Her Royal Highness (H.R.H.), Part XXVI (Baile na Coille)
This is the penultimate chapter of HRH, guys. Much love to everyone who has supported me along the way with writing this story. Your support means a ton, and this would not have happened without @notevenjokingfic, @smashing-teacups, and @desperationandgin. xx. K
Part I: The Crown Equerry | Part II: An Accidental Queen | Part III: Just Claire | Part IV: Foal | Part V: A Deal | Part VI: Vibrations | Part VII: Magnolias | Part VIII: Schoolmates | Part IX: A Queen’s Speech | Part X: Rare | Part XI: Watched | Part XII: A Day’s Anticipation | Part XIII: The Location | Part XV: Motorcycle | Part XV: Cabin | Part XVI: Market | Part XVII: Stables | Part XVIII: Alarms | Part XIX: Visitor | Part XX: Cuffed | Part XXI: A Woman’s Speech | Part XXII: The Harlot Queen | Part XXIII: Rarer | Part XXIV: Balmoral & London | Part XXV: The Ring
Her Royal Highness (H.R.H.)
Part XXVI: Baile na Coille
For the sake of appearances alone, Fraser’s belongings were mainly situated in Baile na Coille. He had not slept a single night under the gabled roof of the two-storyed cottage. In reality, Colonel James Fraser (“the Queen’s Lover” as all of the nation’s newspapers - from veritable rag to legitimate press - had started to call him) had made his summer home within the same four walls as the commonwealth’s oft-maligned royal matriarch.
Beneath her duvet, his long body and his hand drawing one of her thighs between his (“ye canna be close enough as ye sleep”) before resting along the curve of her waist.
At the breakfast table, the serrated edge of his grapefruit spoon slicing through thick-skinned citrus fruits, the spritz of fruity acid hanging in the air as she read letter after letter as her fingers toyed with her earlobe.
And in the griffon-toed tub that steamed the mirrors and tile floors, her careful step as she shed the skin of a silk robe to the floor and climbed into the water with curls piled atop her head. “Coming?” she asked, looking over her shoulder and letting out a slight sigh as she brought a second foot into the tub’s depths. He would nod, shedding his own robe and following her, marveling at the fact that neither had to shuffle their limbs to fit. With a toe carefully tracing the hollow lines that separated Fraser’s abdomen into pockets of muscle, Claire sank further into the bergamot-scented bath water. “Did you know that this is the only place I truly own?”
The massaging attentions of Fraser’s fingers on Claire’s calves paused for a moment. “I hadna ever really thought about what ye own or dinna own, a nighean.”
She hummed, smirking as his eyes fixated on her big toe, which was traveling the sloped line of wiry hair beneath his navel. “Do you know how Baile na Coille came to be?”
“Ye could use some help wi’ the pronunciation,” he commented as he shook his head. His brows furrowed as he added, “And I’ll ask that ye move yer wee feet from that part of my anatomy.”
Ignoring his pronunciation guidance but swiftly relocating her foot to hook behind his waist and draw him closer, she rolled her eyes. “Queen Victoria had a lover. She built the cottage for him, or so the story goes. All manner of lascivious scandal was born in that cottage and paid off before it passed those front gates.”
“So ye’re sayin’ that perhaps someday yer wee stables’ll become a thing of lore, too, then?”
With a well-worn shrug, Claire rose out of the water just enough to reach for the glass of lukewarm champagne resting on the windowsill next to the tub. “Perhaps. I think what happened in London would already have gone to print if it was going to. I trust my staff here, but it is only a matter of time before the Accidental Queen and her Not-So-Accidental Lover are front-page fodder.”
He massaged a knot out of the arch of her foot, and she moaned appreciatively, finishing the last of the fizzy liquid in her flute. “Do ye think they’ll compare me to Queen Victoria’s lovers?”
“Not sure,” she said truthfully, leaning forward as he caught the green neck of the champagne bottle to fill her glass. “It seems an apt comparison–”
“Ye have a much bonnier arse than Queen Victoria, Queen Claire.”
If she hadn’t been utterly fatigued from their day’s worth of galavanting about the property, she would have asked him to declare as much only upon further investigation.
Neither had done much thinking about what life would be like after the declaration, when the Queen’s speech ended and tellies across Britain went dark. While they had steeled themselves against an oncoming storm at the cabin, their arrival to Balmoral and the subsequent days had been quite ordinary, really.
They picnicked alongside a forested area and a stream, surrounded by a meadow of too-sweet butter-yellow flowers. He made her a posey of the flowers as they ate (bundle tied with the green string that had trapped their egg mayo sandwiches in brown paper). She made love to him on their tartan blanket with the bouquet discarded to the side. He wrapped the tartan around them afterward while their steeds grazed just until their hearts stopped pounding. She tapped his shoulder, suggested they should finish exploring the property. He was dressed first and folded their blanket as she hopped about bare-footed, attempting to coax her riding pants back up over her arse with her curly hair in a floating cloud about her. He felt like a fifteen-year-old boy with wanting her again.
