(no subject)
Title: Sarcanet Surety
Author: speak_me_fair
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Kate/Hotspur
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: This second tetralogy AU is set primarily during WWI and just before it. Terrible liberties are taken with real history in both directions :-) and probably horrible things to the characters as well...
Summary: This is not how Kate wants to marry....
Notes: With love to angevin2, gileonnen, and my darling quoshara. Fits before 'A Lady As Thou Art'.
This AU is very much in progress, and I have no idea where it will end up. But if anyone has any ideas as to what other characters might be up to during this time, feel free to discuss it with me!
Sarcanet Surety
Kate supposed she should have expected it, given who they were dealing with and his almost uncanny ability to manipulate popular opinion, but it had still come as a shock. She had grown so used to the innately private nature of the life she and Harry were slowly and carefully and almost wonderingly building around themselves, that to have an outside intrusion in the form of a communal decision to bring their marriage forward left her reeling, unable to make any move to defend herself or Harry, and caught up in the organised machinery of a publicised wedding before she had even caught her breath.
Once she had recovered enough to regain her usual caustic assessment of things, she realised that if Henry could have married off his own son to generate interest of a less distantly appalled variety - or perhaps simply to deflect interest elsewhere, she was not quite sure - he probably would have done, regardless of the fact that it would take several new laws on top of royal permission to achieve that right at this moment, and that was before persuading Hal and his astonishing capacity for recalcitrance into doing anything could be even thought of as an attempt.
Kate, who understood schoolboys of a certain prickly age far better than she would have ever wanted to, given that she had somehow survived two brothers, their friends, and Harry Percy on what had seemed at the time like a five-year length top-note, had nothing but sympathy for the new prince. She also had nothing but sympathy for herself, caught in Society's wheel with no way out and constantly told not to mind, not to worry, to just ignore it (whatever 'it' was, and she still wasn't sure even of that), just to smile.
Never mind, dear.
Never mind that the only one who had supported their engagement was Richard, that Harry's father had done his damnedest to talk his son out of it. Never mind that they had grown used to holding their heads high above all the comments about just what Kate saw in Harry other than a title and a dullness that would surely make him the most complaisant husband in England, so used to it, in fact, that they no longer knew what to do now that they were being used to give some kind of glamour to the new regime. Never mind all that, because now they had officially blazoned approval that somehow stood for more than any acknowledgement Richard had ever given them. Never mind that neither of them wanted it or cared, never mind that what had gone before still thrummed through their little private world like a terrible lightning-stroke.
Never mind that the world sometimes still seemed to turn more than once during a day, that Harry seemed to have lost all his clear certainty of right and wrong, abandoned to make his way in a world of government and politics while he was constantly told how unfit he was to be near it. Her oriflamme was fading, and she did not know what would bring him back to his old bright defiance. But she knew it was not this - not flowers and material and fittings and bloody, bloody Beaufort in all his unctuous pomp, graciously agreeing to perform the ceremony. And it certainly wasn't the magazine who wanted her to talk about her plans, or the damned week of parties ahead of them, in which she and Harry would be kept apart as though she were some harem bride, always looking at him from another side of a room, and through a screen of people, or this rotten hotel in which she had found herself established, far away from anything real.
Never mind the false coyness clenching around her more tightly than her corset, or the fact that the trap of expected behaviour that they had evaded for so long had snapped shut around them, pinning them to an unhappy alien wasteland in which they scarcely recognised each other.
Never mind, never mind, never mind, Kate thought angrily, standing in her beautifully appointed suite of rooms like a mannequin and waiting for the next pin to prick her, sharper than any conscience. Never mind that your letters have come back unopened from Richard, or what that might mean, never mind Henry using you, never mind that your brothers have lost their inheritance, never mind that you're a sop thrown to a market of vultures. Never mind.
Her collar was high, and tight, and made from old Vincennes lace that had once been her mother's. It stung to the touch, like a thousand small scratches against the tender skin of her throat, the soft little places under her chin all searched out and found with pinprick accuracy.
