Chapter Text
Early Winter 1835
As the years went by, Arabella gradually found her privacy restored to herself.
The years immediately following the Great Restoration of English Magic had brought her precious little of her own time, spent as it was, at first, between young men eager to learn the fate of her husband and young women eager to make her a part of their social circles.
Whoever the questions came from - and the askers were many and diverse - she kept the truth about Jonathan's disappearance firmly within the tangle of her own wounds, even after those had started to heal, leaving behind a knotted and twisting path in her heart.
Spending copious amounts of time recuperating in Italy had not done much to quench the initial fervour of pestering Englishmen, either. If anything, as Lady Pole had once remarked dryly, their many admirers seemed to find gawking at survivors of Faerie as a kind of novel holiday distraction.
'I would be better able to hide my revulsion', Arabella had sighed, 'If I could only decide if it is not more thoughtless than cruel, that they try to use dance invitations as a way of enticing us.'
Both women still had tender marks on the soles of their feet. Arabella's teeth ground together as tightly as millstones if ever she heard a melancholy tune in the streets.
'Well! If they wish me to dance, that is certainly brainless enough to warrant any, ah, response I choose to give them', Lady Pole had sniffed.
Let it be said that a certain Mr Jeremy Johns enjoyed nothing more than to cast such admirers out by the scruff of their coats.
(Lady Pole had been wise enough to invite certain members of Strange's household into her own employment, after Arabella had lost both her husband's house and her financial means of supporting servants. The servants of Mr Strange had proved to be both loyal and discreetly sympathetic, as only people whose own livelihood has been upended by magic can be.)
Thankfully, as new practitioners of magic arose, plenty of fresh scandals and misadventures contributed to the 'Ladies of Lost-Hope' finally fading out of vogue.[1]
Thus Arabella was able to plan a trip to Manchester in the winter of 1835.
[1] Arabella rather suspected that Mr Segundus had something to do with the abrupt disappearance of their names in printed materials. Mr Segundus had a certain trait of pushing his way quietly toward a solution, regardless of what complications lay in the way. His patient, stubborn manner certainly would have dampened the efforts of any sensationalist newspapers or researchers attempting to use the names of Lady Pole or Mrs Strange as a cheap device to boost readership.
Other unwanted visitors became more easily thwarted than by Jeremy's efforts, once certain rather cheeky enchantments had been cast by Mr Childermass.
Lady Pole still grinned nastily whenever she remembered the time a particularly bothersome old Earl had refused to stop pestering Lady Pole with questions about Lost-hope.
His voice had returned to normal several days later, although his wife privately wrote that she had much preferred when his voice had been replaced by the warbling of a canary.
She did not miss the feathery moulting, however.
***
The trip was young Flora's idea. She had proven to be quite a force of her own, once the shy bloom of her youth had blossomed into the slightly overwhelmed outlook of a woman balancing her family life with changes she hoped to enact for women's rights in England.
Lady Pole had taken to writing a great many missives on Flora's behalf. Her letters were effectively acerbic, or perhaps acerbically effective.
Arabella, on her part, had been persuaded to see to some new developments in Liverpool, where her stomach had churned at how thin some of the girls were, even after their nutrition had been supplemented by more fruit and vegetables.
She was hardly surprised to learn that some of the youngest charges had opted to disappear - sometimes the call of their previous lives beat trying their hardest to earn an honest living, especially when such efforts were still looked down upon as undeserved charity by many people. Arabella knew the only way to help was to resolutely continue to be there for those who still chose to remain under the care of Flora's Liverpool correspondents.
Perhaps the missing girls might return if they saw proof of consistency and truthfulness in Flora's projects.
Her next stop was a group of female magicians in Manchester, to whom she would be presenting the experiments of a brewer from Nottinghamshire named Mr Tantony, who also dabbled in magic.
Tantony had accidentally discovered a way to cast protective charms on the contents of glass bottles, which had proved a very useful spell for selling more beer. He was actually willing to share his process, once Segundus and Arabella had explained how well an adaptation of the charm would work to preserve fresh milk for children stuck living in the unhealthy atmosphere of industrial zones.
Truth be told, magic had not yet cured a great many social evils. Possibly because it was hard to practice spells with an empty stomach and a mind exhausted to its limits. Arabella supposed large changes would not occur as long as casting illusions at parties still remained more respected than using magic to help with harrowing branches of physical work.
Flora still had her hopes, however. They all did, even if Arabella privately thought she had had enough magic to last her a lifetime.
Perhaps due to this private aversion, Arabella had picked the least magic-like mode of travel available to modern English society: the Liverpool to Manchester railway line.
The bustle of people hurrying along the station, the gloriously overcast sky, the heavy smell of wooden crates, and hot steam and burning coals, oh, the crisscrossing of steel tracks, the piercing metallic whistles of carriage trains, halting to a stop...
Arabella grinned.
The obscurity she gained within ordinary crowds was nothing short of a blessing. The wonders of modern technology owed everything to engineering and nothing at all to centuries-old magical meddling. She found a spot in a corner to sit in while she awaited her train, and took the time to start reading Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, carefully circling the parts she thought Lady Pole would find the most amusing.
It was a wonderful day.
A perfect moment.