Marlene Watkins (breadandroses) wrote in lightning_war, @ 2008-12-23 14:54:00 |
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Current mood: | curious |
Early Thursday afternoon, 17 September 1942, outside the Royal Academy library...
Edmund Bradbury smiled when he saw Marlie Watkins walking out of the library a little after luncheon. He’d been meaning to speak to her since he’d last seen Josette. “Hello,” he said. “Do you have a moment?”
“I do,” said Marlie, “if you’re the one asking.” She smiled; Bradbury was a good sort, even among their fellow St Hilda’s prefects, who were generally regarded as the best among good sorts, with the glaring exception of Prudence Bainbridge. “How’s your Thursday going anyway, Bradbury?”
“So far it’s an improvement over Saturday onwards,” Edmund replied. “Very much so in fact. Listen, I know you probably can’t say much, and don’t worry if you can’t, but can you tell me how Miss Cooper is doing?”
“I think she’ll be all right, in time,” Marlie said cautiously; she had to be careful what she said in an open hallway, even if she couldn’t see anyone near. “I don’t think she would have ever come in on her own. It was good of you to bring her.”
Edmund shrugged. “Nothing else to be done,” he said. “You know how it is. Dare I say it, I hope that that’s the end of things, for a little while. For everyone!”
“I think we’re all agreed on that,” Marlie said with enthusiasm, but her smile faded a little. “Your cousin Bill, the one who’s in hospital—how is he?”
Edmund smiled. “All right, apparently,” he said. “My mother even confirmed it, she, if you’ll forgive me, is a bit cynical about healing. I’m…surprised as well. It really didn’t seem…it was alarming.”
“But in a good way, right?” said Marlie. “And why should I be offended by your mother’s scepticism? Don’t you think I was sceptical myself when I first came to school? But I had the polio too, first year, and I was terrified when they told me, and then it was gone, just like that. And I was so thrilled when I learned I could be a healer, even though I’m a girl, and my family doesn’t have the money to send me to medical school. If I hadn’t had magic I’d have had to become a nurse, instead, and just wish.”
“With healing, she says she still lives out there, sometimes,” Edmund said, shaking his head. “She says there’s some things she couldn’t leave at home and she didn’t get to choose which. I know most women can’t be healers in the mundane world, even if they want it, but…it’s so strange, how different things are.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” said Marlie, frowning. “What you see and hear and feel is real. Believing is for things that you can’t see…I don’t understand how you can believe or not believe in healing. It happens. It’s not like…God, where you just have to trust what you’re told. If you can, anyway.” Marlie had never had much use for religion.
Edmund shrugged. “Don’t ask me, really,” he said. “It’s not that she doesn’t believe in things that have happened, it’s more that she doesn’t believe they’ll happen again.” He grimaced. “I don’t want to give you the impression that there’s…something wrong with my Mum. There’s not. Just it makes it a bit hard at times like this. Maybe she thinks one day she’ll end up living back there, I don’t know.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t think there was anything wrong with her,” said Marlie. “I don’t know why she’d think she’d have to go back though. A lot of people don’t even go back to visit. I go home, and I’m still close to everyone, but a lot of people stop going home as soon as they can; they spend the hols with friends, and such. It’s as though they’re dead to their families, or living in a foreign country, far away. You know that’s what the Office of Mundane Affairs prefers? As soon as you’re seventeen, they start trying to get you set up. They’re rather anxious to make sure we’re all employed and have a place to live when we get out of school. They don’t want anyone to go back there to live. I think they’re afraid we’ll tell stories.” She shook her head. As if such stories would be believed!
“And she isn’t much in contact with her family, in fact, only a bit more since Gresham’s at school, he’s a cousin somehow,” Edmund said. He thought about it. “Would you want to keep living there? At home? I think if I was working in the mundane world, for some reason, I’d want to come home to my parents for tea!”
