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inthedayswhenlandswerefew · 2 years

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We Were Something, Don’t You Think So? [Chapter 10: London]

You are a Russian grand duchess in a time of revolution. Ben Hardy is a British government official tasked with smuggling you across Europe. You don’t hate each other at all.

This is a work of fiction loosely inspired by the events of the Russian Revolution and the downfall of the Romanov family. Many creative liberties were taken. No offense is meant to any actual people. Thank you for reading! :)

A/N: Wow I really pulled a George R. R. Martin and just never updated my story, didn’t I?! I return now with no excuses but with plenty of excitement to at last be giving this fic the ending it deserves. There are only two more chapters left! As always, thank you so very much for reading. 💜

Song inspiration: “the 1” by Taylor Swift.

Chapter warnings: Language, mentions of war and violence, sexual content (not graphic).

Word count: 9k. She chonky.

Link to chapter list (and all my writing): HERE.

Taglist: @imtheinvisiblequeen @okilover02 @adrenaline-roulette @youngpastafanmug @m-1234 @tensecondvacation @haileymorelikestupid @rogerfuckintaylor @yourlocalmusicalprostitute @im-an-adult-ish @someforeigntragedy @mo-whore @mellowfellowyellow @peculiareunoia @mischiefmanaged71 @fancybenjamin @anne-white-star @theonlyone-meeeee @witchlyboo @demo-wise

Please let me know if you’d like to be added to the taglist! 💜

“You are sneaky,” Joe says. He holds his cappuccino in one hand and wags a finger at me with the other. It took Mr. Lee’s kitchen staff a week to learn how to make a halfway decent cappuccino—I’m not sure if Joe’s passionate coaching was more of an asset or a distraction—and now he orders no less than four a day. “You are very sneaky. But not sneaky enough to fool me.”

I flip a page in the book Ben gave me, the one about British kings and queens. There’s a lot of information about the queens, he was right about that. Overhead the leaves are golden and oche and fluttering in the October wind; there is a softness to everything in London, the air and the sky and the trees and the people. It is unlike Russia in even more ways than I had remembered, in more ways than I could ever count. Joe and I are sitting in the courtyard behind Mr. Lee’s six-bedroom house and attempting to cultivate an appreciation for what the kitchen staff proudly call the Full English Breakfast: sausage, bacon, fried eggs, baked beans, tomatoes, mushrooms, toast, ketchup, and a menacing hunk of black pudding, which is just a kinder name for grains mixed with pig blood. I’m sure Joe is fantasizing about biscotti and frittatas every bit as much as I’m missing blini and kasha. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I say, quite dishonestly.

“Why must you lie to me, Lana bella donna?” Joe sighs. “There is no sense in this deceit. I know it already, assolutamente. I told you. My people are fluent in love.”

Here’s what he means: we’ve been guests of Mr. Lee for two weeks now, and each night—even after Mr. Lee and his wife have retired to their wing of the house, even after the footsteps of the maids and butlers and flocks of Sealyham Terriers have quieted—I lie awake alone in my queen-sized bed and Ben is nowhere to be found. Meeting him again in secret is too risky, this goes without saying. There can be no whispers that ripen to be sold and bitten into once I have unveiled myself publicly and married into the British royal family. And yet, still, there are moments, fleeting trivial things that I had believed no one else saw: the way Ben laughs at even my clumsiest attempts at jokes, the way I graze his hand with mine each time he passes me a cup or a plate, the way he watches me from across the dinner table when he thinks I’m not paying attention. I crave him all the time, I am consumed by thoughts of him, I am acutely aware of where he stands in every room…and then sometimes I look at Ben and something about him makes me so profoundly miserable I almost wish I’d never met him at all. Almost. “It’s an infatuation. Nothing more. Like Papa and Mathilde.”

“Who?”

“Never mind.” I dip a corner of buttered toast into the yielding, viscous egg yolk, golden like the sun and the leaves, like my impending future. Yet I find my appetite for gilded things to be dwindling. I peer up at Joe. “Do you think less of me?”

He shrugs with a wry smile. “I am but a humble deserter of my ancestral homeland. I have no judgement in me for anyone. Not you, not Ben, not countries or governments or armies, not revolutionaries. But the mess of it all does hold a certain sadness, no?”

“Yes. I suppose it holds a great deal of sadness.”

“Stai attento,” Joe says gently. His knowing dark eyes say it too. Be careful.

“You’re the one who wanted me to be nicer to him.”

“Yes, but you are between two worlds. And embracing one means slitting the throat of the other.”

“That’s very melodramatic of you.”

Joe chuckles, grins slyly, slurps his cappuccino. “I cannot help this. I am Italian.”

The back door bangs open and Ben comes out to join us in the courtyard. He is agitated, running his hands through his hair and frowning, looking much older than he is. He collapses into the chair beside me and lights a hand-rolled cigarette with the tarnished steel lighter he bought on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. The bear etched into the side glints in the sunshine, pawing the air and roaring soundlessly.

“No luck with Uncle George?” I ask.

“He’s still up in Scotland.” Ben spends much of his time in Mr. Lee’s study making calls on the telephone. It’s not as if he can speak to the king directly, of course; Ben calls someone in the prime minister’s office, who calls someone else, who calls someone else, on and on until Ben’s message has reached Balmoral Castle, and then the same process plays out in reverse. It all seems rather illogical to me, rather needlessly ritualistic, although I suppose Papa once did business the same way. It’s not enough to keep mere distance between royalty and the outside world; one must steel themselves against it with both palms pressed against the door. “I keep telling them that I need a private audience with King George, but I can’t make him come back to London. I’m just a press attaché. I’m not someone who matters. And obviously I’m not going to say anything about you over the phone. I don’t think they’d believe me, and even if they did we can’t have the secret getting loose before your safety is assured.”

“You matter,” I object, pained.

