![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theladywanderer
"Dear Da," she says a bit hysterically, "I've made a terrible mistake. I've been robbing carriages, you see, a dreadful pastime for a young lady but one I find I'm quite good at, and I made the incalculably stupid mistake of deciding to hold up the one carriage in the whole of three countries containing my employer."
for
NOTE:
How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made
By looking on thee in the living day
—Sonnet XLIII, Shakespeare
From this prompt: "Group: Earnest young governess/Her charge's cynical older sister; Educated women! Historical women with agency! Books! Again, pick your own setting: Victorian New Zealand? 1900s South America? Elizabethan England? I’d prefer no big age gap, please."
It's more of a Steampunk/Napoleonic Wars vibe with a touch of vague Arthuriana thrown in (look up the other name for Trevena), but I hope you enjoy!
~~~
MAY, 1814
On her first morning back in Albion, Fionna misses the last airship to Caledonia, and loses any future spot to the aetherists and their predictions of heavy winds coming from over the Channel Sea. When she considers the fact that it's ten degrees colder in Albion than where she had been, alternately spitting down rain and showing deceptively clear skies, Fionna decides she has reason to be miserable, and says as much.
"It's bad luck," says the ticket-taker in response, tapping absently away at a telegraph wire, a message in blocky Kievan script held in one hand. "Just bad luck, I say. Well, some of us are due for some, what with Buonaparte being locked away; the druids had to get that from somewhere."
"But did it have to be me?" Fionna half-wails, and the ticket-taker spares her a quick smile. She knows what she looks like, here at the tie-down in Dover: tall, knobbly-boned, dressed in hard-worn sailor's togs with a rucksack over her shoulder, black hair hacked to curl tightly somewhere just above her ears, skin darker than the wood of the counter and smudged with mud and soot besides. She looks like she washed ashore instead of stepping off a gangway, and to be honest, she feels like it as well.
"Give me a moment, and I'll wire a request for a coach down the road. Won't be as pretty a journey, but it'll get you there," the ticket-taker says, "Just come from Elba yourself, then?" They tap out their final STOP, shuffle the connecting wires around on the switchboard, and turn their attention to Fionna, fingers rapping out what must be a familiar request. "Or somewhere very close, I'd wager."
"Leucotecia," Fionna says cagily, not wanting to go into any more specifics, though anyone who'd paid attention to the broadsheets in the last month would know just where Buonaparte toppled. Fewer would guess why she'd been there, that's what the sailor's togs were for, but a girl could never be too careful.
The ticket-taker tips their head to the side, the telegraph still beeping softly. "Aquitania to Caledonia, that's a big change, even if we've finally made it to spring. And by airship—I hope you don't hope to make it beyond Hadrian's Wall."
Eyeing the counter, Fionna decides they're having a conversation, they're close enough, and leans on it heavily. "It's not so much of a change as all that," she says with a sigh, and then lets a bit of the Highlands creep back into her voice for the first time in almost a decade. "I'm going home, ye ken?"
The ticket-taker blinks, and the telegraph falls silent. They dart a look around at the empty station. "Perhaps," they say, leaning closer to Fionna as their voice drops, "Perhaps I wouldn't mention that, not here. Things have been—"
"Tense?" Fionna supplies. "Aye, I know. The Triple Crown lies uneasy, and nowhere is it more felt than beyond the Wall." She leaves out how, in the last days before Fontainebleau, there had been whispers that Hanover may have been ready to treat with Buonaparte, if only to rid himself of Llewellyn and the Stuart.
"Well indeed," the ticket-taker says, settling in for a chat, telegraph starting back up again, "and besides that, the O'Neill has taken herself over to Inbhir Nis, which has all of Caertroia in a tizzy, Buonaparte gone to Elba or not."
Fionna looks sharply at them. "The High Queen of Eire is in Caledonia? Why?"
The ticket-taker flaps a hand. "Something about the Stuart asking her there, although why a Stuart would agree to talk to an O'Neill is the far more interesting question, and one—again—no one seems to able to answer."
"Hmm." Fionna's only been back across the Channel four hours at most, with at least one of them spent at this ticket desk, first desperately trying to find a ship, any ship, willing to go up to the Wall, and now gossiping. But to have her first piece of gossip in Albion be about trouble brewing between the Triple Crown and the High Queen...it was troubling, to say the very least.
"What's the word on the coach?" she asks after a minute of turning over the possible reasons—and therefore solutions—to this current situation and liking none of them.
The ticket-taker grabs a line of tape, scans down the dots and dashes as easy as if it had been in Albionish, or the Kievan of before. "Shouldn't be more than a quarter hour, Miss."
"Thanks," Fionna says, and gives the desk a double thieves rap before turning to find somewhere to sit.
The tie-down echoes with emptiness, the long tether spire vibrating slightly in the rising breeze. They're in a bit of a lull at the moment, weather-wise, the sun not quite at noon height, and the watery yellow light brushes the brass fixtures and exposed pipes.
