"Here it is," Javert said, though his voice shook even to his own ear as the carriage came to a stop in Dean Street. He pulled out the letter he had received in Paris before they had left, the confirmation of the reservation he'd made, which had kindly been sent in both English and French. He gulped hard and dragged his gloved fingers over his grey hair, which he'd brushed rather neurotically at the inn at Dover early this morning before tying it back very neatly with a black ribbon. He sighed and pulled on his top hat and looked across the carriage to see that Cosette was marvelling out the carriage window.

She had been in utter awe since the moment the carriage had pulled into London. Well, she'd been slack-jawed since the day before, really, because crossing the Channel had been such a novel experience for her. They'd come across on the trusty paddle steamer, the Rob Roy, and though the journey from Calais to Dover had only taken a scant few hours and the water had been mercifully calm for this time of year, Cosette had been so fascinated that she had insisted upon standing at the railing on the upper deck the entire time and gazing down at the churning sea and watching the English cliffs come into view. For his part, Javert was rather underwhelmed and unimpressed by long-distance travel, having spent decades traversing whole continents on foot and seas on ships, but he had said nothing at all to condescend as his young wife's eyes had gone wide and her full lips had parted in astonishment through their travels.

In London, she had noted all of the English language they had heard and had fretted, at first, about not understanding a word of it. Javert had just smiled at her and reassured her that he spoke a bit from his time in Napoleon's army. He had picked up passable German and English to deal with their enemies, he'd informed her, and that had seemed to imbue even more wonder into her. She had gaped as they had passed Greenwich and gone along the Thames, as they had crossed London Bridge and then meandered through busy streets filled with markets and peasants and wealthy Georgian houses until finally they reached Dean Street. She was amazed by all of it, Javert could see.

She had wanted to see London. She had told Jean Valjean that she wanted to see London. Javert had brought her to London.

Now he pushed open the door of the carriage and pulled open his leather purse, striding with feigned confidence up to the English coachman who had brought them here from Dover. He wordlessly reached into his purse and fumbled about a bit with the British coinage until he had what he believed was the right amount of money, pinching his lips as he pawed through the confusing jumble of foreign coins bedecked with the profiles of King William IV. He passed over the coins to the coachman and asked in English thickly accented with his nasal and mumbling French tone,

"This is the correct amount, yes?"

The coachment held out his hand and accepted the coins, nodding and tucking them away. Javert's cheeks went hot; he had no real way of knowing whether or not he'd been swindled just now. But no matter, he thought. He gestured to the back of the carriage, to where the trunks were, and he commanded to the coachman,

"The things inside, please. Before you go."

"Yes, all right," the coachman replied tersely, and he headed into the inn before them as if he meant to fetch assistance. Javert huffed a breath and felt a little embarrassed then. He could only hope his English would be good enough to get them by; Cosette had none at all. It was as he'd told her. He had learnt some English back during the wars when he had been young and had needed to listen to the enemy speaking among themselves, or to interrogate captured prisoners, but, really, he did not have much. In reality, his literacy in French and his ability to read any Latin and to speak any English were a bit of a miracle considering his ignominious origin and upbringing.

He stalked back to the door of the carriage and found Cosette eagerly waiting to be helped out, so he extended his hand and forced a little smile onto his face. She put her small hand onto his and descended from the carriage quite elegantly, her heavy cloak and velvet skirts swishing about her as she arranged herself on the narrow cobblestone road beside Javert. She grinned broadly, looking very pretty as she gazed up at the elegant townhouse before them, dark grey brick with cream-painted trim and Corinthian columns around the sage green door. There was a very crisply painted sign above the door, next to its fluttering Union Jack flag, and Cosette struggled to read the painting on the sign out loud from where she peered beneath her heavy bonnet.

"The Lamb and Flag," she said, pronouncing the b much too heavily in lamb. She switched back to French and looked at Javert. "It seems like a very pleasant place. Shall we go inside?"

He just smirked and nodded. She was happy to be here, he thought. Happy to be in London, happy to be at any inn so long as it was here. He glanced to the back of the carriage and saw that their trunks had been taken inside, and he led Cosette by her arm past the black iron gate and up the few steps until they reached the green-painted door. Inside, the inn was clean and, as Cosette had said, very pleasant.