Ben doesn’t dignify this with words; he rolls his eyes instead. Some days he leaves me under Joe’s supervision and goes to visit his family on the other side of London. I wonder why he’s never asked if I would like to come along. I wonder if he’s ashamed of me, of my affluence, of my distinct lack of working-class wisdom.

“The king must come home eventually, no?” Joe says, trying to be encouraging.

“Sure. In a few days, maybe. Or a week. Or a month. Who knows?” Ben’s gaze lands on my authentic English breakfast and he perks up considerably. “Oh god, that looks delicious.”

I nudge my plate towards him. “Please, by all means, help yourself.”

As Ben eats—fork nestled in one hand, smoldering cigarette in the other—I resume my reading. “How is it?” Ben asks around a mouthful of bacon. He looks young again now, unguarded, curious and smiling. There’s a pang in my chest that is half red-colored longing and half heavy, dark grief. I collect myself like seashells laid in a basket.

“It’s extremely educational. Although I do take issue with some of the subject matter.”

“Oh? How so?”

“Well, the chapter about Queen Mary Tudor, for example,” I say. “She was the first queen regnant of England—one of the only queens—and she had so much opportunity to make her country a better place. So much potential. So much education and talent and resources. And then she spent her reign burning people and obsessing over her indifferent husband, following him around like a dog, paralyzed by misery every time he traveled abroad. Such a waste.”

Ben shrugs. “She did exactly what her parents would have wanted her to do. She married a man of royal blood and submitted herself to him. Because she believed her worth was measured only by the heirs she could produce.”

“That’s not the point.” I’m frowning, irritable; this is not the response I had anticipated. I hate when Ben is sharp like this, covered in barbs of cynicism like needles. It makes me wonder if he really likes me at all, if it’s possible he ever did. “She still had choices. She could have been kind to her people. Charitable, tolerant, forgiving.”

An exhale of smoke; a metallic glint in his green eyes. “Yeah? And what choices would you have made, had you been our dear departed Mary?”

“I wouldn’t have let emotions distract me from my responsibilities. I would have focused on helping the people I could, not falling into some pit of despair.”

“I see,” Ben says as he mops up beans and ketchup with a slice of toast. “So you would still marry the indifferent husband, just have the herculean foresight and self-control to not become quite so maddeningly inert.”

“I don’t know,” I snap, flipping pages rapidly.

“What? You suddenly don’t know what you’d do?”

“I don’t know what inert means.”

“It means motionless or ineffective.”

“Right, so yes, I wouldn’t let myself become that.”

“Perhaps Queen Mary Tudor once thought the same thing. Perhaps bitterness has a way of making monsters out of us all.”

“I’m not interested in this conversation anymore,” I say, burying my face in my book.

“Naturally.”

“Oh look, it is a cloud shaped like a cannoli,” Joe says, pointing.

“You’re not hungry?” Ben asks me with some concern.

“Not for an English breakfast.” How could anyone be hungry for blood pudding and ketchup and baked beans? Baked beans?!

“I can ask the cooks to make something else,” Ben says. “What do you want?”

“No, that’s alright.”

“Seriously, what do you want?”

“I couldn’t bear to trouble them. Our hosts have been so generous already. Once I’m in a position to do so…”—once I’m welcomed into the British royal family—“I’ll have to ensure that Mr. Lee and his household are adequately compensated for this inconvenience. And to think, I was so determined to hate him.”

Ben is perplexed. “Why?”

I reply as if it’s obvious: “Because he’s a cousin of the prime minister. And the prime minister is the man who convinced the king not to offer my family asylum.”

Ben stares at me. Joe stares at me. A silence settles over the courtyard, punctuated only by birdsong and rustling leaves. “That’s not how I understood things,” Ben says at last.

“What do you mean?”

Ben sets his fork down on the now-empty plate and clears his throat. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not going to fix anything. It’s just going to hurt you.”

I marvel at how recently he has acquired an aversion to hurting me. It’s almost like learning a new language, one he hasn’t quite found his footing in yet. “I’d still like to know.”

“Forget it.”

Joe interjects: “You really must see this cloud, look, it is incredibile, I now have a violent hunger for cannoli…”

“Ben,” I say softly, like a plea.

His words come slowly, haltingly. “From what I heard…from Sir Buchanan, and from other people on the ambassador’s staff as well…it was the king who harbored the greatest reservations about publicly aiding the Romanovs.”

Uncle George? Uncle George was the one who didn’t want to save us? Uncle George dragged his feet until my family was executed and butchered and hastily disposed of like a secret, like stolen treasure or a tainted bride? “I don’t believe that,” I whisper, my voice hoarse.

“That’s fine,” Ben replies mildly. “You don’t have to.”

“Why would he do that?” I demand, my eyes blazing, daring Ben to battle me. “Why on earth would Uncle George not want to save us, his own blood, his own family? He loved my father. He loved me. He would never abandon us of his own volition. Someone must have convinced him there was no other choice.”

“Sure. Maybe. You’re probably right,” Ben concedes.

“You didn’t answer me.” There’s a white-hot fire in my chest like lightning. “Why would Uncle George not want to save us?”

Ben won’t meet my eyes. “I don’t know.”

“Because it’s not true,” I say, victorious. “Because you’re mistaken. You have to be.”

“That’s possible,” Ben murmurs.

We sit steeped in an uneasy quiet, Ben peering down at the table, Joe up at the sky, me at both of them. Ben must be wrong. Not purposefully wrong, no, not knowingly wrong, but wrong nonetheless. Uncle George would have saved us if he had known it was feasible, if he had known how truly desperate we were. The alternative is impossible. The alternative is unimaginable.

“There’s one more thing,” Ben says at last, as if he doesn’t want to.

“What?” I ask.

“The king may still be at Balmoral Castle, but someone else came home yesterday.”

I can feel my brow crinkling in confusion. “Who?”

