Chapter Text
Clenna’s first glimpse of Mr. Pond and Mr. Grant is in that market, side by side.
Her leg makes her wobble slightly in her new shoes- hand-me-downs from Mrs. Carruthers, a bit too tall- and it’s that rocking motion like the lilt of a boat on the sea that keeps her nervous. And here I was, hoping to be done with boats, she thinks. Not with my luck.
She wonders if, underneath the borrowed dress and furiously-brushed hair, she’s still too obviously beneath them. Maybe they’ll just see a handmaiden before I even open my mouth. Forbidden from re-dressing herself, she tetters forward like a toddler, the product of someone else’s design.
She knows what to say, even if her voice still carries that accent that makes Mrs. Carruthers wrinkle her nose. “Sorry to interrupt, I’m to deliver this to you. It’s a gift from Elizabeth Carruthers.“
She nearly breathes a sigh of relief when nobody sneers immediately after she’s opened her mouth. Just after she’s said Mrs. Carruthers name.
I know why Mrs. Carruthers chose an Irish nobody pulled from the factory floor over a proper servant, she thinks now. Her mother had always told her hindsight was sharp. As Mr. Pond's gloved hand closes over her mouth, strangling her scream, she knows the truth. She was never supposed to make it in all her finery back to the warehouse.
Clenna Dolan is a sacrificial lamb.
She's been stuck in bed for longer than she cares to think about. The pain in her leg has faded like her fear into a dull and present ache.
The pain doesn't get sharp until she moves. Still, it lives there with her, in her, waiting to bite harder. One wrong move reaching for the water pitcher on her bedside table and her knee lights up like her little brother had stuck a firecracker in the splints. Not that he ever would have. Tom certainly wasn't a good boy by anyone's standards, but he'd never had it in him to be cruel.
She hadn't thought of Tom in so long. She's been clamping down on his memory like it was clenched between her teeth, like if she could just keep her fragile jaw around it she could make it through all this suffering without crying out. She'd bit down around it in the bowels of that ship where she knew that, in the tight damp cell surrounded on all sides by the womb of the ocean, that grief would drive her mad. It was a luxury she could not afford. The grasping hands of sailors and soldiers and the hard tack alive with wriggling maggots and the oppressive solitude and all the while Michael out there somewhere, somewhere- it was too much to take. She had learned to pick and choose her battles.
Like now, she thinks. Like you need to be doing now.
Even still, the tears welling up in her eyes at the thought of his name swirl the bedroom around her into a haze of gold and white and cream. It's the first night in a long while she feels comfortable enough to cry herself to sleep.
She dries her eyes the next morning. The good food and soft feather mattress are too agreeable, she decides. They are making her let her guard down. She's sure it's all on purpose- Mr. Grant does not skimp on her care where he could, where he should know she would never notice. She has peered into other rooms and seen the same handsome furniture and fine sheets. It baffles her that a gentleman like Mr. Grant, so clearly committed to using her, would not, as Lord Benton had, take pains to remind her of her place. Benton had practically been breathing down her neck with expectant gratitude. He watched at meals as if he was weighing the price of every bite of food she swallowed. Mr. Grant only looks faintly amused she has not tried to bolt off into the night.
His appearances in the rooms she occupies are few and brief. With a faint smile he nods to her in passing as he paces through the sitting room where they have placed her to enjoy the sun.
“Miss Dolan.”
She nods back, unsmiling. “Mr. Grant.”
A light chuckle that seems somehow to match the sunshine filtering through the curtains. “I trust you're feeling well.”
“Better.” She admits. “Thanks to you.” She wants to remind him that she is graceful, useful.
Mr. Grant blinks at her. Reconsidering that bet, no doubt, she thinks. He responds with his usual comfortable reassurance- in his own home he is a far cry from the nervous pale man she had handed Mrs. Carruthers’s gift to. A pity I never found out what it was.
“You're very welcome. I hope you enjoy your time as a guest in our home.”
It seems strange to her, the way he says 'our’, when the house clearly belongs to him, a rich bachelor, solitary and affluent . You’re not married, she thinks as she stares into his eyes. You’re alone, like me. Unattached. You’ve got a business to run. He gives her a smile that says his thoughts are equally far away.
He fades out of her realm of consciousness, back into those rooms she has no strength to enter. I’ll get to them someday, she thinks to herself, and it's the last thought she holds in her mind before the sunlight lulls her into a comfortable mid-afternoon nap.