Fionna's not the only person here: there's the ticket-taker, quite obviously, but also a small knot of fur-clad Kievan tourists laden down with maps and picture-boxes, a lone man dressed in the height of Caertroian fashion clutching a briefcase, and a woman with skin almost as dark as Fionna's covered head to foot in the billowing robes of the tribes beyond the Mesogeios, rocking a small child while checking the timetables.
It's quiet; peaceful, even, if she ignores the thrum of the spire, one that sounds too close to Buonaparte's rail-cannons when paired with the whine of the wind.
~~~
Fionna reaches Inbhir Nis a week and a half later, Weir-in-the-Vale still two days' ride out. The steam-coach ride up the length of Albion and the crossing at the Wall had taken four days at most, the line at Tor Na Grèine thankfully short. The rest of the time had been spent in a horse and carriage, changing horses at each stop, pounding their way closer to the coast and then up it.
It would've taken much less time, had she been able to go by airship the whole way, but one of the Caledonian kings had made a bargain with the High Druid around the time of the Umbrian Incursion, ensuring that none of Albion's might would be able to reach beyond the Wall. Apparently, the bargain considered the aether itself part of Albion's might and, consequently, it disappeared a smooth slice down the whole stone stretch of pre-Umbrian fortification, and stayed gone until about a day's sail off the coast.
Fionna knows this, had been taught it in lessons at the Manor, had lived the reality of an aether-free life until she left for the Continent, and yet.
"It's damn inconvenient," she mutters under her breath, and not for the first time. She's in yet another post-chaise, squeezed in next to her own luggage, mail enough for two counties, and a stick-thin, overly imperious matron who keeps eyeing her suspiciously, though that may have more to do with the fact that Fionna hasn't any traveling clothes other than a set of Aquitanish infantry basics than anything else. The insignia and rank markings have been torn off, if a bit raggedly, but anyone with a close eye on the broadsheets would be able to see them for what they are.
The matron sniffs, and pointedly looks out the window into the increasing dusk.
Fionna ignores her, and settles back into her seat, trying to get comfortable enough to nod off a little before they make their next stop. She's just starting to feel the blurry edges of sleep when there's a solid jolt, and a low, grating keen that should be impossible this side of the Wall.
"What?" the matron squawks in shock, before jumping further back, away from the door, as shouts and the screams of distressed horses wash back over them.
"Quiet," Fionna hisses. "Can't you hear that? That's an aetheric weapon they're firing out there, you don't—"
A rattling thump interrupts her, followed by a low moan from the driver and the faint squeal of the carriage door swinging open. The folded steps tumble out almost as an afterthought, falling to land at the feet of a figure dressed head-to-toe in black, holding a torch aloft.
They're tall enough for the height disparity not to be completely absurd, Fionna catalogues automatically for a report she doesn't have to write, but still short enough that their companions in crime have at least a few inches on them. Lean in a solidly-built kind of way, like any sort of width is there on purpose, and it's dark enough she can't say man or woman for certain. A dark wrap covers the whole of their head, leaving only a thin strip at their eyes. The skin is painted thickly with dark greasepaint, leaving the muddy hazel of their irises as the only immediately identifying feature, aside from the faintly smoking revolver.
"My ladies," they say, sketching a short bow. Their voice, Fionna notes, is low and warm, with the faintest hints of an accent she can't quite place. "My deepest apologies for the inconvenience. If you would be so kind as to place all of your valuables in the bag my colleague is holding—" they gesture behind themselves, as another figure in all black waggles a gunnysack helpfully "—as well as any aetheric devices, we shall let you go about your business."
The matron fumbles weakly at her pockets, pulling out a few crumpled Albionish banknotes, a compact, and a modest ring from a chain about her neck. An aetheric firestarter also goes into the sack.
Fionna doesn't move.
The highwayperson turns to her expectantly. "My lady?"
"I have nothing valuable," she says, and it's almost the truth. She doesn't have anything of real, immediately recognizable value. No money—the last of it had been spent at the last inn, sending a message to the Manor to warn them of her arrival. No trinkets, no jewelry, nothing to identify her as Someone, rather than yet another body discarded in Buonaparte's wake.
There is, however, a bag of things from her time in Aquitania that she'd rather not have to explain: a pocket hybrid-pistol that's currently only able to fire bullets; a tied off, coded notebook of personal notes; her set of Albionish sailor's togs; several knives of varying size and style; as well as a few things meant to make Buonaparte's soliders' lives...difficult. Taken individually, they're interesting. Take them together, add in the Aquitanish uniform she's wearing now, and they're enough to arouse suspicion, even in highway robbers.
"Oh, lass." The lead robber sounds disappointed. "I'm afraid we'll be the judge of that. Turn out your pockets, then, and pass over your bag."
Fionna does so, as slowly as she can. The contents of her pockets are receipts, lint, a few coins, a length of thick string she'd forgotten about, and a battered folding pocket-knife her lady mother had given her before she'd left home. Her bag goes over equally slowly, and with a faint clank as one of the knives knocks against something.
"Would you—," she starts, leaning forward as the lead robber turns away. They turn back, head tilting expectantly. "Would you please go through that yourself?"
