Amy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kitchen_maid) wrote2012-09-25 07:45 am
kitchen_maid) wrote2012-09-25 07:45 am
(no subject)
Amy and Perry have a very long, very busy, very full, and very public day. The kind where you get home and your face is ever so faintly sore from the amount of smiling you've done. They were looking forward to having an hour for each other and the children, but the best laid plans of Kings and Queens are always subject to Problems Arising.
In this case, they returned to find a messenger waiting from Amber, with a letter from Prime Minister requiring His Majesty's Immediate Attention. Perry takes ten minutes to wash the carriage dust off his face, look in on the children, eat a sandwich, and then shut himself up in his study with his secretary the messenger and Lord Stefan. "No need to trouble you yet," he tells Amy. "I'll fill you in when I understand the gist of it."
Amy, therefore, has spent the last hour with her secretary, Duncan, overseeing the dispersal of the dozens of gifts collected on their tour of the town. Foods to the kitchens, toys the nurseries, flowers into water, odds and ends to various homes. Duncan has kept a neat record of what came from where, and he starts drafting the thank you notes that she will sign.
After an hour, Amy sticks her head around Perry's door, takes in the set of his shoulders and the expression on his face and decides to send word to the kitchen to delay dinner by at least an hour, and possibly an hour and a half. This will make for a late meal, but no one will want to start without the King. (Though they may have to, as asking for more than an hour and a half will throw the kitchen into a tizzy from which it can't easily right itself, as Amy knows from having worked in one.)
She pays her own very brief visit to her very sleepy children and then heads back to her rooms.
"The kitchen will delay dinner as you requested," Duncan tells her, when she arrives.
"Thank you. In the meantime, if you could ask them to send up some tea and . . . something. I don't really care what."
"Anything but lemon cakes, ma'am?"
"Yes, anything but lemon cakes," Amy says. "I'll take it on the balcony off my parlor. Thank you."
It's quiet and private and she can watch the sun start to set over the sea.
"Of course."
"Oh," Amy says. "And you might ask Lady Marian if she'd like to join me."
You learn, as a Queen, to take advantage of the openings in your schedule when they create themselves.
In this case, they returned to find a messenger waiting from Amber, with a letter from Prime Minister requiring His Majesty's Immediate Attention. Perry takes ten minutes to wash the carriage dust off his face, look in on the children, eat a sandwich, and then shut himself up in his study with his secretary the messenger and Lord Stefan. "No need to trouble you yet," he tells Amy. "I'll fill you in when I understand the gist of it."
Amy, therefore, has spent the last hour with her secretary, Duncan, overseeing the dispersal of the dozens of gifts collected on their tour of the town. Foods to the kitchens, toys the nurseries, flowers into water, odds and ends to various homes. Duncan has kept a neat record of what came from where, and he starts drafting the thank you notes that she will sign.
After an hour, Amy sticks her head around Perry's door, takes in the set of his shoulders and the expression on his face and decides to send word to the kitchen to delay dinner by at least an hour, and possibly an hour and a half. This will make for a late meal, but no one will want to start without the King. (Though they may have to, as asking for more than an hour and a half will throw the kitchen into a tizzy from which it can't easily right itself, as Amy knows from having worked in one.)
She pays her own very brief visit to her very sleepy children and then heads back to her rooms.
"The kitchen will delay dinner as you requested," Duncan tells her, when she arrives.
"Thank you. In the meantime, if you could ask them to send up some tea and . . . something. I don't really care what."
"Anything but lemon cakes, ma'am?"
"Yes, anything but lemon cakes," Amy says. "I'll take it on the balcony off my parlor. Thank you."
It's quiet and private and she can watch the sun start to set over the sea.
"Of course."
"Oh," Amy says. "And you might ask Lady Marian if she'd like to join me."
You learn, as a Queen, to take advantage of the openings in your schedule when they create themselves.
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"And thank good the one changes. Fashion can, at times, be very silly."
Of course, one of the great advantages to being Queen is that Amy can do a great deal to change it when she likes.
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"Alright, if it can't be about hats, what is one of the sillier, memorable, fashions that's come and gone more recently?"
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To some degree, she sets the fashion, and to another degree, she is beyond it.
"There was a period last year when birds were quite in vogue. It started simply enough, with embroidered birds on handkerchiefs and the like, and then sort of just spiraled, until Lady Marcela arrived at a ball in a gown made all of feathers, and shed dreadfully as she danced, and everyone wound up slipping on feathers and sneezing all night.
"After that, I might have said that I thought the fashion for birds was very silly to one or two carefully selected courtiers, and, well, that was the end of the fashion for birds."
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"Droppings."
No one wants to be a Court covered in bird droppings.
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"At least we can be glad for the keeping of those sensibilities."
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"Sunsets, too," she adds, with a nod out toward the water in front of them.
(This balcony does have the most exquisite view.)
"Look at that."
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She watched, letting it expand her own heart, and relax her shoulder ever the more, from a day that had so little stress to it. The endless blessing this trip and these people had graced her with. With a soft, quiet breath first, to the dropping sun, she glanced over, only partially, adding with a smile.
"And dear friends."