Most nights, if there's help needed—or, honestly, even if there's not—it's Thranduil who provides it to his wife, having shared a bed with her now long enough to be far better acquainted than he once was with the intricacies of Orlesian corsetry, the ways that her many gowns come apart with a clever tug here, or there. It's a familiar ritual, and one of which Gwenaëlle is fond, but the night of their wedding he's not given the opportunity; celebrations continue late into the night, but though she stays past the threshold of only good manners she slips early from the courtyard, into the house proper and to the rooms set aside for their use.
Maids divest her of cloak, of gown, of jewels. Each part of her bridal ensemble is taken with care, to be preserved—she thinks Anne would like it if another daughter, one day, wore those same jewels—and there is one last surprise, for all his inquiries as to a costume change had been, at the time, met with nothing but repressive no's.
The filmy thing wrapped around her at the end of the day is more suggestion than garment, held together with strings of pearls and knotted silk roses. It presents more than it covers, purely decorative and painstakingly embroidered to match the veil that she'd worn at the beginning of the day, loose and lightweight over a scant set of matched smalls that Alexandrie might be proud to call more than fine enough for the exacting standards of the seamstresses at Liaisons Dangereuse. Some of the pieces that make up its whole will be, no doubt, recognisable to her husband; embroidered under his nose, oh, for the veil, she had said, because now and then she can keep a secret if she puts her mind to it.
She intends—well, some seductive thing, some clever witticism or particularly alluring pose, but perhaps she misjudges her timing or perhaps he's delayed by well-wishers, an argument, something. Regardless, by the time Thranduil joins her, she's rolled onto her belly, elbows in pillows, reading a book with her ankles crossed in the air behind her, one shoulder dropped.
It is rather more the woman he's married than anything more deliberate would have been.
action ∞
Most nights, if there's help needed—or, honestly, even if there's not—it's Thranduil who provides it to his wife, having shared a bed with her now long enough to be far better acquainted than he once was with the intricacies of Orlesian corsetry, the ways that her many gowns come apart with a clever tug here, or there. It's a familiar ritual, and one of which Gwenaëlle is fond, but the night of their wedding he's not given the opportunity; celebrations continue late into the night, but though she stays past the threshold of only good manners she slips early from the courtyard, into the house proper and to the rooms set aside for their use.
Maids divest her of cloak, of gown, of jewels. Each part of her bridal ensemble is taken with care, to be preserved—she thinks Anne would like it if another daughter, one day, wore those same jewels—and there is one last surprise, for all his inquiries as to a costume change had been, at the time, met with nothing but repressive no's.
The filmy thing wrapped around her at the end of the day is more suggestion than garment, held together with strings of pearls and knotted silk roses. It presents more than it covers, purely decorative and painstakingly embroidered to match the veil that she'd worn at the beginning of the day, loose and lightweight over a scant set of matched smalls that Alexandrie might be proud to call more than fine enough for the exacting standards of the seamstresses at Liaisons Dangereuse. Some of the pieces that make up its whole will be, no doubt, recognisable to her husband; embroidered under his nose, oh, for the veil, she had said, because now and then she can keep a secret if she puts her mind to it.
She intends—well, some seductive thing, some clever witticism or particularly alluring pose, but perhaps she misjudges her timing or perhaps he's delayed by well-wishers, an argument, something. Regardless, by the time Thranduil joins her, she's rolled onto her belly, elbows in pillows, reading a book with her ankles crossed in the air behind her, one shoulder dropped.
It is rather more the woman he's married than anything more deliberate would have been.