Winning His Spurs
Chapter 1, Return of the King, Not all those who wander are lost. The Stone Gryphon Everybody Lives, Nobody Dies AU. Part of the Commoner Royalty series.
This is the beginning of the end to the collaborative story begun in my Under Cover and most recently, Hung Out To Dry. That story of Eustace and Jill was continued in OldFashioned95's Bedgraggled As I Am and concluded in Starbrow's Enchantment Vast But Foolish. (Do check those stories out! They are wonderful and deserve every bit of love they receive!). Here, I pick up with the catalyst for Jill and Eustace's development – the romantic relationship between Peter and Mary Anning Russell which was in turn first told in stories by Anastigmat and Songsmith (links in my Live Journal/Dreamwidth journal).
Or just dive in, Peter/OFC, and very fluffy.
You get whatever accomplishment you are willing to declare.
Georgia O'Keefe
ooOOoo
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Lord of the Rings
ooOOoo
Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, 1955
ooOOoo
The truck rattled and bounced on the rough road, leaving a cloud of red New Mexico dust in its wake. Peter smoothly downshifted and slowly turned down an even narrower road marked by an ox skull perched atop the fence post. Georgia had painted the skull years ago and it had become the symbol of Ghost Ranch.
He and Mary had come here from the Everglades after Eustace had packed up and shipped out. Asim had finally had enough of the No Colored signs all over the American South and returned to England. So it had become just the two of them, more alone than either he or Mary had been in years, and first testing tentatively then enthusiastically embracing their new relationship. Peter felt some twinges of occasional, residual guilt, but no regrets.
He revved the truck up and over the last rise, and across the gully that led up into Box Canyon. Startled deer bounded away and birds scattered. Abiquiu was as different from the Everglades as two places could be. Southern Florida had been green, lush, hot, and teeming with life and noise. Everything squelched, burbled and belched. The bugs were of the most extreme varieties imaginable. Here, it was clean, rough, and endless. Blue sky, red rock, bleached bone, and young, sharp mountains meeting sand.
Peter pulled up to their cottage and stopped the truck. Pack, the Ghost Ranch owner, allowed paleontologists studying the Triassic deposits to stay on the property and had loaned them the cabin for a few months. There were three rooms, a well, a stove, a generator, and it was 50 miles to the nearest grocer. It had been perfect for them and Peter had made some improvements so that by comparison to previous bivouacs, their Ghost Ranch cabin was luxurious. He and Mary had camped all over the Americas and North Africa but now that they were sharing a bed, it was nice to have one, even if very small with a straw ticking mattress.
The Ghost Ranch owner had just donated the whole property to the Presbyterians. It might be the same, but it might not. Mary was ready to move on; she wanted to drive to California and go to a place called Disneyland.
He slid out of the front seat, shook off the dust that would settle over him again within minutes, and gathered up the bundle of mail and packages all tied together that had been waiting for them at the Taos post office.
"I'm in the back!" Mary called. She'd not shouted but it was so quiet, her voice bounced off the canyon walls.
Rather than going around, Peter went through the cabin and stopped to pour out the last of the coffee Mary had left him for him in the kitchen-dining room-sitting room-office. He tucked the pile of mail under his arm and with two more steps he was out the back screen door. The door squeaked open and slammed shut behind, another loud noise in the silence all around them. The scrub, rock and wild lands of the Piedre Lumbre spread out beyond the cottage's back porch.
Mary was bent over the sandbox he had built for her work. She had her hat on and long sleeves and khakis to ward off the early spring chill. She was carefully picking rock from the bone of a Triassic dinosaur skull. He assumed it was Coelophysis bauri but Peter couldn't tell a tyrannosaur from an allosaur. He could, as a matter of survival, identify every venomous and poisonous living thing within 200 miles.
Mary came around the table and he was rewarded for the modest effort of the mail run with a kiss. "Thanks for making the trip into town."
"It was time we caught up on the rest of the world and permitted the rest of the world to catch up to us."
Mary relieved him of the packages jammed under his arm and frowned. "No book?"
"From the heft of it, papers, letters, postcards, at least one manuscript, and banking statements, but no book." He smoothed away her disappointed pout with another kiss.
Mary settled on the porch swing - another of his additions - and braced it so he could sit without spilling coffee on the letters. They both put their booted feet up on the bench and a fine patina of dust swirled up and around and even into his cup.
"Were you expecting something?" he asked.
"I'd hoped that new book by Tolkien would be out. It's the last in the series, very hopefully titled Return of the King, and I desperately want to know what happens to Frodo and Sam. Edmund had said he would send it."
