March 18th, 1891 — House of Lytton, After Closing

With Marcus Lytton and Camilla off to cruise around Europe later that month, there were more than the usual amount of administrative tasks to be seen to. The House of Lytton wasn't going to close during the weeks they were gone, but obviously with the two key designers away, most of their most important clientele would need to be rescheduled. Production and fittings could continue on as necessary, which meant they needed to front-load as much of the creative work as possible before the two left. Juliana had already been planning on staying late today to go over the schedule book with Camilla and to discuss the way things ought to be run while she was away — though after last night, Jules had something much more pressing on her mind.

She made tea for the pair of them while Camilla was still finishing up with the seamstresses and sending them home for the day. She hadn't told anyone about the blackmailer, or about her ridiculous request for a custom Lytton gown before Easter — something that would have been quite outside of Juliana's power even if she had been inclined to play along — but, again, a more pressing issue had arisen.

Juliana debated how she might go about telling her friend what had happened, while Camilla started to discuss business. She watched the steam on her cup of tea with a wrinkled brow, listening to but not really hearing Camilla.

"Lachlan MacFusty kissed me yesterday," she announced suddenly, interrupting Camilla. It would have been more accurate to say this morning, but given that the last thing Camilla had heard on the subject of Lachlan MacFusty was the Witch Weekly article, it was bound to be shocking enough without that extra detail.

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   Lachlan MacFusty

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Prof. Marlowe Forfang

Jules

Camilla and Marcus would take a much-needed vacation before the Season, during which Marcus could very possibly lose his life if Soph felt inclined to kill him, but that was a subject for another day. The trip would have the pair away from work for a considerable amount of time and, while it would give them the inspiration to work for the duration of it, they wouldn't be able to see any of their clients.

She had been going over the customer list, trying to figure out how she could make the most of the time they had left before the trip, when her best friend made the most shocking confession. Camilla was somewhat sleep deprived (from staying up late designing, in her case), so at first she thought she had hallucinated it.

"What?" she finally said, with an expression of surprise that could rival Orpah.

  

Juliana had been expecting Camilla to be shocked, so she wasn't surprised that she would have to repeat herself. She raised her tea cup and took a small sip, as though what she had said wasn't any more interesting than making a mundane comment about the client list. "Lachlan MacFusty kissed me yesterday."

She might have continued, except she didn't really know what else she wanted to say about it. This was the sort of thing, she had been given to understand, that women normally discussed with their best friends, but she hardly felt like a giggling debutante at the moment. They were about ten years too late for a conversation like that, and surely Camilla would have known that, too. Juliana's tone when she conveyed the message in either instance had not conveyed a great deal of enthusiasm, or emotion of any kind, actually. She was just relaying a fact, and she was only relaying that fact because it would be difficult to have this conversation if she didn't, not because she had any particular desire to talk about it.

She paused, wondering what Camilla would think of this. After considering it, she added, "I didn't ask him to."

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   Kieran Abernathy, Lachlan MacFusty

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Prof. Marlowe Forfang

Jules

"How did that happen?" Camilla asked. She had been under the impression that Jules and Lachlan MacFusty didn't have any sort of relationship. That they had appeared in Witch Weekly because of Marianne Finch's lies. It was possible, of course, that the experience had been a binding one and that they had kept contact, leading to them kissing.

"He didn't... Force himself upon you, did he?" Her eyes preemptively narrowed. She had said that she hadn't asked for the kiss, but she hadn't hinted to anything more nefarious hasn't happened. In any case, Camilla had to be sure before she could relax.

  

"Oh," Jules said, with some surprise. She had added her last remark because she wanted to preempt any thought Camilla might have had that they actually were carrying on a secret love affair, but she had not expected Camilla to take her comment in that direction. She wouldn't have really said that hadn't forced himself upon her, at least after a fashion. That had been exactly what he'd been doing with that measured pace across the kitchen towards her, after she'd specifically asked him to keep his distance. He'd gotten right up next to her again, and she'd had to push past him to leave. It was sort of — like he'd forced himself on her emotionally, though, not physically. It occurred to her only now that he absolutely could have forced himself on her, physically, if he had been inclined — he was easily twice her size, and she'd been alone in his house in the middle of the Scottish wilderness. She hadn't even thought to bring her wand with her last night, so she would have been properly defenseless. Even when he'd been approaching her from across the kitchen in violation of her wishes, though, the idea had never occurred to her even fleetingly last night. That said something about him, she supposed, that even now that someone had pointed out the possibility she couldn't picture him taking advantage of her — or maybe it said something about her, and how clouded her judgement was at the moment.

"Not in the way you're thinking," she said. She didn't want to give Camilla the wrong idea about Lachlan MacFusty, but neither did she want to claim that she had welcomed the interaction, by any means. "But he certainly surprised me."

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   Lachlan MacFusty

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Prof. Marlowe Forfang

Jules

Camilla released the tension from her body. Mr. MacFusty hadn't done anything that would warrant Camilla cursing him. That he had surprised Jules was understandable - it was rare for women to take the initiative in those type of scenarios.

"Did you like it?" She asked softly with a hint of a smile. "How did you even get in that situation to begin with?"

  

Jules looked up at Camilla with a start at the question. Had she liked it? She ought to have been expecting this sort of question from Camilla, honestly, but it hadn't occurred to her that that would be one of the most pressing questions, at the moment. The latter seemed far more in line with her expectations for how things might unfold, and so she decided to answer that one first. She'd actually thought about how she might answer the second question, while she had no actual response for the first.