They don't come to inspect her injured leg themselves. They send a doctor, which Mr. Pond accompanies, but he always waits outside her bedroom and only enters when she assures him she's comfortable.
“You can come in now.” She almost growls with impatience the first time. “I won't bite too hard.” But afterwards she sees it for the small act of kindness and comfort it is.
They treat her gently in her immobile state, moving her from one in a small series of rooms she is confined to over to the next, letting her 'take in some sun’ or 'amuse herself with the collection in here’ or 'make sure she's safe in bed’. Everything is phrased so kindly. Everything is for her benefit. This privacy they give her, in her intimate moments of injury, is to reassure her. That want me to keep my dignity.
After all, she thinks, Mr. Pond can always watch me from a distance.
Mr. Pond has uncomfortably beautiful hands. His pinky fingers in particular, which trace the wood of the cane he now holds so absentmindedly, are dainty and poised. He carries his hands carefully, she thinks, because he knows what they can do.
He tests the cane’s balance, admires the pommel-style handle, and then looks at her as if he has only now noticed she is here in this room he has just entered, the bedroom they have laid her out in as one might put to bed a china doll. I’m dressed well enough to be one, she thinks. Flouncing and soft, her nightgowns remind her of fairy stories.
She has mulled over their agreement for several days now, having little else to do, and Mr. Pond’s appearance in her room is not unwelcome. He smiles pleasantly and comprehendingly as she struggles to sit up in bed. She does her best not to wince in front of him- everything up to her hips feels full of knives. He turns his head a little, as if to give her pain privacy. He wants me to know that he knows it hurts.
“What do you want?”
“I brought you a gift.” He rests the cane on two open palms but makes no forward movements. “I thought you'd like it.”
She frowns. “Aren't you afraid I'd use it to swing and make a run for it?”
“Oh, you wouldn't do that.” Mr. Pond shakes his smiling head in a show of mock disbelief. “You wouldn't do something that foolhardy.”
“You'd be surprised.” She eyes him over as he takes a few slow steps towards her bedside. “I once left a governor's house to follow a thief and an Indian into the woods. I'm capable of anything.”
“Is that how you ended up here?” Mr. Pond glances at her leg splints, silhouetted sharply under her sheets. She can't tell if his soft, lilting tone is sincere or patronizing. Possibly both. “How unpleasant.”
Clenna says nothing.
There is a chair by her bedside. Mr. Pond takes a seat with steady reassurance and leans the cane against his armrest, just out of reach.
“I've thought about your offer.”
Mr. Pond smiles knowingly.
“I'd like to try.” Clenna can feel herself squirm in the sheets. She can feel the uncertainty burning a hole in her heart. Mrs. Carruthers served me up as almost-a-lady before, she thinks, and now I’m here. “I'll give it the best I've got.”
Mr. Pond seems to turn this over in his mind. He finally smiles, satisfied.
“Good.”
Chapter 2: Decency and Indecency
Summary:
Clenna begins to accept the unacceptable.
Notes:
Chapter two of three! Next one should be coming out in a few days. Thanks again everyone!
Chapter Text
She does not want to stop feeling frightened of Cobbs Pond. He should always be to her the man who breathed in her panic-sweat like perfume and smiled as she writhed before him, bound up in silk curtain ties and careful, practiced knots.
She does not want Samuel Grant, the well-dressed businessman whose smiles are tight-lipped and whose eyes drill into those around them with expectation to be anything more than what he is; a man with money who wants more of it and is willing to buy her dresses and dance lessons to get it.
And yet, still.
Here is the kind of safety they offer her. I can lay down on my back on my fine sheets, she thinks, and run my hands and fingers across them like I am making snow angels. The sheets are white enough. I can do this, she thinks, bare skinned and bare breasted, before slipping into a nightgown, drinking in with the whole of her touch the immensity of finery she has found herself in. She can do all of this in the moonlight, feeling fine and desirable, and not worry who will be creeping into her bedroom. In this way Michael's loss is almost a relief. As much as she might still hold him in her heart in that aching way she’d prefer not to, and she imagines making love in a bed like this to be quite the experience, there is no one she has to worry about pleasing. No one will try and claim a right to her body.