“Maybe if they lived in London,” Marlie said with a sigh. “But I’m from Liverpool, and I’ll be at Pantaleon’s for at least three years after school’s done. They don’t pay journeymen enough to gate to work, and of course there’s the curfew. I might go back for dinner once in a while on the train though, I hope. At least Corinne understands what it’s like. I don’t think I’d like to have to try to explain to Leffoy; he’s Old Blood and he sometimes doesn’t go home for months at a time.” She doubted his mundane relations were much like her own; he was bourgeois, after all, and she was solidly proletarian. The world of the docks, of her grandfather’s pub, of strikes and organising and labour, was as far from his world as it was from here, maybe further.
Edmund sighed and stuck his hands in his pockets. “I’ll be at the front, I suppose,” he said. “If it lasts that long, which, well, it doesn’t look any better than it did six months ago.”
Marlie gave him a sympathetic look. “I’ve heard,” she said gently, “that despite the recent raids, Kyteler is actually winning the war for us now. They’re trying harder to strike at us, because they’re more desperate, of course. But the Blitz is over, too…we hope.” She sighed. “I hope you’re not at the front, but better ours than the mundane front. You’ve no idea, the letters I get from my brothers…”
Edmund smiled sadly. “I suppose not,” he said. “I hear things, but mostly about the home front, from the younger ones. How many brothers do you have again?”
“Five, but only two of them are fighting, the rest are too little. But then there are some of my cousins as well.” Marlie sighed. “I miss them. And I worry. I wish I could pray, but I don’t believe. So often religion is something the wealthy use to keep the rest of us in our places…I just can’t believe any more.”
Edmund smiled uncomfortably. “I still do,” he said. “I don’t know I just…do.”
“So does Arianwen,” said Marlie. “I think I envy you both a little.” She thought it must be nice to have something to trust in when you’d done your best and things were out of your control. That was probably why people like Leffoy and Arianwen tended to be the praying kind; so much of their work was like that. But she thought, too, that she would be afraid to depend too much on it if she ever started believing. Because some people did, and they left things undone, believing that all of the wrongs in the world would be redressed once everyone was dead. What good was that?
“Maybe one day…” Edmund said, and caught himself. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t interfere. I will pray for your brothers and cousins though, if you allow me to?”
“I’m not offended,” said Marlie. “I did say I envied them. It would be awful of me to resent your good wishes, however you choose to make them.” She smiled at him. “It’s just that vicars and priests are always telling people to think about the afterlife, particularly the poor, and look for justice there. And when they talk about the rich at all, it’s always about things like who Lady Leffoy is sleeping with and not what rich people owe to the people who make them rich.”
Edmund grimaced. “There is too much of that,” he agreed.
“And not enough of the other. The clergy need to be less concerned with where people sleep and more concerned with whether or not they’re safe and fed and educated,” said Marlie passionately. “Christ would have cared about that, as a man. I don’t know if I believe he was a god, but he cared about that as a man.” She shrugged. “At least that’s what he said he cared about.”
“Yes indeed,” Edmund agreed. “There are some still to be found who care about that, inside his church.”
“That’s good to know,” said Marlie. “Do any of them have any influence, inside his church?” She sighed. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to steer you into a political discussion. Things have been so difficult lately, and I don’t know if I know what to think about any of it. The papers are worse than useless. Everyone says the Leffoys are feudalists and that her queenship is just something we have to put up with in order to win the war, but the people who tell us we shouldn’t trust her are the same people who’ve been running things for ages now, and the world they’ve created is hardly a fair one. I don’t believe in feudalism. But I certainly don’t trust the Bainbridges.”
“I’ve met her,” Edmund said. “Based on that I guess I’d be inclined to trust her more than Prue Bainbridge’s family. It’s hard to say though. She’s done us a great favour in forgiving the Lovedays their association with Marcus Pendry.”
