From the Ashes of Victory: The Complete Series, page 53
part #0 of From the Ashes of Victory Series
Being a witch meant nothing here. For all her power, she was just Victoria Ravenwood, the same as she had been before she found out what that really meant. The Longs had wanted Victoria to come because she knew how to talk to these people—what happened if they didn't want to talk to her? Suddenly self-conscious, Victoria looked at herself in her champagne glass, but couldn't see anything she would change.
She wouldn't allow her pride to be damaged by a bunch of lackwits so easily distracted by the shiny thing that they were unable to bring themselves to have an actual conversation with a woman who might be able to carry it better than they could.
Maybe it was the memories of all the times the same thing had happened with her brother when they were first brought to these kinds of gatherings among the academics of the Midlands that hardened her so quickly. The men would all flock to William, eager to pry open the brain of the son of Dr. Ravenwood and see how closely he hewed to his footsteps. The real answer was 'not as close as Victoria,' but it was only after intense cajoling by her father did they ever find out.
She didn't resent her brother for it, she never had. She loved him. They were twins, how could she not have? The tattoo was proof how strongly, it was the world that was unfair.
But that had been just before the war started, and she'd thought she would never be in such a position again. Seeing Yekaterina swarmed as Victoria stood in isolation, however, brought all of the memories back.
So many people took her eagerness to prove her intelligence as arrogance, and she detested that characterisation to such a degree as to be beyond words. She had to show it herself, because no-one was going to ask her! She had to go out of her way to make people see it, or they would ignore her, or simply talk over her. Or worst of all, talk down to her.
That had been her lesson in how long hair and pretty dresses made you an object, a thing to be fawned over and put on a shelf, not reckoned with on an equal level. To be passed over in substantial conversation for frippery and ignoble, demeaning pap.
It's why she chose to look as she did. Minimising her femininity had worked to increase her credibility to many in the circles in which her family ran, and so she had never stopped. She'd been fourteen the last time she'd put on a dress by choice. The night she'd removed it, she'd sheared off her long tresses as well, and never regretted it.
A decade after the death of Queen Victoria, it had been scandalous for the unwed, childless daughter of a university professor to parade around in public with hair that barely covered her ears, but that, to her, had only proven how right she'd been to do it. It had been a means to an end, but the fact that it had sent so many tongues wagging she wore as a point of pride. It had made it liberating in addition to practical. It made people pay attention.
The fairer sex. The weaker sex, Victoria thought disdainfully. If they knew what she really was, there would be a different kind of reckoning for language like that used in her presence. Weak would only apply to their comprehension when she—
"Good evening, Miss Ravenwood," said a voice from behind her. A voice from another lifetime. One she hadn't heard since her parents' funeral.
Turning to look, she found a rotund little man who was maybe a half-inch taller than Victoria's slight frame. His hair was thinner and greyer than she remembered, and the lines on his face had deepened from furrows to crags, but the levity in his brown eyes was just as she remembered. "Dr. Samuels?" Victoria asked in hushed disbelief. One of her father's closest friends, she blinked hard against the possibility she was looking at a ghost.
No matter how many times she blinked, however, he remained resolutely corporeal, and now she had to say something else to keep from choking on the bittersweetness of that reality. "I— I didn't expect to see anyone I knew here."
"And I never thought I would see you again," he said, everything in his voice conveying just how happy he was to have been proven wrong. "How have you been?" He reached out to shake her hand.
"Very well, thank you," she said, taking it in stunned confirmation that he was, in fact, real. "And you?"
"Same as I have ever been, I think," he said cheerfully. "Life in academia goes on as always."
"It's good to know something does," Victoria said. She'd meant it genuinely, but the look on Dr. Samuels' face told her she'd failed to convey that to anyone outside her own head.
"I'm very sorry about your family, Victoria. My apologies, I should have started there, I suppose."
"No need, Doctor. You gave a beautiful eulogy for my father, you needn't express your condolences again. In fact, I don't know that I ever properly thanked you for it."
"That's very kind of you to say, but you were beside yourself with grief. That you even remember it is flattering. I will say, I am sorry I didn't get a chance to say good-bye to you when you left Nottingham. It's a poorer place for no longer having the Ravenwoods in it."
She had never thought about it that way. She was the last one. The last Ravenwood, and she'd fled her ancestral home without a second thought, leaving it without one for the first time in centuries. To Victoria, her family was dead because they'd been taken from her. To the community it had been a part of, it was dead because she'd killed it.
The champagne was suddenly flat and bitter.
"For that, it is my turn to apologise," Victoria said slowly, unable to look into eyes she had had no problem meeting since she was little. "After William died, I couldn't stay. I was desperate to leave, so when the Longs presented me the opportunity to do so, I took it." It was the first time she'd ever said her cover story out loud, but having said it to an old family friend, it sat on her tongue as merely a lie. "I didn't give much thought to you or anyone else I left behind."
"Understandable. To lose so much in so short a time seems unconscionably cruel. I don't blame you for wanting to start over."
Victoria absently ran a hand over her left arm. "It was that, yes."