They do teach her how to move, however. Once it has begun, Clenna cannot think of a better teacher than Cobbs Pond. The grace he moves with is so natural it feels feral. His imitation of men like Samuel Grant is careful and precise. He knows how to copy the slightest touches to refine his every movement, every word. It is only a pity that they are such obvious imitations. But he passes on his art to Clenna, who eats up his instruction hungerly. Like me, she thinks as he looks him over, at how daintily and carefully he tips his hat. It’s good to have company in a fellow pretender.
Pond smiles at her and takes her arm in a way that makes her believe every story of shapeshifting men and wolves raising abandoned children she has ever heard.
But in Pond she has hope. He tilts her chin and whispers low and dark “like a lady” and she begins to feel in rise in her, as if he is summoning dignity from her bones. She rearranges her skirts and learns how to walk again. “Properly.” He admonishes, and for all the terror he keeps in his hands he teaches her strength.
They practice together, again and again, until her step never wavers.
He clasps his hands together in delight when she moves like silk from one side of the room to another. She's flushed in mutual triumph. “My dear pet,” the words rush out of his grinning mouth, redefining everything between them in an instant- “You’re excellent.”
And she knows he is right.
They sit at dinner every evening, the three of them, when her leg is good enough. The first night is the worst, but it gets better quickly. The ache in her leg has turned tender, almost thoughtful. The dining room is lavish, even if they only use a fraction of the table. The silverware alone would have made the girl she used to be back in London swoon. It surprises her how much as changed. Now she puts it to her lips every evening without thought.
At first, Mr. Grant has to be convinced to take interest in her. Pond, who is now after an incalculable amount of time practicing dance and speech and walking has become just ‘Pond’ in her mind instead of Mr. Pond, looks him over with a fondness that betrays no annoyance. He wants him to look up, to notice how nicely she is sitting, raising food to her lips, how daintily he has taught her to bite. Its a longing for him to approve of her they both share. Mr. Grant is otherwise absorbed.
“Books at table?” Pond doesn't chide, only brings it up as if describing a bit of scenery. “You wouldn't want to be rude to Clenna.”
“You're the one teaching her manners.” Mr. Grant smiles and sends the books and papers away with a wave of his hand, as congenial as a good host telling a joke.
“She’ll learn from your fine example.” It’s an honest compliment. Pond is practically brimming with constant admiration for Mr. Grant. This is the first time he's said something like that out loud.
“In part.” There’s a small nod to all of Pond’s hard work.
“Naturally.” An equally subtle, soundless chuckle.
I'm right here, Clenna thinks, offended. You’d think there’s no one else in the room. But Mr. Grant looks to her briefly, and smiles, as if to invite her to laugh with him.
“So,” He begins, in that slow and easy-going way of his. “Miss Dolan, how are you finding your instruction?”
Pond’s eyes flit to hers instantly, and Clenna begins to understand what Mr. Grant was inviting her to laugh at. “It’s all well enough.”
“I see,” Mr. Grant smiles. He does that too often. “I’m sure it’s taxing work, though hopefully not too taxing.”
He means my leg. It’s a pleasant kind of concern. “It’s easy when you have such a dedicated and observant teacher.”
They all know she means how Pond trails her softly, like the train of her dress, and corrects even the crook of her elbow. How he is always somewhere close, even when his lessons are over.
Pond smiles coyly.
“And you, Mr. Grant?”
He has not expected this. He blinks a little, but she is still there, sitting primly and poised at his dining table. “And I?”
“Yes, Mr. Grant. I trust your day has been a pleasant one?”
He smiles a little stiffly. “Productive.”
“I'm delighted to hear it.”
Pond and Mr. Grant exchange glances again. That's right, Clenna thinks, I'm here and I can be fine company. You’ll see.
It's an urge to be included so strong she does not pause to consider it odd.
It takes Mr. Grant a while before he begins to elaborate. She asks every evening, and his answers for some time stay bite-sized.
“Uneventful.” He mumbles, staring down at his plate- she could hear him pacing in the room above her.
“Enjoyable.” He nods sharply on another day. She recalls the small parade of well-dressed fur traders coming and going she was able to catch multi-colored glimpses of through a crack in the door.
“Distinctively disappointing.” He pronounces on another occasion and shoots Pond a wry smile that Clenna, who has watched him flash pleasantries across the table for weeks now, knows is absolutely vicious. That's two words.
“Everything will be fixed.” Pond murmurs, and his usually gentle voice sounds even softer somehow, like fresh rain. It startles her. “Don't worry.”