They walked hand-in-hand and talked about things. He wanted children, an admission hastily given with his feet catching and his body stumbling forward. Her hand found the small of his back, steadied him. When he asked, “and you?” in his slow, easy way, her response was quick, but just as easy (“of course” she wanted children with him, fingers flexing into the marred flesh just above his beltline).
She told him that she loved Balmoral more than any other place on earth – the smell of the Highlands, the privacy, the accents of the staffers, and the way mist hung heavy even at the warmest part of the day.
“It feels like the cabin here,” she whispered when they finally exited the bath (his lips kissing each of her pruned fingers, hands smoothing the half-soaked curls at her nape before wrapping a pre-warmed robe around her frame).
The real world felt ten thousand miles away at Balmoral, and he traced a thumb across her cheek – a rounded, glowing place after the bath that topped off a day of exercise, sunshine, and sex. His Queen had the lightest smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. He stilled his thumb, kissed the dusting of pigmentation. “Yer family cabin ‘tis a wee bit grander than my family cabin.”
She smacked his arm, making a rather serious face before dissolving into a fit of giggles when he blew a raspberry against her throat.
There came a time, after a number of weeks, when summer was giving way to autumn and their return to London was imminent.
Fraser was fitted for a number of suits with Claire sitting across the room on the floor – cross-legged and chewing on the end of a pen as she responded to some letters. Her smattering of freckles had given way to what she called “a decidedly un-royal suntan.” It was unspoken, but he would go public in London. As the leaves crisped with the last gasps of the season and fell to signal an oncoming winter, the nation would see him.
The man the Queen saved. The man the Queen loved.
That night, Fraser made the offhand comment that his fitting had made him realize that her arse was fuller after weeks of decadent food. He called it her summertime arse, and vocalized no small amount of pleasure at the way she’d blushed at the declaration. “I didna realize how well ye’d filled out this summer,” he announced, making a determined, awed kind of face and approaching her to take two handfuls of her backside. “It’s as though ye’ve reached yer natural, full-arsed state, and I couldna be happier about it.”
Had he not been pressed against her (his anatomy an urgent and quite unsophisticated lie detector), she might have taken offense. All societal expectations of a slim queen aside, Jamie Fraser did like her just fine. Feeling brazen, she had lowered her nightgown beneath her breasts. Voice low, she whispered, “Show me.”
Later, when they were stretched out on the duvet, and he had shown her quite fully what he meant, she whispered something that verged on a full-throated laugh: “I love that you can appreciate me at my fattest.” Her skin puckered with goosebumps at the first touch of his hands going around her hips.
“I like ye fat. Fat and juicy as a plump wee hen.”
She purred, winding her arms around his neck. “My summertime hen arse,” she continued, holding onto the moment. “I was thinking I would marry you in the autumn; perhaps we can hang onto it for awhile since you hold it in such high regard. Let it fill out a wedding gown.”
His eyebrows rose, his lower lip migrating between his teeth. “Ye want to marry me?”
“I do, yes. In a military uniform made with today’s measurements.”
“I didna ken that today was a fitting for a wedding suit.”
“Do not be an idiot,” she mumbled, sweeping an errant curl from his forehead. His hair had been cut a little closer than was his norm, but she had made it her strictest instructions that the barber leave enough length that it would still curl. Her voice was light, high on the moment and the enchanting power they held over one another. “It was always part that, and this is a proposal, since you have not bothered to do it.”
“It sounds like an order – marrying ye.” He was joking with her, eyes glittering as his hand cupped her jaw, thumb traveling an unmannered perimeter around her lips.
“Well, do you want to marry me?” There was not even the slightest hint of concern in her voice as she asked the question. It was as if she knew the answer, like it was the one thing that lived freely on his carefully-guarded face. A single syllable.
Before he kissed her, the most elemental groan came from him. Something of ancient stock – needy and base, just truth. “Oh God, yes.”
And then he kissed her in a way he’d never kissed her before. Part of her took flight then as he hitched her thigh up over his hip and leaned into her – a part with steadily-beating gossamer wings that lived beneath her breastbone, that had been carefully hatched under his care those first nights aimlessly wandering together on horseback. A part that he had nurtured somehow despite not knowing it existed in her, but that she had tended to all along, equally unknowing. He took her firmly then, in a way that for a handful of minutes drove any tenderness of their earlier encounter in the meadow away, but was no less saturated with their love for one another.