The lead robber seems to consider it. "An odd request," they say finally, "but an easy enough one to fulfill. Wait here, my ladies," they say, addressing both occupants of the coach, "'Twill only be a moment, and then we'll send you on your way."
She settles back against the seat, avoiding the matron's eyes. They sit in tense silence for five-ten-fifteen minutes, the time stretching thick and uncomfortable. The torch-light is just enough to throw shadows and have the matron jumping at the wind, but not enough to let her see what their merry band of highway villains are doing.
Eventually the torch-light shifts, and the lead robber comes back over to the carriage, Fionna's bag swinging from their hand.
"Your bag, my lady," they say, tossing it back into the coach, "free and clear. Though I am afraid—" and here their voice turns regretful "—that this has been a rather disappointing outing."
"Oh, I'm so sorry," Fionna mutters, "If only we'd known—"
"Hush," the matron hisses, and breaks propriety enough to kick at her ankle like a schoolgirl.
"Never fear," the lead robber says, amused. "We'll be looking for you again, to make up the difference.
"And," they add, "to return this." They hold up a palm-sized compact, pink and green enamel set into gold in the shape of the fleur-de-lys, the whole of it covered over with clear lacquer. Inside, Fionna knows, is a mirror, a tray of powder—and, under a thin metal panel, a cypher-key and low-range transmitter in the Yberian style. The transmitter is powered by aether, which means that it doesn't work this side of the wall, but that doesn't matter; its mere presence is enough to prompt some very uncomfortable questions from whoever thinks to ask.
Her fingers twitch slightly, uncontrollably.
"Yes," she says tightly, meeting those muddy eyes and seeing a level of understanding that's more than worrisome. "Yes, we will."
~~~
Weir-in-the-Vale is bigger than she remembers, growing by at least six houses and a tavern, electric lines stringing from house to house before staggering away towards the great water-wheels. The land around it has shifted subtly as well: there are trees missing in places, hills that seem lower, the start of an orchard on the westward side.
Some things, however, never change: the proprietor at the Weirwood Arms is always a Proctor, the wych-elms always bloom on Beltane, and the kitchen door at the Manor is always unlocked.
Fionna pushes through it two days after the encounter on the road, rucksack slung over her shoulder. She's back in the sailor's togs, having scrubbed them in the washbasin at the last inn and dried them on a chair-back by the fire. The Aquitanish basics are shoved to the bottom of her bag, almost more trouble than they're worth.
Her hair remains an unavoidably ragged mess, and she can almost feel the layer of dirt she hasn't been able to wash out of it crackle whenever she moves.
She looks as disreputable as she did when she first landed at Dover, if not more so, which may explain why the woman sitting at the the kitchen table screams at the sight of her.
She also grabs a knife, Fionna notes with approval, before moving to put herself between her and the rest of the house, letting loose a long stream of—
"Is that Cymric?" Fionna asks, hands going up instinctively, bag sliding down to swing at her elbow. "Are you—Am I really being threatened in my own home by—You can understand Albionish at least, right? Or—" she takes a moment, dusts off vocabulary she hasn't used in ages, and continues in Caledonian "—I'm not just uselessly jabbering in every language but the one you know, am I? It's only, I just made it back from a few years abroad, years that I managed to get through without being shot or—" she gestures to the knife with the arm not weighted by baggage "—stabbed, and I'd so love to keep that streak going—"
"Fionnuala Wallace MacKay, what in the bloody hells are you doing, standing here, talking nonsense, and looking like that."
Fionna's never been so glad to hear her full name snapped out in that tone of voice. "Lucy, Lucy," she says, shifting her attention behind the woman—quiet now, but still wielding the knife—to see her sister, a vision in a violently green plaid velocipede costume and frizzed out hair, standing at the top of the short flight of steps separating the kitchen from the rest of the house, "Light of my life—"
"Aye, such a light you've stayed away from it for near on a decade—"
"Blame Buonaparte."
"—I will, thank you, just as soon as he sends me his updated address," Lucy says with a snort. "And don't you try and distract me, Miss Worldly-and-Weary, from asking what Napoléon Bloody Buonaparte has to do with where the bloody hells you've been." Her voice almost reaches a shriek. "It's been seven years, Fi, and you come back, and you look like you're half-starved and all-wild, and you provoke my bloody governess to brandish a knife at you."
"Governess?" Fionna blinks, takes a closer look at the woman between them. She's not short, exactly, but she is shorter than either of the MacKay sisters; the top of her head looks like it would barely skim Fionna's chin. She's pretty, in a country manner: solid in a way that's reassuring, cheeks deeply bronzed from the sun, black hair a loose braid down the course of her back, and clothes worn in the right places and the right ways to indicate heavy use and steady care.
And then there's the knife, of course, held curiously backwards—like this governess has some idea how to use one in a fight, rather than just in the kitchen.
"Am I paying for her?" Fionna asks finally, letting her bag thump to the floor. "Does she have a name?"