Marlie shook her head. “Honestly, I’ve never understood that. I was furious with Arianwen for a while when she just dropped Annie and wouldn’t go out with us if Annie was going. It’s not as though they could help that association. And I’ve heard some of the Italians say that one puts pressure on the family so the elder will do the right thing and commit suicide, but I think that’s rather beastly. It makes no sense to me at all; I’ve liked all the Leffoys and their kin that I’ve met, but I can’t say I understand them much. I mean, what would Dr Leffoy have done if one of them had turned up on the ward? Refused to treat?”
“He might have,” Edmund said. His father had talked a little about the curses when he’d come to take Bill away.
“Magistra Priscilla would have had his head,” Marlie said with a frown, and then sighed. “And Arianwen’s too.” She knew, when she actually thought about it, that probably Yvon Leffoy would have quietly directed Dr Király to handle that case, but it still wasn’t right. No matter how competent Király was. And what if Király had been out? She always took off three days for her courses; no matter what treatments she tried, she said, they always knocked her out.
Edmund nodded. “I don’t like it. It was pretty miserable for Annie, and Kat for that matter, and it seems to have encouraged Bill to antagonise everyone further if anything.” He sighed. “But in actual fact it got them separated from their father, which…well, you almost certainly didn’t know how bad he was to them, because we didn’t, and we live within walking distance. And also it turns out that this all goes way back in the family history which is the thing about Britannia, I suppose, the story is never about just the present. I wish I understood it better myself.”
“Annie never talked about him much at the hospital,” Marlie mused softly. “All she ever said was that they made her look after the baby all the time, but you could tell how glad she was to get away. Maybe that part I understand just fine. I live with my grandfather after all. My mother has…well, I love all my brothers and sisters, but really, too many children, more than she really can handle, and it’s a blessing for them that I can help out in my grandfather’s pub and they don’t have to feed me all summer. But I always figured, at least her parents were married. So were mine, but he left us, and that was a blessing. Maybe it would have been like that for her too. The man my mother lives with now isn’t her husband, but neither of them could afford to divorce.”
Marlie shrugged; this was probably more than Edmund wanted to know about her family, and it wouldn’t make the best impression, but people like him could be so naïve. “The thing about Britannia…I don’t understand that at all. I always thought growing up that those were just fairy tales. Stories we tell ourselves to keep ourselves in our places, to justify kings and queens by pretending that there was a time when there were kings who were actually fair and princesses who were actually virtuous. But now…I don’t know.”
“Fairy tales are sometimes going to be true, when you’re talking about the Leffoys,” Edmund said. “Or even the Pendrys maybe. But even if they’re true it doesn’t mean that what they come to is right in the end. I hope this time it is. And that it’s over, for Annie and the others.”
“It would take a lot to make me think that kings and queens and serfs and vassals could ever be really right. Or fair,” said Marlie. “Maybe Lady Leffoy herself is fair, and possibly Florrie will be as well, but we have no idea what his children and grandchildren are going to be like. Look at Galen Garnier!”
Edmund shook his head. “I know,” he said. “And her mother, I think, was no lady bountiful. But the land is what it is, at the borders and gates especially.”
“I don’t understand that, really,” said Marlie, “but I suppose that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.” She smiled at him, as if to say it wasn’t him she doubted, and then she heard Bessie Mahoney’s voice ringing down the corridor.
“Marlie! You’re late! If you don’t get back to the infirmary now Arianwen won’t be able to get out to go and see that Frog professor!” Bessie skidded, breathless, to a halt in front of them. “You know she thinks he’s going to marry some cousin of hers.”
Marlie rolled her eyes. “Don’t gossip so, Bessie, you’re going to get a worse reputation than Turpin. Arianwen might not care to hear you telling the whole world her business!” She glanced down at her watch, and then she winced. “I’m sorry,” she said to Edmund. “I was just going in to return some books, but I did promise Arianwen I’d take the afternoon for her, because Lindsey’s been giving her hell about everything, and she wanted a break.” She sighed, because she really did want to continue the conversation.
“It’s all right,” said Edmund, and smiled. Mahoney really was as good as the Herald sometimes, but she wasn’t the only one.
southerlywind, voci_umbrarum (Bessie Mahoney) and breadandroses