charitylovehopefaith | The Fifth

The Fifth - [ written ]

July the first,

It has been suggested to me that I might find myself happier here if I were to engage in further enterprise than I have so far made it my business to do. [Which... She'll grant the wisdom in the suggestion at this point. She has no house to run, and keeping the rooms tidy and her and her brother fed keep her busy but not interested.] I have an arrangement with one individual here [she's trying to be very formal, so she shies away from mentioning Richard by name] regarding sewing and repairing articles of clothing in exchange for what he can part with. [Or the promise of future goods.] Firewood and produce, mostly. I should be happy to extend my offer to others for similar terms.

If this service is unnecessary, I apologise for having troubled the good people of Luceti with this.

I thank you all for your time,
Faith Long

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Faith couldn't help herself. She laughed. "I'm beginning to fear I won't." It wouldn't hurt, she decided, to confide this much in Richard, she decided. "The last man who asked to marry me changed his mind two months before the wedding."

"...All I'm hearing is that he was as daft as the day is long."

And yet -- "Still, Faith, I've had a few ladies change their minds about myself. You must already know that it ain't the end of the world."

He hoped, at least, that this bastard hadn't left too deep a mark on her.

She laughs at first. Daft. Yes, that's quite the word. She can think of a few others. But letting her mind dwell on that will just... bring everything back. How utterly humiliating it was.

To have a man who should have been honoured to marry her -- that she would marry and that her father would consent to her marrying someone so far beneath her station. To have him decide suddenly to leave her for another. To have him try to explain himself to her. To have to endure the looks and whispers, to hear her virtue questioned and her choice mocked.

"He was a fool." She says it as lightly as she can, falling into what has long protected her, from the earliest days of her learnings of flirtation -- the haughtiness of the aristocracy. "A captain who abandons an admiral's daughter will find commissions hard to come by, he'll learn."

It was all she had. The only way to defend herself. What, after all, could she do otherwise? She had no way to challenge the man to a duel for her honour. So she had to reach out her influence, strike at him through her father. Though she'd already been more merciful there than she ought to have been.

Faith shakes her head. "Forgive me, Richard. I'm making this quite unpleasant. I didn't mean to." She made herself smile. The affection in it was sincere, even if she didn't feel like smiling. "I have so few here I may confide in, and I do feel as if I can to you."

Her words surprised him. Touched him, really, with an icy dread right at the core of his heart. But it wasn't the sort of dread a man ran from -- far from it. He witnessed her resolve and he found it particularly intoxicating, like on the day he watched Teresa run a Frenchman threw with his own sword and she'd spat at him for not having done it first. He'd watched it happen and he'd wanted her from that moment -- slim and fine-faced like this woman, too, sitting beside him.

Sharpe breathed deep and kept his wits about him, resisting an urge or two. He tried to stay poised. Precise. Officerly.

"Think nothing of it, love," the endearment slipped out not in a personal way but in the way men are wont to use it. Encompassing and diminutive and familiar. "We use what weapons we have."

"We use what weapons we have," she echoes with a soft sigh. "That's just it, isn't it? A man..." She actually smiled at him. A smaller smile than she had used before, but it was genuine. "A man may dispute a point of honour or such a matter with a gun or a sword... but a woman does not have those at her disposal. We have to find other ways to protect ourselves."

Not, at least, the kind of woman Faith had been raised to be.

His returned smile is equally small, but also sly.

"It needn't be so, Faith. I know women who shoot and cut better'n I do. Not many, mind--" He pandered to his own ego for a moment. "But some. Here, at least, you ought to defend yourself however you like."

"And you can see me with a sword, Richard?" She's almost teasing him. "Or a pistol?"

Almost because... well. She was a little girl once, brought up in a house of military men. Had she been any less well-bred, she might have done what she heard stories about. Might have cut her hair, dressed as a boy, and run off to sea to be like her father.

"A very little one, perhaps," he teased -- reaching for a hunk of bread and tearing it in two with his fingers. "No matter. Sometimes, even soldiers must pay their...debts in ways other than with steel and shot." Debts. It was a kind thing to call revenge.

"You can't always duel. Not in the army. Wellington don't care for it."

"I know there are rules to govern it in the navy, too. I've managed to get David to tell me some. He spared me a great many details, I know. He always did, even when I wanted desperately to know everything."

Much more carefully, she does the same, tearing off a piece of bread for herself rather than going for the knife. Somehow, sitting outside alone with Richard, it seems to suit better.

"How do you repay insults, then? If I may ask such a strange question."

"You do it when Wellington ain't looking. Or else you wait for a battle."

He allowed her to work out the implications for herself -- in the mess of battle, one could not always be certain from where the killing blow came. It was an attitude that persisted from his time in the ranks, where a well-placed bullet was often the on way to deal with a cruel officer.

[The implication is not hard for her to grasp. It strikes a chord. A whispered conversation in the dead of night when she was supposed to be asleep but had seen a light in the parlour and crept to the door.

