It's later in the evening, and Amaryllis was fortunate enough to have no obligations tonight. She's about several drinks in, humming to herself as she makes her way to the next bar. It only take a few passing seconds for her to break out into a song, feet picking up into a combination of a skip and a sashay.
/ reading this book oomf gave me and it’s making me kick post-hawkeye, pre-tbolts yelena around in my head. free from the chemical control but at the cost of everything else, plus the addition of the knowledge of every awful thing she ever did. numbing it all out but nothing fills the void. i thought had something and that’s the same as having something i get mad at nothing blame my dad for something pull no punches then feel bad for months etc etc
where's the silver lining cutting through all the smoke? || self-thread
WHO: Edgar O'Connor (with mentions of Dominic O'Connor, Frederic O'Connor, Genevieve de la Croix and NPCs).
WHERE: Mayfair, London
WHEN: August, 1814
WHAT: Edgar's sorrows to disappointing his family and finding out that Genevieve is a princess.
TRIGGER WARNING: || alcohol tw || and again, very long
Edgar woke with his hand over his chest. He did not notice it at first. He was still half asleep, caught in that grey, uncertain place before the mind had gathered itself properly. His palm rested flat over his heart, fingers loose against the linen of his shirt, and for a few seconds he let himself believe the pressure belonged to someone else. Genevieve used to touch him there. Not often enough for him to have noticed it becoming a habit, but often enough that his body had remembered. And he had loved it. Then he opened his eyes, and the memory of the day before came back all at once. The fair, the art tent, the portrait; her portrait.
He saw it again as clearly as if it were hanging on the wall across from his bed: Genevieve painted in rich colours and careful light, her face composed, her dark eyes calm, her mouth set with that quiet dignity he had mistaken for reserve. Beneth the frame had been the small brass plaque, polished enough to catch the light. Princesse Genevieve de la Croix. He had stood there long enough for the words to stop being words and become something solid inside him. Something heavy. Princess Genevieve of France.
Not the woman from Artois who had wandered alone in parks. Not the woman who sat across from him during French lessons and laughed when he ruined a perfectly decent sentence. Not the woman he had found for himself, by chance, away from Dominic's lists and society's arrangements and all the quiet, awful machinery of suitable matches. A princess. A woman everyone else had known before he had. The worst part was not even the title. Edgar could have found a way to laugh at that, eventually. He could have made some joke of it, could have bowed too low and called her 'Your Highness' until she swatted at his sleeve in annoyance.
The worst part was that she had let him not know. She had sat with him. Walked with him. Let him look at her as though she were simply Genevieve, as though whatever had been growing between them belonged only to them. And all the while, there had been this enormous truth standing in the room, waiting for him to walk into it.
He remembered going to her afterward. The palace. The clipped gardens. The colours arranged too carefully, the hedges shaped into obedience, the whole place beautiful in a way that only made him angrier. He remembered thinking, absurdly, that even the flowers looked like they had been taught to behave. And then Genevieve had come in. He had watched her face change when she saw him. Only slightly, but enough. She had known.
Edgar shut his eyes. His throat tightened, and he pressed his hand harder against his chest, as if he could push the feeling back down by force. It did not work. The ache had settled low in him overnight. Behind his ribs, behind his eyes, in the pit of his stomach. It was not sharp enough to be clean. It just sat there, twisting every few moments, reminding him that he was awake and she was not coming.
He turned his head toward the desk. His notebook lay open near the window. He had not meant to leave it that way. Or perhaps he had. His room had become full of things he had once been pleased to look at and now could hardly bear to see. The pages were crowded with French words in his own untidy hand. Some were underlined. Some had been corrected in Genevieve's neater script. He could see a note she had written in the margin beside one phrase he had never pronounced properly, even after she had corrected him three times. He had pretended to be hopeless at it for longer than necessary because it made her smile.
