The Spare Princess, Chapter Five
The Spare Princess
The Princes treated him no differently, after all that. He still did not belong and was made to feel it perhaps a little more than before. The men seemed eager to emphasize the fact that his marriage had done little in their eyes to better him. It had been a convenient disposal of a surplus and substandard commodity that had cost them little, a gesture lacking in sacrifice. “How is your poor dear wife?” was the rare and only question directed at him, forgotten on the fringe circle of the Pureblood society.
Everard took the keenest interest when other matters failed to amuse him sufficiently. “And how is my darling granddaughter, Mr. Macnair? Elliot, my son, have you heard lately from Mrs. Macnair? You must miss her so terribly…Macnair, have you given thought to starting a family, yet? I should so enjoy a new great-grandson or -granddaughter getting into things!” And then he would smile his nasty, bladed smile.
Evangeline’s father was the only one whose regard had significantly changed, and that was decidedly for the worse. The loathing in his eyes-a blue of a similar shade to Evangeline’s-had not waned, still glittered as dangerously as ever. Elliot’s saving grace in Walden’s eyes was the fact that he loved his daughter…for as much as Elliot loathed his son-in-law, Walden felt nothing but a little respect and pity for the man who so keenly felt his failure to protect his youngest daughter. He could not fault the man for considering him an unworthy husband for his daughter-that was the pure and simple truth.
Elliot and his wife and two daughters seemed the last bastion of decency and good breeding within the Prince household-Everard’s casual cruelty and disdain for blood bonds permeated his line. The Prince daughters, all married off in the higher echelons of society, were all the sort of petty, backbiting bitches Walden couldn’t bear, who tattled and gossiped and put on ugly veneers of pristine politeness. The single (legitimate) male grandson, Evangeline’s cousin Edward, was a snivelly and weedy man with close-set dark eyes and already-thinning black hair, with not enough of his grandfather’s calculating, manipulative intelligence and more than his fair share of his arrogance and pretension.
The Prince family was decaying, Walden privately thought, whittling themselves down on the inside, the malicious Prince streak turning inwards and hacking away at the bonds that held respectable Pureblood families together. Even Severus Snape, the half-blood son of Evangeline’s disowned Aunt Eileen, for all his dirty blood, was a more honorable, respectable wizarding specimen than his legitimate cousins.
And they thought Evangeline, his sweet, beautiful wife… they thought her a waste of pure and noble blood.
Walden mentioned the man over the dinner Teapot had made for them one night. Evangeline had nothing but kind, complimentary words for her illegitimate cousin, though she didn’t know him very well. “He tried to come speak with my grandfather right before Emmeline’s wedding-Grandfather had the house elf turn him away at the door, saying he was no kin of ours.” She grew quiet.
Walden hadn’t pushed for anything more, wasn’t sure there was anything more she had to say. He drank some of the wine-it wasn’t very good, had a strange tang to it. Cheap, he realized disgustedly. He downed it anyway.
Teapot did all the cooking and cleaning around the house. Evangeline, even had Walden considered it an appropriate task for his high born wife, was not capable of the spells. Her wand magic was severely lacking, he’d discovered. She could cast only the most basic of spells, and not to great effect. Her cousin Eirene had announced snottily over a family dinner that everyone had thought Evangeline a Squib until she’d made it to Hogwarts and proved herself “moderately capable of concocting a potion.”
Her Potions aptitude was an understatement, Walden found. Evangeline had carefully asked permission to seek employment in a Potions shop in Inverness-which he had immediately and firmly denied her, no wife of his would dirty her hands if he could help it-before contenting herself with a small laboratory in the unused storage room off the kitchen. She was more than ‘moderately capable;’ she was rather gifted in the subject and her study gave her a way to occupy her time. Walden generously stocked her laboratory as well as he could afford (perhaps a little better than he could afford) and felt rather pleased that he could do something to make her happy.
It was not a bad life. Evangeline seemed perfectly content in his home, however lacking he thought she must have found it. She was always there to greet him in some glittering bit of jewelry, to sit with him in his study and learn how to work the finances-though she seemed more adept than she let on at first-to lay in bed beside him. His whole house smelled of her, from the pillows on their bed to his own clothes in the wardrobe.
He was more careful with her than he had been at first. Walden reserved his rougher attentions for his girl in Knockturn, though it was no longer quite as satisfying. Her lacquered blonde hair was gummy and uncomfortable under his fingers, the waxy red lipstick left stains and her cheap perfume clung like dead flowers and ruined the light notes of Evangeline’s smell that laced the threads of his robes. Her playful taunts and fighting and her wanton, classless behavior grew wearisome, though the bruises he left grew more colorful as his patience with her grew short.
The rough, painful sort of violent sex he’d always pursued seemed lacking, missing Evangeline’s voice, her shy smiles and embarrassed whimpers and delicate fingertips on his face and in his hair. He missed the way she curled up to him in the dark, her cheek to his chest, her soft white arm across the hard muscles of his stomach. There was none of that quiet possession here; this was base and vulgar and not half as enjoyable as it had once been.
