To start off, a Lavender Marriage is an old term or code word for what we would now call a “cover” or a relationship built with the purpose of hiding the true sexuality of one or both people involved. Nothing new really, but in recent years (very recent), it’s a term that has been coming up less and less due new rights and laws geared towards ensuring sexual freedoms for all. From today’s perspective, a Lavender Marriage would seem unfair or even selfish because one party was almost always left in the dark about the others true feelings. As cruel as it may seem, the use of another human being to hide ones own self was, at one time (and perhaps still in some places) a necessity.
In Kingdom Soul, Princess Charlotte has given birth to the child that she shares with the late Prince Young. During that period of time, it is shameful for an unwed woman to have a child with no father to claim it. She would be seen as a harlot. Of course she could have truthfully stated that she was a widow and that her daughter’s father died before her birth, but that would have brought up the question of who the child’s father was. Morgana looked so much like her father, Prince Young, one mention of a dead spouse, and minds, not to mention mouths, would have started wandering.
Gabe, a young man in want of heart, had a different problem. If the people of that era didn’t take kindly to unwed mothers, they surely weren’t embracing a man whose heart swayed in the direction of other men. This is Princess Charlotte’s story so not very much is now known about Gabe. What is disclosed however, is how the two met. Gabe had been apprenticing with a man who he’d later fallen in love with. The villagers didn’t take to kindly to this, so when a group of men got the man alone, they beat him nearly to death. Gabe went looking for him and when he found him, the man was beyond saving. With his last dying breath, he tried to comfort Gabe, stating that it had all been worth it. In his grief, Gabe wanted to follow behind his dead lover into the grave. He went out, looking for the same the treatment and he got it. Charlotte had been out with her new baby daughter when she saw a gang beating him. To stop the violence, she reasoned with the men, stating that Gabe couldn’t be a lover of men if he was in fact a lover of her. Yes, she told them that he was her husband and that her child was his. Satiated, the men left Gabe alone and so began his marriage of convenience with Charlotte. He was beaten up again from time when he failed to be careful about private life, but for the most part, they were safe from the unapologetic scrutiny of the public.
Princess Charlotte and Gabe did come to love each other eventually though, just not in a sexual way. They cared for each other and Morgana in the ways that most loving couples would, but sex was out of the question. Charlotte’s heart and body still belonged to Young, and Gabe stated that he would not hold back from finding happiness if it came his way. In the end, there is few happiness to be found for either of them. But, in a society where neither of their true identities, Charlotte a princess of a conquered land and Gabe, a gay man, would ever be excepted, nothing else is to expected. For a few good years though, they had peace, comfort, and a level of security in their Lavender Marriage.