They had sewn pearls onto it. Harry hated pearls, said they were for tears. They were, of course, but there was no way he could know that unless he had some reason for making that connection himself...
A pin went into her side, and she cried out.
"Sorry -"
"Never mind," Kate whispered.
Never mind that Harry's eating his heart out over something he won't talk to you about, that his father's put the knife in again and he's going through with all this idiocy for some reason you don't understand. Never mind it, don't think about it, get through it, and then you can both go away -
Impersonal hands lifted her arms, pushed them out in strange bent shapes like those of a dancer. She wondered when they thought she would ever need to move like that in any garment known to man.
She wondered how she was going to move at all, when she might need to go -
Where? asked a mocking voice suddenly that sounded alarmingly familiar, far too close to everything she could not, would not think about, something that she could not survive if she let it in. Where to, Kate? Where were you thinking of going? Even if Harry would agree to leave, where would you go? Could you go if it meant you left without him?
Her heart beat suddenly harder at even the thought, real pain shooting through her chest into her throat, and closing off breath for a moment.
"No," she murmured to herself, and as though breaking the ice that had overlaid that small space between breath and speech had torn her free of the whole clinging, insidious, cobwebby mess, she took two steps away from the hands and pins, and looked at herself in the long mirror.
She saw a bride.
She saw a ghost.
"No," she said, clear and calm. "No, it won't do at all. I've changed my mind. I want a completely different design."
They stared at her in horror, and Kate smiled, watching beautifully painted lips curve in a slight and professional-looking unthawing inside the reflection that seemed wholly separate to her.
"If you don't mind?"
Her brother had practised that tone for weeks, hour after hour getting it just right - because, as far as Kate could tell, he thought that Richard's heir needed Richard's arrogance, that ability to make a simple question sound like the ultimate in commands. By the end of the first day of practise, they could all do it, were finding it hard not to, even in ordinary speech, but still it hadn't been right for him.
He still never sounded quite like Richard, was the truth, but by that time they had acquired a new skill, one they had outgrown using long before there was a different heir and the skill would not be needed in any case.
But Kate had never forgotten, and she used it now without a qualm, keeping all expression save that small, demanding smile on her face, letting the question hang, order-like, in the flower-scented air of the room that she would never, ever let them refer to as hers again.
"Would you like to look at the designs again, my lady?" one of the women asked at last, and Kate did not even drop her eyelids to see which one had spoken, letting them scramble to regain their footing in all ways without even turning her wrist in a gesture of acceptance.
My lady. No, not yours, not anyone's but Harry's. No-one's but his, now or ever.
"Yes," she said politely, still that same cool voice of command and expectation that fell like snow in the heavy air. "Thank you."
It was dismissal, and they knew it, but she still did not move, not until she had heard the front door closing, the soft dull muffled thud of it shivering through her and breaking the strange, half-possessed spell of her stillness, so that her hands came up and tore frantically at silk and pearls and lace and all the stupid folds that were supposed to look clinging and artless and would not move under her fingers, no matter how hard she pulled.
She left it all in a mutilated, crumpled heap on the floor, in the end, getting out of it without any care at all, and thinking savagely that Henry could add it to his damn bill, if this was what he wanted from her. If she was to be the smiling face of her family's acquiescence, then he could pay, and keep paying, and she would smile through it all -
She was angry all through getting her own familiar clothes back on, through walking down the hallway with her expression composed so that no-one would see a thing to remark upon; angry enough to have stayed outwardly calm, to have shown no signs of it in her rooms save the ruined dress.
Angry until she finally managed to get through to a startled sounding Harry on the telephone, and then not angry at all any more, not anything other than terribly close to tears, and feeling as though she had been running somewhere for a very long time, her hands shaking so badly that she wasn't even sure she would be able to get the receiver back in its cradle. Not caring who might be able to hear on a connecting line, or any of the unspoken rules about public behaviour, or what any bribing reporter might make of it, she choked out -
"Harry, I can't -" and waited, suddenly mute, for the explosion.
But all he said was - "Thank God," quick and quiet, and then - "Kate, are you at the hotel?"
