Edie arrives at Langford house
Mar. 3rd, 2022 11:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kadharononI'm still trying to figure out what Edie's narrative voice sounds like, and more details about her past. I suspect that her parents were government magicians, and they both died when she was still quite young because they were part of the government force that took out the last Great House that went mad.
Edie woke up from her nap with a start. At some point while she had been sleeping, it had gotten very cold in the car, to the point where even her fur coat and the wide stole it had come with couldn’t keep the chill from her bones.
“Sleep well?” asked her brother-in-law, Charles, unwarrantedly sarcastic.
Edie didn’t answer. Instead, she stared out at the falling snow, briefly mesmerized by the swirling flakes as the weak electric headlights of the car illuminated them. She put her hand to her throat and fingered the charmstone that dangled from the pearl necklace she wore. “I don’t think we’ll make Bitterford while it’s still safe to drive,” she said, eying the drifts that were already forming.
Charles sighed. “No,” he said bluntly.
“So are you going to do anything about it?” Edie swallowed hard and shut her eyes. That had been too much staring out the window.
“I’m not going to have another fight with you tonight,” Charles said, sounding exhausted. “So stop trying to pick one, all right?”
“I just wanted to know if you’ve got a place to go, or if we’ll be begging hospitality from strangers,” she snapped. Edie wasn’t familiar with this part of the country, but Charles had spoken of it fondly in the past; surely if he had come here often as a young man, he would have an acquaintance or two in the area who they could shelter from the storm with.
“M’friend Kit,” Charles said brusquely. “His house is big enough that we’ll hardly be noticed.”
Edie frowned, trying to call up some mental image of their prospective host. She had met more than a few of Charles’ friends over the near-decade she’d been married to Trevor, but she didn’t remember any Kits among them. “Have we been introduced?”
Charles laughed, somewhat unkindly. “No. No, Kit never leaves Langford House if he can avoid it.”
“Why not?”
“You’ll understand when you see him.”
That, Edie thought, was more than a bit foreboding. She opened her eyes long enough to shoot a look at Charles’ face, but what little she could make out of his expression in the dark of the car told her nothing new; merely that he was cold, and tired, and annoyed that he had to leave his own business behind to chase after his feckless younger brother. And no amount of arguing on Edie’s part had been able to convince him that it wasn’t necessary, that she didn’t care, that if Trevor wanted an end to this marriage then as far as she was concerned all he had to do was end it.
It all came down to income and inheritance. Edie had come into her marriage with a truly vast fortune, much of which had been underutilized at the time. After an unhappy decade of marriage, so much of that vast capital was invested in Verricker business concerns that to remove it would ruin the family entirely, and no reassurances from Edie that she would take her time withdrawing her support should she and Trevor divorce were enough.
So here she was, trapped in a car with her brother-in-law, searching for a runaway husband she didn’t want back, the pair of them pretending—in a distant, civilized fashion—that they didn’t know who Trevor had run off with, or that he’d done it because he was just as unhappy in this marriage as Edie was.
If only… Edie fingered the charmstone at her neck. She had been wearing it for three years now, waiting for her chance at the one thing that might make her husband’s family willing to allow them that divorce. But her husband was uninterested—no, incapable—and her brother-in-law… well, he might not have recognized the charmstone for what it was, but it was clear he suspected something. For years now, he’d taken care to not leave her alone with any man other than his brother for much more than five minutes, and those times he forgot, he would thunder back in to the room to glare ominously, as if Edie were going to fuck a man she didn’t know well in a brightly-lit sitting room in the middle of a party at someone else’s house. He was paying the household servants to keep an eye on her too, she was sure of it. And he had decided that he didn’t dare leave her unsupervised for however long it took him to hunt his brother down.
Of course, if Charles really wanted to make certain the baby who inherited half her fortune was actually related to him, he could have stepped up and done something about it himself. But he was married, and shockingly honorable about that sort of thing. On Leah’s part there might be no hard feelings—she and Edie had been close friends even before Edie had married into the family, and Leah had suggested the idea herself when it became clear that Trevor wasn’t going to do the job—but Charles refused to be unfaithful to his wife, even with her permission, even for such a noble cause as laying full legal claim to half of Edie’s inheritance.
“Ah. Here we are,” Charles said, and Edie felt the car swing round. She opened her eyes again to find they were pulling through an open gate. The landscape beyond was hard to make out in the snow and the dark, but she thought it seemed rather wild and unkempt for the grounds of a house large enough that two extra people would hardly be noticed in it. After a minute or so of them creeping down the narrow drive, the dark shape of a house loomed ahead of them.
Edie kept her gaze fixed on that slowly-approaching facade, hoping it would help with her carsickness. It didn’t, but at least it gave her something else to think about. The house itself was even larger than Charles had lead her to expect, a massive hulk of a building, its outline graceless and threatening in the dark. Only a dimly lit set of windows on the first floor gave any indication that it was occupied.
