With Sympathy, You Will Remarry: 4
With Sympathy Masterlist
One Piece Masterlist
Manga Pictures
Shamrock Figarland x Reader Rating: 18+
Previous/Next
There wasn’t an easy escape at this second meeting with Shamrock Figarland.
And much as he filled your nights, having him here in the flesh did nothing to shrink the version of him that lived in your head. He seemed even bigger now, walking beside you, than he had at his first proposal. Your arms were folded tight around yourself, and still the air around him seemed to draw you in, as though he displaced more of the world than a man had any business displacing.
You should have guessed that your decision to leave the picnic wouldn’t separate you from the Commander. Lisette wouldn’t release him, for one. And beneath the many eyes still turned toward you across the grass, sun bright on the white cloths and the abandoned plates, you couldn’t afford to lose your mind and scream at him.
However he’d managed it, he had steered you out of the crowd without seeming to steer at all, folding your every attempt to flee into what now looked, to anyone watching, like nothing more than a respectable need for privacy.
So you walked side by side down the gravel path, the noise of the picnic thinning behind you, laughter and the small clink of porcelain going soft at your back as the soft thuds of his sword swung at his thigh overtook it. Your daughter remained, frustratingly, in his arms.
You had a great deal to say and no clean way to say any of it, because how did you reason with a man who had taken none of your earlier words seriously?
He’d come to you in a moment of weakness to demand an answer, and done it in front of enough people that refusing him would have been social suicide. You supposed that if you had truly committed to flee the city, you should have had the audacity to refuse him anyway.
But you didn't know where to find such courage, or how even to begin, so you let Lisette fill the silence instead. She did so enthusiastically and without shame.
“Do you go to the lower world a lot? Is it dangerous? Is there a lot of water? Rosette said her dad said there’s places where it rains all the time and never stops and the—”
Lisette had years of commentary saved up for her future father, enough to tip well past charming and into a headache. But Shamrock Figarland both carried her and listened, answering each question with short, even replies that gave away nothing but interest. She perched on his shoulders, one small hand fisted in his pretty red hair for balance, and showed him off like this was the proudest afternoon of her short life.
You didn’t like how easily he’d befriended your daughter. You liked even less how happy he looked carrying her; her tiny weight settled on his shoulder as if it belonged there. What right did he have to your little girl? What right did he have to make you break her heart?
Anger brewed inside you—No gentleman should be this conniving. There had to be some answer to shoo this man from your family, but nothing came. Instead, Lisette’s oration hit a lull, and Shamrock tilted his head toward you.
“You’re very quiet, Saintess.” He said it lightly, as though remarking on the weather, though he did not look away from you when he said it. Above him, Lisette had discovered a loose thread at his collar and was prying it free with great concentration. “I am still anxious to hear your response.”
Damn stubborn man.
“I have a great deal to say to you.” You kept your voice low, mindful of the child. “None of it is fit for present company.”
“Ah.” The corner of his mouth moved. “Then I’ll take it later. In full.”
His presumption of a future where you fully unleashed your ire, and he took it happily, landed somewhere beneath your ribs and sat there, burning hot. He spoke of later as though the two of you had a great many of them stretched out ahead, an agreement already signed over. As though the picnic, the magnolias, the word engagement let fall so carelessly among the saintesses, had settled your future rather than detonated it.
“There won’t be a later,” you said sharply, but he merely hummed.
“Water!” Lisette announced, abandoning the thread in favor of once again pestering the man. She had circled back, as she often did, to whatever had lodged in her mind. “You didn’t say if there’s a lot of water. Down there.”
“There’s a great deal of water,” Shamrock told her, grave as a man delivering testimony from firsthand experience. “More than you and all of Mary Geoise could drink in a hundred years.”
“A hundred?” She gasped, and you sighed. “All of us?!?”
“At least.”
She considered this with the seriousness it deserved, and you watched your daughter’s face open with wonder at a man you meant to cut out of both your lives before the week was through, and felt the anger cool into something worse.
By the time you reached the estate, you were so uncomfortable you were nearly twitching; every step up the walk wound tighter than the last. Beth opened the door and was startled at your quick return. Then her mouth dropped open further still at the sight of your company, at the Commander of the Holy Knights standing on the step with your daughter perched on his shoulders like a small conquering general.
You thought, briefly and seriously, about blocking the door. A gentleman would have stopped at the threshold. A gentleman would have lowered Lisette to the ground, offered some final courtesy, and removed himself and his shadow from your house.
