Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

//

Rose is only minding her own business, basket on her hip, choosing a flounder for Friday dinner when the obliging fishwife selling to her grins a toothy grin. 

"Have you heard, Missus —" the fishwife's look turns cheeky, having known Rose for too long to call her by her married name and not the one her mother gave her. "Missus Rose, that the Greyhound is bound for port this afternoon?"  

Rose snaps up, heart twisting. 

"And four days ahead of schedule! That’s impossible, are they — do you know if everything is alright, Mrs. Hawley?" 

"Only that it's been sighted coming in fast. No flags saying danger, Missus, or anything amiss." 

"I'll have to be back to help with your cook stove another time, then," she sighs, hurriedly wiping her hand with the red work towel stuck in the apron of her skirt. 

"Fine, quite fine, Missus. I know you'll be around." 

Rose pays for the mud-colored, glassy eyed fish; wraps her scarf hastily about her head and barely pins her shawl before she takes off at an unladylike trot down the street. Her basket bounces, provisions for lunch threatening to spill over had life not long since taught her how to balance anything and everything on her hip. 

As a little fishwife herself, she'd been famous for her animation and her precision both. She sold excellent stock and counted change without checking twice and was never wrong. It tickled the good wives of this portside town to buy from her, the girl with the big mouth who whispered her prices when face-to-face with her customers.

Sometimes, as now, when the duties required of her as a wife far exceed the simple life she'd imagined for herself, she regrets the exchange.  

"I'm sure he does this just to vex me," she mutters to herself, slowing as she emerges from an alley and is nearly flattened by a cart cutting over the mud. 

Between two squat stone buildings across the street, she can see a strip of grayish sea. 

It takes him away for months at a time. Now, it's carrying him back to her.

And too quickly. 

Her heart beats hard.

Damn him and his obsession with exceeding expectations, and — and vexing her. 

She has so little time to prepare now. It’s a matter of hours before he'll be home. 

Salt in the air, dirt on the hem of her woolen petticoat, in her workman’s boots instead of ladylike heels, Rose decides to cut through the district of brothels and saloons in order to get home that much faster. 

Her dear husband has eyes everywhere. He will be as displeased with her for going that way as he is with his sailors who spend too long with good-time girls.

The thought of making him as cross as he's making her is quite thrilling. 

She goes that way, in too much of a rush to stop for cheek kisses, but calling hello to the girls whom she knows. Many a brothel sewing machine has been saved by Rose's clever work. They used to be the only people who would hire a woman to touch their machines. 

She scurries past women cooking on the boardwalk, and selling fruit, and the children trying to sell mussels and scraps just as she did when a penniless young girl.

Rose stops a moment to catch her breath, her condition not exactly conducive to sprinting all about town. 

A woman sells her an apple and an egg and looks after her, hen-like: "sure you want to be running, missus, and not paying a driver to take you up to the officer's row?" 

"Surely not," Rose says, still a bit out of breath. "Why, only a few days ago I had to loosen my stays. It's no bother."

She stares down at her belly, which has begun to poke out a bit already. Ignores that she ought to have been home today, sewing on her new dress, one with plenty of room let out about the middle. She catches her breath, mentally listing the endless tasks that must be done in a flurry between now and, say, six o'clock, when her captain will finally be free of his disembarking duties and his office filings and come home to her, at last.

/

Officer's row is on a street fastidiously cleaned and lined with fine, well-built stone houses that are heated by coal and lit by soft gas lamps. 

It's nice, she supposes, to live away from the filth of the town roads, the necessity of walking on  raised boardwalks that creak threateningly under the weight they bear. The noise, the clatter, the rush of crowds; all disappear into controlled gentility as streets populated by low-cost groceries and tobacconists turn to company headquarters and the town hotel with its tea room and restaurant. 

The higher up the hill on which the town is built, the finer the living, apparently. 

A whole year of marriage to a celebrated ship captain, and it's all so strange to Rose still.

There is the fact of her attic window which overlooks the sea. The bits of foreign finery the captain brings back from his travels abroad. 

Her niece and nephew are growing up with sunshine and clean ocean air and well-scrubbed aristocratic children for playmates, not the privation of poverty and hard work. 

There is a loss in her heart, though: knowing that her children will rise to a station far above her own. They won't scrabble for mussels to sell back to fishing vessels, nor know the coziness of a tiny stone cottage in a winter storm, nor play in the mud puddles as large as a plot for a house when the spring rains blow through. 

Her daughters will have hair ribbons and dolls. What a wonder. 

She grins to see her nephew, Henry — who everyone calls Henny — a tall boy of seven, young and sweet enough to still entertain himself playing with the neighbor's toddler. Henny is pulling the baby in a wagon, one of the wheels wobbling, with the toddler's mother minding both. 

How lucky! Rey and baby Benji are a fixture in her life just as important and permanent as her husband and sister. Rose flies toward her friend, calling, "Rey, Rey, missus Solo, please, you've got to help, he’s got me all in a mess, he’s vexing me on purpose —" 

Rey must note the delight buried beneath Rose’s desperation, because instead of demanding to know if everything is alright, she grins. 

“The captain? I know, how dare he — Ben’s just left — he’s as cross as you to have to write all of those paychecks earlier than expected.” 

Rey’s husband co-owns the shipping company with Rose’s husband; Ben simply prefers the landside office work to sailing. Of course, everybody knows it’s really because Benjamin Solo cannot be torn away from his wife and child for any amount of time. 

(Armitage has also said, in whispers, that Solo is no sailor; has never had ocean legs. She cannot tell if he’s merely aggrandizing for his own amusement, or telling the truth, but it’s funny nonetheless to imagine. Rose can sympathize with Mister Solo. She can’t imagine setting sail.)  

“It’s terrible,” Rose agrees. “If you would help wash my hair, my lovely deary dearest, mother of the biggest baby I’ve ever seen —” 

“Yes, yes,” Rey laughs, letting herself be dragged inside the house that belongs to Captain Hux, the children following merrily behind, Rose yelping for her sister before she’s even halfway inside the door.

/ 

Although there are none in the village who can claim to shout her wares louder and with more expletives than Rose Tico, it’s also said that in the alleyways and shops she’s as quiet as a mouse. 

This is true. 

And it must be so, that Rose has to go out and work instead of focusing on her womanly arts and finding a husband, because her sister Paige Tico is married to a sailor with dreamy eyes but a bad habit of going gambling with his pay. 

The mother of two stays home, keeping house, while her sister brings in what money she can; and there’s no money to be had in selling fish if a girl can’t rise above the rest of the crowd. 

They manage most months with Rose’s fish selling, her line baiting, her factory piecework done by candlelight with Paige, whose baby must be rocked half the night or not sleep at all. Rose fixes machinery and repairs horse carts when she can find a widow or a cheapskate who’ll trust a young woman with the task. 

It does not stop them from feeling a bit of relief whenever little Henny brings home the few nickels he earns. Like most children, from walking age he’s combed the streets with packs of other children, gathering cigarette butts and glass bottles and bits of foil to sell to the junkman. 

Henny has been trying his five-year-old hand at digging for fisherman’s bait lately, and only bringing home pennies. Perhaps it’s just as well; everyone digs for bait, and sells to the same tight-fisted men. But Rose did the same thing when she was a girl, and surely a penny’s worth is a nickel’s, now, and she asks around and has that theory confirmed. She gets it in her head, while she’s working on a difficult steaming iron, that she ought to give a piece of her mind to the man who sees a child desperate for change and short-sells him. 

Henny comes home from hours of digging one day, receives a scolding for his tardiness, and cries over the price he’d received for a good half-pound of living mussels. Rose has had enough. Nothing makes her roar come out faster than a threat to her dear niece and nephew.

The next day she bribes her nephew with a peppermint to take her to the short-changer. She balks a little when she sees it’s the office that employs her brother-in-law.

Rose has heard all about the captain. 

Paige’s husband is a charming, grand story-teller, but story-telling men never know how to cease complaining, and so Rose knows that the captain is a difficult, if not outwardly cruel man. One who takes his pleasure from being the iron fist of the law, lording over his ship like it’s his own private kingdom. 

A very good captain, sure, never losing a man or arriving late to each port, but with a ruthless hawklike ability to spot sloppy knotwork that always rankled Rose’s brother-in-law. She supposes she doesn’t like him, on principle, out of family loyalty and all, and certainly now that she knows he’s such a miser. 

As for her boldness, the risk to Paige’s husband’s job — Rose quickly reasons he’s of the same use, employed or not, and fancies herself on the side of all the poor children. Of course, the poor voiceless children take precedence over a man who could surely find work aboard any other vessel, should a prying little sister-in-law lose her temper in the face of his boss. 

She opens the door. Henny, used to being dragged around by his auntie, clops along obediently. Already the boy is almost as tall as Rose. 

The captain’s secretary is a small, neatly-trimmed man who is no match for Rose, her fury spurred by the memory her nephew’s tears, and she stands before the captain with a child’s hand clutched in hers and an oceanic desk separating her from the great lordship himself. 

She sees him glance down at the boy, and there’s recognition there, then — of all things — humor when he looks back up at Rose.

He’s — young? Quite young. He snaps his head up from some paperwork and she takes a second to process. She does not see too many men in her daily life who look so perfectly clean. His pale face shaved bare except for some wretched sideburns. His hands, when she passes a scant glance down, are clean. 

It’s the kind of face that looks predisposed to drop into cruelty, all harsh cheekbones and heavy brows, though it’s yet to solidify into the meanness which Rose is expecting. 

Before he can command her out of his office, she makes her stand. 

“Sir,” she explodes out, then loses a bit of steam, because he’s not enraged at her manners, but is regarding her with a bemused tolerance, his fingers folded together in front of him.  

“You cannot — it is just — it is wrong, sir, not to pay a boy at least what his catch is worth.” 

His shoulders puff up a bit. “Is that so?” 

“It is not very becoming of a man of your stature to be cheap, and to make children cry with your bad dealings.” 

“Whether children cry or not is none of my concern, madame. I pay the same pennies as every other vessel. A fair few more than I ought,” he adds, voice clenching down icily. 

“They’re only children, sir,” she says with matching intensity, feeling in her heart all the mother-love in her spirit for the children who must work instead of play. “This is all the opportunity in the world they have.” 

“How noble.” He rises, hands on his desk. “It takes a brave woman to come and demand more than what ought to have been paid at all.” 

“So you mean to say anything more than outright theft is patronization. How very like a high-born man.” 

“I meant no such thing. And I will not tolerate a liar —” 

“I deal honestly, and only so, in all things.” She thrusts her chin up, defiant. “Where is your wife, sir?” 

His look turns withering. 

“I only wanted to drop by a gift for her, to say I’m sorry that she’s married to such a man.”  

He unfurls to a height that is rather intimidating, but the sight of him only makes her more angry, her chest and neck splotching with the telltale uncontrolled rage that so vexed her mother when Rose was a girl. 

“I have none.” 

“Oh, she was driven to an early grave by such a miser, was she?” 

“There is none, and never has been, and I would thank you, madame, to see yourself out.” 

He tucks his arms behind his back, and it’s all very captainly, and she must think of the boy whose hand is in hers. 

“I only meant to tell you that you ought to think of the greater good,” she sniffs. “Times are hard, you know.” 

“Even for a fishwife, you’re rather thick,” he says, regarding her coldly. “Madame, I do not require use of fishing bait at all. My vessel is a trader. I only buy it to throw to the fishermen so that they might grant my ship the right of way.”  

Rose’s throat closes up. Her color rises, face burning, realization dawning on her that she is spitting on charity, and no — oh no — curse her temper, and her hastiness. Impertinence has always been her sin of choice.

“Oh,” she finally squeaks out, “how interesting. Where do you sail to?” 

He speaks slowly, pink himself.

“I’m on a regular route to Marseille.” 

“So you must pass by Spain,” she chokes out. “How wonderful. I hear the citrus trees are plentiful. They must smell very nice. I’ve never had an orange, myself.” 

He takes a single step to move around his desk, and she slides backwards a step, frightened. 

“Are you this boy’s mother?” 

“His aunt, sir,” she breathes, backing towards the door. He takes that in with a note of consideration that quickly passes off his face. “Well, if you’ll excuse us — and I really am very sorry for the confusion —” 

“Ah. Miss Tico,” he cries , stopping her. When she doesn’t correct him he nods his head up a fraction, a movement she catches only because she’s watching him so closely. 

“He may come again,” Captain Hux finishes, awkward and clipped, nodding down at the boy. “If he works hard, and digs up another crop worth buying.” 

Rose doesn’t thank him. She thinks he might be insulted if she were to try.

/

Henny continues to get a few pence for his efforts, and thank the Lord that there are no pity shillings thrown in where they aren’t earned. 

Accepting charity is one thing, but she couldn’t take the captain’s condescension. 

At Christmas, when Paige’s husband is playing a long game of poker with his holiday bonus, a small crate is delivered to their apartment. 

The family leaves their feast of whole chicken and dumplings and carrots, made with ground peppercorns and herbs that Rose has presented to her sister as gifts. It’s the best food they eat all year, but the promise of an unexpected gift is too alluring.

Rose pries the crate open, Paige and the children keenly interested. 

A square of four bright Seville oranges winks up at them. 

The color is offensively bright, and too familiar. 

A handwritten note sits on top. Rose snatches it up.

Because I haven’t got a wife to buy for, as you well know.

Yuletide Greetings,

Capt. A Hux

//

Chapter Text

/

“Paige!” 

Rose all but wails, throwing her basket of flounder on the kitchen table in her bluster and haste. 

She’s just flung herself through the door of the fine home — which used to be only Hux’s, and used to be cold and dusty, which now at all hours hums with liveliness — to the smell of agarwood incense burning on the sill of an open window. 

Paige blinks up slowly from her cup of tea, sitting with Kaydel, the head housekeeper. In her mother’s lap, Rose’s baby niece looks up and grins. At eighteen months, little Francie is already used to all sorts of theatrics from her family. 

“We’ve just received a bit of happy news from the harbormaster,” Paige says, nodding towards an unfolded letter that’s come to rest amongst a jar of honey, a plate of crumbling shortbread cookies, two crumpled cloth napkins. So many luxuries unthinkable just two years ago. 

“He’s just awful,” Rose moans. “He’s due tonight.” 

Rey cuts in, grinning, pinching Rose’s hip as she bustles in through the door behind her. 

In his mother's arms, Benji kicks his fat legs. He nearly dwarfs the woman already. Rey takes a hold of one of his feet, waving it for emphasis. 

“The nerve of that man, wanting to see you an extra day longer. Would not all of us do the same, Rosie? Just to hear the dulcet tone of your voice.” 

“Sweethearts, you and the Captain both,” Paige sighs theatrically. Her sarcasm is palpable. She’s got a wicked tongue when in close company. 

"I am sweet, when he isn't vexing me." 

“A husband who can’t wait to see his wife’s adoring face, so much so that he runs against time to come home to her? I daresay many girls go to bed neglecting prayers to the good Lord in favor of wishing for such a man.”

“Oh, don’t compliment him. He’ll hear it on the wind.” 

“You’re worth it, little sister, of that I am most certain.” 

“He shirks his precious schedule, his very much so most precious schedule, the schedule that shall not be gone against — oh, Pae-pae, Rey, Miss Kay — you all know he does it just to vex me! There’s no valor in it. None at all. There’s only conniving. It’s trickery.” 

Rey laughs, covering her mouth reflexively to hide her teeth.  

“What a romantic you are. You know, if Mr. Solo were gone for months at a time, and he came home to me…” 

“You’d probably mourn your peace, too.” 

“Perhaps if I had such an — exacting — mate, I may.” 

Rose tries to keep a sour face but finds it difficult not to dissolve into giggles herself. 

Kaydel’s already called for one of the scullery maids to draw water, and she’s sent another to find the bathing tub. Not one person in the house fails to understand the importance of a flawless moment of arrival for the master of the house. Should his mood be thrown off by a detail neglected or a flaw immediately noticed, everyone will suffer from extra chores and merciless inspections. 

“So you need a bath,” Paige snorts. “A change of clothes, and to promise a favor to your sister and your dear Miss Kay for cleaning the mud from your petticoats again.” 

“I’d haul the water for you sweetlings, if I could.” Rose bats her eyelashes, taking off her apron and her cap. “I’ll buy you a book, Pae-pae. Or — or two books, yes, two! Miss Kay, I haven’t forgotten you, my love, it’s a dozen raisin buns for you.” 

“I’ll add them to my ledger of baked goods you owe me, then, ma’am."

/

Henny runs off to join his neighborhood friends loitering on a street corner; Rey and Paige’s babies take up banging spoons against an overturned bowl on the kitchen floor; and Rose is then scrubbed within an inch of her life by the two women she loves most. 

There’s hardly time to wait for water to heat, so the washtub is set up in the kitchen and Rose is dunked in it, cold. 

Kaydel scurries around, laying out clothes and hurrying to ensure the Captain’s suits have all been properly uncovered and dusted, his things arranged in his particular ways. 

Rose is far from the only one who enjoys their time as a little coven of women, the only male presence being Hux’s valet, who goes home to the countryside and his two grown sons for weeks at a time while his master sails, and Henny, who has yet to come into his own roosterdom, and remains a very sweet boy. 

Paige and Kaydel grow especially close over the weeks, sharing bed heat and the whispered sweetness that every pair of lovers enjoy, while Rose and the cat kick about all night. 

(Rose would tell them, if propriety allowed, that if they chose to bed together all the time her husband would be none the wiser. The man has no particular regard for the emotional lives of women who do not share his own bed. At worst, he'd comment his usual nonsense: love and felicity ought not pose a distraction during the day, when one should indulge oneself in the high pleasure of achieving his goals and doing the best work he can. 

Half his crew are usually making it with the other half, he’s told her, and hardly blinking an eye about it. 

Anyhow, Paige and Miss Kay seem perfectly happy sneaking about and casting each other significant glances. Rose is not one to disturb that charming game, for her sister has been harried and lonely in love for far too long.) 

Paige uses a washcloth to make suds with a bit of yellow Spanish soap. It seems wrong to use such a fine cake of soap to scrub off flecks of street mud. 

“I’ll have to send Henny to the tobacconist,” Rose grumps, shooting a significant look down at her sister. Paige keeps smoking up all of the good tobacco, sitting on the porch watching the street during the baby’s naps.