Now Ben’s eyes finally find mine. “The Prince of Wales.”

“David?” I gasp. “Really? He’s on leave?”

“He’s at Buckingham Palace. I could try to arrange a meeting with him. Somewhere secluded, somewhere safe. Which brings me to my question for you. Do you want to see him today?”

“Do you think he’ll take me to stay with him? At the palace, I mean?” Will I ever see you again, Ben?

“I don’t know.”

My answer should be clear and immediate, but it isn’t; it catches behind my teeth like a horse’s bit. Reaching the Windsors has been my objective since I left Tobolsk in a trunk in the back of a mule cart, yet somehow this feels too sudden, too final. I feel like I’m standing on the edge of a great precipice, the wind howling up to tangle my hair, my father’s blood in my cheeks, my mother’s palms on my back. But there’s only one correct answer. I surrender to it. “Yes,” I say simply, as if it took no thought at all. “Of course I want to see him.”

Ben’s still watching me, his eyes emerald-green and searching and pensive. “Okay.” He stands, bites his lower lip, shakes his head once like he’s casting out bad dreams. “Okay,” he says again, and then he retreats back inside the house.

~~~~~~~~~~

The clock tower chimes twice and ominous grey clouds are filling the sky as Ben leads me through Hyde Park, a sprawling and verdant place I’ve never been to before. He chats nervously while I barely reply; I feel like dark water, still and quiet and kilometers deep. Ben tosses me trivial trinkets of British history like tarnished coins into a fountain.

“Do you know what we call it?” he asks, nodding towards the omnipresent clangs of the clock tower.

I shake my head distractedly, skating my palm over the pliable purple petals of asters.

He grins. “Big Ben.”

“Oh. After you, of course.”

“Yes, because I am definitely that important.”

“I have a few things named after me,” I say. “A library, a hospital, an art gallery, a room in the Winter Palace, a naval base in Vladivostok…”

“Jesus Christ,” Ben replies. “No wonder you’re so humble.”

“Well…come to think of it…I suppose they probably aren’t named after me anymore. Or won’t be for much longer. The revolutionaries will erase my existence entirely, chisel me off the monuments. They’ll obliterate all the Romanovs. It’ll be like killing us all over again.”

Ben hesitates, then takes my left hand in his. This is unwise; and yet I let him. In fact, I do more than let him. I squeeze his hand fearfully, desperately, my fingertips reading his scars like Braille. “You’ll have plenty of things named after you here if you want them to be,” Ben says.

I squint up at the shadowy, tumultuous sky. “I’d rather have them named after Tatiana or Alexei, I think.”

“That could probably be arranged.” Ben releases me, shoving clenched fists into his coat pockets. Arranged by the man we’re here to meet. By the Prince of Wales.

Because a prince of a powerful nation could do anything, right? Anything he wanted. Anything at all. Except stem the blood tide of revolution, of course. Except turn back the clock and raise my family like Lazarus.

We round a corner and find a guard, uniformed and on horseback, blocking steps surrounded by tall, dense, dark-green juniper trees. His eyes flick over Ben briefly, dismissively. “Move along, quickly now,” he says, with an encouraging swing of his sword. It feels wrong for a royal guard to treat me this way, disorienting, like a clock running backwards. It occurs to me that this same man might have been serving me and my family the last time we were in London; yet now he doesn’t recognize me, now he doesn’t see me at all. But I’m the same person, aren’t I? I try to catch his eye. He doesn’t seem aware of me. I might as well be a goldfinch or a stone.

“I think we’re meant to go up,” Ben says rather meekly, gesturing to the steps, like it’s a tepid suggestion. He barely sounds like himself at all. Ben? Meek? Since when is Ben EVER meek?

The guard scrutinizes him. “Name?”

“Benjamin Hardy, press attaché for Sir Buchanan, the British Ambassador to Russia.”

“Right.” The guard moves his horse to the side. It’s midnight black and tall and shining and surely a purebred, its mane and tail lustrous, its dark eyes sharp and arrogant. Kroshka could never compare, and yet I find myself missing her. “His Royal Highness is touring the Italian Gardens. He is expecting you.”

“Thank you very much,” Ben says, bowing his head, and leads me up the staircase. The guard still doesn’t look at me, not even once.

We ascend, my heart in my throat, my feet numb and clumsy; I keep having to remind them how to work. My hands are trembling. My skin is sweated and cold, my sweater clinging to my spine. There is a break in the clouds and muted daylight cascades over us. The steps are ending just ahead. My grand adventure with Ben is ending too.

Ben glances back and asks in a murmur: “Are you ready?”

Yes, I hear Mother say confidently. Yes, I hear Papa concur with warm, dusk-pink pride in his voice. Yes, I hear Tatiana and Alexei and Olga and Maria and Anastasia whisper from their gravesite in some unknown corner of the world, waiting impatiently for vengeance. The revolutionaries may hold Russia, but they will never hold me. The Romanovs will live on. Our blood will run in the veins of queens and kings until eternity turns all the earth to ash. It is the best revenge imaginable. “Yes,” I tell Ben, as if there is no other possible answer.

At the summit of the staircase is a spacious landing overlooking water, lily pads, swans, fountains, the horizon. The Prince of Wales is standing near the railing, framed by statues of half-naked women emptying their pitchers into the pond. I might have blushed at that two months ago; now I feel only an ache of curiosity, of longing.

David Windsor turns. He is just as I remembered him, only better, clearer: tall, slim, blond, blue-eyed, graceful, composed, fit for a fairytale. An ocean of relief crashes through me.

Oh, thank God. I love him after all.

His mouth falls open. His cigar—Cuban, imported, made by another man’s hands—tumbles forgotten to the ground. He is the opposite of the guard on horseback; the Prince of Wales sees only me. I can feel myself glowing with exhilaration, with pride. I can feel my family here on the landing with me, translucent and bloodied, beaming with ethereal approval. “Dear Lord,” David Windsor marvels. “Is that really you?”

Nodding with tears in my eyes, completely overwhelmed and unable to speak, I run to him. He opens his arms and bellows amazed laughter. His embrace is kind and familiar, if a bit formal.