The Knockturn girl had never quite got over Walden’s marriage to a woman who was not her and was bitterly jealous of his new wife. She made the mistake of mocking Evangeline one evening, her shiny red lips twisting nastily as she grinned at him. “That’s right,” she purred in his ear, her hands fisted tight in his hair. “That little wife of yours can’t do this, can she? Won’t give you what you want, what you need, will she?”
He’d beaten the whore to within an inch of her life for daring to speak so of Evangeline. She was a gutter rat mocking the elegance and grace of his beautiful black swan, and he felt no remorse leaving her in her Knockturn hovel, bruised and broken and crying pathetically, whimpering some weak-voiced threats of revenge.
He would always be a monster, make no mistake.
Walden had carefully erased every trace of the whore from himself and gone home to find Evangeline asleep in their bed. He tried to let her sleep, tried to slip into bed, but she woke and grinned at him sleepily, reaching her arms out for him and she smelled perfect, felt warm and soft in his arms. He smiled back at her, hands petting her long, soft hair as she fell back asleep on his chest.
He kissed her awake in the morning, leaving tiny light kisses on her eyelids and forehead and cheekbones and jaw and neck just because he knew it would make her happy and she would smile for him. A smile on her face satisfied him more than a bruise on any whore’s. He hitched up her virginal white eyelet lace nightgown and he made love to her in the grey morning sunshine, and he enjoyed it because she did. Every giggle and whimper was a triumph, every time he made her sigh his name the best victory he’d ever won.
He didn’t leave a single unsightly bruise on her pale perfect skin and that was winning, too. He found joy in making her happy, satisfaction in giving her pleasure, and if that was not love then it was the closest Walden Macnair would ever come to it.
Evangeline found their marriage contract in the pile of papers on the floor beside his desk one day as she reorganized his records. She frowned over it, reading the tiny, elegantly indecipherable Italian script. She looked up at him from her seat on the ancient, battered hardwood floor, the parchment settling onto her lap with disbelief on her face.
“That’s odd…my grandfather disinherited all my cousins when they got married-he put it in their marriage contracts. It basically cuts them off from coming back to claim any of the Prince fortune when he dies-everyone in my family is more than petty enough to squabble over baubles and bits just to be nasty. He wants it all leveled on my Uncle Edmund, and then on my cousin Edward. He doesn’t want it split up, which is…” She grew painfully quiet.
“Never mind,” she said quietly, putting the parchment into a file that she labeled appropriately and filed away. Walden did not ask.
After she’d retired, though, he had gone through the file and reread the marriage contract-he hadn’t paid close attention at the signing of it, and was rather concerned with what had upset her in it.
There was no clause in the contract that disinherited Evangeline; there was no mention of anything of the sort.
Walden didn’t see anything at all. It was just a marriage contract; it itemized the contents of her dowry-he didn’t know how he’d missed the descriptions of all the jewelry Everard had given Evangeline to take with her into her marriage. There was nothing about it that seemed unusual at all, down to the clause that restricted the inheritance of the Prince jewelry and the rest of Evangeline’s dowry to blood descendants.
He took a sip of his tea-and-brandy as he perused the contract again. He wrinkled his nose, cursing the house elf under his breath. The damned rat couldn’t make tea to save its life, couldn’t seem to resist over-sweetening the brew no matter how many times Walden howled about it.
Evangeline was warmer than usual when he came to bed. In the morning, when he woke, the arm that was listlessly draped over his chest was burning, and his little shadow swan was grey with fever. He found the box of poisoned chocolates from a sweet shop in the deeper reaches of Knockturn Alley in the kitchen, his name signed to a note he did not write. Walden burned them, his hands steady in his rage.
Evangeline did not die. Walden would never have let her. He wasn’t ever even afraid she would, though for days she lay unconscious, stripped of all strength and burning with fever while everyone around her-the Healers, her distraught sister and father and mother-spoke in ‘ifs’. Walden thought only in ‘when.’
He disappeared for a few hours one night, but no one noticed.
There was a Ministry investigation into the source of Evangeline’s poisoning. It was quickly determined she must have mixed something wrong in her laboratory and the case was closed. Some of her vicious family laughed at her ineptitude.
When she woke he was there, and she managed to smile at him. Walden smiled back and sat down on their bed and cradled her up against him and ran his fingers through the greasy, unwashed lengths of her hair. “You don’t have to sit up with me,” she whispered, his shirt grasped weakly in her fingers. He hushed her and kissed her hair and she settled against his chest, falling back into an easier sleep.
Everard Prince had given a kitten to a manticore the day he had given Evangeline to Walden Macnair. He was a monster, make no mistake.
A landlord in Knockturn grew impatient when the rent never came in and the tenant never came back. Good for nothing whores, they were always wandering off or getting arrested. He sold off what possessions of hers were worth anything and let the dilapidated flat out to another girl, hoping this one would be better about getting the money in on time.