And when they were finished, dark having fallen and the world outside the cracked window gone silent, they were left without even the grayest, shadowiest hint of amorous intention. Eyelids drooping with mutual pure exhaustion, they laid together, completely bared. It was then that they somehow wound their way around a bend in their relationship.
To talk of loss and family, of longing and fate’s plans for them in a way that they never had. Stripped bare, they peeled back their naked skin to expose something deeper, rawer, redder, rarer.
Fraser told her in a clinical, detached way of his parents’ death. The loss of a son that stole the very life and light from his mother’s eyes, molded her like clay into something his mam had never been before (dry hands pouring cereal into bowls with eyes fixed on the window, like she was awaiting someone to round the bend that would never come).
The slow way his father slipped away – an undiagnosed condition that made his eye droop, his body eventually no longer cooperate in the performance of basic functions, until one day he was gone and cold in his bed in the morning (eyes open and dull-blue in their fixation on something beyond the ceiling, his fingers folded over a knit afghan in prayer).
An economy of words described the prison camp (words he learned in German so he would never have to speak aloud in English). The dampness of the cells, the length of the interrogations, the blood on the snow. The wounds that seeped from cracks in the flesh just above his forehead, the never-ending red stream that caked his eyelashes and made him wonder if one could feel an oncoming death. The smell of men shitting themselves and dried vomit on ragged clothes. The way he had slept face-down for two months after his back had been whipped into ribbons that sent red streaks of infection along his ribcage and over his shoulders. How the second time he’d been flogged was worse, each bit of scar tissue giving way so his muscles met the air, this time the odor of infection choking him when he stripped his camp-issued shirt off.
They laid silent for a long time after that, his hand charting a course over her spine again and again and her fingers tracing the scarred etchings of war in his flesh in a way they never had before.
So Claire told Fraser for the first time at any length about her parents and her sister.
Before that moment, there had been the natural snapshots of them in casual conversation (locations on the grounds of Balmoral taking on meaning with reference to them – her father’s study, her mother’s dressing room, her sister’s playroom; meals that reminded her of them – her mother’s favorite chicken, her father’s preferred tea, the buttery biscuits that Anne ate smeared in raspberry preserves; the bottle of perfume on her nightstand that had yellowed with age and no longer smelled sweet, but somehow still reminded her of Julia).
But this was the first graphic retelling of it.
The iciness in her veins – the frost and chill of it sucking the life out of her with each of her mother’s screams. The taste of copper in her mouth, the breaking of her bones and the lifeless feeling of no longer gulping for air, of just waiting with the icy water in her throat and lungs. The burning of vomiting the water again and again, her broken ribs screaming at her to just die now as she rid her body of the contents of the creek. How the burning in her lungs and throat had eventually given away to something more primal, a need to survive.
Claire breathed in, looking away from Fraser as she explained that she hated herself in the back of the ambulance because she was afraid she was going to die. She did not think of them at first – of Henry, Julia, or Anne. She laid still, shivering as the navy-uniformed men tried to warm her, told her she would be okay. She had not thought of them as she willed herself to live.
Papa. Mum. Oh Christ, Anne.
In the retelling of it, Claire did not cry until Fraser reached for her, touched her forearm, whispered “I’m sae sorry, Sassenach.”
She dissolved over their loss then, feeling it new and blooming beneath her breastbone. Under his touch, she leaned into the sensation for maybe the first time in years, since well before her coronation and well before Lamb had passed. A confession: Claire loved her papa and her mum, of course, but Anne was the one she loved the most, a feeling that made her feel sick and wrong. “It was never supposed to be me, Jamie,” she confessed, closing her eyes as he touched her hair. “Anne, maybe, but never me. We played. Toilet roll sashes and our mum’s shoes. She was always Queen. You and me? We could have been free of all of this… gotten a flat in the city, you would not have to live like this–”
He quieted her, shook her head. “Dinna ever think that the tragedy ye experienced, or yer job, has made me do anything that I didna want to do. Being wi’ ye – however I can be wi’ ye – is perfect. Ye canna pull one thread and have an entire tapestry stay the same. I’m no’ sayin’ that yer parents died for a reason. It was senseless. Ye canna wish away yer position for me. It’s how I found ye, and I’d ‘ave found ye somehow, but as it is now, I’m yers, Claire. It’s as it’ll be forever. Irrevocably. In my entirety. And I intend to marry ye come autumn.”
She reached absently for the heavy, well-formed curl just above his temple and ran her fingertip around its circumference, thoughtful for a moment. “I was never really one for planning a wedding, Fraser. Autumn is beautiful, but there is something about springtime. The daffodils and the lilies. The fat bumble bees and the trees coming back to life.”
“Then springtime it is, a nighean.”
But two weeks later, the Queen would realize that she had not had her courses in two months.
The wedding would not wait until springtime after all.