She nodded, forgetting he could not see her, and then swallowed, her voice seeming to have run out of her with those three words, and blushing at her own silence, because dear God, what he must think -!
"Go down to the foyer." His voice was so calm, so quiet, that for a moment she did not register what he was saying, and when she did, her heart began to pound so hard and fast with hope that waves sounded in her ears and she almost missed the rest of it. "Wait there. Just take your coat and bag and wait."
She put the phone back down without saying anything, without acknowledgement, not needing to give it, because Harry had already thought, he had already planned, the words had been ready on his tongue and she hadn't needed hers after all.
When she picked up her coat and bag from the chair in the little hallway where she had flung them the night before in a miserable fury of refusing to care what happened to her or her belongings, the woman who caught the all-knowing eye of the mirror was no longer a stranger, nor a ghost, but the image she had seen reflected back at her time and again from mirrors and windows and even polished wood, familiar to her as her own skin and as well-inhabited.
She drew in a breath, and watched her body move, no longer a mannequin; drew in another and tasted the strangely dead air of the hotel room for what she suspected would be the last time.
"Damn you anyway," she said to the expectant, wide-eyed woman who looked back at her as though, familiar though she was, she knew something Kate did not, and then laughed at her own idiocies, and hurried out of the suite, not even bothering to fully close the door behind her.
She smiled all the way down the stairs, knowing herself a sphinx, a flat print to be looked at, cold and exultant in her painted victory, and when Douglas met her in the foyer, laughing and breathing the cold air of escape from his every pore, she leapt at him, kissed him, and, knowing what they would all say, cried out even so -
"Oh, my Lochinvar!"
*
"You see," Douglas shouted at her later, as she tore the hem off her skirt to wrap over her hair, "it's tradition!"
"What?" It was a shriek, doing its own best to carry over the noise of the motor. "It's a what?"
He passed over a flask, and the whiskey burned through her, harsh and sane and scalding-true.
"You're a border bride, Kate! I have to carry you away!"
She screamed for laughter, then, skirling like a wild bird, and kissed him again.
Harry was at the end of their road, and she rode the devil's steed.
*
Author: speak_me_fair
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Kate/Hotspur
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: This second tetralogy AU is set primarily during WWI and just before it. Terrible liberties are taken with real history in both directions :-) and probably horrible things to the characters as well...
Summary: This is not how Kate wants to marry....
Notes: With love to angevin2, gileonnen, and my darling quoshara. Fits before 'A Lady As Thou Art'.
This AU is very much in progress, and I have no idea where it will end up. But if anyone has any ideas as to what other characters might be up to during this time, feel free to discuss it with me!
Sarcanet Surety
Kate supposed she should have expected it, given who they were dealing with and his almost uncanny ability to manipulate popular opinion, but it had still come as a shock. She had grown so used to the innately private nature of the life she and Harry were slowly and carefully and almost wonderingly building around themselves, that to have an outside intrusion in the form of a communal decision to bring their marriage forward left her reeling, unable to make any move to defend herself or Harry, and caught up in the organised machinery of a publicised wedding before she had even caught her breath.
Once she had recovered enough to regain her usual caustic assessment of things, she realised that if Henry could have married off his own son to generate interest of a less distantly appalled variety - or perhaps simply to deflect interest elsewhere, she was not quite sure - he probably would have done, regardless of the fact that it would take several new laws on top of royal permission to achieve that right at this moment, and that was before persuading Hal and his astonishing capacity for recalcitrance into doing anything could be even thought of as an attempt.
Kate, who understood schoolboys of a certain prickly age far better than she would have ever wanted to, given that she had somehow survived two brothers, their friends, and Harry Percy on what had seemed at the time like a five-year length top-note, had nothing but sympathy for the new prince. She also had nothing but sympathy for herself, caught in Society's wheel with no way out and constantly told not to mind, not to worry, to just ignore it (whatever 'it' was, and she still wasn't sure even of that), just to smile.
Never mind, dear.