Beside the translations were sketches. Too many of them. Genevieve looking down at a book. Genevieve in profile. Genevieve's hand holding a pen. The curve of her mouth before she laughed. Little drawings he had made when he was supposed to be conjugating verbs, because apparently even then he could not be trusted with a quiet moment near her. Beneath one of the sketches, he had written a line of verse. 'Not all crowns are made of gold; some are made of rainlight'. He stared at it for a long moment. Then he gave a short, humourless laugh. A crown. Even when he had not known, some ridiculous part of him had reached for the word.
He sat up, slowly, and rubbed both hands over his face. His eyes stung. They had been doing that since yesterday, never quite enough to let him cry properly, only enough to make him feel constantly on the edge of it. He hated that. He hated feeling so close to something so undignified. His gaze moved to the nightstand. The cufflinks were there. She had given them to him for his birthday. Small, golden, elegant things. Not flashy. Not obvious. Exactly the sort of thing he would have chosen for himself, which was the problem. A thoughtless gift would have been easier to despise. Some expensive royal trinket passed from a servant's tray would have given him something clean to reject. But these had been chosen with care. She had noticed him. She had known enough about him to choose well.
Edgar reached for one before he could talk himself out of it. The metal was cold in his palm. He remembered the day she had given them to him, the faint uncertainty in her expression, as though she had not known whether he would like them. He had been so pleased that he had probably made an idiot of himself. He had worn them every single day after that, with the sort of private satisfaction he would have mocked in another man. He closed his fingers around it. He wanted to throw it. For a moment, he truly did. He pictured it hitting the wall, disappearing under some piece of furniture, anything to make it stop sitting there looking beautiful and innocent. He could throw both of them into the fire. He could send them back. He could write a note sharp enough to draw blood.
Instead, he sat there holding it. Because the awful truth was that he did not want to be rid of it. He wanted the version of her who had given it to him. He wanted the woman who had seemed shy for once, the woman who had looked at him as if his happiness mattered to her. He wanted that moment back before it had been spoiled by everything she had not said. Eventually, he put the cufflink down beside its twin.
He dressed without calling for his valet. His hair was a mess, his face pale, his jaw rough with the beginning of a beard, but he did not have the patience to sit still while another person tried to make him presentable. Kindness would be too much for him this morning. If anyone fussed over him, he might snap. Downstairs, the house felt too quiet. It was never truly silent. There were always footsteps somewhere, doors opening, a murmur from the servants, the low sound of Dominic's voice in some distant room, Frederic fussing over Sardine stretching in its sleep. That morning, though, everything seemed softened, as if the house had noticed him and was politely pretending it had not.
He passed the drawing room where some of the French lessons had taken place. He didn't look inside. Instead, his feet carried him toward the garden windows before he had made any decision to go there. When he reached them, he stopped. Outside, the hydrangeas were in bloom. Hundreds of them. Blue, violet, pale cream, all moving gently in the morning air. He had planted them with such ridiculous pleasure. Not roses; everyone sent roses. Dominic sent roses on his behalf when he wanted to turn courtship into strategy, as if affection could be managed by a florist and delivered before luncheon. Edgar had wanted something else. Something that came from listening.
Hydrangeas, because Genevieve loved them. Wisteria too. The sight of them made his stomach turn so sharply that he put a hand against the window frame. "Mr O'Connor?" He had not heard William approach. The footman stood a little behind him, posture stiff, careful in that way servants became when they knew something was wrong but had no right to ask. Edgar kept looking at the garden. "Have them cut." William did not answer at once. "Sir?" There was clear hesitation in his voice. William had seen, first hand, how long Edgar had spent planting each flower. "The hydrangeas," Edgar said. His voice sounded calm, which somehow made it worse. "All of them. I want them gone." There was a long, restless silence shared between them, before William nodded. "Yes, sir." William turned to leave.
Edgar watched the flowers sway. They were only flowers. They had not deceived him. They had not promised anything. They had done exactly what they were meant to do: taken root, grown, opened themselves to the light. There was a blunt honesty in that which made his anger falter. "Wait." William stopped. Edgar closed his eyes for a second. "Leave them," Edgar said, sighing to himself in defeat. "Sir?" The need for clarification was strong in William's tone, but he wasn't about to do something that either of them would regret. "Leave them," he said again, quieter. "Do not have anyone touch them." William hesitated only briefly. "Of course, sir."
