The Careys (carey_quintet) wrote in weddedto_sonora, @ 2012-01-06 00:00:00 |
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Current mood: | tired |
To Laugh or Go Crazy
OOC: Minorly fuzzytimed to before smythe_et_al's latest post. BIC:
“I’m sorry if it’s not a good time,” Morgaine remarked as she took her seat in the little office. Robert, prudently, had a set of chairs off to the side, so there was no question of who should sit on which side of the desk or what that implied, despite the small size of the room in which he handled business affairs and occasionally dealt with greater men – and even women, she thought wryly – than himself.
“Why wouldn’t it be?” Robert asked, with a small, humorless smile. “It’s barely past Edmond’s birthday.”
“You don’t look well, I mean,” she clarified. “Do you require healing?”
Robert shook his head. “No,” he said shortly. “Adam’s told me which potions to take, and I doubt you can do more for this than he did.” He gestured vaguely toward his chest. “I had hoped it was just last year,” he explained, “but it seems he was right, about how it will be worse near…anniversaries.” He gave her the empty, social smile most of the family learned as small children, and for a moment, it was possible to see that he’d once been slightly better than average-looking, though age and circumstance had lined and filled out his face and grayed his black hair enough that a dignified average was all he could usually manage. It did not, Morgaine thought, help that he was fairly short for a man. “Your father was altogether a wretched example of a human being, if in fact it pleases you to acknowledge him as one at all, but he did know what was what with a wand.”
Morgaine could find no graceful reply to that, and so made none, occupied anyway with the lingering feeling of her father’s blood on her hands. Even now, she glanced at them to make sure it was behind her, but they were clean, even the little creases where her nails joined with the fingers, and the places at the quicks that couldn’t quite be cleaned out right until she’d repeated the scouring charm several times.
“I doubt, though,” Robert said, just before the silence could go on too long, “that you came here to ask about my health. Or see the children.”
Morgaine shook her head. “No,” she agreed, wondering if ‘children’ was really an appropriate term to use for Edmond or Jane anymore. The latter would not be sixteen until May, but after the things that girl had seen…A near-death experience, she thought bleakly, could almost be a rite of passage into adulthood in their family. “I came to ask you about that.” She pointed to his left hand, where he still, almost two years after his wife’s death, wore a wedding ring. She smiled slightly and added, “the children were a convenient excuse.”
Robert looked at her for a long moment, his hand having folded without him seeming to notice it so his thumb could run along the bottom of the ring in question. “Perhaps you should tell me what you already know,” he suggested.
“So you know what not to lie about?” Morgaine replied, but then shrugged. “It’s not much. I know there’s a faction which wants to see you married to Meredith. I know that you have refused to say yea or nay until Jane’s taken care of. And that’s all.”
Robert nodded thoughtfully. “And is there any chance you’ll tell me how you came to know that?” he asked, as though only mildly curious. “It is supposed to be such a secret.”
Morgaine shook her head. “You can see my information network when I can see yours,” she said, and he laughed.
“Fair enough,” he replied, then rubbed his eye, as though he were getting a headache. “I was approached, some time ago, by Thomas,” he said bluntly, “with that proposition. I told him I was not willing to even consider it until Jane was safely married off. I was buying time.” He grimaced. “Which I suppose I can’t do much longer. They’ve been putting pressure on me to find her someone since they realized I intended to hold to that objection, and she’s nearly sixteen. I’ve been dangling Julia’s old thought about the Smythes in front of them, talking about that ball last year…” He shrugged. “They seem to be accepting it, but sooner or later, we’ll arrange something or we won’t, and then it’s only a matter of time until she marries him or he either marries someone else or the family simply becomes impatient and intervenes.”
Morgaine frowned, thinking through what she knew about the Smythes. She didn’t like it much more than she ever had, but now, keeping track of other families to some extent was her business, part of the package. “He’s not likely to inherit much,” she pointed out.
“Indeed not,” he said. “But there are worse things, I suppose, and Jane seems to like him well enough. He won’t be overly in her way. Functional marriages have begun on less.” He looked briefly as though something amused him. “For myself, I’d betroth her to the Pierce boy, or the Brockert one, in a moment, but I doubt it would stand.”