A townhouse so small and so feminine it should surely offend him, and remind him that you were an old woman, dry as a cactus and just as welcoming to his advances.
But Shamrock Figarland followed you right in. Only then did he set Lisette down, and she scampered off to find the dozens of toys she’d already described to him in such exhausting detail.
For a moment, you stood there, hoping he’d turn and leave. You had no such luck. Even when your staff appeared, each one was startled by your early return and then struck dumb at the sight of your guest. Shamrock merely nodded to them, polite as a prince, and waited for an invitation to sit.
You did not offer one, as you were barely managing to ensure your expression didn’t turn downright thunderous.
The Commander waited anyway, entirely at ease in the small bright hall, the low ceilings and the pale papered walls doing nothing to diminish him. If anything, the smallness of the room only underlined the enormous size of him, the way an adult plate looks larger laid across a child’s table. The lace doilies and your little chairs, the vase of dried lavender on the side table, the framed sampler Lisette’s grandmother had stitched. None of it cowed him. He stood among your soft feminine things and didn’t look a dash uncomfortable.
He seemed, instead, to find real interest in them. His gaze moved slowly across the mantel and the side tables, unhurried, taking inventory, and settled longest on the pictures that featured you and your daughter. A miniature of Lisette as a fat, furious infant. You in profile at some function years past, younger, your late husband’s hand just visible at the edge of the frame where the crop had failed to remove him. Shamrock studied each one as though it were being explained to him, as though he were a guest at a gallery and not a man who had forced his way past your door.
You wanted, badly, to turn each frame face down.
He seemed perfectly content to outwait you, to pry into your life at his leisure. So it seemed it was time to set the record straight.
You cleared your throat, taking a deep breath, and he turned politely at the sound. You walked into the parlor, and he followed, and behind him, the staff warily followed too.
Bless your staff. With great intuition, Beth had gone after Lisette to ensure she’d not interrupt. Ness, Antony and Arnold hovered in the doorway to the servants’ hall, but at one wave they closed it behind them, and to their credit were almost certainly listening at the door.
You weren’t entirely sure there was a single question that could hold every grievance you meant to level at Shamrock Figarland, but you tried.
“Commander Figarland—” You said it as politely as possible, which was not polite at all. A pause. A truly monumental act of reining in a great many swearwords and coming out the other side intact. “—just what do you want with my daughter and me?”
You’d kept yourself mostly turned away, for your own nerves, one hand still resting on the back of a chair as though you might need it. But to punctuate the question you made yourself turn and stare at the Commander. Stared up, with some difficulty, given his height. You had to lift your chin to do it, and hated that you had to, hated the small concession of the movement. He was tall enough to nearly brush the low ceiling of your parlor, close enough that the plaster seemed to catch at his hair.
He met your stare without any of the discomfort you’d hoped to provoke. He nodded, slowly, with an air of understanding, as though this were a casual disagreement between reasonable parties and he needed only impart some standard courtesy to smooth it over.
“In our initial proposal, I presented several reasons for such a union.” His voice was pitched low and filled the small room and wrapped around your senses like mist. “Upon reflection, I realized these proved an inadequate case with which to persuade you. As you have not yet answered my letter, I wish to remedy my previous misstep.”
“A misstep?”
“Indeed.” He nodded. “I have realized that in my haste to secure this exceptional match, I nearly entirely failed to rightly convince you. If you have doubts about my affections, rest assured, there is little I wish for more than to make you happy. I have found myself genuinely affectionate toward you.”
If you could have fainted out of pure shock, this would have been a fine time for it. Was Shamrock Figarland attempting to convince you that he was enamored with you?
How was that even possible?
“You don’t even know me, Saint Figarland,” you said sharply. “And I barely know you. It is out of line for you to so forwardly create a public scene as you did.”
He didn’t seem chastised, but he did look tolerant, like a seasoned pet owner tolerant of a small dog barking at his boot. His hand rested on his sword, but more out of habit than threat, a thumb running down its side thoughtfully.
He was quick to answer.
“My lady, we may not have spent much time together, but the late Saint Marcus was an acquaintance of mine.” Shamrock said reasonably, “I often watched you from a distance, and the way you carry yourself with a grace and composure few others possess, and I knew that you were singularly the woman I wished to marry.”
