May 28th, 1894 — Lestrange Household

Cash was nervous. Partially, he was nervous because this would be the longest Ford had been around his wife, or Cash around Ford's. Partially, he was nervous because he had not yet told Ford that Adrienne was pregnant. It seemed inevitable that it would come up tonight, and he was sure it would be awkward — but how could it possibly be more awkward than anything else they were going to discuss tonight?

The butler let in the Greengrasses and took their coats. Cash and Adrienne were in the dining room already; he stood to greet Ford and his wife when they were let in. "Good evening," Cash said, "Welcome to our home — can we get you anything to drink?"

Cash was drinking white wine, and there was an open bottle on the table — but they had a great many options.

Adrienne Lestrange Jemima Greengrass Fortitude Greengrass
Philomena Sprout Elias Grimstone
two posts / two days

  

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MJ made this!

Ford had been spending a lot of time scenario planning for this dinner. He had decided that it could only go favorably for Jemima, which was why they were here and he hadn't made excuses to put it off. He was sure Cash's wife would like her, because he didn't think anyone could have a conversation with Jemima and come away not liking her at least a little. And having an ally in Mrs. Lestrange would be an excellent way for her to move past the rumors that had followed her into their marriage... and having a friend in her would be good, too; he worried she was lonely.

On the other hand, he was sure this could only be a disaster for him. Cash already knew some of the truth of the matter, but Ford was still nervous about Cash seeing him alongside his wife for too long; Cash knew him too well and could see through everything. And Ford had a low confidence in his ability to make suitable small talk with Cash's wife, given that he had all but boycotted their marriage for a year.

"Please," he said, to Cash's offer of a drink, and didn't specify. Cash already knew what he drank. He glanced at Jemima, wanting to do something to make her feel more at ease but unsure how to manage it when he was feeling on pins and needles himself.

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Set by Lady!

She wasn’t sure she had seen Ford quite this apprehensive since the wedding – or before the wedding; at the wedding; that whole day and night – but then Jemima had always been too caught up in her own nerves to entirely take note of her husband’s all-encompassing dread if or when it appeared.

But she had decided she couldn’t possibly be too nervous about tonight. She wanted to make a good impression, obviously, but it still felt rather less monumental than being out for all society to see (and comment on, and judge), and if Mr. Lestrange was really Ford’s closest friend then it could hardly be a hostile invitation. And it was, after all, only two people to be worried about; that was much fewer people than usual.

Mrs. Lestrange – the former Miss Adrienne Selwyn – had been a year below her at school, but Jemima had only really known her from a distance. (That said, she had never written anything damning about the Selwyn twins in her diary – after all, they were French, and pretty, and effortlessly composed – so Mrs. Lestrange ought to have no direct reason to hate her.)

Mr. Lestrange she didn’t know at all – personally, at least. He had been Jack’s teammate, of course, and captain for a time; as a consequence of Jack she had followed the Cannons’ progress quite keenly, so she knew rather more about Cassius Lestrange than she had let on. Not that she wanted to make a fool of herself in front of a famous – former – quidditch player.

“Wine would be lovely,” Jemima said, having seen the bottle at the ready and not being inclined to prove a difficult guest. She offered a small token – a box of after-dinner chocolates from Honeyduke’s – to Adrienne Lestrange, and added, more to her than her husband, “Thank you so much for the invitation.”

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Adrienne was feeling surprisingly rejuvenated for the evening. It had caught her by surprise seeing as she’d been so sick for the first few weeks, but this evening she felt her strength was good, and in turn her energy high (for her, at least, seeing as she had never been an overly energetic person). She sat by her husband, hands crossed in her lap to welcome their guests. Once the butler had seen to their guests’ coats, she stood with Cash and found herself smiling easily as they came in.

The two of them looked in good health; if she wasn’t mistaken there was an air of awkwardness floating about, but that might have been a number of things that Adrienne couldn’t possibly parse through in the amount of time it took their guests to enter the room. She took the proffered gift with a gracious smile. “It was no trouble at all,” She responded kindly to Mrs. Greengrass. Even with the box of chocolates in her hands, Adrienne felt her stomach turn a notch as the smell hit her nose. Merde. Chocolate, once a decadent treat that she loved (though she frankly preferred the ones from France rather than Honeyduke’s) seemed to have had an odd effect on her in the past few weeks, and she hadn’t had the heart to tell anyone besides Ari about it.

Perhaps this was a sign she should start cluing her husband into more of her symptoms.

Pushing that thought to the back of her mind for later, Adrienne turned to call the butler in and request that it be served after dinner. She would resolve how best to handle rejecting them when the time came. Besides, Mrs. Greengrass looked a tad uneasy, and Adrienne felt sympathy for her regarding how the marriage came about. Of course, she wouldn’t do something so crude as to bring it up in a direct manner, but she didn’t want Mrs. Greengrass to feel as if she judged her harshly for it. “You’ve since settled into your new home, I take it. Have you gotten used to the ins and outs of running the household yet?”

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Three seconds in and already off to a terrible start, it seemed. Jemima didn't run the household, but of course the question had been meant innocently. Most women did, once they were married — but handing that off to her would require letting her handle the bills, which would require reading her in on the family's dire financial straights, and of course he'd had no desire to do that. How on earth could Ford ever face her again if he had to admit how quickly he'd spent her dowry? Not to mention that if she looked at the history of their finances and started doing the math, she might notice that at some irregular intervals they had unexplained influxes of cash. No, there was absolutely no way Ford could have let her anywhere near it — and thankfully Jemima hadn't asked about any of it. For all Ford knew, she didn't know there was even a gap there — maybe she thought she ran the household already; maybe she thought all that was meant by the phrase was receiving visitors and responding to invitations.