"A name, and a tongue to go with," the lady in question says. They're still speaking Caledonian, albeit—in the case of this governess—with a strong Cymric accent. "Charity Grace MacKinnon—"
"A MacKinnon?" Fionna interrupts. "Didn't one of those boys steal away an aunt of ours?"
Lucy sighs, rubbing a hand across her face as she comes down the stairs to stand level with everyone else. "Fi—
"We hail from Trevena, so I very much doubt," says Miss MacKinnon tartly, deftly avoiding the question of kidnapping. "You must be the MacKay, then."
Fionna starts. Her mother's been dead and gone for years, but this is the first time someone's used the title that used to be hers to refer to Fionna. "Yes. Well. I suppose I am."
"Wonderful," Miss MacKinnon says, twisting the knife around deftly and setting it back on the counter. "Now that we all know who's who and what's what, I think I'll go back up to my room." She looks rueful. "I've had rather more excitement than I'd planned for the afternoon, and I'm sure the two of you have lots to catch up on.
"Miss MacKay," she continues, turning to Lucy, "the aetherists—though why we call them that here when there's no bloody aether for them to look at, I still don't know—say the rain should hold off until the evening, I'll meet you outside for our walk at the usual time. Lady MacKay, it was lovely to meet you. I'm sure Miss MacKay and I would be overjoyed if you would join us for Lady Fitzroy-James' spring soirée tomorrow evening."
Miss MacKinnon bows precisely, hand over her heart, looking up at Fionna the whole while, before leaving the kitchen.
Her eyes, Fionna sees as she turns away, are a bright, clear hazel.
~~~
"Charity Grace MacKinnon, you absolute fool."
Char blows into her room at the top of the house like a hurricane, the calm and poise she's trying to instill in Lucy MacKay by example gone in a flushed wave of....of something.
Feeling, maybe. Passion, perhaps, if she wants to end up screaming in the attic, writing letters to her Da in Cymric explaining why she's gone off her head.
"Dear Da," she says a bit hysterically, consciously speaking the language of home because it's the only one she knows no one else in this house speaks. "I've made a terrible mistake. I've been robbing carriages, you see, a dreadful pastime for a young lady but one I find I'm quite good at, and I made the incalculably stupid mistake of deciding to hold up the one carriage in the whole of three countries containing my employer."
She's pacing now, in odd, half-thought out fits and starts, her feet clumsy in her distress, arms wrapped around her waist.
"What's more, Da," she says, tugging her arms free, pulling the tie from the end of her hair and untwisting the strands, "I'm pretty sure she's up to something nefarious. Or was. Probably on the continent, since it seems like half the suspicious things going on during the last few years happened on the continent, unless she's caught up with druids, in which case Saints only know what sort of mischief she’s involved in."
Char runs her hands through her hair, fingers catching on the slight tangles, and fights the urge to laugh. Of all the things she'd thought she'd be doing away from home, this—talking to herself, full of nervous energy, her hair a cloud of loose black strands—is closer to what she'd be doing if she'd stayed with the smugglers and the other lurking mysteries of Trevena than what she'd pictured. Even still, in all her years helping her dad and all other sorts of water-based miscreants with the coastal trade, she's never encountered this particular brand of trouble.
Eventually the nerves run their course, and she's left weak-kneed and lightly sweaty to sink down onto the bed.
"Da, Da, Da. I came north, beyond the wall, beyond the lake, to keep myself out of trouble.
"Well," she corrects herself wryly, "out of any sort of trouble I didn't start. But this, this..." She rolls over, stares at the edge of the compact she'd taken from the lady in the carriage, the lady with a shadowed face and an inability to keep her mouth shut.
The lady who, Char had to admit, in the privacy of her own head, had been interesting enough for her to let her get away with nothing but a token to show for it.
Char had promised they'd meet again, that she'd be looking for recompense. Billy O'Dwyer, a thin lad who'd come over from Éire Mary and walked off the airship at Trevena with a punch for anyone who dared call him anything but a derivative of William, had suggested—very circumspectly—that perhaps the payment in question could be delivered by less...traditional...means.
She'd raised an eyebrow. "Less traditional than a makeup case that screams 'I'm a spy or at least a very stupid imperial'?"
Billy, bless him, had blushed. "Yes," he'd said, and then buried his face in his drink.
Which was all very well and good when it was the conjecture and maybe-when's of a ha'penny romance, less so when it was the cold and uncomfortable reality of having robbed her employer while living in her house and teaching her sister.
And I still want to take Billy's non-traditional compensation, she thinks, and groans, rolling over to stare up at the ceiling, the cracks already familiar. "Whatever she's mixed up in, I really hope it's not druids."
The compact, resting innocuously on the top of her dresser, emits a low beep.
"Ah, hell," Char says, with feeling.
~~~
The sunrise in Caledonia is different, not just because it's coming up over the smooth arch of the North Sea rather than the padded roll of the headlands at Trevena. There's a quality to the light, a suddenness to the morning, a smell in the air, something to indicate the fact that Caledonia is the only place in the known world where the day doesn't filter through the roiling streams and drifting clouds of the aether.