You grasped your chair harder, fingers flexing into the upholstery. The mention of Sheamus landed like a cold hand at the back of your neck. Yes, you knew that your husband had been schoolmates with him, but was this some sort of joke? You wouldn’t say they were friends by any means!
And so what, you just happened to catch his eye? That Shamrock Figarland, the most desired bachelor of Mary Geoise, had been at the fringes of your life all along, admiring you, was preposterous.
Or entirely unnerving. If he had been watching, how much would he know?
You searched his face for it and found nothing you could use. He gave away only what he intended to give.
Shamrock paused, and his gaze moved over you, and while his face remained solemn as it was at rest, his eyes were unusually… soft. “I won’t pretend or insult your intelligence. I have earned your ire thrice-fold—but—.” A beat, then, he continued lower. “—But I do not wish to watch you marry another in an uncomfortable bid just to ensure Lisette’s safety. In fact, I will go through a great many undignified things to ensure the rest of your lives proceed with the utmost happiness.”
The words settled over the little parlor and stayed there. Utmost Happiness. You turned the phrase over, hunting the edges of it. Saint Figarland had not looked away from you once while saying it, and you could not tell whether that was tenderness or the man wanting you to know precisely how much he had seen.
What did that even mean, to be happy? To unquestioningly marry someone who insistently demanded it? And while thanks to doing such a thing, you’d never lacked materially, were you ever happy?
Not married to Sheamus.
And you didn’t want to risk it again. Before you was a man who, like your first husband, knew all the right words to use. And even more, he probably knew even better where to strike and was much more powerful. Your first husband had tired so quickly of you, and harassed the maids, had an ever-changing litany of slaves, who started leering younger and younger—!
What would a man like Shamrock Figarland do when you inevitably became wearisome to him?
No matter how intoxicating Saint Figarland was, how well he smelled, how tall and broad, how tightly the uniform fit across him, how could you dare let a potentially dangerous man into Lisette’s life? You had failed so horribly once already. Your daughter's hopes were too great, her affection too broad and too freely given, for this man you didn’t know.
Steadily, you went to the desk in the parlor, the one containing the marriage charter given a week ago. If Shamrock Figarland was insistent on being here, you could at least give it back. A stubborn showcase of your seriousness.
You pulled out the papers, carefully ensuring they did not bend. Then, turning, you set them before him on a side table. He glanced at the papers and then at you.
You pressed your lips together. “My answer to your proposal was not out of spite or shyness, Commander. And I am… flattered by your most generous offer, but it was not my intention to make a fool of you by ignoring it. I simply felt it a bit… odd. Especially after I declined your first proposition.” You made yourself hold his gaze. “I do not aim to play coy. I was serious when I refused you, not angling for more attention or a finer proposal. You have put me into an uncomfortable position.”
He gave a thoughtful hum, low in his chest, weighing your testimony. It was like he was genuinely puzzled at your rejection. A single finger of his tapped the top of the paper as if to check it.
“I see,” he acknowledged, nodding respectfully, as if a bit startled by your bold refusal. “I was merely attempting to smooth over such a negative first impression, but admittedly my approaches have carried more enthusiasm than thought. I confess I find the distinction rather embarrassing.”
He gave a brief chuckle, a surprisingly warm thing for his cool demeanor, directed at himself. Like he finally had realized how insane this had all been. Your brows pulled up, and you fought to keep your mouth from quirking into a smile. Whatever else might be said about Shamrock Figarland, there was an almost awkward stiffness to him, a real shyness under all that bearing. For all his regal composure, he seemed, at least in this moment, genuinely rueful about the force of his own approach, a large man who had knocked over a vase reaching for a teacup and only now noticed the pieces.
Then, he straightened, and the bashful modesty folded neatly away, as though it had only ever been a courtesy he’d extended to hoodwink your better judgment.
“Still, my lady, I must insist on your signature.” He slid the cream paper back to you, making your brows raise. “It truly is the only way this matter can be settled properly.”
“Only.” The word came out of you like a splinter. “Saint Figarland, this is preposterous. I have just informed you of why I will not!!”
He wasn’t moved.
“Consider the current optics of what has happened.” He turned the paper a quarter so it faced you, squaring the document to be signed. “I declared us as good as promised at the picnic. Before the most talkative of the saintesses, all who carry news faster than any Den Den Mushi. By supper, you will be considered engaged with or without an agreement.”
The floor tilted strangely beneath you as the realization of the trap set in.
