Work Text:
Daddy insists that she be wed in white, but Anne has a strong streak towards honesty that even Warwick blood can’t dilute, so she and Isabel stay up until three the night before the ceremony, sewing a trim of tiny fabric roses across the neckline of Anne’s wedding gown.
“You’re being ridiculous,” complains Isabel. “You might at least make them white, to match your gown.”
“Mm,” says Anne, but fortunately it’s too late to change anything now. For once the thought brings comfort instead of despair. Isabel lets out a frustrated sigh, her fingers never pausing, and Anne is married the next morning with a noose of scarlet rosebuds around her neck. If Daddy minds that she’s ruined the designer gown acquired at such short notice and at such high cost, he says nothing about it as they march down the aisle implacably towards Edward Lancaster.
She thinks once (no, twice) to tell him the truth.
The first time is the one she cares to remember. She’s young, and the test is newly positive in her bathroom, and the Yorks have fled the country yet again after their latest scandal. She has no address, no phone number, no options.
The second time comes later, when the enormity of what she’s just agreed to sinks in. She wants him to know what he’s forfeited, what he’ll never have. She imagines what she’ll say, how casually she’ll mention the baby and Edward’s most chivalrous proposal, how she’ll dwell on every detail of the wedding plans. In the end she decides against it, and only sends a wedding invitation, without further explanation, to his sister in Canada. It’ll reach him somehow.
She is a Warwick, after all. Cruelty, and how to effect it most efficiently, comes as second nature.
Margot Lancaster’s hair started to go grey the day her husband left office thanks to Rick Warwick’s smear campaign, but one would hardly know it from the bright auburn waves she flaunts in fashion magazines and The Financial Times alike. The secret is this: Margot dyes it every morning, with the same ruthless precision she applies to everything else.
Anne, fascinated, watches her sometimes, until the morning Margot’s gaze turns away from the mirror to meet Anne’s instead. It is shrewd, and slate gray, and makes all sensible thought in Anne’s mind quiver away in fright.
“Very impressive,” Anne babbles, and, for lack of anything else to say: “I always thought it was real.”
Margot quirks an eyebrow up, amused, and does not say: Poor child, to think anything in our world real. She does not need to. Anne thinks it for her, and hates herself for needing the reminder.
Later, she will try to remember how Edward looked forward to the baby, so often it becomes a mere platitude. But the truth is that he does; buying countless clothes and toys, bringing home a new extravagance every day, all for another man’s child.
Anne doesn’t fool herself for a moment that his enthusiasm is prompted by feelings for her. He married her to put Rick Warwick so deeply in his debt that he would never let his loyalties shift with constituents or lobbyists or caprice. She suspects, though, that Edward, haunted by rumors of illegitimacy, might have wanted to spare another new life the same fate. It is what speaks best of him, this kindness; it is what makes Anne think this marriage might work after all.
It is why the night she wakes up to find blood blooming on the sheets is the beginning of the end for them.
Smiling was never something she thought she would have to learn.
Once, there had been kittens and books and a low voice droning on about political science, and the corners of her mouth had drifted upwards naturally, but now at the rally Edward’s fingers dig into her shoulder and Margot gives her a cold-eyed smirk. From her position at their side, they are understandable; Edward is terrified and Margot, terrible nonchalance notwithstanding, not much better. Anne forces herself into an expression less rigid and more regal.
It becomes easier eventually.
Except there are times when they expect her to kiss a baby for the cameras. Except there are times when someone has hair the wrong shade of black, or holds their shoulder the wrong way. Except there are times when a girl in the crowd looks too carefree for her own good.
Anne smiles anyway. She learns how, with time.
She never does find herself in Anne Lancaster, who’s an exemplary dinner companion, reasonably well-dressed, and always supportive of her husband, or in Anne Warwick (who will always be her mother instead). But Anne Neville, who’s published a few slim volumes of poetry and who teaches the occasional class in English literature at the local university, comes closest to being right.
One night in bed Edward turns to face her as she’s preparing a lecture on eighteenth century poetry, and brusquely commands: “Read me something.” He is trying, in his own way, to understand her, and futile though it might be, she recites what she’ll realize later were words she read to another young man sprawled across her bed:
“And fare thee well, my only Luve /And fare thee well, a while! /And I will come again, my Luve, /Tho’ it were ten thousand mile.”
(It sounds like prophecy. Anne prays it isn’t.)