Lewis fic (Lewis/Hathaway): A Joy Forever
Title: A Joy Forever
Author: chiralove
Characters/Pairing: Lewis/Hathaway
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 4k-ish
Warnings: character death (nothing worse than you’d get in an episode)
Summary: Lewis helps him strip the skin-tight leather gloves off without soiling his coat, and that’s enough to make James indulge in a quick internal grin. There’s no storm blown through the world yet that didn’t blow some wind through the turbines, as his gran used to say.
Author’s note: A complete AU, because I rather fancied the idea of playing with the characters in a steampunk universe. Apologies for any “anachronisms” -- a few of the quotes, I know, don’t belong here -- except that they do.
The tick-over of the ballast in the ion engine stops with a final phirrr, and James stifles his groan in the sudden silence. He pulls on a pair of gloves and tugs the laces around his wrists until they’re tight.
Without another word, just a nod to his governor, he hops out of the hyperbolic gondola, keeping his attention focussed on the scuff marks made by the struts in the dirt, and then after he’s made his way to the back of the gondola, on the ion engine.
He doesn’t look at Lewis. He’d been hoping -- if he’s honest with himself, he’d been hoping quite badly -- that this would be one of the quiet nights, no final call-outs or interviews or paperwork, just a pint in the pub at the end of the lane and (if he’s especially lucky) some quiet conversation to go with it.
After last week’s scuffle with a mis-programmed clank that kidnapped a first-year Balliol student, he’d hoped that they were due a quiet one. Filing the paperwork to convince their Chief Super that they need the funding to repair one of the Force’s precious gondolas … that wasn’t on James’s wishing-list by a long shot.
He fiddles with the matter/alpha ion transmitter until he hears a quiet clink, and then jumps back before the engine starts turning over again. Sorted -- at least for the moment.
Lewis helps him strip the skin-tight leather gloves off without soiling his coat, and that’s enough to make James indulge in a quick internal grin. There’s no storm blown through the world yet that didn’t blow some wind through the turbines, as his gran used to say.
When Lewis touches him, James always feels the thrum of magic brushing against magic, the sparkle of it, the warm comfort. He’d not thought that he could look for this in a partnership -- never dared to hope for it -- and yet…
“I’ll drop you at yours, and then leave this at the garage,” Lewis says. “No amount of tinkering’s going to get the engine back to where it was. Best if Hammersmy gives it a look-over and a proper fix.”
“The paperwork-”
“Can wait until tomorrow,” Lewis says. James looks at him sideways, peeking through the corner of his eye, and then fixes his attention forward. The cobbled road rattles under them at a more sedate speed than usual.
“Aye, sir,” he says.
That, as his gran would say, is that -- for with Lewis walking back from the garage to his, there’ll be no stop at the pub for them. James slouches a bit in his seat and shoves his cold hands into his pockets.
The gondola rolls to a halt with a slight shiver in front of James’s flat. He touches the brim of his hat and nods at his governor before hopping down and away from the sparking of the ions. “Goodnight, sir.”
His housekeeper is waiting at the entrance for James, as patient as only she can be. (James renamed her Hudson last month, in a fit of whimsy, and she’d accepted it with the same phlegmatic whirring as she’d taken all his previous inspirations.)
It is a long process, peeling off the layers that he wears to face the world, and Hudson stands still, accepting items as he discards them. His brass-buttoned coat, his tall-brimmed hat, his badge of office and his amulet of protection. James loosens his cravat and toes out of his boots, finally passing the oil-soaked gloves to Hudson. “These will need to be washed,” he says.
She gives the clanking bob that serves as acknowledgement and putters off, busying herself with the dispersal and disposition of his garments. James bends his own energies towards his dinner. (He has long since learned that his housekeeper, whether he names her Mrs. Hudson or Mrs. Beeton, is a terrible cook.)
Silence echoes through his rooms, but it is a comfortable sort of silence, one that James is well fond of. The high-arched windows offer a sweeping view of Oxford in all its aquatint glory -- strange, still, that he should come here to this other city, trading those old familiar greens and riverbanks for these, for another set of well-trodden lanes spreading out and circling and connecting the hallowed halls of colleges and cloisters.
Sometimes, when he blinks, he fancies that he can see the familiar outlines and shadows of Cambridge overlaid on the here and now.
He wrestles with the gas range until he manages to pour a respectable cup of tea, raising it in a toast to Mrs. Hudson. She bobs at him again with a happy-sounding clank, and lays out the table before retreating back to her corner.
