14th February, 1894 — Love At First Sight Ball, Wellingtonshire

She thought she was going to pass out. This evening had been too much to begin with – she ought to write it off as a debacle. Jemima had accepted a pink dance card without thinking when she arrived, hopeful this Valentine’s Day might prove the Moment for her, and remembered too late that she oughtn’t have, because of course the rumour had gone and spread further than she had meant that she was engaged. And she wasn’t, really – and she still didn’t know what had possessed her, that day before Christmas. But it had left her here, awkwardly switching to a white card in an attempt to spare herself from more befuddled looks, and nonetheless fielding curious interrogations about the engagement that wasn’t, even from friends.

She had no good excuses, and had never been a good liar to begin with. Her new corset wasn’t helping, tonight; it was supposedly self-adjusting, but all it had seemed to do was grow tighter and tighter until her pulse was racing and her body tingling, and her head too light – and there was no way she could dance like this. Or answer questions.

So Jemima excused herself and slipped out from the ballroom, veering into another, smaller room off the hall. She had meant to head for the ladies’ retiring room, but this wasn’t it – this room was deserted and dimly lit, just cloaks and hats and outerwear hung up in rows in a downstairs parlour: a makeshift cloakroom for the night. But she was too dizzy to think of backtracking, so she cast a frazzled charm to lock the door behind her, and started undoing her dress’ bodice from the back.

It was the middle of the evening – the latecomers had long since come through the Floo, and even the most miserable guests couldn’t yet politely leave, so no one would be disturbed by her being here. Admittedly, it was hard enough to focus on anything else, with the room swimming before her – her thoughts were coming in shallow and her breaths out shallower. Frantically, she managed to shrug herself out of the bodice entirely, and struggled with her underlayers until she had loosened the corset-lacings far enough to heave a better breath in and out.

It was much cooler like this, half-dressed, and so Jemima sank to the floor in a relieved pool of skirts, never mind about creasing her ballgown. She would give herself ten minutes – or maybe fifteen – which would be just long enough to slow the erratic thumping of her pulse, and to perhaps regain feeling in her tingling fingertips. She focused on her breaths and fanned herself with a hand, leaning back against the wall, and Jemima had just decided the worst of her panic had passed when she looked up to see the fireplace opposite her light up, green.

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Ford was pretty good at burglary, at this point. It wasn't the sort of thing he had ever expected to be good at, but then, there were many things in his current life he had never expected. By this point he'd been doing it for a year, and enough practice could make someone good at anything.

He had to pause for a moment as he sifted through the bag of ill-gotten goods in his bedroom: he had been doing it for a year. When he'd started he hadn't really had much thought for how long it would continue. He'd been mostly expecting to get arrested after the first one. But nothing about their circumstances had changed in the past year. Grace was still suitorless, Clementine still obstinate, his mother still insensible to reason when it came to budgets. If anything, the situation was worse now, because they had live-in cousins now. The first theft had paid down a few of their debts, but so long as their spending outpaced Ford and Noble's salaries the debts just resurged a few weeks later. Maybe this was just what Ford did now, as certainly as he worked at the Ministry. Maybe burglar was becoming part of his intrinsic self.

He stored the invisibility cloak in the usual place under the back corner of his bed (his invisibility cloak had an established place), and completed the cursory survey of the things he'd stolen. The initial pass wasn't to check for value; it was just to check for tracking spells or other charms that might prove problematic for him. He had practiced a spell that identified applied magic, and if anything alarmed he generally tossed it in the Forbidden Forest for a few days until he could decide how best to handle it (generally; he had an established procedure to get around anti-theft charms). Then he checked himself over in the mirror, tidying anything that seemed awry, and headed back through the floo to establish his alibi. He'd been at this ball earlier tonight and Noble was there now, covering for him if anyone asked; he just had to slip back into it. People rarely missed him at parties, fortunately — if anything his sisters were probably much happier when he disappeared for long stretches in the middle of balls, and not inclined to ask many questions.

The firepace roared green and Ford stepped through, just adjusting a cufflink that had come half-undone. The room wasn't well lit, but it was immediately obvious that he wasn't alone in it. Ford froze just on the edge of the fireplace ledge, unable to prevent his panicked expression as he looked over to the room's other occupant. He hadn't even realized who it was, or what she was (not) wearing yet — but people were not supposed to see him come back through the floo, people were not supposed to know that he had left and returned.

