(no subject)
Aug. 21st, 2007 12:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quigonejinnFor ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
black_hound and nolivingman,
The first time you saw the man that you would marry, you thought that he was ugly.
Granted, you did not look him in the face -- it would have been improper. Even beyond that, though, he frightened you. He was a massive man, broad shouldered, with hard lines on his face and an old-fashioned queue bound up in black. Paler, too, than most of the Navy officers you saw. Older, and he did not say much when your parents tried to draw him out in conversation. When your mother tried to talk to him about social events, he answered her between bites of food. He had a voice that was too low for a room with candles and linen on the table, and your mother's silverware disappeared in his hands.
Even though he sat across from you, you barely looked at him twice in the course of the meal -- you did it once when, he was talking to your father about the war and engaged for the first and last time of the meal. The other time, he happened to be looking at you with directly, clearly. You had a glimpse of blue eyes, a hard mouth.
That was when you thought he was ugly, and your mother had to talk you around. You were resistant until she pointed out that with his foot, with his position as the Resident Commissioner, he would never go to sea again.
He would never leave you a sea widow; you would never have to make do with half pay, much less go begging like your sister.
...
There was not much of a courtship. He was the first, best prospect in sight and had every expectation of success. In fact, you had no idea why he chose to come back to your house for another supper and not go to someone else's, much less why he ever came around that rainy afternoon. You had said nothing to him during that dinner that might make him favor you more than any other girl in town, and your mother had warned you not to expect much in the way of courting.
He was a man, a Captain in the Navy, not a lieutenant writing poems and living on the hopes of prize money, and you had been nervous when your mother told you that he was coming. You were ill with nervousness, in fact; you almost shook as you dressed. Tried to think of what you would say to a man almost thirty years older than you, and it was a relief when he did not seem much inclined to talk.
Captain Bush gave you a book. Your father had, apparently, told him that you liked poetry, and you stood with Captain Bush in the hallway looking at the mist blowing down the streets. It had only started getting dampish after he came into the house.
"We might still go out," he said, looked at you briefly, then looked back out at the door, which was shut. "It is only mist."
Your mother, standing just behind the two of you, made a displeased noise. You could hear, upstairs, your sister's second daughter, your niece, say a few words to her brother. They were up there. You were down here. You held the book against your stomach, stole a glance at him standing there in his Navy blues with his eyes fixed on the door, then looked back down the floor. It was not strange to see men missing an arm or a leg or both, even, but this was somehow different. Still, you did not have the courage to look him in the face, though you knew he was watching you when he was not watching the door.
Two weeks and a few more visits later, he asked your father for permission. Two weeks after that, you married him.
...
Your wedding night was like this: you came out from behind the screen in your wedding nightgown, and you found him sitting by the fire in the armchair. He still had a glass of brandy in his hand, and you did not know whether you should go over to him or lie down in bed and wait for him, but he signaled for you to come over.
He put away the brandy, and you stood in front of him with your back to the fire. You were shivering, a little from fear, a little from cold because it was, indeed, getting chilly in the room now that the fire was being allowed to die down. He looked at you for a moment, and then he drew you into his lap, and he kissed you -- one of his hands was so large that you felt that they would swallow up your face. Maybe you flinched, so he took his hands away from you and studied you a bit more.
"Let me show you something," he said and took two pieces of twine from the table that was next to his chair. "This is a one-way sheet bend."
It was odd to sit on his knee and learn like a child, but he showed you the one-way sheet bend, the gaff topsail halyard bend, and tried to teach you to put a clove hitch around his finger after he did it once, one-handed. You failed with two hands and a great deal of coaching; you blushed, he laughed, and he settled for teaching you how to tie a square knot.
In fact, after you had practiced a few times, he had you put two lengths around his wrists to prove to you that a square knot would not slip, and it was with his hands bound, loosely, that he slid his hands underneath your nightgown. Again, his hands were so large. One of them covered most of your belly, and the callouses felt strange on your skin. The twine scraped a little, and then he put his hand on your breast, brushed his thumb over your nipple so that it stood up. You still had your nightgown on, and strange as it was to feel another person's hand on your body, it was even stranger to see someone else's hand, one that looked so different from yours, on you.
His hands were still tied underneath your gown.
Later, of course, there was blood. It hurt, too, and you became frightened again when he took off his shirt. You saw the scars, realized again what an enormous man he was. Your hands and feet suddenly felt cold, but what you choose to remember from that night is, instead, the warmth. The room was chilly; the fire was not much help, but there was also the sight of your frightening, scarred, captain husband with his hands bound together with half-penny twine, palms lying together, as if he were praying in church, all because he did not want to scare you.
You had not been cared for like that since you were old enough to walk without leading strings. Was it any surprise that you fell in love?
...
It was, of course, not entirely sweet. You were newly married, but there were quarrels -- you did not approve of the way that he roared at the servants, and you had to hire three different girls before you found one that would put up with his bellowing if his shoes and coat were not kept the way he wanted. There was also a spat over your mother and how he disliked her and did not want to see her in his home unless there was a reason. Even more than either of those things, too, it was how he could leave you to weep for hours while he went down to the tavern and had a pipe. When he came back, with every sign of having had a perfectly pleasant time, he would treat your swollen eyes and red nose as though they were what he saw every day.
Your captain would not be disagreed with: once he had made up his mind, it was settled. If you wanted to see your mother, you would have to put on your bonnet and go out and see her. It was a bitter thing for a girl who who had to be talked into thinking of marriage, who could remember sleeping with dolls and not her husband, who had cried the morning before she was married while her mother brushed her hair. It was a cruel thing to do; you knew it then, and you know it now, too.