“Oh, I meant to —” 

“Don’t worry yourself about it.” 

Rose relishes in getting to be the superior sister for once. She’s got to hold still so Rey doesn’t yank the hair she’s combing, and therefore must be satisfied by merely smiling cheekily to herself.  

“You’re helping me now, are you not, Pae-pae? Oh, ah — that smarts a bit, Rey-rey, thank you, dear — we shall have to send to the bakery, to make good on all of my bribes, and have his favorite shortbread ready…I love you, Miss Kay, did you know that? This house is kept so brilliantly that I am not concerned at all about its cleanliness.” 

Rose gets a flippant wave with a bit of linen in response. 

“I’ll know your gratitude when I’ve got a dozen buns in my hands, Mrs. Hux.” 

“Oh, you kitty-cat. I’m good for them; if it’s too late today, I’ll tell Armitage I’d still be a stinking heathen if not for you, and he’ll send for them in the morning.” 

She nearly stumbles as Paige scrubs harshly down one leg, then the other. Rey steadies her, then needs to let go so she can attend to a misbehaving baby. 

“There’s time to worry yet about buns and tobacco, Rosie,” Paige sing-songs. 

“If I know that man,” Rey adds, plucking a wet sock out of Benji’s mouth. “He’s got enough to smoke in his jacket to last him the night, at the very least.” 

“I should have known he’d be ahead of me. It’s just like him. He’s going to fuss at me for not being prepared. ” 

“We’re plenty prepared,” Kaydel chimes in, her cheeks pink from exertion. “He’s only got eyes for one thing the first night, anyway,” she adds, in that perfectly bold and delicious way she has. 

Rose chokes out a strangled noise, hiding her face in her hands. “My goodness, don’t remind me.” 

It’s true. Almost as soon as it grows dark and it’s proper to retire to bed, the Captain take her with him and keep her up all night. She hadn’t allowed herself to dwell too long on that thought, but as soon as she remembers, a clench of something hot and strong trembles all through her. It’s scary. She doesn't know if he'll stand to touch her. He hasn't seen her since her belly's popped out, but she’s been missing him so terribly these past few weeks — has needed settling with his mouth and fingers and cock, his hand holding her cheek, his surliness something to scratch back against. 

Her’s sister’s voice butts into her thoughts.

“It must be a boy, the way you’re carrying so low,” Paige says, eyeing Rose’s belly. 

She’s sworn off men after the loss of her husband, insisting two children is all she’s good for, so she’s been watching her sister’s first pregnancy very closely, cooing and worrying and scolding for every thing Rose does and doesn’t do. 

Rey shakes her head. She’s beating some egg white in a tin mug, and bids Rose sit down, then to tip her head back. 

“I think it’s a girl,” Rey murmurs, combing the long wet locks, then massaging the beaten egg into Rose’s hair to shampoo it. “I’ve got a feeling.” 

Rose glances down, draping a hand hesitantly over her bump. She’s shy of doing it in front of company, even her sister and her other best friend.  

Rey always has an accurate sense about these things. 

“It is a little kitten, for all I know of its clawing at me,” she pronounces, tart but affectionate. 

Her mind sticks on the words, a girl. 

When she’s sitting in front of the hearth to dry, wet hair tightly braided and in a clean shift, Rose feels like a plucked chicken. She shivers, hugging her squirming niece on her lap. 

All day she’s been on the move, and now that she’s more at rest, there’s the telltale nudging feeling inside of her. 

The baby. 

His baby. 

And hers.

It’s an odd sensation. She’s yet to acclimate to it. 

She supposes the child is going to be as insistent on hogging her attention as its father, and therefore these kicks will only grow more dramatic. 

All day her mind runs with these unintended thoughts, these soft-focus dreams of a future that’ll crash into her no matter if she thinks of it or not. 

The thought of a brash little baby is, at the very least, quite heartening. 

/

Benji and Francie watch from the floor as everyone flurries around them. 

Rey somehow manages to get a batch of fresh buns in the oven, set out a pitcher with some flowers out of her garden, and wrangle Benji away from pulling a chair on top of himself. 

Rose’s hair is toweled off, a fresh pair of stockings thrown her way. 

“The red ones, not one of white, please,” she begs of Kaydel, “the red will distract him.” 

Her shoes are retrieved after many cosseting requests of Benji, who eventually complies, toddling carefully with one polished heel in hand, taking a detour to bother the cat, then slowly bringing over the other. He hands them off with his serious little face pinched in concentration. 

“The green dress?” Paige raises her eyebrows with droll, elder sister knowingness as she asks. “Are you sure? What of the blue striped? Perhaps the brown?” 

“Oh, he’ll hate any of them,” Rose moans, catching the I told you so look her sister is giving her. 

She was meant to spend a certain amount at the dressmaker on new dresses, that was the Captain’s order, but she found it frivolous to have new dresses made when she could simply let out and re-trim her old ones. Rose’s plan was to use a bit of the budget to buy a bolt of fabric and sew a couple of simple new garments herself, putting him off the scent of her disobedience long enough to make him happy by other means. 

Of course, said plan fell by the wayside. She’s never been a diligent seamstress, and she was having such fun using her money to buy candy and tinned milk and penny dolls for the children of her friends in the brothels. 

"I know I should have listened to you, Pae-pae. I knew I might not have it all done in time, but I thought…" 

"You didn't consider your poor sister, and how I'll be getting an earful for not dragging you down there myself," Paige tuts, holding back her smile.

"He won't notice. I've got a plan." 

"She's scheming now, is she…" 

Rose is given a bun with butter and shredded chicken to shove in her mouth before her stays are tied. Francie is put in her best baby smock, shriek-laughing as she plays with the skirts and ribbons. Rey has to snatch Benji up and run home to get her own supper started; she kisses Rose on both cheeks with promises to see her tomorrow, and a wink of good luck. Kaydel finishes her second bun and declares the Captain's suits ready, and they all breathe a sigh of relief.

Paige has no sooner tightened the strings of Rose's striped green dress when there's a knock at the door. Rose's heart jumps up into her throat, until it's revealed that it's only Mr. Mitaka, the office assistant. He’s come with the Captain's personal crates.

"So quickly, this time!” Despite herself, her heart leapt to know that he’s here, he’s on land, in town, so close, so near. "Is the crew simply that good at unloading now? Can he not let them relax for a single second?" 

A smile warms Mr. Mitaka’s pale face. “I’m to bring you to the office, ma’am, when it’s all unloaded.” 

“Right,” Rose sighs, when the schedule is laid out. There’s hardly time to settle things here at home and tie her bonnet on before she’s wanted. 

Irritation rises instantly, as it’s been wont to do these past few months. Worsened by the way everything is going according to a timescale not her own and utterly unpredictable to her. Rose bites her tongue against a complaint and barely contains it. 

Months of marriage have yet to cool her temper or teach her the patience and obedience required of a good wife. Likely as not, as Paige likes to tell her, she’ll never quite learn, but her husband will never stick around long enough to come to know it.     

Mr. Mitaka stands there while the valet unloads the crates and Kaydel directs their delivery, the man as loyal as ever, hands clasped and brows lifted, as if to say, how may I be of assistance to you? 

Paige, barely concealing her mirth, pops from around the corner leading to the parlor. A bonnet dangles from each hand, each one adorned with handmade silk flowers, all frill and social signal. The sisters agree at once which one it must be, and Rose submits to having the blue ribbons tied in a large bow beneath her chin. It’s always been such fun to be dressed up by her big sister. 

A good pair of white gloves is pulled down to meet the tip of each small finger, and she’s ready. 

Rose sets her eyes upon Paige. The well of courage she draws from the dark eyes so like her own is unfathomably deep. There is no need for words between them, especially with the Captain’s man present. 

She draws her shoulders back. Smooths her hand down the hem of the hastily tailored gown. Asks her sister, silently, if she’s going to be okay — and receives a warm nod, a squeeze of her gloved hands.   

“Hasten back, my love,” Paige says, before kissing her goodbye and sending Rose on her way. 

An entirely different creature than the one who stormed in a few hours ago, she follows Mr. Mitaka out to the carriage. 

This young wife is self-possessed, with a straight back and clean shoes. 

She glides. She does not skip, or run, or trot merrily. 

The brougham is a recent model, and eye-wateringly expensive, she is sure. (Dearest Armitage is not one to discuss exact figures). Light and angular, it seats only two for an intimate ride through the village streets. 

The sight of the black wheels contrasted against the navy gleam of the carriage body sparks a memory. His hands, tracing those sleek arcs. He’d shown them off with an indecent air of pride when it had been delivered, redeeming himself by taking pains to discuss all of those things which most highly piqued Rose’s interest.

The mechanism of the lanterns mounted to the front of the vehicle. The spring mechanisms of the wheels. The innovative design. 

He had been very thoughtful in its selection. Every detail had been accounted for. She was loath to admit that she admired — even, in many ways, shared — his taste, but on that day she couldn’t resist telling him so. The need for her approval had been written all over his face. 

/

Chapter Text

/

A month after the Christmas delivery, the crate still smells of citrus. 

Once the fruit is gone, Rose’s mouth aches for more of that tart sweetness sweeping across her tongue. Never before had she tasted anything like it. 

It would be wasteful to do anything with the crate but make use of it, so Rose does just that. Her few hand-sewn kerchiefs and small linen things live there. Her red stockings and the spare apron sewn from a dress of her mothers’.  

Paige raises an eyebrow, and Rose makes a show of pretending to ignore said brow. 

She sends a thank-you note to the Captain’s office, making pains with her penmanship. It is short and mostly free of the affection so intrinsic to her character. 

I suppose you are well aware of how much you have brightened the holiday for us all. I and my sister are at your disposal should you desire anything which we have the power to give. 

She blushes every time she’s reminded of his gift, and tries to put the entire ordeal behind her. 

Her handkerchiefs all smell of oranges, though. 

They don’t allow her to forget him. 

/

It’s a hard winter.

In this country the weather is gray and drab all year round, but this season is particularly miserable. Ice cold rain pours for days on end, wetting the stone cottages and blackening the sea. 

Christmas is a bright and merry spot, but soon enough January comes, leaning exhausted on the rickety door frame, letting the cold and wet leach in. 

The baby catches a cough and can’t shake it. She whimpers through the night and fusses in the day. There’s just enough left to pay the doctor if they skimp on rent. Rose takes only hot coffee drizzled with condensed milk for supper to save more for the rest. Penny loaves of stale bread dipped in coffee are just fine, especially when she’s imagining biting down on lavender shortbread, on lemon frosting, on cake crumbling decadent in her mouth. The thoughts provide what sustenance she needs. She has always been good at living on dreams.

Rose takes a temporary job scrubbing a buildings’ stairs while its usual janitress recovers from childbirth. She sells what stock she can afford to buy off the fishing boats with her usual vigor. Paige stays home doing piecework for a faux flower factory, twisting green wires into stems for a few pennies per dozen.

The little family claws their way through. 

February is no better, but hope lives on: Paige’s husband is due at the end of the month. There will be the remnants of his pay, and his grand stories, and the last halves of bottles of brandy. Laughter, for a day or two or even a week. Light. 

Late one mid-February morning, on a day made significant by its relative lack of rain and fog, a messenger comes flying to their front door. Slaps the wood loud enough to bother the neighbor, a crotchety old woman who pokes out to complain.

Rose answers the door, Paige behind her. They do not often have messages. There is a general sinking of the stomach. A sailor’s family is well aware that such urgency is never proceeded by good news. 

Bright shock blunt-forces its way through their world, which is already dismal enough. 

The young boy’s voice trembles. He’s straight from the dock, out of breath, and been told to tell them that Paige’s husband is lost at sea. It’s all he knows, ma’am and ma’am, but Mr. Captain will be by to see them as soon as he’s able, a few hours hence.

Her sister doesn’t react at the initial recitation of the fact. 

This dominates Rose’s impression of the event: Paige’s utter stoicism. Her unsurprise. Her straight spine, which never falters. This seems so deeply emblematic of who her sister is, the woman Rose has come to know over a lifetime of being by her side, and she is seized by sympathy and love and grief, all at once. She rather forgets her brother-in-law’s name, it’s all Paige Paige Paige inside her head.  

Paige pays the messenger a dime and gives him a sugar bun before she sends him on his way. Under Rose’s guiding arm she hobbles over to the table and sits down very slowly. 

She is still for a long while. Dead-eyed, focused on the wall, brow furrowed in her Pae-pae way.  

“A child, telling that news,” she says, after a time, and that’s about the sum of it.

There’s not much more to say. 

Words escape them both. They have been here before, with both of their parents. With aunts and uncles and baby cousins. Death is no stranger to anybody who lives in the village with damp walls. This is ground well-worn and uninteresting to discuss.  

All they can do is hold each other’s hands like they did when they were little girls, and Mama had just passed on. 

“This doesn’t change a thing,” Rose says, trying to soothe the atmosphere of wretched tension, but it’s not true. The words land with dull thuds. 

Paige's husband was always good for a little cushioning with the rent, a burst of a few pounds here and there. They lived by what scant help he gave. 

He was sweet, too, a sporadic but affectionate father and a great love of her sister’s, once — before he let his wandering eye take him where it pleased, and the tarnish of life had clouded that once gleaming affection she had for him. 

It's only the last of a long series of Paige’s first love’s disappointments: dying at the most inconvenient time, with barely enough insurance to bury him. 

/

The Captain is flushed and radiating nervousness when he comes knocking late that night. 

Rose cannot help but resent his sending a message instead of delivering this news in person, now. They wouldn't have had to mourn all through the unusually sunny, cruel day. 

Rose unlatches the door, stomach curdled with dread from the earlier horror that awaited her on the other side. She’s unable to control the hostile set of her lower lip. She has refused to comb her hair, to even put on a cap. 

 Before her stands a very different man than the one she met and verbally abused at the office.

He wears a beard and the hollowed eyes of a man run ragged over the past few days. His shirt is rumpled. He searches for her eyes. 

The top of her head barely reaches his shoulders. She steps back to let him in. 

They’re burning expensive kerosene to make the clean but shabby apartment look better, throwing away money they don’t have to spare in order to make this highborn guest more comfortable.  

He is a pale, severe-looking and strange presence in their home. Mr. Armitage Hux introduces himself, cap in his hand, pressed to his chest, and the civilities are reciprocated in stilted politeness. Henny sleeps on in the apartment’s single bed, snoring dreadfully. 

“Surely you will have heard the message I was very sorry to have sent.” 

Compared to the measured self-control when they first met, or his tone of derision, he seems genuinely at a loss. 

“I — in all my years, I have never lost a man,” the Captain says, after a brief moment in which he glances about the room. He’s unmoored. Probably too inured to a life of barking orders than being gentle to women. 

Rose stares blankly at him, and Paige stares blankly at him, and Henny snores like an old dog, and in her mother's arms Francie starts to fuss. 

"There were high swells, and he — he was not located. He was the only man lost." 

The Captain looks very briefly at the blanket-wrapped bundle in Paige’s arms, his Adam’s apple bobbing. 

"I would do whatever possible to make it right. A failure of leadership as such is not acceptable to me." 

He speaks straight to Rose.

She flushes, then is filled with shame at once for thinking anything of being looked at when her brother-in-law is dead. 

Neither sister speaks when the man seems to expect them to.

"Of course, we'll pay out his full wages —" the Captain scrambles even harder the longer the women are silent. After a clear moment of deliberation he reaches into the inner pocket of his large navy coat, the shoulders cut to make him look broad. 

He counts out money from a wad of bills. When he lays it on the table, it sums the entirety of what Paige’s husband would have earned, had he returned and brought it all home; a fortune in its own right. 

All three of them know the man would have gambled at least half that before he ever touched it. The pile of bills is worth three months' rent. It is utterly ridiculous. Rose nearly chokes at the sight. Paige sighs deeply.  

The Captain receives their thanks like parched earth taking rain, his lip momentarily twisting into something like a smile as he ducks his head in false humility. Aloud he tells them it is nothing, nothing at all, that man worked nearly the whole voyage, it is his due, and he is proud to be the kind of man who can pay up for all of his crew. 

Rose hasn't heard of any widow receiving such a benefit before. She keeps quiet about it. Far be it from her to stomp all over this fancy man’s dreams of being a benefactor. 

Before Mr. Hux takes his leave — the man just as relieved as the sisters for the ordeal to be over — Rose stops him near the doorway. They are alone, and he is close enough that she fancies she might feel the heat radiating from his coat. Certainly she can smell salt. She speaks in a low voice, urged by a strange sense of candor that exists between her and this man who has seen her at her most indecently blunt, with whom she is now inexorably tied by a string of tragedy.  

"I want to know something, Captain, if you please?"

"As far as I am able to answer," he stumbles out, as taken back as she by the sudden and urgent interview. 

"He — my brother — he always said…" she bites her lip, trying to think of an appropriate way to put it; to not laugh, as is always her inclination when things are unbearable, and also when she remembers these stories of her brother-in-law. 

"When he went overboard the first time, two years ago…" 

A light of instant recognition on the Captain's face, and just as soon, his lips press together in a firm line.

Oh, dear merciful God, that face practically moans.

"He always told Paige and I that he, ah…" she sniffs. "He fell in and he swam for a whole night and he fought a… a 'creature'? A creature, Captain. He never would tell us anything more, and it always scared Henny, the very idea; he refuses to swim even now. I wanted to know, is it true?” She has to hold a straight face. “Do you meet many creatures on your voyages?" 

There’s instant recognition on the Captain’s face, which is a bit of a surprise. 

“Seaweed,” he says. He heaves an aggrieved sigh, near to sneering but possessing enough propriety not to let it out.

“It was a patch of seaweed. It was not a creature. My Lord. The way he could carry on about that. God rest his soul, of course.” 

Rose repeats after him, yes, God rest his soul . She returns the bow Hux gives her, a sad smile of remembrance on her face.

“He often told us that tale. Thank you, Captain. I had always wondered. I will be sure to tell Henny, when he's old enough.” 

“That brings back memories.” This time, the Captain's sneer leaks through. “We lost a day and a half on his account.”

And you fished him out and instead of lashing him you kept him in the net dangling off the yardarm for a day and a half...

She would ask about the netting — if that's true too, if he’s that strangely cruel, and really possessed of that wicked sort of humor, but one look at the set of the Captain's face, and she knows. 

Of course it’s true. 

/

Hux has overpaid by fifty pounds. 

