“I came to apologise,” he says, trying to sound formal, the perfect civil servant, but he’s stumbling over his words. “For - for my behaviour last night.”
Marie inclines her head to one side, just a fraction and raises an eyebrow. “Oh, honey,” she says. “Nonsense. You weren’t that bad.”
He colours immediately and loses even the bare pretence of trying to be official. “Marie!” He catches himself. “Mrs Werner, I should say.”
“No, no, I understand,” she says. “You aren’t resigning after all, and you don’t want scandal. That’s just fine by me. So, now you either thank me nicely and go, or you come in and stop trying to make a scene in the doorway.”
Last night had been one thing - last night had been in revenge at the world, at the law, at Caroline - but today is another entirely. Edward can’t be happy having an affair with a married woman, no matter how little she says her husband minds. There’s no future in it and surely hurt for someone in the end. He’ll thank her and go, that’s what he’ll do.
He steps inside instead, betrayed by himself: he can’t keep away.
He fears he’ll back out when it comes to the point. He always does. He has always been a coward, always been weak.
This time, he thinks, this time the alternative might be bad enough to force his hand.
<<1943>>
It doesn’t matter how well it goes or how badly, it’s the idea, the process, that’s at the heart of the issue. Edward walks into a bare office, armed only with information, and from the safety of a chair behind a table, says everything he can to get the other man to risk his life.
It doesn’t work an awful lot of the time, but it’s easy to try. A spy has already made that agreement once before, why not again, for them? It’s a game and one tries to steal one’s opponent’s pieces from the board and turn them back against them, to find the best positions for them. It takes skill to do it well, and there’s a thrill to it: all you need, just once in a while, is the right piece of information to be able to scare, coax or bribe the enemy into a betrayal of their side.
It’s necessary; it’s for the war. It’s just that sometimes the game isn’t a game. Sometimes Edward isn’t in the office; sometimes he’s in a dingy flat in Deptford or wherever it is this time, trying to contain the damage as someone else gives way under the stress of the pretence. Not everyone can do it, and few people can do it for long.
When he has his assignation with Peggy, he can’t get it out of his head: that someone like him called her in, asked her to put her life on the line. Can you forgive us? he wants to ask, but of course, he can’t. If he could, what could she ever say anyway?
“Get me Whittaker,” he says again to one of his personal secretaries in passing, but still he can’t get a response out of the man. He’s away - or refusing to return the Foreign Secretary’s calls.
If one piece rolls off the board, do you lose the game?
“Damn him,” says Edward under his breath, but sometimes the right key simply won’t fall into your possession.
<<1958>>
He’s never been so angry before as when he hears that Fields has ordered the raid on France, on Paris. The Prime Minister has gone against all his advice, so Edward writes out his resignation, he drafts out a speech to the Commons, all fire and condemnation. He’ll make the House shake a little before he leaves it.
Julia’s furious, too, though; that’s the trouble. She’ll return to the organisation, she says, if he can’t do anything - try at least to get information through, and save what lives they can. Edward wonders what she might try to do while he withdraws from the arena.
Then there’s the uncomfortable fact that if he resigns, Fields will put someone in his place who’s far more amenable to his hard line policies.
It’s a small thing in the end to betray his country. One piece of paper copied and passed on.
It’s the same as ever, moving the pieces on the board. It’s about logic: Julia’s contacts, his information, and his presence to block Fields when he can. His mind still works that way.
That’s when he realises that he will have to die sometime sooner rather than later. That is the penalty for treason, and someone will have to see it executed. It occurs to him even then that it might have to be him.
There is nothing he can say to lesson his betrayal of Julia and plenty he could do to worsen it. He ruthlessly carves out a few minutes for her, sending away the private secretary, the undersecretary, the personal secretary, and anybody else still hovering around, taking her hand before she can leave.
She thinks she understands - they’re waiting for the axe to fall, waiting for their crime to be laid bare to the world, to be caught and sentenced - so she sees nothing odd in his behaviour.
“You don’t think someone will come now, do you?” she asks.