On the other hand, he was also kind. He never struck you; he never made you even think that he might strike you, much less beat you the way that you had seen some Navy men, particularly ones as large and rough-looking as him, beat their wives. He gave you everything that you asked for, furnished the house and table exactly as you wanted him to and trusted your taste entirely. When he came home from the Dockyard, he wanted little more than a hot meal and quiet company while he sat by the fire and worked on his models. He appreciated a rum toddy, made strong and sweet; he liked the sharp-tasting mustard in the dark brown jars rather than the kind that came in the lighter-colored ones.
If there were guests, you took the duties of playing hostess. You supplied most of the conversation, and it was both surprising and gratifying to see how appreciative he was after they had left.
...
There was a great deal of surprise in your marriage, in fact. One of early happy moments, in fact, came after an evening at the assistant master shipwright's.
Your husband had been as reluctant to talk, as ornery as always in conversation that did not involve ships and stories of war, but you had held up your end of things well. He could not remember any of the marriages and weddings and kin relationships of the families in town, but you had grown up with all of it, and when someone tried to engage him on those topics, you took hold of the conversation and led it away from him. You knew what turns to take, what things would not offend. You circulated with him through the room afterwards, and you walked home with him through the darkened streets, too.
An unseasonably early wind was blowing in from the North, and you shivered in your dress. He was not so badly off, having his Navy coat as he did, so he took his scarf off and put it around you with his own hands. He even offered you his coat, but you shook your head, refused it, and that was how you walked home.
Swaddled up to the eyes with a scarf that smelled wonderfully like him, your fingers in the crook of the elbow to guide you through the darkness because after so many years of the night watch, he could see in the dark like a cat. Through the walk back to the lodgings, above and to your right, he was singing, softly, about stars and snow. About old sailors who had finally come home.
...
Your mother had passed on to you a letter from your sister, and you were reading it over when your husband brought home his friend. It was clear that they would not be staying, but still, you put the letter and its news that she was pregnant by her new husband, that she hoped her children were doing well, and your husband came back with his friend -- you put it away.
There were introductions, and you could tell that they were going out for some time together. Your husband was, in fact, already a little gone. You could smell it when he came close, gave you a kiss hard enough so that he had to hold you still. You were blushing furiously that he would do this in front of anyone else -- you thought the skin would burn off your cheeks -- and he laughed and chucked you under the chin, asked what the purpose of having a sweet wife was if he couldn't get a kiss every once in a while.
You blushed some more, and then, in a more gentle tone, when he saw that you were still upset, he touched your cheek and told you that he would be back day after next. He told you not to wait up for him, that he would take care.
You caught a glimpse of a look on the face of his friend. The friend hid it well, but it surprised you how gratifying it was to see his shock at your husband's affection for you. He was not surprised when Bush kissed you while he was drunk, that Bush would make such a display of the marriage bed, but he was surprised to see Bush take your feelings into account. Comfort you. Be kind to you. Later, your husband told you a little of what he had gone through with this man: they had been lieutenants together in the Carribbean. This man had been his captain for years -- not Trafalgar, he explained, when you tried to be interested and ask -- but he was nevertheless as great as Nelson.
You had known some of this, as it had shortly been in the papers, but you had not paid much attention. You had not been married, after all, and the two of you were sitting next to each other by the fire, and you studied him by light of it. He had put away his brushes and glue and models in favor of you. You lay with your head upon his knee, and the fire played on his face.
"You must have been his Hardy."
He looked surprised, as if the thought had never occurred to him, as if no one had ever said something so nice to him before. He stroked at your cheek, smiled at you. His fingers were gentle, and he looked so happy that you found yourself moved.
"Maybe," he managed.
...
You were seventeen. You were newly married, mistress of your home, with prospects of a house of your own if your husband's comments about wanting a garden, possibly a workshop, meant anything. It was the happiest existence that you could imagine, and even though you had only been married two months, you began to hope for a child: if you conceived now and the baby lived, it would be walking before you were nineteen. Talking before you were twenty.
One night, while William was lying next to you, half-asleep, you reached for him. You ran your hand down his stomach across the scars, and after a bit of hesitation, you settled your hand on his hip -- you were bold, but not that bold, and the most that you could manage was to lay your lips against his shoulder and hope that he was amenable. He was, in fact, amenable. Startled, yes, but amenable. Even in the darkness, you could see him blinking at you, but you smiled at him, suddenly too shy to speak, and he smiled, too, and stroked your hair.
You wrapped your legs around him, moved against him in a way that made him gasp in a way that you'd never heard before. It was strangely thrilling to hear him do that, and you did it again, and he held you even more tightly. Afterwards, your heart was so full of happiness that you thought the birds starting to sing outside must be singing to you: you were sure that you would have a baby by him.
You were some months past seventeen. Your husband was old enough to be your father, but you were in love.
...
Your lodgings were rented, and there was, in fact, little work to do. One night, while you were in bed with him, you asked him why so many of the songs that he liked had to do with sailors -- sometimes, ships, sometimes, the weather or women or, if he were feeling raucous, dirty Frogs or Dagos, but he never had anything about captains and very little about captains who won.
He said nothing then, stayed so quiet that you thought he had fallen asleep and had not heard you. The next morning, though, while he shaved and you watched from bed, after he knew that you were watching him, he sang a bit of a street ballad about the only happily married highwayman in Scotland.
...
You can be excused, as a result, for thinking that he was happy with you in Sheerness. He gave all the signs of being a happy. You forgot how he had looked at the door and the mist, driven in from the sea, the afternoon that he came to court you -- it had been the first time you were within arm's reach of him, and you barely knew him. How could you have known?
He was always happiest after his old Navy friend came to see him.
...
For instance, there was that afternoon -- he had come back earlier than he usually did from his trips with his friend, and he was humming, possibly till even a little drunk, so dirty with river mud that you would not let him into the bedroom until he'd had a bath. You called up the servant to fill up the large tub with hot water, and then you sat down the floor and watched him while he washed. He was so happy, in fact, that you could not find it in your heart to be angry at him even when you found a mark on his back that looked like what a woman, holding him close during a particular moment, might leave.