"Tell me what happened, Gregory."
"Nothing. The captain was shot, David. In action."
"By a Frenchman."
"By a Frenchman."
"And you'll swear to that at the inquiry?"
"I will."
"Burr?"
"Will as well."
"...Then he was shot by a Frenchman. And all his officers saw it."

Faith nods slightly.]

The Lord works in mysterious ways, delivering justice through an enemy.

[But her gaze says what she doesn't. "Or in a way where an enemy can be blamed."]

He caught her eye and allowed for a knowing smile -- a wry one, really. Not quite mirthful, but staying all the same as he seemed to share her understanding.

"In this small way, the enemy does on occasion oblige us. No matter -- you'd be shocked with how many frowned-upon duels even a man like myself can get away with, Faith. Or perhaps you wouldn't be shocked at all."

"The way some men talk to me about these sorts of things, one would think I had no capacity to understand any manner of violence."

And from the way she says it, she prefers being treated like she has enough of a mind to comprehend at least some things.

"Aye, well -- no disrespect to them, lass, but you come from a family of sailors. It ain't like they share their battles with many women."

Barring, he supposed, those that were snuck aboard for very specific purposes. And although he didn't mind discussing violence with the woman he intended to woo, he was less eager to discuss prostitution. "But I've watched army wives strip a field clean, after a battle."

Much could be had off enemy and friendly corpses alike, and the women were not to be left out of those spoils.

"Have you?"

She can't help but be interested. It was always a fascinating thought -- that the army kept their wives with them. But, then, she supposed it was a question at times of room. Still, the thought was interesting.

"Them and their children, too."

He supposed there was something that ought to be chilling about watching a child roll a dead body for what few coins could be found. But it was, as ever, about survival. And Richard Sharpe could rarely fault anyone -- man, woman, or babe -- for surviving.

"...What a dismal discussion for our little feast. Bloody hell. I'm sorry."

Faith shook her head. "It may be a little... unusual... but I find it very interesting. I don't mind at all, actually."

Better than the same boring conversations about the weather or people or the sort of thing she'd have had with men of her 'station.' Which was probably why she usually found those sorts of men dull. Military men -- especially those who weren't wholly polished -- spoke to her about war (however heavily they censored it) and politics (however much they simplified it) and other such things.

And Richard... Well. She smiled, taking a bite of bread. "Besides, I do believe it is my fault we are talking about this at all."

"You would tell me, wouldn't you? At the moment I've said too much. Gone to bloody far...I've no head for these boundaries and rules for conversation." A beat. "I confess, Faith, that I'm more used to not talking at all for fear of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. But it's not such a present danger, here. It's..."

Freeing.

"It's very different."

She smiled a little as she finished for him.

"For both of us. You fear saying the wrong thing to the wrong person; anything I say is usually discounted." But he had never seemed to do that to her. Perhaps hedged certain topics, but never just done the verbal equivalent of patting her on the head and telling her she was quite right and very smart to think so but the grown-ups were talking.

"I would tell you, if you overstepped."

"A toast, then," he said with a glimmer in his eye. Sharpe grabbed a thick wineskin and expertly dumped a dash of its contents into one little tin cup. And then another dash into a second. These poor marching utensils hadn't gotten much use since he'd moved into the Everdeen house, but they would serve him well now.

He passed one over to her. "To storming boundaries and to paying our debts, Miss Long."

Faith can't help but laugh. A playful, happy sound. She takes the tin cup and raises it slightly. "Cheers."

Then, she drinks. Which quiets her for a time. Quiets her and lets her think. After that, she has to ask. Simply because his world is new to her. Different than anything she's experienced. She knows the Navy in and out, but the Army is a different creature, and the one officer of it she knew well rarely humoured her questions.

"Can any wife of a man serving come? Or only certain men?"

"Officer's wives, certainly, are allowed. But if a man marries on the march, he'd damn well best do it with his CO's blessing. Adding names to the camp list is a dreadful fuss." It was a damned sight easier as an officer to get someone officially added. The unofficial list, of course, spanned a great thick tail behind the marching army. Carts of merchants, gaggles of women, and their children running along besides. And other women, too.

"The enlisted -- ah, well. There's only so much room on those lists. But they find ways. A'course, it helps if a woman's already named on the papers..."

Widows. Army wives -- particularly of the enlisted men -- were used to trading in husbands at semi-regular intervals. Cleverly moving from one staunch protector to the next, fearing to be widowed for too long lest someone take advantage of their unclaimed state.

"We use what weapons we have," she repeats. It makes sense to her, certainly. Far from home, surrounded by men who might not have much to fear in that regard. A living husband was far more capable of protection than a dead one. It was true even in her world.

A widow might lead a fine life if she structured everything just so, but should ill happen to her, she might go unavenged without a son or other male relative to know it happened and repay the offence. Women whose husbands were ever away, though. That was the sort of life Faith had always imagined for herself. Not a bad life, either. Freedom from his expectations, yet with an ever-ready threat should someone presume too much.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The Fifth - [ written ]

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject