Work Text:
When Aral and Cordelia made it back to Vorkosigan House that evening it was to find Helen Vorthys standing in their entryway. She was in the act of bidding a forceful farewell to a pair of gentlemen, both of young middle age, in whom Cordelia was sure she recognized Ekaterin Vorsoisson's politically-awkward kinsmen.
“... yes, Hugo, I'll be sure to let you know,” Helen was saying forbearingly, patting one of them firmly on the arm.
“Come on, Vassily,” the man – Hugo – muttered, visibly motivated to departure by the Count and Countess' approach. Both men bobbled a bit as she and Aral passed them in the passage.
“Professora, good evening,” Aral said, taking Helen's hand cordially in his own as the interlopers cleared the door and were gone.
Helen looked rather tired, Cordelia observed, and she was showing some signs of frazzling at her edges. “How long have you been here? My boys didn't both abandon you, did they?” Cordelia asked.
“I'm afraid they did,” Helen answered. “But I suspect I was crowded out of their minds by other concerns. Ekaterin and Nikki and I came back with Miles, that dunce Hugo and Vassily Vorsoisson in tow. We witnessed some, ah, very interesting business in relation to Dr. Borgos' parole earlier in the afternoon, after which excitement I understand he withdrew to regroup. Nikki's been with your armsman Pym, I think, and Ekaterin's vanished off somewhere with Miles. Well, they do have a deal to speak of, I suppose.”
“Leaving you alone here to cope?” Aral said, dry and knowing.
“Yes, well,” Helen said, equally knowing; and Cordelia was struck, in that moment, by the mature gentleness of the other woman's face, weathered and lined and radiant with generosity of spirit. She knows, but she doesn't mind.
“I'll tell them off for it tomorrow,” Cordelia told her. “Until then, Helen, you'll come upstairs with me and rest for a bit, until the rest of your party regroups?”
The other woman raised an eyebrow, and Cordelia realized that she'd phrased her words as an imperative rather than a request. Her cheeks warmed with the blush that she'd never been able to train herself out of, no matter how much she'd studied command. “I should be delighted to take the opportunity,” Helen said. “We, likewise, have a great deal to speak of.”
Aral, drat him, was twinkling at her. “Go find Miles, then, if you're so cheery,” she needled his self-satisfied mood.
“No thank you,” he replied. “Tonight, I put my faith in General Romeo Vorkosigan to keep the guard; he's been embarrassed enough for one afternoon. Unless you'd like me to roust out the lovebirds, Professora," he added, but Helen shook her head in the negatory. "I will look up Mark, though," he said, "and make sure that the affair with Enrique is fully resolved. It must have shaken him, to have been menaced by galactic forces here, in his own house.”
“Mmm,” Cordelia affirmed, “though I'm not sure it's accurate to call this Mark's own house, I don't think he sees it that way. You'll be up later?”
He nodded, kissed her, and went on down the hall after their son.
*
“And so I suppose they'll be married,” Helen said. She sat with a sigh on the squashed sofa in the antechamber to Aral and Cordelia's suite, and promptly toed off her shoes.
Cordelia, strategizing her attack on the outer layer of her day's finery, turned to look at the other woman, surprised by the odd bitter heaviness of her tone. “Miles and Ekaterin? You say that as if it's a suboptimal outcome. I had the impression that you were not – unsupportive – of Miles' marriage plots.”
“Not unsupportive, no,” Helen admitted. “He's a dear boy, and I'll be happy to welcome him into Ekaterin's family. You've done excellent well with him. It's only – I suppose I had hoped that she would wait for a while longer.”
“Love comes when it comes,” Cordelia said, spreading her hands. "Tea, or coffee? Or something stronger?"
"In fact, water would be lovely."
Freed of her bolero jacket and jewelry, Cordelia poured for herself and her compatriot, the fellow-member of the unofficial baba network who was also one her way to becoming a friend to depend upon, and sat down gratefully on the squashed sofa beside her. “If I didn't think she was every bit as passionate about him as he is about her – and I read his sonnets, Helen, it's real love on his side – I wouldn't support the match myself. She deserves his love, and he wants to give her the world, so why should they wait?”