You had to struggle with yourself for a moment because the thought of any other woman having your husband, holding him so tight that she left bruises, made your heart clench up and beat strangely. Then, you reminded yourself that men did what they did. As long as they kept it out of the way, it was no business of yours.
He was so happy that afternoon. You were so happy to have him back early. He sang in the tub like a baby, let you soap his back and rinse it back off again. You studied with eyes and fingers what you had only either seen with your eyes while he dressed or, separately, felt under your hands at night. At one point, he teased you by making as if to put water on your dress, but intead, only touched your cheek. You were too busy washing his hands, so large and unlike your own, yet strangely handsome, that you did not brush it off.
Later, he stepped out of the tub, naked as the day that he was born, and pulled you against him until you had to take your dress off or it would be thoroughly ruined. You pretended to be angry that he wanted you in the afternoon when he could see the shamefulness of the act, but you helped him to bed so that he could, in fact, have you.
That afternoon, you thought only of the touch of his hand, not the water that came from it, smelling a little like the sea, running from your cheek to your chin before falling off entirely.
You loved him so much.
...
When the letter for command of the Nonsuch came through, he went mad with joy. You had never seen him so happy; it was the way that some men reacted if they had just been presented with their first son. You tried to help him as best you could, do as much of the provisioning and sewing for his cabin as you knew how to, but when you learned that he was being sent to the Baltic, that there would be no use even going down to Portsmouth and living there so that you could see him when his ship came to port because he would not be coming in for months -- when you learned that, you left, and you went to your mother's house.
It was not to see her, though. You had grown enough now to know that she could be no comfort.
Instead, you wanted to cry yourself sick in peace.
You did not want to see him see you, ugly with fear and worry. You were half out of your mind with grief at the realization that he loved the sea, the Navy, his friend who had gotten him the command -- he loved them all more than he loved you.
...
He was not much of a letter-writer, your husband. His letters, when they came, were good for news, but he was a Navy man. He wrote letters when there were things to report, not because you had sent him letters, and the messages were almost naked of endearments and marital talk. He had met Peter, the Tsar of all the Russias. He had not known that Russians spoke French. He gone to a Russian banquet. He had bought you a piece of Baltic amber, and Hornblower had fallen ill with typhus, and he, Bush, would have to take the squadron home for the winter.
When that news came, you flew south to Portsmouth and waited for the Nonsuch to come into harbor. You had an afternoon with him in the following year; the force of a ship with seventy-four guns was needed in the blockade, and you spent the entirety of that month, following that afternoon, desperately praying that you were pregnant.
You moved to Portsmouth, in fact, and you were there when the news of Caudebec came in.
...
One night, shortly before he left you in Sheerness, the two of you were sitting by the fire. You had your book; he had his glue and tools and model, and at that point, he turned it to you and asked if you thought that "Caroline" would make a good name for a ship.
You blushed, and after a moment where he seemed a little puzzled as to why you would take pleasure from him asking, he realized, smiled at you, and you thought him all the sweeter for how he knew so little about women, but managed to be so kind anyways.
The model went with him to sea, as did his glue and tools. After he came back to England, Hornblower -- now an Admiral and a Baron, you had read -- brought them to you personally. It was a great compliment, a statement of how much he had valued and loved your husband. Despite his triumphs, he looked tired, far older than those times when he had come to Sheerness, and his words stumbled over one another. He offered you any help that he could, anything that he could possibly do. He would see to it that you received a pension, if you wanted it.
You remember how William had said that Hornblower always knew what to say, so it was entirely likely that he had spoken well and that you had just been too numb to appreciate the fine words. He had, after all, your husband's bag of tools, as well as what had been your husband's sea chest of clothes and personal effects. Once you saw them laid out in front of you, realized that he had not had a chance to do much work at all towards completing the Caroline the grief came over you again. He had carved all of the letter C, the letter A, most of the R, a start of the O but nothing after that.
Whatever grief you thought you had felt on learning that you were not even second in his heart, but maybe fourth or fifth, whatever grief you had felt on seeing the report and reading the letters -- it was nothing compared to this.
You tried to stop yourself, but you wept, and you wept in front of Hornblower.
After all, you had been happy while you had been married. Eight months of happiness, a year of anticipating happiness, were more than some people ever had in their entire lives, and you knew it. It was the curse of happiness, too, was that once you had a taste of it, it was the only thing that you felt you could stand anymore.
...
The grief had been too much with you, then; you had not noticed at the time how Hornblower had watched you grieve for your husband, but having seen him more frequently in the years intervening, now, you can go back to your memory, recall the play of emotions of his face, and realize that it was a mix of sympathy, grief, and his own jealousy. He was an Admiral, a Lord of the Realm. As it had been explained to you by your father, the life of your husband and a hundred and fifty two men was a small price to pay for the security of Le Havre, and that afternoon, Hornblower had envied your freedom to wear black and grieve openly.
This is the sort of wisdom that you have learned as you grow. If you suspect other things, too, about what else Hornblower envied you for, you do not think of them.
Another truth is this: you were nineteen, and you had suddenly become free again. Your husband had made arrangements before he left such that you had enough money to last you for the rest of your life, if you managed it carefully. It was enough so that you could have your choice of second husbands, if you wanted, become even richer when this second husband died, perhaps, but there were years for that yet. Instead, you buy a house a bit out from town, with a view of the the sea, but not the harbor, and now that he is back from France for good and seemingly on land for the rest of his life, Hornblower comes in from his estate to visit you.
The two of you would go down and walk by the ocean together while his personal servant stands at the top of the cliff with the trap.
These are short visits. You never go out to his estate to visit him, and majority of these walks are always silent. Occasionally, the two of you discuss books, one of the things that you had never been able to talk about with William, and sometimes, he tells you about William when he had been younger. You discuss with him various suitors that have come knocking, and he turns over the options in that mind of his that, as you've realized, is in fact every bit as brilliant your husband described it as being. He gives you a perfectly balanced opinion, advice about how to handle particular one of them, and it is all a little awing to have a man like this take an interest in your household affairs.