Dr. Samuels cleared his throat. "Have you been keeping well by yourself?"
Victoria's chest tightened.
Even hinting at what had actually happened to her since they'd last spoken would only send one of them screaming from the room.
"The Longs keep me very busy," she said.
"They must be quite happy with you to have sent you here on their behalf."
Such positivity from a familiar face brightened Victoria's spirits considerably, and she stood a little straighter. "They interpreted years of discussing mouldering tomes with people such as yourself as an asset, and I was volunteered," Victoria said gamely.
"Ha! Well, I'm glad I will have someone to speak to, at least. What do you do for them?"
"Theoretical research," Victoria answered quickly. If it came out as over-prepared, Dr. Samuels didn't show that he'd noticed. "I can't really talk about it, you understand."
"Of course."
"But I enjoy it very much. It's challenging, but in a good way." She needed to change the subject before she improvised herself out of what she was actually allowed to say. "And you? How did you come to be involved with… these people?"
"I was made an Earl since you left. I inherited quite a bit during the war," Dr. Samuels said in a way that left him sounding embarrassed about such a fact.
"I'm sorry to hear that. Well, not sorry, but—" Victoria stammered, looking down into her champagne glass. What was no longer in it was finding its way into her head at a pace she would rather it didn't.
"It's quite all right. It was all on a technicality. A quirk in a branch on the family tree," he said with a dismissive wave.
"Ah, well, I hope I can count on having an ally on my crusade tonight," Victoria said conspiratorially as the first wave of champagne bubbles fizzed through her brain.
"I wouldn't that it were any other way. Besides, come to think of it, I don't think I've ever actually won an argument with a Ravenwood."
Victoria's eyes crinkled. "I shall endeavour to keep that streak alive."
"Then I shall be happy to preemptively concede defeat."
"Well met, Doctor."
As Dr. Samuels moved on to fulfil his obligations as a man of means among men with more, Victoria fingered the ends of her hair and smiled.
As Katya finally sat down to dinner, it was hard to believe that at one time, the fare on the plate in front of her would have been normal. So would the plate itself have been. And the silverware.
Now, it was just… strange. Alien. Being thrust into this world was decidedly not like coming home again. The marbles of fat in the beef sat in her stomach like squirming white worms, and the pâté made her mouth water—but only as a precursor to vomit.
The wine, however, was excellent. She had to stuff herself with bread to keep drinking it, however, and that was leading to complications of its own.
Inside, she was miserable, her body not yet up to the task her mind had committed it to. Outside, that same mind had slipped into a familiar costume and flaunted it with little effort, even as she hated herself underneath.
She smiled, she flirted, she blinked more than was really necessary, looking out through her exaggerated eyelashes at men whose egos required that she do it if her roiling insides were ever going to forgive her for what she was doing to them.
"That's fascinating, Mr. Warwick. Do explain again how radial engines are on the way out," Katya said, brushing his wrist with her finger. "The Long's new airship has water-cooled engines, does it not?"
Inside, she was screaming. She knew it did. It made no sense for her to have been sent on this mission if she didn't know a fact as basic as that, but sense had nothing to do with the man sitting next to her. After the first few seconds of conversation she knew he was the type who needed a pretty girl to tell him how smart he was and feed him a steady diet of lies to keep his sense of self-worth from imploding on itself.
Across from her, Victoria was in a far more productive conversation with a balding, bespectacled man Katya remembered was called Samuels. The word 'quantum' was coming up a lot, as were a lot of names that sounded awfully German, considering the company.
The man on the other side of Victoria, Arthur Harris, for his part looked almost disgusted. It might have been the names, but he kept flicking glances at her hair and her chest, seemingly unhappy with what he found each time he did.
Whatever differences Katya and Victoria may have shared, Katya had to fight the urge to kick him.
The sudden presence of a hand on her own left one snapped her out of that fantasy, and she jerked it away involuntarily as a wave of anxious nausea crashed into her. Swallowing the memories that threatened to make her misery far worse, she forced herself to remember where she was and looked up at who the intrusive hand belonged to.
"Ah, Mr. Huxley," Katya said, reluctantly returning her hand so he could knead the back of it as she reached for a wine bottle with the other. "I understand you prefer a chardonnay over a chablis?"
"Why I do indeed," Huxley said, proffering his glass with zero intention of filling it himself.
As she did, Katya allowed herself to admit that, in any other context, she would be forced to admit that he was charming. It was practiced and overly familiar for her taste, but she could see how others might be taken in by it.
But as he continued to envelop Katya's hand with his own, she began to wonder if the pomade in his hair was flammable. She was a witch now, she could fight back this time.
But she couldn't, could she? She was trapped by circumstances and forced to endure.
Again.
"You have a very striking look about you, Yekaterina."
Her calling him Walter would have been a borderline epithet, and she had no choice but to swallow her offence. "Thank you, Mr. Huxley."
"A bit thin though, wouldn't you say?" chimed Mr. Warwick.
Katya maintained her smile, but it felt tight enough to rip her face in half. Hemmed in on all sides, the unpleasantness within Katya redoubled, and she had to force herself not to show it under so much scrutiny. She had to be what they expected, and that didn't include being human.