Peter had read the first two books and the battles had been well written. While all the traveling about had bored him, he'd very much enjoyed the walking, talking, and fighting Trees.
"Maybe not until Fall. I think there's a paper shortage in England. Still." He took a sip of the cold coffee and set the cup down. "I brought two weeks of New York Times, so they are less than a month old and the Time and Life magazines might be almost current."
Mary handed him the top half of the stack, all letters and postcards, and began rooting through the newspapers and magazines. Mary also kept the banking statements, though they included his as well as her own as they came from the same excruciatingly clever American bank. The envelope from the journal publishing her and Eustace's latest article was set aside and he assumed she would forward it on to Eustace, maybe unopened and certainly unread. She had been doing that a lot lately. Peter was not sure if it was flagging interest, guilt over the crushed feelings Eustace had long had and Mary had never reciprocated, or a frustrated envy that the academic road that had been so very hard for her had been so easy for Eustace. On the last, he certainly understood the feelings very well. It was so mortifying to fail where others succeeded.
"Not just paper in shortage," Mary said, scanning the international section of the latest Times for news on sighed. "It is not as if we have need of much out here, but…"
"We have the option of doing without; they do not."
"I never thought we'd still be sending Boxes for Britain so long after the war ended," Mary replied bitterly. "It's just not right, Peter. It's not sitting well with me at all."
The letters were all from family. The one from his father was on top. Peter held the letter in his hand, weighing it and what it portended.
Mary glanced at the envelope, snatched it from his hands and flipped it on to the work table. "Not that one. It will be put us both in a mood. Even more of a mood once we read the news from home."
"As you command, my lady," Peter replied. He truly wasn't up yet that day to another tirade from Father about his layabout, wastrel existence.
He started sorting through the letters that would be more cheering.
"Churchill might be resigning," Mary murmured, scanning one of the magazines.
"Eden for PM, then?" Peter asked. He slit open the letter from Susan.
"Probably. Followed by a general election so the Conservatives can grab even more for those old, gray, right sort men," Mary said, her tight voice matching his own opinion on the subject and that party. "New Elizabethan age my arse, as your goat swordmaster would have said."
Mary could effortlessly mash together and switch between Narnia and Spare Oom idiom.
"I don't feel we have any right to criticise when we are not even living there," Peter replied.
"It has never stopped us from doing so before," Mary replied. "Besides, it's still our country and the freedom to throw figurative bombs from the backbench is one reason we fought, and won, the war."
He supposed it was still their country, though Peter had not felt worthy to claim it since the war ended. He and Mary had been over it all so many times and the nagging guilt because they had both, for different reasons, embraced selfishness. Once peace was finally declared and he'd been demobbed, Peter had dutifully followed the path that had been set out for him to university. It had been an unmitigated disaster that led to his humiliating withdrawal from Oxford.
Only Mary had really understood and had never judged him as less for failing, maybe because she'd never seen that he'd done anything to earn the impossible regard in which others had held him. Mary also knew what it was to disappoint the expectation of those whose respect meant so very, very much. When Richard died, she fled, and he went with her.
Running away and forgetting had worked, for awhile. But as his siblings had begun to embrace bigger, greater callings, Peter was finding it harder to ignore his own shortcomings. And as Mary found her own healing, Peter had noticed an increasing restlessness with their previously contented exile.
"There is just so very much that is wrong," Mary said with a vehemence strong even for her. "Surely someone should be able to do something other than more of the bloody same and electing over and over the same ogres whose only recommendation is that they've always been there." She paused. "Ogres? Is that the right species or is there another more appropriate?
"Ogre is fine," Peter replied. Mary was always interested in Narnia taxonomy. "Mountain troll is apt as well, though I don't know why Tolkien thought they turned to stone in sunlight."
"Trolls, ogres, idiots is what they are! They can't even stop the railway accidents. There've been two more terrible ones." She angrily tossed the Time magazine away and snatched up a stack of postcards. "When I think of the narrow shave you lot had and that was six years ago!"
Peter jostled her shoulder. "For which we all daily thank Aslan's intervention as there could be no other possible explanation for Asim and Edmund both reading the timetables incorrectly."
Mary returned the nudge, roughly affectionate. "And I do. Though I don't think that Cat's been about for a while now; I've seen none of the benevolent feline deity in our local mountain lions."
He shrugged, pushing aside the discomfort of Mary's too-perceptive remark. Lucy always said that Aslan was there if you listened; Peter knew he'd not listened for years. He had thought he'd known what Aslan wanted. He'd obviously been wrong and figured the Lion had just thrown up his paws in despair at his thick-headed, dim-witted, layabout former High King.