When Helen looked over at her, something complicated and distant in her kind brown eyes, Cordelia found herself abruptly and totally transported back to her thirty-something self, the outworlder Survey Captain with the lingering stutter and the foreign socialization stumbling through the minefield of Barrayaran history and culture. It was always strange when Old Barrayar looked out at her from a friend's eyes. It gave her pause.
It had been like that with Alys Vorpatril, her first guide to Barrayaran womanhood; Cordelia vividly remembered the way she'd struggled with the conversational subject of her friend's widowhood, unable to approach the complex bitter knot of Alys' grief at the death of a husband of whom she had been merely fond. Particularly because Cordelia had been - was - so very passionate in her love for Aral, so very sure that giving up everything to be his wife had been the best and wisest thing she'd ever done.
Drou Koudelka had entered happily into matrimony, and Alys had seemed pleased enough to help with the marriage. But it had been decades since Padma's death, and Alys still was careful to skirt, sidestep, and avoid the topic as it touched on herself; Ivan's marriage, yes, many words on that, but it was clear that she had no intention of ever becoming a wife again. And one of the direct results of Drou's wedding, plucky little Kareen, had outright refused betrothal, though she clearly cared a very great deal for Mark, and he for her.
It spoke to the desirability of the wifely role, didn't it, if neither Alys nor Kareen would accept it? But Cordelia had been happy in her marriage; and so, she'd thought, had Helen Vorthys.
“Don't give me that look, Cordelia," Helen said. "I'm not unhappy with Georg. He was my choice. But I don't fool myself that it was an unconstrained choice. Marriage grants power, respectability, access, on Barrayar. They're good things to have; but they come at a cost. You don't have to be unwilling to pay it in order to perceive it. I experienced the intensest double consciousness when each of my own children were married, I scarcely know how to describe it; I was delighted for each of their happiness, but at the same time, I'd never been more aware of the ways we are bound by the mechanisms that regulate our society.”
She continued, softer now and almost sad, “Ekaterin's been in domestic enclosures nearly all her life. Her father was an old stick in the familiar mold; Ekaterin got her few years of university, but you must understand that those were the only years she's ever been outside of a directly controlling patriarchal system.”
“Surely you can say the same of any of us," Cordelia said. "That we're all held in the matrix of larger social systems.”
Helen considered the question for a moment, her index finger tapping lightly against her cheek. “Yes,” she said at length, “but also no. It's different, when your personhood is subsumed within that system. A Vor wife's only honor is her husband's.”
“I'm sure Miles doesn't see it that way,” Cordelia demurred, put on the defensive.
Helen laughed at that. “No, he wouldn't,” she said. But she added more somberly, “I do worry that Ekaterin still might, at some deeper level. She gave so much of herself in her marriage to Tien. She was terrifically brave and determined. It was appalling to watch.”
Cordelia hesitated before plunging on with her next question. “How did he hurt her? I mean, what was the specific pathology of the relationship? Miles has talked of it a little, but he didn't really have a sufficient observation period, and couldn't give me enough solid information to build an analysis.”
Helen sighed. “Tien – made use of her. In a number of ways. The worst, perhaps, was the way he commandeered her sense of wonder. Ekaterin was a delightful student, just brimming with vitality and promise. She was so interested in the world, so determined to help it toward beauty and balance. Tien, on the other hand, never saw a downside he didn't attach himself to; he had no faith at all in the world, the system, his fellow human beings - or, ultimately, in himself. But Ekaterin did. He could borrow her positive feelings, so to speak; she was a prosthetic, there to hope and beautify for him, as he himself could not. Which absolutely reduces her to the status of an object.”
Cordelia found, to her surprise, that as Helen spoke, her own throat was closing up. She was back in time again - twice in one night! She hadn't realized that Miles' engagement would carry this kind of personal cost - going even further into the uncomfortable past. It had been a long time since she had thought of her first lover, but Helen's words transported her back to him so vividly that she might never have left his bed, might never have fought free of him and Beta and all the rest of it. “Oh,” she said haltingly. “Oh. Yes.”