Best not to say anything, then, if there was still a chance things might just be glossed over and anything he could say would only make it worse. He wanted the drink Cash had offered, but hadn't made yet — he shot his friend a do you mind? look and then helped himself to the wine.

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Set by Lady!

So much for not being worried about a single pair of people – here she was, all set up to rush headlong into the very first hurdle. Jemima waved goodbye to all possibility of making a good first impression. At least she could look forward to drowning her sorrows in the wine.

She felt her cheeks heat up. “Oh, well, we still live with Ford’s mother,” Jemima explained, wishing she was not wincing at it – and Ford’s mother sounded no better at all than Mrs. Greengrass, an address which they had also been mixing up regularly between them in the most awkward of ways. And Jemima wasn’t sure how many of the household duties the widowed Mrs. Greengrass even took on. Ford seemed more involved in organising everything than her. Jemima had been so focused on not making waves in the house to try and disrupt any settled routines too fast, but now even that felt like an oversight or some negligence on her part. Why was she leaving all the responsibilities to her husband?

She didn’t want to glance sidelong at Ford in case his expression said to their hosts can you believe she hasn’t even made herself useful at home?

“Though of course I would like to be of more help, now that – now that we’re settled,” she added hurriedly.

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Alcohol, Cash thought, could only help matters — he poured a glass of wine into Mrs. Greengrass' glass before he set about pouring himself and Ford two fingers of gin into smaller glasses. He was thinking, as he did this — Mrs. Greengrass could not run the Greengrass household, because the Greengrasses had no money. In years, he had not told Ford that Ford had told him this, but Cash remembered, and knew that he had to get their conversation changed.

He handed the guests their drinks before plucking up his own. ''Did you two enjoy the Sanditon?" Cash said — hopefully he sounded less abrupt than he felt, or his wife and Mrs. Greengrass would assume he knew so little about running a household that he just changed the subject. "Adrienne and I may spend some time there this summer." He was making this up. Hopefully his wife would not hold it against him — although perhaps the sea air would help her pregnancy symptoms.

  

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MJ made this!

She realized her mistake too late. Adrienne felt the slight blush wash across her cheeks. Of course the Greengrass household wouldn’t be run quite like she ran the Lestrange house, seeing as the Greengrasses were solidly middle class. And Adrienne, for all the knowledge she was proud to posess, seemed to have forgotten that crucial detail; and even as Mrs. Greengrass amended her response, Adrienne felt the only way to remedy this situation was to simply ignore the slip up and nod with a smile plastered on her face. As it was, she seemed to have suddenly forgotten how to apologize in English anyhow. Her whole stream of consciousness seemed to have switched to French; even as she opened her mouth to reply - with anything that jumped to her mind within the next half a second.

Cash, thankfully came to her rescue, and she took advantage of his switch of topic to take a hearty sip of her own drink. But what he said surprised her, and she did a double take. “Ah, bon?” Really?

He hadn’t mentioned anything like that to her, had he? Adrienne fished in her memories to try and find any evidence of this but ultimately came up short. Perhaps the pregnancy was taking more of a toll on her mentally than she originally thought. As if the child already hadn’t done enough to her physically. “Euh…that is to say, it certainly would be wonderful to get some air by the sea.” With her slip up behind her, she turned to Mrs. Greengrass again; when an idea suddenly came to her. “Oh! Perhaps you two might like to join us for a bit?” She looked to Mr. Greengrass, then her husband, pleased with her sudden inspiration of hospitality.

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Ford hoped he did not look as panicked as he felt. He couldn't afford for them to go to the Sanditon for a week during the summer. The rooms were more expensive during their prime season, for one thing — the same suite they'd had the first week of March would have set them back three times as much, at least, during July or August. Even if the rates didn't change at all, he couldn't afford to take time off of work again — Jemima's dowry was the only thing that had made that possible in the first place. (He still always felt a surge of embarrassment when he thought of the ways he'd spent her dowry, and he felt one now. He had it all down in a separate page in the ledger; he knew where every sickle had gone, and he had the idea — Noble would have called it a crazy, idiotic ideal — that someday he would balance that sheet out, earn it back so that he could spend it as it had been intended, taking care of her. In the meantime, he lived in the hope that she wouldn't make any inquiries about it, so that he wouldn't have to lie to her).

A stay at the Sanditon was out of the question, but on the other hand Cash's wife was looking at him with such obvious delight that he didn't know how to refuse her. She was trying to be welcoming, kind; she was trying to be a friend, and Ford had been so hopeful that she and Jemima becoming friends would be the outcome of tonight. He didn't want to dash any chances of that, and he didn't want to discourage her, but — obviously he couldn't admit to the financial side of the equation.

"I, ah —" Cash had given him a drink and he wanted to have some, but didn't want to look too obviously like he was avoiding the unasked question Mrs. Lestrange had directed at him. "I'm not sure my boss would be thrilled to part with me during the middle of the social season," he bluffed — this was an utterly ridiculous thing to say, but maybe no one here would know enough about what the Spirit Division did to call him on it. "Barnaby Wye has been threatening to crash a fancy dress ball the next time one turns up," he lied; hopefully this would get him out of things, because he knew they had all met Barnaby and could perhaps believe he was enough of a public menace to warrant special attention. "Never know when he might cause a scene."

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Set by Lady!