MIA AND ANNE'S Most EXCELLENT ADVENTURE
"No, you're doing that wrong. You want your legs apart wider."
Anne felt herself blush, but did what Mia said. The wind felt cold between her thighs, the tattered pants she wore had a hole in the seam. It was the third time she'd put these on and they still felt strange.
"Yeah, and slouch some more. More. Come on, you're trying to be a boy."
Anne laughed. It was true boys -young men- did slouch, especially when leaning against a low wall. Too, they often kept their legs wide apart, as if their groins were of particular importance to them. After three forays of sneaking around as a young man she though she was doing it better. Obviously not.
Their strange young visitor, dressed in a tattered boys jacket, scratched her red nose and nodded as Anne slouched properly. Anne closed her legs a bit more, but it was nice to take a big deep breath and not have a short stays pulling her chest tight. Cheeks, nose, fingertips were cold, Anne pulled the knit cap lower over her ears, with hopefully, a sullen teen's scowl. They stood, their backs to a brick wall, watching her own house in the cold, watery sun of a an early February afternoon.
Mia had quickly recovered from her magical attack, Elizabeth had helped the girl by working gentle magics. Then said girl had gotten very bored. After several days healing in the house suddenly she was like a trapped wild animal needing release. In a whispered hush she had suggested an adventure for herself and Anne - "Hit the streets as boys, go see the sights. Bath! Jane's Bath!"
Something had made Anne agree. It was completely unlike her. Maybe it was triggered by Frederick and Mia's easy camaraderie and laughing companionship, as he treated the strange visitor like a young boy. She suddenly knew she very much wanted something like that between herself and Frederick, an easy, laughter filled friendship. Maybe she could understand him better, the darkness he now carried on him, if she could understand a mans life better. So Anne had agreed. Besides, she might learn some skills she might need aboard ship when he took her away, and was desperately bored.
The first time they'd quietly snuck off to teach Anne to play a boy, Mia had pulled "boy" off instantly. Anne hadn't, it had been an utter disaster according to Mia. Because of that Mia would not let her out of the little stable behind Sophie Croft's house. The next time they'd made it as far as the garden, while everyone was away, and even did a short saunter up and down Gay Street, but they'd stayed on the block. Today, a bigger test - the streets of Bath.
Anne shivered - what would Frederick think? Suddenly she laughed. Great gods, to quote Mr. Musgrove, what would Lady Dalyrimple think? She tried not to contemplate father's shock and Lady Russell's censor. Mrs. Musgrove would probably just laugh, rocking in her seat.
"No.. you still have it 're too…" Mia said, "Do you guys do theatre in school? Like learn to act?"
Anne tried to not betray her shock. "It's not tasteful to act, to partake in theatre pieces." She blushed again, "Only…those who…"
"Oh yeah. That's right..." Mia slapped her forehead in a very boyish way. "Ladies of the night used to act. I remember that... another stupid thing about the past."
Mia leaned against the wall picking her teeth with a twig, somehow a "tough little street urchin" so fierce yet in need of a good meal and good hug, too, a bath. With her grey wool tuque pulled low around her ears at a jaunty angle, Mia could have been any of the delivery boys in Bath. She stared at Anne, her cheeks red with cold, her pale blue eyes bright, but filled with frustration.
"The way I did this was I was watching that delivery boy... then I pretended I'm' that delivery boy. My teacher - Miss Markell -used to say in Darth Vader's voice, "Just Channel someone Luke. Luke, Pretend you are them." She did a great Darth. So I'm the delivery boy. Call me Jim."
Anne sometime could only understand 40% coming out of the Mia's mouth, thought the girl spoke English. "Ok ... Jim."
Mia smiled, and with a raspy boy voice asked, "So who are you channeling, what guy?"
"Oh... I don't really know... any - guys." She smiled, time for a lesson about 1815. "I know gentlemen."
Mia looked confused. "But there's guys all around. The guys who work in the house, your boyfriend. He's a sailor guy, and don't ya know others? You have a brother? The gardener here, the guys who drive the horses. Don'cha got a dad?"
Anne blushed, and leaned against the wall, trying to mimic "Jim". She couldn't bring herself to snap off a twig and stick it between her teeth though.