“There there!” David soothes, patting my back. “You’re alright now. You’re far away from those traitorous animals in Russia. How did you manage this?! What a shock, my God! Father will be elated!”

“I escaped,” I say, wiping away tears. David hands me a handkerchief from his jacket pocket. It is embroidered with his initials. “Ben…Ben rescued me. He and Sir Buchannan formulated a plot. Ben smuggled me out before my family was moved to Yekaterinburg. We…we…we were supposed to save them. I was supposed to come here and convince Uncle George to offer us all asylum. But I was too late, I…I…”

“You poor thing.” The Prince of Wales shakes his head and rests a hand on my shoulder. “You poor, poor girl. Traveling in secret and in God knows what sorts of conditions. Learning of your family’s brutal slaying while on the run like some criminal, as if you have ever done anything wrong in your life! What could you have done?! Just a dutiful daughter, a grand duchess, a little girl. You are an innocent. What have you ever done to deserve such suffering?”

I can’t seem to stop weeping. Surely David will understand; he knew my family too. He loved them too. “My parents…my sisters…Alexei…” Sobs hitch from my throat. “I would have done anything to save them, anything—”

“There there,” David says again. His words are gentle but weightless somehow, bloodless, dispassionate. “Please, dearest, do collect yourself. I hate to see women cry. It’s such a pitiful sight. There’s no need to despair. You are exactly where you belong now.”

“Uncle George will welcome me?”

“Oh, my dear, he will proclaim his love for you in front of the entire world.” There are things shifting rapidly in the prince’s pale eyes: strategy, surprise, hunger, satisfaction…and perhaps a threat of envy, too. “Yes, Father…he always approved of you, didn’t he? He always hoped that…maybe…someday…” The Prince of Wales smiles down at me. “You might marry into our empire. And here you are at last, at the end of such a dreadful voyage, on our doorstep.”

“I could never thank you enough for this,” I say shakily. “I…I…”

“Please,” he urges, uneasy. “Did you think there was any other possible remedy? Of course we will take you in. You are the daughter—the last heir—of a great dynasty, one whose blood has melded with our own for generations. You and I, we are both great-grandchildren of Queen Victoria. We are both anointed by our Creator as the finest of mankind. Your house has fallen into ruin, this is true…but you are blameless in that. Just a grand duchess. Just a daughter. What could you have done to stop it? You poor thing. Poor, poor thing.” He smooths my hair once and then steps away, his mind already elsewhere. “I will call Father as soon as I return to the palace. I will tell him that he must come to London immediately. When he is back, he can summon you to an official audience, and then your survival can be announced publicly. The king—and only the king—must initiate everything, of course. And when your proper period of mourning has passed…” The Prince of Wales smiles again, this time vaguely and into the distance. “Other announcements can be made as well.”

I fold up David’s handkerchief and stow it in the pocket of my corduroy trousers. My husband, my husband, my husband, this man is going to be my husband. Surely if I repeat this often enough, it will start to feel real. “I would very much like to see Uncle George again. To be with all of you again.”

“Indeed.” The prince’s ice-blue eyes, as his shock evaporates, travel down to my clothes. “Dear Lord, what on earth are you wearing?!” he exclaims. “An old shabby sweater? A cheap scarf? Trousers? Well, I suppose you are in hiding. You must feel so out of place. Not to worry, dearest. You will be back to your old self in no time. And the sooner I go, the sooner you will be able to resume your rightful place.”

“I’m not going to the palace with you now?” I ask, unsure if I am disappointed or confused or pleased.

“I’m afraid that just won’t be possible, dearest. I don’t have the authority to invite you there, only Father does. And we can’t have this secret getting out before Father is informed, can we? He would be furious. I’m terribly sorry about the circumstances, but surely you understand. The attaché said he was staying with Mr. Gwilym Lee, I presume that’s where he’s been hiding you too? Are your accommodations there comfortable?”

And that’s exactly the way he puts it: comfortable. Not safe, not enjoyable, not enlightening, not affectionate, but comfortable. I suppose that’s the yard stick by which my kind measure their lives. Something in my chest is sinking, darkening. Did I really think that I love him? That’s impossible. I don’t even know him. Not really. “Very comfortable. Mr. Lee and his wife have been godsends to me. And Ben…” I turn to him. Ben is standing in the shade of the juniper trees and watching us with no expression that I can read. His face is a void, flinty and heartbreakingly beautiful. “He has saved my life over and over again. He has displayed both exemplary courage and judgement. He is my hero, my champion, my truest friend. I will be indebted to him until death. He must be adequately rewarded.”

“Is that so?” The Prince of Wales—for the first time, as if it is the dimmest of afterthoughts—looks at Ben. Ben bows deeply. David Windsor considers him for a few brisk seconds; then his eyes dart to me, back to Ben, to me again. “We will have to reward him,” David says, a winter-cold edge in his words. “Won’t we, dearest?”

“Whatever you decide is best,” I recover quickly.

The prince’s arm curls around my waist. He kisses me delicately on each cheek, feather-lightly, as if he might crack my skin like porcelain. “Good day, Your Imperial Highness. We shall meet again soon. Quite soon, I think. Yes, that would be for the best.”

The Prince of Wales descends the steps, leaving a silent open space like a grave in his wake. In Moscow, the communist revolutionaries have seized control and executed most of the Provisional Government. In Passchendaele, battlefields are being combed for dog tags to send back to the households of the dead. At Balmoral Castle in Scotland, King George V is about to receive a very urgent phone call. Somewhere—and I’ll never know where—my family’s bones are alight with the promise of redemption.

Meanwhile, here in Hyde Park in the heart of London, Ben and I stare at each other as sparce drops of rain begin to fall from a ghost-colored sky.

