Wherefore Weep I Then?

Content Warnings: Click here for warnings

"But though I am a daughter to his blood, I am not to his manners."

February 17th

Wake up. 

A gray, cloudy day. What time is it? Not late enough, I know that. I could go back to sleep - no. I can't hide from this.

Get up. Feet on the floor. Now, wash up, brush out my hair, put on a dress. Three things, Cecily. Just three more things.

Someone's been in to light the fire. Should I call the maid? No. I don't want her. I don't want help.

What color do I wear today? Gray? Or black? Black. They expect black. Black is respectful, appropriate. I'll wear black for Mother. Mother never surrendered her dignity to what he was.

Was.

Bertram's groggy march toward breakfast stalled in the doorway to the dining room.

He hadn't expected to see Cecily this morning.

Yesterday evening, her mother had grandfather had arrived unannounced, and Cecily had seemed to know immediately what this meant. She had excused Bertram from the conversation, but Lord Nowell had none-too-gently pulled him back in and dropped him at Cecily's side. Then, Lord Nowell had then announced that Cecily's father, who had been exiled to a secluded house to live out the unspeakable final stages of his illness, had died. Though Bertram strongly suspected it had not been a natural death, a look in his grandfather-in-law's eye had forbidden questions. Cecily herself hadn't had any. After only a few words more with her mother, she had retired for the evening.

A fleeting stab of guilt raised the question of whether he ought to have risen earlier today for her sake. As quickly as it had been born, the guilt died. His wife didn't need him to hold her hand. If she wanted to mourn at all, Cecily could do it on her own.

"Morning." He wouldn't be the one to call it 'good'. Death had a way of sinking ambivalence.

"Morning." Cecily looked up from her tea, which had long since turned cold. Her eyes were weary. "You'll have to ask a servant to bring breakfast back up if you're particularly hungry. I let them leave the bread and jam; I couldn't abide the smell of anything else."

"I like bread." Bertram liked other food better, but he could have a proper meal later. He sat down and prepared his first slice. Before he ate, he paused and looked over, somewhat hesitant. "I wasn't sure you would be here still."

"This is my home," she replied, an edge poking through her matter-of-fact tone. "Where else would I be?"

"With your family?"

"My mother went last night with my grandfather to meet the body halfway. They ought to be home tonight - at which point you and I will be expected to join the others." She raised a brow that quickly fell. Cecily felt disgustingly weak. "Until then, I would rather not be expected to grieve on command or accept sympathy."

"Understood." Bertram tore a second piece of bread in half but shoved both pieces in his mouth at once. His mother had never broken him of the habit of talking with his mouth full. As he spoke, his lips smacked. "They'll all remember your father was a miserable bastard soon enough. Reaped what he sowed."

Cecily flinched at the second comment. The first was only too accurate. Though he had not always been a monster, he had never been a good man. By nature, her father had been avaricious, selfish, and possessed of an ill-temper he could not control. His family had suffered worse than words at his hands more than once. Age, and with it a growing impatience to use his father's corpse as the final step-stone to greatness, had compounded his faults. When he had been forced by others to close the door to any potential for a son, Cecily's father had developed a strong, mercenary interest in her marriage prospects. Every mysterious and disastrous failure had only hardened his will to make a profit on his daughter. All this had provided fertile ground for a mind-wasting disease. He might still have gone mad without it.

Whatever punishment Sebastian Nowell had reaped from sowing his seed in every whore in Port Gale was over. The family he left behind would continue to shoulder the consequences of his actions. Cecily, who refused as a rule to torment herself over lost possibilities, had acted quickly to make the best of a diminishing hand on the marriage market. The result wasn't her ideal, but she was married and well enough. Cecily had taken that as a victory. Today, however, she couldn't help herself. Today, the injustice of it all, brought on by her selfish, angry father, meant something. She ought to have been outwardly solemn and disdainful in her heart, but she felt she was turned inside out.

"We reaped," she corrected him, "my mother and I. Even my grandfather. My father sowed, and the rest of us reaped the consequences."

"Like marrying your last choice of a husband? Couldn't even rub it in my cousin's face because you'd been to him first." Bertram's joke flowed from good intentions. It was the approach he would take to kick one of his friends up out of a rut.

"You were as good a choice as any. And I suppose," she said more quietly, "you deserve some sort of apology for our bit of deceit."

Bertram shrugged. "It doesn't matter. My parents are no asset to you in any sense of the word, in truth, and I like your family. They're good people." Even when your father was sinking the average. "I know I don't know them like you do, but I don't think they'll expect you to grieve. They seem smarter than that, or at least reasonable."