The realization hits her as soon as she counts out the extra bank notes. 

A precise man such as the Captain could never overpay by accident. 

Rose remembers the way that man regarded her, the long stare at her and his furtive glances about the misery of the sisters’ shared apartment, and knows what she ought to do. 

She must go and thank the Captain himself, and see about returning the extra money. 

/

Rose doesn’t know what to do to make this visit to return the overpayment any less unbearable.

Her goal is to ask the Captain if he might know of any positions available for a woman with Rose’s abilities. Sure, the little sister is woefully under-trained in all domestic arts but basic tailoring and the cooking of good porridge — the only thing that comes out of the cookpot when Paige is sick — but she is a quick learner, and clever, and although lying makes her sick to her stomach she will, indeed, do anything to keep her family together. 

She’s sure she can cover for any lack of actual skill. 

Rose wears a dress of Paige’s; a pale yellow frock whose collar is low and sloping, dipping down to show off a generous portion of her shoulders, collarbone and bustline. She even has herself laced into a corset, and puts her hair up neatly beneath her white cap.

Hux's mousy assistant stands the second he sees her. Rose bows her head, sheepish, pushing back the memory of how delicious it was to mow down all obstacles in her way and be angry, in a way a woman never ought to be. 

Now, feigning a dainty submissiveness, and dressed quite like a respectable young woman — not a common fishwife in stained apron and striped skirt — she is granted her audience at once. 

The Captain looks up, quite surprised, his reaction clownish in its exaggeration for a second before he schools himself back to sternness. Dropped jaw and all, teeth clicking back together. Had he expected to never see her again, too? Was he hoping to forget? 

When she tries to return the bank notes, her face immediately goes scarlet. 

She doesn’t regret her passion, but her passion has also led her quite astray before. 

The Captain refuses to receive the overpayment. 

“It’s the leftover from an insurance policy the owner takes out on each sailor,” he tries to explain. 

She finds herself envious of how easy it is for this man to lie, unblinking and utterly convincing. She nearly admires him for it.

But Rose has seen the insurance documents. There’s just enough to have her brother-in-law buried. 

“I appreciate the gesture, sir,” she says, insistently pushing the bills back towards him on his desk. “But I cherish my honesty, and I’m afraid it would not be right to take your money.” 

He stares down at the money, displeased. 

She rushes to fill the silence. 

“I was hoping, actually, sir — if you could perhaps, should you know of an empty position that I might — I’m quite skilled in many areas and very diligent in all that I do, sir, so I was thinking if you knew of a family with a position open, you might...” She winces with her full body. “You might recommend me.”  

She squeezes her eyes shut, embarrassment shearing through her at what she’s become bold enough to do. Foolish enough to do, more like. A Captain has much pull about town. She’ll never have respectable work, now that he knows she’s such an opportunist. 

She twists her hands in the front of her dress, forgetting there’s no apron there. When he speaks, it lifts her temporarily out of her agony.

“You have quite a reputation, you know, Miss Tico.” 

“Have I?” 

She peeks at him, and finds him with fingers templed, leaning towards her. 

“They say you’re quite clever, for a young woman. Excellent with small household repairs. Ah, and not one to cross,” he adds, with a bitter, knowing little smirk. “The latter, of course, I know now from experience.”

“I truly do regret —” 

He cuts her off with an impatient wave of the hand. 

“If you refuse to take what money you’re given, Miss Tico, why don’t you come and work for it?” 

His eyes are cool and heavy but there’s a quirk at the corner of his lips like a victorious smirk. It lives, then dies. Her stomach drops. 

“I would be happy to, sir,” she says slowly, suspicious. “Have you a position on your ship for a woman?” 

“I’ve recently inherited my father’s house, and it stands full of appliances in need of attention. I hear you’re quite useful with such things. The word used for you was — meticulous. ”

Has he frequented the brothels where she worked? 

“Of course,” he goes on, as if she hadn’t spoken. “I will have to be there to observe you.”  

/

The Captain’s house is, indeed, full of appliances in need of attention. 

Left alone for ten years before he recently took occupation of it, sheets had been draped over everything, leaving the steam irons and the cookstove and the sewing machine all rusted and out of sorts. 

He is on shore leave for the next month, and has much time to fill; therefore between his social engagements and business meetings, he will be able to entertain the services of such a clever repairman as herself. 

/

Paige hears of the arrangement, and her lip stiffens, same as Rose’s does when she’s mad but biting it back.

“Men always have their own agenda,” she says, bouncing the baby on her hip. “But once they have you, Rose —” 

She claws away images of being had by the Captain as soon as they flood her mind. How inappropriate. And unrealistic..

“That’s not at all how it is, Pae-pae.” 

The look her sister levels at her makes Rose’s blood boil. It fuels her fire to keep on doing just what she thinks is right.  

/

Mr. Hux prefers to simply sit there and observe. 

Rose lacks enough fine dresses to wear to her daily occupation. She makes do with what she can scrounge up from her own and her sisters’ wardrobes. Dressing well has never been part of her occupation. It has never been this lucrative before. 

On those days when she wears her clean striped fishwife dress he takes on an intensity that makes her shiver. 

She does her best to ignore what heat that level of supervision arouses in her; the anger, and other odd feelings. She wants to simply enjoy the job as much as she can.

Rose has always had a guilty little taste for luxury, and being inside of such a fine house nourishes that giddy bit of her. 

She takes one look at the Singer sewing machine in his home and lets out a cry of half-delight, half-dismay. It’s in terrible shape. It’ll take two months, at least, of hard work to restore it, if not many more. It needs sanding and re-priming and painting, not to mention all of the problems that’ll lie beneath its exterior…

Happiness blooms in her breast. Sewing machines are a special favorite of hers, and the one in this house is in desperate need of love.

/

The master’s conversation, meanwhile, is tolerable enough. 

Sometimes he accidentally stumbles into being engaging.  

He does a lot of empty hen-pecking, clearly having had mechanical experience but not quite an expert in these small appliances, like Rose. She shows him what she’s doing, and gets to rambling about her favorite techniques for sanding rusted metal and organizing one’s hand tools. 

 He is, when he wants to be, a rather good listener. She could talk for hours like this if she were allowed. Propriety and his busy schedule seem to be the only things stopping him from letting her. 

/

Those two months go by very quickly, and she’s nowhere near finished with the rusted old Singer. 

Hux is always her companion when she’s hard at work on the sewing machine. She’s glad not to be alone, but he’s mercurial; at turns irritable, fussy, determined to force her to try things his way even when she knows it’s a useless pursuit. 

Once she passes an internal marker of feeling like she’s earned that extra money — which doesn’t take long at all — she’s not afraid of standing up to him. 

An “if you don’t mind, Captain,” here, and an “I happen to know what I’m doing, Captain,” there .  

Shockingly, he tames up quite nicely. 

Almost as if he’s waiting for her to raise her claws back at him, he takes his cuffs on the chin with wry amusement. 

The Captain slowly figures out how to go about getting her to talk to him out of real interest, not nervous obligation or annoyance. 

Instead of hovering over her shoulder and nitpicking, he shares his knowledge with her. 

He lets her pick up his heavy spyglass, extending it and focusing its eye out the front window to spot ships far out at sea. She even gets to see the sextant, another gleaming golden thing in a lacquered box; gets to touch its spindly legs and wonder about using it herself. 

His attempts at conversation are still strange and awkward, but he has a dry sense of humor, a habit of making her have to hide her laugh behind the back of her hand. 

His hobby is botany, and he has a special interest in poisonous plants. The first time he clearly loses himself in rambling about his various scientific studies, her heart cracks open. 

Just a bit, but enough to let him in.   

She is no liar, simply by nature, but she knows enough to stay in his good graces: knows that he is a most valuable acquaintance, this strange sea Captain who is unafraid to let his housekeeper and his valet see him entertaining a poor young fishwife. A man of great pride, who corrects her pronunciation of long words but took her spit and fire to his face and said, please, let’s get to know each other a little better.  

A very strange man, indeed. 

Rose has always found her heart uniquely defenseless against the strange and the awkward and the misfit. She has, many a time, been engaged in long evenings of dancing at the town hall with men who otherwise have little hope of finding suitably pretty and lively partners. 

She enjoys coming to this fine house, conversing and debating with its keenly intelligent master. He is rather a wonderful speaker on subjects which are unfamiliar to her, possessing a teacher’s disposition, the pedantry and patience necessary to allow her the thorough understanding of the subjects which he presents to her. An excellent reader and even better engineer, but no scholar, she knows much about modern novels but little of the natural sciences.

Rose’s first taste of a thorough explanation of why heather in one heath grows differently from heather in another, and she is captivated. They pass a few afternoons in this pleasant manner, rain streaking outside of the Captain’s fine glass windows. 

“If you are interested,” he says one day, after a stretch of quiet punctuated by her noises of effort as she works with the machine. He clears his throat and shifts in his seat when she looks up at him, surely streaked with grease, terribly unladylike. He doesn’t tear his eyes from her face. 

“It would please me very much to give you a tour of my greenhouse.”  

She has been waiting so long for such an invitation, and has to exercise superhuman strength in order to rein in her excitement. 

Some of it slips through, anyhow. 

“That — I would truly — that would really… yes,” she breathes, twisting the fabric of her apron. “Yes, that would be quite nice, I think.” 

The next afternoon, Rose wearing a pair of clean gloves filched from Paige’s drawer, he shows her his collection of specimens. She gingerly takes his arm as they walk outside, certain that in his gallantry she’s being made fun of somehow. He keeps it raised for her even when it is just them alone in the green, growing silence with the plants. Therefore she keeps hers in the same position, threaded through his crooked elbow. She tries and fails not to become distracted about the physical contact.  

Until she's inside, and then Rose, ever-distractible, drops his arm with the weight of absolute wonder. 

The wrought-iron greenhouse is bigger than her apartment. It's a miniature crystal palace, with its insides full of poison and spines and snapping teeth. 

“What treasures,” she breathes, entirely sincere. “And all of them deadly! A wonderful theme for a collection, indeed, Captain.” 

There are cacti planted in sand and rocks that prick her when she impulsively tries to touch. He scolds her, right after he flinches his hand towards hers. She sucks the pads of her fingers, trotting close behind him and keeping her hands to herself after that. 

There are plants that eat insects. Ooze toxins. Can kill a man with a thimbleful of sap. There are flowers that hang upside down in long yellow bells, their pollen hallucinogenic; a specimen from North America that traps flies in the throats of its sticky pitchers. 

Rose glimpses a proud hitch in his lip as she admires his collection. 

Like the fishermen she used to buy her stock from, who responded very well to her calculated compliments and cosseting, she encourages him. 

Asks questions until she feels like a little girl pestering the traveling mechanic again. He has boundless enthusiasm, luckily for Rose, because wafting about in a greenhouse is highly preferable to the eye-straining manual labor of the sewing machine, no matter how much she enjoys it.  

/

On another afternoon, he asks her to bring oysters. She raises her brows and laughs. Of course she can bring oysters, she knows just the woman for them, but why? 

“That’s poor man’s food, is it not, sir?”  

“They were a favorite of my mother’s. I had them once, as a boy.” 

She cannot laugh at that. 

Carried in her apron from the docks, the oblong shells clatter together and hold their jaws fast, stubborn, until the Captain takes them in his hands and cleaves them apart. She watches as he slips the tip of a knife into the bivalve and wrenches it open, carefully, without mercy, not a motion wasted. 

The white palm of inner shell reveals a gray treat glistening in its center, almost as good as a pearl. Rose raises it to her lips. Pure ocean on her tongue, and the stormy green shade of his eyes as he watches her, downing his own mucosal gob at the very same time, tipping the shell delicately balanced on his fingertips. The oyster slips cool down her throat. She could eat dozens. She supposes, with as many as she bought with the money he pressed into her palm, that she’s about to.  

“I had supposed you would know best where to get them,” the Captain says. “I was right. As I often am.” 

/

She knows that he is a most valuable acquaintance, one to be gently manipulated her way — this strange Captain who is unafraid to let his housekeeper and his valet see him entertaining a poor young fishwife. A man of great pride, who corrects her pronunciation of long words but took her spit and fire to his face and said, please, let’s get to know each other a bit better.  

She is delighted to be invited to this fine house, and to converse and debate with its keenly intelligent master. Enjoys overhearing his visits, and being introduced to his people, for she absolutely delights in absurdity. 

He associates with people from all classes, united by a common theme of being useful to him.  She disdains the falsity and the pride and the greed of this set, and determines to milk them for all the use they are worth. 

Luckily, the Captain keeps with interesting company, and there is much to learn from each person she is introduced to.

Rose even sees a few brothel madams who have hired her in the past to fix things about their places. She learns from them that the Captain disdains entering their establishments, but maintains these connections with gentlemanly courtesy, because his sailors frequent their girls — and because these women are uniquely powerful in their tiny port town. The sons of the working girls are suited well to harbor life, too, or working on ships as young as nine or ten years old, if they’re clever. 

Nothing useful escapes Hux’s brutally extracting eye. 

Rose copies the many refined conversations to which she is party, and her amiable disposition and earnest desire to indulge anyone in giving a lecture about his or her topic of choice disposes her to being liked by all, despite her utter lack of social standing. 

Hux has a tendency to hover near her on these occasions, silently jealous until she turns and addresses him directly. He’s constantly brushing his fingers on her waist to guide her across the room, away from this person or towards another. 

/

One particular introduction is precious indeed. 

The acquaintance is made with another young woman like herself, whose carefully affected manners Rose picks up on immediately. 

For all the finery of her gown and the refinement of her air — and beneath her stays the swelling evidence of her happy marriage to the man, presumably quite wealthy indeed, who is Captain Hux’s partner in commerce — she eyes the selection of dainty bites to eat with the wild eyes of a formerly ravenous street urchin. 

Mrs. Aurelia Solo, as she is introduced, or Rey, as she insists she be called, is fox-faced, freckled, and easy to induce to laughter when Rose sticks by her for the length of an afternoon. She reveals that her house is the one right next door; she and her husband were away visiting his uncle at a southern monastery, or she would have been very glad to become friends with Rose from the beginning of her acquaintance with the Captain, whose name she utters with a slight, knowing rise of her brow. 

"Certainly you seem to have him well under control already," Rey says, sly but warm. "I must say, I have never known Mr. Hux to freely give a kind word about anybody; and yet he wrote a description of you which was very warm indeed. It made me curious to make an acquaintance with such a woman. I must say, the gentleman was not wrong.” 

She grins with such open friendliness at Rose, who blushes and wishes to deflect such direct praise. To know that the Captain was praising her behind her back, too, is a heady thing. 

“I am so exceedingly glad to have met you, Miss Tico." 

They turn about the room together, arm-in-arm by the end of the first hour of their acquaintance. 

Rey pokes a skinny finger towards her husband and the Captain, leaning in close to Rose to whisper.

"See those two turtledoves, nesting together?"  

The men are playing at cards, twin glowers on their aristocratic brows. Neither speaks, nor seems particularly at his ease, but the two are infamous for their proclivity to speak together in furitive whispers and do not choose to separate into their own occupations, and so Rose assumes they are happy together that way. Like calls to like, she supposes. What that says about her own self and the way she reluctantly enjoys the Captain’s company as well, she dares not conjecture. 

/ 

Most of all, Rose enjoys taking tea with the Captain before she leaves from her day’s work in his house. 

She's gotten him to tell her about his travels, to speak a little in Spanish and French to her, and the novelty of it is like getting drunk. 

She thinks she would make a fine crewman on one of his ships. The faint dream of seeing the world lives in her fantasies. 

Lisbon and Seville and Marseilles, so often she bores of them. To go to Barcelona and be dull there. This place again? What a life. 

She nearly forgets he is the one voyaging until he reminds her, the concept intruding on their routine rather rudely. 

Before she commences work one day, he clears his throat and announces that his next voyage departs the following Wednesday. He’ll be gone three months at least, trading along the coasts of Spain and Portugal and France, and shall be very busy the next few days hence as well. 

“I’ll have you visit the dressmaker, in my absence,” he tells her. “I’ve established credit there. I’d like to see you in nicer things. More…” he searches for the word. “Cheerful. Better suited to your figure.” 

“That’s… that's very generous,” she squeaks out, insincere, because what’s wrong with her current faded and too-short old dresses? They’re just fine. Besides, she cannot possibly accept such a kindness, can she? 

“I worry that there’ll be no more work to be done by that time, Sir, unless I cease working until you return.” 

He makes a humming noise of acknowledgement without answering, hands tucked behind his back as he wanders closer to the window of the second-floor study. 

She likes the sound of his shoes on the hardwood floor. The coziness of the bookshelves and the hearth.

“I prefer you wait to finish repairs until I return. However, I am sure, in any circumstance, we could find a way to occupy you,” he says, cryptic as he likes to be. "Regular maintenance is critical to any mechanism’s operation, is it not?" 

“It is. Yet, sir, I cannot accept this gift.” 

He flashes her an irritated face, pinched mouth, before it smooths out.

“Consider it as a favor to me. As a work uniform, if you please. If I must attend you to ensure the quality of your work for all of these hours, you may as well be outfitted to best suit the task.” He coughs a bit into his fist. “As your superior sees fit.” 

How bold he is. 

She demurs, but does not thank him. 

A not at all small part of her is glad of his desire to continue meeting. 

To her chagrin, she believes she would miss him, too. 

At the window, Hux clears his throat, cutting a glance over at her and then looking back. If she knew him well enough to presume, she would think him nervous. He usually has no compunction about uncomfortably long eye contact. 

When he speaks his voice is rather softer than she’s ever heard it. 

“Would you allow me to write to you while I’m away, Miss Tico?” 

She blinks at his back, watching his thumb twitch atop the other thumb, hands clasped professionally, as always.

“Of course I would, Captain,” she says, biting down on a half-smile, hope blooming almost painfully in her chest.

/

Chapter Text

/

Rose smooths her palm down the flat of her belly, staring in disbelief at her reflection in the glass. 

The woman who looks back at her is flushed, her cheeks full from eating well, her hair shiny and freshly braided by Paige, whose shoulders have finally relaxed now that there’s milk and medicine for the baby. 

Rose has never considered her appearance so closely. 

Her new green striped dress arrived from the dressmaker just this morning. She went to her first fitting as instructed, awkward the whole while and choosing, with great reluctance, a silk which would cost more — as she calculated quickly in her head — than a months’ rent. 