“Which means the fact of what already exists,” he went on, and there was no cruelty in it, which was the cruelty of it. “The only question left open is whether the paper agrees with the city or contradicts it. A lady contradicted by her own city cannot hold a good reputation. The talk feeds on you, and on Lisette after you, and will treat you with disdain. Your signature closes the gap and ensures your safety. My offer is not a leash, Saintess, like the others. It is a roof. A home for you.”
“You built the storm, and now you offer me shelter from it.” Your voice shook as you raised a finger in rebuttal. “Do you imagine I can’t see the deceit of your tactic? This hardly endears or inspires me to do so!”
"I imagine you can see it perfectly." He inclined his head, as though you had paid him a compliment. "I have never once mistaken you for a fool. I am only asking you to be wise enough to sign in spite of seeing it—a proper roof keeps the rain off whether or not you admire the man who raised it."
How audacious, how vexing, how horrible. And for some worse reason, how could it be so utterly intoxicating that a man so handsome, so esteemed, would do something this ridiculous and this final for you? It was terrifying. It was grossly, mortifyingly romantic.
You wanted to throw the inkstand at him. You wanted, with a heat that appalled you, to close the distance instead—and that second wanting was the one you could not forgive, because it was the very instinct that had ruined you the first time.
And there was, once again, no real choice in it. Unless you fled the city and gambled Lisette on the road, there was no escaping the backlash of refusing. Your friends would fall silent. Your own family would edge away. Lisette would be isolated and whispered about for the whole of her childhood. One did not refuse a Holy Knight—much less a Figarland who commanded them, son of the Supreme Commander himself—and walk away unscathed by the city. The order of power was plain, and Shamrock had pressed only an inch of it against you to secure your compliance. Only an inch, and it had been more than enough.
But an inch of power still answered nothing of the question underneath.
"I fail to see just why—" You steadied it, barely. "What could possibly be so important about me that you would pass over a whole city of women who'd faint to be your bride? Men do not do this without a reason. They do not want a used widow with another man's child and a temper unless there is something they mean to take—"
"There is." Shamrock cut the accusation clean off, and the surety of it stopped you soundly.
He came round the table. Not quickly, but you had already backed yourself to the chair, and there was nowhere left to go. He stopped only when he was near enough that you had to tip your chin to hold his eyes, near enough to catch the clean starch of him and the leather and warm cologne beneath it, near enough that your own pulse turned renegade in your throat. And when he bent, one arm coming down to the chairback to cage you there, it turned thunderous.
"You ask what a man can want with a used widow. Used is an unfitting word. What I see before me is an experienced woman—one who has not been used, but whose use has been entirely ignored. I see a fine mother, a careful mistress of a house, a wife whose whole potential was left to waste on a useless husband. I see a woman I want as a companion and friend, whose competence and judgment I trust, whom I know I can trust. There are a great many useless, used-up people in this city, dear Lettie. I mean to ensure you are never counted among them."
Your mouth pressed into a straight line. You hated that such a speech could move you—but then, who could have blamed you?
And even so, how on earth were you meant to match a fervor like that?
"I don't trust you," you said simply, and braced for the frown, for the temper to surface at last. “Nor do I like you. Much less love you.”
You had expected to offended him.
How it surprised you when it didn't. Instead, he smiled, and your stomach jolted clean over, because he was very handsome indeed when he smiled and meant it.
"I did not expect you would, so soon. But I mean to attain your regard through honest means." He pitched it low, meant for the space between you and no further. "I am aware I have not earned it yet. I am aware I am extracting your name by force of circumstance, and that a better man might be ashamed of it. I find I am not. I would sooner have you unwilling and safe than admired from a distance and handed off to some other."
Your right hand found your left arm without your leave. Your fingers closed on the place just above the sleeve—the place made for a grip, for a wrench, for a bruise a long glove could hide.
He looked at your hand. His fingers flexed, as though he might lift it to comfort you. Instead, they curled into a fist and held.
He said nothing of it. He simply looked, and then raised his eyes back to yours, and you understood that he had known before you ever touched it—had perhaps known for years—how thin the farce hiding your situation had always been.
The humiliation took your legs, buckling them, though they didn't collapse entirely. Your vision went hot and blurred, and you turned your face away, because you would not, you would not, give this stranger the sight of it.
You heard leather and cloth stretch, and it made you glance back. Shamrock had gone to one knee—though it hardly made him short enough—and a pristine white handkerchief waited in his outstretched hand.
