Chapter Text
She already knew the story before she married the prince.
No one had meant for her to find out, she was sure, but she had never been a stupid woman. All of Euphrania’s court seemed to be at once desperate to tell her something and keen to keep something from her. Perhaps, she mused years later, they had meant to be kind? Perhaps they had relished knowing something she had not? In any case, despite the King’s efforts, her maids had caught whispers, and then they’d asked questions and then they had brought her the answers.
The man she was to marry had loved another lady. Had met her at the self-same ball that Vivienne had met the prince, had danced with her and lost his heart to her and then lost the lady. Had lost her twice, it was said.
When Vivienne had first heard the story, she had been relieved, foolish simpleton that she had been.
She thought she was prepared. She thought they’d be able to work past it.
Men fell in love as easily as they fell out of it after all. And besides, what did love had to do with getting married? They were royalty after all, and it was expected that their parents would choose their spouses according to alliances and politics.
She had been so very wrong, and now there was nothing she could do.
*
The wedding had gone without a single hitch - not that she or her father had expected any differently, of course. Euphrania had needed the alliance just as much as they, after all.
The service was interminably long, as they always were; the dress was heavy as she processed first up the aisle and then back down it; the feast was excellent. Her groom was handsome, and she caught many envious looks from the court’s matrons as they eyed her place next to Prince Edward, filled as it was by herself and not their own daughters.
As the evening drew on there was dancing and the prince – no, Edward, he was her husband now after all – Edward had proven to be as skilled a dancer as he had at the Ball.
Vivienne had once called the Ball the highlight of all her memories; she’d been so excited after her father had accepted the invitation!
Vivienne had known that she was starting to lose something in the way of youthfulness, as the years passed by without a marriage proposal carried through to the conclusion. She’d started to avoid mirrors, fearful of catching sight of some new wrinkle, or a blemish from age’s remorseless work. But with the Ball’s invitation she happily twirled in front of every mirror in the house, twirling her skirts and imagining catching the prince’s eye!
He was very discerning, they said, not just any lady would do. Seven courts he had visited, to catch a sight of their eligible princesses, and never an offer of marriage. Some might have called such behaviour proud and arrogant, but Vivienne knew that he was looking for someone special, and was she not special? Her mother had told her so, when Vivienne had been younger, and her father had always agreed.
Her ladies-in-waiting wrote to friends, family, and connections that they had to find out more about him, his likes and dislikes. It was said that he wished for a young lady, not the aging flowers in Karrolsvelt or Lichtenstein. That he was friendly to all, but seasoned courtiers had noticed him struggling to conceal his boredom in the face of idle twitterings and that he considered an excess of show and pageantry to be distasteful.
Vivienne nurtured her private hopes. She had great skills in conversation, from music and literature to plays and horses. She might not be in her first flush of youth, but neither was she nearly so old as half of the maidens who had received invitations also. Prince Edward himself was not so very young these days, perhaps they were of an age? Yes, all in all, Vivienne felt that they would suit each other very well.
And then there had been the Princess Incognita’s arrival, and all of Vivienne’s dreams had come crumbling down, although she had not entirely understood so at the time. Now Vivienne’s mind shied away from memories of the Ball, the way her eyes had once avoided a glimpse of those mirrors. There was only pain in the looking, after all.
*
She waited up for him on their wedding night, sat nervously in her bed in her newly stitched nightgown. She waited up for hours wondering what could be keeping him. Was she meant to go to his room?
In the end, in the small hours of the night, she crept out of her bed and started to open the door, intent on seeking him out. It was unfair that no one had warned her that in Euphrania, the bride sought the groom’s bed on their wedding night, but then again many things about her new home had been unfair.
What was one more?
She was out in the corridor before the flaw in her plan becomes apparent: she had no idea where her husband’s bedchamber lies.
Defeated she went back to bed and sits alone in the dark until morning brings a chambermaid to her room. The girl looks puzzled when she sees Vivienne still in her own bed and alone, but she curtsies well enough before taking her leave. Vivienne’s maids come to dress her, all of them sharing in an awkward silence: why had the prince not come?
“Perhaps he over-indulged in the wine, madam?” One of the braver girls ventured.
Vivienne nodded, accepting the easy answer without question. There is a voice in her head whispering that Prince Edward had barely drunk anything the night before – had barely eaten anything too come to that.
Still, there was no use in worrying about it now.
“If you wanted me to come to your bed, husband, you really ought to have told me where to find you.” Vivienne attempts to tease him a little, later that morning when they are finally alone.
Prince Edward looks confused for a moment, before he stiffened and looked grave. It occurs to Vivienne that perhaps the prince is shy, and would rather not speak of such things, but really they must address these things early or the tension will continue to grow.