And he paid for her to have three of them. 

(Not all of silk, thank goodness, but nonetheless an absolute overreach of generosity.)

The dressmaker told her she “already had instructions in regard to the cut of the gowns.”  

Two of them are to be practical day dresses, cut finely and to the latest fashion. The silk, however, is another creature altogether.

It reveals her shoulders; her collarbone, and her bust, too, in the latest fashion. Not immodest, but a little daring. Stylish, for a town where style holds no water. Silk, in a place where silk is ruined in the rain and mud. 

Made for sitting in his parlor only. 

She would not have chosen the cut, but finds she likes it. If she is to be the talk of the town for befriending the Captain, she might as well be mentioned for her daring and quite becoming new wardrobe as well.  

Thoughts of him admiring her in it, devouring her with his gaze, send heat rushing to her core. 

Rose never thought she’d wear such a fine garment in her life. She wishes she could feel wholly wonderful in it, unburdened by complicated questions.   

In whose image is she being dressed? 

She wonders if he looked at fashion plates, thinking of her, or if she’s being styled after a foreign paramour of his. 

Paige tightens the dress strings and ties them off, as she has done all of Rose’s life. Those knots have held her tight through every single day. Her sister knows her better than anyone else, loves her better than anyone else, passed girlhood with her, and is now a woman standing at her side. The way her hands move is familiar; her knots are always perfect.  

"My baby sister," Paige sighs, embracing her from behind and resting her chin on Rose's shoulder. In the mirror their faces both look so similar to Mama’s, but in two different ways. "Look how lovely you are." 

"A lovely little poodle, perhaps." 

Paige steps away, smiling faintly as Rose turns to make her skirt swish. 

“This is no mere gift,” she says, watching as Rose sways her hips a bit with the new crinoline weighing comfortably on them. It’s so light compared to the layers of warm petticoats she’s used to. This silk gown is going to require a new shawl, long and protective from the rain. Plus a bonnet, and suitable gloves… 

Rose twists her lips. “He only means to have me dressed appropriately when I work with him.” 

“In silk, and so prettily.” 

“I know the Captain to be an honorable man, and I believe that an honorable man would make his intentions clear, and would visit with you first for your permission.” 

Paige meets her eyes in the mirror. There is no judgment there. Only a soft place to land.

“I should hope he would, but… I suppose you’re not quite an honorable woman, in most eyes.” 

Hurt flashing in her breast, Rose clutches her skirt. Whip-fast she remembers the girlish habit, scolding herself with an internal echo of the tiny click of the tongue he makes when she pulls a bolt too tight or butts into a conversation too abruptly. 

She lets go, lest she cause wrinkles. 

Paige is only correct. 

Ever since she was a little girl running away from busy, working parents Rose has lived in her own way, and been notorious for it.

Everybody in the village knows of her as a girl who clops about without so much as another fishwife at her side, striking deals with fishermen and inn owners and household cooks of all sorts. She has entered brothels, repairing their things and selling them oysters, rubbing elbows with harlots without a care in the world for her reputation.

Rose had never considered her reputation before she spent those afternoons and early evenings in Hux’s society. Polite society was not of her concern when survival meant taking whatever jobs came her way, and integrating within it will never truly interest her.  

She wore her best borrowed clothes to those gatherings and knew she stuck out. She was not ashamed; she did not blush. Though they made polite and even enthusiastic, warm conversation with her, Rose caught quite a few of Hux’s associates and acquaintances flashing him looks which seemed to say whatever is the nature of your business with this delightful creature, Captain?  

“I could not have a man whose whole opinion of me is shaped by my position.” 

Rose is adamant on this. 

“I do not mind working all my life, and never marrying, if I might avoid the fate of submitting to one who sees me as ruined , or beneath his dignity.” 

“Have you made him quite aware of the fact?”

Rose runs a hand over the wrinkled silk with a gesture like a chopping knife. Clean, flat and sharp.

"He gave the gowns of his own free will. I suppose he may throw his money away as he chooses.” 

“You must excuse your elder sister for worrying. These gentlemen are never simply generous.”

If he makes himself known to me, I will answer him. Until then I will work in order to support our lives, as I have always done.

Say he desires your hand. How shall you answer him then? Do you love him? 

Paige finishes settling the skirt and Rose chews over innumerable twisting thoughts. 

There is the impulsive answer which propels forth, based not on reason but on pure feeling, on a sense of fear and knowing that have weighed heavy on her head ever since she laid eyes on him. Her sweet, anticipatory impending doom, which burst forth with a shout of glee from her blood, from the socket of her being, ready to answer him, to answer Paige, the whole world and her yet-unborn family, ready to be sparked into life by the man holding the flint.

And then to muddy everything come logic and fear and the ironclad requirement of Rose to wait, patient and modest and womanly, for an offer. 

The children make noise on the other side of the tiny apartment, which has yet to grow cold since the Captain tripped over a dead man on his way to shove himself into their lives.

/

He keeps true to his word, that man. He writes to her. 

Letters from foreign ports pile up inside of the orange crate where Rose keeps important things. The Captain tells her where to write ahead so he might catch up to her messages. Thus, no conversational thread is followed all the way through, their communication off-beat and oddly syncopated, two self-contained threads which refer to each other weeks out of time. 

He writes about wind speed, spilling his agitation when he’s behind schedule and noting with pride when he’s ahead. 

She ruminates about how he’s touched these same papers that unfold in her hand, covered back to front in tight letters. 

Maybe he stayed up late to write to her. Sacrificed sleep and comfort on her behalf. The thought is delicious. Living as a phantom in his head, tormenting him when he has so many other critical things to gnaw at his attention. 

/

Her very favorite are the small details he notes. 

girl at the port with very red hair ribbon

and 

I will teach you some Scots songs as my crewmen have passed all that they know to me. I believe you would have a much more pleasing rendition if it is to be my fate to remember these blasted tunes forever

and 

there comes a moment twice each day when the ocean resembles molten glass, if you are lucky and it is smooth, but all of this blasted sun (pardon my wording) makes me long for the gray waters of home, and shade, and our work on that house, which has been such a burden these past years.

/

Each time the mail carrier brings another wax-sealed letter, her neighbors notice and get to tittering. Their coincidental visits increase tenfold around the arrival of each one. They receive a reading of the general news meant to be told to her sister, and some tales from overseas. News from anywhere else is good currency in these narrow crowded streets. 

Rose finds it difficult to speak with anybody of her relation to the Captain. 

He is her employer and nothing more, she informs each of her friends. This hardly satisfies them, for they know she has been seen in his house.  

The fishwife’s courting has been quite the talk of the town. 

That’s how they all put it: her courting. 

Rose dislikes that habit immensely. 

If she is being courted, then she is certainly the last to know. 

Even to Paige, she can hardly speak of it. She sits on her emotions like a hen brooding her eggs, wondering what it all might come to. Strange, for a girl so accustomed to all manners of rough joking, whose immediate clarity of feeling often runs her into trouble. 

/

Never much of a writer, Rose sends back reports of the daily rains and the progress of her dresses and notes about her niece and nephew. She is determined not to seem to care too terribly much, lest he have no intentions towards her. 

She constantly fails in this regard.

My afternoons are dull now that I am unemployed. I think often of the sewing machine. 

Pauses.

Sometimes of you. 

She dashes out the rest before she can think better and contain herself. 

I am looking forward to seeing you again. I hope your travels are safe & merry. 

Very faithfully yours, 

And don't forget to smile,

etc.  

/

She misses his company, as much of a headache as he can be. 

To have him reprimand her against tracking mineral oil on his floors, his voice only sharpening a little, never rising: with all the assured finality of a man quite used to having his every order eagerly obeyed. 

Used to being the little sister, the pious follower of orders when they come from those who command her respect, she found herself falling under his sway more often than she would like. 

Found it more pleasurable straightening up her posture, prompted by the single light rap of his knuckle on the back of her neck as he paces behind her — or kneeling on the floor to clean miniscule drops of oil — or allowing herself to be led by the gentle tug of a sardonic murmur from a man who couldn’t be bothered to lift his eyes from the pages of his textbook — than she will ever admit. 

Ever. 

If she wants him, it is because she has never had such careful attention paid to her, and because she’s attracted to things which challenge her like a moth to lamplight, and because he is steady and willful and not ugly and the men she has known are none of those things at all. 

The force which stirs her blood whenever he is near is of a wholly different quality. It cannot be explained, nor named. 

Instead of dreaming impractical dreams, she remembers the pleasure of drifting through his greenhouse. 

His too-familiar face. His strange, pleasing angles. 

The span of his hands, freckles across their backs. Evidence of a man accustomed to both sun and shaded drawing rooms, a duality which implies that she can never know all of him, which thrills her to her core.     

/

“Impossible to make a coarse thing entirely smooth,” he said once, upon correcting her manner of greeting, demonstrating the way to straighten one’s back and “float down” when curtsying. It was fond, like he knew she couldn’t help it, but he forgave her.

/

“Yes,” she says, “of course, I would tell him yes. I would require that you and the children live with us, and we shall never be apart, just as we promised each other as girls.”

“You're so pretty, so lively, such a good girl, Rosie, that your choice in marriage should be of the heart.” 

“It is about what is right and practical. Besides, in this flight of fancy, I may imagine my future unfolding as I wish, and in this one he brings me sweets from abroad, and he is never cross with me for long, and he leaves me as soon as I tire of his company again. I may always love him in that special way a woman has for a sailor, because he’s never underfoot for long, and he’s always hungry.” 

Paige laughs, and Rose laughs, and the baby girl, who will also grow up in fervent hope of a good man extending an offer, claps and laughs too, wanting to join in on the fun. 

/

From the south of France, he writes to her about mushrooms. 

He describes the way he had searched a certain species out as a boy living further in the countryside. As a man, many years later, he still remembers every detail. 

Considering the parched and slippery grass that one had to pass over, it looked like a break neck excursion to attempt to reach it; but with the aid of two stout sticks I successfully gained the eminence. The toadstool was perfect in all its parts, with a pileus six centimeters wide…

His penmanship visibly worsens in his haste to write it all down, and she can nearly hear him; overenthusiastic, as odd a fellow as she is, consumed by scientific interest.

She is swept up in a rush of affection that has to have been carving its way down into her being for a very long time. A constant erosion she put effort into not noticing.

Thoughts of her duty as a woman to be modest, and the better sense to know to contain herself, scatter like starlings in open sky. 

/

Almost as soon as she lifts the lid stifling that burgeoning feeling, it overwhelms her. 

/

She has been left wondering what he wants with her, and if he is alright out there at sea.

She thinks of him, and does it again, and does it some more. 

Repeat until the candle is snuffed, when she sleeps badly and resorts to rereading an old taxonomy textbook, borrowed from Hux's library, to tire herself out. 

It is so undignified, the manner in which she’s carrying on. Even she who has shouted about fish up and down the streets is mortified.

She worries at the edges of her thumbnails every morning, rereading his letters, searching for evidence which might dislodge the affection which keeps him perpetually centered in her thoughts.

She even doodles the cut of two furrowed brows in her journal before she realizes what she's doing and swiftly destroys the evidence. 

Rose attends two births, along with Paige and a handful of other neighboring women. There are christenings, a funeral, mass every Sunday, and orders of seafood to bring to Rose’s most special customers. How lovely it is, to not have to wander up and down the streets shouting in order to make her rent. 

At least for a little while. 

Every morning she removes all of the linens on the bed she shares with her sister and the children. She spreads them over the furniture, turns the mattress and airs the whole apartment out. She minds the baby while her sister cooks, and walks far away to visit the grocer still near their childhood home, who has always given her the best part of every beef tongue, the biggest onions and the least floppy soup carrots. 

Life continues ever on.

Yet nothing dislodges her attention from the matter of her incredibly confounding man.  

Especially once she speaks to her landlord, and finds out that the rent had been paid for the next three months by a benefactor he is “not supposed to name”. 

Another gift with countless invisible strings attached. 

The dresses were not enough for him. Nor this psychic occupation he’s taken up inside of her mind. She can never hope to repay him unless he breaks and she repairs everything he owns thrice over.

It’s only fuel for her fire.

/

He returns home in two weeks’ time, and she sends a letter forward to Seville, to meet him there. 

It is against her nature to hold an idea and not tear it right open to get to the heart of it. 

She is meticulous as she cuts a new pen from a scraggly goose feather, then scrapes black ink powder into a shallow dish and mixes it with a bit of white wine to make it as dark as possible.  

I would be much obliged to know what your intentions might be, once your things are all repaired and I am no longer eligible to be called your employee.

She writes furiously, watching in horror as the ink blots and her penmanship goes to hell. 

Her hand shakes. She is being improperly forward, she knows. 

She has been ruminating on the significance of his gifts, and it will not do. She must make things clear at once. 

I shall take the opportunity as well to remind you that I am free and sovereign and I cannot be bought. 

She sends the letter out with the late afternoon post. In desperate need of settling down, she takes a walk with Mrs. Solo, out in the day that is gray and thinly lit and does not have him in it but has his hands all over the making of it. 

/

Rose has had her fancies before — including a pre-teenage fascination with Jesus which had almost had her taking holy vows, until Paige informed her that nuns cannot covet worldly things such as stolen engine manuals and rock candy — but never one which affected her in this way . 

It helps not at all that she blushes with mortification every time she remembers how she had lost her temper in the letter, which she had sent without a second thought. 

She never allows herself to lose sight of the truth, which thumps with its own heartbeat like a sliver under her nail. 

The truth is, they are not made for each other. 

A simple naval captain or merchant journeyman might do for her, but Captain Hux is intensely ambitious. He declined a commission in the military to strike out on his own and now does very well for himself. 

A man in such a position would prefer a wife who can entertain any number of guests, and direct the styling of rooms, and who knows a great many important people so that her husband might gain the greatest advantage by marrying her. 

Certainly the Captain is that type of man, just as much as Rose is not that type of woman. 

Her image of married life is smaller, warmer, cozier, more tender than he could possibly offer. 

She would like to sit in her man’s lap every evening. She would like to ruck up her skirts as she squats to sharpen his straight razor by hand, feeling his eyes on her. She would like to run her razor up the line of his neck to keep his beard in a neat line. She would like to feel that thumping pulse beneath her blade. 

The one writing to her is not nearly that kind of man. He touches everything through the dead leather of gloves. He has a valet for his personal care. He detests his beard. 

/

When the parcel sent from Seville is delivered, her stomach drops. 

There is a letter, and also a small flat squarish package, wrapped in brown paper. She pops the string tie of the package with a knife, without opening the letter first. 

Nestled inside, along with two glossy green leaves, is a portrait miniature.

It is stretched over wood and folded in half, so that she might not immediately see its subject, and the size of her palm when closed thus. 

Is it a portrait of himself? Is he offering his fidelity and wishes to remind her of his countenance? 

God forbid she forget his stern face. As if she ever could. 

A shiver runs up her arms, imagining his cold eyes peering out from the canvas. 

An image of him for her own use must be painted at her direction. Simply must. He would have himself captured all wrong. She would feel his menace from across the room, haunted by those sideburns and that puckered severity, and never look at him again, and never be prevailed upon to marry him. 

Rose gasps when she flips the portrait miniature open. 

It is a lush little duo of landscapes, one side a scene of some hilly countryside dotted with orange trees, and the other side an impression of a small Spanish village. It looks nearly like home, but with whitewashed walls instead of stone, and golden sun instead of a permanent slathering of clouds. 

She stares for a long while, imagining herself there, in that sunbaked place. 

He knew better. He knew she would want this instead. 

She imagines his hands running up from her hip to her waist, feeling her form in her new corset. 

/

When she finally opens the letter, she nearly faints from further excitement. 

I understand that you wish to know of my intentions with you. 

This is a topic that I feel would be best discussed in person, especially as there have been some rather exciting developments… 

He’s staying in Portugal an extra few weeks. A business opportunity has arisen; he writes in breathless tones of the chance to take over the contracts of an old rival and supplant his importing business. He has further investments in unrelated manufacturing machinery, which are paying off handsomely and allow him to take the risk. 

Now, at once, many of my carefully laid plans are coming to fruition. 

Rose bites her lip and cannot believe what he writes next. 

If you can be spared, and if your sister allows, I would like to have you come and see me here, so we can discuss matters. 

It is my hope that you excuse the rapidity of the offer and understand that the conditions are most extenuating, and that you shall have excellent chaperones and find it a most diverting use of your time. 

/

Chapter Text

/

Although Rose has grown used to the rumble of the steam ship beneath her, and even took a bit of bread this morning, the novelty of her journey has yet to fade.

She sits up stiff in her travel outfit, trying not to be seasick, and over the course of their six days at sea her cheeks go numb from laughing and talking merrily with the rest of the traveling party. 

Her companions are the mild-mannered office manager Mr. Mitaka; his wife Jessica, who by the end of the second day can set Rose giggling with just a look; and the Captain’s valet, Mr. Raymond, who finds out that this is Rose’s first foreign journey and sets about teaching her some French. 

She fails to grasp any of the grammar but picks up a few phrases, and Mr. Raymond chuckles that as a young man the Captain too was not so adept at French, although his Latin was excellent. 

Rose pictures the Captain as a young man with a cracking voice, frowning down from his gangly height, the imposing width of his shoulders more like the pointy wings of an ill-feathered adolescent bird. That he has kept the same valet so long is exceptional. 

"What else of his teen years?" Mr. Mitaka asks, a little mirth in his eyes, and Mr. Raymond responds in kind to never ask the Captain about eating dolphin, or taking a swim in the middle of shark-infested waters. 

Rose asks how long Raymond has been in his service, and finds that Hux is a mere eleven years her senior. He took his first helm at twenty-two, the same age she is now. 

She would so much rather gut a fish than command a ship. 

Paige sent her off with a fresh blank book, charging her to record every fresh impression her travels made upon her. She scribbles phrases down in this commonbook, the words in French and Portuguese for port and bird and sky, and sketches all she can. She hardly sleeps, despite the soothing rumble of the engines, which she itches to inspect, but unfortunately cannot.  

Rose has always dreamt of taking coaches and trains and channel-crossing ferries while on her travels. Never was her jittery stomach a part of those fantasies. Nor the complicated knot in her breast, which grows ever more agitated when she lays eyes on the Captain as they disembark in Porto. 

He has come to greet them himself.

She hardly breathes.  