Char is up with the rest of the serving staff the next day, swaying in and out of the rhythms of the house. Her charge is up an hour after she is, bleary-eyed and disheveled at the kitchen table, dressed in what looks like servants’ castoffs. They’re a great house, here at Weirwood Downs, but the lady—now ladies, Char supposes—of the manor couldn’t stand less on ceremony if they failed to stand at all. She doesn’t think she’s ever seen the formal dining room opened for anyone, and the family dining room only for the most unwanted of guests.
The family, Char has learned, eat in the kitchen, and sling pots, pans, and spits around with the ease of career servants, and the habit has transferred to the rest of the denizens of the Downs.
The elder MacKay, ostensibly Lady of all she surveys, is down and out before Char reaches the bottom of the stairs. They’d had dinner yesterday, the three of them, and Char came away from it with the feeling that Lady MacKay did not like her, or at least felt a healthy suspicion towards herself and her presence in the house.
She’d thought about explaining how she’d come to take the job: how Lucy had put an ad in the Caertroian papers and across the wire, how she’d picked up a copy by happenstance while hiding from the latest round of Albionish excise men, how her father had agreed that the best place for her to be, right now, was in Caledonia, beyond the wall and the reach of the lake.
Hells, she’d thought about trying to explain the lake, and the pull of Trevena for someone of her ilk, anything and everything to impress upon Lady MacKay that there was nothing further to see here, nothing at all.
I certainly don’t have your whatever-device, she’d been trying to say with every fibre of her being, and it very definitely hasn’t been going off since last night with worryingly regular frequency.
Instead, here she was, leaning over a steaming mug of hot, black coffee, brewed in the Tartarish fashion, a plate of lightly toasted buns next to her, wishing to the Goddess and all the Saints that she’d spent less of her time last night fretting, and more time sleeping.
“Good morning.” Lady MacKay thumps to a seat across from her. She’s had time to acquire other clothes, Char notices, and run something other than a hand through her short-cropped curls. She looks, well.
She looks like something Char shouldn’t be thinking about.
“Good morning,” she says instead. They’re still speaking Caledonian, mainly because Char had seen no reason to disabuse Lady MacKay of the notion that she didn’t speak Albionish. “Toast?”
Lady MacKay looks ruefully at the plate of buns. “No bread for me, I’m afraid. I’ve had quite enough of it—or the lack of it— to last me a lifetime at this point. Does Cook still make oatmeal of a morning?”
Char waves absently behind her with one hand, coffee mug cradled in another. If they’re going to be civil and informal, she’s going to run as far as she can get with ‘informal’ this early in the morning. “Behind me somewhere, on one of the smaller ranges keeping warm. The brown sugar should be back there as well.”
“Thanks.” There’s a low level of clattering for a while, the soft glug of coffee or tea being poured, and one sharply bit off curse—in a language Char is almost certain was Aquitanish.
Drat, she thinks. I really do wish you’d stop confirming my greatest fears—most pressingly, the suspicion that the long lost sister of my charge spent the last seven or so years doing unsavoury things in service to one Crown or another on the continent.
“Will you be joining us?” she asks, after Lady MacKay sits back down. “At Lady Fitzroy-James’ this evening, I mean. I will admit, I left in no small amount of haste yesterday evening; there wasn’t time for me to properly get a confirmation.”
“I—,” Lady MacKay starts, and then trails off. Her eyes are fixed on Char’s face, her own visage crossed with something Char cannot even begin to name. “I think I shall, actually, though I’ve not a thing to wear. I suppose it’s a bit ghoulish to ask one of the servants to alter something of my mother’s, isn’t it.”
Char hums in agreement, taking a sip of her coffee. “Rather. Besides, as I’m sure you know better than I, the late Lady MacKay was meant to be closer to my height than yours, which would leave your hemlines distressingly short, no matter what you chose to remake.” She sighs, flips through the contents of her wardrobe, then Lucy’s, the late Lady’s, then—”Your father. Were you and he of a height?”
Lady MacKay squints in thought. “He was an inch or two taller when I left, but I was still growing. I’ve no idea how things ended up.”
Char shrugs. “With any luck, it won’t be much of a difference. It might cause a bit of a stir, you showing up in fashions more than a few years out of date—”
“And me showing up in men’s clothes won’t?” Lady MacKay’s voice is dry as dust.
“No more so than your sister’s insistence on the visual harmony of fuschia and magenta,” Char says tiredly. “I’ve had that fight on more than one occasion. I’m convinced she’s color blind.”
Lady MacKay snorts. “More like bullheaded.”
“Anyway,” Char plows ahead, “back to you. Hemming is always easier than adding fabric, we’ll have you looking the picture of Caledonian Laird soon enough.”
“Very well.” Lady MacKay takes a spoon, swirls it in her oatmeal, lifts it out. After a pause she asks: “Are we taking the carriage there?”
Char’s chest goes cold. “Yes, we are; it’s far too far to ride, and my dress isn’t suited for riding.”
“It’s just,” she continues, as if Char hadn’t spoken, “I was robbed on the way here. Well,” she amends, “my carriage was held up. It was outside of Inbhir Nis, but something one of the robbers said makes me think they might try it again. Might try me again.”