“My apologies, Madam. I certainly would rather that you did not come to my rooms, if you please. They are the last remnants I have left of a private kingdom-” He stops, swallows and changes his words “-of a private space.”
Vivienne nods, though she does not understand at all.
“So I am to wait for you then, my lord?”
There is the faint, bitter ghost of a smile on the prince’s face, she thinks, but Vivienne cannot be sure before the prince turns away to stare out of the window.
“As the sole feature of this match which has been left to my choosing, I fancy that you may be waiting for some time, madam. I would urge you not to stay up waiting.”
The new knight, Sir John, enters the room then, preventing whatever words Vivienne might have found from the depths of her shock in response. To his minuscule credit, Sir John seems to be aware that he has interrupted something, but he forges ahead regardless. It seems that the prince’s cousin, the Duke of Montague, wishes to speak with him.
Vivienne has been a lady of court her entire life: she knows a diplomatic rescue when she sees it. Above the affront she feels, there is puzzlement. Why should the prince need to be rescued from her?
And above all else are the words she has been forced to swallow back down, chalky and bitter. What of my choice in this? What about what I want?
She doubts there would have been an answer.
*
Outside of her husband’s bedroom window stands a small monument – a column of stone topped with a glass case. The glass on one side is smashed-in, and whatever it once held has been taken from it, but the monument still stands.
Vivienne had only taken notice of it because of the way the servants had gathered around it, holding their children up in their arms to get a better look and talking amongst themselves. She’d seen the way they would glance up at their prince’s window, and then look back at the glass case with sadness in their eyes.
Vivienne had only made the mistake once of asking her husband about the glass case. He had not answered, but his eyes had been cold and hard as he gazed at her, and it was the closest that she ever came to seeing her husband show any true emotion in her presence. He had stormed out of the room leaving her and their breakfast untouched, had taken his companion-at-arms and gone riding for the whole day, leaving her to make excuses for his absence at court. The King and Queen had not been pleased, she knew, and she was sure that they blamed her for their son’s dereliction of duty. Perhaps they were right to think so.
Edward refused to receive her in his rooms after that day. Oh, he never outright said as much, but Vivienne had not been a princess herself all her life without knowing how to pick up unspoken cues. If she wished to break her fast in his company, then they must do so elsewhere.
Vivienne turns once again to her maids to find out the truth.
Why is the monument important?
What did it contain?
Who took the object inside it? Where did it go?
When she finds out, there is a moment when she is deeply sorry for her husband. To have searched for so long without success for his love, to find her at last when all hope had been lost at last and then to have her taken from him again?
She understands now why the servants whisper so in the corridors, why the whispers have not died down despite the royal wedding and the month thereafter it. This story is far too good to be forgotten like that.
Vivienne would be far more understanding still were she not inhabiting the unwelcome place of an intruder in the tragic tale of lost love. She is a flesh and blood woman, warm to the touch and filled with life, and all Edward has left of The Girl is stone and broken glass. Why should he cling to her so when the memory of her can only hurt him?
In time, Vivienne thinks that Edward looks only ever to the monument because it is the only thing which is as cold and rigid as he: hard and unyielding and frigid. Her maids do not tell her, but Vivienne overhears the tales of others anyway, speaking of Prince Edward as having been a warm, laughing kindly man. Given to playing jokes with his friend Sir John, and dreaming of romantic adventures.
Vivienne chooses to believe that these are lies. The alternative is to accept that she has married a shell of that man; it is better to believe that he never existed.
*
Vivienne was not a stupid woman, and she knew when she was being lied to.
Oh, she had to admit that she was not outright lied to – no one lied to her face when they said that Prince Edward’s unsuitable love was sent away and out of the country. No one said as much to her directly.
But a lie told to her maids so that they may tell that lie to her unknowingly was still a lie.
It all makes sense to her now, of course. Naturally the prince would not have fallen in love with some servant girl or country nobody, the daughter of a dead minor lord (the reports had always been vague and confusing). Of course he had fallen for a lady of the court, a woman of high breeding and sufficient favour to be the lady-in-waiting to the Dowager Queen. The Lady Caroline must have thought her future was secure as future queen, and Vivienne is viciously glad to imagine the lady’s heartbreak on learning that she would never marry the prince, that he was meant for higher things.
Perhaps the lady had lost her virtue to her royal lover? It certainly would have explained a hasty marriage to a newly knighted royal bodyguard, after all. A man with no lands, no fortune and no influence outside of his friendship with his prince.
It was said that the prince himself had promoted the match, possibly –as Vivienne suspected – so that his father could not send his lady-love from his side. The best lies had a grain of truth inside them, did they not?