You took it because the alternative was to weep in front of him, bare-faced. You used it without dignity. You filled it with gunk and disgrace and frustration and resignation.
The crack in your composure finally let the bitter reality seep through. You had to marry Shamrock Figarland.
You did not trust him. You weren't certain you trusted any man—or, worse, that you trusted the part of yourself that had wanted so desperately, once, to be a good wife and mother, and would reach for the chance again if you let it. But the arithmetic of his logic was clean. Unless you meant, in earnest, to leave Mary Geoise: To leave your family, to sever Lisette from every opportunity she might ever have, to risk the disdain of the lower world and slave away the rest of your days beneath a collar—there was no other sum that balanced.
Above you, Lisette shrieked with laughter, and the sound went through you like a needle drawn through cloth.
You would do it, then.
For her. Only ever for her.
You left the white handkerchief on the desk, refusing to meet your suitor's eyes, and reached past him for the inkwell. At some point, Shamrock rose again.
His hand closed over yours before it reached the inkstand, folding your fingers still.
"Consider it all first," he said, and he had risen with you, so that this was said close—close enough that his breath stirred the loose hair at your temple, warm against the shell of your ear, and a shiver you could not command traced down the back of your neck. "I will not have you say later that I hurried your hand. Compare every line. Be certain I have not cheated you. Add any concession you require."
"I—cannot—" The pen had stopped mattering. His thumb moved once across your knuckles, slow, unhurried, tracing the ridge of bone there, and every ordered thought went out of you like candles in a draft. Did he imagine you could think at all while he touched you like this? The leather of his glove was warm and supple against your cold fingers, worn soft with use, and beneath it you could feel the sheer size of his hand swallowing yours, the restrained strength in a grip that had chosen, deliberately, to be gentle.
It had been years since your husband had touched you. Before Lisette was born, even. Longer still since a touch had meant anything but a warning. This was neither. This was warmth traveling up your wrist and into your arm and pooling somewhere beneath your sternum. It was discombobulating to say the least—and though you flinched at the first of it, some animal part of you, starved and disloyal, unfurled toward the heat of him almost before you'd decided to allow it. You caught the scent of him again this near: clean starch and warm skin, leather, the faint iron of the sword, and under all of it the cologne, cedar, and a darker scent that seemed to settle low in your belly and stay.
"Cannot what?" Shamrock tilted his head down toward you, and the shyness from before was nowhere in it now; this was a man who knew exactly how intoxicating he looked bent this close over a flustered woman, and had decided to weaponize every inch of it. His gaze dropped from your eyes to your mouth and rose again, slow enough that you felt it like a touch of its own, cataloging the heat climbing your throat, the breath you couldn't quite recover, the way your lips had parted without your leave. "You have gone very quiet, Saintess."
"There's… a great deal to consider," you whispered—a lie so obvious, so threadbare, that the corner of his mouth curved, and the shame of being caught in it only sent the warmth higher into your face.
The corner of his mouth moved. He continued to hold your hand closed over the pen, and he had no intention, you understood, of releasing it until you gave him leverage more damning than a signature: the admission written all over your traitor face.
"More money. More servants. More tutors for Lisette, more anything." His thumb stroked slowly across your fingers again, and the small drag of the leather sent heat racing up your arm. "Be greedy for me."
You should have torn free. You should have summoned the memory of Sheamus like cold water and let it douse you. You even reached for him, but the relief would not come. There was only the near heat of Shamrock Figarland pressing into the small space between you, and the mortifying truth that some starved animal part of you had turned its face up to him and would not be whistled back to heel.
Damn him. Damn him, that he'd found the one lever your dead husband never had. That you'd believed yourself proof against a handsome man precisely because the last handsome man had cured you of the taste, and here you stood, flushed to the ears, your hand gone soft under his, undone not by his threats but by his gentleness.
"That's enough," you managed, and it came out with none of the iron you'd meant. Breathless instead, nearer a plea, and you watched him hear exactly that, watched the low flicker of satisfaction move behind his eyes. "The contract is enough."
"As you say." He guided your hand the last inch to the paper, so gently it could not be called force, and pressed the pen firmly between your fingers, and released you into a perfectly correct distance. The air rushed cool into the space he'd left. "Your name, Saintess. That is all I came for."
