FF – Gilded Cage

Another post from afar, hence the lack of photo and the haste of writing / posting. You can see it at Rochelle’s FF homepage. Your comments and feedback are welcome.

Gilded Cage

It was a storyline that filled his wife’s shelves in the library: forbidden love. A girl of lowly birth who falls for the son of a Duke, but is forced to marry a blusterer while her true love enters a ‘proper’ marriage with a woman his social equal.

Teddy wondered if Diane’s sympathies for the lovers ever stepped off the page; if she ever thought of him and the gilded cage that she represented. He did, daily. And every time he read a story about Lois’ horse breeding business, he wondered whether his story would share the novels’ happy ending.

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A brief extroduction…

Our excellent prompt photo this week, courtesy of J Hardy Carroll, reminded me of a thought that’s been mulling about in my head recently regarding the British royal family: Prince Charles and Camilla really need a better spin doctor. Because theirs is a love story.

Years ago, ten years before he had even met Lady Diana Spencer, the young Prince Charles met and fell in love with Camilla. The match was frowned upon and eventually he was married off to Di while she was dispatched to Captain Parker-Bowles. Maybe they went willingly, maybe not; we can never know.

The story we have been sold is that that should have been an end to it: Charles should have accepted his lot, and with it his beautiful, upper class and appropriate wife, leaving the less ‘correct’ Camilla in his past. But love stories don’t run like that, and in fiction most of us don’t want them too. Furthermore, until really very recently, royal Princes weren’t expected to be faithful to the trophy wives chosen for them by ‘the machine’ – and the trophy wives weren’t expected to mind. Charles and Diana happened to live at a tough time for the royal family, when automatic deference was dead, but people still wanted them to be greater than human and without our failings or feelings. Under intense scrutiny and modern expectations, I suggest neither came out particularly spotless. I certainly don’t defend any party’s actions during their respective first marriages.

But Diana has been dead 20 years and Charles has now fulfilled the romantic, love story ambition of a happy ending. He and Camilla may not be innocent, or beautiful, or particularly easy to put on a pedestal, but I suspect they are better for each other than either’s first spouse ever was, and I for one , wish them all the very best in the final act of their love story.

Friday Fiction – Death Becomes Her

As promised, it’s December, so I’m back with the Friday Fictioneers. NaNoWriMo was great – I miss it already, and I’m desperate to finish my novel, but December is never a great month to write, and especially this year when we have guests for more than half of it! So quick, while I have a chance, here’s a story for Rochelle‘s prompt – a photograph from long-term and highly-committed Fictioneer,  Janet Webb.

 

Death Becomes Her

“It does what?” Larry asked.

“It becomes her,” I said. “She looks good on it.”

“I’m sure that’s a great comfort,” he said, indicating her grieving bastard of a husband, then edging away.

“It is,” I said – to her really, or myself. It wasn’t clear to me where one began and the other ended. She wasn’t “a beauty” in life; too round, she always sighed, although some of us like a fuller figure.

I could hear her voice in my head – bemoaning the figure that had turned heads. Usually the wrong kind, she said.

“And mine,” I whispered.