Edward shakes his head, and kisses her cheek. “I don’t see any reason why they should, not yet.” She’ll hate him come the morning, he knows. There aren’t many things he could do that she would never forgive, but this is undoubtedly one of them. He releases her and smiles. “Say hello to Nancy for me.”
He doesn’t have to do anything more. She does the rest, stretching up to kiss him more firmly, holding him too tightly, just for a moment before letting go and straightening his jacket and tie. “Darling, I can always telephone Nancy and say that I can’t go, not this time.”
“What has Nancy done to deserve such cavalier treatment?” says Edward lightly. “Go.” He thinks about saying she’ll see him tomorrow, that he’ll still be here, but it would be painful sophistry.
He isn’t sorry, he thinks almost savagely, as she leaves. He looks back on all of it and he can’t find it in him to be truly sorry. He’d rather be in this mess now and have had these years with Julia than have lived differently and not known her, or never won her. He’s never understood how he has. He has regrets, but he’s not sorry, or not enough.
<<1948>>
Edward’s a new MP and it’s a privilege to be invited to Amyas Harding’s. It’s also a test of sorts. Harding can and usually does drink anyone else under the table. He seems, Edward’s begun to think, to like trying to find out all he can about his colleagues. It’s not a worry for Edward; he’s been in the service long enough not to be easily careless if only a little drunk, and when very drunk, he’s has a tendency to say less, not more.
Maybe Harding’s worked that out for himself; maybe that’s why he tells Edward an indiscreet tale about his an affair with the wife of a prominent figure - so prominent Edward’s sure he’s inventing it all. Or maybe Edward’s been in the service too long, seeing traps everywhere and Harding has no agenda, not tonight.
“There must have been someone, eh?” Harding says, bringing the conversation back round to Edward. “If not, there should have been, Iveson!”
Edward shrugs. He can’t talk about Marie because she’s alive and he can’t talk about Peggy, because she’s not, but he’s somewhere at the line between mildly drunk and very drunk, enough to tell the truth this once. “Maybe. Nothing that lasted.” Edward leans his head against the side of the leather armchair. “Last year. There was someone - a girl - I met once.”
“That isn’t a fair exchange,” says Harding, and it isn’t.
“Just once,” says Edward, more to himself than to Harding. “She won’t remember. And if she does, she’ll hate me.”
Edward has explained to Harding, to Diana, to some of the others, the threat that Hallam poses, but none of that erases what he did to them; the secrets he gave away or sold. To save his skin, to save Julia’s, he did what Hallam asked and brought down his fellows. He needs the right people on the outside, he thinks, but it’s not an excuse, and shame is hard to shake off. Maybe he hasn’t judged it right; maybe all he has done is give Hallam the advantage he needs. Even what he does tonight will play into their hands - Hallam and Jemmings and the others.
Edward makes his way to the study and sits at his desk. He pulls off his tie. He’s going to do what he must when the time comes; he isn’t afraid of failing any longer. There isn’t any time left; he knew that when Jemmings started demanding money. (Hallam wants the country; Jemmings is more practical). There is no other end, and after all this time trying to hide the guilt, to obey Hallam, to find hidden ways to fight, to fear for Julia, and for Emily - all Edward truly wants now is the end, any end at all.
<<1947>>
The morning after his encounter with Miss Graves, Edward gets up and dresses with more than his usual care, trying to come to a decision.
He can almost feel her still beside him in the morgue, if not breaking, then certainly cracking under the weight of tragedy. He stares into the mirror unseeing and straightens his tie for the third time.
He could go round to see her. He has the address and the perfect excuse - their families’ connection. He can say with complete honesty that he feels obliged to call, that he knows his mother and aunt wouldn’t have him do anything else. It would merely be natural to ask if there is anything he can do to help.
He silently debates it again. He can’t trust his motives; he’d be taking advantage of her grief. She’s staying with someone, a friend, or a more distant relation, he’s not sure, but she has help already. Edward is the last person in the world she’ll want to see now. He can imagine her expression only too well if she opens the door and spies him there; the look of bafflement and horror that will inevitably cross her face. He brings with him the shadow of death, he always will.
Edward swears and pulls off the tie, changing it for another, not much different. He can’t, can he? He can’t plague her with unwanted attentions at a time like this.