The nib caught once on the downstroke and then ran smoothly, and it was done. Your name lay neat beside his, the ink black and gleaming and final. And you could not for your life have said, in that moment, whether it was yourself that moved your hand or the certainty that if you waited a breath longer, he would close the distance and kiss you and ruin you entirely.
Once it was done, he drew the inky pen from your fingers and set it back in its home. The sudden cool where he had stood felt like a slap you'd somehow asked for, but it was short-lived. Because he turned back to you then, eyes gone half-lidded, that terrible calm warmed through with something darker.
"Well done, my Lettie." He said it smoothly, low in his chest, and his hand settled at your waist, broad and warm and certain through the fabric, the heat of his palm bleeding straight through to your skin, and you very nearly fainted on the spot.
You should have stepped back. You should have struck the hand away and reminded him of every inch of propriety he had spent the whole afternoon so calmly ignoring. Instead, you stood rooted, your breath gone shallow, aware to the point of pain of the five points of pressure where his fingers curved against your side, of how easily that single hand spanned you, of the fact that he had not pulled you in and that somehow the restraint was worse than if he had. His thumb shifted, the smallest stroke along your ribs, and a fresh wave of heat climbed your throat.
"I'll speak to your father," he murmured, near enough now that you felt the words as much as heard them, warm against your temple. "Then arrange a meeting with mine. After that, we'll publish the banns and be married."
You lifted your face to answer, though what you meant to say you never learned, because his gaze had dropped to your mouth again. The whole small parlor seemed to draw tight around the two of you, the lace and the lavender and the ticking clock all falling away, and for one appalling breath, you were certain he would lean the last handspan and simply take what your turncoat body had been tipping toward all afternoon.
You had lifted your freed hand to your own hot cheek, the pen still bleeding a small blot onto the blotter, when the front door banged open in the hall, and three voices came in on the draft at once.
You jumped. Shamrock didn't even twitch.
"—told you the letter bore the Figarland crest, I have eyes—"
"—she isn't even receiving! We ought to have sent ahead—"
"—bullshit, we have every right. After those last rumors, we should have made her see us—"
"—Lettie? Lettie, what is going on—"
The parlor door swung open before you could so much as flinch. Arianne, Margaret, and Fanny, the three loudest of the six of you, were halfway in before they froze.
They saw the tableau you had not arranged and could not now rearrange: you flushed to the hairline with your hand at your own cheek, a signed page still wet on the table, Shamrock Figarland only a half-step off, close enough that the air between you had not yet cooled.
To three women arriving cold off the street, it read as one thing only. Arianne made a sound like a kettle. Fanny, the youngest, clapped both hands to her mouth. Margaret, in the middle, said into the ringing silence, with the delight of a woman watching a wager pay out, "Oh. Oh. We are interrupting."
"Not at all." Shamrock had already stepped clean back, the flush and the closeness sealed away behind that faultless composure as though you'd imagined every second of it. He took up the signed contract from the table and folded it once into his coat, collected his handkerchief beside it, and inclined his head to the three of them with a courtesy that made the small room feel briefly like a court. "The fault is mine entirely. I have stayed well past my welcome." His gaze moved once across the doorway, unhurried, taking in all four of you together, and something almost friendly surfaced under the formality. "Though I see now, I should not be surprised that the hour ran away from me with such great fortune. The resemblance is remarkable. I had thought my Lettie the loveliest woman in Mary Geoise. I find her family means to make an argument of it."
Arianne flushed a deep rose, very like the color climbing your own face. Fanny pressed her knuckles harder to her lips, a small strangled sound escaping anyway. That he should call them lovely, the Bavette sisters, breeder stock hauled in from distant cousins and slave lines to thicken the blood of better houses, technically a tier beneath every saintess they curtsied to until they'd bred enough sons to earn the standing. Arianne had six—Margaret, eight, and complaining of a ninth. Even sweet foolish Fanny had five before she was five-and-twenty. They wore their fertility like medals because it was the only rank the family had been granted, and a Figarland had just called them beautiful in your parlor.
"Saintesses." He bowed, the folded contract now safe against his chest, and the parlor seemed to give him back a foot of its ceiling as he moved for the door. "You'll forgive me. Your sister and I have a great deal newly settled between us, and I expect she would sooner tell you of it herself. I have a registrar to see before the office closes." A last glance found you, your burning face, your name drying somewhere against his heart, and the corner of his mouth moved, just once, only for you. "My lady. I'll send word this evening."
