A bit of fluffy indulgence to sooth the soul. Expect chapters of about this length at regular intervals. In the words of my dear beta, LovelyLittleFreckle, this is more like a series of petit fours for your delectation. Title from an "old english ballad" invented for the Victorian stage, which rose to great popularity for a while, and is meant (largely) ironically. It's reminded me of a Certain Person for quite a while ;)
My Johnny was a shoemaker and dearly he loved me
My Johnny was a shoemaker but now he's gone to sea
With pitch and tar to soil his hands
And to sail across the sea, stormy sea
And sail across the stormy sea
His jacket was a deep sky blue and curly was his hair
His jacket was a deep sky blue, it was, I do declare
For to reive the topsails up against the mast
And to sail across the sea, stormy sea
And sail across the stormy sea
Some day he'll be a captain bold with a brave and a gallant crew
Some day he'll be a captain bold with a sword and spyglass too
And when he has a gallant captain's sword
He'll come home and marry me, marry me
He'll come home and marry me
The idea of the charade had been Red's, of course, but the weary, guilt-sick look on his face when he'd put the proposal before had robbed her of the will to put on a show of anger and dismay. They would have to be married, or rather, they would have to appear to be married, for at least a good few weeks while attracting the attention of their mark, and then for another who knew how long while waiting in hope for this contact to whisk them away to his remote compound where he kept encrypted secret servers full of information that they desperately needed.
She wasn't sure at first why he'd insisted on marriage, rather than the slightly simpler part of serious girlfriend, or even kept woman, if it came to it. After a few hours of badgering him about it, Red admitted with a measure of chagrin that he'd had more than one of his more publicly known romantic relationships fall apart amidst scandal and his ex declare her intention to make the split by selling him out to either a convenient enemy or to law enforcement. Only the legal binding and the promise of spousal privilege would grant her a secure position at Red's side for the duration, and she had no intention of letting him go alone.
Faking a marriage was a little more work that she anticipated though. It took more than a pair of rings and a willingness to endure. Or perhaps it just took more willingness to endure than she had entirely accounted for when agreeing to the plan.
"It's just a grift, Lizzy," he'd said gently, as if to placate her, though she'd already agreed by that time and she wasn't sure why he kept trying to argue his case. She realized later that she should have taken that as a warning, as gentle and kind a warning as he could give.
They started with the wedding photographs, to set upon the pre-war mantle of their beautiful penthouse on the Upper East Side. The origins and provenance of the penthouse were completely opaque to her, but she'd stopped questioning these things somewhere along the way. In any case, she wasn't living there yet, she was being put up in a nice hotel where Red wasn't staying. If he was staying at the penthouse or somewhere else she had no idea, and she was too busy being pampered within an inch of her life to care either way.
The dress arrived early in the morning, delivered by a kid in a hotel uniform who quickly fled from her glower. All the pampering had put her into a perversely horrible mood.
The thing she unwrapped from its bed of shell pink tissue paper was made of silk charmeuse the color of old ivory or pale sand and so smooth it nearly slipped through her fingers as she held it up. It wasn't a structured confection of a dress, the way her first wedding dress was. Her real wedding dress. The one for her real marriage to a fake man, as opposed to this one for her fake marriage to a real man. Her brain gave up parsing the issue and simply looked at the dress.
It was simple and beautiful and draped and set in with nearly invisible gores in a way that was both modern and sweetly deco. It was unadorned, it's beauty came from the dress-maker's skill at patterning alone, no frills and no fuss. Sophisticated, she thought, not for a girl dressing up but for a woman who could carry it off.
It fit well, but not so impeccably as to unsettle her. This was reassuring, she decided, after a half-second's thought. She took it off again when her standing breakfast order arrived, and answered the door in the giant fluffy hotel robe, unaccountably unwilling to be seen trying it on.
It was a beautiful day, balmy and warm and brilliantly sunny, only the very barest breath of autumn in the air though it was the middle of September. It could as well stand for a warm spring day, which was when their wedding was supposed to have been. Red picked her up in one of his sleek town cars shortly after breakfast and they drove out to Yonkers to that beautiful, half-decrepit mansion where they'd stayed the night Berlin disappeared. They would have their wedding pictures there. Perhaps out on the grounds if the leaves hadn't turned yet in the lingering summer warmth, or in the long gallery which had the faded grandeur of a formal Edwardian salon. Red said that the photographer would be equipped for both.
Traveling in cars with Red was familiar enough and comfortable enough that it didn't occur to her to be nervous about the coming performance until they were climbing out of the car on sweeping front drive and being swarmed by Red's coterie of people waiting to dance attendance. She looked at Red in hopes that he would put them off for a few minutes while she got her feet under her, but he seemed happy enough to begin at once. He came and walked beside her, making introductions and guiding her into the house with a gentle hand on her back. He was smiling that bland, genial smile that always covered a multitude of sins and she wondered what in particular it hid this time.
The suite of rooms on the third floor that had once belonged to the lady of the house were still in good condition, although long ago denuded of furnishings. That was where the gaggle of stylists had set up camp with their own supplies, and lead her up the stairs straight away. She'd cast a last look at Red over her shoulder, who was talking animatedly photographer and showed no signs of following her, as she climbed the grand marble stair and felt that his apparent detachment over this ruse was admirable.
Liz was settled in a chair while her makeup was done and her hair was styled. The three women who hovered around her made polite small talk with her in perfect english but spoke to each other in some rapid slavic language. A delicate, filagreed wisp of a bridal circlet was pinned into her hair and she was handed a box with a pair long pearl drops to put in her ears. Her bridal gown was brought over at last, still warm and clammy from it's careful steaming and preening, and she was left alone to dress.
