Catherine Raines and Family (forever_raines) wrote in weddedto_sonora, @ 2008-07-12 21:15:00 |
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Current mood: | restless |
A Matter of Appearances
Sticking her finger yet again, Lila put down her needle and glared at the three lopsided pansies she'd managed to complete in what felt like a lifetime of embroidery. If the feeling in her hands was anything to go by, she could have sewn every stitch with her blood instead of colored threads. Dropping the work back into Livy's sewing basket - her sister-in-law could give it to her staff to use as a wash rag - she turned her glare to the man calmly reading the newspaper on the opposite side of the room.
"Are we going to sit here all day pretending we care about needlework and the Louisiana news?" she asked irritably.
Charles lowered the paper enough to look at her. She wanted badly to slap that peculiar half-smile off his face, but had already decided doing it would be...impolitic. "Not all day, no," he said, just as if he thought she was being serious. "I understand the kitchen is attempting to make supper without any fish. I would not like to miss it. Besides, the reporters here are most interesting to read for style." Just as if every word of that hadn't been picked to mock her and her family. If she didn't stop grinding her teeth, she was going to lose one. Maybe a slap or two wouldn't be too impolitic after all.
"A pox on your style," she snapped. "Catherine will be coming home for Christmas soon. We need to go home." It almost still struck her as odd that she called returning his home as going to hers. Almost.
"They got out today," he said absently, half of his attention already back on the paper. Lila hadn't even tried to read one since the first few reports about P.U.R.E. came out; it was too hard to go through the articles every day with her stomach in knots, waiting to read that her lover of almost eighteen years was among the dead. The bad end they'd made - her stomach gave a small twist at that, at how immeasurably worse she'd made it when she first arrived here in Louisiana - had not made her wish any more harm to Nick than she'd done him herself. "I wrote Catherine two weeks ago to tell her to stay at school."
After a stunned moment, Lila leapt to her feet. Before she quite knew that she intended to, she had crossed the room and snatched the newspaper from her husband's hands, leaving him a paper cut to curse at. "You did what?" The last word came out a shriek, but for once she didn't care at all.
Charles glared right back at her, still nursing his finger. "I dislike repeating myself, Lila," he said in a low, tight voice.
"It wasn't enough to keep me away from her all summer? How much more do you think I need to be punished?" Her voice was still loud, angry, but she felt as if she was going to cry. She doubted anyone could have come up with a more effective way to punish her for running away, and the thought that it might not end until Catherine was both an adult and chose to oppose Charles in anything, something she thought about as likely as the sun going green...
"Punished?" he said, sounding disbelieving. She could almost believe he really was. "I know this may come as a shock, Lila, but not everything I do is somehow about you."
"You left me here for months," she said. "You told my brother that I wasn't allowed to leave, even if I only wanted to go home. You made Catherine spend her entire summer with that bitch Margaret - "
"You will not insult my sister," Charles snapped. "She's certainly a better role model for Catherine Elizabeth than you are." She gasped, eyes widening with outrage, but if that was noticed at all, he didn't show it. "And yes - I was trying to teach you a lesson, since it seems you never grew up enough to learn manners and your place in a more civilized manner. Since these lunatics - " he pointed to the newspaper, lying a few feet away on a very fine carpet patterned in flowers - "started raising hell, though, it's all been about trying to keep you alive!"
She stared at him, paling slightly, her arms folded. "Keeping me alive?"
"They're after blood traitors," he said irritably, seeming to regret his outburst. If even he knew if he was regretting what he'd said or just that he'd given way to emotion, Lila doubted she ever would. Charles seldom told her much, but she had come to understand at some point in their almost twenty-one years together that he prided himself on his talent for suppressing - or at least hiding - what he felt most of the time. "Those who have - condescended - to mix a lower blood in with their own. I doubt that sort have forgotten the tales that you did so any more than I have, and your death would...irk me exceedingly." Lila blinked, not sure what she should make of that. "Whatever you've consorted with, you still have a better family than any replacement I could hope for would. Besides, I'm too old now to get used to a new wife's ways and have another set of children. That's why Catherine stayed at Margaret's after you learned your lesson and why she's staying at Sonora now. They might be able to reach her there, but I think that even someone foolish enough to attempt another kidnapping off a wagon would decide it was too much trouble to get 'round Manfred Bulla to murder one of his students. Especially when that student's father is in the practice of giving him large amounts of money."
Lila refolded her arms. Charles fussed with his clothes, though nothing actually needed to be straightened. She sat down. He got up just long enough to retrieve his paper. The silence was speaking a volume a second. "I apologize," she said stiffly.
To her amazement, Charles smiled at her, a warm, genuine-looking smile. "I don't seem to recall anything happening that you would need to apologize for," he said.
Lila shook her head. Trying to understand a man was like trying to walk a labyrinth in the dark for a woman. It would be even harder for them to understand each other or themselves, which perhaps accounted for why so many of them liked to start wars and scorn any workable form of communication. "I don't, either."
"In that case," he said, still pleasantly, "I see no reason not to tell you my plans. I will return home tomorrow and have it put about that Catherine is staying at school with a friend I will intentionally avoid naming, for obvious reasons." Lila nodded her agreement without a second thought. Merlin knew loyalty was a precious thing, but Catherine took it too far. The Howard girl and the...Nicoletta were almost certainly using her for her money, but Catherine either couldn't or wouldn't see it. "I'll also see if I can plant a rumor that we've been on a second honeymoon in Rome; I was there with a friend who looks a bit like you not long ago, so it should hold up fairly well."