“Oh...my,” Char says weakly, lips numb.
“I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about,” Lady MacKay says, her gaze steady on Char’s own. “After all, who would be so foolish as to rob the same person twice?”
“Who indeed,” Char repeats, and—in an act of blatant stupidity and obvious guilt—excuses herself from the room and goes out to the garden, fully intending to contemplate the merits of a humble, law-abiding life, one where breakfast doesn’t turn into a maybe-interrogation and she can finish her coffee in peace.
And, she decides with a sigh, watching the lazy, winding path of a bee as it weaves its way to a stand of bright white flowers, figure out how to slip the compact she’d stolen back to her employer, preferably without letting it slip that it had been she who took the thing in the first place.
“So good of you to start simple, Char,” she mutters. “Really taking after your Ma.”
By the flowers, the bee swirls drunkenly to the ground, and Char resists the urge to follow suit.
~~~
The governess, Fionna is reliably certain, is hiding something.
What it could be escapes her, for the most part; the things a normal governess would hide: radical leanings, unexpected sartorial leniency, unconventional methods of teaching and determining the importance of subject, all of that’s out in the open, in neatly bound and filled-in ledgers stacked up on the desk in the Laird’s Office—now, Fionna supposes, her office. It’s small things—questions about her family, her background, her hometown, her life before appearing on their doorstep—that seem to trip her up, throw her for a loop, prompt her to hedge, evade, and never quite lie.
Which is fine: Fionna’s hiding something as well. It’s just that this MacKinnon girl is hiding something while near and dear to Lucy’s heart, and Fionna’s had seven years of disappointing and neglecting Lucy; she’d rather not add to them.
Add to that, there’s something else tugging at the back of her mind, something she can’t quite place. Whether it’s the flash of her eyes, the way her hair is limned in candlelight, the way she walks, something about Miss MacKinnon seems to Fionna to be suspect, but in a way that’s familiar.
“You’re projecting,” she mutters, tugging on the sleeves of the coat she’s wearing. Lady Fitzroy-James, aside from being the premier entertainer of the nearby counties, also had a nose for weakness that rivaled that of the great razor-toothed fish of the southern oceans.
The clothes her father had left behind had mostly been abandoned in a room at the east end of the house. Some of them, she had to admit, were hideous to the point of obscuring any other merit. A good deal more were visibly costly, but with no real sense of style or panache to them. The suit she and Lucy had settled on was a clean, light grey, with spidering criss-cross embroidery over the whole in a delicate green that evoked vines, or, maybe, old druidic maps of currents in the aether.
She looks—with her hair slicked straight, boots shined, and now cuffs properly shot—rather alright, she thinks. If nothing else, as if her time away had been spent respectably in armed service, rather than honing her skills at multi-national skulking. Lucy, on the other hand, is wearing something that's a bare step up from a Liberty Dress, shaped from a dusty rose pink material overlaid with bronze netting that makes the brown of her skin glow in the candlelight. It's a strange mix of outrageous and practical, one that Fionna's growing to see Miss MacKinnon's hand in.
The governess, Fionna had noticed almost against her will, is somehow the most traditional of them all, in a straight-column sheath in various shades of blue, a feather tucked into the thick braid encircling her head and trembling with every movement of the air.
They'd made the long, uncomfortably awkward carriage rode over to the Fitzroy-James' after Lucy had finished her daily lessons and Fionna and Miss MacKinnon had fumbled their way through some painfully polite conversation. The pattern had continued in the carriage, stuttering only as Miss MacKinnon had been handed out: her eyes caught hers, and for a moment she saw, not the outspoken, practical, painfully proper (until she wasn't) governess, but the shadowed eyes and hidden face of a bandit on the road.
"Don't be ridiculous," she mutters, even as she mulls it over again, and is saved by her own thoughts by the unceremonious, almost abrupt arrival of the subject of her ruminations.
"Here," Miss MacKinnon says, shoving a short glass of bubbling champagne into her hand. "Take that."
Fionna's eyebrows raise, almost on their own. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"
Miss MacKinnon huffs, hands going up to grip her elbows. "Some asshole imperial who got left here high and dry when the news about Buonaparte came through." Her voice is low, clipped. She's scanning the crowd like she expects the gentleman to pop out of the screen of pastel-clad debutantes in order to continue his tirade. "Seems to think he can sway all the ladies and some of the men of Caledonia to his side—and eventually, I assume, his bed—by being an absolute tosser and implying that, somehow, we'll be sorry we didn't ally with him when Hanover decides to show the Stuart what for, as if I bloody care what Hanover does to the Stuart, except as how it affects Llewellyn."
Fionna has to fight back a laugh. She's known Miss MacKinnon for a day now—perhaps two, depending on your reckoning—and seeing that she has the potential to become cat-mad, almost spitting and hissing in her outrage, reassures her, in an odd way she doesn't want to explore. "What's this Aquitanish buffoon's name?" she asks. "Partly because I'm curious, but also because I am selfish and a coward, and would like to know which name to run away from."