But these are still lies, and Vivienne will not be played for a fool.
She cannot send the woman from court, she knows. The Lady Caroline is a well-loved figure, popular with the other ladies and well-thought of by the lords. Vivienne does not yet have sufficient favour to move against her so obviously. Instead she takes to surveying the guest-lists for tea parties, luncheons and dinners. Whenever she can, she removes Lady Caroline and her husband from the invitations, and when she cannot, she places the pair as far from the royal table as she can.
Prince Edward, a man who has never been taught to read such things, does not notice. Other courtiers do, and Vivienne smiles to herself behind her wine glass, satisfied when the whispers begin.
Unfortunately, Vivienne has reckoned without the Dowager Queen, an ancient old woman with no care for the opinions of others at all. When Vivienne first met her, she had peered through weak eyes at a nervous young bride in a foreign land and then snorted gracelessly.
“Really Charles, if your scheming must continue to lack originality, could it not have at least involved a measure of wit? At least the other gel had charm to her.”
The room had taken in a shocked gasp, but the king had merely pretended not to hear and the moment had passed. It had been the comment which led to Vivienne send her maids to find out about the other woman, and Vivienne has never forgotten the Dowager’s slight.
It seemed that the Dowager Queen is not yet done making Vivienne’s life miserable, as illustrated when the old woman surveys the seating for the luncheon in honour of the Duke of Montague’s birthday.
“Really child, I don’t know who you expect me to talk to if you insist on seating my lay-in-waiting all the way across the room.”
Vivienne seeks inside herself for dignity. “I cannot help that my husband’s mistress continues to have a place at court, but I am not at all required to speak with the woman.”
The Dowager Queen is silent for a moment and Vivienne thinks that she has shocked her by knowing and owning the truth. Then the old woman snorts gracelessly, and begins to laugh a creaking withered laugh.
“Oh child! Just when I think I have seen the most foolishness this court can manage to produce!” Still chuckling, she patted Vivienne’s arm. It was not at all comforting. “Well, well, my foolish gel, if you really must take your frustrations out on the innocent, at least Caroline is well-defended. Have your little tantrum, child.”
Vivienne watched her walk away, and wondered why nothing ever made sense in this strange place. She does not relent in her bid to side-line the lady Caroline, and one day her husband does notice. His fury is all that she had feared it might be, cold and sharp and cutting as steel. Vivienne argues back that she will not be so dishonoured and it is only then that she discovers her mistake.
Vivienne always wondered whether having her husband confirm the whispers of his lost love would ache less than the wondering. It is infinitely worse, it turns out. His words cut her to ribbons and he leaves her alone in the library to bleed her heartbreak out onto the floor. He leaves her to comfort the real wife of his best friend, his only two friends left in the world.
*
The Queen – she will never be Mother to Vivienne, and she never offers such an endearment either – reminds her often of her duty to provide heirs. It has been two years now, and there has been no sign of a child. The Queen, it is well-known, might only have brought her husband and king one living son, but it certainly had not been for the want of trying.
Vivienne knows that the servants talk, that they have kept a close eye on her bed-linens and know for a fact that there has never been anyone other than Vivienne herself sleeping within them. Her maidenhead is still intact after all these months and months of marriage, and the marriage remains unconsummated.
The Queen looks at her with disapproval, badly disguised as concern. It is not Vivienne’s fault if her lord husband will not come to her, will not do his duty! Vivienne does not know how to seduce a man, and she refuses to debase herself and try. Let him stay away if he likes!
And yet…
Two years becomes four and Vivienne can hear the whispers at court that grow and become stronger, sniggers that become giggles that become laughter. She knows that they are mocking her, these nobles who have never taken to her. She is a foreign bride spurned even by her own husband for company, and the ladies at court are only too willing to remember for her that the prince had chosen a woman of his own people to marry.
Just as he should have, they sniff as Vivienne passes by in her favourite gowns with their high waistlines and higher collars, so different from their own.
At least the prince had good taste, they murmur when someone makes a half-reference to The Girl that the prince had loved so much and lost so tragically.
Vivienne wants to rail at them all. To call out their blatant hypocrisy for what it is. These people would never have accepted The Girl as their queen either, some nobody, who came out of nowhere, without connections, influence or wealth. The Girl would not have been perfect and it is unfair of them all too constantly hold her up to be such; to constantly compare Vivienne with some impossible ideal who doubtless never existed.
But that is not what matters.
The Girl is not here, she was spirited away like a dream in the night, to be gone by dawn. The Girl is a fantasy to these people, and fantasies are always better than reality, are they not?
Vivienne is not a spirit of dreaming, and she is cold in her reality.