~~~~~~~~~~

“Why haven’t you ever taken me to meet your family?” I ask Ben. We’re sitting in the ill-lit, unassuming corner booth of a pub in West London. We each have a pint of brown ale. I sip mine tentatively; it’s thick and bitter and strange. Ben gulps his like water.

“I didn’t think you’d want to,” he says.

“Why wouldn’t I want to meet them?”

“Because…” Ben shows his palms penitently. “Because of what happened to your family. I thought it might be painful for you. To see my mother, my siblings. To be around all that.”

“Oh. I was worried you were too embarrassed of me.”

He seems genuinely puzzled. “What’s there to be embarrassed about?”

I smile down at the heavy oak table and say nothing, spinning my glass between my hands.

“Do you really want to meet my family?” Ben says.

“Of course I do. You’ve already told me so much about them.”

“Okay. We’ll do dinner at their house tonight.”

I watch him as he drinks his ale, his hair falling in messy twists over his forehead, his cheeks flushed, his emerald-colored eyes flitting restlessly around the pub. I remember how his hands felt against my face. I remember the way his lips tasted on mine. There’s a knot in my chest like barbed wire. The thought of never touching him again is indescribable. “How is it possible that no one has fallen in love with you yet?”

“I told you. All I’ve ever done is work.”

“It’s a shame. It’s a crime, actually. There’s too much good in you to not be shared.”

Ben smirks at me from beneath his curls. “I suppose at this point I’ll end up with an American.”

“What will it be like for you there? When you first arrive, I mean. It must be difficult to start over somewhere new without help, without many…resources.”

“As a relatively poor person, you mean?” Ben laughs. “I’ll be alright. I don’t need much. I’ll rent some dodgy little room somewhere and scrape by until I get my feet under me. There’s cheap lodging if you’re willing to share space. And I’ll have Joe. He’ll have the time of his life finding a woman for me. He’s been trying to give me condoms for years. He hides them in my pockets and luggage when I’m not paying attention.”

“Condoms?”

“Uh…” Ben blushes a deeper red, turning shy. “Something to prevent…children. One of several possible methods.”

“Ah. Yes, I don’t believe I’ll have the luxury of knowing much about that.”

Ben frowns at me, somber, anxious. I swallow a mouthful of my dark, bitter ale.

“You could stay,” I tell him suddenly. “Here. In London. When Sir Buchanan retires, I could ensure the royal family keeps you on as a press attaché for the next ambassador to Russia. Or any country you want. Italy, France, Greece, America, anywhere. I could convince David to do it.”

“No,” Ben returns with a sad smile. “I don’t think you could.”

The way he looked at Ben. The way he looks at me.

No, perhaps the Prince of Wales will never be a man who is swayed by his wife. I won’t have any power over him. It’s difficult to have power over someone who doesn’t love you.

“He’s not cruel,” I say softly. We’ve already discussed this, but I’m confirming it.

“No,” Ben insists. “Distant. Vain. Unfaithful. But never cruel.”

“Many women have suffered far worse,” I murmur, mostly to myself.

“Yes. And plenty have suffered less.”

“Is that what you’ll write about me in your article?” There’s no malice in my words, no fight, only curiosity. “That I’m materialistic…or mindlessly obedient…or spineless…or…or weak? Too weak to consider a different kind of life?”

“I don’t think you’re weak,” Ben replies softly, staring down at his hands. “I think you’re brave.”

There’s warm contentment rising in my cheeks. Pride, even. I’ve learned that there is nothing Ben respects more than courage, just as there is nothing I prize above honor. Perhaps we have learned to see both in each other. “Really?”

“You could come to New York with me,” he says in a rush, his eyes sparkling. “You could start over too, with me and Joe, you could be anything you wanted to be. I’d help you.”

I bark out a stunned laugh. I’m positive he’s joking. It’s a ludicrous prospect. “What, and live in some tiny room in a run-down apartment, shooing away rats with a broom, driving the mule cart to the market each week to buy beets and cabbages, sharing a toilet with God knows how many other people and no bathtub in sight? Can you imagine me living like that?”

But Ben doesn’t find it funny. It’s not just his head that drops; everything in him sinks, goes silent, goes still. He’s disappointed. He’s ashamed.

“Ben, wait, I didn’t…I didn’t mean…”