Maybe he wasn't a very good burglar after all — or maybe he wouldn't end up being one for much longer.

"Um," he said, and came up with nothing else.

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Set by Lady!

For a moment, she stared at him in an absurdly calm daze. Her mind, so newly recovered, took that moment longer to catch up with her eyes, but then it at once became apparent that someone had come in here after all – a man, a vaguely familiar man, and she was in here with half her ballgown discarded on the floor.

“What – where – where did you...” Jemima’s eyes widened in horror, and once her limbs had become unfrozen, she scrambled up to a frantic, dishevelled standing position against the wall, hair half-fallen out of its updo and corset still shamelessly on show. “I –” she stuttered, but words failed her again; she was only glad she hadn’t shrieked outright and made someone come running.

“Don’t look!” she whisper-exclaimed instead, urgently motioning at him to tell him to stay where he was and close his eyes, or turn around, anything. She didn’t know where she’d dropped her bodice in the room, so for now she pulled at a cloak on the rack and held it up, stupidly, in front of her chest.

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The woman scrambling to her feet made it rather impossible not to notice how much in disarray she was. Part of her dress was off — was that just her corset she was wearing now? Merlin's sake! Were women generally in the habit of stripping down to their corsets in the middle of balls? Of course they weren't, at least not in the middle of makeshift coatrooms that ought to have been abandoned. So he had surprised her doing something she wasn't meant to be doing, too — but regardless, he was seeing her very much under-dressed, and as she admonished him for it he realized he'd been gaping. With some effort Ford shut his mouth and whirled around, so that she could be quite certain he wasn't looking. Unfortunately he'd misremembered how far he was from the fireplace, and in whirling around had ran his shoulder straight into the mantle. He flinched at the sudden pain. Something fell off of the far edge of the mantle and shattered on the ground. Well then. Things were going from bad to worse, because someone was going to notice whatever it was that had broken, whether the noise of it now or the pieces of it later. And things would be even worse if someone were to hear it and come now, because he couldn't even give a reasonable explanation like taking a wrong turn to the bathroom and knocking it over by mistake, not while there was a woman behind him who would know that was a lie.

All of the other reasons why it would be terribly unfortunate to be caught alone in a poorly lit room with a mostly undressed woman caught up to him a second later. Merlin, he hoped no one had heard that... but the thought did beg the question of what she was doing here. Well, what she had been doing seemed fairly obvious, to Ford. There were quite a limited number of reasons a young woman would steal away to private rooms during a ball and get undressed. The real mystery was why she was alone. It seemed (to Ford anyway, who admittedly lacked this particular experience) that her partner ought to have hung around long enough to get her back into her dress, at least. Unless — it made his stomach turn to even think it, but the possibility presented itself to him regardless — unless someone had taken advantage of her, and already beat a hasty retreat.

"Are you — okay?" he stage-whispered at his feet. (It occurred to him that if she was deeply traumatized she probably wouldn't interrogate him too much on why he'd just been coming back to the party. He didn't particularly want to think of that as a silver lining, but he also wasn't keen on being arrested).

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   Jemima Greengrass

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Set by Lady!

He’d knocked something over and Jemima would have winced at the noise it made, if she hadn’t already been so dismayed by his general presence – no one was supposed to have been coming or going at a time like this! Where had he been?

Not that that was the top of the priority list to ask, at the moment – and maybe she was only trying to push her own guilt about being here onto him and his untimely interruption, for she was sure he was judging her in turn and she hadn’t even done anything wrong – but even as he obediently turned away she felt her face burning.

He’d asked if she was okay. No, Jemima almost wanted to say, plaintive, because no one had seen her in so exposed a state before – not besides her sisters, the maids who helped them dress, and her former dormmates at school. Certainly not a man. She knew this was bad, and wrong, and never mind mortifying, but – she was determined to fix this, and fast. So –

“Yes, I – am now,” Jemima said, swallowing her embarrassment as far as she could, and taking advantage of his back being turned to grope breathlessly for her bodice layers to restore her modesty. She found them where she had discarded them in her spike of panic, but – she recalled the struggle it had been to get them off in the first place, alone – she would probably need a second pair of hands to get properly dressed again, and preferably before someone came to fetch their cloak or investigate that horrible shattering noise he’d just made.

(The anxiety was threatening again; Jemima was all-too-aware of her climbing pulse.)