When William was gone again, Edgar stayed by the window with his hand still resting against the frame. He hated that he could not even destroy properly. Everything he wanted to hurt was either innocent or absent. The flowers had done nothing. The notebook had done nothing. The cufflinks had done nothing. Even the handkerchief, folded somewhere upstairs beside all the other pathetic little relics he had kept, had done nothing but exist. Genevieve had. And still, if she had walked into the room at that moment, Edgar did not know whether he would have raged at her or reached for her. That was what finally made him turn away from the garden.
He did not know what he meant to do when he went looking for Dominic. Perhaps that was the shame of it. At thirty years old, Edgar still found himself wanting his older brother when the ground fell out from beneath him. He had gone toward Dominic's study with some vague, miserable intention of asking for advice; real advice, brotherly advice. He wanted to ask how a person moved on from something that still felt alive in his hands. How one stopped loving someone one was furious with. How one took the part of himself that had believed Genevieve was his and made it behave.
But when he reached the door outside Dominic's office, Lord Pembroke was coming out. Edgar had stopped at once. The way Pembroke looked at him, was as if a hand was closing around Edgar's throat. A hatred that had apparently waited years for the chance to stand in the same hallway as him. Edgar stood there long after the man had gone, suddenly aware of his own heartbeat, before he stalked into Dominic's office a moment later. Whatever advice Edgar had hoped to ask for disappeared almost immediately. The latest Lady Whistledown had made sure of that.
Dominic did not read it aloud this time in some grand, theatrical way. He did not need to. The damage was already there, pushed against his chest, sitting between them like evidence. The fire at the Pembroke townhouse was no longer a secret. Lady Whistledown had written of the French princess, of Edgar's ignorance, of the old scandal at Pembroke's house, of noble anger and diplomatic displeasure. She had made him sound not simply reckless, but dangerous. A rake was one thing; a fool was survivable. But an arsonist near a princess was the sort of phrase that could rot a family from the inside out.
Dominic seemed furious. His jaw had been tight, and it looked as if every vein in his body was about to pop. He was angry in the way that made every word measured, every pause worse than the last. Lord Pembroke, he told Edgar, had come demanding blood. He wanted Edgar punished. At one point, apparently, he had said he would have seen Edgar hanged for what had happened to his family's home if the law and the O'Connor name had not stood between them. Hanged.
The family would pay, he told him. One of their English esstates would be given up. A monthly sum would be paid until restoration was complete. There were also the missing invitations, the suddenly cautious friends, the French diplomats expressing their displeasure with enough politeness to make it feel like an insult sharpened at both ends. Edgar listened. There was nothing else to do.
He had known the fire was a sin he carried, but he had not understood, not fully, that a secret could wait years and still arrive with fresh teeth. He had thought, foolishly, that the worst of it had happened on the night itself: the smoke, the window, the rooftops, Clara's frightened face somewhere below. But this was worse in a different way. This was the fire reaching people who had not been in the room. Dominic, Daniella, Frederic, Edith's name. The O'Connor name. The Kleypas name. The whole grand, difficult, impossible family that had taken him in when he had nothing and made him theirs. And what could Edgar say to that? He apologised.
When Edgar left the study, he did not remember deciding to go. He only knew he could not stay; before a body guard would start surveilling his every move, he needed to leave. The house felt different after that. Or perhaps he did? The walls seemed too close, the halls too polished, every servant's careful glance too kind or too curious. He thought of Whitehaven, of giving up one of their homes because of him. Not the grandest, not the most necessary, but still theirs. Still something Edith had known. Something Daniella would have to surrender. Something Dominic would have to sign away while London whispered over the scandal sheets and their tea.
He had disappointed them before, he knew that. Broken rules, missed appointments, public disturbances, drunken fights never won. All the usual debris of being Edgar O'Connor. But this was not that. This was not a bill paid quietly. Not a carriage sent at midnight. Not Dominic arriving with a cold expression and a purse full of money to release him from some foolish consequence. This was land. This was reputation. This was his family being made smaller in public because Edgar had once been young and heartbroken and careless in a room with too many candles.
