There is no grand procession or fanfare to introduce this woman, they are not in any of the palaces or apartments that King George is ignoring in favor of pining for Hanover and the convenient disappearance of the dozens of Catholics with more legitimate claims to the empire. There's a steward who introduces them and then moves away to wait in the wings, leaving Lord Hamilton standing (hopefully awkwardly yearns the collective Whitehall) across from the chair she is sitting in.
In the absence of anyone else in England willing to take this seriously, there is Thomas. His gaze is steady - what she can glimpse of it before he inclines his head and everything else in a proper, formal greeting. "Your Majesty," he says, and wonders what his etiquette tutor would have said about this. They'd spent a week on the finer points of meeting royalty, and he'd daydreamed absently through most of it, though of course the details have made it with him regardless.
"The pleasure - and honor - are of course all mine, Rani Lakshmibai." His is not a mouth made for languages too far past the dreary boundaries of Europe, but it's significantly less grating than it could be.
Parliament and the crown both are trying to choke her and her people before a word is spoken, putting her in here like this, with the son of a minor earl, shuffled away in a meeting room in a third-string government palace. It is insulting; the kind of affront that would be grounds for significant diplomatic strain between another, less routinely subjugated, royal house. Thomas knows this, hates this, but his alternative to showing up is letting someone else handle it, which he hates even more.
He puts in a valiant effort, and for that - it turns her that little more keenly towards him, below her veil. Her many jewelled fingers coming up to curl around the edge of her veil as she beckons him to do just that. The stained tips of her fingers dark against the bright material of a widow. Pure in it's ornamented white. The golden embroidery the glimmers to obscure her further behind it.
But to her, he is plain made out. A man of standing, and it turns out, a man of manners. Two things she often found incompatible. But here he seemed to be both, as she sat in his house and he asked her if he was welcome to sit.
"Please do." A soft word, it orders and it doesn't. The hand returns back to its hold on the veil. Like she had barely moved at all for the effort of staying watchfully stiff. "Rani will do henceforth."
Since his Lords seemed ready to humiliate them both, with their ignorance and inflicting it upon her. Spare them both that, she wasn't interested in being their victim anymore.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a thousand years later
In the absence of anyone else in England willing to take this seriously, there is Thomas. His gaze is steady - what she can glimpse of it before he inclines his head and everything else in a proper, formal greeting. "Your Majesty," he says, and wonders what his etiquette tutor would have said about this. They'd spent a week on the finer points of meeting royalty, and he'd daydreamed absently through most of it, though of course the details have made it with him regardless.
"The pleasure - and honor - are of course all mine, Rani Lakshmibai." His is not a mouth made for languages too far past the dreary boundaries of Europe, but it's significantly less grating than it could be.
Parliament and the crown both are trying to choke her and her people before a word is spoken, putting her in here like this, with the son of a minor earl, shuffled away in a meeting room in a third-string government palace. It is insulting; the kind of affront that would be grounds for significant diplomatic strain between another, less routinely subjugated, royal house. Thomas knows this, hates this, but his alternative to showing up is letting someone else handle it, which he hates even more.
"May I sit down?"
no subject
But to her, he is plain made out. A man of standing, and it turns out, a man of manners. Two things she often found incompatible. But here he seemed to be both, as she sat in his house and he asked her if he was welcome to sit.
"Please do." A soft word, it orders and it doesn't. The hand returns back to its hold on the veil. Like she had barely moved at all for the effort of staying watchfully stiff. "Rani will do henceforth."
Since his Lords seemed ready to humiliate them both, with their ignorance and inflicting it upon her. Spare them both that, she wasn't interested in being their victim anymore.