“We should go,” he says, and stands before I can stop him.

~~~~~~~~~~

Ben’s family’s home is not what I’d envisioned. It’s a modest little place squeezed between a bakery and a blacksmith’s shop—far from a castle or mansion, surely—but it’s not dilapidated. It’s simple, quaint, a bit overcrowded, but not impoverished. They have the entire townhouse to themselves: two floors, a few windows, a fireplace, a scuffed old piano in the living room, two basset hounds with wagging tails and drooping ears, a tiny garden in the backyard where the children tend pumpkins and kale and sugar snap peas. It’s not as desperate as I had imagined Ben’s childhood to be when he described it to me. I wonder how they can afford this.

“Let me show her, let me show her!” August, ten years old and grinning enormously, shouts as he drags me around the house and presents each room as if he lives in a palace, every piece of furniture handed down through dynasties instead of secondhand and scuffed. He looks very much like Ben; but August is brighter, more open, less pummeled by life. He makes me wonder what Alexei might have been like had he been born healthy.

Leo, fourteen, is wrestling with his mathematics homework at a worn desk in the living room. Opal and Kathryn are in the kitchen helping their mother prepare dinner: roasted chicken, gravy, potatoes, stuffing, glazed carrots, sticky toffee pudding for dessert. That was once Alexei’s favorite, I remember. I hope he can see me now. I hope he’s proud of me.

Ben’s mother is a whisper of a woman, very hushed, very thin, her face much older that her years. She is like a battered ship limping home to harbor. She is polite to me but remote; she is like that with everyone, except perhaps August, her youngest. She seems to be irrevocably exhausted, as if someone pierced the soles of her feet and bled out her capacity for loud, careless joy. She has short, black curly hair and hands gnarled with arthritis far worse than my own mother’s was. There are no portraits or photos in the house, but there are three small wooden crosses on the mantle of the fireplace, one for each of her lost children: Willis, Cecil, Louise.

As Ben and I help set the table, a young man around twenty limps through the front door. He has dark hair, glasses, a narrow bookish face, and a moderate clubfoot on his left side. He walks with the assistance of a cane.

“You’re here,” Luther says calmly to Ben, a smile illuminating his face. “Now we can read the letter.”

“There’s a letter?” Ben drops the spoons he’d been placing. “From Frankie?”

Luther fetches it from the desk drawer and hands it to Ben. We gather around him on the single frayed couch: me, Luther, Leo, Opal, Kathryn, August, the basset hounds called Pancake and Pickles. Ben’s mother listens gravely from the kitchen, stirring and basting, all the recipes living only in her head.

“When did it arrive?” Ben asks.

“Yesterday,” Leo replies eagerly. “We wanted to wait for you. We wanted to read it together.”

“I can’t believe you had the patience.” Ben rips the letter free from the envelope. The first thing he reads is the date at the top. “Only five days ago,” Ben says with a great exhale, and they all burst into cheers; even his mother casts us a weary half-smile. At first I don’t understand, and then I do: if Frankie wrote a letter five days ago, it means he survived the Germans’ last major counter-offensive. It means he’s likely still alive right now, eating his dinner out of cans while we eat ours off chipped, mismatched plates. It means he might still come home someday.

Frankie’s letter is short, probably because he refuses to tell his family what Passchendaele is really like. Instead, he writes about the books he’s read, the Allied soldiers he’s met from Ireland and France and Belgium, the weather improving, the sight of the stars at night, his memories of home. He writes that he hopes he’ll be back by Christmas. He writes about the now-infamous fate of the Romanovs, the gossip that has spread like wildfire and horrified an already shellshocked world. Little do they know that the true story has barely begun.

As Ben reads, August huddles up beside him, and Opal hold his free hand, and Leo’s eyes begin to glisten, and Luther braids Katheryn’s long golden hair; and I am reminded so much of my own family that I am flooded not with sorrow but overpowering, breathless love. I can hear Papa telling us folktales by candlelight, his voice changing with each character. I can see Mother sitting in her wheelchair and knitting a hat for Alexei, new mittens for Anastasia, a sweater for me. I can feel Tatiana combing and arranging my hair. I can smell the tobacco from Papa’s pipe. I can taste hot chocolate and snowflakes and wild raspberries plucked from bushes. For a moment, and only one, none of it happened: Papa never abdicated the throne, the wars never raged, my family never died. For a moment, I am home and always will be.

I’ll never have that again, I think.

No; the Prince of Wales is my destiny, he is as much a part of my existence as my own bones. But he will never give me what Papa gave Mother. I am only now understanding how rare my parents’ love was, how remarkable. It is an uncommon thing to find a true home here on earth, and it is magic if you can manage to keep it.

“Are you alright?” Ben asks, and I realize that they’re all watching me. The letter is finished and folded carefully in Ben’s hands. His hands…I can’t seem to stop looking at his hands.

“Are you alright?” his siblings echo with genuine concern, these children who know nothing about me except that I am ostensibly a typist named Lana Brinkley, a colleague of their brother, perhaps even his friend. I’m a nobody, and yet they see me with perfect clarity.

“I’m fine,” I say, offering up a smile. “I was just reminded of someone I used to know.”

All through dinner—as the voices of Ben’s family rush around me like the warm foaming surf of Greece or Italy or Spain or some other romantic kingdom I had once dreamed of marrying into—I am silently bracing myself for my future. I can see it like paintings in a museum: opening presents with my children under a towering Christmas tree at Buckingham Palace, attending polo games and crystalline balls, posing in tiaras for photographs, cutting ribbons at hospitals and parks and bridges, sipping afternoon tea with Queen Mary and the Princess Royal, holidaying in the Caribbean or the Mediterranean, touring countries and territories littered across the globe where the sun never sets on the British Empire. And I do, I find, believe wholeheartedly that I would be safe here: the British are not hard in the way that Russians are, nor hereditarily restless like Americans. I would never be imprisoned, tortured, guillotined, burned, discarded like the entrails of a butchered animal. I would enjoy unparalleled opulence and security for the next half a century. How many people would kill to be me? How many people live on the edge of a knife, the color of each day bruised black with hunger, violence, disease, prostitution, deprivation, slavery, filth, war? I would be insane to subject myself to such risks when I was born so high above them. It would be like kicking a hole in a ship when it’s midway across the Atlantic.

Yes, I can see my life as if I’ve already lived it, and there’s nothing there that startles or horrifies me. The Prince of Wales would be a perfectly adequate husband, popular with his people and courteous to me. He would never criticize or yell or—God forbid—raise a hand in anger. He would be handsome and stylish and proud of our children. Perhaps he would even abandon his mistresses as our bond grows stronger through the years. I realize that the thought of him with other women doesn’t especially wound me. It would be alright to embrace him, to kiss him, to do much more with him. I can stomach the idea of that. We would have a pleasant co-existence…a comfortable one, to use his own word.

No, what gives me pause is something else, something unexpected, something that is just now dawning on me: not the presence of the Prince of Wales but the absence of anyone else, the prospect of never experiencing real passion, of never knowing what it’s like to have someone I’m mad for between my thighs, of David having feasted on heat and desire and wildness while I will never taste it. I think of the bitterness that will grow in me like a child I’ll never deliver. I think of writing some dull, too-careful letter to Ben once or twice a year while whispers tangle in my skull: What if? What if?

Luther’s voice rouses me, hesitant and bashful as he stirs his mashed potatoes and gravy together, avoiding everyone’s eyes: “Ben…listen, I hate to ask this…but there are a few more textbooks that I need for the Michaelmas term…the professors just told us about them, and I thought I had enough money squirreled away but I’m…well, I’m a little short…”

“I’ll take care of it,” Ben replies instantly.

“I’ll pay you back someday,” Luther insists. “I’m keeping a list of the expenses and when I have my own dental practice I’ll give—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Ben says with a wave of his hand and changes the subject, and then I know exactly how his family affords this house. I know how they afford everything they have.

As the sun is setting and his mother is clearing the table to serve dessert—and adamantly refusing my offers of assistance, slapping my hands away with her crooked fingers—I follow Ben out into the backyard when he goes there to smoke one of his very inexpensive hand-rolled cigarettes, one of infinite tiny sacrifices his mother’s and siblings’ lives are now built on.

“He didn’t really say anything about my family, did he?” I ask Ben, meaning the Prince of Wales.

“No, he didn’t,” Ben agrees, vivid amber sunlight glowing on his face.

“He didn’t say that Papa didn’t deserve it. He didn’t even mention Tati or Alexei.”

“No,” Ben says again.

“Why wouldn’t he?”

Ben debates telling me something and instead replies: “I don’t know.”

“You have all these secrets now. You used to just hurl anything that crossed your mind at me like stones.”

“Yes, it is immensely inconvenient to have grown a conscious.”

I’m studying him in the receding light—fire like a yellow topaz—acutely aware that our grand adventure is waning like the starving crescent of the moon. “Can I ask you something else?”

Now Ben seems nervous. He flicks ashes from his cigarette with a restless hand. Everywhere I look I find the color of embers, like the whole world is burning. “Sure.”

“What made you choose the name Lana?”

He’s a little relieved, a little disappointed. “Oh. That.”

“If you even have a reason.”

“There’s a reason,” Ben says. “But you’ll hate it.”

“Yeah?”

“Firstly, I liked that it sounded like a nickname instead of something regal and important. Secondly, it’s easy to pronounce and won’t divulge your Russian accent. Thirdly, and most importantly…” He smirks guiltily. “It means something in Gaelic.”

Gaelic is one of the languages I haven’t gotten to yet. It’s a humble language, a working-class language, no royals study it to my knowledge; there is no recognized Irish royal family and there hasn’t been since the English invaded them in the 12th Century. But I suppose it’s likely that Ben has come across plenty of Irish people during his travels, maids and cooks and shipbuilders. He might have even grown up with some. “What does it mean?”

“Little rock.”

I erupt into giggles. It feels fantastic. “You…you named me…rock…?”

“Little rock,” Ben clarifies. “Which makes it cuter.”

“You are possibly the worst person who has ever existed, Benjamin Hardy.”

“Who’s going to keep your ego in check if not me?”

“My husband, I suppose,” I say, flatly now, as indigo night falls like a curtain.