What he learns, weeks later by chance, is that what he’s done is far worse: he’s left her to the mercy of other people who’ll take advantage of her situation more surely than he ever would and have no compunction about it. It’s too late for him to help. The only thing he can do now that won’t make things worse, he does: he walks away and pretends he never saw her. He doesn’t do what they pay him to do; he doesn’t put her name in the file. He never will.
***
Author: lost_spook
Story: Heroes of the Revolution (Divide & Rule)
Flavor(s): Peach #2 (the moment you’ve been waiting for); Sangria #7 (They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm)
Toppings/Extras: Gummy Bunnies (also for hc_bingo square “atonement”).
Rating: Teen/Mature
Word Count: 2445
Notes: (1924, 1935, 1942, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1958), 1961; Edward Iveson, Julia Graves, Emily Iveson, Elizabeth Iveson, Marie Werner, Amyas Harding. (References to suicide, suicidal ideation. I’m sorry, revisiting this yet again, but I think this fills in a lot of stuff I’m not sure was clear before.)
Summary: Edward Iveson, and betrayal.
***
<<1924>>
Edward sits on the back doorstep, arms around his knees and stares out at the garden, trying to pretend he’s not scared. Mother said she’d be back before too long, but it already feels like hours and hours, and there’s no sign of her yet. He hasn’t had any dinner and it’s starting to get dark. If it weren’t for Mother, he thinks, he’d run away.
He drags himself up and hammers on the door yet again. “Mr Taylor!” Surely, he thinks, even if Mr Taylor won’t let him in, Jennings will. He’ll glare at him and be mean, but he won’t keep him locked out here. No one but Mr Taylor would do that.
But nobody answers and after a while longer, Edward gives up; leaning back against the against the cold bricks of the wall, shivering and beginning to wonder if it’s possible to die out here in the night, if maybe he’ll freeze or starve still sitting on the back doorstep. He’s old enough to know that’s probably impossible but logic doesn’t seem very convincing in the face of the ever encroaching dark.
When Mother arrives, she ushers him in with her. She doesn’t say much, but he can tell she’s angry from the way her face tightens, the way she moves. He sits in the kitchen, rapidly warming up and kicking his feet against the chair as he awaits the sandwich she’s making for him. As he eats it, he listens with satisfaction to her shouting at Mr Taylor in the study. Make him go away, he wills her. Take us away.
The next morning, however, he hears her talking to his aunt on the telephone as he’s coming down the stairs and, forgetful of not eavesdropping, sits down halfway in sick dismay.
“He can’t stay here, not after this,” Mother says and Edward, half a flight above her, knows she means him. “If you meant what you said, then I’ll have to take you up on it. You can still have him for the summer?”
Suddenly there’s so much to be done and so many people in the way. Edward understands now something of what Julia means when she complains about other people in the house, but he’s Foreign Secretary. There’s no way to make them leave.
Today, it bothers him as it never has before: he fears one of the secretaries will read his mind, or the security detail will search his desk and find out his secrets.
More importantly, they’re getting in the way of what he has to do. So many things, so little time. Every last heartbeat suddenly so important. International affairs barely matter at all; they shrink into insignificance while the small things expand to encompass everything.
He steals time from the Bulgarian Foreign Minister to find his daughter, to say goodnight.
“After tomorrow,” he says, giving what warning he can, “I shall be away.”
“Again?”
“Again.” He brushes a hand against her cheek. “For a long while, I’m afraid.”
Emily screws up her face. “Daddy, when will you stop being very important?”
“Soon,” he says. “Soon.” He kisses her goodnight as if it’s an ordinary day, and leaves.
<<1938 >>
Edward stands in the doorway, finding his heartbeat sounding loudly in his ears as he waits.
When Marie opens it, she smiles.
“I came to apologise,” he says, trying to sound formal, the perfect civil servant, but he’s stumbling over his words. “For - for my behaviour last night.”
Marie inclines her head to one side, just a fraction and raises an eyebrow. “Oh, honey,” she says. “Nonsense. You weren’t that bad.”
He colours immediately and loses even the bare pretence of trying to be official. “Marie!” He catches himself. “Mrs Werner, I should say.”