“I was just a little lightheaded,” she told him quickly, praying that his mind wasn’t leaping to more horrible conclusions about her from this. She had had her fill of rumours already. “But I need some help... will you please?” She trailed off, having crossed over to him (it had taken every ounce of resolve she had to do so in this state of dress) and tapped him on the shoulder. Jemima was facing away now, clutching her bodice layers to her front with one hand and gesturing helplessly at her loosened corset-strings at her back with the other. They needed re-tightening; and then he would just have to help her with the finicky little hook-and-eye fastenings of her bodice proper. And then they would leave and never have to mention this encounter ever again and everything would be fine.

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Ford was trying to work out the situation from her answers. She was alright now, she'd been lightheaded. In his mind both of these seemed to be connected to the activity she had probably been engaged in a few moments ago, not standalone statements. She hadn't explicitly said that someone had taken advantage, but the clues still seemed like they could have pointed in that direction. His heart leapt to his throat when she said she needed some help. Of course he would help her, if she needed it — he couldn't imagine turning her down, in a situation like this, and if any of his sisters found themselves in a similar predicament he would want someone to help them — but helping meant becoming involved, which rather complicated his attempt to get himself a clean and simple alibi. If she wanted him to go fetch one of her family members, or go tell the hostess something, or help her contact the authorities, or anything — someone would eventually ask if he'd seen or heard anything before he'd discovered her in the coat room, and then he'd have to make up some very good reason that he'd been coming in through the floo.

But then she tapped on his shoulder. Ford tensed, unsure what she was asking for a moment, then eventually took a tentative peek over his shoulder. She had her back to him, and her dress falling around her like the cocoon of a half-emerged butterfly. He stared for a beat, not sure what was being asked of him — and admittedly a touch distracted by her bare shoulder blades emerging from the top of her corset. It wasn't desire so much as shock: he didn't think he'd ever seen a woman's bare back before, unless one counted his sisters when they'd been children.

When he finally caught up to what she wanted him to do he hastily cleared his throat and jumped (rather clumsily) into action. He had no practical experience with corsets, but Verity had lectured him once on the differences in the fastenings (while trying to justify the purchase of three new ones, which he'd told her was superfluous), so he knew at least academically what to do. He pulled one section so the slack was gone — but not tight, because he had no idea how women typically wore these and did not want to be in the position of needing to loosen them for her — then realized there were laces below and above the one he'd started with, and he'd have to start over. Did one tighten corsets from the bottom or the top? Where was the slack supposed to end up? Both answers seemed wrong. Ford was sure he'd seen women wearing dresses that fit snugly across their upper backs, which meant they couldn't have big knots of corset strings hiding there, but wouldn't the bustle and things make it inconvenient to deal with those at the bottom, too? Did they magic them away after the corset was tied?

"Uh, sorry," he mumbled. "Do you start from the top or —" Ford was not able to finish the question before he heard a noise. He froze, trying to identify it. Someone in the hallway — a hand on the doorknob? It half-turned, stopped, unwound.

"Did you lock it?" Ford whispered. It sounded like whoever had tried the door had found it locked. The door being locked was good for them, wasn't it? He certainly didn't want anyone to walk in while he was trying to figure out which direction was up on this corset.

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Set by Lady!

Valentine's Day. Thomasina had never been particularly enthused by the holiday, but she was even less so today — if she wasn't still feeling so sour about the ballerina, and about the election, she would have taken one of the pink cards to cause some dramatics with her husband. But she was feeling sour, still, and she was the Minister's wife now, and people would not stop talking about her.

Accordingly, she did not last very long in the main room of the ball. She decided to play a game, a twist on her usual games with her husband. She would take the floo, and then she would go home, and she would see how long it took Ozymandias to find her. But when she reached the downstairs parlor, the door was closed. Sina frowned and heard frantic sounds from inside. She tried the doorknob.

No such luck. She pressed her ear to the door, but it was quiet, now.

Sina shook the door handle more vigorously, and drew her wand. There were a man and woman in here, and — she'd been furious for months. Wouldn't it be a change to have someone else be the center of attention? Besides, if two people were up to no good at the party — she wanted to know who.

She hardly had to convince herself. "Alohomora," she whispered, and heard the resounding turn of the lock in the door.

Sina pushed it open.

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   Jemima Greengrass

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set by MJ

He had started – barely – and she had opened her mouth to answer his question (his first question, about the corset ties) when the noise stopped them both.