He unfolded Susan's letter as Mary drew out a postcard of the London Zoo from her pile.
His sister's Christmas letter was uncharacteristically short – "Sometimes, my dear brother, a picture is worth a thousand words."
"Polly's written," Mary said. "Digs has had a bad winter." She plucked the postcard fretfully. "I hope he's still…"
"Susan makes no mention of it," Peter said, turning over his sister's letter. "If it was dire, she would have written."
"Unless he has died in the meantime," Mary said, sounding very gloomy. With fixed determination, she put Polly's postcard to the side. Peter saw that the writing on the postcard was fainter and more spidery. Age was catching up with Polly as well.
A photograph fluttered out of Susan's envelope and landed in his lap. Peter stared at it, utterly unprepared for the surge of emotion it prompted. The picture was of his brother, sisters, and their spouses in front of the decorated mantle of Susan's house, with a Christmas tree in the background. Lucy was holding Jack, Jr., the nephew Peter had not yet met. Miriam and Susan were both obviously pregnant. He'd not even heard that either was expecting. He would be an uncle, again, twice over, and miss this growth of his family as surely as he had before, in Narnia.
"What on earth!" Mary exclaimed, her shocked tone pulling him out of the sudden and very unexpected pang of intense melancholy.
"Indeed," Peter replied, handing her Susan's picture, captioned, "Happy Christmas!"
Mary glanced at it. "It's a veritable Yule fertility festival. And in keeping with the spirit…"
She handed him a bright postcard of a white sandy beach, blue-green sea, and gaily painted wooden boats. Jamaica?
He turned it over and recognized Jill's flowing handwriting.
Peter and Mary-
By the time this reaches you in New Mexico, Scrubb and I should be back from our honeymoon. We were married last month in Kingston. It was a sudden thing, if you can consider knowing each other for over 10 years sudden. We are deliriously happy and hope to see you some time later in the year. Perhaps we can meet in New York or Boston in the summer? We are on our way to England now to see everyone and share our joy. We feel Aslan's blessing daily.
With our very best wishes and our deepest thanks,
Jill
Eustace had printed at the bottom. Thanks so much. Never been happier. I owe you both a bottle of rum and will pay up when we see you. So glad I went. Fantastic herps in Jamaica; great material for articles on island adaptations; saw C. acutus; want to get to Galapagos with Jill—waiting to hear from NG about size of next grant. Probably time to accept that teaching offer.
The mood settled like a wet fog on them both. They sat silently, side by side, rocking in the swing, staring at the pile of good familial tidings and ill news of England. Mary snaked her arm around his waist.
"It is all moving on without us," Mary said. "I don't like that feeling very much."
They watched as two big horned sheep began picking their way along the canyon walls. Their hooves sent rocks skittering down the cliffs and the pings sounded overloud in the silence of their backyard sanctuary. A hawk circled overhead hunting for rabbit or marmot.
It was all perfect and beautiful.
"I need to go back," Peter finally said. It hurt so much to say it, but it was truth. They only spoke truth to one another - it had been part of their friendship for years, ever since Mary had divined the truth of Narnia, believed it, and become painfully reconciled to the fact she'd not been chosen to go down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass with the rest of them.
"Yes," Mary replied softly into his shoulder and pressing the picture of his family into his hands. "You've been selfish for long enough. I've been selfish keeping you here. I'd do it again in a moment. But it's time."
The swing creaked.
"I'm sorry, Mary. I've been so very happy. I'll miss you…"
"Miss me?"
Peter stiffened at the surprisingly sharp tone that had entered her voice. "What?"
Mary pulled away and her eyes turned narrow and dangerous. "Why would you miss me?"
"Of course, I will miss you!" he protested and now felt rising hurt. After all this time, she wouldn't miss him?
"Just like that? You are going to sally off back to England?"
"But you just said we'd been selfish, that it was time…"
She poked him in the chest hard enough to hurt with a sand-encrusted finger. "You are just going to leave? And leave me behind?"
What was she talking about? "But you don't want to go back!"
"Peter, honestly, you are so thick sometimes. You did not even ask! You just assumed."
"You have all this!" He gestured toward her work table. "Why would you go back?"
"Why would I go back?" she repeated. Mary rolled her eyes and rocked back so hard on the swing it set the whole thing swaying. "I would go back there because you would not be here."
This was impossible. She could not possibly mean what she was saying. "I would never ask such a thing of you, Mary. Your work, your…" Peter floundered, stammered, and repeated, "Your work."
"Is important and is about things that died a hundred million years ago. But something right next to me is living and is very important, too. More important, even."
