beatrice_otter | Fic: Tea for Two

The third

yuletide fic I wrote was a treat for a pinch-hitter, which was an excuse to write Wimsey fic. Now, I love the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, but I have only once been brave enough to write Peter himself--and that was only for a few scenes in a crossover. I minored in English, but that is simply not enough to give one the depth of knowledge of pre-20th-century British literature that one needs to be able to write Peter, who drops allusions and quotes like nobody's business. I spent so much time doing keyword searches through poetry archives, it was ridiculous. So instead, I wrote about Harriet and Mary, who I think would get along well together.

But in the course of doing canon review, I looked for a timeline, and discovered that Mary is much older than I thought she was--she's only five years younger than Peter! He, the Dowager Duchess, and the narrative all treat Mary like she's some silly young girl in Clouds of Witness, and she's actually 28! She and Parker don't marry until she's 35! She's older than Harriet! She served as a nurse in WWI, and she was old enough that she might have served in France itself! (Younger women were only allowed to nurse in British hospitals.) That changed a lot about how I saw her and interpreted the few scenes she's in, and also changed how I saw her and Parker's relationship. I now headcanon that the reason it took so long for Mary and Parker to marry is that at first he was hoping she'd grow out of her radicalism, and she wasn't willing to marry him on that basis, and also had to work out if she was okay with someone as socially conservative as Parker is. Which left them with some things to work out.

Title: Tea for Two
Fandom: Lord Peter Wimsey - Dorothy L. Sayers
Characters: Harriet Vane, Mary Wimsey
Author: Beatrice_Otter
Written for: tucuxi in Yuletide 2024
Rating: Gen

Harriet regarded the invitation with some suspicion. She had resolved to put Lord Peter—and all the tangle of gratitude, resentment, and admiration he provoked in her—out of her mind, at least for now. He was out of town, on a case, and Harriet had rather been hoping to use the time to settle her mind a bit.

She was beginning to plot out the next Templeton novel, and it was going as well as it ever did at this stage—meaning she was wondering why on earth she'd ever thought detective novels should be her passion, as she poked holes in every possible complication she dreamed up, and the ones she couldn't poke holes in would require ever so much research. But it would come; it always did. When she could focus; Lord Peter was not always conducive to that.

And here, as Lord Peter (and all his distractions) was safely out of the way, came a note from his sister, Lady Mary—or, as she styled herself, Mrs. Charles Parker, with an invitation to tea. Not at the Parker residence, but at a restaurant. There would be little danger of seeing the detective, and thus being unpleasantly reminded of her recent sojourn as a target of the judicial system. The restaurant was a respectable one, well within her budget, and easy to get to.

Much as she was grateful that Lord Peter was out of town for the moment, she was curious about him; what had made him, and why he was so interested in her. Lady Mary might answer some of her curiosity, without having to deal with the confounding man directly.

Harriet wrote back a courteous note accepting the invitation.

***

Mary Wimsey Parker was a beautiful blonde woman in her mid-thirties. She was dressed in a sensible dress and coat that were closer in style and expense to Harriet's own wardrobe than she would have expected a duke's sister to wear. Obviously, whatever money she had brought to the marriage, they were choosing to live mostly on the Inspector's salary.

They exchanged the usual pleasantries and sat down at a table. Looking over the menu and making their choices moved the conversation along until the waitress departed, and then a bit of a silence fell.

"I admit I was a bit surprised to receive your note, Mrs. Parker," Harriet said. "Did Lord Peter ask you to keep an eye on my recovery from my ordeal, while he is away?"

"No," said Mrs. Parker. She looked down at her hands and gave a sad smile. "I was complaining to my brother about how few friends I had, and he suggested that you might be an interesting person to know."

"Oh?" Harriet said. "I'm sorry to hear that. Is it your marriage?"

Mrs. Parker sighed. "No. Or, not only. I'm afraid I've never had the knack of making friendships that last. During the war I was very close to some of my fellow nurses, but then it turned out that when we were no longer living and working together we had very little in common. Then I started doing social work and ran in some very radical circles, and made an awful lot of friends in that scene. I almost married a communist speaker, you know, and when I couldn't marry him because of Gerry that was fine, it was the tyranny of the social order, but when I discovered that he was a coward and fell out of love with him, that was betraying the cause."

"As if your devotion to your principles should be expressed first and foremost through your marriage," Harriet said, dryly. In her case, Philip had expected her principles—or his, at any rate—would be expressed through lack of marriage. The underlying idea of a woman's chastity being her most important contribution, and not her ideas, struck her suddenly as very similar. "Which is a terribly old-fashioned way to think about it, and not in line with the political ideas they claim to espouse." She wondered what the other woman thought of Harriet's relationship with Philip Boyes, and if this might be someone who would understand. Sylvia and Eiluned supported her and always had, but they'd never really cared for Philip, and neither had any experience with learning that someone you loved was not what you thought he was.

"Very true," said Mrs. Parker. "I would have liked to continue on in those circles, but of course they all supported him. It didn't matter that I still supported the message; he was the Great Man to be adored, and I the scheming aristocrat who threw him over—never mind that several of the girls gossiping about me were at least as aristocratic as I am! And never mind what he'd done."