Gravel mixed with snow crunched beneath the wheels of the car as Charles brought them to a halt on the sweeping drive, right near a massive door. “Wait here a moment,” he told her, not giving her a chance to ask any further questions as he opened the car door and swung out into the snow. Edie watched as he made his way to the door and knocked on it, but she could not see who answered it. Not that the owner would be the one answering the door; no doubt he had someone else to do that for him. Probably several someone elses, in a house this size.
Charles returned to the car with a slim red-headed man in tow. “Get your bag out of the back,” he told Edie, coming around to open her door as the man who had come with him slid into the drivers seat of the car. “Hiram’s going to stow the car.”
With a short, hurried nod at the man she assumed was Hiram, Edie slid out of the car and went to the rear of it to fetch her overnight bag. The moment she was out in the cold, she began shivering and couldn’t stop, not even when Charles opened the door for her and ushered her in to the warmth ahead of him. But by then she was shivering for a different reason.
Langford House was a Great House, and Charles had just let her walk into it completely unprepared.
The weight of it hit her the moment she stepped through the door. She shut her eyes and shuddered, barely able to move; it was only Charles’s hand in the center of her back, shoving her along, that forced her to make room for him to follow her inside and close the door behind them both. Edie distantly heard Charles say something—“Come on now, Edie, he doesn’t bite,” she thought he’d said—and somehow, she managed to force her eyes open just far enough to see what Charles was talking about.
There was a man standing there in the hall, waiting for them. Short—shorter than her by several inches, and she wasn’t exactly a tall woman—and barrel-chested, and leaning on a cane he seemed to actually need, dark haired and well-dressed. And his face…
He had a heavy, glowering brow, frowning over unevenly set eyes. His entire face was crooked and uneven, his jaw lopsided, his nose strong and hooked. His upper lip was pulled into a sneer, one that made her want to apologize, to justify her actions, to tell him it was the house she couldn’t bear, and not the sight of him. But the breath had been pressed from her lungs by the weight of the centuries of the family who had lived and died within these walls, by the weight of the great working that had bound the house to them and which, even now, beat strong and steady in her sight, centered on the man standing in front of them.
It was too much in her current state. Edie had to close her eyes again, and felt her bag drop from her nerveless fingers as she half-swooned. Charles let out a shout of surprise, but managed to catch her before she fell, his arm firmly around her waist as he kept her on her feet.
“In here,” an unfamiliar voice said. Charles scooped Edie off her feet and, a moment later, deposited her on something soft. It was warmer here than it had been in the hall, but she still found herself shivering uncontrollably. A fire-warmed blanket was laid over her next, and she heard the murmur of voices, discussing what was to be done with her. But the warmth of the blanket was having its way with her, and, between one barely-heard word and the next, she slipped from consciousness.
Edie woke up from her nap with a start. At some point while she had been sleeping, it had gotten very cold in the car, to the point where even her fur coat and the wide stole it had come with couldn’t keep the chill from her bones.
“Sleep well?” asked her brother-in-law, Charles, unwarrantedly sarcastic.
Edie didn’t answer. Instead, she stared out at the falling snow, briefly mesmerized by the swirling flakes as the weak electric headlights of the car illuminated them. She put her hand to her throat and fingered the charmstone that dangled from the pearl necklace she wore. “I don’t think we’ll make Bitterford while it’s still safe to drive,” she said, eying the drifts that were already forming.
Charles sighed. “No,” he said bluntly.
“So are you going to do anything about it?” Edie swallowed hard and shut her eyes. That had been too much staring out the window.
“I’m not going to have another fight with you tonight,” Charles said, sounding exhausted. “So stop trying to pick one, all right?”
“I just wanted to know if you’ve got a place to go, or if we’ll be begging hospitality from strangers,” she snapped. Edie wasn’t familiar with this part of the country, but Charles had spoken of it fondly in the past; surely if he had come here often as a young man, he would have an acquaintance or two in the area who they could shelter from the storm with.
“M’friend Kit,” Charles said brusquely. “His house is big enough that we’ll hardly be noticed.”
Edie frowned, trying to call up some mental image of their prospective host. She had met more than a few of Charles’ friends over the near-decade she’d been married to Trevor, but she didn’t remember any Kits among them. “Have we been introduced?”
Charles laughed, somewhat unkindly. “No. No, Kit never leaves Langford House if he can avoid it.”
“Why not?”
“You’ll understand when you see him.”
That, Edie thought, was more than a bit foreboding. She opened her eyes long enough to shoot a look at Charles’ face, but what little she could make out of his expression in the dark of the car told her nothing new; merely that he was cold, and tired, and annoyed that he had to leave his own business behind to chase after his feckless younger brother. And no amount of arguing on Edie’s part had been able to convince him that it wasn’t necessary, that she didn’t care, that if Trevor wanted an end to this marriage then as far as she was concerned all he had to do was end it.
It all came down to income and inheritance. Edie had come into her marriage with a truly vast fortune, much of which had been underutilized at the time. After an unhappy decade of marriage, so much of that vast capital was invested in Verricker business concerns that to remove it would ruin the family entirely, and no reassurances from Edie that she would take her time withdrawing her support should she and Trevor divorce were enough.