“No, no, I understand,” she says. “You aren’t resigning after all, and you don’t want scandal. That’s just fine by me. So, now you either thank me nicely and go, or you come in and stop trying to make a scene in the doorway.”
Last night had been one thing - last night had been in revenge at the world, at the law, at Caroline - but today is another entirely. Edward can’t be happy having an affair with a married woman, no matter how little she says her husband minds. There’s no future in it and surely hurt for someone in the end. He’ll thank her and go, that’s what he’ll do.
He steps inside instead, betrayed by himself: he can’t keep away.
He fears he’ll back out when it comes to the point. He always does. He has always been a coward, always been weak.
This time, he thinks, this time the alternative might be bad enough to force his hand.
<<1943>>
It doesn’t matter how well it goes or how badly, it’s the idea, the process, that’s at the heart of the issue. Edward walks into a bare office, armed only with information, and from the safety of a chair behind a table, says everything he can to get the other man to risk his life.
It doesn’t work an awful lot of the time, but it’s easy to try. A spy has already made that agreement once before, why not again, for them? It’s a game and one tries to steal one’s opponent’s pieces from the board and turn them back against them, to find the best positions for them. It takes skill to do it well, and there’s a thrill to it: all you need, just once in a while, is the right piece of information to be able to scare, coax or bribe the enemy into a betrayal of their side.
It’s necessary; it’s for the war. It’s just that sometimes the game isn’t a game. Sometimes Edward isn’t in the office; sometimes he’s in a dingy flat in Deptford or wherever it is this time, trying to contain the damage as someone else gives way under the stress of the pretence. Not everyone can do it, and few people can do it for long.
When he has his assignation with Peggy, he can’t get it out of his head: that someone like him called her in, asked her to put her life on the line. Can you forgive us? he wants to ask, but of course, he can’t. If he could, what could she ever say anyway?
“Get me Whittaker,” he says again to one of his personal secretaries in passing, but still he can’t get a response out of the man. He’s away - or refusing to return the Foreign Secretary’s calls.
If one piece rolls off the board, do you lose the game?
“Damn him,” says Edward under his breath, but sometimes the right key simply won’t fall into your possession.
<<1958>>
He’s never been so angry before as when he hears that Fields has ordered the raid on France, on Paris. The Prime Minister has gone against all his advice, so Edward writes out his resignation, he drafts out a speech to the Commons, all fire and condemnation. He’ll make the House shake a little before he leaves it.
Julia’s furious, too, though; that’s the trouble. She’ll return to the organisation, she says, if he can’t do anything - try at least to get information through, and save what lives they can. Edward wonders what she might try to do while he withdraws from the arena.
Then there’s the uncomfortable fact that if he resigns, Fields will put someone in his place who’s far more amenable to his hard line policies.
It’s a small thing in the end to betray his country. One piece of paper copied and passed on.
It’s the same as ever, moving the pieces on the board. It’s about logic: Julia’s contacts, his information, and his presence to block Fields when he can. His mind still works that way.
That’s when he realises that he will have to die sometime sooner rather than later. That is the penalty for treason, and someone will have to see it executed. It occurs to him even then that it might have to be him.
There is nothing he can say to lesson his betrayal of Julia and plenty he could do to worsen it. He ruthlessly carves out a few minutes for her, sending away the private secretary, the undersecretary, the personal secretary, and anybody else still hovering around, taking her hand before she can leave.
She thinks she understands - they’re waiting for the axe to fall, waiting for their crime to be laid bare to the world, to be caught and sentenced - so she sees nothing odd in his behaviour.
“You don’t think someone will come now, do you?” she asks.
Edward shakes his head, and kisses her cheek. “I don’t see any reason why they should, not yet.” She’ll hate him come the morning, he knows. There aren’t many things he could do that she would never forgive, but this is undoubtedly one of them. He releases her and smiles. “Say hello to Nancy for me.”
He doesn’t have to do anything more. She does the rest, stretching up to kiss him more firmly, holding him too tightly, just for a moment before letting go and straightening his jacket and tie. “Darling, I can always telephone Nancy and say that I can’t go, not this time.”