A friend. Lila was surprised to discover that she was the slightest bit jealous. She'd never cared who Charles was...friends with, so long as he left her friend alone. "I'd forgotten we had a first honeymoon," she said.
"A late honeymoon, then. Twenty-one years late, but I've heard of couples wanting to get away after having a child, so again, it should hold up well." Lila decided it would be against her best interests to mention the rather less creative way he'd gotten away after Catherine. That time still stood out in her memory as vivid as nightmare, vivid enough to have made her try a run when it looked like history might repeat itself. Now that she thought about it, he did look thinner and grayer than he had before, as if he'd been living hard all these months apart. She would never say it, but perhaps running hadn't been so very foolish after all. "It will get out, but if no one mentions...certain other things to our faces, then I don't really think they'll call us out over this. The Christmas party is being arranged already, so that won't be a problem. They'll probably have everything in hand before I get back."
In all of that, he had failed to mention one important thing. "What about me and Isabel?"
There was a pause, during which Lila wished she still had her embroidery in hand. Working on it was out of the question, but it would have been good to have something in her hands. "You are, of course, welcome to accompany me," he said finally. "Or not, if you prefer to stay. I will not attempt to remove you from your brother against your will."
Lila's eyes widened again. She hadn't expected to be given the choice, and wasn't really sure she wanted it. It seemed to her that she hadn't made a decision larger than what robes to put on in the morning in years without it causing disaster, and even her taste in clothes had, on a few occasions, caused trouble. "I...I think I will come," she said, taking care to keep her attention on anything but her husband. "Jack and Liv will hardly cry to see the back of me or Isabel."
There was another pause. If Charles was actually reading the paper he held, he was reading it very slowly, because it wasn't even rustling. "So we begin again," he said after a moment. It had the sound of a man slowly shaking his head. "Back to the same old dance, then." There was a rustle, then, as if he, too, felt a great need to fiddle with something to relieve a little of the awkward tension. "I hope it goes better than last time. I still haven't decided what I think you were doing, but I'd prefer it if you refrained from...simpering this time. It's odd when I know you don't mean a bit of it."
Simpering? She had never simpered at him in her life! Maybe - maybe! - she'd crossed a line between civility and warmth a few times, when she really wanted something or for him not to know something, and had crossed that line more often than usual in the period after Isabel was born and before he started behaving oddly, but she had never simpered. What had he intended to say before he settled on 'simpering'? "I'll try to refrain from it," she said, as dryly as she could when she wanted to demand an explanation so badly. Try, indeed! She almost wanted to see a situation dire enough to make her simper at him!
Charles nodded, quite as if he hadn't caught her tone. Maybe he really hadn't; it was hard to tell, sometimes, and she had spent twenty-one years constantly changing her opinion about his level of intelligence. "As soon as we finish paying for the Christmas party, I'm going to put Lorenzo to authorizing additional security measures so Catherine can be with us this summer," he said. Lila tried not to think he'd sounded very much like a man granting a favor or giving a well-trained crup a treat. "To tell you the truth, I'd have Lorenzo and maybe a few more at Sonora around her if I could, but it would attract too much attention and probably make Bulla have apoplexy."
Lila sighed at that, but finally nodded. "I suppose you're right." In a way, it was just as important to Catherine's safety that she be seen to move around as freely as any other pureblooded girl as the spells Charles was quietly inquiring about were. Maybe more. If the two of them made a show of protecting Catherine from the threat, it would seem to some parties that she needed that protection because she was what they threatened. She still wished Catherine could have a few bodyguards, though. Catherine was her baby, which did tend to cloud her judgment, but Catherine was also the acknowledged heir.
"I believe that covers the major points," Charles said, interrupting her thoughts. She didn't miss his omission of the minor points, though. "Anything else we need to establish in regards to the agreement?"
Her mouth almost fell open - he was treating this as a business agreement! - but she still had herself more in hand than that. Except in a few storybook instances, anyway. "I don't think so," she said faintly, then paused. "There is something you should know, but I don't know if you'll think it affects the...agreement," she added slowly. "Nick won't be a problem for you anymore."
For a moment, she thought Charles might manage to trip over his chair without getting out of it. In that moment, he looked as shocked as she'd ever seen a man look in her life. What was wrong with him, for him to show so much emotion twice in one day? "You killed him?" he asked disbelievingly.
Her mouth did fall open this time, and no matter that it was not one of the standard stock moments for that sort of thing. She'd heard that line a time or two before. "No!" The word came out as close to a proper shout as she could manage before she clicked her teeth shut. Merlin, but Charles could always hit on a way to put her off-balance. "No," Lila repeated, more mildly than the first time. "Something else. You don't need to know the details."
If anything, he just looked more shaken by that, but he managed to sound steady enough. "You are sure he'll stop harassing me?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Very good, then." He did not quite manage to sound as if it was very good, and the look he gave her was very, very wary. She thought she knew what he was thinking now: If Lila has it in her to do something to restrain her toy boy.... She made herself to meet his eyes with at least a semblance of calm. "Then we can go on with our lives."
"Yes," she said again, not quite sure what she was feeling. It felt like a moment for grand gestures, but she couldn't think of even one appropriate one to make. How many years had it been since her novels failed her? "I suppose we can."