He was the only thing living that was next to her – unless maybe lizards under the porch?
"You can't mean that, Mary. You can't mean me..."
"Oh for Aslan's sake, Peter, I love you. Of course I'm going back with you, though if you keep behaving like such an idiot, you'll make me reconsider that decision."
With a look of distaste, Mary reached for the envelope from her publisher. "I'll need to actually read some of my professional correspondence, and, irony of ironies, ask Eustace to call in a favour on my behalf. Perhaps someone will deem me worthy to hire without getting Richard in the deal. Ideally, there will be something around Oxford or maybe even at Experiment House, which is not beastly at all anymore." She waved her arm about. "As for this site, I'll just cover it all up and leave it for Eustace, if he's not too occupied spending grant monies in the Galapagos, or maybe that smart young man from Yale…"
Wait.
Peter sucked in a steadying breath, tuning out the prattle. "Say again?"
Mary looked up from the thick letter. "That I'll write to Eustace about a position…"
"No, before that."
"That you are an idiot and that if you don't start speaking intelligently, I shall…"
"No. Before that. That you…"
The words got stuck, like a bone in the craw.
Mary looked puzzled, tilted her head, and repeated the conversation under breath. "Oh, that I love you? That?"
Peter nodded.
"What about it?"
He cleared his throat. "I believe that is the first time I've heard those words."
She scrunched up her sunburnt forehead. "I shouldn't think so. I'm sure I've said it before to you."
Peter shook his head emphatically. "No, you have not. If you had, I'd remember it."
He had her full attention with his confession. Mary turned on the bench and put her hand to his face, almost putting his eye out with the corner of her letter. "Sorry," Mary muttered and dropped the paper. "I would not have thought my declaration so very remarkable or memorable."
"As it is the first time any woman has ever said it to me, I assure you, Mary, it is." He took her hands in his, kissed them lightly, and received a taste of New Mexico fine grit.
Mary leaned in closer, and her hard edges turned softer. "Really? The first time? After all this time? No one else?"
He shook his head, not wanting the bitter to crowd out what was now very sweet.
"I am sorry for that." Mary blew out an aggravated snort. "I have told you before, but shall say again, I have a very low opinion of those other women who only wanted a crown, a country, or chocolate and stockings."
"I don't have any of those things, Mary, not anymore. I don't have anything to offer you. I'm just a vagabond living off the inheritance of a generous man who we both loved very much."
"Oh, Peter, you break my heart when you talk that way." She gently traced his face with her dirty fingers and her expression was soft.
"You still don't see that it's not things that make you deserving of love? I do not need anything I cannot provide myself. All I ever wanted is your good self, nothing more. Nothing less. And that you have given me. Always given me."
Blushing, he ducked his head under the warm regard, the love he could now see and name.
"That is the most generous thing anyone has ever said to me. I love you, too. Very much and for a very long time, I think." He looked around, seeing the work table, her notebook, the dozens of bone fragments, the precious fossils, and, always, Richard's final diary that had recorded mysteries waiting to be proven. Things that had been common Narnian understanding, such as the honey bee dancing, had garnered a Nobel Prize here. Some of this could be possibly continued in England, but not all of it.
"Mary, please think about this. Do you really want to go back, to all those memories after avoiding them for so long?"
Her eyes darted to the table and stopped to rest on Richard's journal. "You call me generous, Peter, but you are more so, to never once criticise that I mourned Richard for longer even than we were married."
Mourned. As in, in the past? Was Mary's mourning finally complete?
"The problem with loving dead things is that they don't love back. I think it turned me hollow and then you filled that empty space. I gave you love, yes, but you gave me a life and love besides."
Her eyes returned to his and Peter felt a shadow lift, as if Richard's silent ghost was, at last, no longer between them.
"We both loved Richard, and he loved both of us," Peter said. He squeezed her hands and pushed Mary's hat aside to kiss her forehead.
"And more than that, Richard loved England, Peter. He would not want us to abandon her forever or each other, now that we are finally together. That's not honouring his gifts to us."
"Are you sure, though?" He had been sensing her rising discontent but never thought it so strong. Peter could scarce believe that his directionless self and struggling England could combine to create a pull so strong Mary would leave her rocks and reptiles.
"Peter, please don't make me explain it." Unexpectedly, her eyes reddened. "You, of all people, know how soul-destroying it can be... to..."
To disappoint those you loved. To fail where you had so wished to succeed. In marriage. In love. In studies. In career.