You would not give him advice about his wife, of course.
Mostly, though, despite the occasional conversation, the two of you would walk together on the shore in silence. It is a quiet, steady kind of thing; he does not come out all that often, but whenever he does, when the two of you reach the easternmost point of the land you own, you both stop. He clasps his hands hands behind his back, and you stand a little straighter, and then, the two of you look out over the ocean at France, at the remains of the captain that you both loved and, to this day, love still.
You are only twenty four now, but you suspect that even if you marry again, you will love your captain until the day you die.
After all, it is love. It is the curse of happiness and the price of living.
black_hound and nolivingman, As far as I can tell, the idea for this particular surfaced during a conversation with
I think that's the origin. All I really know, actually, is that the first few lines of this came out of my hands, and I couldn't stop telling the rest of the story.
The first time you saw the man that you would marry, you thought that he was ugly.
Granted, you did not look him in the face -- it would have been improper. Even beyond that, though, he frightened you. He was a massive man, broad shouldered, with hard lines on his face and an old-fashioned queue bound up in black. Paler, too, than most of the Navy officers you saw. Older, and he did not say much when your parents tried to draw him out in conversation. When your mother tried to talk to him about social events, he answered her between bites of food. He had a voice that was too low for a room with candles and linen on the table, and your mother's silverware disappeared in his hands.
Even though he sat across from you, you barely looked at him twice in the course of the meal -- you did it once when, he was talking to your father about the war and engaged for the first and last time of the meal. The other time, he happened to be looking at you with directly, clearly. You had a glimpse of blue eyes, a hard mouth.
The fandom-standard option for a wife for Bush is, I think, an older woman, possibly a widow. You know. A thirty-something woman who could stand up to him, possibly with children of her own and a home already. They wouldn't get along at first, but would come to mutual respect, etc, etc. It seems like the obvious thing to do because then you can do a strong contrast between Bush's Navy life and his home life -- it highlights the degree to which what we see of him in the books is Bush as a Naval creature.
But I decided to go in the opposite direction. Partially out of sheer contrariness. Partially, because it made for the more interesting store because we don't really get a view of book-Bush from the POV of somebody who is subordinate to him. Most important, though, was the idea that if if Bush was high up in the local food chain, he wouldn't be stuck with sloppy seconds. XD I mean, I can imagine him in his LtH days marrying a widow or whatever for money, but he's a man of social status and property by his Sheerness days.
So I started with that. Bush gets a young girl, straight from her mother's house. And that's the only trait of the girl that shows up in this initial section: her youth. No name, no personality. Nothing. Just youth. And a very reasonable, from that standpoint, fear.
That was when you thought he was ugly, and your mother had to talk you around. You were resistant until she pointed out that with his foot, with his position as the Resident Commissioner, he would never go to sea again.
He would never leave you a sea widow; you would never have to make do with half pay, much less go begging like your sister.
...
There was not much of a courtship. He was the first, best prospect in sight and had every expectation of success. In fact, you had no idea why he chose to come back to your house for another supper and not go to someone else's, much less why he ever came around that rainy afternoon. You had said nothing to him during that dinner that might make him favor you more than any other girl in town, and your mother had warned you not to expect much in the way of courting.
He was a man, a Captain in the Navy, not a lieutenant writing poems and living on the hopes of prize money, and you had been nervous when your mother told you that he was coming. You were ill with nervousness, in fact; you almost shook as you dressed. Tried to think of what you would say to a man almost thirty years older than you, and it was a relief when he did not seem much inclined to talk.
Captain Bush gave you a book. Your father had, apparently, told him that you liked poetry, and you stood with Captain Bush in the hallway looking at the mist blowing down the streets. It had only started getting dampish after he came into the house.
"We might still go out," he said, looked at you briefly, then looked back out at the door, which was shut. "It is only mist."
Your mother, standing just behind the two of you, made a displeased noise. You could hear, upstairs, your sister's second daughter, your niece, say a few words to her brother. They were up there. You were down here. You held the book against your stomach, stole a glance at him standing there in his Navy blues with his eyes fixed on the door, then looked back down the floor. It was not strange to see men missing an arm or a leg or both, even, but this was somehow different. Still, you did not have the courage to look him in the face, though you knew he was watching you when he was not watching the door.
Two weeks and a few more visits later, he asked your father for permission. Two weeks after that, you married him.
The more that I look at this story critically, the more I realize that I wrote this as a reaction to the usual fandom (read: modern) ideas about romance and fandom. I didn't want Bush and his wife to be of similar ages. I didn't want them to have similar experience in life. I didn't want this to be a partnership or whatever. Those might be what I want for myself, but Bush is a man of his times, and I suspect for some reason that our desires might not be the same. XD
Something else that was a part of that reaction: making this story about marriage, rather than the stuff leading up to the marriage. I mean, modern American society always talks about the courtship, but very little of what happens after the wedding cake, whereas I think for a more practical society, it's got to be about married life.
...
I'm almost positive that somebody else gave me the idea for this section. If you know who did -- or if you did -- for the love of God, speak up and tell me.
Your wedding night was like this: you came out from behind the screen in your wedding nightgown, and you found him sitting by the fire in the armchair. He still had a glass of brandy in his hand, and you did not know whether you should go over to him or lie down in bed and wait for him, but he signaled for you to come over.
He put away the brandy, and you stood in front of him with your back to the fire. You were shivering, a little from fear, a little from cold because it was, indeed, getting chilly in the room now that the fire was being allowed to die down. He looked at you for a moment, and then he drew you into his lap, and he kissed you -- one of his hands was so large that you felt that they would swallow up your face. Maybe you flinched, so he took his hands away from you and studied you a bit more.