“Yes,” Jemima breathed, more mouthing than saying it aloud – and she inclined her head in the ghost of a nod. It had seemed sensible at the time, because she had been here alone, and no one would be able to walk in on her in such a state.

Only – only now someone was trying to come in, and she... wasn’t alone anymore. That was – not good. Not good at all. Jemima glanced at him, eyebrows knitting in confusion and sudden concern, and then back at the door. The handle was moving. Oh, no. Not just the handle.

There was a squeal of horror in her throat that she didn’t have time to get out – she didn’t know what to do with herself – hide? Cover herself? Play dead? What she ended up doing was turning halfway towards the man in panic, as if she could shove him back into the fireplace and through the Floo to wherever he had come from. Too late, she thought, before she did anything; she could see the woman in the doorway in the corner of her eye, and – like a deer in the wandlight, she froze, heart lodged somewhere in her throat.

It was fine, anyway. She could explain. She could certainly explain.

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   Fortitude Greengrass

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Ford registered the door opening with a paralyzing sort of panic. He didn't move except to tense slightly (which was a good thing, actually, because it was all that kept him on balance when the young woman turned to him; with his fingers still twined in her corset strings he might otherwise have been in danger of falling into her as she moved). Someone had come in the room; someone had found him alone in a dimly lit room with an undressed woman. He recognized the partly undressed woman, he realized now that she was turned towards him — but he also recognized the woman who had come in, and at the moment that seemed like the far more significant of the figures, because the person who had surprised them was the Minister's wife.

Ford had already met the Minister in less-than-ideal circumstances and imagined the man didn't like him much. He had heard nothing at all positive about the Minister's wife. He did not expect this to go well for him.

What was he supposed to do now? His first thought was simply to try and flee, but it would have been quite damning to disappear through the floo and leave the young woman behind, and he would lose control of the narrative — whatever very minimal control was left to him, at this point. He could try and offer an explanation, in theory, except that there really was no explanation for this, was there?

I just found her like this, he could have said, except that would of course beg the question of how he had happened to stumble into a locked coat room to surprise a mostly undressed woman, and he had no answer there. None that he was going to give to the Minister's wife, anyway.

Very belatedly, Ford pulled his hands out of the young woman's corset laces.

"Her dress broke," he blurted, which he determined immediately was absolutely the stupidest thing he could have said in this situation.

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   Elias Grimstone

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Set by Lady!

She recognized the panicked couple, or at least the man — he worked at the Ministry, something with spirits, Sina thought. And the girl was — a Farley? She could figure it out; they were frozen, and looking at her, and Sina caught the belated pull of the Ministry boy's hands away from the girl's corset strings.

"You broke her dress?" Sina said, willfully misunderstanding — because she thought she had a good idea of what was happening here. It was obvious that the two had been getting up to no good in the floo room, and had gone too far — and now Sina had caught them.

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   Fortitude Greengrass

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set by MJ

If she hadn’t already been suitably chagrined, Mrs. Thomasina Dempsey walking in had made her colour rise and her hands go clammy all over again. Jemima only knew her from a distance, but Mrs. Dempsey had been a terrifying figure in society even before her husband had become the Minister. She seemed too clever and too confident, the sort of person who would see cleanly through a lie.

So just as soon as she gathered her wits Jemima had been going to offer up the events as they had occurred, in a perhaps-desperate bid for sympathy, only – her eyes widened at him in newfound horror – he (...Mr. Greengrass, her brain would only later be able to supply) had changed the story. What was he talking about?!

Jemima opened her mouth to protest, but was forced to swallow her words. She had been going to confess to her fit of nerves, which was embarrassing enough even before him being here – but now if she made a different excuse it would only sound worse, as though she were lying. But her dress wasn’t broken! He hadn’t even been here! Couldn’t he just tell her he’d snuck out somewhere and come back in at the wrong time through the Floo? And now Mrs. Dempsey thought he had had anything to do with her undressing?!

“No, no, he didn’t – he was helping,” she said fretfully, slightly hysterical at having to have a conversation still not fully dressed. “He...” He had thrown her off with his line; silently, she implored him to back her up.

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   Thomasina Dempsey

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The question from the Minister's wife rattled him, and it showed on his face. I don't even know how to break a dress, he thought a little desperately, but at least his brain was working well enough to prevent himself from saying that. It would have sounded like nonsense, anyway, and I'm not actually very suave or anything was hardly a fitting defense to someone who thought he'd been in the middle of undressing a young woman.