Morgaine looked at him blankly, her mind automatically going boys she’d once thought she or her sister might end up married to – Pierces she had never attended school with but whom were more or less of her generation, and then to the only Brockert she could think of off the top of her head. “You’ve been considering Duesius Pierce and Adam Brockert?” she asked, confused.
“Thaddeus and Evan,” he corrected her, his smile more wintry than the weather had ever thought to be today.
“The first years?”
“The first years,” he said agreeably. “A very good match either way, don’t you think? Both a step, two at most, away from becoming heirs, and both in a position to put at least six years between me and my prospective bride, where Mr. Smythe would more likely only give me two.”
Morgaine supposed it was indicative of certain flaws in her character, born from spending too much time in the higher ranks of the family over the past few years, but she couldn’t help but laugh. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d assume you really didn’t want to marry her,” she remarked.
“I don’t,” Robert said flatly. “I’m sure you know the woman better than I do, cousin, but I’ve never liked her, and…” He shrugged. “You’re aware that many consider young Malcolm’s claim to our Edmond’s inheritance…stronger than it properly should be, after all the associations between your branches. If he and Edmond were to become, for all practical intents and purposes, brothers….”
Morgaine shrugged, too. “He’s a little boy,” she said. “Edmond’s an adult. He’s highly educated, completely law-abiding, reasonably sane. What more do they want?”
“Someone who’s not your brother,” he said quietly. “Not Gwenhwyfar’s brother. No kin at all to Alasdair.” He shook his head. “Thomas referred to him as my son. He’s never done that before. If he formally acknowledged him as such, Malcolm as such, and then disowned Edmond on the basis of bad acquaintance, it would be an easy step. You would have to die, of course, and your sister and our friend Mr. Pierce, and probably your cousin Richard. But who can you name who would fight for you? It would go over easily enough. More’s been done before.”
“Mr. Pierce isn’t my friend,” Morgaine said irritably, “no more than you are. And no one would fight for me. Except maybe Edmond, if he was still alive. Which I doubt very much that he would be for long.”
"You're wrong," Robert said. "I am your friend. But I couldn't save you. I couldn't even save myself, if it came to that point, not for long. But that's not my concern." He crossed his ankle over his knee, holding it between his two hands. "The family uses us, you know. How did Alasdair used to put it? 'Everyone has a place, and everyone should be in their place?'" Morgaine flinched very slightly, but Robert didn't acknowledge it. "I allowed it to use me for all my life, put me in whatever place I was deemed best suited for, and because of it, I lost my wife and I lost my health in the space of a day and I nearly lost my son because of that same day. And that, I don't forgive. I stopped caring about what the family wanted, what was best for it, the moment Adam told me Julia had died." He shook his head. "I don't intend to lose anything else, Morgaine."
Morgaine sat back in her chair. “And that’s why I believe you,” she said in conclusion, breaking the mood.
“Come again?”
“I’d like to trust you on shared experience,” she said, “or your impressive oratory - " he chuckled dryly at this, no doubt fully aware that he'd just made a speech - "but I trust that you love my brother more than I do any of that.” She half-smiled. “Prove me wrong, and Edmond may actually finally run out of parents,” she said.
“Of course,” he said. “Though he only ever really had two.”
True enough, she supposed, though she didn’t like to hear it. It hadn’t been their mother’s fault she…was what she was, any more than it would be if, as Morgaine still feared might prove to be the case, it turned out she’d passed along her problems to one of them, and Father…She slid her hand into her pocket. Father was complicated.
She looked over at him, feeling very weary. “I’ve had a word with Meredith already,” she said. “I doubt she’ll back off on my account, though. I don’t…have exactly the same effect on people that my father did.” He laughed shortly. Survivor humor, she thought. It was strange, even so, to laugh, but if she didn’t find it blackly amusing, it might just drive her crazy. “Hold them off as long as you can, without hurting your chances or the kids’,” she told him. “I’ll try to figure out something.”