"Let me show you something," he said and took two pieces of twine from the table that was next to his chair. "This is a one-way sheet bend."
It was odd to sit on his knee and learn like a child, but he showed you the one-way sheet bend, the gaff topsail halyard bend, and tried to teach you to put a clove hitch around his finger after he did it once, one-handed. You failed with two hands and a great deal of coaching; you blushed, he laughed, and he settled for teaching you how to tie a square knot.
In fact, after you had practiced a few times, he had you put two lengths around his wrists to prove to you that a square knot would not slip, and it was with his hands bound, loosely, that he slid his hands underneath your nightgown. Again, his hands were so large. One of them covered most of your belly, and the callouses felt strange on your skin. The twine scraped a little, and then he put his hand on your breast, brushed his thumb over your nipple so that it stood up. You still had your nightgown on, and strange as it was to feel another person's hand on your body, it was even stranger to see someone else's hand, one that looked so different from yours, on you.
His hands were still tied underneath your gown.
Later, of course, there was blood. It hurt, too, and you became frightened again when he took off his shirt. You saw the scars, realized again what an enormous man he was. Your hands and feet suddenly felt cold, but what you choose to remember from that night is, instead, the warmth. The room was chilly; the fire was not much help, but there was also the sight of your frightening, scarred, captain husband with his hands bound together with half-penny twine, palms lying together, as if he were praying in church, all because he did not want to scare you.
You had not been cared for like that since you were old enough to walk without leading strings. Was it any surprise that you fell in love?
...
It was, of course, not entirely sweet. You were newly married, but there were quarrels -- you did not approve of the way that he roared at the servants, and you had to hire three different girls before you found one that would put up with his bellowing if his shoes and coat were not kept the way he wanted. There was also a spat over your mother and how he disliked her and did not want to see her in his home unless there was a reason. Even more than either of those things, too, it was how he could leave you to weep for hours while he went down to the tavern and had a pipe. When he came back, with every sign of having had a perfectly pleasant time, he would treat your swollen eyes and red nose as though they were what he saw every day.
See the stuff above about not wanting to go with the fandom conceptions. Sure, I think Bush puts up with a lot of HH's idiosyncracies, but that's Hornblower. And HH only gets away with it because he is, in every other way, perfectly consistent with what Bush think the ideal commander should be.
Poor wife doesn't get that accomodation. What Bush thinks = law in his house.
Your captain would not be disagreed with: once he had made up his mind, it was settled. If you wanted to see your mother, you would have to put on your bonnet and go out and see her. It was a bitter thing for a girl who who had to be talked into thinking of marriage, who could remember sleeping with dolls and not her husband, who had cried the morning before she was married while her mother brushed her hair. It was a cruel thing to do; you knew it then, and you know it now, too.
On the other hand, he was also kind. He never struck you; he never made you even think that he might strike you, much less beat you the way that you had seen some Navy men, particularly ones as large and rough-looking as him, beat their wives. He gave you everything that you asked for, furnished the house and table exactly as you wanted him to and trusted your taste entirely. When he came home from the Dockyard, he wanted little more than a hot meal and quiet company while he sat by the fire and worked on his models. He appreciated a rum toddy, made strong and sweet; he liked the sharp-tasting mustard in the dark brown jars rather than the kind that came in the lighter-colored ones.
If there were guests, you took the duties of playing hostess. You supplied most of the conversation, and it was both surprising and gratifying to see how appreciative he was after they had left.
In my head, this social stuff is a big part of why Bush got married. I don't think that the Bush in this story has any particular, specific desire to get married, but he's the Resident Commissioner. He's a man of status and standing, and just like men of status and standing have a certain number of suits and shoes of a certain kind, they've got wives.
Plus,
Bush is a Navy creature, and in his obscure, intuitive way, he senses that he needs a bridge to to land society. So he picks a girl with family connections in town, who seems nice and well-behaved, and he marries her.
...
There was a great deal of surprise in your marriage, in fact. One of early happy moments, in fact, came after an evening at the assistant master shipwright's.
Your husband had been as reluctant to talk, as ornery as always in conversation that did not involve ships and stories of war, but you had held up your end of things well. He could not remember any of the marriages and weddings and kin relationships of the families in town, but you had grown up with all of it, and when someone tried to engage him on those topics, you took hold of the conversation and led it away from him. You knew what turns to take, what things would not offend. You circulated with him through the room afterwards, and you walked home with him through the darkened streets, too.
An unseasonably early wind was blowing in from the North, and you shivered in your dress. He was not so badly off, having his Navy coat as he did, so he took his scarf off and put it around you with his own hands. He even offered you his coat, but you shook your head, refused it, and that was how you walked home.
Swaddled up to the eyes with a scarf that smelled wonderfully like him, your fingers in the crook of the elbow to guide you through the darkness because after so many years of the night watch, he could see in the dark like a cat. Through the walk back to the lodgings, above and to your right, he was singing, softly, about stars and snow. About old sailors who had finally come home.
I knew at the time when I read this that what with the glare off the water, blue-eyed sailors like Bush had a lot of issues with seeing, but I decided to take a bit of creative license. I mean, he's taken lots of night watches over the years, right? So his version of shitty night vision might be pretty darn good compared to a seventeen year old girl who's never been outside after dark in the rain.
And there is, for the record, no doubt in my mind that Bush would make a kind husband. Within his limitations.
...
Your mother had passed on to you a letter from your sister, and you were reading it over when your husband brought home his friend. It was clear that they would not be staying, but still, you put the letter and its news that she was pregnant by her new husband, that she hoped her children were doing well, and your husband came back with his friend -- you put it away.
There were introductions, and you could tell that they were going out for some time together. Your husband was, in fact, already a little gone. You could smell it when he came close, gave you a kiss hard enough so that he had to hold you still. You were blushing furiously that he would do this in front of anyone else -- you thought the skin would burn off your cheeks -- and he laughed and chucked you under the chin, asked what the purpose of having a sweet wife was if he couldn't get a kiss every once in a while.