A quick gesture, his hand beneath hers, cupped lightly, solid and leatherbound in black; shiny, neat, his whole person clean and well-coiffed in a new jacket with his characteristic dramatic shoulders and polished boots. Rose changed her gloves at the last moment only because Mrs. Mitaka had done so, and she is exceedingly glad, because he presses his lips to the back of her hand in greeting.

He glances up from his position, bent over her hand, and his eyes are viciously bright. This recent success has done wonders for his ego, she can tell already. 

Captain Hux straightens up tall but does not let her hand go until she takes it down herself. He tells her he is very glad to hear her journey was pleasant. He is most gratified that she has come. 

/

He catches her for a moment alone in the hallway of the hotel. 

In close contact with him she cannot help but flush. Her irrational fondness of him is undeterred. It grows, in fact, as he makes his apologies about the fact that he cannot schedule a private interview with her until the next afternoon. 

“What fortune, having so much to occupy you,” she says, smiling. It requires Herculean effort not to look at his lips as he speaks, but she makes it. 

He, however, does not. 

His eyes keep darting down conspicuously and his phrasing is jumbled, words tripping over themselves to pour out before her.

“It is quite a busy time — a very good one — we shall speak of it during our meals — I think you should be very interested indeed, once I explain everything…” 

She nods. She loses focus. She has missed being able to look upon him, taking her greedy fill of watching this novel, interesting, animated thing. The sun has done him some good, she cannot help but notice. There are freckles on the highest points of his cheeks.    

She only comes back when she feels soft leather on her chin. His thumb, raising her head just slightly, a fraction of an angle. 

It’s startling, and unforgivably bold of him, and it instantly achieves his aim of capturing the rigid attention of her whole being. 

Incensed, her lips pinch together, especially when he grins down at her. 

“There she is,” he says, satisfied, as if he was waiting her out and his patience has been rewarded. 

Before she can warn him about the compromising nature of this position, he drops his hand. 

“I’ve been told by your companions that you are charming to the utmost.” He’s so proud, bragging about her to herself. “Everyone says you are a first-rate travel partner, despite your inexperience.” 

She supposes he means it as a complement, but the words drip with condescension.

“I read the Traveller’s Handy-Book before I left. Cover to cover. I am very glad its advice was of such use to me, and that you are pleased.”  

She did so twice, actually, but she does not venture to outright brag.

“Oh, very good,” he says, genuine now, which disarms her. “You understand the importance of preparation.” 

She feels the back of her teeth with her tongue. Pleasure warms her belly, drips further down. 

Rose does not want to love being complimented by him, but she does. 

Day after tomorrow, they shall have a private interview. But they will dine tonight, and he will see her then. 

/

She likes his face flickering warm in the candlelight at dinner. 

They’re sitting apart, and he’s quite busy conducting business with the other guests. Rose focuses on surviving this harrowing experience. Fine dining is utterly alien to her: elbows tucked in and silver service and multiple courses and resisting the urge to carefully sniff each bite of unfamiliar food. She watches those around her before she touches anything, is careful with her silverware, and copies Mrs. Mitaka’s manner of sampling the food. 

Rose laughs behind her hand at a quip from the businessman seated next to her. When she glances up to see that she is being devoured by a very direct green gaze she ignores the fact. 

In the aftermath of his kissing her hand and lingering over it, the Captain pays her no special attention during the meal. They converse in a group after dinner before the men recuse themselves to smoke and drink and Captain Hux asks quite casually how she liked the food. 

“Is it very new to your palate?” He asks, his eyes sparkling, and she feels slighted until he adds, “it is my sincere hope that you try as many new things as you’d like.” 

At the end of the night, after they ride to the hotel in a carriage scented with smoke and murmuring with the stale conversation of businessmen, Hux offers to help her down the step. Her heart thuds at the contact, though it’s through two pairs of gloves. 

She takes her hand away first. He tucks his own neatly behind his back. 

With no special intimacy he bids her visit him tomorrow in the afternoon; he shall provide her a driver who will take her at the appointed hour to his office. 

He hesitates there for a moment, a whiff of indecision on his face, then nods, as if half to her and half to himself, and takes his leave. 

She goes to bed dizzy from two glasses of champagne and broods, playing his thumb on her chin over and over, seeing the nearness of his face as if he was right there. 

/

The next day, the simple joy of breakfast with Jessica; bread and thickly sliced cheese and meat, served with coffee and real cream. It’s difficult not to let her thoughts return towards the Captain, like iron crawling after a magnet, wondering why he sent no note this morning, was cold last night, is so infuriating, is so unreadable. 

In the morning, thinking of her later interview, she quietly despairs over the state of her accoutrements — the caps and bonnets she and Paige labored over, using scrap fabric in an attempt to festoon old pieces. The result is an impression of carelessness which she hates giving, especially in this foreign place where she is already conspicuous. If she must dress in rags, then God bless her for being alive and clothed at all, she wouldn't mind it and never has; but looking so much the part of the country mouse partially dressed up in finery really stings. 

Of course, the Captain did not think beyond purchasing her gowns and the most obvious underthings: clean shifts and gloves and appropriate hats for the situations in which she would be wearing her gifted gowns. Nothing of her old wardrobe, smelling of fish and smoke, could be used, not a shawl nor a single glove, but men do not brook such frivolous considerations. 

Rose has made do, as she always does. 

Luckily, her companion offers her the use of one of her own bonnets, with a knowing wink in reference to Rose's appointment with the Captain. It’s dark purple satin, trimmed on the sides of her head with imported lace. 

The lace itches, and Rose feels more than a bit ridiculous, but Jessica’s warmth as she ties it beneath her chin is a great comfort.

During their morning tour of the city, Rose makes hasty sketches to bring home. 

The scribble-filled pages of her commonplace book declare that she truly did see these buildings, with their orange tiled roofs and many windows; the strings of salt cod drying on lines like laundry, and the laundry itself, strung up out in the sun without worry for rain.

No, Rose was not merely having a lovely dream of a seaside town built on a hill that could almost be called similar to her own, only less gray, less shabby, less the place her heart is centered towards. 

More beautiful than any place she has ever seen, but less home. 

/

Captain Hux’s office in this country is located atop a fabric shop whose awnings open to the street. 

The Captain stands in greeting, as he always does, and gestures for her to sit without coming around to push her chair in after her. 

The skirt of her modest day dress had brushed both walls of the narrow stairwell on the way up. Now she is being pressed upon by the polished wood ridge of his desk, as she settles a bit uneasily before it. 

“Good afternoon, Miss Tico.” 

Captain Hux’s attention is fixed upon a document, tapping the edge of his pen upon it. He seems mildly bothered.

Rose smiles, determined to be unperturbed, and chirps her own, “good afternoon, Captain. I must extend my unending thanks for your invitation, I cannot even begin to say it enough. It’s hardly believable that I’m sitting,” she gestures around them at his office. “ Here.” 

She means it in the best way — here in Portugal , abroad, this dazzlingly lovely place, where she never thought she’d have the chance to go — but she catches him wincing. 

“It is my pleasure to have you here, though I regret the setting. This office is ridiculous, I know,” Captain Hux says, grimacing at the shelves overcrowded with rolled maps, the papers pinned to the wall and in stacks on his desk. “It shall do for now, but very soon it will prove insufficient as compared to the stature of the company.” 

She opens her mouth to clarify, but he takes that as an opportunity to overtake the conversation. 

“You see, this business will require great effort to establish, and great precision,” the Captain begins, becoming more animated as he speaks of his professional dealings. 

“Yet it shall earn out handsomely, once done, and forevermore, with the grace of God and my own good work. I pride myself on being a master of negotiation, and such skill has helped bring these opportunities which I field today. Including the one which I have brought you here to discuss.” 

A humble man if she’s ever heard one! She bites the insides of her cheeks to keep a straight face. 

“I shall be very glad to hear of it.” 

The Captain glances up at her, his gaze having wandered from her face to his papers to the crowded office as he spoke. 

Is she mistaken, or are his cheeks beginning to go pink? 

He’s oddly stiff, like a boy feeling ungainly in his skin, although she cannot imagine that he’s nervous. She’s quite sure the emotion has never even occurred to him. 

“It became clear that I must find someone to assist me in my domestic life. I have no intention of selling my family home or making a permanent residence elsewhere than our shared port of origin. In fact, my sincerest desire is to see the cold home of my youth made lively again.” 

The Captain steeples his fingers and looks at her significantly. 

Rose waits for him to continue, her heart up in her throat. 

The Captain is clearly thrown off by her silence, yet she has no idea what to say to make it right.

It is obvious, clear as day from what he’s saying. 

He’s too successful now — he must solidify contracts by marriage — indeed, with no declaration of his affection, she concludes that he can mean only one thing. 

He intends to hire her permanently. 

In the same instant she realizes this, she knows that cannot be his housekeeper. 

Rose is in no position to refuse work, but to wait upon him and the wife he inevitably shall find among the daughters of his business partners, to serve only her when he is gone, and to watch their family grow… 

She had thought her feelings toward him were only fragile, newborn things. 

She was wrong. 

The severity of her reaction to the mere thought guarantees that she could not bear it.

He hesitantly continues when she fails to respond.

“It is imperative I settle my affairs, so that the way should be clear and my focus can be honed where it ought to go: where it is most profitably spent.” 

“Yes,” she ventures. “I suppose it’s very important you have a — an assistant. One who understands you.” 

“Exactly,” he rather beams. “A decent, industrious, sensical sort, who shall make the perfect instrument at my right hand. With domestic matters under her control, things done according to her good taste and judgment, I shall only reap benefits from this arrangement; and she as well, of course, will have a most comfortable life. In these past months I have come to find that it is true that man was not created to live alone, and you have shown me that such company need not be tedious, nor unpleasant, or unstimulating.” 

He’s businesslike, brisk and to the point. It gives him such joy to be so efficient, and to lay things out thus. Everything so clearly defined, this woman's roles and the rest of her life laid out in his mind as notches along a straight line that points perfectly into his ideal future. 

Her smile has gone wooden, propped up on her face by a twitch of muscle. 

She is glad he has finally decided to be so very clear as to what he wants.   

“I’m sure the wife you choose will be quite gratified by the life you offer,” Rose says. "I am very proud of having set the course for her future happiness.” 

Confusion begins to gather on his face, slow, a stormcloud eradicating the light which had built upon it. She stares down at her hands.

“But sir, I cannot assist you in building it. I regret that you’ve brought me so far with such a pleasant objective that I am now ruining — it is not for lack of interest in keeping your home for you and her, but I — I think I might be better suited to my fish.” She glances up wildly. 

“We argue too much, you would not tolerate it long. I would make a horrid housekeeper, as I have not the faintest idea about dinner parties, or keeping silverware, or —”

“You think I want you for a housekeeper?” 

His lip has taken on a twist. Her heart thuds hard. 

“What else could you mean? You were very clear upon the subject.” 

He stares incredulously. 

“I want you for a wife , Rose.” 

Time, blood, everything, absolutely everything comes to a halt. 

Her breath leaves her body. She has not a comprehensible thought in her head. 

“But Paige would have told me, had you asked her,” she blurts out. 

Something in her had been holding onto hope that he was serious about her; that after their talks together, and their ease of finding equilibrium between his fastidiousness and her testiness, he would do her this dignity; that he loves her, and wants her for his own; but her creeping dread overtakes every other nascent feeling when he responds.

“Asked… your sister?” 

“Did you not ask her for my hand?”

He’s silent a moment, and in that moment the miasma of confusion and shock and explosive joy inside of her is hardened into something like grief. 

 “You told me your parents, God rest their souls, had passed away, and that you had no guardian.”

“My sister looks after me,” she cries, mortified, rushing off into one of her furies from which there is no rescue. “If you had thought even a bit , you would have known that you must ask her; if you intend to join me to your soul forever, she would be your family by matrimony, as well, but you did not think of that, did you? Only of acquiring help .” 

She cannot stem the angry flow, and he does nothing to stop her. 

“Perhaps you might have informed me, too, that we were courting when I thought myself merely your employee. I was unaware that I was being considered as a candidate for marriage, Captain, and I would have returned your money at the very start if I knew it was being used to buy my time so you might consider me like a — a workhorse you mean to purchase.”  

It’s the Captain’s turn to sit there, stunned, jaw dropped a little. 

He’s less confused or angry now than simply astonished, though all emotions reflect out of his tightly bound inner world in the same manner: as mere flashes in his eyes, and the tightening of his fingers about his pen, which he failed to put down in order to make his proposal. 

“You wrote with an explicit request I make my intentions known.” He enunciates carefully. “And I believe the significance of being invited here at my own expense spoke for itself as to the seriousness of the matter at hand.”

“You were speaking as if you wanted me merely to run your home exactly as you like.”

“I do — a wife — Rose, that is what a wife does — she runs the home.” 

Rose huffs an aggrieved breath. 

“Yes, of course, sir, you are right, as you are in all things. A tool for your hand indeed,” she snips, staring down at his hands instead of her own. 

He replaces his pen in its stand, fingers folding together on the desk. “I beg your pardon?” 

“I am not your best prospect, if a woman most competent at housekeeping is your goal,” she says, dragging her gaze right back up, fists balled in her skirt where he cannot see and correct her for it. 

She remembers, in a vivid flash, how in the past he’s referred to himself as her superior and feels her stomach tighten further, her resolve crystalizing into something that can cut. 

“I must be honest with you, sir, and therefore must say that I have not the faintest idea about the duties of the sort of wife you need. I believe your time will be most profitably spent elsewhere.”

He shuts his mouth. 

What warmth there was to his expression cools down into his usual icy way. 

“You think me a fool for asking you. Perhaps I am.” He looks a while down at his papers. “I am not unaware of the disadvantages of such a match, but rest assured I have considered it from every possible angle, and have decided that your defects in education and relations and fortune are well accounted for.”

She flinches, hurt. For a moment his face softens, his hand twitches as if to reach towards her, but he stops himself.  

“How wonderful to hear I am not too defective for your taste. I suppose it is a lovely compliment, coming from yourself.” 

He waits before he answers. Aside from the quizzical pinch of his brows, he still reveals nothing of himself. 

“I seem to have insulted you with my offer,” he says. “I apologize for my oversight in failing to speak with your sister — but I cannot account for your distaste, otherwise.” 

“You have not insulted me by asking for my hand,” she mumbles. “I would have told you yes.”

“Would have,” he repeats, the words hollow. 

“I would. I do admire you. I am utterly changed for having met you.” 

Her throat tightens. Beyond her temper she has not thought a bit about what she’s saying. 

“I think that if you were the forgiving sort that I could learn to keep house, and do wifely things, and give you grief all the rest of your days with my joking about.” 

“And yet?” 

She opens her mouth.

Shuts it. 

She feels ridiculous, sitting in front of this man who would declare himself master of her heart without deigning to win it — who has won it, blast him and his letters and his mystery and her curiosity of knowing him — in a bonnet she would not have chosen, in this dress that likewise is not quite her, in this foreign place, this uncharted life.  

"I am to entrust you to be the custodian of the soul, the guardian of my future. Yet you cannot even bring yourself to make it known that you regard me before you assume the privilege of my hand in marriage.” 

He doesn't fight her. Merely listens. 

Her heart breaks a bit at his silence, his simple acquiescence to her answer. 

“You look into your future and what you see is some woman who will make your life easier. I believe I would make your life hell. I can return the dresses you bought, if you like.” 

He waves that last idea away impatiently. “Perish the thought. I have no need of any dresses.”  

“As you like,” she mumbles. “Yet you have no argument against my point.” 

His steepled fingers touch his lip lightly. He considers her with a cool look down his nose, and at least it is less excruciating to sit under his gaze than it might be. They’ve grown good at sitting together in thoughtful quiet.  

“You are difficult, indeed,” he says at last. “But do not insult yourself by implying that you would do anything but improve my condition in all possible ways. I dislike your habit of self-deprecation.” 

She starts to speak — to beg him to release her from this situation, please , so she might step out of her crinoline and run off to join the Portuguese fishwives, where she would be much happier, never having to think of him or his too-handsome face, content to pack sardines and sing pretty songs forever — but he cuts her off. 

“Anyhow, I find I rather like a fight. I have never had interest in anything which comes easily.” 

“I have no interest in fighting you, sir.”

Oh, confound the flat smirking smile that comes at that. 

“Yet you’re fighting tooth and nail against my best intentions.” 

“You sound no worse for it,” she shoots back. "In fact, you seem quite jolly for a man who has just learned he cannot have the wife he wanted." 

"Cannot have? For all you've castigated me, dear, you have not said no but merely that I have the wrong goals, and bad means of achieving them." 

"Marriage is a fine goal, sir. I think it should suit you and the servant you select as your wife very well." 

"Fine indeed," he smirks, taking the insult. "Are you previously engaged? Have you accepted my invitation here under false pretenses?" 

"Of course I'm not engaged. If I were going with any other man, I’m sure you would have heard of him." 

Blushing at the mere notion — she did have a failed courtship, once, seasons ago, but Finn sparked nothing but fond kinship when he held her hand. 

"My affections, rather, are already engaged… They would be to your advantage, but it seems they will be given no gentle encouragement to grow." 

"Gentle encouragement," he repeats. "Are you a delicate creature after all? A soft little thing?" 

She keeps her face still, despite the tremble of her lower lip, and does not indicate yes or no, cannot find it in her when he is so at his ease, and unrepentant. 

He merely smiles again, flat but not unkind. 

"May I smoke my pipe, Miss Tico?"

"You are free to do as you like, Captain, as it is your office.” When he merely looks flatly at her without moving she motions and says, “smoke, sir; please do.” 

She rather likes the scent of the fine tobacco he uses, and how it smells like calm slow afternoons in his study, but she is loath to tell him so. Especially now, when her whole existence is confused, too excited, and raw, an open wound of a girl.

“I’ve found you a mostly reasonable young woman,” he explains after he’s painstakingly removed, filled, and lit his pipe with a match that he extinguishes with a decisive flick of the wrist. 

He exhales from the side of his mouth, not once taking his eyes from her. 

“I would also like to register my disagreement that your current lack of experience in homemaking precludes your ability to learn it. You have absorbed your other professions just as well, in a similar manner.”

“While I appreciate your faith in my abilities…” she starts, wary of his intent. 

“Let us not speak further upon that matter, for now; lest you put to eternal rest the final shred of my pride.” 

