A/N: Hi! I know it's been radio silence from me for a while, but that's because I'm in the thick of final exams for uni at the moment. An update to 'So Near' is coming soon, I swear. In the meantime, I thought I'd upload this story that I worked on very quickly a few months ago. It's a f/f Anastasia AU, so if that doesn't interest you then there's not really anything I can say to convince you. I will say, before we start, that this has as little to do with French history and the French Revolution as Anastasia does with Russian history, so any comments about historical accuracy are really not needed and will not be appreciated. If you also follow me on AO3, you'll note that this is exactly the same, minus the extra chapter which does not follow content guidelines on FFN. As I stated on AO3, this will eventually be rewritten to a fuller extent, but I thought I'd share it as-is for now. Enjoy!
TheTeaIsAddictive
ACT ONE
Paris, 1789
The Bastille has been stormed, and there is rioting in the streets. The King and Queen tried escaping with their family once before, but were apprehended and taken prisoner again. A very few servants remain at Versailles, and a very small family – on the royals side, the King and Queen, the Queen Mother, and their three children Adam, Vincent, and Ève. On the servants side, a small skeleton crew of maids and valets, and the young daughter of the old Royal Engineer who passed away two months earlier. The servants call her 'little Beauty', although her given name is Joy. She knows the secret passageways around the castle almost better than her father did – and she also knows that he made a passageway that led directly from their cottage on the very outskirts of the grounds to the lower west wing.
The peasants storm the castle, and while the king and queen resolve to face their fate, along with their two elder sons, they can't bring themselves to sentence their seven year old daughter or her elderly grandmother. So Ève and her grandmother run around trying to escape, when little Beauty appears literally out of the wall and shoos them inside. Ève drops the Plot Convenience music box as in the film, Belle picks it up but is knocked out before she can join them, and the two royals flee into the night. But before the sun rises the next day, they are separated, never to see each other again.
Dundee, 1803.
A tall, red-haired woman leaves her childhood workhouse, with instructions to find employment at one of the industrial mills. After looking at her (very valuable) gold necklace, inscribed with the words Ensemble à Paris, she decides 'nah', and makes her way to Edinburgh for the sole reason that it is closer than Glasgow. Once there, she tries to bluff her way into a train ticket, but is fobbed off and told to find 'Joy and Lizzie. They're good for getting girls to France. Look at the base of the castle.'
Evelyn (Evie for short) duly goes, but something about the landscape seems … familiar. (A diplomatic visit, when she was five. Her mother's people had been Scots, generations ago, but their political alliance is a powerful memory than anything else. She had danced as best she could, but been tired out after half an hour and put to bed while her brothers kept on laughing through their steps) After a few minutes of polite coughing, she turns and sees two women – one of them is black, in her mid-thirties and looking rather amused to see her. The other is around Ève's age, white as a sheet apart from her bright red nose and cheeks, with dark brown eyes and hair. She looks pissed)
"Are you here for the –"
"Are you Joy and Lizzie? I was told you could get me to France."
Yep, Ève thinks. Definitely pissed.
"How does she look, Joy?" the other woman – Lizzie – asks under her breath.
"Hard to tell under all the dirt," Joy responds, at normal volume. "So, what's your name?"
"Evelyn."
"Surname?"
"Orphan. I was found wandering the streets of Caen back in '89, and some Scots rescued me. Well. They rescued me from France, but they put me in a workhouse."
"Right age," Joy mutters. "What do you know about the lost princess? Ève of France?"
Evie shrugs. "That she exists? I saw a picture in a broadsheet once, but it was kind of a caricature. Why?"
Joy and Lizzie share a heavy look. "We're looking for her," Lizzie says. "And – well, we'll need to ask some questions – but you're a dead ringer for her." She takes out a copy of an old portrait and hands it to Evie. "I think we might have found our match. What do you think? We can get you to France – and if you're not the right girl, no harm no foul."
Evie looks back at the dying twilight. She thinks about the life waiting for her in the mills of Dundee. About the life she left behind in the orphanage. And she remembers the inscription – Ensemble à Paris.
"Alright," she says. "I'm in."
The three of them end up wedged in one corner of a large coach, carrying any number of other passengers. Evie looks at the money that Joy and Lizzie hand over, remembers that her own upbringing didn't exactly foster a sense of morality, and decides not to ask where they got it. Which is good, because it means she needs to talk to Joy less.
Joy is . … kind of a bitch. After the comment about personal hygiene, she had kept looking at Evie critically, as if there was something fundamentally wrong with her face. (Evie knows that workhouse folks aren't as finely bred as others, but she's also more than a slightly aware of her own good looks. It's the first time batting her eyelashes hasn't worked as a charm, and it's a touch irritating.) Evie had snapped over nothing (her temper, always her temper, which didn't help the comments about her red hair) and Lizzie had eventually stepped between them, so she was currently the sandwich between two very pissed-off girls.
Now, Evie peered over Lizzie's shoulder to see that Joy was asleep. Her face was gentler when it wasn't screwed up in a frown, and she actually looked like a woman in her early twenties. Pretty, and almost beautiful – but then Evie remembers how Joy had given as good as she got, and her feelings towards her cooled somewhat.