"Michel Royer, previously Vicomte Descharron, now Citoyen Royer, formerly an esteemed member of his Imperial Majesty's inner court," Miss MacKinnon says with a bite, and continues on blithely as Fionna's heart skips a beat. "What he did, before or after Buonaparte rose to the fore is unclear, as he seemed most interested in communicating just how much of the Aquitanish public funds he had personal access to."
She continues, but Fionna's not listening. She's gone on full alert, eyes sweeping the ballroom, trying to find a glimpse of Lucy. She's trying not to mirror Miss MacKinnon, her arms itching to rise and cross themselves, her fingers craving the feeling of twisting themselves endlessly and revealingly around each other.
Vicomte Descharron she had never met, but Citoyen Royer had been in Leucotecia, both after Buonaparte had fallen at Fontainebleau, and much, much before. He was a boring, pedantic blowhard in public company, that was sure, but in service, the little, whippet-thin man with the light, almost white-blonde hair bound back in a queue just this side of too tight had been the best of Buonaparte's spymasters. They had met, at least twice with Fionna in disguise, and once, fatefully, with her out. If he catches her out tonight, that "fatefully" could turn to "fatally" impossibly and brutally quickly.
She separates from Miss MacKinnon, swirls back into the whirl of the dance. She leads Lady Fitzroy-James, a stout battleaxe of a woman, in a delicate minuet, picks up a reel with a local boy, and suffers through enough of a waltz with her own sister to know that she hasn’t spoken to the Vicomte Descharron or a Mr. Royer, and doesn’t plan to, no matter what he’s calling himself.
“He’s a prat,” Lucy says matter-of-factly, “which is astounding for someone of his age, but there you go. I don’t need to talk to prats to know they still are one.”
“Good,” Fionna says, distractedly. “Good.”
Her eyes are flitting over the crowd, still trying to catch sight of that blonde head, which is most likely why she sees the distinctive form of Miss MacKinnon slip out the door to the ballroom, in a manner that can best be described as ‘“furtive”.She doesn’t walk off in the middle of the set—the music ends before she can—but she does leave in a manner that, if it had been someone other than Lucy, would have forced her to write apology cards and send over complimentary ratafia for a week.
Once out in the hallway herself, it’s easy enough to follow Miss MacKinnon’s trail to the only open door in the corridor, about fifty feet away from the open doorway of the ballroom. The room looks like it’s usually used as a reading room, with tall bookcases lining the two walls not taken up by windows or the door, but is currently pulling double duty as a cloakroom, with various wraps, coats, cloaks, muffs, ruffs, and whatever else littering every possible surface.
Miss MacKinnon is bent over something on the left side, by a bookcase stuffed with the tall bound spines of an encyclopaedia set, a blue shadow in the dim light of the room, deft fingers fishing out a worn black balaclava that Fionna knows well, seeing as it was on her body naught but three hours ago. There’s a flash of something metallic, and Fionna steps forward, landing deliberately hard on one booted foot as she swings the door half-shut behind her.
“Lost something, Miss MacKinnon?” she asks with forced casualness. “And please, don’t say your way to the loo, we both know better than that.”
Miss MacKinnon whirls, hands going behind her back, the resulting straight posture belying the guilt scrawled across her face in the dim light.
“Lady MacKay—”
“Fionna, please,” she says, coming fully into the room. “If we’re going to be doing shady things together, I think that warrants a first name basis, don’t you, Charity?”
“Char,” says the same, with a bit more snap than she planned, if the wince she lets out is indicative of anything. “And it’s not..what you think. I don’t think.”
“You don’t think?” Fionna’s had near on a month to get out of the habits of spying, but she finds they slip back on easily enough. “You’re in my house, you’re teaching my sister, fine, wonderful. She seems to like you, and I’m glad of it; I haven’t done much to make her glad in my life.
“And yet,” Fionna hardens her voice, “A man I last saw whispering in Buonaparte’s ear is whirling his way through the ballroom, and here you are in Lady Fitzroy-James’ cloakroom going through the pockets of my coat, which is the farthest thing from chaperoning I can think of, and edges very hard into criminal activity, actually.”
Char, against all expectation, snorts out a laugh, the feather in her hair shaking.
Fionna frowns harder than she already is. “Is something I said funny?”
“No, no,” Char says, with the stiff cheeks of someone still trying to hold back amusement. “It’s just, um. I am not a spy—although, I think you just confirmed that you might be—and I have, uh. Experience? With criminal activity? You could say? And this—” she gestures in a broad circle with one hand, the other still firmly behind her back, to indicate the general situation “—is very far off from what I’d usually classify as, uhm. That.”
She blinks. “Experience? With—Why are you telling me this?” The accusation of espionage she leaves alone.
“Uhm, because I don’t want to be mixed up with whatever had you looking like curdled cheese in the ballroom?” Char says, before she’s interrupted by a familiar low beep.
Familiar, but impossible.
