Fights Like The Devil, Dressed As A Man

One morning, Edward awoke from a drunken stupor, blinking in the morning light, only to find Caroline already dressed for the day ahead.

“I don’t want you to go,” she said, then turned and left the room.

---

One night Edward sat in the Livid Brews. ( He'd like to say he was not his usual self, but the sad fact of the matter was that he was. )

[[ nfi, nfb, taken from the Black Flag novelization. tw for alcoholism. ]]

What a scandal it had been: Caroline Scott marrying beneath her would have been cause for gossip enough. That she had spurned Matthew Hague in the process constituted quite a stir, and some time after, Edward wondered if that scandal might ultimately have worked in their favour, because while he steeld himself for retribution, for over a month, he saw nothing of Wilson, heard nothing of Matthew Hague.

In the end, the threat to their marriage came not from outside — not from the Cobleighs, Emmett Scott, Matthew Hague or Wilson. It came from the inside. It came from Edward.

The problem was that he kept returning to his meeting with Dylan Wallace and his promises of riches in the West Indies. He wanted to go and return to Caroline a rich man. He had begun to see it as his only chance of making a success of himself. His only chance of being worthy of her. For, of course, yes, there was the immediate glory, or perhaps stature, of having made Caroline Scott his wife, taking her from beneath the nose of Matthew Hague, but that was soon followed by a kind of... stagnation.

Emmett Scott delivered his cutting blow at the wedding. They should have been grateful, Edward supposed, that he and Caroline’s mother had deigned to attend. But Edward was not at all grateful and he would have preferred it if the pair of them had stayed away. He hated to see his father, cap in hand, bowing and scraping to Emmett Scott, hardly a nobleman after all, just a merchant, separated from them, not by any aristocratic leanings but by money alone.

For Caroline, though, he was glad they came. It wasn’t as if they approved of the marriage, far from it; but at the very least, they weren’t prepared to lose their daughter over it.

Edward overheard her mother — “We just want you to be happy, Caroline” — and knew that she was speaking for herself alone. In the eyes of Emmett Scott he saw no such desire. He saw the look of a man who had been denied his chance to clamber so much higher up the social ladder, a man whose dreams of great influence had been dashed. He came to the wedding under sufferance, or perhaps for the pleasure of delivering his pronouncement in the churchyard after the vows were made.

Emmett Scott had black hair brushed forward, dark, sunken cheeks and a mouth pinched permanently into a shape like a cat’s anus. His face, in fact, wore the permanent expression of a man biting deep into the flesh of a lemon.

Except for this one occasion, when his lips pressed into a thin smile and he said, “There will be no dowry.”

His wife, Caroline’s mother, closed her eyes tightly as though it was a moment she’d dreaded, had hoped might not happen. Words had been exchanged, Edward could guess, and the last of them had belonged to Emmett Scott.

So Edward and Caroline moved into an outhouse on his father’s farm, the day after the wedding. They had appointed it as best they could, but it was still, at the end of the day, an outhouse: packed mud and sticks for the walls, their roof thatch badly in need of repair.

Caroline had been used to a brick-built town house with the life of Bristol all around, servants to boot, her washing, her cooking, every whim attended to. Here she was not rich. She was poor and her husband was poor. With no prospects.

It ate at Edward.

And it kept eating.

[[ nfi, adapted from the Assassin's Creed IV novelization. ]]

Edward was starting to drift away into sleep when he heard it, coming from the window. A tapping.

He looked out with no little trepidation. What did he expect to see? He wasn’t sure, but memories of the Cobleighs were still fresh in his mind. Instead what he saw, sitting astride her horse in the pale moonlight of the yard, as though God himself were shining his lantern upon her beauty, was Caroline Scott.

( She was dressed as if for riding school. )

They parted, with arrangements made to meet again, and after that, their relationship began in earnest. They were able to keep it a secret. For some months, in fact. Their meetings were held entirely in secret, snatched moments spent wandering the lanes between Bristol and Hatherton, riding in the pastures.

[[ nfb, nfi, taken and tweaked from the ACIV novelization. ]]

She was in the Auld Shillelagh, a tavern halfway between Hatherton and Bristol, which was a regular haunt of Edward's and like before, as it was the summer and Mother and Father toiled over the shearing at home, when Edward'd make more frequent trips into town, it was regular to the tune of several times a day.

He'd admit he hadn’t taken much notice of her at first, which was not unusual: though once he'd prided himself on knowing the exact location of any pretty woman nearabouts, Cosette was still a recent if fading notion in his memory. Regardless, the Shillelagh wasn’t the sort of place you expected to find a pretty woman. A woman, yes. A certain type of woman. But this girl wasn’t like that: she was young, about Edward's age, and she wore a white linen coif and a smock. Looked like a domestic.

( In which Edward tries to be a hero and winds up needing rescuing himself, instead. )

[[ and we're off into canon for real! taken and adapted from the novelization of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, by Oliver Bowden. mentions of attempted (but unsuccessful) date rape under the cut. ]]