Another World, Another Time
A Narnia Fanfiction
The woman most people called Miss Plummer – and the Pevensies, Eustace, and Jill affectionately christened Aunt Polly despite her being of no relation to any of them – never married.
Right up until the railway accident that ended her life (she was nearly sixty-one) she remained single and kept her maiden name. The sole child of her late parents and never having had much in the way of aunts, uncles, or cousins on her father's side, she was probably the only Plummer left east of Finchley.
It was not that no one had ever asked her; for, in her youth, the cascading hair which was gone mostly white was fair – almost golden – and she had a contagious laugh and a good nature.
Somehow, she'd simply never fallen in love.
Or at least she believed she never was in love – which is not quite the same thing.
Perhaps in another time and world, she might have looked across many a merry dinner at her best friend since childhood, one Digory Kirke, and granted him a shy smile.
And the professor, for his part, might have, upon seeing this smile and noting its difference from other smiles granted him in the past, felt some inclination that his housekeeper Mrs. Macready and the other servants (their names were Ivy, Margaret, and Betty, but they never entered his mind much) were not the only women he needed in his home; he might have had some sense a very different sort of woman was needed there, too.
Alas, it never entered into either of their preoccupied heads.
Polly never thought of wedding dresses or white cakes, nor – even in her most rebellious moments – of something more scandalous, such as staying the night not in one of Professor Kirke's endless string of guestrooms (the house left him by his great uncle was vast and fully furnished, so when she visited Miss Plummer certainly had her pick) but in his bed with him. Digory had his work when he was young, followed by the war and then sudden poverty when he was old.
Too old, by then, perhaps.
That Polly was always there as a friend of Narnia when she was needed was enough for a man with all his distractions. Dear Polly was a brick, the truest of companions. Only she seemed, inexplicably, far dearer in the moment when the train slid from the rails and people began to scream, just before they felt a wondrous sense of un-stiffening and found themselves not on the train at all any longer.
Neither thought their life had been wasted, nothing of the kind (they had both done a great many good things and helped very good people, and in more than one world), but perhaps something had been missing from it all the same...
Now 'Miss Plummer' sits on a green hill, in a place that never dies and smells of golden apples and rich heather, and is not Miss Plummer to anybody – she is born anew as Lady Polly.
Her hair isn't white and she wears it unbound, all in loose blonde ringlets, its only ornament a thin gold circlet. One of her arms, crooked in a position which would have left it stiff if she were still old, is wrapped around the knees drawn to her chest. Her flowing gown pools about her ankles in folds and wrinkles but never looks untidy.
Easing down beside her on the grass is a gracious man with a long, full beard down to his chest, nothing whatever like the traces of brown-gold whiskers Polly dimly remembers from just before Digory Kirke started to shave regularly.
He is no longer 'the professor' but Lord Digory.
And wordlessly he covers one of her delicate rosy hands with one of his larger ones, folding his fingers over her knuckles.
She turns her head and smiles a shy smile.
They are in another world, another time.
So...
Perhaps...?