“What is this game, anyway?” Margaret asked, having retrieved the battered old box from August. “I don’t think we have it in England.”
“It’s a strategy game of sorts,” August answered. “Every player tries to establish a settlement on this made-up uninhabited island. Players compete for resources, build civilizations—”
“It was actually kind of a terrible game,” Helena interrupted. “I mean, I remember that they stopped playing it because one summer Harriet asked how they could all believe the game’s island was really uninhabited. She told us no one in the Empire should be able to play that game with a clear conscience. She was sixteen or so at the time.”
“I remember that. She shouted a fair bit back then—about all sorts of things, but especially that,” said August. “And I don’t think they ever really played again. They weren’t angry at her, though. I remember that distinctly. I don’t think they expected what she said, but they were also kind of proud when she said it.”
Helena nodded.
It is no small feat for one generation to do right by the next, to both make a clear path and at the same time not close off other ways forward. No parent can hope for perfection in this task. August thought of his father and knew this now, on some level. Helena wondered whether she was right in her certainty that her mother never knew about her genetic makeup. Or did Anna Marcus, too, carry a secret, bound by convention and conviction not to reveal it.
“‘You’re a grown-up now. You decide,’” Margaret said suddenly, breaking the silence.
“Excuse me?” Helena and August said at the same time.
“My father said that when he gave me my –chip. It annoyed me at the time—I thought he was teasing me.”
“He wasn’t,” August said. And, finally, he saw the strange fairy tale, too. “We could make the story true. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? We’re grown-ups now, and we could decide to do this together.”
Margaret nodded. “It would be awkward. It would be work. We have the rest of the summer to hammer out the details in relative privacy. It would be a secret, held by the three of us, and it would be binding. But it’s possible.”
“The world thinks that Princess Victoria-Margaret is in love with a Canadian boy who is also a genetic match,” Helena reminded him.
Margaret continued. “Once we’ve agreed to it, we would be held to each other until one of us dies. I know it’s not a small thing to ask. It will be a life of service, August. I will be an active Queen and would expect no less from you. Under our rule, the Empire may come to any number of crossroads, and I intend to rule it.”
“I have recently, for unrelated reasons, pledged myself to a life of service,” August said, with a slight smile that warmed Helena’s heart. “I had not expected to find a way to work towards undoing my wrong so quickly, but I will gladly take it.”
“We would have to be incredibly discreet. You and I would have to parent children someday.” There was a great deal that Margaret was not saying, and they each knew it. “It’s a massive undertaking for all of us. But if we are willing to do the work, we all get what we want.”
“Helena is a who, not a what,” August corrected.
Both girls smiled.
“We were going to tell you that you’d have to give up your stake in the family business,” Margaret said, her tone had gentled somewhat. “But you say that’s taken care of.”
They had saved him. Even though he was sitting, August nearly looked as though he might faint. Helena was half standing to go to him, but Margaret beat her to it. She sat down beside him and took his hand.
“Evie will buy my stock. Callaghan Limited will go on without me,” August said again, still sounding a little overwhelmed. It was getting easier to say. “She’s probably better suited to it than I am, anyway.”
“What will we tell your family?” Helena asked. It was a test.
“It will be fairly close to the truth, I think,” August said. He smiled. “We love each other, but then we met Margaret.”
“And I swept you off your feet?” Margaret asked.
“And you reminded me about the difference between family and . . .” He trailed off.
“Lust?” Margaret suggested.
“No,” August said. “I’m not sure I’ll ever feel that for you.”
“Which is just as well,” Margaret said. “But we can work all that nonsense out later. My mother is in excellent health.”
They both turned to look at Helena, who rose to her feet very slowly.
“Queen, Prince Consort, and Handmaiden,” she said. “And everyone gets what they want, including your mother, August, though I imagine her party on the Segwun will have a much more interesting guest list than she could have possibly dreamt. It is like a fairy tale. I’m not entirely sure I’m up to it.”
“Please,” Margaret said. “According to your DNA profile, you’re the perfect candidate to be Prince Consort yourself.”
August laughed, and the last bit of Helena’s doubt melted from her face. Margaret knew she had been waiting for August’s free consent before she let herself really believe, and he had given it.
