The Future ”The noise level dropped when Alicia pushed the kitchen door shut behind her, but she could still hear music and conversation and laughter through it. Anne’s parties were many things, some of them things Alicia sometimes wished they weren’t, but they were never boring. She invited nearly everyone she knew or had ever known – a…diverse group to say the least – and let them mix. It sounded like a recipe for disaster, but it tended to work rather well – or at least, to work better than its writer had looked when Alicia had noticed her ducking out of the party.
“Anne?” asked Alicia, concerned. “Are you all right?”
Her former Latin teacher was sitting on a stool at the island, sipping what Alicia assumed was a cup of tea and still looking very white about the mouth and strained about the eyes. “Morning, they tell me,” she muttered into her cup. “Won’t last long, they tell me. Bah!”
Confused, Alicia stepped closer and then identified the smell she had noticed when she entered the kitchen. The room smelled of pure ginger, and there was an open jar of ginger root on the stove beside the kettle. Alicia looked from the jar to Anne’s robes. They were, she noticed now, rather loose and flowing, but….
“You always were too smart for your own good,” grumbled Anne, no doubt deducing Alicia’s deduction as soon as she deduced it.
“When?” asked Alicia, unable to think of anything better to say.
Anne smiled a tiny bit. “In the summer,” she said.
Alicia laughed and hugged her, nearly spilling tea all over them both. “Congratulations!” she exclaimed.
Anne sighed. “I hope that’s the right word,” she fretted, fiddling with her robes. “It only fully occurred to me after I found out, just how terrible a mother I could really be.”
“Oh, be quiet,” said Alicia. “You’ll be wonderful.”
Would I be?
That was a question Alicia had wondered more and more often in the past…she wasn’t sure. A while, she supposed. She didn’t particularly want a child right now, but someday….
In her daydreams, it all worked out. She and Thad told Wesley to take the financial business and shove it. They moved to Italy, to be closer to Cepheus and Lucrezia, and lived on a farm, away from politics. They had children she loved even though they were hers and Henny, once she finished sowing her wild oats, came to live with them and help Alicia and Thad teach the academic areas, literature and such, they weren’t as strong in. There were no politics, just late summer dinners on patios with the people she loved and walking to some picturesque village to shop and laugh at her own bad Italian and sometimes commandeering Thad’s last clean shirt on laundry day so he’d have to chase her around the house to get it back.
In reality, it was more complicated. University had been good for her marriage, she thought – as married students, they hadn’t had as much of a social life or public role as they had at Sonora – and Thad had never made her think he truly regretted the decision he’d made, but…well, it was a long way from taking her on as a partner and having a child with her. The one Muggle a few generations back in her family tree could take on a whole new significance when he considered that Muggle being related to a Pierce. Plus there was sheer pragmatism – the simplest solution to the conflict in the family was to persuade Wesley to step aside after Derwent II died in exchange for Thad accepting Winston, or perhaps Winston’s son, as his own heir, ignoring any child he and Alicia had. Doing so would be much simpler, and much easier to convince Wesley they would do, if such a child never existed in the first place.
Right now, though, she needed to focus on her friend and mentor. This was wonderful news and she really did think Anne would be brilliant at it.