It was only just falling evening, but the fires in all the hearths were raging and warm. The dining room to the left was the farthest thing from the raucous, debauched hellscape in which Cosette had spent her childhood. The room was spacious and bright, with pale blue and white wallpaper and dark oak furniture that looked to seat around twelve or so in comfort. There were several decent framed paintings upon the walls, and a few little sprigs of holly and other festive indications of the upcoming Christmas holidays scattered about.

To the right, a large salon was bustling with activity; there was someone playing decently well at the piano against the wall while decently-dressed guests of the inn sat about engaged in discussion. There were clean, upholstered chaises and chairs, more framed paintings, and two festive evergreen wreaths on either side of the faux-gilded mirror above the fireplace. An impressive Turkish rug covered the floor, and a chandelier of Venetian glass hung from the ceiling. Before them, a staircase led upstairs, very clearly to the inn's guest rooms.

"Oh, but it's marvelous," breathed Cosette from beside Javert, and he just stood still in shock, because the price he had paid for this had led him to think it would be, at best, a decent inn where they might get good stew at night and a clean quilted bed to sleep in. This establishment was… well, it was like nothing Javert had experienced in his life. He felt, suddenly, very much out of his depth. He blinked a few times and almost panicked as a plump, middle-aged woman who was engaged in the revelry in the salon caught sight of him and Cosette and clapped her hands together, heaving herself off of the chaise where she'd been sitting and rushing over.

"Monsieur! Madame!" she exclaimed, immediately dipping into a curtsey and holding out her white-gloved hand. Confused, Javert froze, but then at last he took her hand and touched his lips to it until she dropped it. He opened his mouth and shut it, unsure of what to say, and looked the woman up and down. She was clad in vibrant pink taffeta, and her hair was a confusing, ornamental tower of knots and braids, with rouge dotted on her cheeks and far too many pearls around her neck. Beside him, Cosette tensed up, and Javert knew that she also did not know what to do with herself here. But the woman said warmly, and - very mercifully, in fluent and rapid French,

"I am Mrs Burton. You have made it safely from Paris. What a relief. Thanks be to God! Your coachman brought your trunks inside. They are upstairs. You are room four… just upstairs! You must be so very hungry after your travels. You must change for dinner! We are having Oysters, Mushroom Ragout, Lamb, Stilton Cheese, and Mulled Wine this evening. I hope it suits you."

"I should think I have never eaten so well in all my life," mused Cosette softly from beside Javert, and Mrs Burton laughed jovially, reaching to touch at Cosette's cheek.

"You darling little lamb, you. Sweet thing. How exhausted you must be. And I know you must be craving a hot bath after your travels, hmm? After dinner, I shall have Florence draw one up for you. She's the maid here. You'll be clean and fed in no time at all, my little lovely, and then you shall be able to enjoy all that London has to offer with your husband, hmm?"

"Yes. Thank you," Cosette sounded almost numb, and Javert gulped heavily as he carefully and delicately reminded Mrs Burton, slowing his French just a little,

"Madame… erm, Mrs Burton, I did pay ahead of time when I wrote the reserve the room, so I -"

Mrs Burton laughed and shook her head, "Never you worry, Monsieur. All is taken care of already; all accounts are settled. Now. The two of you take your key and get settled in, hmm?"

She reached for her chatelaine and fiddled through the skeleton keys dangling there, and when she reached the one she was looking for, she unhooked it from her chatelaine and pulled the brass key off and happily passed it over to Javert. He nodded his thanks and then bowed his head to her, and from beside her, Cosette said very politely,

"Thank you, Madame… Mrs Burton."

Javert looked around the room he had rented for himself and Cosette and wondered, suddenly, if he had accidentally been wildly irresponsible with money. He pinched his lips and went over to his leather bag where it sat upon the walnut writing desk, and he fished out the bilingual letter Mrs Burton had sent to Paris to confirm his reservation. He'd received the letter a week before their departure and had sent his payment back immediately. The cost of the stay at the Lamb and Flag, Mrs Burton had written, was ten pence per night, which by Javert's calculations worked out to be very nearly one franc per night. That seemed downright cheap for the quality of the establishment, but perhaps it was indeed so that their French money went farther here. He would not have thought himself capable of affording several weeks for himself and Cosette in so fine a place without it imposing stress on his mind, but here they were.