Mary wiped her nose on her shoulder and yanked her hands away from his. She thrust her fingers awkwardly into her pockets for a foil-wrapped candy, fumbled about and popped the sweet into her mouth; the crunch sound was louder than the squeak of the swing in the desert stillness. In America, Mary had replaced humbugs and Cadbury Roses with LifeSavers and Hershey Kisses.
Their kiss tasted of her cherry LifeSaver.
"I understand, Mary. Perhaps together we shall succeed where individually we have not."
She nodded and earnestly chewed another candy, pineapple. When she spoke again, her brisk tone had returned. "It's time for the King to return to England. Just like Tolkien's book."
King?
"Mary, I'm not a King, not anymore."
He got a hard shove. "Of course you are. England, Narnia, it's all one and the same. Isn't that what you really learned from Richard?"
"Well, yes, I suppose." Peter recalled now with chagrin how revelatory it had seemed to find Narnia in this world and to not sooner comprehend the variety of Aslan's creation. "But it was not only Richard. You were very much part of that discovery, too."
"That's just because I look like a Dryad." She shrugged, offhandedly dismissive in a way he did not like to see.
He again took her hands in his. "It is nothing so superficial as that. Since we met, a day has not gone by that I was not bettered by you and those around you."
"I do have a way of collecting interesting persons and things," Mary said, sounding smug. "Though put that way makes you seem very much like a Limoges box in a curio cabinet."
"You have it backwards, perhaps. As you said to me, so I say to you. You have value and talent, too, Mary, and even if your work has not been as fruitful as you would wish, please don't give it up on a ..."
Mary's growl could be as chilling as that of the local mountain lions.
"If you say this is a mere whim, I shall kick you." Mary's boots were steel-toed. It hurt when she kicked him.
"Hasty then," Peter amended quickly. "You shouldn't be hasty about..."
"Do stop quoting Treebeard, Peter. Recall that if the Ents had been a little more hasty, they might not have lost their wives. That's not going to happen to us."
Us. Wives.
Wife?
Peter glanced down again at the picture of his siblings and their spouses. The world was spinning very fast. "The Entwives. Right," he muttered.
She nodded her head with a look of and that's that satisfaction he had learned to regard warily.
"Precisely! Enough with the exile. It's time to go back. We'll need to get married first."
"Married?"
The world went from spinning fast to rocking completely off its axis.
She grabbed Jill's postcard and jabbed it in the direction of Susan's photograph. "Yes! Of course we must be married. You just said that we might succeed together where we failed individually. This is the perfect opportunity. Eustace and Jill are managing it. And your siblings, too. We can't let them all get the upper hand in this. Some children, too. We'll need to get started on that straight away."
Yes, right then. Absolutely.
Mary stood up too quickly and set the swing swaying wildly. Peter flailed about to keep from pitching onto the ground. "Are we going somewhere?" He had a sudden, celebratory idea that involved the straw pallet mattress and getting started on the children.
"Passports. We'll drive into town. If we get there before the cocktail hour, the padre at the pueblo church in Abiquiu should still be sober. We can get a licence at the courthouse."
"But..."
"I love you, Peter Pevsnee, so let's get married, and get this right, you and I, and do something about those idiots running our country."
"Pevensie," he repeated. "If you are going to take my name, you should get it right."
Mary held out her hand and firmly drew him out of the swing. "I know your name perfectly well, Peter Pevensie, and I always have."
She started pulling him into the house. Peter recognized the full on head of steam and he could either get in her way (not recommended) or get on board (much preferable).
"We can get packed up tonight," Peter said to her back as Mary shoved her way into the cottage. "Then drive to Albuquerque and make the arrangements. We could be back in England within a week."
"Los Angeles," Mary said, already rooting through her satchel for her passport.
Her orienteering was usually better than that. "Isn't Los Angeles in the wrong direction?"
"Not if you go to Disneyland first."
To follow, Chapter 2, the conclusion, Thus Should A Knight Rule Himself
I had vowed I would never attempt Mary and Peter again. However, OldfashionedGirl95 and Starbrow, pushed ahead with their Jill and Eustace story and urged me to try again. Without them, neither this, nor anything else, would have been written.
Chapter 2, near done, takes place 50 years ahead. I'm struggling a bit with the British honours system so if you have some expertise there, I could use an assist.
A lot happened in 1955. Disneyland opened; Return of the King was published; Arthur Pack sold Ghost Ranch to the Presbyterians; Churchill resigned as Prime Minister in April. Churchill was succeeded by Anthony Eden, who called a general election in May and significantly increased the Conservative majority. American painter Georgia O'Keefe lived in the Ghost Ranch area and painted the ox skull logo of Ghost Ranch.
Thank you for reading.