“Ah,” Helen echoed; it was obvious that she'd made the necessary inferences, and Cordelia was grateful for the other woman's honed and practiced intellect. After a moment, Helen said, “I'm sorry. But it's good that you understand.”
Cordelia said, "It helped me, marrying Aral. He gave me the chance to overwrite the memory of bad times with better ones. I would hope that Miles would be able to offer your niece the same renewal."
"In fact," Helen said, "I'm certain of it, and because of that I won't speak against the engagement. Your Miles is an agent of growth in others; rather like that remarkable fertilizer Ekaterin's been using on our backyard garden."
“Marriage launched me into an entirely different career,” Cordelia reflected. “I had to become Lady Vorkosigan; it was the growing experience of my life! And Ekaterin will also have the role of Lady Vorkosigan to grow into, just as I did.” Ekaterin grows into Lady Vorkosigan as I have grown out of her, she thought.
“I've read all about your growing experiences, Cordelia,” Helen told her dryly. “I'd prefer Ekaterin not have to behead any heads of state, myself.”
Cordelia flushed.
A soft knock at the door broke the still moment; Aral was there, Pym and little Nikki Vorsoisson behind him in the doorway, all wreathed about with the most lovely smell of coffee. “Cordelia, Helen. Something to revive your spirits. And then, Helen, we would be pleased to lend you and your niece our armsman-driver; it's getting late. Miles and Ekaterin should be waiting downstairs.” Nikki's big brown eyes were half-lidded with sleepiness, and Pym had an arm around him.
"I don't know, Cordelia," Helen said, bending down to retrieve her shoes. "You're right that we all have our greenhouses, in families or other institutions. Is it just a fantasy, that we might be able to thrive in the open wild? Is that thought too decontextualized and individualistic for hope or reason?"
"If there's one thing I've learned from my association with Cordelia," Aral said, handing round the china demitasses of espresso, "it's that hope beyond reason can lead to the most fantastic results."
They exited the lift-tube on the ground floor to find Miles and his Ekaterin holding hands in the hallway; it had looked to be quite an intimate scene, but they started apart when the lift doors hissed open. Miles, Cordelia noticed, had inherited her problem with self-betraying blushes. Ekaterin seemed calmer than she had that afternoon, the adrenaline that had carried her through the difficulty of the day's public spectacle dissipated into the quiet imperturbability that Cordelia was coming to know as the hallmark of her new daughter-in-law's character. She smiled at the girl, hoping that the intimidation factors of fame and history wouldn't last, that she could find another friend in Ekaterin, as she was in her aunt: one more of the bright women of Barrayar, the most brilliant and terrifying cohort she'd ever encountered.
The lovers were the last through the front doors, Helen and Nikki kept standing on the steps while Miles and Ekaterin made eyes at each other; and it was Ekaterin who leaned forward first, the kiss exchanged still chaste but perceptibly shot through with fervor before she pulled back and away. Cordelia's grin was wide and involuntary; it was so clear to her in that moment that the feelings attested to in Miles' absurd and precious attempts at poetry were fully reciprocated. If Ekaterin needed a more permeable enclosure than a greenhouse, Miles would find one for her, and Cordelia would do everything in her power to back him in the endeavor. She told herself, firmly, it will be all right.
Miles fell into place beside his parents as their guests went out into the darkness, calls of "Good night!" from all three Vorkosigans following them down the walk.
*
In the groundcar, Nikki had fallen asleep in his mother's lap. Helen looked across to where Ekaterin sat still and quiet, but with high color and bright eyes. "Are you happy?" she asked her niece, keeping her voice low so as not to disturb the child. "Is this what you want?"
Ekaterin bit her lip, but said, "Yes." Then, more firmly, "Yes, it's what I want. He's what I want." As if marveling to herself: "I want him."
Helen smiled. "Good," she said. "Remember that you can take as long as you need to with your engagement. There's no need for hurry." Ekaterin nodded but did not reply, her caressing hand in Nikki's hair becoming arrhythmic in its movements as she gazed out the dark half-reflecting windows, losing herself in what daydreams her aunt could not guess as the night rushed by beyond them.