Besides figuring out what kind of marriage Bush and his wife would have, the other major consideration in this story was figuring out what POV to tell it from. The easy choice would have been HH; I'm comfortable writing about him, and he could register lots of fun (#$*)(*@#! about his boyfriend being married.
On the other hand, it's a rather stifling POV. HH's POV on Bush is HH's POV. And this is really a story about Bush and his wife, and it deserved better than to have everything viewed through the POV of HH's crazy. Telling it from the wife's POV lets it breathe a little more and lets Bush stand as his own man. It makes the marriage a story in and of itself, and I can still show HH being a jeluz twit.
You blushed some more, and then, in a more gentle tone, when he saw that you were still upset, he touched your cheek and told you that he would be back day after next. He told you not to wait up for him, that he would take care.
You caught a glimpse of a look on the face of his friend. The friend hid it well, but it surprised you how gratifying it was to see his shock at your husband's affection for you. He was not surprised when Bush kissed you while he was drunk, that Bush would make such a display of the marriage bed, but he was surprised to see Bush take your feelings into account. Comfort you. Be kind to you. Later, your husband told you a little of what he had gone through with this man: they had been lieutenants together in the Carribbean. This man had been his captain for years -- not Trafalgar, he explained, when you tried to be interested and ask -- but he was nevertheless as great as Nelson.
You had known some of this, as it had shortly been in the papers, but you had not paid much attention. You had not been married, after all, and the two of you were sitting next to each other by the fire, and you studied him by light of it. He had put away his brushes and glue and models in favor of you. You lay with your head upon his knee, and the fire played on his face.
"You must have been his Hardy."
He looked surprised, as if the thought had never occurred to him, as if no one had ever said something so nice to him before. He stroked at your cheek, smiled at you. His fingers were gentle, and he looked so happy that you found yourself moved.
"Maybe," he managed.
...
You were seventeen. You were newly married, mistress of your home, with prospects of a house of your own if your husband's comments about wanting a garden, possibly a workshop, meant anything. It was the happiest existence that you could imagine, and even though you had only been married two months, you began to hope for a child: if you conceived now and the baby lived, it would be walking before you were nineteen. Talking before you were twenty.
I totally hadn't been thinking about children when I started the fic, but it popped up anyways. Mostly, I suspect, because from what I can tell, the production of children was so important to a marriage of the period, and because I was continuing in my rampage about making this NOT THE USUAL MODERN MARRIAGE.
The benchmarks here are total guesswork, by the way,. I took the modern ages for when kids are able to do things and tacked on extra months to make up for the fact that nutrition wasn't as good then and, also, stuff that I remember from my parents saying that when they were growing up, kids didn't walk until they about a year old.
One night, while William was lying next to you, half-asleep, you reached for him. You ran your hand down his stomach across the scars, and after a bit of hesitation, you settled your hand on his hip -- you were bold, but not that bold, and the most that you could manage was to lay your lips against his shoulder and hope that he was amenable. He was, in fact, amenable. Startled, yes, but amenable. Even in the darkness, you could see him blinking at you, but you smiled at him, suddenly too shy to speak, and he smiled, too, and stroked your hair.
Again, subverting the romance novel as much as I could. I mean. There's almost always some kind of retard scene where the heroine discovers the clit or whatever and ORGAMZZMZ follow, but that really doesn't strike me was likely for Bush and his wife. Sure, I could buy sexual awakening for the wife, especially since I wrote Bush as taking pains, in his own his way, to make it not-scary as he could. And because I wanted to write her as slowly falling in love with this big scary man she married.
But I couldn't see them going at it doggy-style on the marriage-bed with Bush giving her reacharound. Even if Bush has totally done that 10003423x before with prostitutes in every port from Plymouth to Patagonia. I don't know if it would be what his sweet little seventeen year old wife who's never even held hands with another man would do.
You wrapped your legs around him, moved against him in a way that made him gasp in a way that you'd never heard before. It was strangely thrilling to hear him do that, and you did it again, and he held you even more tightly. Afterwards, your heart was so full of happiness that you thought the birds starting to sing outside must be singing to you: you were sure that you would have a baby by him.
You were some months past seventeen. Your husband was old enough to be your father, but you were in love.
...
Your lodgings were rented, and there was, in fact, little work to do. One night, while you were in bed with him, you asked him why so many of the songs that he liked had to do with sailors -- sometimes, ships, sometimes, the weather or women or, if he were feeling raucous, dirty Frogs or Dagos, but he never had anything about captains and very little about captains who won.
He said nothing then, stayed so quiet that you thought he had fallen asleep and had not heard you. The next morning, though, while he shaved and you watched from bed, after he knew that you were watching him, he sang a bit of a street ballad about the only happily married highwayman in Scotland.
...
You can be excused, as a result, for thinking that he was happy with you in Sheerness. He gave all the signs of being a happy. You forgot how he had looked at the door and the mist, driven in from the sea, the afternoon that he came to court you -- it had been the first time you were within arm's reach of him, and you barely knew him. How could you have known?
He was always happiest after his old Navy friend came to see him.
...
In my head, Bush and Hornblower went off on a wee re-enactment of the Loire Valley o' Love, and there was lots of mud, since Sheerness was actually a GIANT FUCKING MUD PIT with TYPHUS ENDEMIC TO THE COUNTRYSIDE and so forth. In my head, the marks on Bush's back aren't actually from HH, though readers are, of course, free to read it that way. And the wee wife certainly doesn't think of it that way. Not yet, at least.
For instance, there was that afternoon -- he had come back earlier than he usually did from his trips with his friend, and he was humming, possibly till even a little drunk, so dirty with river mud that you would not let him into the bedroom until he'd had a bath. You called up the servant to fill up the large tub with hot water, and then you sat down the floor and watched him while he washed. He was so happy, in fact, that you could not find it in your heart to be angry at him even when you found a mark on his back that looked like what a woman, holding him close during a particular moment, might leave.