"Yes," Harriet said, fiddling with her napkin. "It always seems to be the woman's fault when something goes wrong, isn't it. No matter what actually happened."

They were interrupted by the arrival of their tea and cake. Harriet fixed it to her taste and sipped as Mrs. Parker went on.

"After that I was so disgusted with the hypocrisy of them all that I dropped out of that circle, and started looking for another one," Mrs. Parker continued. "Mother put me in contact with some of her friends who ran charities and would let me work for them; that was good, and fulfilling, but of course most of it is merely bandaging up the wounds caused by social inequality and so there was a bit of frustration there. And the ladies I worked with were all very kind, generous people, but … they all thought my politics were a phase I should have grown out of, already, and they were all very self-congratulatory about what good people they were for being so generous, and I never got close with any of them."

"We get the same sort of philanthropists in Bloomsbury," Harriet said. "All itching to show how generous and open-minded they are by patronizing the right artists and throwing the right parties. I was always glad that my sort of writing pays for itself without a patron, and is too low-brow for their tastes, anyway. Some of them are very nice people, whom I would be pleased to know in other circumstances, but the need for gratitude becomes grating."

"Exactly!" Mrs. Parker said. "I certainly wouldn't want to be beholden to someone whose generosity depended partly on their need to be seen to be generous, and although they were always gracious about it—"

"—there's a limit to how much graciousness matters, in those circumstances," Harriet said. She had refused Lord Peter because of it; but she had had a career that would support her, and the financial freedom that she could refuse it. Not everyone had that luxury.

"I've always thought so," Mrs. Parker said. "Which rather got in the way of my finding a close friend among them. And then I got married."

"Are your husband's friend's not to your taste?" Harriet asked.

"No, they're lovely," Mrs. Parker said. "Unfortunately, most of them are a bit overawed to find a Duke's sister in their midst, and that does put a damper on things."

"Ah," Harriet said. "Whereas the socialists probably fell all over themselves to keep from being overawed."

"Exactly," Mrs. Parker said. "I'm sure they'll get used to me eventually, but it will take time, and then of course I would prefer to have a social circle of my own, not just my husband's. So I threw myself on Peter's mercy. He has such a large circle of acquaintance, you know; all sorts of interesting people. In retrospect, I should have asked him earlier, after leaving socialist circles, instead of letting mother set me up with her friends, but at the time I didn't know just how many—and how odd—his friends were."

It was not exactly the sort of thing Harriet had wanted to know about Lord Peter, but it was close. "Oh?" she said. "Sounds interesting. I'd love to hear any stories you have."

There passed a pleasant hour. Mrs. Parker had a facility with describing people, and recounting their odder mannerisms, and had a string of amusing anecdotes about people she'd met in her brother's company, and some she'd met in the course of her work. Harriet responded with stories of some of the odder members of the Bloomsbury set, and then of course there were so many eccentric authors.

By the time they were to settle the bill, they were on a first-name basis. "This has been such a pleasant afternoon, we must do it again sometime," Harriet said.

"Oh, certainly, that sounds marvelous," Mary said. "I do hope I'm not taking you away from your work—you needn't feel sorry for me, I probably shouldn't have gone on so about my lack of friends—"

"No, nothing of the sort," Harriet said. "I don't have an abundance of them right now, myself." She sighed. "So few of the people I counted as friends stood by me through all of it. It's not as if they didn't know Philip and I were living together without benefit of clergy, and they all claim to believe that I really didn't do it, but somehow having the whole mess splashed through the papers changed things."

"Now it's public, instead of private gossip," Mary said. "Which shouldn't make a difference, but it does."

"And then of course there are people now who want to meet me, only they're not interested in me, they're interested in the scandal, and they hope I'll do something equally thrilling."

"How tiresome," Mary said. "People can be so awful. We had a bit of that, after the whole mess with Cathcart and my brother on trial for his murder."

Harriet had almost forgotten about that; she'd read about it in the papers, of course, but that had been years before she'd thought there would ever be a personal acquaintance with the Wimseys, and of course when she'd met Lord Peter her own case had overshadowed everything else in her mind.

Harriet nodded. "Then you know what it's like. But worse than that is the men who believe that because I lived with Philip, I have neither morals nor taste, and will happily sleep with any man who asks."

"I thought the whole point of the trial was that you had both, and that's why you'd left him?" Mary said. "Though I shouldn't be surprised, many men can be so tiresome about only believing things about a woman that are convenient to them."

"And here we are, we've spent quite a pleasant hour talking, and my recent travails have only been brought up now at the end, by me speaking of them." Harriet spread her hands. "You didn't even dance around the subject uneasily. It's been marvelous."

"And I suppose Peter could see you needed a friend too," Mary said. "But you'd have denied it if he asked."

"I don't know that I'd have denied it," Harriet said. "I do value honesty quite highly, and that's one thing Peter and I have always been, is nakedly honest with each other. Even when it would be more convenient not to be. But I wouldn't like having something else that I'd have to feel grateful for."

"Whereas now, since I'm the one who went to him for help finding a friend, there's no need for any such thing," Mary said. "Peter has always been good at arranging things delicately." She checked her watch and made a face. "I really do have to go—same time next week?"

"It's a date," Harriet said. "I look forward to it."