He folded up the letter from Mrs Burton and tucked it into his leather bag, looking around the rented room. A small clock on the mantle that ticked very quietly and the crackling in the fireplace were the only sounds to break the heavy silence in the space. The walls in here were a lush, buttery yellow, a damask wallpaper that was accented with crisp painted white trim and burgundy brocade curtains. There was matching burgundy brocade on the bed, which was a bit narrower than what Javert had at home but very elegant, a four-poster with curtains like those on the windows, made from walnut like the writing desk. The rug on the floor was only a little worn but seemed like it had been fine enough when it had been brand-new. There was a shiny brass candelabra with three fresh candles lit on the walnut table beside the bed, and there was even an oak toileting chair with a chamber pot beneath it and a discreet screen before it. There was art on the walls in here, just like in the common rooms downstairs. The place was elegant and refined, Javert thought, much more so than almost anywhere he had stayed in his life.

He felt an almost violent shock in his veins, a sudden feeling as though he did not belong here. He was a half-Gypsy Frenchman, a policeman, an ex-soldier, an old man with a wide-eyed little wife who didn't speak any English. They had no business being in a place like this, did they? Neither of them did. He licked his lips and sank onto the edge of the burgundy brocade bed, glancing down at himself and feeling rather foolish. He had brought Cosette to London to try and make her happy, but he feared that during their time here, he would embarrass her horribly. He was anything but refined. He was a wild brute, a beast, a hulking animal of a man who had spent decades being violent and cruel, and he was a half-Gypsy Frenchman in a silk-stocking British environment that felt very alien just now.

He picked rather anxiously at the long white nightshirt he had donned after scrubbing himself at the wash table in the bedchamber, using Castile soap and a sponge, and after combing through his hair with a little scented oil and pulling it back more loosely to sleep. It was getting quite long now; he ought to have had it cut before they'd left, he thought distantly. Indeed, he found himself frustratedly blowing a few stray tendrils of his hair from his face now and huffing a breath as he sat and waited. At last, the door to the room opened, and Cosette came walking in wearing the only wrapper she'd brought (stuffed into her trunk just before they'd left when she and Toussaint had realised they'd not packed one). It was the lavender muslin one with cream lace that Cosette had had made for her wedding to Javert, and for some reason, the sight of her in it now made his eyes prickle strangely. She slipped into the room and murmured something quietly to a person outside - the maid who had helped her bathe, no doubt. She shut the door behind her and then flashed Javert a little smile as she approached him, her lovely golden blonde hair obviously still wet where it had been put into long twin braids.

"I told her thank you in English," Cosette said. "She did not speak any French, so… it was a bit of an experience. There was quite a lot of gesturing and holding things up and…"

She giggled then and walked toward him, and Javert tipped his head at her. She threaded her arms around him and kissed his forehead, and he breathed in the clean aroma of her, a delicious relief after days of travel, and he hummed,

"Mmm. My English rose. How delightfully fragrant you are."

She gave him a cheeky little look and dragged a fingertip down the bridge of his nose as she murmured,

"I may smell like a rose, Monsieur l'Inspecteur, but I think that among all of these actual English ladies, I am Joan of Arc. Hmm?"

He found himself quirking up his lips at her and nodding. "Quite so. Where would you like tomorrow?"

"Westminster Abbey," Cosette said immediately, without the slightest hesitation, and Javert laughed a little, nodding.

"I ought to have known. Of course. That is the entire reason we have come, isn't it?"

Cosette shrugged a bit playfully, and Javert dragged one hand from her waist up to cup her breast through her wrapper, and he stared right at her as he said very seriously,

"I want to make you happy."

Cosette's flirtatious expression faded a bit as she whispered to him, "You made me so happy last night at the inn in Canterbury that I could hardly keep quiet."

Javert choked back a chuckle and shook his head. "You did not keep quiet, my little wife. Sorry to inform you."

Her face patched scarlet to hear that, and that only made Javert laugh harder. He reached up to stroke her fiery cheeks, feeling very amused. At the loud and raunchy but serviceable inn where they'd spent six hours on their way from Dover to London, mostly to rest the horses, Javert had used his mouth on Cosette between her legs twice to the point where she'd been writhing in almost agonised bliss. Her climaxes had been intense; she'd clamped around Javert's lips and flushed so wet that the sheets on the inn's bed had been left with wet spots. Javert had dragged his cock along the sheets himself in desperation and had spilled himself straight onto the mattress, groaning onto her inner thigh and wanting nothing more than to spend the entire night devouring her quim.

She had not been quiet. He had not been quiet. There had been looks at both of them, entertained and knowing looks, from the innkeeper in the morning, though Cosette had seemed blissfully unaware and had just gotten back into the carriage.

