Ladies of Esteem: Part Two

"Put thyself into the trick of singularity."

September 16th 

Juliette approached the great hall with her head held high. Inside her, trepidation sparked and ate away at her confidence, one crumb at a time. Beyond the doors, the war council awaited her arrival. It was comprised of good, trustworthy people: her husband, her siblings and their spouses, her aunt and uncle Gale. These were people she loved. Their opinions and good counsel, offered in earnest, proved that they loved her as well. She didn't want any of them to be disappointed; after this meeting, some could be.

Hermia sat at the foot of the table. Her advancing pregnancy got the better of her moods and energy more days than not. Sidelong looks among the rest of the family had long speculated that she might again be carrying twins. Puck was at her side day and night. He had arranged for leave from his mother well before Consort's death; Titania had been only too happy to have an opportunity to begin instructing her daughter and successor. The seat opposite Puck's was for Georgiana, though it was filled but half the time. By Juliette's request, it was currently occupied. Georgiana's calming influence on Tybalt was more important today than any household matter ever could be.

In the middle of the table, Lord and Lady Gale opposed one another. The Gales had a clear family interest in deposing Goneril in favor of Juliette. Greater importance, however, flowed from their years as caring uncle and aunt to Juliette and her siblings. They each also brought valuable insight to the discussions. Stephano was an influential lord in his own right, and Eleanor had served as an interim ambassador to the Fae for nearly two years. The latter fact had badly strained the Gales' marriage, but they had so far kept their conflicts out of these meetings.

Flanking Juliette's seat at the head of the table were her husband and brother. Fitzwilliam was the only other person who knew what today's meeting would bring. She hoped for a smile from him as he helped her into her seat, but none came. He was apprehensive, she supposed. So am I.

And he was, but even more frustration festered inside him. This tumultuous circus was unnecessary. If the late Lady Capulet had only changed a handful of words in her will in the three years between her daughter's death and her own, the succession would have been settled. Juliette would have been provided the loyal regent and proper instruction in her duties she deserved. Fitzwilliam made no allowance for fear. Forewarned was forearmed. If Juliette and her siblings had something to fear of Lady Goneril and Lady Regan, that was all the more reason for the succession to have been made clear. Instead, those ladies had power and practical experience, and they were entrenched in their position. Laying siege to it would be tremendously dangerous, and righteousness would not protect Juliette and her supporters. A properly-worded will might have.

Juliette thanked everyone for their attendance while the men retook their seats.

"Most of us do live here," Hermia joked - from above the ankles, at least.

Diplomatically, Stephano added, "And even for those of us who do not, it is our pleasure."

Lips pursed, Juliette tried to smile in return. "Thank you, uncle." Any pleasure in this meeting would not last long. "I have been considering our strategy quite a bit recently. I called you all here to inform you of some changes that will be made - one particular change, to tell the truth. I have decided that Fitzwilliam will be our primary advocate before Lady Iden."

Silence blanketed the room. Puck and Georgiana shared a strange look between them. Tybalt and Hermia, for all their disagreements, quite similarly expressed disapproval and frustration toward their sister. Ever at home with silence, Fitzwilliam looked at nothing in particular. Lord Gale was the closest to speaking but was silenced by a fearsome look from his wife.

"Your overwhelming support for my decision is noted and appreciated," Juliette muttered.

"You aren't supporting us," Hermia snapped back. "Did you expect us to cheer?"

"I expected you to understand I am doing the best I can for us all."

"You aren't! You're handing us off because you're afraid." Hermia sniffled and leaned into her hand, pressing the supporting elbow hard into the table. "Well, we're all afraid, too."

The sisters bickered. Each wanted support and security, and each thought the other was stubbornly refusing to provide it. Old arguments simmered just below the surface.

"How can you be a leader if you're afraid of leading?"

"How am I a leader at all," Juliette scoffed, "if everyone is afraid of following me?"

"We're afraid of losing our home. We're afraid of spending decades afraid, waiting for that dreadful bitch to either come after us or die!"

"Which is precisely why-"

Tybalt cut off his sister with a quiet word: "Jule."

"Don't," Juliette warned.

"Jule, she's right. You're our lady, our leader." His eyes flickered toward Fitzwilliam briefly. "Goneril is already bound to argue that you aren't dedicated to the family. You'll be handing her an immediate example if you hand this off to an outsider."

"My husband is not an outsider!"

Under the table, Fitzwilliam touched his wife's hand. "He isn't entirely wrong, dearest. I don't consider myself a Capulet or have any desire to be one. But I must count my wife, my sister, my closest friend, my niece and nephew, and any daughters I may have as Capulets, all of them." He looked to Tybalt and held his gaze. "But I do believe 'outsider' is an exaggeration."

"Very much an exaggeration," Georgiana ventured. "He's been here these six weeks, working as hard as anyone else. It's not right to use his name against him."