Never mind that the only one who had supported their engagement was Richard, that Harry's father had done his damnedest to talk his son out of it. Never mind that they had grown used to holding their heads high above all the comments about just what Kate saw in Harry other than a title and a dullness that would surely make him the most complaisant husband in England, so used to it, in fact, that they no longer knew what to do now that they were being used to give some kind of glamour to the new regime. Never mind all that, because now they had officially blazoned approval that somehow stood for more than any acknowledgement Richard had ever given them. Never mind that neither of them wanted it or cared, never mind that what had gone before still thrummed through their little private world like a terrible lightning-stroke.
Never mind that the world sometimes still seemed to turn more than once during a day, that Harry seemed to have lost all his clear certainty of right and wrong, abandoned to make his way in a world of government and politics while he was constantly told how unfit he was to be near it. Her oriflamme was fading, and she did not know what would bring him back to his old bright defiance. But she knew it was not this - not flowers and material and fittings and bloody, bloody Beaufort in all his unctuous pomp, graciously agreeing to perform the ceremony. And it certainly wasn't the magazine who wanted her to talk about her plans, or the damned week of parties ahead of them, in which she and Harry would be kept apart as though she were some harem bride, always looking at him from another side of a room, and through a screen of people, or this rotten hotel in which she had found herself established, far away from anything real.
Never mind the false coyness clenching around her more tightly than her corset, or the fact that the trap of expected behaviour that they had evaded for so long had snapped shut around them, pinning them to an unhappy alien wasteland in which they scarcely recognised each other.
Never mind, never mind, never mind, Kate thought angrily, standing in her beautifully appointed suite of rooms like a mannequin and waiting for the next pin to prick her, sharper than any conscience. Never mind that your letters have come back unopened from Richard, or what that might mean, never mind Henry using you, never mind that your brothers have lost their inheritance, never mind that you're a sop thrown to a market of vultures. Never mind.
Her collar was high, and tight, and made from old Vincennes lace that had once been her mother's. It stung to the touch, like a thousand small scratches against the tender skin of her throat, the soft little places under her chin all searched out and found with pinprick accuracy.
They had sewn pearls onto it. Harry hated pearls, said they were for tears. They were, of course, but there was no way he could know that unless he had some reason for making that connection himself...
A pin went into her side, and she cried out.
"Sorry -"
"Never mind," Kate whispered.
Never mind that Harry's eating his heart out over something he won't talk to you about, that his father's put the knife in again and he's going through with all this idiocy for some reason you don't understand. Never mind it, don't think about it, get through it, and then you can both go away -
Impersonal hands lifted her arms, pushed them out in strange bent shapes like those of a dancer. She wondered when they thought she would ever need to move like that in any garment known to man.
She wondered how she was going to move at all, when she might need to go -
Where? asked a mocking voice suddenly that sounded alarmingly familiar, far too close to everything she could not, would not think about, something that she could not survive if she let it in. Where to, Kate? Where were you thinking of going? Even if Harry would agree to leave, where would you go? Could you go if it meant you left without him?
Her heart beat suddenly harder at even the thought, real pain shooting through her chest into her throat, and closing off breath for a moment.
"No," she murmured to herself, and as though breaking the ice that had overlaid that small space between breath and speech had torn her free of the whole clinging, insidious, cobwebby mess, she took two steps away from the hands and pins, and looked at herself in the long mirror.
She saw a bride.
She saw a ghost.
"No," she said, clear and calm. "No, it won't do at all. I've changed my mind. I want a completely different design."
They stared at her in horror, and Kate smiled, watching beautifully painted lips curve in a slight and professional-looking unthawing inside the reflection that seemed wholly separate to her.
"If you don't mind?"
Her brother had practised that tone for weeks, hour after hour getting it just right - because, as far as Kate could tell, he thought that Richard's heir needed Richard's arrogance, that ability to make a simple question sound like the ultimate in commands. By the end of the first day of practise, they could all do it, were finding it hard not to, even in ordinary speech, but still it hadn't been right for him.
He still never sounded quite like Richard, was the truth, but by that time they had acquired a new skill, one they had outgrown using long before there was a different heir and the skill would not be needed in any case.