“Impossible. You are immortal in that sense, sir.” 

He takes a thoughtful puff, screwing up his lips after exhaling. 

“What delightfully bitter speeches you make.” 

“In that regard alone I believe we are indeed well-matched.” 

“And only in that regard?” 

She does not answer. 

Cannot open that box of spirits, and be responsible for what she unleashes.

Knowing Hux, he ought to have sent her away and to be licking his wounds at this very moment, but he’s nearly nonchalant as he successfully entreats her to stay through the end of the week, as he’s got “a few plans already too far gone to retract.” 

She’s unsure if it’s gotten through to him that he has lost here. 

Though he must have expected a kiss at the end of their interview, he walks her down to the waiting carriage and helps her in without pretense. She sits, and from his position a fair bit lower than she, arms crisp behind his back, he looks up with those keen eyes and bids her a good afternoon. 

"Remember," those eyes say, "you promised to be civil, and let me do my work upon you," and seeing them, and reading them so clearly as she does, she says silently back, "just you try."  

/

She was clearly right the first time she told him no.  

Her hasty agreement to maintain civility has landed Rose in the horrible position of smiling, rather painfully, through a dinner so fine and so carefully planned that it must have been in anticipation of her answering his proposal very differently. 

The Captain passes it off as a celebration of the recent business success, and does so without a hitch. Various business contacts are invited, crowding the table with a hodgepodge of languages, and begging the question if they were late additions or if it was always in the plan to use their engagement dinner as a business function. 

Hux betrays no sign of regret, nor discomfort. He is as stiff and overly formal a host as he would have been if she were hanging on his arm. 

He sits directly across from her, his face bisected by a candlestick, cast in oily yellow light, and when he is not talking to her — as he makes pains to do with polite regularity throughout the evening’s ordeal — she observes him. 

He does not repel her by being too obviously false or superior with the guests around him, as she’d hoped, but has a restrained manner which she hardly recognizes but cannot reproach him for. Only by seeing him in this company, when his face is solemn and he sinks into intense discussion with another English trader, does she feel she is beginning to understand him as a whole creature, and not just a man in parts: the confounding admirer, the infuriating employer, the reluctantly affectionate friend. 

By the time the meal is over and they’re drinking sweet red wine, the conversation has drifted its way towards the professions of the guests’ fathers. Those engaged in the discussion count among them fathers mostly in the military or in business. The Captain’s father was of a somewhat high post in the Navy and had the son raised aboard strangers’ ships.  

Rose had gone thus far sparkling along in her usual manner of asking questions and revealing nothing about herself, when all eyes come to rest on her in expectation that she might answer the question.  

“My father was an oysterman,” Rose says shyly. A man who spent most of his days out in the bay, hunched over. His hands shook during the off season but they were always steady in ice cold water. A beat passes with no response. 

"My mother was the daughter of a schoolmaster," as if it will help their estimation of her. Rose has always been proud of the fact, and of her own education. 

"She married for love," she finishes in a small voice. She cannot help it. She is proud of that fact, too.  

None know what to say, except for Jessica, who smiles, and says, “I do love oysters so very much,” although it must be out of pity. She catches Hux’s lower lip curling up for a brief moment as he raises his wine to his lips, and is insulted, until he cuts into the awkward silence. 

“My own mother was a scullery maid,” he says, with the timing of a joke but none of the jesting in it. 

"Was it love between them?" She asks, utterly inappropriate, speared on his gaze. 

His lips close and stretch in a flat smile, eyes sparkling with mirth as he slowly shakes his head. 

"No, darling. They would not have recognized what we call love." 

All of those in earshot hear this, his professional contacts and personages of some import, but he speaks directly and, as it seems, only — intimately — to her.

/ 

The rest of the week they are constantly in the company of others, and it is an exquisite form of torture. 

When she sees him — and he is in that rare state where he’s not busy with work or in serious discussions with the men around him — the Captain holds her paper parasol and walks slowly beside her, or otherwise offers a stiff triangle of arm, which she takes with a stomach sticky with reluctance and other mixed emotions. 

They speak only of superficial and easy things, of which there are always plenty after days of sightseeing and nights visiting fine homes and low-ceilinged music halls. 

At night, unable to sleep, she’s seized with paroxysms of emotion. 

A girl of sanguine nature, Rose is unused to the jagged edges of embarrassment and frustration and longing which come all in separate waves through the hours of darkness. 

Jessica snores softly, asleep at her side for want of a bedmate in lieu of Mr. Mitaka, whose tasks here keep him up very late. Rose is constantly tempted to wake her and talk things through, as she might do with Paige, but the Captain’s proposal is too surreal to address with anybody. She’s hardly able to think of it at all, and yet it is the only thing on her mind. 

At two weeks this is the longest she’s ever gone not seeing her sister, and what a time to miss her. 

In Paige's absence, she thinks altogether too much. 

Rose lights a candle and stares at the duo portrait which the Captain had sent her. She had packed it on the journey so as to make comparisons between it and the scenery of Portugal, and it serves as a token of memory, of reminder; he is indeed the same man who so thoughtfully picked it out for her, and brought her here, when she had been dreaming so tenderly of traveling someday. 

All week long he does not renew his wish to have her for his own. He does not beg, nor pen romantic letters to slip beneath her hotel room door. 

In fact, he's quite unbothered by the whole affair, at least compared to Rose, for whom it has changed everything. 

She spends her days with Jessica and Mr. Raymond, gaping in wonder at the world around her, but quietly ruminating inside of her heart. As she dresses she perfumes her hair with a tiny bottle of scent water, and thinks not of the Captain but of herself: wonders, looking down at herself beneath her shift, what sort of allure that useful body holds, what allure he sees in her, and wants for his own. 

The long sunny days are wonderful, the two women left to divert themselves with Mr. Raymond as their chaperone. They accompany him on his errands, going to men’s tailors to pick up orders of pants cut to the Captain’s exact liking. 

Rose's legs ache pleasantly from exertion, carrying her up and down the steep cobbled hills. She fills her whole commonplace book, sketching out the gargoyles on the Gothic cathedral and the snarling faces of the lion statues in the fountain before it; the medieval faces of saints and penitents out of the paintings in the eternal smoky dusk of the cathedral.  

The evenings consist in equal wonders, adding the company of the men. Guests from all over pass through the hotel drawing room, with their interesting society and their faces perfect for sketching. 

All the while, Rose can only think of the Captain . 

He always joins them, yet speaks little except when matters of botany or business inevitably arise. Mostly he prefers sitting just out of her sight in his fine chair, a novel on his lap, in quiet observation of the social goings-on. Ankle propped on his knee, he slowly taps a paper knife against his hard palm, listening, haughty indifference on his face when she allows herself a ration of looking at him. 

It becomes a particular habit and then a game to meet his eyes and hold them for as long as she can. She always ends up catching him glancing at her, and she always outlasts him in their staring contests. It gives her such a fantastic sense of victory each time he looks away first. 

When circumstances force them together it takes a great effort from Rose to smother any appearance of untoward emotion, but for Hux it seems like no problem at all to hold off. Questions and confessions stay bursting behind her lips but she tries very hard to only express sentiments of the yes, it is indeed very different here variety. 

He is calm when he’s with her. Patient. Cool, but not cold, bending his head to show his neck when he’s listening to her, as if in submission. He could never be called wholly submissive, his constitution would rail against it; but he is positively humble in comparison to his eagerness to correct her back home, in his house, with her as his employee. 

Which she shall never be again. 

In every room, she knows exactly where he is. She would know him without sight at all, but merely by the way her whole body reacts when he’s near.

Without words, nor actions more significant than a quick press of his gloved hand as he helps her out of a carriage, and a glance from across the table, she comes to understand that his proposal was not to be once rejected and never again brought up. Rather, it was the start of a long negotiation between two equally obstinate forces. 

/

He watches keenly as she dances with a few young men in one of those dim, smoky little venues which she and Jessica have begged to visit. 

Rose is perpetually a step behind, because these hopping circling dances are not the country hall steps she's used to. She has always adored the physicality of dance, the playful flirting it allows for and then the quick escape, but her partners’ polite physical attention is unbearable when all of her senses are trained elsewhere — on the one who sits and smokes and watches her, his cool gaze never wavering. 

It’s a gorgeous smear of gaslight and skirts and silken waistcoats and men more her height than they are back home, but Rose tires quickly of the dancing and the perfumed glamor of the nightlife.

She’s standing along the edge of the room for barely five minutes before the Captain comes to join her. 

“Good evening,” he says, a light jest as they arrived here together. “Have you had your fun?” 

“Very much so,” she answers, leaning just the slightest bit towards him.  

He has a way of passing a single glance over her person. With the faintest curl of the corner of his lip a calm peace passes over him, like the assembled sights of her hair, her dress, her manner of walking and her smile and the way she moves her hands are all so agreeable to him as to settle his nerves. 

She realizes then how much he loves her. 

By that look alone she knows he has peeled her down to the quick and no longer sees anything but that bright kernel of her being. No longer does he look at her and find her lacking. He has no need of teasing or correcting her. He has seen what he needs to now be fully satisfied with her, and regards her with that warmth of a highly particular man who has found the rare something which exceeds all his standards. 

She was so stupidly stubborn not to have noticed it before. 

She has been seen, and found worthy, and loved so highly by this fastidious creature, and for months she took it all for granted; as a matter of course. 

Embarrassment might burn through her, but instead she finds that with this revelation that a sort of nerve, which had been jangling uncomfortably for so long, has been soothed. Instead the feeling that floods her is relief, and it is incomparably brilliant. 

With his ability to see into her, she cannot construct any artifice that may conceal the rush of emotion happening within, so she does not bother. There is no need for words, with all the noise and the lack of privacy. 

Both of them are silent, listening to the lady singer in a black fringed shawl seated at the head of the room, a few gentlemen with guitars behind her. Her voice is a spilled glass of wine, rich and nostalgic and passionate.

In the hired trap they take to the hotel, Rose leans her head back, face tilted up at the moon and the blanket of stars. They trot over a Roman bridge which arches high over the river bisecting Porto. Her stomach thrills at the salt-green smell of the water, river mixing with ocean, and at the chasm of open space dropping down on either side of them. 

Her thigh, as if to seek a secure hold while they fly out between juts of land, is pressed in a firm line against his. They hide this bit of impropriety beneath the cover of the Captain’s black wool jacket, which he insisted he drape across her lap despite the night’s balmy warmth. 

Obsessed with that point of contact, she distracts herself by singing sotto voce, warbling her notes with strained vibrato in imitation of the fado singer.

The Captain and a trader friend of his speak over the sound of the horses on cobblestone, Rose’s humming partially drowning them out. The trader says “how melancholic I should find that style of singing,” and the Captain remarks blandly, “those songs are quite often about loved ones taken over the sea, or taken by the sea…” 

She makes slow waves and little movements with her hand in the air, thinking that nothing can be so bad or truly bitter if it can be sung about. She spots Venus rising on the horizon and uses her thumb to blot out the cold pinprick of her light.

/

He gets her alone on the second-to-last day, when her homesickness and her longing to stay where it’s warm and everything is new are equal to each other. It is a tour of a public botanical garden he insists on giving her, and during which she learns not one new bit of information about the natural world. 

As soon as her hand is perched in his bent arm and they begin to walk, she has to know: “is it true, about your mother?” 

“Ah, Rose. I reserve lying for useful pursuits which make my life easier and my image better.” 

She glares up at him, and he dips his head. 

“Yes, yes. It is true.” 

"So you're the son of a maid and an Irish naval officer." 

Another show of his neck. "A bastard, as well," he says, with a frankness she cannot marry to his usual calculated responses. "My father never allowed me to forget it. I was disinherited, except for that blasted house. What little my father did not spend was dispersed to the church."

A traitorous surge of affection crowds through her, and new understanding of him which complicates everything. 

"You have come a very long way, Captain." 

"I shall not expound upon the subject of my career, although it is a favorite of mine.” 

"I believe you may have your choice of wives, despite the circumstances of your birth," she ventures, finding it nearly painful to pronounce the word wife, bringing things towards that subject. 

"If my choice would simply consent to marrying me, then yes — I would have my choice indeed."

"You are impossible," she cries, stepping away from him, ostensibly to admire a furry red flower resembling a cock's comb. 

"I won't speak to you, then. It's just as well that I don't. You vex me for sport." 

He brushes her sleeve, and she whips around, stopped in the building of a proper fury by his resolute calm. 

Pity. The anger would have been much easier for her to hold onto.

“I do not try to vex you,” he says. “It is not done on purpose.” 

Either way, it is well done, she thinks, but has the newfound self-possession not to mutter petulantly aloud.

He joins her in the admiration of the garden, tucking his hands behind his back. 

"Celosia," he names the flower she’s staring at without comprehension. "Of the Amaranthaceae. Ornamental, but also edible in many cases —" 

She lifts her eyes beseechingly to him. 

"Armitage.” 

She has never spoken his given name to him. Has never felt the propriety over him to do so, but it comes naturally when she reaches for it. 

The mere gentle press of it sobers him. 

"You told me that my proposal was insufficient," he begins. 

"At first, I figured I ought not allow such a young and inexperienced woman to make her final pronouncement under the duress of excitement. As the hopeful guardian of your life, it is my responsibility to know when to allow you a while to think things over, and to not allow you to make decisions rashly. If you must be held off until such time as you can think rationally, so be it." 

Indignation is a hot flash in her belly, but a traitorous pleasure rises too.

"I believe you are rather in danger of holding me off the rest of our days, then, if your pure cold rationality is what you desire in me."  

"Yes, I… I meditated further upon your response to my offer, and while I do believe that it is incumbent upon me to guide you as far as I am able… It came upon me that you may have been right to reject me. Ah, no, please, don't make that face yet — you were right.”

She walks slowly alongside him, all her soul grabbing onto his words, unable to speak, watching him with a testy set to her lip, ready to leap on his misstep.  

“Yes, I had done terribly by you with my offer,” he continues. “In my effort to appeal to you I omitted what you ought to know in order to make your decision." 

"I believe you rather said everything you ought to have, if you meant it the first time." 

"Not nearly. No; you had no idea of my regard for you, my ignominious birth, nor I of your family life except what I had gleaned from your brother, and…” 

They share two hesitant smiles over the ghost of the man with whom Rose was never peaceful. 

“He was no proponent of mine,” she says, breaking the moment with a laugh that feels like steam releasing a terrible pressure. She’d never felt the pressure of itself, had not known her brother-in-law was hanging over their heads quite so, but the relief of openly addressing him is palpable. Instantaneous. 

“He was a first-rate seaman. I regret very much my mismanagement of him. I have sworn to myself never to go slack on any creature under my purview again.” 

Unreadable emotion crosses his face and just as quickly disappears. 

“He painted you a woman far too clever for her own good… spirited…  known to be stubborn. I admit my curiosity was always piqued to be introduced to such a woman. I'm very glad it was under a happier circumstance than upon his loss.”

She lets out a shaky breath at the reminder. “I cannot even think of our meeting without blushing.” 

Hux shakes his head, showing fondness in his way. 

He stops them in a shady, quiet spot, and stands looking down at her from a distance just enough to be called respectable. His voice is low, an intimate tone meant only for her. 

“You came to me, you little tempest, and burst in on me with such vigor, such righteous fury as I have never seen , ready with bared teeth to defend the innocent creature in your care… Rose, I am a man of reason, I abhor common sentimentality — but I swear to you: by means of a simple glance, I knew at once that you would be my wife.” 

Her eyes sting, dread and joy burning her up. She would have liked to hear this speech days ago. Weeks ago. 

"A very fine and romantic idea, Captain. It seems unlike you to have such fancies."

"I assure you, did not want it to happen this way. I did not know it ever could happen this way. I sought your company in an effort to rid myself of that burdensome and strange affection for you, yet only made it worse. I've been — you cannot imagine how… how you've ruined me. It was not my intent to ever be married. I had no special inclination towards family life at all, and yet... You."  

He pronounces the last word almost as an accusation, but it falters, and comes out cracked halfway through. A plea, rather than a curse. 

If only he understood how he has marked her, too. Has ruined her for all others. All the village knows well that she has spent quite a lot of time alone with him. They have ideas fixed in their minds . 

Or perhaps a quiet conquest was his goal.

Either way, it has been thoroughly done.

"I'm very sorry to have caused you such distress," she says, barely above a whisper. "I hope it is soon remedied." 

"That all depends upon you." 

He has a bit of her sleeve between his thumb and pointer, rolling the fabric gently. She's glad he is not fixed solely upon her, for when he turns his eyes to her face even the brief glances are dangerous; she's liable to lose control of herself, and give into the part of her which is ravenous for love.

"I cannot be responsible for your ruining. If you are unhappy to have such affection for me —"  

"Unhappy? No. You could not make me unhappy.”

Just as in the train station, she feels the softness and smells the leather of his glove as he tips her chin so she might be forced to look at him. He moves her with the underside of a single crooked finger, gently, and she swallows the instinct to snap at him. 

"And affection there may be, Rose, certainly beyond what I thought myself capable, but it is not merely that. I hold you in the highest esteem. My wife must be an exceptional woman. Cheerful in my absence, possessed of good friends who may help her… she must be fully self-sufficient, a woman whose judgment I can trust wholly. You have proven beyond a doubt that you are her."

"Don't speak of it," she implores, "please, do not tell me what you think I am. I told you what my answer to your offer would be, and what prevents me from making it." 

"No," he agrees, with that submissive bending of the head. "I would not do you the dishonor of renewing my offer before speaking with your sister. You're to leave soon, and I shall come along in about two weeks' time. I beg you to wait until such time as I am able to ask you properly. Then you may tell me no, and I will hear it." 

"I do not think you could ever hear an unwanted no and take it for a fact."

"Perhaps it is so. You may still try, as you like." 

The arch of his neck, of his whole upper body down towards her, his large frame bent over her, and his mouth — his mouth, directly up where she might meet it with hers if she were bold, and wrong, and surged up onto her toes to fulfill the desire that has been building for longer than she could ever admit. 

“You are absurdly persistent,” she murmurs, fixed on his lips. 

Despite his assurance of what answer he will hear and which he will not, the semblance of control he is giving her, the crumbs he is allowing her to lick up, the fortitude and resolve and absolute paternalistic power which she has never experienced from her own volatile father, she stays flat on her feet and does not kiss him. 

She is the master of this situation. 