At least she seemed inclined to defend him. This was probably good, as he hadn't had the presence of mind to come up with a decent defense for himself on the spot, but he wished very much they'd had a second to get their stories straight before the Minister's wife had entered. He oughtn't to have wasted time asking whether the door was locked (particularly since the lock had entirely failed to slow her down), he ought to have spent the time making up and communicating an excuse to her, or just pulled her back through the floo so that they were at least out of danger of being spotted, or — literally anything more useful than just freezing up and waiting for the worst to happen.

It seemed to be his turn to do his part now; she had drifted off mid-sentence and thrown him a pleading look. Right — what was he supposed to say?

"— getting her, uh," he sputtered; he had started trying to explain what he had been doing to help but stalled out on the word corset; it seemed like the sort of thing he maybe shouldn't admit to out loud, for all that it was probably quite obvious to Mrs. Dempsey. "— helping, yes. I was trying to help her get back to the party."

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Set by Lady!

Sina blinked at them; her eyes were widened, largely for the affect. They could not seem to get a story together; Thomasina supposed that made sense, given their situation. If she was in a better mood, she would likely have felt bad for them — neither of them had the confidence to pull this off. But the longer she had the pair cornered, the better she felt — something was building back in her. It felt like power.

"And why," Sina said. She did not bother to speak in an undertone. If more people wanted to join in on her line of questioning, let them! "Were the two of you away from the party?"

The Ministry worker was a Greengrass, she thought — one of those pureblood families of the middle class with a mess of daughters, but if there were sons then they could not be the Potts family.

  

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set by MJ

Jemima had returned to watching Mrs. Dempsey’s face for any sign of what she was thinking. Was she convinced? She was staring; she was still staring. Jemima wanted to shrink into a tiny little ball. And maybe cry.

But she couldn’t do that, because the woman was speaking so loudly – if someone else stumbled in on them then all would be lost, it would be too late. There would be no public corrections she could make to erase the whispers then. If she wanted this encounter to remain private, it would have to stay within the confines of this room.

Her voice came out higher-pitched and more wavering than she would have liked. “It isn’t – what it looks like,” she insisted, although maybe alluding to Mrs. Dempsey’s worst possible accusations hadn’t been particularly wise, either, to seem innocent of it; she should have pled anxiety after all. Jemima could feel her heart fluttering worryingly fast now. She took a tiny step away from the man, subtly trying to increase the distance between them. “I didn’t want to make a scene.” That was why she’d left the ballroom, that was all!

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It isn't what it looks like may have been true, but it wasn't a very good excuse. All very well for Ford to think so, of course, when he had come up with nothing better. In the time it had taken her to answer he had done nothing beyond mutely opening and closing his mouth. Still, it could not escape his notice that the young woman (he recognized her, definitely, but what was her name? He'd danced with her before, he thought vaguely — a recollection that did nothing to help their current situation, so it was easy to focus his mental efforts elsewhere for the moment) had not actually offered any answer to the question the Minister's wife had posed. What were they doing away from the ball? She didn't want to make a scene, but she didn't say what she might have done in the ballroom that would otherwise have made a scene, and this did not explain at all how Ford had gotten there.

"I just — Just —" Ford began weakly, but he couldn't figure out what to say from there. He'd just found her like this — there was really nothing else to say about it. But he didn't think Mrs. Dempsey would believe that, and if she did then — he still didn't know how Miss Forgot-Her-Name had gotten that way, but suspected it was probably nothing she wanted to share with the Minister's wife, so he'd be throwing her under the carriage wheels a bit by saying it, wouldn't he?

This was all far too much for him.

"— just trying to help with her dress but I didn't really know what I was doing anyway and I'm sure you don't need my help with it anymore so I think I ought to just go back —" he said all in a rush. "— and leave you two to, uh, whatever the issue with the dress was and I'll just — just get back to things and get out of your way —"

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Set by Lady!

Neither of them could explain, at all, and Sina was starting to look and feel exasperated with them. What were they thinking, getting themselves in trouble without any excuses up their sleeves? And now the boy was trying to leave.

Sina snapped her fingers at the boy, an impatient method for getting someone's attention that she most frequently used on hospital interns. "Mr. Greengrass," she said sternly, "I would advise against your leaving until one of you gives me a competent explanation." She was feeling more rude about the boy than she was about the girl, but she was not feeling particularly kindly about either of them — still, she looked at Miss Farley with expectant eyes.

  

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set by MJ