It's an intimate tone, one that makes skin prickle. Pond is dangerous on a good day, and his servile reassurances carry with them a promise that frightens. He's so- she begins to think, but stops herself. The right word doesn't come.
Tender? Kind? It's bizarre to be sitting here, trying to find the right word to describe the way one of the pair of men who took her in looks at the other. Abducted. She has to remind herself forcefully, not took me in, and not a pair either. Samuel Grant is as alone in this world as I am, only with a damn sight more money.
But the way Grant- that's Mr. Grant, she reminds herself- stares across the table at Pond it's hard to remember. Like he’s got expectations of the world he knows Pond can ensure are met, Clenna thinks, and it's almost jealous.
It shocked her when they first let her roam unattended. With the cane in her hand she is far more free than she expected to be. Pond makes it clear in that soft, unnerving way of his that she is not to wander off, but she has the house and the grounds to stroll and soon realizes the idea of walking outside the carefully-maintained gardens and out into the streets of Montreal makes her nervous. Another wise thing they have done. They haven't skimped in the slightest on what I’m dressed in, she thinks. Some good luck I’d have slipping away.
Indeed, not skimping is the least of it. When the time of the dinner with the Marquis draws closer they bring a seamstress to her, a talented one by Clenna’s measure, who accounts for her leg. This petite woman, sweet-smiling and round-hipped and good-natured, is the first woman Clenna has seen in the house who is not the wife of another businessman. Her touch is gentle. She moves to take her measurements with utmost care.
Her human warmth and closeness is so different from Pond and Mr. Grant it surprises her. There is something oddly comforting about being treated with such familiarity. The seamstress moves deftly and gracefully and the palms of her hands are lightly calloused. A working woman. Clenna feels less ashamed of her broken leg and the marks of wear on her own hands and feet. She smiles openly and directly when Clenna looks at her, as if to say there are no secrets and no judgements between people and their tailors.
The little comments the seamstress makes to herself in French as she measures each feature sound well-pleased, and make Pond laugh.
“What fabric?” She murmurs in a thick French accent once the measurements have been taken and they both emerge from behind the dressing screen. She brings out a book full of little pieces of cloth, all carefully indexed and sewn onto the parchment pages. The seamstress points to a few and watches with delight that almost equals Pond’s as she watches Clenna take them between her fingers.
Stunning, Clenna thinks. How can I even begin to make the right choice? And then- This is what we could have been wearing in London, Michael. This is what you promised me.
She looks to Pond, that constant shadow. “What do you think?”
Pond, who has been leaning lightly against a corner wall with an air more like a piece of decorative furniture than a man exchanges a brief glance with the seamstress and shrugs. “What compliments one’s features is always best.”
Clenna tries to nod comprehendingly. Perhaps that is why Pond is always wearing such odd sunset colors? She can't imagine him in a deep blue like the silk she runs her fingers through now. She looks to the seamstress.
“What do you think compliments me?” She doesn't mean to sound so timid pronouncing the words.
The seamstress looks delighted to answer.
Even with her limited French, Clenna knows she is calling her beautiful. The grin on Pond’s lips, all teeth, tells her the seamstress is right to say so. His pride makes her feel-
Something.
When she swans around the market square with Pond on her arm, she feels strange. In other towns, far across the ocean, I have dreamed dreams like this, she thinks. Pond is not Michael, but he keeps her safe from thieves. In this way, he is the opposite of Michael.
She feels strength in the curve of her neck and proud on Pond’s arm. His disinterested eyes survey her and seem pleased at what they see. Men have looked at her with love and hunger, with plans shining in their eyes, but not approval. Pond seems to take a kind of personal satisfaction when Grant grins at her success. He finally sees, she thinks, and something warm and soft rises up in her heart.
Pond watches her dance with Grant. This is clearly a test, she knows, but still Pond bobs his head in time with the music and the steps he has so painstakingly taught her and takes small, admiring glances at her dance partner while gesturing at her for a step change or spin. The way he stands, a little apart, is almost envious. I’m intruding, she can't help but think, but Grant beams at her in pride. It's worth it, somehow.
Over dinner they both beam a her proud like parents and there's not a doubt left in her mind. She belongs here now. Her fate is sealed.
Chapter 3: Love and Trade War
Chapter Text
“
So you owe him for that.