"I'd never met him before the garden party," she said, which was true but bore reiterating in light of recent events. "But we exchanged a few letters after the ordeal with Mrs. Finch. And he — suggested we might talk in person," she said, returning her eyes to her tea cup. "Which I knew was a mistake at the time, of course, but for some reason I still agreed to it."

The specifics — that she had seen him alone and in person multiple times, at his house in the Hebrides, and that the most recent time had been after midnight and in her housecoat — were not details she felt were material enough to the story that they warranted sharing with Camilla.

  

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Prof. Marlowe Forfang

Jules

It was somewhat like a plot of a romance novel - Mr. MacFusty and Jules had met on accident, gotten into a scandal they weren't guilty of and that caused them to bond with each other.

"Did he hint anywhere in his letters that he may have feelings for you?" Camilla asked. "Did he flirt? Did you have an inkling that he might take things that way?"

That she had agreed to meet with an unmarried man, presumably unchaperoned (because Mrs. Binns wouldn't have allowed for that to happen) was careless if one cared about propriety, but it could be forgiven if Jules had thought the meeting would be friendly. Camilla thought her friend could be naive regarding those things and she couldn't fault her for it.

  

"Not from his letters," she admitted. "Not until we were together." She'd arrived with the intention of throwing those letters at his head, in fact, and she hadn't given much thought to anything else that might happen afterwards. Once she was in his home, she'd started to notice where things were slipping out of her control, but she hadn't acted on it quickly enough to prevent it from happening.

"I don't — I don't know that I would have realized if he was trying to flirt in his letters," she admitted, with a flush of her cheeks. She didn't like to admit to being wrong about anything, or being misled, but there had to have been a miscalculation somewhere, to have landed them where they'd ended up last night. It was a bit easier to stomach the idea that she'd been too focused on the task at hand regarding their reputation to pick up on the subtext of his correspondence than that she had had all the evidence before her and just wildly misjudged the situation.

"He did send me biscuits," she said suddenly, looking over at the plate of biscuits she had prepared for the two of them. "I imagined it was a joke, but..."

  

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Prof. Marlowe Forfang

Jules

"Oh, Jules!" Camilla exclaimed with a small laugh. "Men don't just send biscuits to women! Unless you're my brother and you're trying to please a loyal customer who just gave birth." But Marcus was also allowed more familiarity than many men were, because he wasn't viewed as a threat. He was a dress-maker and that job had certain connotations for the men who held them, even if untrue.

Lachlan MacFusty wasn't her brother. Camilla didn't know him personally, but she imagined a man who was over six feet tall, with big muscular arms who seemed like he could have come out of a Norse myth.

"Why would it be a joke, love? He's clearly smitten with you! Aww, I can just imagine him at Honeyduke's, picking up sweets for you!" She imagined a giant amongst Hogwarts aged children, dressed in dragon leather, which was very vivid and fantastical but a fun image nonetheless.

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   Juliana Ainsworth, Lachlan MacFusty

"Well — because I like biscuits," Juliana said, suddenly feeling incredibly self-conscious about it. She'd given a good deal of thought to how she might explain the biscuits, actually, in case she needed to do so for the blackmailer. Since it was something that had been referenced in her original Witch Weekly article, it could easily have been something he'd sent her as a joke. Mr. Abernathy had said something about the biscuits when he'd written, too, and he certainly wasn't smitten with her.

"Do men only kiss women they're smitten with?" she pressed. "Don't they have — impulses, sometimes, just because they're men?" She had always been told so, at any rate — allegedly that was the reason it was so important for her to be chaperoned as a young woman, to save her from the impulses of lusty gentleman. Which, honestly, seemed to be the truth — she'd been unchaperoned and had fallen prey to one of those impulses she'd always been warned about.

  

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Prof. Marlowe Forfang

Jules

"Well, yes, civilized men at least!" Camilla replied. "All people have general impulses and a need to feel certain things, but civilized people take care of those need on their own, rather than kiss random people they're not even attracted to." Unless you were drunk and at a party, but even then, you wouldn't be kissing someone you're completely repulsed by.

  

Juliana wasn't sure what, exactly, Camilla meant by taking care of those impulses on their own, but decided it would be best not to ask. It wasn't as though that information would be useful to her, when he was the one who had said she looked suddenly kissable.

"Well, in any case," she said briskly. "I told him not to write me anymore."

  

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Prof. Marlowe Forfang

Jules

"Whyy?" Camilla inquired, who always loved a good romance. She leaned towards her friend. "Don't you like him? Did his breath stink?"

She supposed that it was possible a MacFusty's breath might reek of firewhiskey and... Dragon meat sausage.

  

"His breath was fine," Juliana said, a bit too quickly. She'd specifically noticed it that morning, directly after he'd kissed her, but less because of the scent of it and more because it was a visceral reminder of his continued proximity to her. "And whether I like him or not — I hardly know him," she said, with a slight flush to her cheek. "I don't know that's even a question I'm qualified to answer, having met him so recently. But I certainly can't just — let him kiss me," she continued, the color on her cheeks deepening. "And especially not when there are still rumors about the pair of us from Mrs. Finch."

  

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Prof. Marlowe Forfang

Jules

"Who cares what Mrs. Finch says!" Camilla said dismissively. "Would you want to kiss him again?"