Hello lovelies! My fic is finally done, and is too long to post here in its entirety. I give you the first section and links to what follows. Thank you for the wonderful prompt and I hope you enjoy it! :)
***
How right, she had thought when she saw them together that night. She thinks it again at her breakfast table in London when a cousin who has come to stay turns over the newspaper and pales, gasps, squeaks out with wide eyes (and a glimmer of delight at the prospect of such melodrama) that the engagement of Mr. Matthew Crawley to Lady Mary Josephine Crawley, eldest daughter of the Earl of Grantham, has been announced. Lavinia thinks, how right.
And then she thinks, Josephine – perhaps she was named for Jo March, proud and fierce, the bravest of the sisters. She imagines what she has a hundred times, a scene she did not witness and merely pieced together from a few lines of Mary's (I have broken my engagement to Richard but it was easy – I only followed your example. It was awful, too, of course. We have all been so very foolish.) In spite of Mary's dismissal of the situation, Lavinia knows Richard Carlisle, knows that he will have raged and threatened, that his voice fills one with doubts, makes one feel utterly helpless. And his eyes are always sharp, all-seeing; they have a knack for spying weakness. (She felt them search her more than once in the drawing room or the library as Matthew and Mary talked together, and she took some small comfort in the knowledge that there were things they did not, could not discern.) Lavinia knows Mary Crawley, too, and she is a storm-braver, fierce and proud, Diana the huntress in lace and pearls. Jo March ought to have been named for Mary Crawley.
"Well?" prompts the cousin, a tiresome spinster with a round, childlike face and a voice to match. She has come to London to Lavinia's father's house – Lavinia's house, now – to fill the space after his death. He is nearly six months buried now, and it has been almost a year since Lavinia stood up from her sickbed and left Downton for good.
"Well what?" Lavinia busies herself buttering toast. "We would never have been happy, Matthew and I." She does not know why she bothers with this cousin, whose eyes grow, if possible, even bigger and more incredulous.
"Not with her around, I shouldn't think. You poor dear."
Lavinia does not correct her. "I wish them every happiness."
Read on at ff.net (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8015730/1/Speak_of_a_Life_Already_Wild) or AO3 (http://archiveofourown.org/works/381307)!
no subject
***
How right, she had thought when she saw them together that night. She thinks it again at her breakfast table in London when a cousin who has come to stay turns over the newspaper and pales, gasps, squeaks out with wide eyes (and a glimmer of delight at the prospect of such melodrama) that the engagement of Mr. Matthew Crawley to Lady Mary Josephine Crawley, eldest daughter of the Earl of Grantham, has been announced. Lavinia thinks, how right.
And then she thinks, Josephine – perhaps she was named for Jo March, proud and fierce, the bravest of the sisters. She imagines what she has a hundred times, a scene she did not witness and merely pieced together from a few lines of Mary's (I have broken my engagement to Richard but it was easy – I only followed your example. It was awful, too, of course. We have all been so very foolish.) In spite of Mary's dismissal of the situation, Lavinia knows Richard Carlisle, knows that he will have raged and threatened, that his voice fills one with doubts, makes one feel utterly helpless. And his eyes are always sharp, all-seeing; they have a knack for spying weakness. (She felt them search her more than once in the drawing room or the library as Matthew and Mary talked together, and she took some small comfort in the knowledge that there were things they did not, could not discern.) Lavinia knows Mary Crawley, too, and she is a storm-braver, fierce and proud, Diana the huntress in lace and pearls. Jo March ought to have been named for Mary Crawley.
"Well?" prompts the cousin, a tiresome spinster with a round, childlike face and a voice to match. She has come to London to Lavinia's father's house – Lavinia's house, now – to fill the space after his death. He is nearly six months buried now, and it has been almost a year since Lavinia stood up from her sickbed and left Downton for good.
"Well what?" Lavinia busies herself buttering toast. "We would never have been happy, Matthew and I." She does not know why she bothers with this cousin, whose eyes grow, if possible, even bigger and more incredulous.
"Not with her around, I shouldn't think. You poor dear."
Lavinia does not correct her. "I wish them every happiness."
Read on at ff.net (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8015730/1/Speak_of_a_Life_Already_Wild) or AO3 (http://archiveofourown.org/works/381307)!