There was a long mirror stood up against the wall, and the woman reflected in it was a proud, pale stranger. It was herself, but amplified, refined. Herself as she might have been if she'd been born to a family such as the one who'd owned the mansion in it's heyday, not a government employee raised in a midwestern suburb. She wondered who had designed this look for her, if it had been Red, or one of the capable Baltic women, or someone else. She wondered how much all of this had cost, and how many favors were traded. She wondered who was going to make use of the dress and the jewelry when she was done playing dress-up.
She lifted her chin and looked this way and that to see the earrings swing. She shifted her shoulders to see how well the soft fabric moved with her. The shoes pinched abominably, for which she was grateful. Otherwise she might have liked the picture presented a little too well.
"Well," she said to her reflection, "this is going to be interesting."
Red was in costume by the time she saw him again, or rather another of his fine suits, this one better matched to her dress. He looked nice, the warm, pale grey of it complimented his complexion. But Red didn't wear any suit that didn't set him off to his best advantage, and she was fairly sure it wasn't even a new one. She was strangely disappointed that he wasn't as transformed as she had been, but she supposed the point of this exercise was to fit her into his world, nothing more, nothing less.
She'd taken the grand staircase slowly in deference to the miserable shoes. She'd tried very hard not to think about all the cliched movie scenes where the heroine descends in all her finery and renders her love interest speechless, and failed. She'd tried very hard not to take it personally when Red wasn't there to meet her, and that when she did find him, holding court with Dembe and a few of the photographer's assistants, he only looked at her for a long while with a strange stiff expression and called her over in a brisk tone.
Dembe looked impressed though. He smiled warmly at her over Red's shoulder. Her mood rose considerably.
The only real tense moment came when Red gave to her the rings. He stopped her from following the little crowd into the half-wild garden so that they stood alone in the long, echoing salon with its musty, dry wood smell. He looked resplendent in golden afternoon light, his skin still tanned from summer travels he hadn't explained and his eyes bright and vivid with intent. The twitch of his mouth was nervous though, and she braced herself for something she wouldn't like.
"I think you will need these, Lizzy," he said, and opened his hand so that she could see the rings he had chosen for her resting on his palm.
"That's… really a lot of diamond on that ring," she said, skeptical and strangely reluctant to reach for the ostentatious thing. "Whose taste is this supposed to indicate, anyway? Am I supposed to want to wear it, or are you supposed to want me to be seen wearing it?"
"We've been over this. The idea isn't to play a character so much as to play a version of yourself who…would condescend to marry a figure such as myself," he said, with a wincing smile of apology, "But surely but both versions of yourself know the virtue of making a show, when necessary."
She took the ring. It was by no means ugly or crass, beyond the fact that it was large and made with diamonds, a combination that she always found suspect in taste. The center stone was round and as clear and colorless as deep arctic ice. The shoulders were set with smaller diamonds in deco style cuts, narrow bars and rounded triangles, put together in shapes rather like leaves. It was heavy as she held it and even heavier when she slid it on. The narrow wedding band followed. She twisted them experimentally and found the fit good enough but a little loose.
"They're vintage pieces," he assured her, "and their history is entirely clean."
"I didn't think otherwise, Red," she said softly. "Still. I think the band is enough for most of the time, don't you?"
"There will be dinners, galas. I'll be taking you on a grand whirlwind social tour with the best and the brightest, Lizzy. It's better to be prepared."
"Will you be wearing a ring, too?" she asked, teasing, smirking at him.
He held up his left hand wordlessly to show the simple, heavy band he already wore. He looked apologetic about that too. Her smile froze and drifted away.
The actual business of the pictures passed quickly and easily. She was too used to appearing on Red's arm to balk at smiling for the camera. It was a little more awkward when they were joined by Dembe and Kate Kaplan, also dressed in false finery, for pictures of the pretend wedding party. Dougan Wallis knew Red well enough to know which of his companions would be included in a real wedding, he reminded her, his hand warm where it cupped her waist.
They all smiled at the photographer and his assistants holding reflectors aloft. Half an hour or less of posing in front of the overgrown arbor of late blooming roses and trying not to be flustered by the bees hovering around the same flowers. Then they were done. Red drifted off to talk with Kaplan and Liz went off back inside to be rid of her grand look.
When she was back in her own clothes, her hair freed of its pins and brushed out, she felt better. She was angry, she realized, about the ridiculousness of the whole production. About how casual and unaffected by it Red seemed. She was also angry about how he had seemingly decided that he had burdened her with this project, and was mincing his way through, making amends before she'd even had a chance to decide if she was, in fact, burdened or offended.
His behavior seemed preemptive and even petty. She was offended by how little faith he seemed to have in her ability to separate her personal tolerance for him from her ability to do her job. Or to do a job, anyway, since this all seemed so very far from the rightful purview of the FBI. Ressler had had a pretty spectacular tantrum, the briefing when she and Red brought forward Red's plan. Cooper had agreed, in the end, but he too had looked at Liz with apology and pity. She was fed up with all of them.
Being annoyed energized her though. It woke her from the uncertain, dreamlike feeling that seemed to fog her preparation for being under cover. They couldn't afford for her to by fuzzy headed or careless. Only days left, and then they would be working without a net. As pretty and frivolous as the trimmings of this project seemed, it was Red's very future that was at stake.