“What has Nancy done to deserve such cavalier treatment?” says Edward lightly. “Go.” He thinks about saying she’ll see him tomorrow, that he’ll still be here, but it would be painful sophistry.
He isn’t sorry, he thinks almost savagely, as she leaves. He looks back on all of it and he can’t find it in him to be truly sorry. He’d rather be in this mess now and have had these years with Julia than have lived differently and not known her, or never won her. He’s never understood how he has. He has regrets, but he’s not sorry, or not enough.
<<1948>>
Edward’s a new MP and it’s a privilege to be invited to Amyas Harding’s. It’s also a test of sorts. Harding can and usually does drink anyone else under the table. He seems, Edward’s begun to think, to like trying to find out all he can about his colleagues. It’s not a worry for Edward; he’s been in the service long enough not to be easily careless if only a little drunk, and when very drunk, he’s has a tendency to say less, not more.
Maybe Harding’s worked that out for himself; maybe that’s why he tells Edward an indiscreet tale about his an affair with the wife of a prominent figure - so prominent Edward’s sure he’s inventing it all. Or maybe Edward’s been in the service too long, seeing traps everywhere and Harding has no agenda, not tonight.
“There must have been someone, eh?” Harding says, bringing the conversation back round to Edward. “If not, there should have been, Iveson!”
Edward shrugs. He can’t talk about Marie because she’s alive and he can’t talk about Peggy, because she’s not, but he’s somewhere at the line between mildly drunk and very drunk, enough to tell the truth this once. “Maybe. Nothing that lasted.” Edward leans his head against the side of the leather armchair. “Last year. There was someone - a girl - I met once.”
“That isn’t a fair exchange,” says Harding, and it isn’t.
“Just once,” says Edward, more to himself than to Harding. “She won’t remember. And if she does, she’ll hate me.”
Edward has explained to Harding, to Diana, to some of the others, the threat that Hallam poses, but none of that erases what he did to them; the secrets he gave away or sold. To save his skin, to save Julia’s, he did what Hallam asked and brought down his fellows. He needs the right people on the outside, he thinks, but it’s not an excuse, and shame is hard to shake off. Maybe he hasn’t judged it right; maybe all he has done is give Hallam the advantage he needs. Even what he does tonight will play into their hands - Hallam and Jemmings and the others.
Edward makes his way to the study and sits at his desk. He pulls off his tie. He’s going to do what he must when the time comes; he isn’t afraid of failing any longer. There isn’t any time left; he knew that when Jemmings started demanding money. (Hallam wants the country; Jemmings is more practical). There is no other end, and after all this time trying to hide the guilt, to obey Hallam, to find hidden ways to fight, to fear for Julia, and for Emily - all Edward truly wants now is the end, any end at all.
<<1947>>
The morning after his encounter with Miss Graves, Edward gets up and dresses with more than his usual care, trying to come to a decision.
He can almost feel her still beside him in the morgue, if not breaking, then certainly cracking under the weight of tragedy. He stares into the mirror unseeing and straightens his tie for the third time.
He could go round to see her. He has the address and the perfect excuse - their families’ connection. He can say with complete honesty that he feels obliged to call, that he knows his mother and aunt wouldn’t have him do anything else. It would merely be natural to ask if there is anything he can do to help.
He silently debates it again. He can’t trust his motives; he’d be taking advantage of her grief. She’s staying with someone, a friend, or a more distant relation, he’s not sure, but she has help already. Edward is the last person in the world she’ll want to see now. He can imagine her expression only too well if she opens the door and spies him there; the look of bafflement and horror that will inevitably cross her face. He brings with him the shadow of death, he always will.
Edward swears and pulls off the tie, changing it for another, not much different. He can’t, can he? He can’t plague her with unwanted attentions at a time like this.
What he learns, weeks later by chance, is that what he’s done is far worse: he’s left her to the mercy of other people who’ll take advantage of her situation more surely than he ever would and have no compunction about it. It’s too late for him to help. The only thing he can do now that won’t make things worse, he does: he walks away and pretends he never saw her. He doesn’t do what they pay him to do; he doesn’t put her name in the file. He never will.
***