You had to struggle with yourself for a moment because the thought of any other woman having your husband, holding him so tight that she left bruises, made your heart clench up and beat strangely. Then, you reminded yourself that men did what they did. As long as they kept it out of the way, it was no business of yours.
More of the reaction and the trying to set this story apart from the standard, stereotype romance where exclusivity is such a big deal. The expectations in this kind of marriage are, I think, totally different. And the notion of male entitlement is so much stronger in this time period. And this is a marriage of its times.
He was so happy that afternoon. You were so happy to have him back early. He sang in the tub like a baby, let you soap his back and rinse it back off again. You studied with eyes and fingers what you had only either seen with your eyes while he dressed or, separately, felt under your hands at night. At one point, he teased you by making as if to put water on your dress, but intead, only touched your cheek. You were too busy washing his hands, so large and unlike your own, yet strangely handsome, that you did not brush it off.
Later, he stepped out of the tub, naked as the day that he was born, and pulled you against him until you had to take your dress off or it would be thoroughly ruined. You pretended to be angry that he wanted you in the afternoon when he could see the shamefulness of the act, but you helped him to bed so that he could, in fact, have you.
That afternoon, you thought only of the touch of his hand, not the water that came from it, smelling a little like the sea, running from your cheek to your chin before falling off entirely.
You loved him so much.
...
When the letter for command of the Nonsuch came through, he went mad with joy. You had never seen him so happy; it was the way that some men reacted if they had just been presented with their first son. You tried to help him as best you could, do as much of the provisioning and sewing for his cabin as you knew how to, but when you learned that he was being sent to the Baltic, that there would be no use even going down to Portsmouth and living there so that you could see him when his ship came to port because he would not be coming in for months -- when you learned that, you left, and you went to your mother's house.
It was not to see her, though. You had grown enough now to know that she could be no comfort.
Instead, you wanted to cry yourself sick in peace.
You did not want to see him see you, ugly with fear and worry. You were half out of your mind with grief at the realization that he loved the sea, the Navy, his friend who had gotten him the command -- he loved them all more than he loved you.
Still more subversion. Bush is fond of his wife, but it ain't the most important thing in his life. It's not even in the top three. It's an unequal relationship -- and it's still enough for the wife to treasure it for the rest of her life.
...
He was not much of a letter-writer, your husband. His letters, when they came, were good for news, but he was a Navy man. He wrote letters when there were things to report, not because you had sent him letters, and the messages were almost naked of endearments and marital talk. He had met Peter, the Tsar of all the Russias. He had not known that Russians spoke French. He gone to a Russian banquet. He had bought you a piece of Baltic amber, and Hornblower had fallen ill with typhus, and he, Bush, would have to take the squadron home for the winter.
When that news came, you flew south to Portsmouth and waited for the Nonsuch to come into harbor. You had an afternoon with him in the following year; the force of a ship with seventy-four guns was needed in the blockade, and you spent the entirety of that month, following that afternoon, desperately praying that you were pregnant.
There's an unpursued AU of an AU where she does have a child. Naturally, you know. A son. Who grows up within seeing-distance of the sea. In a cottage with his mama and the occasional visit father's old friend, and the Caroline on the mantle. And he either goes to sea as a midshipman under the patronage of Hornblower and dies young. Or never goes to sea and becomes something thoroughly middle-class and completely different from the man that his mother loved so much.
You moved to Portsmouth, in fact, and you were there when the news of Caudebec came in.
...
One night, shortly before he left you in Sheerness, the two of you were sitting by the fire. You had your book; he had his glue and tools and model, and at that point, he turned it to you and asked if you thought that "Caroline" would make a good name for a ship.
You blushed, and after a moment where he seemed a little puzzled as to why you would take pleasure from him asking, he realized, smiled at you, and you thought him all the sweeter for how he knew so little about women, but managed to be so kind anyways.
The model went with him to sea, as did his glue and tools. After he came back to England, Hornblower -- now an Admiral and a Baron, you had read -- brought them to you personally. It was a great compliment, a statement of how much he had valued and loved your husband. Despite his triumphs, he looked tired, far older than those times when he had come to Sheerness, and his words stumbled over one another. He offered you any help that he could, anything that he could possibly do. He would see to it that you received a pension, if you wanted it.
You remember how William had said that Hornblower always knew what to say, so it was entirely likely that he had spoken well and that you had just been too numb to appreciate the fine words. He had, after all, your husband's bag of tools, as well as what had been your husband's sea chest of clothes and personal effects. Once you saw them laid out in front of you, realized that he had not had a chance to do much work at all towards completing the Caroline the grief came over you again. He had carved all of the letter C, the letter A, most of the R, a start of the O but nothing after that.
Whatever grief you thought you had felt on learning that you were not even second in his heart, but maybe fourth or fifth, whatever grief you had felt on seeing the report and reading the letters -- it was nothing compared to this.
I had no idea of what the wife's name ought to be until this. Like. None. I hadn't even been intending to name her at all because I wanted the story to be relentlessly focused on what did matter -- namely, her character and her relationship to Bush.
But I needed something to structure the scene where HH comes to her and gives her Bush's things. It ain't much of a scene if there's nothing else. "Sorriez, I killded your huzband." "LOL" So I was casting about for something -- if she'd been pregnant, it would have been easy, but having to take care of a subsequent child would introduce distract from the lines of the ending that I had in mind at point. Having her be pregnant but lost it, that would also distract from the cleanliness. And I was originally thinking that this section would be the last one, so it was absolutely vital that everything stay clean and not introduce new elements.
So I went back through the story, found the bit about Bush's model ship and used that. Having the ship carry her name was pretty useful because it brought her sharply into focus, strengthening the emotional whammy of this section. I even did a little research, looking at a a few pages about period names and picked the one that sounded gentlest and most middle-class.