Then he was gone into the hall, the front door drawing shut behind him with a soft, final click, the contract gone with him to be entered and witnessed and made real by nightfall.
The three of them rounded on you at once.
"LETTIE."
"His Lettie? SHAMROCK FIGARLAND'S Lettie??" Fanny had both hands fisted in her own skirts, bouncing on her toes like one of her toddlers. "Did you hear him, did you hear what he called us—"
"Never mind what he called us, you goose." Arianne shoved past her to seize your wrists, her rings cold against your still-hot skin. "Lettie. Lettie, look at me. The Commander of the Holy Knights was standing in your ugly little parlor with his hand practically still warm on you, and he has just walked off with a contract in his coat, and you are going to tell your sisters every last word before I perish where I stand."
Margaret had drifted to the table only to find it bare, the blotter still bearing its small wet ghost of a blot where the page had lain. She pressed a hand flat to her chest, over the ninth child she was forever announcing.
"Oh, he's frightfully handsome up close," she breathed, scandalized and thrilled in equal measure. "Terribly. Edwina will die. Elinor will die twice." She turned, eyes enormous. "Does Father know? Does his father know? Lettie, that man's father is—"
"—the Supreme Commander, yes, thank you, Margaret. I am aware of who I have apparently agreed to marry into."
You said it faintly, sinking into the nearest chair, and none of them heard the tremor under it, because none of them ever had. They had not heard it across all the years of Sheamus, either. They had disliked him, said so freely at every dinner, and still not one of them had lifted a finger, because a Bavette girl with a single daughter and no sons had no standing to be spared, and a husband's temper was a private weather no sister interrupted. You had learned that early, and you had stopped expecting otherwise.
A Figarland changed everything, though, and they knew it, and so they were kind now, giddy and grasping and kind, and you let them be, because it was easier than explaining the difference between the two.
Then your words landed in the little parlor and stopped all three of them dead.
"Marry," Arianne repeated.
"Marry." Margaret sat down without checking for a chair and was fortunate that one caught her. "Not—Lettie. We thought—when we saw the two of you, and his hand, and your face all—we thought he'd made you an offer. The other sort of offer. A house, an allowance, a discreet arrangement."
"We had a whole speech," Fanny wailed, "about how it's nothing to be ashamed of, and half the loveliest women in Mary Geoise are somebody's dear friend, and we wouldn't breathe a word to Mother—"
"—and now you tell us he means to wed you." Arianne's voice climbed to a register only dogs and offended saintesses could hear. "You. A widow. With the one child. He could have any unbled girl in the Holy City, any of them, and he walked into this doily-riddled little box of a house and put his name beside yours?"
There it was, a flicker under the joy, quick and unbecoming and instantly smothered. Because between them, the three had nineteen children and not one husband a fraction so grand, so tall, so ruinously handsome, so ranked. They had done everything asked of Bavette daughters, bred and bred. They climbed the ladder rung by dutiful rung, and their spinsterish little sister with her single daughter and her disgraceful lack of sons had just leapt the whole of it in an afternoon, straight into the highest house in Mary Geoise.
But they loved you, in their loud graceless way, and the jealousy passed through them like a shiver and was gone, and then they were simply beside themselves.
"His father will be your father." Fanny had both hands pressed to her cheeks. "The Supreme Commander. Oh, imagine the christenings—"
"Imagine the dress, Fanny, do keep up—"
"Was he as—" Margaret leaned in, dropping her voice to the register reserved for the truly important questions. "Up close, Lettie. Is he as handsome up close? He looked incredibly handsome from the doorway, but doorways are forgiving. Tell us honestly."
"Frightfully," you heard yourself echo, faint, and all three of them shrieked as though you'd confessed a filthy secret. You let the sound wash over you, and did not tell them that up close was precisely the reason you were in this circumstance.
Arianne looked like she still couldn't believe it.
"I can't believe the gossips actually got it right. Or that you accepted. What on earth will you tell Father? Since you're his favorite, he's going to be unhappy all over again. He was delighted when Sheamus got chucked off that horse. And you know he wanted you back under his roof."
Good lord. You hadn't even considered what you would say to Father.
Mother would be no trouble; Mother wanted only to see you married, and married again would suit her perfectly well. One husband was much like another to her, a station a daughter occupied, and she had never troubled herself over which man filled it so long as some man did. A Figarland would please her the way a fine hat pleased her, briefly and loudly and without any deeper thought.