"Well, I can't help it," she said petulantly now, in a little hiss, her lips pursing. "How am I meant to stay silent when you do things like that to me?"

Javert tossed up an eyebrow. "I never demanded your silence."

She seethed out a confused little breath through her teeth, and her eyes rimmed red a little. She moved a little closer to Javert and asked in a small, cracked voice, "Surely I embarrassed you? Sounding like a wretched whore?"

But he just shook his head and insisted, quite truthfully, "There is no shame whatsoever for a man, particularly a man my age, to have people know that his beautiful young wife is enjoying herself. No, Cosette. There is no humiliation on my part in any of it."

"Oh." Cosette frowned very deeply and licked her lips, looking like there was something she wanted to know but was afraid to ask. Javert reached up and toyed with one of her clean, damp braids and insisted,

"Ask me. Whatever you are thinking, ask me."

"Is this another strange thing about us? Am I odd?" Her face flushed a deeper crimson than ever, and she came to sit beside Javert on the bed, staring at her own hands as she twined her fingers together. "Many times now, you make it seem as though women do not enjoy the act. As though it is an anomaly, an aberration, for a woman to take any pleasure in it. Whores are just pretending, you say. And most married women, you have told me, are not having a particularly good time."

Javert let out a long and heavy sigh. "Cosette."

She snapped her eyes up to him, seeming almost angry all of a sudden. "Tell me, husband. Is it true, or is it not, that most of the time, women are not enjoying themselves?"

Javert let out a helpless, asphyxiated sort of sound and tossed his hands up. He threw his head back for a moment, trying to gather himself, trying to find an answer. Why could Jean Valjean have not educated his own daughter on matters such as this, he thought angrily? Why did Javert have to school his own wife on -

Well, of course Valjean would not have wanted to talk to Cosette about anything so crass and base and vulgar as intimacy and pleasure. And Toussaint had tried, in a way, to approach to subject, but she was a servant, not a mother, and even then, Cosette had been horrified and had not understood. And Fantine had been gone for a long time now. It was not as though the nuns in the convent where Cosette had hid were ever going to teach her such things. How had she been meant to learn? Javert gulped and forced his gaze to meet hers, and he finally said in the steadiest voice he could manage,

"Matters such as these are usually discussed, I believe, between a mother and a daughter, if they are discussed at all… which, I think, they often are not."

"I have not got a mother," Cosette said very stoutly, and Javert nodded slowly.

"Right. Well. Yes, whores are pretending. They are pretending because they have not chosen the men who are their customers, and they would not choose those men. Those men are often filthy, and rude. They can be cruel. They can mock and jeer at the whores. They are usually drunk or out of their minds on opium. They are very frequently married. Many have diseases. And so the whores are pretending, making sounds, grunts, moans… smiling. Putting on a happy face, so that the customer will pay and perhaps come back again. Or, at least, so he will not complain, or beat her, or worse. You understand?"

Cosette's eyes welled, but she nodded. "Yes."

Javert reached to play with one of her pretty blonde braids again, dragging his fingers up and down the length of it somewhat mindlessly and watching her shiver when he did. He moved his fingers to her neck and then to her collarbone, letting her soak in the feel of his touch for a long moment. Her skin was impossibly soft when it was this clean, he thought in the back of his mind. He swallowed hard and then said in a low baritone,

"You and I were not an arrangement. Not strictly speaking. Your father and I agreed… we made promises for your well-being, but… I asked his permission to marry you because I love you very much. By contrast, many people are married because of convenience, or obligation, or duty, or familial ties, or other silly reasons. They are not compatible. Sometimes they hate one another. For the man, in these cases, intimacy is tolerable enough. Get in and out, put one's seed in. Hopefully a child comes and name gets passed on. Take mistresses on the side. But for the woman… there can no lovers, no doubt of fathers for any children. And the act, by my understanding, can be painful and unwanted."

"How dreadful," Cosette murmured, reaching to rub her hand over to burgundy brocade blanket distractedly. She nodded a little then and whispered, "In one of my romance novels, there was a… a wife whose husband took her bed when she did not want it. Over and over he did it. He put children on her three times when she never wanted him. I never really understood… but now it sounds like torture. And now I wonder… was he off enjoying himself whilst she was heavy with a child she did not want?"