“August,” she said, placing her free hand on top of the hand of his she already held, “of the friendship and loyalty you bear me, as Margaret Sandwich and as Victoria-Margaret, and of the love we both bear for Helena, will you marry me?”
“Your Highness,” he said. He had never called her that before, and against her better judgement, she glared at him. He smiled. “Margaret,” he said. “I will.”
He bent, and kissed her hand, and they turned together to look at Helena. She crossed to them in three quick steps, and placed her hands on top of theirs.
The full, deep silence of summer and rock and sky cocooned them for a long moment, future and eternal, extending from the bottom of the lake to the tops of the trees. Then life rushed back in, and they marched with it.
“So,” and;
“We will have a lot of work to do,” and;
“God Save The Queen.”
. . . and begin!
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
That Inevitable Victorian Thing is a smallish story that takes place in a very big world. I wanted to be sure to include that world, not the least because in real life, Victorian England was kind of the worst. It would be unfair to paint it over with a glossy sheen, undoing all the colonial wrongs, in the name of Alternate History. To that end, I attempted to make everything slightly better than it was in real life. Throughout history, there are always people who say “What if we did this instead?” before those in power do something awful. They are almost always ignored, but in my made-up world, those people were listened to.
Furthermore, there were some parts of the world that just didn’t fit into the narrative. Some of these I was able to include in the snippets of history that head each chapter, but there were two in particular that didn’t fit that I wish to mention now.
All of the First Nation treaties signed in Canada after 1837 changed. (Specifically, this impacts the Wahta Mohawks, who were relocated to the Bala area in the late 1800s. For purposes of the novel, they never left Quebec.)
The successful slave revolt in Haiti served as a model for other Caribbean islands, and also influenced the southern US. By the 1880s, the South (Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee) has successfully seceded from the US, but as an independent nation of former slaves. Mostly stable, this southern country does not suffer the fractiousness of the remaining American States to the north, who have never successfully maintained a central government for very long. Mexico owns Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and California. Utah is independent.
If you have questions about this world, that’s a good thing. It’s a complicated place, as our own world is, and the more you pull at history’s threads, the more thin
gs you have to change as they unravel. Some of them wove back into the narrative, but even the ones that didn’t were considered carefully as I was revising. The book is very Ontario-centric, for obvious reasons, and while I did my best to be as informed and sensitive as I could, I have undoubtedly missed or misrepresented something, and for that I apologize.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
A world of thanks to Josh Adams who, in 2014, said, “What? No, never mind. We can do this.” (The “what,” by the way, was in response to the formatting of an email, which I had set up to resemble Do You Want to Build a Snowman, which was the style at the time.)
Thanks also to Emma Higinbotham, who loved this immediately and put up with me while I stressed out about various drafts; Colleen Speed and Dot Hutchison, whose critical reading skills are unmatched; Faith King, who accidentally gave me the best title ever (and Royals three days before the whole world did); Katherine Locke and Marieke Nijkamp, who provided much needed critique; and RJ Anderson, Rachel Mikitka, and Laura Josephsen, for moral support as always.
There are a number of women who, often thanklessly, work to make YA a better place. All of them have helped this book, even if they don’t know about it, just by being themselves on Twitter. Specifically: Justina Ireland, Renee Sylvestre-Williams, and Sara Taylor-Woods. Thank you all for taking the risks you do.
I also owe thanks to @findmereading, whose courage is matched only by their eloquence, and to Dhonielle Clayton, whose keen eye and clever suggestions saved my bacon on several fronts.
And I guess I should thank Richard Armitage and Danielle Denby-Ashe. For, um, existing? Yes, let’s just say that and move on.
Unending thanks to Team Dutton: Julie Strauss-Gabel, Anna Booth, Natalie Vielkind, Theresa Evangelista, Elaine Damasco, Rosanne Lauer, and The Indispensible Melissa Faulner.
Andrew Karre, what would I even do? Thank you for your extreme patience as I struggled to get this done as well as I could (often without being able to explain myself), and for humouring my Canadian-ness even more than usual. I’d say I was sorry for destroying Michigan again, but we’d both know I was lying.
That Inevitable Victorian Thing began in a series of text messages sent from an airport shuttle, was—for a brief period of time—a Pacific Rim/North & South fusion AU fanfic, and was finally finished three and a half years later, after the writer had received an education.
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