So here she was, trapped in a car with her brother-in-law, searching for a runaway husband she didn’t want back, the pair of them pretending—in a distant, civilized fashion—that they didn’t know who Trevor had run off with, or that he’d done it because he was just as unhappy in this marriage as Edie was.
If only… Edie fingered the charmstone at her neck. She had been wearing it for three years now, waiting for her chance at the one thing that might make her husband’s family willing to allow them that divorce. But her husband was uninterested—no, incapable—and her brother-in-law… well, he might not have recognized the charmstone for what it was, but it was clear he suspected something. For years now, he’d taken care to not leave her alone with any man other than his brother for much more than five minutes, and those times he forgot, he would thunder back in to the room to glare ominously, as if Edie were going to fuck a man she didn’t know well in a brightly-lit sitting room in the middle of a party at someone else’s house. He was paying the household servants to keep an eye on her too, she was sure of it. And he had decided that he didn’t dare leave her unsupervised for however long it took him to hunt his brother down.
Of course, if Charles really wanted to make certain the baby who inherited half her fortune was actually related to him, he could have stepped up and done something about it himself. But he was married, and shockingly honorable about that sort of thing. On Leah’s part there might be no hard feelings—she and Edie had been close friends even before Edie had married into the family, and Leah had suggested the idea herself when it became clear that Trevor wasn’t going to do the job—but Charles refused to be unfaithful to his wife, even with her permission, even for such a noble cause as laying full legal claim to half of Edie’s inheritance.
“Ah. Here we are,” Charles said, and Edie felt the car swing round. She opened her eyes again to find they were pulling through an open gate. The landscape beyond was hard to make out in the snow and the dark, but she thought it seemed rather wild and unkempt for the grounds of a house large enough that two extra people would hardly be noticed in it. After a minute or so of them creeping down the narrow drive, the dark shape of a house loomed ahead of them.
Edie kept her gaze fixed on that slowly-approaching facade, hoping it would help with her carsickness. It didn’t, but at least it gave her something else to think about. The house itself was even larger than Charles had lead her to expect, a massive hulk of a building, its outline graceless and threatening in the dark. Only a dimly lit set of windows on the first floor gave any indication that it was occupied.
Gravel mixed with snow crunched beneath the wheels of the car as Charles brought them to a halt on the sweeping drive, right near a massive door. “Wait here a moment,” he told her, not giving her a chance to ask any further questions as he opened the car door and swung out into the snow. Edie watched as he made his way to the door and knocked on it, but she could not see who answered it. Not that the owner would be the one answering the door; no doubt he had someone else to do that for him. Probably several someone elses, in a house this size.
Charles returned to the car with a slim red-headed man in tow. “Get your bag out of the back,” he told Edie, coming around to open her door as the man who had come with him slid into the drivers seat of the car. “Hiram’s going to stow the car.”
With a short, hurried nod at the man she assumed was Hiram, Edie slid out of the car and went to the rear of it to fetch her overnight bag. The moment she was out in the cold, she began shivering and couldn’t stop, not even when Charles opened the door for her and ushered her in to the warmth ahead of him. But by then she was shivering for a different reason.
Langford House was a Great House, and Charles had just let her walk into it completely unprepared.
The weight of it hit her the moment she stepped through the door. She shut her eyes and shuddered, barely able to move; it was only Charles’s hand in the center of her back, shoving her along, that forced her to make room for him to follow her inside and close the door behind them both. Edie distantly heard Charles say something—“Come on now, Edie, he doesn’t bite,” she thought he’d said—and somehow, she managed to force her eyes open just far enough to see what Charles was talking about.
There was a man standing there in the hall, waiting for them. Short—shorter than her by several inches, and she wasn’t exactly a tall woman—and barrel-chested, and leaning on a cane he seemed to actually need, dark haired and well-dressed. And his face…
He had a heavy, glowering brow, frowning over unevenly set eyes. His entire face was crooked and uneven, his jaw lopsided, his nose strong and hooked. His upper lip was pulled into a sneer, one that made her want to apologize, to justify her actions, to tell him it was the house she couldn’t bear, and not the sight of him. But the breath had been pressed from her lungs by the weight of the centuries of the family who had lived and died within these walls, by the weight of the great working that had bound the house to them and which, even now, beat strong and steady in her sight, centered on the man standing in front of them.
It was too much in her current state. Edie had to close her eyes again, and felt her bag drop from her nerveless fingers as she half-swooned. Charles let out a shout of surprise, but managed to catch her before she fell, his arm firmly around her waist as he kept her on her feet.
“In here,” an unfamiliar voice said. Charles scooped Edie off her feet and, a moment later, deposited her on something soft. It was warmer here than it had been in the hall, but she still found herself shivering uncontrollably. A fire-warmed blanket was laid over her next, and she heard the murmur of voices, discussing what was to be done with her. But the warmth of the blanket was having its way with her, and, between one barely-heard word and the next, she slipped from consciousness.
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Date: 2022-03-03 05:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-03 08:28 pm (UTC)