“It is the fundamental fact of my character.” 

He straightens up. 

“I suppose I would be remiss if I did not warn you that my fascination, once fixed, cannot be otherwise directed. I was blessed with an excess of patience to achieve this purpose.” 

“That is a rather intimidating sketch of your own character, Captain,” she says, attempting a smile which he does not return. 

“Let us call it an explanation, then, so when I continue to persist, my behavior might make sense to you.”  

"Even if I learn how to be the sort of wife you require, I shall still have furies, and flights of fancy with lace knitting and tatting and getting lost in mechanical manuals…" 

"I do not care. As long as you do them in my home," he says, with the inflection of a shrug but making no such casual, easygoing move. 

Rose watches, transfixed against her will as he removes his day gloves, the fine leather giving way to long-fingered hands. She crimsons, feeling it a more intimate ritual than she ought to be privy to — than anybody ought to be privy to, as anybody indeed may wander through the garden and see him. 

Thus made naked, he tucks his gloves away and takes her hand. When he brings her fingers to his mouth to kiss she turns away from him, her lips puckered indignantly, but her hand stays docile in his, not once struggling away, and he takes that as permission. 

He turns her hand over to expose the pale underside of her wrist and unbuttons her glove. 

Her mouth drops open with indignation — “these are my best pair,” she protests, “whatever are you doing, you devil?” 

Hux takes the tip of each finger and with tart little pulls loosens the white kid leather.

“I’ll send you a dozen more.” 

“I want none of your gifts.” 

“Unfortunate. You’ll simply have to miss half a pair, then.”  

He slips her glove off slowly. The satin interior passes cool over her skin, exposing more and more of it until her hand comes free in the open air. 

He gives her a flat smile, sneaking a tender look at his prize and hiding it away in his pocket. Her look asks him why? 

“I wanted it,” he explains, not saying that he’s merely exercising what he knows, and now she knows, is already his right. He kisses her open palm.

/

Chapter Text

As she is unpacking her borrowed trunk, Rose finds an unfamiliar little box tucked among the linens and souvenirs. 

Slim and pink, embossed with a gold seal. 

She eyes it for a long while before she touches it. There is only one person who might be responsible. 

Did he tip off the maid? 

Sneak into her hotel room himself? 

Did he see her while she was sleeping? 

The mystery is rather more delicious than the gift itself.

Gingerly opening the box, she finds a pair of kid gloves resting in its red interior. They are not white and bridal and pure, but of a rich brown leather with dark stitching. 

Gloves for a fine lady who has much to do with her hands. Gloves to match her gifted outfits, clearly selected with the utmost of thought and taste, to the point of proving obsession on the part of the chooser. Of course, they fit perfectly. He must have a Portuguese glover on retainer, skilled enough to match the glove she had given him. A glover in every port: she would expect nothing less of Armitage Hux.  

There is also a note slipped intimately inside the box. She has a feeling like a thousand sheets catching a breeze and billowing inside her chest as she unfolds it and sees his tight, familiar penmanship. The scrawl and rise of each letter is a caress.

I must express my thanks for the gift of your glove. Please rest assured it is well looked-after. It may be retrieved at your earliest convenience when I arrive home, if that is your wish. 

Since the fatal moment that I was introduced to your most amiable and endearing self, I have not known a moment’s rest from thoughts of you. Peace shall continue to evade me for-ever if I fail to obtain an answer to my affections for you. Whatever it is, I must hear it. 

Let me be clear: I should regard the pleasure of calling you my wife as the greatest that life can afford. 

God’s eye may be upon the little sparrow, but mine shall always be fixed upon you.

It is you alone who may choose whether to cast me into bliss or misery.

Your most obedient servant,

A

/

With the bright orange memories of Porto fresh in her mind, the gray tones of home at first strike her to be particularly dreary. 

It’s true that her seaside town’s brick and rolling green and harbor air have their own particular charm, but settling back into real life presents a far greater challenge than she might have expected. A sense of terrible falseness and suspense pervades the two weeks between Rose’s homecoming and the arrival of the Captain back home. 

Rose yearns to speak of what has occurred, but she is stopped from doing so as if by physical force. The words simply cannot pass her lips. Her sister is too dear, and the matter yet unsettled: what if word gets out of an impending engagement, and yet it does not come to pass? On his voyage home he may decide he has no need of a mouthy, hot-headed wife after all, and then Rose shall have brought her sister and the rest of the world into the matter for nothing. 

Furthermore, it is hardly even to herself that she can describe what she is feeling. She has a word for being snickered at while selling mackerel, and a word for the restaurant owners who try to swindle her, but for the man who writes her sweet letters and brings her abroad? The only word she can put to it is nerves, but good nerves, nerves that rush to her head and her stomach with every thought of him, and she thinks of him far too often. 

She’d much rather gather these thoughts first, and with all the giddiness and heavy guts and dread and wonder to be felt first, words hardly form at all. 

“Keep your secrets, then,” Paige sighs, satisfied simply to know that her sister’s reluctance is not because of a grave ill done against her. She knows well when to choose her battles. Even she cannot get through when Rose is in such a way. The only trick is to wait her out with utmost patience. 

/

Life has unsettled itself, even as everything at home is the exact same. She cannot walk the streets without the same old eyes looking upon her in new ways. The housewives and shop owners and cooks she has known affectionately now see her as set apart, chosen for her company by a powerful man, and therefore no longer quite one of them: making her a friend to be gossiped about, that fishwife with the loud voice and the iron spine confirmed to be just another girl ready to fall into a rich man’s bed. 

If only it were so simple. 

Stuck in a liminal space in between her days as a fishwife and the unknown future, the rent paid and Paige’s piecework enough for the remainder, Rose helps her sister, her lip stiff and her stories about Portugal scrubbed of their emotional sparkle. 

The neighbors all wish to talk of Rose’s travels, and the repetition of the same stories and impressions becomes tiresome. She feels as if she is bragging inexcusably. I went here, I went there, and you here at home did not! She is busy enough with all of her thoughts to be thought, her many obligations to tend to, clothes to be washed and children’s cheeks to pinch, and her entire vast network of social connections to be visited with . Added to that the habit of her stomach to swoop with anticipatory fear and joy at the mere mention of the Captain’s name, and the weight of his imminent coming falling like apples on her head with every passing minute of those lagging weeks, and the whole effect is as swimming in quicksand.

She looks up one day from the pile of piecework wire roses to find her sister’s dark eyes staring surgically through her. Baby Francie whines in bored discontent at her side, absorbing the mood of the room. 

“Men,” her sister sighs, out of nowhere. “Each of them a frustrated little conqueror, coming and changing everything and leaving as he likes.” 

“The way you talk!” Rose exclaims in an exact impersonation of their mother, and both dissolve into tired laughter.

/

She escapes by taking Henny down to the rocky beach she remembers visiting with her father as a girl. It is a fair distance away, but the longer they walk, the easier it is to breathe. They pass by all the best spots for digging mussels until they come upon it, the black stretch where fossils in the shale peek out of the sand continually swept on and off of their faces. 

Rose enjoys answering her nephew’s endless questions and thinking of anything but what her mind is usually full of. She and Henny fantasize about what the spiral-shelled animals beneath their boots would have looked like when they were alive. Strange insects scuttling about before the long crush of time had done its petrifying work. 

The Captain would know. He would recite the creatures’ names in Latin, and explain their taxonomy. He would speak more Latin to her. “Docendo discimus,” as he is so fond of saying whenever he gets to discourse on topics new to her and familiar to him. 

More rarely, when he is feeling magnanimous, he follows it up: “and you are a particularly apt pupil, Rose.” 

Rose likes to think of him. It makes her warm with affection and curiosity and a searching desire like hunger, but sweeter. She does it all the time, unable to speak. 

Watching her nephew and the ocean at once, she tries to picture a life full of this perpetual waiting, always watching the horizon, worrying in the back of her mind, remembering his voice and their afternoons together and hoping that the gray sky and gray water will produce him. 

But just as she has known miserable sailors’ wives, she has known happy ones, too. 

/

The Young Wife, or, Duties of woman in the marriage relation, comes at the price of two pennies. 

Bless this modern world and its supply of guides for the curious pupil of any and all subjects, for Rose has known and loved so many dry technical guides. 

Rey Solo put her on to such a volume, with a knowing grin recommending which chapters to pay less heed to; seeing as she is an old married matron of an entire year, and knows such things. 

Their afternoons together are a refuge, as well as a chance to observe the marriage of a lowborn girl to a wealthy man, to pick apart every gesture and table setting for future meaning, Rose cobbling together her own education as she has always done. 

She thought she knew about marriage. Had seen her sister be married, her neighbors, her parents. 

How little she knew!  

Many times the young women have sat together at afternoon tea, their sewing forgotten in their laps, in deep discussion of topics of immense mutual interest — how to set a table for highborn guests, and how to pretend not to hear when old women mutter about these days no-good girls certainly do all they can to marry up — and Mr. Solo bursts into the room. His cufflinks, he might breathlessly charge, the manservant has misplaced his pearl cufflinks. Or perhaps it is an errant breeze that has fluffed his hair too much, or business matters are a pain, or his elderly mother has made an errant remark on the quality of his household linens.

Mrs. Solo, so far gone with child that her confinement has long since begun, is always alert to the shifting moods of her husband, always ready to soothe or to motivate him, ready with cheerful words, taking his hands in hers and rubbing circles on the enormous backs of them until Mr. Solo eventually calms. 

It seems that marriage is at once a duty, a joy, a fulfillment of all that womanhood promises, and a shackle binding one to the whims and the ever-growing needs of a man. Observing this, Rose is beset by a strange new gratitude for Hux’s complete self-sufficiency, his cool reason. He would not require such emotional support, nor careful reading, nor their marriage such sympathetic effort, Rose is quite certain of that. 

On all other topics related to the proposed marriage, she still feels woefully uninformed.

Her eyes strain to read in the red-glow of a late evening lit only by the night fire. A candle isn’t too precious to spare, not anymore, but she’s too comfortable to get up and find another to replace the nub in the holder beside her. 

— The growth of the vegetable world is not so much effected by the bright meridian glare of heaven’s resplendent luminary, and by the violent rain and the tempest, as by the milder light of morning and evening, the gentler breezes, the soft descending showers, and the still more softly distilling dew. 

She yawns. Lays a fist against her hot cheek. 

— In like manner, is it the province of woman to accomplish most for human advance-ment, and above all in her own family, by indirect, if not by silent efforts.  

She tries to picture the Captain as a growing vegetable — a peevish pumpkin, vines and leaves crawling all over everything, colonizing the whole garden when left unchecked — and she, the soft morning dew, which simply does not do at all. 

Her thoughts wander. 

It goes towards that nagging memory of how Hux had shucked oysters for her, his little paring knife tucked up against his long thumb, and the color of his beard, and how the sunrise she’d seen from aboard the steamship had been that same washed-out shade of orange. She’d noticed then that she was seeing him everywhere, in everything, and she hasn’t stopped yet. 

She’s been in his field of gravity for so long, she’d forgotten the instant pull he had on her. She came running to him even when he was nothing but a name and the idea of a snobbish sea Captain in need of a good tongue lashing. 

The disorientation of falling for that strangely compelling stone-faced sourpuss sweetens considerably when she remembers how he had not commanded her to be silent and soft, but in the face of rejection had said, with playful vigor in his usually cold eyes: I rather like a fight. And then had fought quiet, by means of utter patience. By joining her in observation from the outer edges of crowded rooms. By looming over her like a specter until she was ready to turn her face to him, her eyes searching his, spark to spark, question to answer, lock to key.

/

All this contemplation of wifely life does nothing to prepare Rose for the day when she comes home and sees Paige in her chair, baby on her lap, a letter in her hand. Her new black mourning dress is unbuttoned enough to allow Francie access, but the child is more interested in her mother’s hair — even so, from her position sitting down, Paige is intimidating in the way only an elder sister can be. 

The unfolded paper and the arch of her brow radiates danger. 

“I’ve had a terribly odd letter, Rosie.” 

“Oh,” Rose squeaks out, stopped in place right by the front door. “Whatever does it say?” 

“It seems I am to have an audience with the Captain.”

Paige over-enunciates Captain and Rose blanks out on a good lie. 

“How interesting,” is all she can come up with. 

“If his predictions from last port are quite accurate, he arrives any time now. Tell me yourself — what business could he have with me?” 

Rose clams up with dread and excitement at any time now. 

“I  — I suppose he shall reveal his intentions when he has his interview with you,” she manages. 

“Rose.” The look her sister levels at her could cut through iron. “Tell me at once what this business is about. Ought I be happy for you? Indignant on your behalf?” 

Rose dissolves under such scrutiny. She rushes to sit down at her sister’s feet, her cheek on her knee, a pose they have taken many times together; one less of supplication than of comfort, though Rose’s little sister senses tell her that Paige cannot be angry for long when she sits with her this way. 

“I think I’ve come very close to ruining us, Pae-pae,” she moans, and the whole tale comes pouring out. How she heard his offer and rejected him, wounded his pride and refused his special attention until such time as he could speak to her sister and correct his error, and now he’s come to have an audience with her, and Rose is so terrified and overjoyed that she can hardly speak of it.

“You cannot have ruined us,” her sister assures her when she’s heard the matter out. “If it is you he’s chosen, then this difficulty shall only serve to make him ever more in love with you.” 

“I acted very badly, I fear.” Rose sniffs. “I have been angry, and impulsive, and — and I —” her voice drops into a whisper, remembering her thoughts of what it might be like to have his hand on her waist, and her hip… 

“I believe I am in danger of his renewing the offer, and of having all the happiness of a life with him thrust upon me.” 

"How could it be so bad, Rosie? You don't want him?" 

" He offers marriage to the sister of his dead man's wife. It cannot be proper."  

Rose stops to catch her breath and in that span Paige rescues her, with eyes full of knowing and laughter, so unlike the expression Rose expected.

"If a thing even half as good as my children can come from that man, I would be delirious with joy. Speak not of what is proper, for I give you my blessing and that is well enough, if I may say so myself. But — Rosie — of the Captain — what is it you love in him?” 

Her sister asks gently, seeing in Rose’s manner and the slightest changes of her expression all the struggle of holding back her most tender and violent emotions. 

For a long moment she composes a thought — about the practicality of the match, how she thinks she will be a good wife for a man like him, how she and Paige will stay together forever now — and then abandons it.

“He has always been so patient with me. Even when I’m in a fury.” 

Rose goes on, trying not to think at all, lest she make illegible her feelings, the soft things that she can barely reveal to even her sister, the closest creature to her heart. 

“He is fastidious, and utterly brilliant, and perfectly vexing in a manner I find tolerable, as all men have something about them which vexes one.” 

She searches through the rush of emotion that comes with admitting these things not only to Paige but to herself, realizing their truth as she says them. 

“I never expected to be able to marry, but I ought to have known it would be him — that it is him — because when he and I are quiet together, I am at my ease.”

Paige strokes her hair. She’s quiet for a minute or two, each second an eternity, and when she speaks there is the unmistakable sheen of tears in her voice.

“Well, my dove, if he is so yielding, and so in love with you, I’ll give you to him gladly. I should like nothing better than to see you married.” 

“He seemed as chagrined as I that our hearts have chosen one another.” Rose sniffles. "It would be our salvation, too, if I marry him. We might all stay together." 

A rush of cold gulping fear at her own tempestuousness, again; for if she does not marry the Captain, what shall she do? Mama’s family never recognized her after she married beneath her station. Papa’s are all long gone, and no help to anyone. Rose’s temper had not thought so far ahead, but she has had far too much time to ruminate. 

"We would get along without your marrying,” Paige scolds gently. “Although it is certainly true that you’ve made a smart match, if it comes to pass. Mama always said you would, and you never believed her.” 

“She said that I should, not that I would,” Rose laughs, watery, tears in it too, having caught them like laughter off her sister. 

“Anyhow, that man is absolutely cow-eyed for you. Though of course you are too stubborn to see it.” 

Henny straggles in from his outside play, and for a long while the little family sits at the hearth, talking over old family stories. The reminder of Mama brings back memories of the tiny, cantankerous woman, whose marriage to a poor oysterman had cast her out of her schoolmaster father’s graces but could not stamp out her sharpness, nor her love of reading. She had been a shrewd midwife, but too generous with those who couldn’t pay, mostly bringing Rose and Paige up on the money she earned selling filched cauls down at the docks. 

It is said that a baby born with an unbroken caul portends terribly good luck, and that was true for the Ticos. Once dried, the shriveled membrane would be sewn up in a leather bag and sold for two months’ rent to a sailor, among whom runs a belief that no man wearing a caul will die by drowning. 

Rose and Paige solemnly agree Henny’s that it would have been good for his papa to have had such a one — but he did not, and the boy takes a while to think this fact over, pausing his usual stream of questions for a few moments. Soon enough, he’s more interested in the matter of his supper than of his father’s soul. 

Henny is making the very compelling case for having sweet buns as their meal when a knock comes cracking into the middle of the conversation. 

A decisive but not impolite two thuds. 

Rose knows it instantly, just as she would know him anywhere else.

She freezes, horrified of her current state, in her black day dress with her hair loosened from its usual bun, hanging down past her shoulders in terribly informal style. 

Of course that vexing man couldn't wait for the morning, when she would be more put together. 

Paige hastens to rise.

“Answer the door, will you, Rose? I have to put on a fresh collar.” 

"Pae — please, no, I am in no state," Rose protests in a strangled voice. Her hands fly to her hair, straightening her errant face-framing curls, then she just as soon gives up the effort: why ought she to scramble, when he is the one surprising her? 

Paige ignores her half-voiced plea and hurries behind the screen that forms the apartment's bedroom.

“Answer him!” She commands from behind the screen. “Do it at once, and worry not, you look lovely, no need to pinch your cheeks for rouge — pity we can’t do a thing about your hair, but it’s just as well. Men love long hair. Now answer the door, Rose, do!”

The candles have yet to be lit in the gloom of twilight, but there's no time to fix anything when Henny is taking it upon himself to admit their guest.

Rose only just catches the door, pulling it open from her barely superior height and nudging Henny out of the way. 

She nearly collides with the black waistcoat of the man knocking. 

He lowers himself into an awkward bow, right as she blurts out, "my goodness, I didn't know it was raining."  

When she comes up from her quick curtsy she keeps the wool of her skirt gathered in her fists, and it is a good thing, too, because she knows not what to do with them. 