"Most of them are, but it isn't about intelligence. Grandfather is burying a fourth child, and Uncle Fabian has lost his last full sibling. Aunt Maria is too tender-hearted not to mourn, especially for Grandfather's sake."

"He doesn't seem like the mourning type to me."

"He has handled many more losses than this, but I doubt a callous ever forms on the heart. He had four children, three who grew up, by my grandmother, and Uncle Fabian and I are all that remain to show for it."

Bertram had to admit that sounded rather sad. He had no idea whether he would ever have children. Cecily had never broached the subject, and Bertram didn't have a strong enough preference either way to do it himself. If he did have children, he didn't want to live to bury them.

Trying to help, he pushed the conversation in a different direction. "Is he actually going to go through with making Fabian his heir?" Fabian Nowell displacing his brother had become an open secret despite the Nowells' efforts. The Gales hadn't cared very much once they discerned Sebastian Nowell's decline was the result of an illness and not a blood defect. To the family, Cecily still meant a dowry that would keep Bertram's line afloat for a few generations. However, Bertram had been under orders from Lord Gale, his uncle, to play dumb for Cecily's benefit and not mention it. Shit! "I mean, it just seems like he would."

"Why else would Fabian have bothered to marry a stranger at thirty-seven? I can scarcely believe the entire matter was meant to be secret when they took such a stupidly obvious action." Cecily finished her cold tea. When she set her cup down, it trembled against the saucer. "You can stop pretending. I know that you already know. Only a fool wouldn't."

"Then I am a fool. I know nothing - well, almost. I know I would choose you over Fabian. It's stupid that your grandfather wouldn't."

Cecily shook her head. "It's not so simple as that one choice. The family name goes through the male line. Our house law prefers male heirs - not unlike your own. Your father would inherit ahead of Rosaline, though her father was born first, wouldn't he?"

He shuddered at the idea. "Probably, but house law isn't the law outright." Between naps during lectures, he had learned that much at the Académie. "House law is tradition and agreement within the family."

"All laws are tradition and agreement. Our families agree that the line goes through males, and others agree the line goes through females. No laws at all exist but for our belief in them and their consequences. How many murders and other crimes go unpunished because they are considered just, despite the letter of the law? At least God will not judge my father better than a virtuous peasant because my father was to have been Lord Nowell. That value is our construct. They all are, every last unearned value we award. We do these things to ourselves!"

Oh, Goddamn it all to Hell. Is the sky falling, too? He would have bet all of his money and his cock that he would see the end of days before he saw his wife shed a tear. Yet, here she was, weeping at the breakfast table. 

Odd that it was at breakfast, he thought. Breakfast had been an infrequent pleasure at best in his parents' household, even when he came home from the Académie insisting he couldn't live without it. It was one of the few things he and Cecily had in common, one of the few things they regularly did together. Expressing feelings was not another of those rare things.

"Cecily?"

She recoiled from the pity in his voice. Wiping her eyes, she hauled herself to her feet and tried to straighten her spine. "I'm sorry. You will waste quite enough time on this mess as it is, Bertram. Have your breakfast in peace while you can."

"Cecily, wait." Bertram caught up with her before she could put a hand on the door. "Look, you and I are going to be together a lot more often for a while. That's what we signed on for. Neither of us wants me mucking up your grieving by getting involved, pretending I can help you when we know I won't. The only thing I can do is not make it worse. Would you tell me that much, just enough that I don't accidentally make it worse?"

Cecily's paused thoughtfully. She and Bertram lived as comfortably as two people who had little in common could. Privacy was respected, distance kept, and civility maintained almost continuously. His basic question felt almost intimate in comparison, and on a rare occasion that called for it. She would answer and remember that he asked. "I feel like I've lost an aching tooth. I am relieved of a source of pain, and my life will be better for it. And yet, something that was part of me, a lifelong fact of my existence which was not always painful, is no longer there. I've lost something I didn't want. I cannot stop noticing that it is gone." Exasperated with herself, Cecily exhaled and pursed her lips. "I hope that made some sense."

"It did," he replied honestly, "in its way. Thanks."

"You're welcome."

They lingered at the door in uncertainty. Bertram was glad for the insight, but it felt very strange to hear Cecily's feelings, not only her logic. "Is there someone you might want to talk about this with? Before we have to join your family?"

Cecily started to shake her head but then stopped. There was someone she wasn't likely to see much of in the mourning process who might understand a lost parent and a difficult father, even if they were not one and the same. She wasn't sure they were very good friends as of yet, but they were friends of some sort. And this person was just the sort of friend Cecily needed right now: someone sympathetic but entirely unlike herself. "I think there might be."

Next Post: "Praising what is lost makes the remembrance dear."