By the time he reached the front hall, he felt hollowed out. He thought of Edith then, suddenly and with such force that he nearly stopped walking. Edith, who had called him darling when he was too frightened to lift his eyes. Edith, who had told him he did not have to earn kindness. Edith, who had loked at him as though all the wildness in him was not something shameful but something worth loving carefully. Her newspaper, her influence, her name; all of it dragged into the mud with his. He had spent half his life trying not to prove the world right for questioning why the O'Connors had taken him in. And now Lady Whistledown had done it for him in print.
Outside, rain had started to fall. Edgar stepped into it without calling for a carriage. London moved around him as though nothing had happened. That felt obscene somehow. Edgar walked. At first, he told himself he only needed air. He needed to move, to put distance between himself and the study, between himself and Dominic's face, between himself and the garden full of hydrangeas blooming for a woman who had not trusted him with her name. But he knew where his feet were taking him. He hated that too.
French followed him along the way. On shop windows, on paper notices, in snippets of conversation from people who had no idea their pretty little phrases could cut. Mode de Paris. Nouveautés. Bon marché. Every word sounded like Genevieve correcting him. Every word reminded him that she had taught him how to speak to her while refusing to tell him who he had been speaking to. That was the thing he could not set down.
He had been angry at Dominic's lists because they turned women into strategy. He had hated the roses sent on his behalf, hated the idea of being moved like a piece on a board. Genevieve had seemed outside all of that. She had seemed like chance, like freedom, like the one thing he had found for himself. Not an arrangement, or a name chosen because it would strengthen the family, or a woman who belonged to anyone else's ambitions. Just his.
Except she had never been only his. She had belonged to a country, to a title, to diplomats and histories and obligations hehad not been trusted enough to know. And perhaps that was selfish. Perhaps no person truly belonged to another. But Edgar had not wanted possession. He had wanted honesty. He had wanted one part of his life that had not been quietly negotiated around him by people who knew more than he did. Instead, he had been made a fool. Again. By love. By secrets. By his own longing.
The tavern appeared almost by accident, though he knew better than to believe that. Places like that had a way of finding a man when he had already decided to be found. He went in without looking at the sign. The warmth hit him first. Then the smell of ale, smoke, wet wool, old wood, and spirits sharp enough to promise nothing pleasant. It was loud enough that no one had to notice him and dim enough that no one could see him clearly. That suited him.
He sat in the corner and ordered whiskey. The first drink burned. How ironic, he thought to himself. Edgar closed his eyes as it went down and felt the pain in his throat cut briefly across the pain in his chest. It did not help, not truly, but it changed the shape of the hurt for a few seconds. That was enough to ask for another. He had promised sobriety. He thought of that as the second glass came.
Frederic would be disappointed. Dominic would be furious, or worse, unsurprised. Daniella would look at him with that careful, composed sadness that made him feel smaller than any shouting could have done. He drank. The second softened the room. The third loosened the sick twist in his stomach. The fourth did not make him forget Genevieve, or Pembroke, or Dominic, or Whitehaven. But it blurred them slightly, put glass between him and the sharpest edges.
When he reached into his pocket for coins, his fingers closed around something hard. The cufflink. He stared down at it in his palm, dark and elegant and impossible to hate. He had no memory of bringing it with him. Perhaps he had taken it without thinking. Perhaps some pathetic part of him still wanted proof that she had cared, even now. Edgar let out a breath that was nearly a laugh. Then he closed his fist around it until the edges bit into his skin.
Genevieve's gift in one hand, whiskey in the other, his family's shame waiting at home, and somewhere behind him, years ago and still burning, a house he had never truly escaped. It felt as though he had burnt everything to the ground; Clara's house, Dominic's patience, Daniella's peace, Edith's legacy, Frederic's faith in him. Whatever fragile, foolish thing had been growing between him and Genevieve. Everything touched by him seemed to blacken eventually. The whiskey did not argue with that. It did not soothe him with pretty lies. It burned. It made him unsteady. It took what it took and did not pretend the taking was tenderness. So Edgar drank. He drank until his head fell into his arms.