Father was the difficulty. Father, who had wanted you home, and whom you had gently, carefully declined, because a new concubine was arriving before the season turned. You had no wish to raise Lisette in a house rearranging itself around that arrival. You had not said as much, because it was not uncommon and he’d done his duty, and no matter how wrong it felt, there was no fighting against it. You had let him believe it was grief that kept you in your own small townhouse. Better that than admit you would sooner remarry than watch him take a woman younger than you to bed.
He called you his favorite. He had said it since you were small, that you were nearly as sharp as a boy, the cleverest of all his daughters, as though intelligence in a girl were a charming defect he'd decided to enjoy rather than correct. And it was because he prized that cleverness that he had loathed Sheamus with a quiet, permanent loathing, had never forgiven the man for taking his brightest daughter and dulling her down to being bruised and quiet at his dinner table.
And now you would have to look him in the eye and tell him you had handed yourself, and your wit, and Lisette, to the most powerful unwed bachelor in Mary Geoise, in an afternoon.
He was not going to take it well at all.
But all the talk ended the moment Lisette came flying down the stairs, Beth's protests trailing uselessly behind her. She burst into the parlor at a dead run and flung herself into the tangle of her aunts, who caught her up and cooed and passed her between them like a parcel, exclaiming over how she'd grown, how like her mother she was, how clever.
Then she wriggled free of Fanny's arms and planted herself at the center of the room, breathless with the importance of what she carried.
"MARGI! FANNY! ARI!" She rounded on them one by one. "Did you know there's more water down below the Red Line than everybody in the whole world could drink? Even if we drank for a hundred years!" She held up all five fingers, then, dissatisfied with their number, produced the other five as well. "That's a lot of water. Wait—where'd Daddy Shamrock go?"
The word dropped into the parlor and detonated.
Three heads snapped toward you at once. Arianne's mouth fell open. Fanny made a sound like a punctured balloon. Margaret's hand went back to her chest, over the ninth child, as though the shock might bring it on early.
"Daddy Shamrock," Arianne breathed, reverent as a woman at prayer.
"Oh my."
"He said that, did he? Well, he would know, darling." Margaret shot you a look over the top of your daughter's head, sly and delighted and altogether too knowing. "He's supposedly been down there." A beat. "Daddy. Is that your little name for him, Lettie?"
"It is a great deal of water, darling," you said to Lisette, ignoring Margaret entirely, then turned and gave her a short glare. "And it is Commander Figarland. Or Saint Figarland. To all of us."
Arianne caught your eye and, with great deliberation, mouthed Daddy, purely to watch you suffer.
"Commander Figarland had to leave," you told Lisette, evenly, because Lisette required evenness above all things and because you could not, would not, look at your sisters just now. "He'll send word. And my darling, you cannot go about calling him your father. Not yet."
But Lisette fixed you with the flat, relentless logic of a five-year-old who has caught the grown-ups contradicting themselves.
"But he said I could call him Daddy." She pointed at Arianne, then swung the accusing finger back to you. "And she just said, Daddy. But you said I can't call him Daddy yet." A pause, while the whole towering unfairness of the adult world assembled itself behind her eyes. "Why?"
You opened your mouth. Nothing adequate came out. There was no version of it! Because the arrangement is not yet announced, and your grandfather does not yet know, and your mother has not yet decided how she intends to survive it, that would fit inside the head of a child who counted to ten on her fingers and believed a hundred years to be the largest number in the world.
"Because," you began, and got no further, because your three sisters were watching you flounder with open glee, and Lisette's chin had begun the ominous crumple that preceded either tears or a scene—-
"Why don't you help Beth fetch some treats for your aunties?" you said, with the desperate brightness of a woman changing the subject before it changed her. "I'm sure Fanny is simply starved."
Lisette perked up at once, the injustice forgotten as thoroughly as if it had never been.
"Can I have a biscuit with honey?"
"Yes."
"Two?"
"One. Go."
You sent her off to the kitchen with Beth, and the instant the small footsteps faded, all three of your sisters rounded on you a second time, louder than before. And this time, there was no signed contract to whisk away, no Commander to bow himself out, no small daughter to shield you. Nowhere left at all to look.
Because you knew the moment you tried, the very instant your gaze so much as drifted toward the safety of the window or the wallpaper or your own folded hands, all three of them would turn as one and mouth Daddy at you.