~~~~~~~~~~

The Lees’ house is quiet and still like winter. The staff have gone home for the night, the Sealyham Terriers are slumbering somewhere with their noses tucked under their paws, Ben and Joe are outside in the courtyard tossing sticks into the firepit. It’s cold when the wind blows, but not cold enough to drive them inside. They don’t want to go to bed; they know it’s our last night together. Nothing will ever be the same after tonight. I don’t want to go to bed either.

I’m rummaging through the kitchen trying to find a pot, mugs, milk, sugar, and cocoa powder; my plan is to surprise Ben and Joe with hot chocolate, but I’ve never made it myself before. I’ve rarely navigated a kitchen at all before.

“Can I help you with something?” Gwilym Lee asks from the doorway, startling me. There’s a Sealyham Terrier wagging its stubby white tail by his feet.

“Oh, I’m so sorry…I hate to be an inconvenience…I was just thinking as we were sitting out there around the fire…perhaps some…hot chocolate?”

“Ah, just a moment.” He moves deftly around plucking items from cabinets and drawers. He’s a wonderfully benign person from what I’ve seen, and so is his wife Hazel. She has blonde hair and umber eyes and a way of telling the most cheerful, long-winded, dramatic stories. Oddly enough, she’s Australian.

“How did you meet your wife, Mr. Lee?” I say as he begins heating milk on the stove.

“Her father is a shipping tycoon back in Australia. He was here on business and brought Hazel and her mother along. I bumped into them at a Christmas ball and couldn’t stop staring at Hazel all evening. I asked her the most idiotic questions just to hear her talk.”

“What a romantic meeting,” I say admiringly. It’s the sort of thing princesses dream of. And grand duchesses too.

“It wasn’t all a fairytale, let me assure you. My parents were horrified.”

“I can’t imagine why. She’s lovely.”

Mr. Lee chuckles. “Because she’s not Welsh, of course! Although I suppose that wouldn’t be so obvious to you, being from…” He gestures vaguely, raises his eyebrows. “Elsewhere.”

I smirk down at my shoes as he stirs sugar and cocoa powder into the pot, neither confirming nor denying. “Now that you mention it, I have heard that the Welsh are…rather prideful of their heritage.”

“We’re like the Irish. We’ve never stopped bristling at British rule. And I come from an old, old family. There are artifacts in this house that date from when Wales had its own kings.”

“Rebellion everywhere,” I mutter to myself, feeling like I’m drowning in it. Perhaps everyone is, all over the world since the dawn of time; perhaps rulership is something that will inevitably be hated and act hatefully in reply. “So your parents wanted you to marry a Welsh woman.”

“Welsh was heavily preferred. From the Continent would have been acceptable. English would have been very bad, American even worse. But Australian? That was unthinkable! Australia was once a prison colony, you know. They’re just English people without the veneer of sophistication.” He grins, knowing how ridiculous it sounds, this shallow prejudice. “They’re barely humans at all.”