”
Grant responds when he hears of how the boy she longed for left her. It is not the kind of thing she expected him to say. Vengeance for all her troubles, of which there are so many- a dead brother, a cold and lonely imprisonment, a ruthless sea voyage, a dangerous escape, a broken leg, a penniless migration, a destitute existence in a sweatshop- had never occurred to her. She had been so focused on suffering through it all she had not stopped to consider if she wanted someone to pay for it.
She had not expected Grant to suggest it, either. With all his fine clothes and pleasant niceties, she had not thought he would be the kind to suggest that pain and hardship and the betrayal of love ought to be repaid in kind. Now, after living under his roof for some time, she begins to understand.
He was only suggesting a course of action he himself would gladly pursue.
She knows she sneaks around too much.
It's their fault
, she thinks darkly,
they keep too much from me.
Business is constantly on Grant’s lips and in front of his face, paper blotting out everything until Pond snatches away his attention. And even Pond, around her, is too concerned with proper diction and the right way to curtsy. She has to peer behind closed doors and through keyholes to understand them as men. And there is so much to understand.
She wonders if Pond ever looked at Grant with jealousy. Stared at his fine clothes and wondered what it would be like to have some of his own. But the thought is too strange- though Pond assures her he has a past before Mr. Grant they are permanents in her life, standing like statuary grouped together in her mind’s gallery forever. Grant without Pond is a trick the mind might play, Pond without Grant a mere illusion. They seem never far from each other's mind or speech even when the other is out of the room. The effect is that neither ever really seems to leave.
Clenna thinks she has seen Grant on his own once, while drunk and speaking of his mother, but even then she understands later that the warm, languid comfort in his limbs and the easy tipsy nod of his head are only reassurances that Pond is not far off. His comfort exists and grows in the shadow of another man. She knows she has never seen him alone before when she finds him wet and sticky and nauseous on the polished wood floor. He looks at his hands and she knows without asking that he is finally, awfully alone. He looks at his fingers as if something has been ripped from his grasp. She doesn't have to ask where Pond has gone- Grant has never looked so anguished, so separate before. The golden, dripping confidence is gone. The edges of his face seem clearer. She tells herself it's all this dark and moves the lamp in her hands closer.
“Mr. Grant?” She speaks his name as if hoping to summon him to himself, that man who always seemed to be laughing at something. A flicker of recognition passes through his eyes. She tries again. “Are you alright?”
It's one of those questions she's not sure Mr. Grant has been asked often. He seems to understand she is trying to communicate something to him, however, and he attempts in his own broken way to communicate back.
No words come out.
“We’ll need to get her body out and tossed in an alley.” There’s something stirring, some great pain rising in her chest to see him here.“They’ll all think… it was done by a stranger.”
A comprehending silence. It seems to swallow them all.
“You should get yourself cleaned up first, and then we’ll make a plan.” They share a brief nod. “In the meantime, I’ll get at scrubbing this floor.”
She helps him to stand. He stumbles out his first words, unsteady as a newborn fawn. “She pushed me too far.”
“It’s alright.” She says, even though it’s not.
He slips from her hands back out into the moonlight. She is alone, candle in hand, the dim gold of their precious hospitality somehow making everything more terrible. She breathes, reminds herself of London, and looks around at those stained floorboards.
Mrs. Carruthers is so much paler than before.
She thinks of the confident lady who fondled her face and sneered at her accent and gave her that second taste of what it felt like to wear silk. She thinks of the beautiful woman who fed her to the wolves. She had expected the poor little Irish lamb with the broken leg to be eaten alive. Clenna can almost imagine her saying so, with that captivating toss of her head and crisp English diction.
It’s a terrible sight. She throws Mrs. Carruthers’s veil over the face that stares vacantly ahead. She wonders if this is what Mrs. Carruthers had planned for Pond to see- hair matted with blood, a half-crushed skull, blood on silk. Something wells up in her stomach.
A survivor
, she thinks to herself for the first time.
That’s what I am. That’s the good I see in Grant, the hint of human kindness in Pond. A survivor.
She looks down at Elizabeth Carruthers with pain in her heart, but the thought makes a long evening of scrubbing down bloody floorboards bearable. It makes her unsurprised when Pond, freshly sprung from prison, arrives back on their doorstep, asking for Mr. Grant.
bentsage on Chapter 3 Sun 07 Oct 2018 12:47AM UTC
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Vanemis on Chapter 3 Mon 19 Nov 2018 12:54AM UTC
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avoidingdestiny on Chapter 3 Wed 23 Jan 2019 02:49AM UTC
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