"The fragile ones need to be treated with the most care," Huxley said, and raised Katya's hand to his lips.
The food, the alcohol, the sorry dead thing within her that was her pride; Katya now had her fourth reason to throw up.
Then she overheard what Victoria was saying, and it was like someone had tried to relieve the pressure within Katya by shoving a corkscrew into her gut.
"Britain lost over 700,000 men in the war, Mr. Bentham. 700,000 breadwinners, husbands, sons and brothers. What about the women they left behind? One didn't have to see combat to suffer." Victoria reached into her jacket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. "Katherine Farnsworth, mother of two. Husband killed at Passchendaele. No living blood relatives. Elizabeth Atwood, mother of one. Caregiver to her elderly mother, husband went down with Indefatigable at Jutland. What should they do? Should they be turned out onto the street, to let their children starve? Should they have their livelihoods taken away from them because they had the audacity to be born a woman?"
Victoria folded the paper back up and returned it. There had been nothing written on it but the wine list, but she found that reading from something prepared gave it more credibility than proving she'd memorised it.
"And it's not about simple finances," she continued, "it's about dignity and respect. Being forced out of a position that makes us productive, contributing members of society through no fault of our own, just so we can go back to what? Being homemakers, living off of the state until some other man swoops in to save us from ruin? Why? We're staving off ruin right now."
"Do you have any children, Miss Ravenwood?" Mr. Bentham replied pointedly, his silver moustache quivering in agitation.
"I do not."
"And you are unwed?"
"I am."
"So let a brave hero have that job, and you can find a husband. Help replace the generation you so eloquently reminded us was lost. There's no indignity in being a wife and mother."
Victoria was getting into territory that she knew she had to tread very carefully in, but her blood was keening in her ears with her need to respond.
"Because it should be my choice to do so, sir." She had to force her jaw open to make the words sound close to normal, rather than a hiss. "I am content in my station, and until such time that that changes, I feel that it should remain mine to relinquish when I so choose."
"Where's the sense in that?" Harris said. "Britain is grateful for the contributions her women made during the war, filling in for those brave men who fought to defend her. But the war is over, and I see no reason why a single veteran should have to live on the streets because a woman refused to return to her proper place."
Magic tingled in Victoria's fingertips, and she had to fight the effort to loose it. Words would have to suffice. "Forgive me, I'd thought you a capitalist, sir."
"Excuse me?"
"You've seen the reports, have you not? The company is healthy and thriving. The choices the Longs have made are working to their financial advantage. Should they not be allowed to continue making them as they see fit?"
"We aren't talking about nationalisation, Miss Ravenwood."
"No, but you are talking about removing the agency of the company's founders and rightful managers."
"We're doing no such thing. We were approached about investing, and the company's management is a factor in our decision. We are under no obligation to do so, " Mr. Bentham protested.
"Quite correct. But we are discussing the future. Things will not go back to how they were before the war. They cannot. Too much has changed, and will continue to change. When women gain the franchise, it will be even more difficult to wind the clock back."
"If you gain it," Harris muttered.
"The wave of change is already approaching, gentlemen. Whether you ride it ashore or drown beneath it is your choice."
It was too much. Katya had forced a sort of control over her mouth and body for an hour, but between Victoria's evangelising and the assault being unleashed on Katya from inside and out, she had had enough. She couldn't fake it anymore, and the control she'd been exerting over her rebellious body failed. Doubling over as sharp, stabbing pains eviscerated her stomach, the churning, roiling awfulness within her demanded a way out. She was sweating profusely, and could barely draw a steady breath as she placed a shaking hand on the arm of Mr. Warwick. Shivering, she sucked in a sharp breath before she could speak. "Oh, Mr. Warwick, I'm so sorry," she said to one of the two of him wavering in her vision. She hoped it was the real one.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
"I don't believe so. If you'll excuse me," Katya said, pushing herself onto legs that wanted nothing whatsoever to do with her weight being foisted on them.
Warwick stood as well, but seemed flummoxed as to whether he should touch her or not. "Of course," he said, his hands clearly unsure what to do with themselves.
Katya shot a look across the table through hooded lids, and only then did Victoria seem to notice Katya's dire straits. Her mouth fell open in surprise.
"Victoria, could you escort me to the ladies room, please? I fear I may not make it on my own."
Wincing the whole way, Katya staggered down the hall to the toilets as quickly as she could manage, Victoria trailing behind. Finding their destination unoccupied, Katya hauled Victoria in by the arm and locked the door.
"What is wrong with you?" Katya snapped, covering her belly with one arm.
"Me? You look like you're about to die."
Sweat dripped into Katya's eye. "Yes, you! You're going to ruin this with your self-righteousness."
Such a response clearly took Victoria by surprise, her eyes going wide before narrowing severely at such a challenge. "I'm sorry? I'm going to fail due to self-righteousness? Are you unclear what that word means?"
"Don't you dare patronise me," Katya said, the shock of the cool tile as she leaned against it just invigorating enough to strap steel to her words.