"I, ahem, don't really know any men, properly, except for my father, Sir Thomas, Squire Musgrove and his son Charles. The rector, the sexton and the vicar. Frederick, of course." She fell silent. Who else did she know? She barely remembered Lord Russell. The old man in the bookstore, if he was still there, over on Milsom Street. Curate Wentworth, Frederick's older brother, she had known well for a while, but he was always so upright and cool. Not the sort of man to sit on a wall in Bath in raggedy clothes in a cold, damp February afternoon. "The Admiral."
She did not consider Long, Jones and Rickettes, Sophia's "crew", nor Sheppard, her father's lawyer, nor Mr. Butler, the butler at Kellynch as quite models to base her personage upon. There were the stable hands but of course, she would not admit to even knowing their names, though she did. "There's Gard'r, the gardener."
"Well channel one of them."
"But they are all old."
Mia smiled. "Annie," she had started to call Anne that when they were all alone, else wise it was Miss Anne to avoid a clout from Frederick or Long. Anne hadn't realized she had missed that name. A name used by both her mother and a young Frederick. With sadness she realized he'd not yet revived that Annie, they both still had healing to do.
"Annie, imagine one of them... well, when they were16 or 17." The girl paused, looked at her, thinking. "You're funny though. It's like you are acting a fake person all the time and the real Miss Anne, that Annie inside, is channeling someone. But...,but that person aint' who you was supposed to be… And you ar channeling someone so old too. Some stiff necked old lady." Mia considered her. "I think you need to get young again…"
Startled by the girls words, Anne heart clenched, then she smiled. She would have kissed the child if they were alone. She had indeed "parked growing" herself the last 8-1/2 years, and had settled into the role of old maid, spinster, everyones aunt. "Haa, I think an angel sent you."
Startled, the child smiled, then looked serious. "So if we are gonna do this , you gotta channel some guy from ...I dunno, who is still a kid at heart."
Anne thought instantly of Charles Musgrove. Despite being the father of her two nephews there was something childlike and endearing about Charles. But no... that was not the man she'd choose.
Who else?
When she'd first met Frederick he'd already past the cusp of manhood. Despite his youth and age he had been a hard and experienced man, grown that way through war; he'd been dangerous yet cultured and well travelled, yes, there had been still flashes of a boy in him, a silly boy at that when she knew him then. But by 23 he'd been a man who had already killed, who had lead others into battle. He had most definitely not been at all like the country lads she knew. There was a fire and a hardness to him she could never pretend to have.
The Admiral, William Croft. What had he been, once, before Sophie?
He'd been a country lad from Somerset once. A gentleman's grandson, but only an inn-keepers son, his genteel mother almost disowned. Crewkeherne, not too far from Kellynch. What would he have done, how would he have felt the first time he stepped into the bustle of Portsmouth to find the ship he had a letter for? She rolled her shoulders, slouched a bit, bit her lower lip, and stuck a finger in her ear, and scratched it. Pulled it out, looked with interest at it, then turned to "Jim" and with a long Somerset drawl of the merchants and farmer's from Kellylynch said, "Naw, no brains this time. Maybe next time."
Mia laughed.
"Nice to meet ya. Names Billy. I'm... 'oping to get a ship, get made a mid-shipman. Me h'uncle knows a man in the Navy."
Jimmy/Mia socked Billy-Anne in the shoulder. Instead of yipping, Billy punched Jimmy back, then said "Oww." and shook his hand.
"No, I am sorry sir, both Miss Elliott and Miss Anne are both out."
"Well, please let them know I called." Frederick passed the baronet's butler his card, slightly insulted to not be invited into the house. Damn it, he'd head over to Milsom Street, maybe the two women were shopping.
As he turned he caught site of two scruffy boys that he could have sworn had been hanging around the Gay Street house. Maybe he was wrong, those two scamps had worn dark flat caps. These two had old knit toques on, the kind worn in cold weather sailing, the younger boy lost in a tattered jacket too big for him, not the raggedy overlarge fisherman's sweater the other had worn on Gay Street.
He looked hard at the older lad. A slight, dark lad, no more than sixteen he thought. He stopped for a moment, certain he knew him, but realized maybe he had met someone that looked like the boy. The younger child appeared to be only about 10 or 11 and spun away with a shout and poked a stick into a hole in the wall. Had he spotted a rat? Together they both turned their attention to a dark chink in the wall as if a whole world of excitement lay beyond.
