A girl in the world barking up the wrong tree, a creature conditioned to employ matrimony

[motherspider.livejournal.com]

*Let it never be said that Esmerelda Rosier does not know how to throw a wedding. With a month to arrange everything, she swept her schedule clean, let the business languish, and began placing orders almost as soon as Evan and his bride-to-be left the estate. Her wandwork is not quite as deft as it once was, but she refuses to see a healer, and she doesn’t need wandwork to tell the florist that the roses were to be red, true red, not this flaccid pink, and to send a Howler to the baker demanding why the red velvet cake tasted like sweetened ashes, and to harangue the seamstress why the bride had not been even scheduled for her third fitting of the white dress Esmerelda had negotiated her into, as clearly the first two fittings had failed to demonstrate to her that everything needed to be taken in at the waist. Whatever the guests of this affair might think or gossip about, they’ll get no bump in Amrita’s abdomen to prove it.

She can hear Evan pacing outside the dressing room, and has to go out to tell him--repeatedly--that he cannot see her before she walks down the aisle and he should go kill the squirrels outside or something, anything to get him out of the way so she can personally finish buttoning the thousand and one buttons that go up the back of the dress. But the last time she lectures him on this, he catches a glimpse of the bride in the mirror over her shoulder anyway and grins.

“You’re beautiful,” he says over Esmerelda’s shoulder.

“Out, it’s bad luck,” the bride orders, and then, and only then, does he obey.

When she finally takes her seat in the very front of the chapel, Esmerelda’s chin is high but she clutches Dearborn’s hand fiercely. The ceremony begins, and it’s finally all out of her hands.

The door to the chapel opens and the light is blinding even though the forecast predicted rain over the reception, and there she is, shimmering like a vision, painted with the charmed designs of her culture on her hands, wearing enough skirts and petticoats and undergarments that Esmerelda had to resist the urge to catalogue them individually in a spreadsheet. Everyone turns to watch the bride proceed but Esmerelda’s gaze sweeps the crowd and then, finally, lands where she knew it would: on Evan.

He is standing there, hands held before him, frozen in the process of being wrung. His knuckles are white. There’s a tiny bit of hair sticking up at the back of his head, the part she always charmed firmly down when he was as boy, and suddenly her vision goes blurry. She looks up and blinks once, twice, pulls out the bright red handkerchief out of her bright red handbag sitting on her bright red skirts. It is acceptable to cry, she supposes, but she doesn’t want to. Not for this, the thing he manipulated her into doing, this ruinous match. But the look on his face--

When Evan was five, she took him to the hall that holds the Rosier family tree. She pointed to herself and Dearborn on the tree, how other families intertwined, and how he, someday, would marry someone who also had a tree like this one and have children, and when he did, the tapestry would grow further up because it had been enchanted very long ago to do so. All this was his, and he belonged to it as much as it belonged to him. He gave the whole thing a wide, encompassing look, finally resting his little palm next to his own name as if to cover a hole, and then turned to her and asked, “Why isn’t she here already?”

And Esmerelda smiled, and told him that she would come along in due course, that he might meet her on his own or they might introduce her to him, but what was most important was the fact that she would become family, and that he should care for her as well as he cared for her or Dearborn. That is what made her worth putting up on the tree.

Looking at him now, watching this woman come up the aisle, there is so much of that boy in him that, for the first time in all of this, Esmerelda is willing to allow that perhaps it will not all end in calamity. Perhaps they will grow old and happy together as she and Dearborn have, and the grandchildren birthed from surrogates will still be grandchildren. Perhaps they will love each other until they both rot.

The ceremony is beautiful, and Amrita is radiant, and they don’t have eyes for anyone but each other, and when they kiss at the very end, it is a brazen, full kiss, and when he finally pulls away, his mouth is smudged with her lipstick. He ducks his head to murmur something into her ear as the audience rises to its feet, and she laughs and runs her thumb over his bottom lip to try to rub off the lipstick, and they leave the church together, arm in arm, so boldly and arrogantly in love that even Walburga can barely muster a scandalized little sigh.*

Comments

[purely-better.livejournal.com]

An accident or several.

*He agrees with a sharply disapproving glance toward the bride's family - he couldn't have proven they were the ones shouting, but it's likely enough, if you ask him. Perhaps that's how things are conducted in India, but they really ought to have a care and follow proper manners when in England.*

We should probably talk to his parents.

*The prospect of which, from his tone, is not particularly enticing.*