I observe Gwilym Lee, tall and poised, as he pours hot chocolate into three mugs: blue, red, green. Steam rises in the air like smoke, like ghosts. Something about the way he moves reminds me of Tatiana. “What made you decide to marry her anyway?”

He shrugs and smiles at me over his shoulder. “Life is long. With the wrong person, I imagine, it feels much longer.” He sets the mugs on a tray and gives it to me. “Anything else I can do for you, Miss Lana? Or should I say Lana bella donna, as Joseph does?”

“No, you’ve done quite enough already. Thank you, Mr. Lee. You shall be generously rewarded. I’ll see to it.”

From the shadowy doorway, he responds: “I’d rather you see to your own happiness.” And I’m left standing alone in the kitchen as Mr. Lee and the Sealyham Terrier vanish, the dog’s nails clicking on the hardwood floor.

I bring the tray out to the courtyard and sit in the firelight, sipping my hot chocolate, as Ben and Joe toast theirs and discuss the ethnic neighborhoods of New York City: Little Italy and Chinatown and Little Spain, Irish in Hell’s Kitchen, Norwegians in Bay Ridge, Poles in Greenpoint, Syrians and Lebanese on Washington Street in Manhattan, African Americans moving up to Harlem from the treacherous South, Jews in Borough Park, Greeks in Astoria, Russians in Brighton Beach. It’s the whole planet in miniature. Joe wants to live near other Italians. Ben wants to be able to volunteer at settlement houses and maybe even meet Jane Addams one day.

I’m listening to them, but from a distance; Ben keeps trying to draw me into the conversation and I ignore him. I’m too busy thinking about what I’m going to do next. I have an idea, you see; I’ve had it for longer than I could admit even to myself. It’s unforgiveable, but it won’t go away. And I know it’s the right thing to do because at last when I commit to it—silently, like the dead of night—I feel a great calmness settle over me, a great peace. As I cradle my mug of hot chocolate, my hands don’t shake at all.

Abruptly, I rise to my feet. “I’m going upstairs now,” I inform Ben.

He blinks. “Okay.”

“I expect you to join me in precisely one hour.”

“Okay,” Ben says again, thunderstruck, smiling. Joe stifles a rapturous laugh and pounds on Ben’s shoulder with his lithe little fists. Ben, still smiling, doesn’t seem to notice.

Upstairs, I take a bath so hot it fills the room with steam, and I lay in the tub listening to the echoing plinks of dripping water and the late-October wind rattling the window shutters. When I drain the water—opaque and shimmering with rose-scented soap—I can feel the weight of the past two years shedding off me like a snake’s skin, bleeding away like summer, disappearing down the drain. I sit at the vanity, brushing out my hair, naked and serene, gazing at my reflection. In the mirror, in the golden lamplight, I see not flaws, not history, not the future, not my family, not tragedy or triumph, but only myself; and I don’t think that’s ever happened before.

Exactly one hour after I left him, Ben opens the bedroom door. I’m waiting for him on the bed with my hair loose and wild, my skin dewy with steam, my heartbeat steady. He inhales, exhales, closes the door as quietly as possible. He walks to the bed and covers his face with his hands, his beautiful, scarred hands. I think of how pure his flesh is, uncolored by dynasties or pacts. I think of how everything he has he built himself. I stand to meet him, laying my hands lightly on top of his own.

“Ben?” I whisper.

“Yeah?”

“You can look at me. It’s alright.”

Slowly, hesitantly, he drops his hands. His eyes drift over me like snow: soft, quiet, melting away. I feel no nervousness, no shame. Ben is pulling off his sweater. I skate my palms down his chest, his belly, his forearms lined with ocean-blue veins. “Goddamn,” he gasps, resting his forehead against mine. I can feel the heat coming off him in waves. His fingers tangle in my hair. His clothes are in a messy pile on the hardwood floor.

“We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” I say.

“Believe me, I want to.”

“Everything?”

“Everything,” he breathes.

I climb onto the bed and he follows, touching my face and my neck and my breasts, kissing me so deeply the rest of the world ceases to exist. There’s no one but us, there never has been, there never will be again. The valleys and peaks of his body fit perfectly with mine. I guide his hands lower, lower, lower.

Ben cautions: “Are you sure? Now? With me? I don’t want you to regret this. And I might be legitimately terrible because I’ve never done this before—”

“I don’t care.” I’m smiling; I can’t seem to stop. “I don’t want my first time to be with some prince I barely know. I want it to be with you.”

“I love you,” Ben says. “But I guess you already know that.”

“I do now.”

It’s like a dream in the weak golden lamplight: our skin, our voices, the effortless rhythm we stumble unsuspectingly into, no pain, no thought, time running neither forwards nor backwards but fading away entirely like ink in water.

~~~~~~~~~~

Afterwards, we bathe together and put on pajamas—the Lees keep the dressers stocked for guests—and turn off the lights. Ben doesn’t offer to leave, and I don’t ask him to. We slip beneath the blankets and find each other again, our fingers linking together, our minds untroubled. Tomorrow will be different, surely, but tomorrow doesn’t feel real yet. It’s a legend, it’s folklore. It’s a myth people shared around bonfires, carved into stones, painted on cave walls.

I say in the darkness: “We really must thank Joe for the condoms.”

“Yes, absolutely.”

“How many more do you have?”

“Four or five, I think.”

“Hmm.” I kiss his stubbled neck, and then his jaw, and then his mouth with teasing darts of my tongue. I can still taste myself on him, inside of him, growing into his bones like roots. I can feel his lips smiling against mine.

“So you want your second time to be with me too, huh?”

“Silence, commoner,” I murmur, grinning, dragging him closer by the collar of his shirt, drawing him into me like the moon pulls the sea.

#ben hardy x reader #ben hardy fic #borhap fandom

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