All she can do is stand there pierced by his water-light eyes. 

This single point of contact between them smoulders, as much heat rushing to her chest as if she were crushed to him. Their mutual gaze does not break as she stumbles back over the rug of knotted rags. Her mouth goes dry, heart pounding, everything in the room a blur except for him, the only thing who comes through with perfect, almost painful clarity. 

An embarrassing sheen of tears from pure overwhelm stands in her eyes. She blinks them away, sniffing once, resolute, determined not to let him see. 

The Captain, ignorant to all the shades of feeling passing through the young woman staring up at him, stoops to pass through the too-short door and must remove his hat, which adds unnecessary inches to his stature, to do so. He holds it against his chest.

"We reached port this morning," he answers, thrown off, glancing around, his voice lacking that steady confidence she realizes now must always be somewhat of a facade. "I was caught up on some business. I regret that I was unable to come sooner." 

Patient, hey? Yet you run right over here, she would laugh, if he weren’t swallowing up all the space and air in the place. 

“I’m very well pleased to see you,” she breathes, the words a half-swallowed whisper towards the end. “I did not know you were coming, or I would have — cleaned up a bit.” 

Hux's black greatcoat drips more luxury on the floor than has ever been seen in this part of town. His boots shine like oil slicks. 

"Hullo, sir," Henny pipes up, beating his shyness to stick out his hand and saving the moment by speaking into it, when Rose would have rather stared silently at her man for the whole of the evening. Never ruining it with her curse of mixed-up words, her tongue that wants to run, and merely existing forever inside of this charged atmosphere. 

The Captain takes Henny’s proffered hand as if shaking hands with another gentleman, clearly put off but also clearly glad for the momentary distraction. 

"Good evening, Henry." 

"Do you have a caul?" 

"A caul?" Green eyes lift to Rose and dart back to the subject of his conversation, but always seem to come back up to rest on her. 

"I do not. The use of a caul is superstition, nothing more." 

"My papa hadn't got one." 

“I suppose I would not know whether he did or not." 

"Then he died." 

"Indeed he did," the Captain says stiffly, and Rose barely has the wherewithal to join the recitation of God rest his soul. She has just enough strength left over to not start anxiously plaiting her loose hair.

"Henny, love, please, do go and light the candles, there's a bit of newspaper by the hearth — and be careful of your sleeves! Let us not bother the Captain, he has — he is — he is saying… he means to say important things, and must not be bothered." 

Curse her mumblemouth, which never obeys her mind! 

The Captain is fixed entirely on her now, his demeanor so far thawed as to render him halfway to smiling. 

"He is no bother," he says of the boy who scuttles away to follow orders. "He has reminded me…" a curious purse of his lips like he's deciding whether to speak more, or trying not to smile. 

"There was a woman I once saw, when I took the helm of my first ship. It was eleven years ago now. She attempted to sell to my sailors. About your height, with your complexion, and quite a hard bargainer, with a pretty young daughter…" he looks very fondly down at Rose, who had thought he was done pulling surprises that upend her world. 

"You saw —"

"I believe you wore a red dress then. It was short about the legs." 

Words collapse out of her throat, failing her utterly. She can only gape up at him, feeling particularly small in comparison to his height at this moment. 

He reaches out and plays absently with the ends of her hair, which brush nearly to her elbows in poking, curling waves. He smiles his flat smile.

"Worry not, Rose, I have not been a ghoul watching over you. I had only a single passing glance.” 

Before she can answer, Paige reemerges, and he drops her hair with jarring swiftness, Rose stumbling back a half step, feeling caught despite the relative innocence of their position.

No matter. Paige knows all within a second of her entrance. She curtsies with her usual air of subtle irony whenever she addresses a man. 

She’s freshened herself up marvelously. The baby is even in a clean bib. 

“Rose,” she says, smiling conspiratorially at their guest, who makes another stiff bow. 

“May I ask you for a favor, my dear, darling sister? If you might deliver the cap I finished this afternoon for Mrs. Halloway, it would be so helpful." She turns a disingenuous note of surprise at their guest, looking every single inch the cat that got the canary. "And how do you do, Captain? I received your note just a little while ago. I would be delighted to speak with you, if that is the aim of your kind visit.”

Paige lays special significance on the delighted, her sly expression a sign she is absolutely enjoying this tension. Seeing Rose crimson and unusually petrified, and the Captain a stooping humbled figure like a misplaced sentry in their apartment. The both of them reliant upon her to decide their happiness. 

"Of course," Rose mumbles, pulling her shawl on, all too aware that she is the focus of much attention. 

“I would love to be of use. If you will both excuse me,” she says, back teeth grit, accepting the proffered cloth bundle from her sister and hurrying out, through the rain and three doors down. 

Mrs. Halloway loves nothing more than a captive audience, luckily enough. Rose warms her toes at the kitchen stove and feels entirely separate from the physical body which politely listens and makes conversation. 

The majority of her focus lies elsewhere, soul and heart aching, longing to fly where her future is being decided. 

She cannot stop turning over the thought of him glimpsing her as a girl, and remembering her. 

So she's been stored in the back of his mind all this time, accompanying him everywhere he sails. 

Mrs. Halloway is in the middle of her raptures over her Navy son’s recent promotion. 

Henny comes tapping on the front door after what is both an eternity and no time at all. When Rose meets him there's Paige too, the baby bundled in her arms, Henny slapping a stick against the ground in his patched cloak. All of them are dressed to walk in the faint drizzle, which is dwindling down to the usual cold mist of evening.

“Henny, if you do not put that stick down and be polite in front of Mrs. Halloway and your auntie!” Her tone flips out of its motherly sternness in a second. “Rosie — I have had a lovely chat with Captain Hux just now — we have decided upon having sugar buns. Did you know the Captain has a sweet tooth? Go and warm yourself at home, Rosie, and see that we don't leave our guest alone too long." 

When the neighbor's door is shut behind Rose, Paige briefly takes and squeezes her hand, pulling her in to smack a kiss on both cheeks. 

"You know what I said my answer to him would be," Paige says, and by the happy glow to her face she was glad to give it. 

/

Rose opens the door of her own apartment only on the strength of counting down from three, propelling herself forward at one, stomach dropping in a thrill of terror. 

She comes upon him standing and peering at the shelf on which her family’s three books — those not sold, like the rest of their mother's collection — are gathered: the family Bible; a tome of Shakespeare, the Henries and the smirking Queen’s portrait printed on the first page of the volume all gutted for kindling; and the textbook on botany Rose borrowed from him months ago. 

Caught snooping, he snaps into perfect posture when she comes in, the movement clearly made by instinct rather than conscious choice. The air between them bites, like the charged moments after a lightning strike, devoid of the inane chatter that would have filled it if either of them found it necessary. 

There is only a repeat of that prolonged look of mutual understanding which so affected her in Porto . 

She admires what she sees in him to a degree which almost pains her physically. 

He’s well dressed in his familiar dark wool suit, tailored loose in adherence to the current style. He hasn’t had his valet shave his beard off yet — is uncharacteristically rumpled, in fact, holding himself together with white-knuckled determination. She has never been able to lie to herself and say that she does not find him handsome. He is. It is a marked weakness of hers that she loves beauty so much. He has high cheekbones, a heavy brow, a mouth that looks terribly inviting. 

Months of sailing has given him more freckles, she notices. 

Even his usually orderly hair hangs over his forehead in strands that he would find inexcusable if he weren’t all in excitement. 

She lets slip a smile — cannot help cracking into the sweet meat of this moment — wants to hear him speak, watch the subtle expressions flit across his face as he reacts to her own speech. 

“Have you brought my glove back to me, Captain?” 

Rose marvels that her words do not tremble. Her voice, characteristically low and smooth, is made lower by her nerves, which wrap around her throat. 

She does not miss the way his face blanches a shade, hardening into disappointment for a moment before he smooths it. Instead he opens the lapel of his coat just enough for her to glimpse the inner lining. 

There's an obvious patch, a satin square three shades lighter than the rest of the lining, sewn with neat black yarn stitches. 

She stares, comprehending at once that he has ensured she is always close to his heart.

He quickly refolds his coat and resumes his modesty. 

“As you can see, it will be a difficult extraction. If you’ll bring me a pair of shears…” 

“I'll have you do no such thing.” 

Hux exhales, his shoulders relaxing. She waits, soft, warm, the most inviting and tender version of herself. 

“I will not attempt to make another speech at you,” Hux begins.  

“But you dearly love to speak.” 

He takes a step towards her, brows raised dangerously. She hardly meant to sound mocking, but as always he seems not to entirely mind. There's passion of a different sort in his eyes. 

“I find that the more words I use, you tend to like me less.” 

"How very untrue, sir. I think on your words quite a bit." 

A down turned smile hides at the corners of his lips, the lines by his eyes gathering.

"Do you?" He asks, velvet, and she swallows hard.

"I think on them,” she repeats. "And on you." 

"When do you do so?" 

"When do I think?" 

"When you're out in the world, being seen? Or when you work? When you're in bed, and warm?" 

For so uptight a man, he speaks like a devil. Her cheeks flame. 

As speaks her heart and her wild wandering mind: "always, Captain." 

"Very good." 

He takes another step towards her. It is a very small apartment. Her heart gallops, all sore about the business of waiting for him, stuck in place when she would so much rather run to him. 

“You know why I am here. My intentions are unchanged." 

He does not cease coming towards her, even when he crosses past the polite boundary of physical distance. Rose refuses to back away as a good modest girl would. By the time she can feel the heat radiating off of him, she’s trembling with excitement and unspent energy longing to be given animation. 

“I am once again requesting the honor of your hand in marriage,” he says, voice pitching soft with the lack of distance between them. “You have demonstrated already that you understand the weight of my offer, and for that alone I am most gratified, but I must know — I must have your answer, Rose. You’ve no idea the torment you’ve caused me, and the most unwelcome sort of torment, not your usual delights." 

He is at her mercy, hating having to ask twice. She basks in this small power. She loves it. Loves — him, and how he makes her feel, and how he seeks to know her, and how he looks at her.

He removes his gloves, tucking them into the interior pocket of his brushed frock coat, and raises his bare hand to her jaw. His thumb rests lightly on her chin. 

“I want you for my own, and I’ll not be made to wait any longer to know if you will consent to it." The Captain speaks low and smooth, as if she’s liable to spook away. As if that were possible, considering the gravity he projects from his saturnine person, cool and steady.  

"I am not a lover by nature, but you have made me love you. Know that, Rose." 

“I did not know it was in my power." 

"Not in your power? To simply know you is to love you," he says, lips forming a sneer at her doubt, then gentling, as though by effort. 

“Should you accept me, I do not demand that you reciprocate my affections for you — I should hope that the advantages which I offer might overcome —”

“I do love you, you absolutely maddening man,” she cries, vexed. “I let you through the door knowing what your purpose was, and that I would most certainly say yes if you renewed your offer, and — and so you have, and so that is my answer. I have thought upon it, and I say, unequivocally, yes." 

He's smiling now. 

Really smiling, not his approximation but a genuine look which becomes his face very well. There is a hint of supremacy in it, of gentle mockery, which is familiar and oddly dear to her already. 

He reaches into the same interior pocket of his coat, and produces from it a gold ring. 

It’s absurdly tiny pinched in his fingers. 

The centerpiece stone is a garnet, with tiny diamonds and seed pearls flecked around it, the blood-red jewel as lush and dark as a live beating heart. 

She keeps herself from unladylike gaping, but her eyes fly open wide. 

“You picked that for me,” she says, not so much a question as an amazed statement. She wonders how many months’ stock of cod and headless haddock she could buy for the value of that ring. 

"I thought it would suit you, but you may choose another that you like better," he starts, and Rose snaps out of her stupor, offering her hand without another second’s hesitation. 

“You’ll do no such thing.” 

"So you will have me," he says, his voice touched with an awe that makes her knees weak, and the tart response ( it pains me to confirm that you are correct; that girl demanding you pay a premium for mussels shall, indeed, be your wife ) disappears from her mind. 

Rose allows herself to be overcome — by him, by emotion, by her own smallness at his side and the enormity of their future laying just ahead — and simply nods. 

The ring slides to settle cold on her pointer finger, the only one which fits it.  

As soon as she accepts him, he cups her face with both hands and leans in, so close she can feel the warmth of his words breathed against the corner of her mouth.   

"We haven't much time alone," he says, rasping his beard on her cheek. "And I will not be made to wait to kiss you any longer." 

When she does not move, only keeps watching him, needing to see how he will handle her, he touches his lips where the corner of her mouth meets her cheek. 

His lips are softer than she thought him capable of being at all with his hard hands, all the hard angles to him, his lean body beneath those dark wool clothes. 

He draws back far enough to survey her expression. It is her sincere hope that she does not look as overwhelmingly nervous and excited as she feels, but the giddy grin most likely gives her right away. 

“You are a very demanding man.” 

She allows her hands to come to rest up on his chest.  

He huffs his version of a laugh and presses a kiss to the corner of her mouth. 

“Indeed. Some might claim I am the most demanding. I have the greatest faith that you know exactly what you are doing by accepting me.” 

“I am agreeing to love and to help you to the best of my abilities,” she says very seriously, melting against him, her arms rising to wind around his neck as he kisses the other side of her mouth. “I guarantee you nothing else but that.” 

He hums his approval. He is right about to take his first proper kiss from her when she beats him to it, broken from her trance to surge up onto her toes and capture his lips.

The Captain breathes in and returns her kiss, parting his lips for her, responding slowly when she's all rash passion, cradling her cheek and keeping her close to him. She could not move away from him if she tried; if she could possibly want to, and there is no chance of that.

Her knees fail as one of his hands finds her waist. She has played kissing games with the simpler, easier-to-understand town boys, but they were nothing to this, the long-awaited touch of a man with power and esteem in the world, whose mind is a shaded place she cannot broach, who wants to share his life with her. The shocking softness, the aftershave and body salt smell of his beard. He must have been running around all day and truly has not taken a moment to collect himself, has come right for her. 

The pale blue wool of her skirt pools around them as she sinks down slowly, taking him with her, her arms strong around his neck and refusing to stop kissing him. In a moment he’ll have to drag her back up, for propriety’s sake. He’s just so delicious when he's brought to his knees before her, looming over her, head bowed, nearly domesticated, and all hers. 

/

In their wedding photograph, taken directly after the ceremony, neither of them exactly smiles. 

The portrait studio is fascinating, with its variety of backdrops pulled down from a large scroll of many colors affixed near the ceiling. Rose asks the attendant to show her as many options as possible. It's good fun, which she savors. The church service was so dull; it was such torture waiting the whole morning to be married, even though she was holding his hand until hers grew slick with nervous sweat inside of her new glove.

In the short ceremony after church which bound them before man and God like generations of townspeople before them, she barely heard a word of what she was vowing. The plain gold wedding band was slipped onto his finger, and with the declaration of a brand-new man and wife she stepped into a foreign land.

The party attending the ceremony is raucous, full of sailors who all want a glimpse at their Captain’s lady, and with Paige all beside herself after watching her baby sister be married.

Rose, glad to be out of the fray for a moment, is fascinated by the studio lights, the shine of the silver daguerreotype plate as it's prepared — the whole chemical process, really — and most of all: the camera. She keeps squinting to look into its strange eye. 

Rose stands next to her seated husband, his posture stiff and face freshly shaved, his hair slicked back in the severe way he likes. While standing she is hardly taller than he is while seated. She’s further dwarfed by the bouquet in her hands, and the equally dramatic tumble of the veil tucked behind her shoulders. 

He turns thirty-four tomorrow. She has sketched a picture of his beloved cat Millicent as a birthday gift, and he doesn’t know. 

The photographer warns them to remain as still as possible. Armitage glances up at her, the corner of his mouth quirking down fondly, and says, “steady, now.” 

Thus the photograph is developed, exposing the plate for about thirty seconds. Rose, vision all stars from the magnesium flashbulb, can hardly breathe. 

In the photograph, her expression is muted but the excited tightness in the bride’s lips is immediately evident, while the groom beside her is pale and stern. His suit is immaculately pressed. Rose’s wedding dress rises in white ruffles around her. From an easily overlooked spot near the distraction of her bouquet, her hand reaches out and finds his. 

Hux’s pinky and ring finger stay tight in her grip. Side by side, it’s the only point of contact between them. She leans towards him, though she hadn’t explicitly meant to: it was an instinctual urge, just as she hadn’t meant to clasp his two fingers but simply had done it. (They were all that would comfortably fit to grasp, anyhow.) 

Being committed in a flash by silver and mercury to an object she can hold in her hands seems more binding, somehow, than the exchanging of the rings and the kissing.  

They look well-suited in the estimation of every person who sees the photograph, of which there are many, because Rose’s friends are numerous and enthusiastic, and so are the curious sailors. 

It is the eyes, they all agree. Two pairs of intense eyes, one set black and one very light, both practically burning through the picture.

Man and wife sit close together in the elegantly upholstered privacy of the hired carriage which brings them home in the darkness after the celebration has dispersed. There is not enough money yet for such a vehicle of their own; the Captain has tied some funds up in an investment in exporting Portuguese sardines, at his wife’s behest, and in making liveable his old childhood home. 

The hired carriage feels like too much; the trappings of the marriage of an entirely different girl. One born to wealth and accustomed to velvet. Rose is elated, but out of sorts. She tries out her new name silently, reciting them to herself like a prayer, soothing her mind over the rounded beads of syllables, short and small, plinking down from her palette to fall at her feet. 

Rose Hux. Missus Captain Armitage Hux. Missus Somebody. 

The scent of violet powder exhales from her neckline. Her heart seems to want to take flight straight out of her chest. Her body is worn out from the day, and she’s simultaneously sick with excitement at what’s to come tonight.

Her husband begins speaking to her about a delivery of orchid specimens from Florida that the botanical society is expecting next week. She suspects it is a play to calm her nerves, and she is vexed that it is working. 

He’s telling her that in their native habitats the flowers hide themselves in crocodile-infested swamps, behind curtains of biting insects, wherever the ground is an acidic muck, and they are called epiphytes, a word which she asks him to say twice. It means they grow wrapped around the limbs of trees, taking their sustenance from the humid air. Clinging to something bigger to survive, living on seemingly nothing, and blooming anyhow. 

It makes her smile to herself. She rests her head on his shoulder.

/