Tybalt wilted. "It isn't-"

"It is," Juliette interrupted. "Am I Lady Capulet or am I not, brother?" She tried out her most imperious look.

It didn't work, not on Tybalt. 'Afraid? I'm not afraid of you. Under the blood, it's just you, my brother. I see you.' This time, I see you, Jule. "Everyone here knows that you are, but the rest? We're going to war. They won't come to our side if we don't have a leader - one leader."

"And is it leading to tug at every branch with my own hands or is it leading to see the way is properly cleared for us all?"

Hermia sighed, "We're not going on a damned hike."

"No, we're going to a court of law. I don't have an education in law; my husband does. Why is this so hard to understand?"

Stephano put on a kinder face than his younger niece could manage. "Juliette, you are selling yourself short. I assure you, a degree in law alone does not a proper advocate make."

"What would you and your mathematics degree know of it?" Eleanor scoffed. "Do we have anyone at this table who can get closer? Let's see. Tybalt, my darling, what did you study?"

"History, but-"

"And you, Puck?"

"Governance and Diplomacy."

"And as we ladies are not welcome at the Académie, I believe our champion is clear."

Hermia begged to differ. "Lady Iden herself has no degree from the Académie, and neither does Lady Capitano or any of the other ladies who are the equal - or superior - of the male jurists. Sister, you can speak very well. It will be a credit to us. Fitzwilliam, I mean no insult, but you must see that it would be better if you prepare her, not act for her."

"Words are words," Tybalt agreed, "and she can deliver them with better engagement."

"Impressions will be vitally important." Stephano emphasized the complexities to his wife in particular. "What we know doesn't matter in comparison with how things appear to the world at large. If Juliette has her husband, who didn't take the name-"

"The name, is it?" his wife interrupted, feigning ignorance. "Silly me, I never suspected it was the name. I suppose that's safer, lest the remainder of womankind learn they aren't inherently inferior... or the minority with the name realize they don't have to make stupid choices to preserve their peculiar, fragile power."

Hermia sighed and mentally withdrew from the conversation. When Puck brushed her arm under the table, she didn't acknowledge him. The small but bitter lump she was swallowing said she had gone astray, but how? Even her mother would have acted for herself! Juliette had to see reason. But then why do I feel so wrong? She ruminated while slowly drifting into awareness of her aunt and uncle's spat. 

"... We're trying to secure our niece's seat, Eleanor, not mark the miles on the high road. This is not the time for this!"

"It is exactly the time, Stephano, and I'll be damned before I let anyone say a woman has to be pleasing to be right!"

"And I'll thank you not to put words into my mouth."

Georgiana edged up into the silence to propose a break in the discussion, to allow tempers to cool. The others muttered agreements, but none took the initiative to stand. A few awkward minutes passed.

"We may as well keep talking, rather than just glaring at each other under false pretenses." Juliette waved her hand, inviting the combatants to take aim.

Tybalt rarely needed an invitation to charge headfirst, whether into a battle or a wall. "Perhaps you should start. Perhaps your silent advocate only means to give you a chance to hear your own potential."

Fitzwilliam glared across the table at his brother-in-law with an expression brimming with annoyance and hard as stone.

"Or is there something else you meant by saying nothing?"

"No-one would disagree with her talents. She has many more than I ever will. Tell me, Tybalt, could you teach her to fight?"

"I have." And if you were anyone else, I'd pray she'd have an occasion to bloody your smug face.

"I meant something more than how to blacken my eyes for your amusement. Could you, given a month or two, teach her to swing a sword as well as you do? To perform as well in true combat?"

Tybalt had to admit he could not.

"But she can hold a knife as well as anyone, can she not? Why could you not teach her to fight with a sword, to lead an army?"

"She has me to fight for her. And thank God for it, I'd say, if you believe holding a knife has anything to do with swords."

"The ability to speak no more makes one a competent lawyer than the ability to use a dinner knife makes one a swordsman. In both instances, such hubris comes at a dear price."

"If we accept that as true," Stephano countered, "then why have you been silent on this important point until now? Why not raise your concerns?"

Fitzwilliam shifted in his chair, prompting three lips to be bitten. Puck, Georgiana, and Juliette all knew how that shift usually carried him onto his feet and across the room to a window or fireplace - someplace safe to cast a glower and recompose himself. This time, he had to stay put, his tense hands folded flat against his stomach. The three all wondered what his aborted silence would sound like. "This is Juliette's domain." He strained for politeness. "Like the rest of you, I am here to serve. Thus far, my service was the same whether I prepared for myself or another to speak. When she asked my opinion, I gave it. Imposing it on her before that seemed unwise."

"But your silence was bad counsel."

He barely checked the natural urge to roll his eyes. "If we had come too close to the day? Yes. If she had asked me directly and I did not caution her? Certainly. As it happened, and with a month of preparation ahead of us? Certainly not." He felt a reply coming from Juliette's uncle and stared it down, killing it before it crossed the other man's tongue. "Learning to take counsel is a vital part of leadership, doubtless."