You tried to stop yourself, but you wept, and you wept in front of Hornblower.
After all, you had been happy while you had been married. Eight months of happiness, a year of anticipating happiness, were more than some people ever had in their entire lives, and you knew it. It was the curse of happiness, too, was that once you had a taste of it, it was the only thing that you felt you could stand anymore.
...
So yeah, I think that previous section was supposed to be the closing section, but I re-read the fic, and it didn't seem quite strong enough. And it didn't seem to do justice to Caroline when the story had been as much about her growing up as about Bush. And it also seemed important to show that life goes on after someone you love dies, so I put this section on about her life post-Caudebec.
I have spent every re-read since regretting it. XD I mean, OK, I like the idea. I'm even proud of the way that it loops back to the love/happiness theme and shows that Caroline is continuing to grow up and stuff, but as the immortal line of Holmes's from The Adventure of the Norwood Builder, that the true artist knows when to stop.
This is way too long. It needs to be more compact. Further, there are two specific things that make me flinch like hell: first, the explicit (for this fic) suggestion that Caroline knows Hornblower packed the hot willy for Bush. It just strikes me as, um, just pandering. And me overplaying my hand when I could have left things as they were.
And second, the stuff about Barbara. It was popular with commenters, but I regret it now. I needed a pacing element, and Barbara was convenient, so I bashed it, but kdjflakjdf. New element! Too close to end! I'm fairly satisfied with the rest of this fic outside of this last section, but when I re-read my fic, which I do, uh, obsessively, I always have to bail before this last section because AUUUUGH SHAMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMME.
The grief had been too much with you, then; you had not noticed at the time how Hornblower had watched you grieve for your husband, but having seen him more frequently in the years intervening, now, you can go back to your memory, recall the play of emotions of his face, and realize that it was a mix of sympathy, grief, and his own jealousy. He was an Admiral, a Lord of the Realm. As it had been explained to you by your father, the life of your husband and a hundred and fifty two men was a small price to pay for the security of Le Havre, and that afternoon, Hornblower had envied your freedom to wear black and grieve openly.
This is the sort of wisdom that you have learned as you grow. If you suspect other things, too, about what else Hornblower envied you for, you do not think of them.
Another truth is this: you were nineteen, and you had suddenly become free again. Your husband had made arrangements before he left such that you had enough money to last you for the rest of your life, if you managed it carefully. It was enough so that you could have your choice of second husbands, if you wanted, become even richer when this second husband died, perhaps, but there were years for that yet. Instead, you buy a house a bit out from town, with a view of the the sea, but not the harbor, and now that he is back from France for good and seemingly on land for the rest of his life, Hornblower comes in from his estate to visit you.
The two of you would go down and walk by the ocean together while his personal servant stands at the top of the cliff with the trap.
These are short visits. You never go out to his estate to visit him, and majority of these walks are always silent. Occasionally, the two of you discuss books, one of the things that you had never been able to talk about with William, and sometimes, he tells you about William when he had been younger. You discuss with him various suitors that have come knocking, and he turns over the options in that mind of his that, as you've realized, is in fact every bit as brilliant your husband described it as being. He gives you a perfectly balanced opinion, advice about how to handle particular one of them, and it is all a little awing to have a man like this take an interest in your household affairs.
You would not give him advice about his wife, of course.
Mostly, though, despite the occasional conversation, the two of you would walk together on the shore in silence. It is a quiet, steady kind of thing; he does not come out all that often, but whenever he does, when the two of you reach the easternmost point of the land you own, you both stop. He clasps his hands hands behind his back, and you stand a little straighter, and then, the two of you look out over the ocean at France, at the remains of the captain that you both loved and, to this day, love still.
You are only twenty four now, but you suspect that even if you marry again, you will love your captain until the day you die.
After all, it is love. It is the curse of happiness and the price of living.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-21 09:50 pm (UTC)<3333333333
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-22 09:56 pm (UTC)And goddamn. I'd really wanted to go to Cooch's, but I'm moving in this weekend. (#*$)(#*$1.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-22 10:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-22 10:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-22 01:44 am (UTC)So, when are you going to a DVD commentary on the Jedi crossover? ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-22 09:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-22 03:03 am (UTC)You show the lack of equality so clearly and quite unjudgmentally. She’s not at all aware of it; you don’t give her any modern agenda. She knows what is appropriate to want.
I like the end bit, if only because I am attached to her and want to know she is OK. There is potential for awfulness demonstrated by the little snippets you show of her sister! I worry for those children.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-22 10:00 pm (UTC)Me too. I think that I borrowed the structure of what happened to them from historical Pellew, who was separated from his mother and raised by his grandparents in a cottage/hovel once his mother re-married. :|
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-22 03:32 am (UTC)I want to be like you when I grow up. XD
<33333
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-22 10:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-22 10:49 am (UTC)I love that you worked to make this subversive of all the usual fanfic romance things.
I'm not sure if I agree with you about the ending. I think there's some valuable stuff there - for instance I love the idea of Hornblower coming and having these silent walks with her. I get the bits about Barbara and even the Bush/Hornblower thing being kind of fanservice-y and they could have been cut, and I approve of tight writing as a rule, so *shrug*.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-22 10:20 pm (UTC)Thanks for requesting this, by the way. I really loved thinking through it again.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-23 05:57 am (UTC)Also I really like your point about the sexual awakening thing. A lot of fic tells me that the right person for me will mean instant amazing sex OMG. And you know, there's reality disappearing in the rearview.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-25 04:19 am (UTC)Also. I am 100% in agreement with everything you have said and done here re: subverting romantic clichés; maybe I'm lucky in that I've deliberately avoided the sectors of fandom which I suspect of propagating these types of things, but to me all of this is simply What Makes Sense when it comes to Bush, and you've articulated it all so much more perfectly than I could. *takes notes*