But Kate had never forgotten, and she used it now without a qualm, keeping all expression save that small, demanding smile on her face, letting the question hang, order-like, in the flower-scented air of the room that she would never, ever let them refer to as hers again.
"Would you like to look at the designs again, my lady?" one of the women asked at last, and Kate did not even drop her eyelids to see which one had spoken, letting them scramble to regain their footing in all ways without even turning her wrist in a gesture of acceptance.
My lady. No, not yours, not anyone's but Harry's. No-one's but his, now or ever.
"Yes," she said politely, still that same cool voice of command and expectation that fell like snow in the heavy air. "Thank you."
It was dismissal, and they knew it, but she still did not move, not until she had heard the front door closing, the soft dull muffled thud of it shivering through her and breaking the strange, half-possessed spell of her stillness, so that her hands came up and tore frantically at silk and pearls and lace and all the stupid folds that were supposed to look clinging and artless and would not move under her fingers, no matter how hard she pulled.
She left it all in a mutilated, crumpled heap on the floor, in the end, getting out of it without any care at all, and thinking savagely that Henry could add it to his damn bill, if this was what he wanted from her. If she was to be the smiling face of her family's acquiescence, then he could pay, and keep paying, and she would smile through it all -
She was angry all through getting her own familiar clothes back on, through walking down the hallway with her expression composed so that no-one would see a thing to remark upon; angry enough to have stayed outwardly calm, to have shown no signs of it in her rooms save the ruined dress.
Angry until she finally managed to get through to a startled sounding Harry on the telephone, and then not angry at all any more, not anything other than terribly close to tears, and feeling as though she had been running somewhere for a very long time, her hands shaking so badly that she wasn't even sure she would be able to get the receiver back in its cradle. Not caring who might be able to hear on a connecting line, or any of the unspoken rules about public behaviour, or what any bribing reporter might make of it, she choked out -
"Harry, I can't -" and waited, suddenly mute, for the explosion.
But all he said was - "Thank God," quick and quiet, and then - "Kate, are you at the hotel?"
She nodded, forgetting he could not see her, and then swallowed, her voice seeming to have run out of her with those three words, and blushing at her own silence, because dear God, what he must think -!
"Go down to the foyer." His voice was so calm, so quiet, that for a moment she did not register what he was saying, and when she did, her heart began to pound so hard and fast with hope that waves sounded in her ears and she almost missed the rest of it. "Wait there. Just take your coat and bag and wait."
She put the phone back down without saying anything, without acknowledgement, not needing to give it, because Harry had already thought, he had already planned, the words had been ready on his tongue and she hadn't needed hers after all.
When she picked up her coat and bag from the chair in the little hallway where she had flung them the night before in a miserable fury of refusing to care what happened to her or her belongings, the woman who caught the all-knowing eye of the mirror was no longer a stranger, nor a ghost, but the image she had seen reflected back at her time and again from mirrors and windows and even polished wood, familiar to her as her own skin and as well-inhabited.
She drew in a breath, and watched her body move, no longer a mannequin; drew in another and tasted the strangely dead air of the hotel room for what she suspected would be the last time.
"Damn you anyway," she said to the expectant, wide-eyed woman who looked back at her as though, familiar though she was, she knew something Kate did not, and then laughed at her own idiocies, and hurried out of the suite, not even bothering to fully close the door behind her.
She smiled all the way down the stairs, knowing herself a sphinx, a flat print to be looked at, cold and exultant in her painted victory, and when Douglas met her in the foyer, laughing and breathing the cold air of escape from his every pore, she leapt at him, kissed him, and, knowing what they would all say, cried out even so -
"Oh, my Lochinvar!"
*
"You see," Douglas shouted at her later, as she tore the hem off her skirt to wrap over her hair, "it's tradition!"
"What?" It was a shriek, doing its own best to carry over the noise of the motor. "It's a what?"
He passed over a flask, and the whiskey burned through her, harsh and sane and scalding-true.
"You're a border bride, Kate! I have to carry you away!"
She screamed for laughter, then, skirling like a wild bird, and kissed him again.
Harry was at the end of their road, and she rode the devil's steed.
*