"So – can i ask what your deal is?" Evie asked Lizzie. "How did you two meet?"
"I have a lover in Paris; he's the confidante of the queen mother, and has been trying to find the princess ever since she went missing. When i first met Joy in London, looking for the princess, I thought she was Ève – but I didn't even know what the girl looked like. My love, my Lumière, he's not the best at planning ahead." She sighed nostalgically, her eyes in Paris. "Joy got in contact with him and arranged for a copy of that portrait we showed you. We were following any lead we could – all the seven-year-old girls lost in Paris, who bore the slightest resemblance. We narrowed it down to Scotland eventually, and decided to start in Edinburgh."
"And you're just doing it out of the goodness of your heart?" Evie said, raising an eyebrow.
"I can't help but feel for the woman," Lizzie shrugged. "To lose children and grandchildren in one fell swoop, at that age … If you are the princess, then even a little bit of family must be a comfort."
"You really think I'm the princess?"
"I have no reason to doubt it," Lizzie said.
The thing is.
Lizzie's not lying. She's just not telling the whole truth.
There's a handsome reward, which even split between her and Joy would make her life much easier. There's been ten other girls they auditioned for the part, none of whom had quite the right look or the right character to satisfy Joy, who's really the driving force behind the whole operation.
And then suddenly, a tall redhead in her early twenties, who has a very faint French accent and has little memory before being found in France? One whom Joy had taken one look at and, despite her cold exterior, had practically leapt at to join their party? So this one needs to employ some method acting. For all Lizzie or Joy know – and more to the point, for all Evie or the Queen Mother know – she could be the lost princess.
Lizzie carefully avoids mentioning whether or not Joy believes that Evie is princess Ève.
And as the coach rumbles towards the border, something else, something deep and green and sinister, rumbles awake beneath the turning wheels on the earth.
The coach stops for the night in a small town roughly half an hour from the border. Lizzie, Joy, and Evie are the last three out the carriage, and all three of them take a moment to stretch their aching limbs and regain feeling in their extremities. Joy wrangles their sparse luggage down from the coach, splitting half of it with Lizzie, and marches towards the inn where they're sleeping that night. Evie follows a moment later – it seems to be a general consensus that they're not going out of their way to grab attention.
Once in the room, Lizzie excuses herself to use the facilities to wash up a little before the evening meal. As soon as the latch clicks shut, a heavy, dull silence settles over Joy and Evie.
"So," Evie says, "what's the plan for tomorrow?"
"We take the post-carriage as far south as we can," Joy says, not looking at Evie. "At some point we're going to have to walk on foot for most of the journey, so be aware of that. We only have so much money. we'll get the ferry over the Channel, and then … well, Lizzie's the expert on French transport, so she can take it from there."
"Okay," Evie says. Reflexively, she begins fiddling with her golden necklace – the pendant itself is hidden beneath her chemise, and the numerous other layers of her dress and winter-wear. Evie knows that it's nothing short of a miracle that such a valuable trinket has never been stolen. "Early rise, then?"
"Mm-hmm," Joy says in agreement. "You should wash up if you can, try and get some rest. The princess of France should look her best."
Evie grits her teeth. "I'm not filthy," she spits. "And I don't have – lice, or ticks, or anything else infectious like that! I know I grew up in a workhouse, but I'm not – we're not unhygienic! Cleanliness is very important."
(Another memory, this one played out every Sunday – the freezing bath water, changed after fifteen women, then after the next fifteen, and so on. Scrubbing at fingernails and crevices that were never quite free of dirt, no matter how hard Evie tried. The equally cold water of the pump on weekdays, scrubbing at everywhere in reach to keep clean as best she could. The accusations of vanity by her superiors for trying to wash her hair every other day, which led to it being cut. Evie's hair had been shorn short to the scalp more times than she could count.)
Joy looks at her. "I'm sorry … Princess. I didn't mean to touch a nerve." Evie can see that Joy is also fiddling with something – something in her pocket, fairly large judging from the shape under the fabric. "How do you – I don't mean to be rude –"
"That'll be a first," Evie mutters.
"–but how do you know the word 'unhygienic'?" Joy continues.
Evie blinks. "I read it. I was one of the few girls who could read, so I would sometimes be allowed to read one of the books the superiors had."
"Really?" Joy asks, hunching over and shuffling on her bed so that she's a little closer to Evie. "I love to read – what did you have?"
And so Lizzie came back half an hour later, fearing that the two women had murdered each other, and instead finding them laughing and debating various fiction and non-fiction books. Joy promised to introduce Evie to the works of Mary Wollstonecraft, and Evie shared her opinions on the few works of Austen which she had been able to sneak peeks at.
Meanwhile, deep green shoots across the land. it follows the coach to the inn, follows the girls to the room, and hears them talk, and talk, and talk until they fall asleep. It slinks down, down, down into the kitchen, where the exhausted cook is winding down for the night. She shuts the door and joins her husband the innkeeper in their rooms.
A cinder falls from the dying fireplace, still red-hot. Another falls, and another. finally, the deep green manages to land one on the small pile of broadsheets which the coach driver had given to the innkeeper that evening.
The paper lights.