Frederick swore at the Baronet's closed door then strode off. He had a meeting with Charles Musgrove to keep.
"That was close Anne. You didn't need to stand there mooning at him."
"I … I was startled." Anne had forgotten how beautiful could Frederick look with the rare winter sun hitting his features. His skin was dark, walking outdoors, riding in the sun, lines deepening around his eyes where he squinted into the sun, a hard manly set about his mouth. That was not the face of a soft, bored -and boring- country gentleman. Frederick was so completely unlike her father. Her beloved splashed and spilled command, strength, and intelligence. She suppressed a phrase Mia had taught her, but yes, he was that too.
"Come on, we need to keep trailing him. Let's switch into the other jackets first." Mia pulled out the two beat-up and tattered coats from the canvas sack that Anne had bought at a store near Mrs. Smiths, but threw a concerned look at Anne.
"Ann, you're certain you want to do this?" Mia asked as they trotted after Frederick.
Anne looked at Mia, a little frightened. She tried recall why were they doing this. After repressing her own magic for years, after repressing everything about herself for years, when the magic burst forth the other evening, it seemed to rip so much from her, including that thick caul of suppression, repression and depression she'd wrapped around herself to protect herself from death and loss. The magic roared and raged and rippled within her now, even though she was so very far from Kellynch, burning so much away. Over the past few days, watching Mia with Frederick together, as they joked and sparred, bantered and traded words, Anne realized she wanted something like that between herself and Frederick.
She wanted that easy camaraderie, simple friendship and too, she wanted great passion. She wanted it all.
As she had sat in contemplation by her fathers window one morning waiting for Frederick to come and take her for a walk, she had realized that she wanted to be alive again, strong and deep and joy filled again. Anne Elliott, at almost 29, knew this time, that needed to come from within herself, not from that beautiful passionate man who always was dancing with death, standing on a possibly sinking ship or in the sights of a cannon or gun.
Anne Elliott had to become her own captain.
Sitting there, waiting, she thought about her life. Anne had always been bright. After her mother's death and seeing how alone she was with Elizabeth always gone, Father distant, Lady Russell not Mother, she had decided she would become the perfect country miss. She would, with the death of her mother, deny her own magic, become the perfect god-daughter Marie Russell longed for.
Magic would be dead to her. She would become normal.
She would work hard and become an exceptionally accomplished young woman - a proper gentlewoman, not one of the "witches" of the land. Her French, Italian, German and Latin would become fluent and fluid. Her Spanish and Greek, less so, but who, if one was cultured, truly spoke either those, if you were a lady? She painted and drew but poorly, but made up with it by being a better than average musician. She could play the harpiscord, harp, the spinnet, the pianoforte, the viola, the harp. She played all very well, and even took joy, great joy in it. She would even play the tin whistle and the drum, play the ancient country tunes for the old crofters who lay sick in their beds while she made her visits about Kellynch.
Surprisingly she had finished her schooling as the best archer, having been in keen competition with one very spoiled Emma Woodhouse, during that girls one year at that horrid school in Bath. No one but her cousin Ellie Steventon knew that she was also a pretty good shot.
She had trained hard in managing a house, and if she had been the one to replace her mother, she would have run Kellynch and its 273 servants, gardeners, farmers, herders, shepherds, plowmen and boys, milk maids, crofters, goose girls, cheesemakers, potters, barrel makers, smiths, foresters, grooms, drivers, cattlemen and pig-keepers with both care and a vision, just as her mother had. Kellynch would have stayed a prosperous place, would have been even a growing concern.
But Father had insisted that the "great house" was Elizabeth's role until she married. Elizabeth hadn't cared at all for that role. Instead, Anne's sister had flitted from country great house to country great house, hunting for husbands; but mostly, Elizabeth had flitted through time and across space like a constant "tourist". Paris and New York, 100 years hence, were her favourite places to visit.
Since 1802 Elizabeth had partied across both time and space, while Anne learned and worked however she could. She slowly slipped into a role like all the girls from her school - trained to become the wife of a great man in a great house, and if that did not work, to become a useful spinster.