“Also,” she plows forward, ignoring the sound that Fionna is now very much interested in, “I feel like this is an awkward conversation—”
“You think?” Fionna mutters. The room is dark and navigating through the chairs, sofas, and low tables heaped with outerwear a tricky business that she embarks on as Char keeps talking. She hasn’t relaxed, per se, but there is a certain amount of her guard going down, which is a stupid, stupid thing to do when the woman in front of her has all but admitted she attempted to rob her at gunpoint no more than five days ago.
And you’ve been thinking about her for those past five days as well, a voice in the back of her mind whispers as she sidesteps a trailing sleeve, and not because she stole from you.
“—To be having in a closet, but I did, in fact, attempt to relieve you of your valuables—” Now she has admitted it, straight out, sounding vaguely apologetic, and Fionna’s still waiting for the floor to drop out from under her. “However, I feel like I should get some credit for—”
“For what?” Fionna asks, genuinely curious. She’s standing in front of Char now, the two of them separated by no more than a foot, the bookcase looming large and dark behind her.
Char looks up at her, eyes wide and deep. “For attempting to return it, however surreptitiously.”
The compact, for its part, beeps again.
“How is it doing that?” Fionna asks. “It works off the aether; we’re in Caledonia, that shouldn’t be working.”
Char flushes, noticeable even in the low light. “That’s, uhm. That’s me.”
“That’s you.” Her voice is flat, disbelieving.
“It’s a long story,” Char says, smiling a little, “involving several things that don’t matter, a lake that isn’t a lake, a lady of questionable provenance, and dragons, though my da tends to dispute the last.”
“Dragons.”
Char shrugs. “It’s better than saying ‘we’ve no clue’, which is what we tend to say to anyone who asks with—” She breaks off, spine stiffening. “Did you hear that?”
Fionna strains, and catches the edge of the sound Char must have identified: the softest of thumps, like the sole of a shoe hitting carpeted floor, with a slight scuffing drag at the heel.
The compact, traitorous enough already, beeps again.
“Who—” Fionna starts, although she's nearly certain it's Royer. It could very easily just be a housemaid, but she'd learnt to be paranoid in Leucotecia, even more so in Fontainebleau.
“Does it matter?” Char hisses. “Either it is someone we very much don't wish to speak to due to their proficiency at murder, or someone we equally don't wish to speak to because of their proficiency at gossip.”
“That doesn't leave us with very many options,” Fionna points out. “None, actually.”
“Hush,” Char replies, holding up a hand as if she'd intended to put it over Fionna's mouth if she hadn't obeyed. “You know, for a spy, you are surprisingly lacking in deviance “
“I never said I was—” She's interrupted by the slight creak of hinges, and the sudden desperate clutch of Char’s hands at her waistcoat.
“Kiss me,” Char says, “kiss me, and don’t look.” She pulls Fionna down before she has the chance to ask why.
Their lips meet with an awkward bump of noses, bodies following a moment later, her arms flying up to loop around Char’s waist. Fionna can feel Char’s breath sliding across her cheek, the heat of her body seeping through the layers of their clothes. Her instinctive jerk backwards is held in check by the sound of a sharply indrawn breath and her hands; her involuntary shift forwards is halted by much the same means.
It’s a light, shallow kiss, one that deepens flashily as Royer awkwardly clears his throat in surprise. For a moment, Fionna is torn between the knowledge of the danger of what could happen—Buonaparte is gone from Leucotecia, safe on Elba, but Royer is here—and the unexpected urge to tilt her head further to the side, to open up, to raise her hand from Char’s waist to her face and run her thumb along her jaw.
Char breaks away in a showy huff, leaning to the side to look at Royer archly over Fionna’s shoulder “Excuse me,” she says, in Albionish heavily flavoured with the lilt of Aquitania. Fionna’s eyebrow twitches. She hadn’t know Char spoke Albionish; they’d been solely conversing in Caledonian ever since that fateful meeting in the kitchen.
“Do you mind?” Char continues, with all possible imperiousness. “We are trying to have a private moment.”
Royer, from the doorway, coughs. “Ah, my ladies, I, uh—”
“Whatever it is,” Char says, leaning forward, one hand dancing its way up Fionna’s back, before gripping at her shoulder, “I am sure it can wait.”
“Well,” Royer says. “Well. I suppose I—Yes. Later. I shall return, uh, later.” He swallows audibly, and there’s a rustle of cloth, as if he’d just bowed. “Please carry, uh—as you were then.”
The door shuts a moment later, and footsteps thump hurriedly away back towards the ballroom.
Fionna lets out a long breath looks at the empty doorway, and thanks the Goddess and all the Saints that Royer is, apparently, a prude on top of all his other sins.
“What do we do now?” she asks after a moment. “Go back to the party? Lucy will be worrying.”
“Well, we will talk about this,” Char says. “This—” she pulls out the compact and waggles it at Fionna, before tucking it in her breast pocket “—We will talk about.
“Until then,” she leans back so she can look Fionna in the eye, hands braced on her shoulders. “All suspicions and explanations aside, I wouldn’t mind kissing you again.” She blushes lightly, looks sideways and back up through her eyelashes. “Lucy can handle herself.”
“That she can,” Fionna murmurs after a moment, and bends down to do just that.