"Probably," Javert admitted, shrugging and thinking of all the soldiers he'd seen whisking whores upstairs in inns, all the married policemen he'd heard bragging about conquests outside the conquests of their vows. One Commissaire, he knew, had a bastard living in Lyon and felt no shame or compunction about it. Javert moved his hand up to brush his thumb around Cosette's cheekbone and murmured,

"And most of them have never felt that delicious cinching of a womanhood around their cock or their fingers, much less tasted what is between a woman's legs. I doubt most of them care about such things. They do not realise what they missing. To witness you in the throes of your pleasure, Cosette, is the most satisfying and deeply…"

He stopped then, his breath catching in his chest. Blood had suddenly rushed, hard and fast, to his member, and his hand tightened its grip where he held Cosette's face. A flash came over her wide, pale eyes, and he heard her breath quicken. She nodded a little and finally whispered,

"Take your nightshirt off."

Javert's mouth fell open a bit at that, at the way she had commanded him, but he obeyed at once, doing just what she had said and drawing his cotton nightshirt up and over his head. He tossed it onto the burgundy brocade blanket behind him and then leaned back on his hands where he sat on the edge of the bed, watching with a bit of wonder as Cosette got off the bed and began stripping off what she wore. She took off the gauzy lavender wrapper from their wedding day and let it pool on the ground at her feet, then carefully pulled her own nightgown up and over her head. She had nothing on beneath that, Javert saw, his throat going dry at the sight.

He thought perhaps she would ask him to get into the bed with her, or to do something so that she might take him in her mouth as she was wont to do. But she shocked him by coming up to him rather confidently and assuming a position she had never taken before. She moved carefully, for she was inexperienced, but it was clear what she wanted, and Javert helped guide her once it was obvious what she was seeking. She faced away from him and made a move to sit back down upon his lap, and when she did, she sank down onto his cock. Javert hissed and let his head fall back, reaching up for a moment to pull out the exasperating tie in his hair so it would hang loose.

Cosette moaned quietly as she worked her way down onto Javert's lap, grasping his thick thighs for purchase and squeezing desperately there. She arched her back, and between the feel of her womanhood wet and tight around his cock and her body aching backward against him, Javert groaned a little against her hair. He reached around her with one hand and grabbed a breast, manipulating it almost too roughly as he fingered a peaked nippled and crushed the soft tissue there. For some reason, Cosette liked that very much, and she started to cycle her hips and pump them around on Javert's cock in response.

"Oh… oh." Javert felt wildly dizzy as she did that, and he could scarcely breathe as the overwhelm made his body nearly shut down. He managed to use his left arm to clutch Cosette's thin form and yank her back against him, almost possessively, whilst his right hand searched absolutely everywhere with grasping, squeezing clutches. He dragged around her ribcage, held her shoulder, took hold of her backside… he found himself shoving aside one of her braids and kissing her neck for a moment before that devolved into him just huffing deep breaths beneath her ear and muttering her name every so often. All the while, she moved on him, her hips cycling perfectly - back and up, forward and down. She ground on him hard until her steady stream of wordless moans finally turned into a plea and then an exclamation of ecstasy, and her movements slowed a little as Javert felt her quim contracting in erratic pulses around him and felt her collapse back and go slack against him as she panted and heaved, spent and satisfied.

His cock was seconds from bursting, Javert knew, and it took every single ounce of effort he possessed to heave Cosette off of him just enough to pull her onto one side of his lap, still holding her tightly against him with his left arm as he used his right hand to stroke madly at himself. Within a moment, creamy jets of seed had let loose all over his right thigh, and he found himself bucking his hips a few times and whispering Cosette's name again once or twice. He turned his face, meaning to kiss her forehead, but she had turned to him, and he caught her straight on the mouth and wound up deepening things for a very long while.

It felt like ages before they were cleaned up again. By the time they settled beneath the burgundy blankets and had extinguished the candelabra and were twined together for sleep, it was very late and they were both completely exhausted. Javert was almost asleep when he heard Cosette's soft voice ask him,

"So are we strange? Because we are passionate with one another and I enjoy myself with you the way I do?"

Javert quirked up his lips and shook his head. "I could not possibly care less, my little Songbird. Now. Get some rest. Tomorrow you and I are going to see Westminster Abbey. And after that, there's loads more to enjoy in London, all right? Goodnight."

He felt her kiss his sternum then, and just before he drifted off to sleep, she mumbled, "How I love you."