Spinster – both of her sisters had called her that to her face recently. Sitting there Anne realized she was done with spinster. If Frederick didn't work out she would leave, go somewhere, become a governess. Maybe her second cousin Georgiana needed some improvements in her Italian and German out at Pemberly. Maybe she could go to the continent and teach English to a distant cousin, or a Hapsburg daughter.
Spinster. That was not the child her mother had been raising. Most definitely not.
No, Elizabeth Steventon, Lady Elliott, had been raising witches, powerful and free witches. Young witchlings raised wild and unfettered, magical sprites dancing in the forests of Kellynch, running over the fields in the morning dew with their mother, one of the greatest Old Blood witches in the south of England.
Anne could picture Mother still, dressed like a young man in a gorgeous brocade coat, astride her grey horse. Annie and Lizzie, her "two darling little bairns", following on fat ponies dressed like little boys. Mother taught them basic magics: the strengths of trees, life-magic drawn from the growing world, the fluidity of water, the power of wind, the solidity of rock. She taught them to sing the land and the waters of Kellynch. Late at night she taught them the stars and the seasons, the right way to honour the elementals, the fire's dance and the transformations it brought.
Just before her sudden illness Lady Elizabeth Elliot had started to teach them the magics of blood. She had gone further and deeper with Elizabeth as she became a young woman, teaching her eldest of the blood and the moon. Then when the girls were ready she had planned to reveal the magics of sex and death.
That had not happened, death snatching her too fast to even ask another to step in and take the girls into those magics.
Anne's dearest memories of her mother were of stopping and sitting on banks of the little brook where the trout splashed, her mothers strong warm arm pulling her close, Elizabeth laying across mothers lap, as Mother sang ancient ancient songs in the summer light, the girls light voices following her. Mother taught them the songs of birds, the way to speak to deer and horses and cattle, the rabbits and the foxes. She told them of the time of the great ice, and its melting, of the Śidhe who had left after the great battles with Caesar. She taught them the magic of stars and flowers, and of healing and of poison.
Most importantly, Anne thought, Mother had taught the girls to respect life and the animals and plants of the forests and fields.
There had been no fox hunts at Kellynch then. Charles now hunted their lands as did Sir Thurlow and the Crickhern hunt. Elizabeth, after that sudden dark day of Mother's death, just did not seem to care about anything. Anne had felt powerless and too dis-interested to stop the hunt after her mother's death, and most importantly, after she broke with Frederick.
Anne realized now that her mother had laid down enchantments and glamours, protecting the land and her daughters and the people of Kellynch, as the women of her line had done since the great walls of ice melted back, the glaciers turned into rivers. The girls had not strengthened those magics - Anne had been too lost in pain and sunk in sadness, Elizabeth running away all the time, angry at the house, the land, at Mother.
Here, now in Bath, it felt good being a boy again, Anne thought, not an empty, cool, collected facade of a cardboard woman. It was a tiny rebirth. Dressed as a boy, with a slight glamour of magic laid over them both, she could run, skip and even walk through the streets of Bath as much as she wanted - unaccompanied.
So, where to start? Dressed in tattered boys clothes with a rip in the inner seam she felt alive, as she'd last felt 8-1/2 years ago. This time though, she was would remain in the drivers seat, no matter if "the gig she drove" tipped or not.
She smiled. Maybe, like Sophia Croft, it was time to learn to drive a gig.
With a shout, she punched "Jimmy" in the shoulder, just for the fun of it, then dashed away. Mia caught up and whacked her. With a smile they settled down, and turned to following Frederick as he headed into the centre of Bath. They kept their distance, kept him in site, but never too close.
Turning a corner they raced forward. Fredrick was nowhere to be seen, the narrow side street empty, just a cat crossing at the end of it.
"Oh... cool! Look- a gun shop! Says Swords, Guns, Cigars! Bet ya he's there. I'd go there if I was a captain an' had sum money."
Anne froze, leaned against a wall, Mia dashed over, snuck under the window, peeked in, did two thumbs up that Anne took to mean he was in there. Racing back Mia dragged her to the corner. The cold, bitter February wind had picked up even more, almost taking her breath away. Anne shivered.
"We'll wait here."
"What was he doing?"
"Looking at little guns - teeny hand guns. Is the Captain rich?"
Anne looked at Mia. She pulled her coat tighter around her, looked at the shop. "We don't... here and now, talk about that. But yes, he is rich, I suppose."