"But learning to make one's own decisions is even more so." Juliette had jumped into her husband's pause almost gracefully. "When it is necessary or expedient, whenever I wish to, I will speak. Let there be no doubt. But just as I would entrust a battle to my best warrior," she said, aiming a curious look at her brother, "I entrust the lead of this charge to my best advocate."

Long past the days of morning sickness, Hermia thought she would be sick on the spot. Juliette still didn't understand - perhaps she couldn't. Her home was waiting, win or lose. She could look after the dearest drop of her own blood simply by opening up that home. If not at the manor, Hermia didn't know where her third child would be born. She didn't know where she could hide her Fae husband and her 'half-breed' children where they would be safe from Goneril and Regan's scorn. The acrimony that separated her from Miranda would only grow if Goneril triumphed. Hermia would have to learn to live without her cousin; she couldn't make peace with the Devil. "We entrusted it to you, Juliette. Not to him. To you."

"And I trust-"

"God Almighty, do you ever listen? You're my sister. You're my older sister," Hermia sobbed, "and I need you to act like it! I'm afraid. I'm so afraid for all of us, Juliette. Why don't you understand that?"

Juliette went back to a night, a night at once too far gone and not long enough ago. Under a cover of darkness threatened by a growing, red-orange nightmare, she and her sister had cowered in an orchard. Juliette had been the 'big girl' then, responsible for keeping Hermia safe until someone else came for them. Their mother had promised that someone else would come, but Juliette had worried. She had fretted about knowing when it would be time to leave on their own, about how she could keep her little sister safe on that long, dark trip up to the Manor. They hadn't been safe in their own beds! How could she, the older sister by little more than a year, have kept anyone else safe on a night when Hell had come for them all?

She never had to. Tybalt had come, strong and armed and angry. After him, Grandmother and Grandfather had taken charge, and the threat of responsibility had faded away. Now, it had come back for her.

And she was afraid again.

"I'm afraid, too, Hermia," she confessed, hand over her heart. "I can't do this all on my own, and I've felt like I had to. I've been so afraid that I could never be good enough, and that I would lose - and what would become of us all then? I've had more nightmares about Goneril and Regan reviving their plans for you than I can count. Most of that fear came from knowing, in my heart, that I can't be Lady Capulet the way Goneril has been."

"It isn't about who you'll be. The only thing that matters right now is winning - by any means!"

"We're not going to win a game she invented. She doesn't get to decide what it means to be a Capulet. That's our entire goal," she reminded her with a nervous little laugh. "We're going to do this right, which is why Grandmother wanted our line and not Goneril's in the first place. If Lady Iden wants to decide on something other than the law, we'll give her the best option: a family, a team that works together and loves each other."

"And the reason you can't say that yourself is...?" Tybalt asked.

Juliette shot her brother a stern glare. "That is what I would be saying. If the Hereditary High Magistrate, for some strange reason, decides she wants to discuss the law, however..."

"Then that would be the perfect time for your co-advocate to speak." Puck beamed an expectant smile to everyone in the room. "The queen rides at the head of the army, but she doesn't ride alone."

The 'queen' wanted to announce that she would ride wherever she liked. That was the prerogative of a queen. It seemed to Juliette that only so many people could be at the head of an army - and the queen, if she wasn't a warrior, was taking a spot from someone who was.

But then her signet ring caught her eye.

"I imagine you all know this, but Fitzwilliam gave this ring to me." Juliette held her hand just so, that the stone would shine in the light. "The stone is purple - the combination of blue and red, but also the color of this realm. It's never been my dream to lead this house, but I've always wanted to look after my family. To do one, I must do the other, and so I will do both. I will do everything in my power to do both because I love all of you and all the family yet to come, but I can't make purple with just red. I'll fight to the death for you all, and I'll be one of the people at the head of the battle if it will make you happy. I only ask that you all trust me to go about it my way."

One by one, they agreed. Some agreed reluctantly, some dutifully, some happily, but all agreed to unite under Juliette's leadership. If they fought each other, theirs would be a queen with no crown.

Fated to be in the ranks of the happy, Puck thumped the table. "Hear, hear! A toast to the queen's team!"

Hermia requested a less treasonous name. Even here, the walls had ears for a word like 'queen'.

Puck thought hard for a moment, biting his lip and looking up at the high, painted ceiling for inspiration. "Team... Juliette?

"No, that's awful." Clearly determined to shift the mood of the meeting with theatrics, he cried, "The irony! The disgrace! All those glorious nicknames, only to die on this hill!" Then, he shrugged. "Well, it's nothing some wine won't wash down. Let's have that toast!"

"Puck."

"Yes, sprite?"

"There isn't any wine."

"Another blow! No matter, though. We'll also have three cheers for Puck..." He jumped up and skipped away from the door so he could drag his friend up by the collar.  "And for Fitzy, too, who both went to get some wine so they could all toast and not go thirsty. Hurrah!"

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