"The captain can buy what he wants, what he needs, if that is what you are asking." Anne frowned. He could buy things even if he didn't need to. She could have used a warmer jacket at the moment. Gloves. No money for that. She tucked her hands under her arm pits like she'd seen labourers do.
Mia nodded wisely.
Anne spun suddenly, stuck a finger in a hole in the mortar, as she had once watched a match boy do, as if the world was much more boring than a vastly interesting mortar needing to be picked away from bricks. She remembered she'd cast a glamour of do not see us, and they were dressed as boys. but when Charles Musgrove brushed by her with a grunted "Watch it" she shivered. He bounded through the gun makers door with a shouted, 'Frederick, damn man, you beat me here."
"Was that Musgrove?" Mia asked startled. Anne nodded, then they waited. And waited.
"So remind me, why are we here?' Mia said, suddenly bored by their game, maybe thoroughly chilled to the bone too.
"We're here to see if I can play a boy well enought that no one who knows me recognizes me...".
"Well success then - your boyfriend didn't see you! Neither did Musgrove. Lets go home. I'm hungry and cold." Mia whined. She looked tired.
Suddenly Anne's thumb pricked, as if someone had stabbed it, and a shiver ran across her shoulders. It pricked hard again and she tried not to yelp.
A slow black carriage trundled down the road. It pulled up in front of the gun makers. Anne watched with trepidation, fascinated and yet repelled and frightened, waiting to see who would get out of this well appointed and elegant carriage.
Colonel Wallace, her cousin Elliott's good friend, descended.
"I tell you this is the best place to buy guns..." he said turning to another man, older, tall and barrel chested. He had large arms, the biggest hands Anne had ever seen in her life, and got out stiffly. His unruly grey-brown hair bristling over face and cheeks caught the wind and a deep scowl made him ugly. Both wore the bright red coats of the army. The older man was quite obviously a general by the look of him.
Anne started and pulled back into a darker corner as, a slim, dark elegant man dressed for a day's visiting of fine ladies, of medium height leapt out with a whoof. Her cousin, Walter Elliott, turned to Wallace.
"What we need is a cannon..." William Walter Elliott grumbled in his clear elegant voice.
"Elliott, my lad, a gun will do you fine." riposted Wallace.
As they turned to enter the gun shop Charles tumbled out, followed by Frederick. "Brilliant piece, isn't Frederick. Told you it would be..."
Suddenly Frederick stopped, his wide shouldered form filling the doorway. "Elliott." He nodded, his voice cold.
Anne's cousin said nothing, just stared, eyes narrowing. Finally he offered the barest nod, almost imperceptible.
He wasn't a baronet yet, and a rich post captain had weight, consequence and presence in Bath. Frederick's commanding and haughty look demanded more. As Elliott's nod deepened Anne could feel a cold poison spilling off of her cousin and cool disdain from Frederick.
Frederick frowned, nodded, ignored the others and followed Charles into the strong wind, with a slow confident saunter as if the wind were yet another element under his control.
"God damn..." Hissed cousin Ellliott.
"Ah yes, the god damn Navy." Said the older man with a glower.
Colonel Wallis snorted a laugh, "That's the captain that snatched away William's lady love, Tilney."
"Really. Very interesting." The big man stared after him. To Anne it seemed as if her were sniffing the air, trying to catch the scent of something faint. "What did you say his name was?"
"Name? I never said." Laughed Wallis.
"Wentworth," hissed Elliott. "Captain Frederick Wentworth. No family of note. One of those low scrabblers scratching at the gentry's door, trying to make it through by compromising our females."
Tilney watched, his features so wolf-like, his eyes a strange amber colour. "More interesting. An old name, that one. You say he's the one that grabbed your fine pure blood filly? He bedded her yet?"
Anne stiffened. Mia grabbed her sweater, pulled her back into the shadows.
"Tilney - " Cousin Elliott raised an eyebrow. "We don't speak about ladies of breeding as breeding stock. Lower orders, yes, but never a lady. Now, what is this all about old blood, old families now? Is there truly something to what you were saying in the carriage?"
The general looked around, noticed Anne and Mia. His eyes narrowed. Anne suddenly felt stomach sick.
"Boys. Come here. Want to earn a penny?" His voice was commanding.