There are times, James thinks, eating as he stands leaning with his hip against the counter and staring into his milky tea, there are times--
Lewis has the knack of looking at a person and seeing. There are times when James thinks that Lewis is looking at him -- and then there are days like this one, James dropped off without a word or a look good-bye, and those days, his heart ticks over like an ion engine, faltering sometimes as it goes.
(On the other hand, James sometimes thinks that Lewis doesn’t see anything at all.)
In Cambridge, the daffodils will be bursting out along the riverbanks, bright heads bobbing with the breezes -- they bloom also in Oxford, but James fancies that they are not half as bright here. Perhaps it is the sunlight or the speed of the river or the shade of the petals.
He keeps a glass pot, where two goldfish swim around each other in circles, kept well in the confines of glass and water. James sits and watches them for awhile, the infinite circles somehow soothing.
He breaks the silence in his rooms with a sigh and by taking up his mandalay, strumming it around the percussive ticking of the pendulum clock in the corner and the occasional accenting whirr from Mrs. Hudson. The sweet sound of the strings rises and falls, the improvised melodic line never faltering. There are times when it is best to be content. (In statu quo res erant ante bellum.1)
*****
When the call comes in the middle of the night, it comes with the alembic glow and the low mellow thrumming of the message-bell. James reaches out and fumbles for it, the thrum bubbling under his fingertips as he wakes. “Hathaway,” he says, holding the sphere up to see it.
He can hear Mrs. Hudson moving around in the kitchen, the tread of her wheels on the floorboards -- the running water that carries with it the rattle of cutlery, the promise of tea.
Once fortified, James rushes out into the faint and strengthening pre-dawn light. The world is gray at this hour. He waits at the kerb until Lewis pulls up, then hops into the gondola next to him.
“Any word, sir? The duty sergeant wasn’t very specific when he called.”
The deceased is one Dr. Olivia Cuthbert-Cartwright, professor of Natural Linguistics and Foreign Languages at Christ Church. When found, she was clutching a runic dictionary and a divining rod, crystal-tipped. Lewis is a steady presence next to James, warm and solid in the dimness. His shoulder bumps against James every so often as he steers the gondola through the empty streets.
The Leys, next to Blackbird, is like all the small villages James has ever seen or heard of. It has an indescribable, inertial, inescapable pull. The villagers orbit one another in the same sedate social rounds, moving at set paces from the grocer’s to the butcher’s to the mechanic’s shop and back again, pausing at the pub for social lubrication.
(Like an electric magnet, a village’s pull is sometimes simply shut off - and someone escapes.)
The ley lines that run through the area, from the meadow, down the river, and down through the village, may be part of the case -- Laura Hobson has already started mapping them. James can feel them thrumming in the background, a low electric murmur distorted by the recent violence. Lewis, he knows, is even more sensitive to them -- it looks now as though there’s an itch running through his veins and into his bones -- James knows that kind of feeling, deep-seated and hard to ignore.
Olivia Cuthbert-Cartwright, if she was at all sensitive to such things, would have felt the loud, strident, thundering jangle of the ley lines before she died. It would have woken half the village. The discordance of violence and murder still batters at all of James’s senses even now, even after so many cases. It is more than he can count -- more than he will be able to measure.
(Batter my heart, three person’d God…2)
James shakes his head -- it is not helping. Lewis gives him a quick empathetic look and then sends him off, scraping his knuckles along the line of James’s shoulders in a gesture of comfort. “Go on, then,” he says. “You know what to do.”
James could, if he sifted through countless conversations, work out the history of the village -- the year that Mrs. Prindlow wasn’t speaking to Miss Barrymore, the courtship of Hymenela Brinks and Theosius Goodwin, the year the apple crop failed, the year Ellen Parker’s cat escaped and ate one of the exotic fish kept in the village pond- everything from the arrival of the new vicar, last month, to the crowning of the church with a new steeple, in 1262.
He does not find any threads tying Olivia Cuthbert-Cartwright to the village. She lived in the house at the end of Blackbird Lane, kept tidy trellises that bore roses flowering in three colours, commuted to Oxford city proper for her lectures and tutorials at the college. She seems to have lived apart from village gossip and the everyday communion of secrets.
“Bookish, rather, I should think,” Miss Barrymore says.
“Quiet,” says Eleanor Green, her neighbor.
“Lovely roses -- I’m sure she will be missed--” the new vicar, who had met her twice, and half the village. (None of them, James notices, say that they will miss her for any specific reason, and none of them utter more than empty pleasantries.)
They are going nowhere when Lewis finally calls a halt to it for the day. He helps James hop into the gondola, one hand on his elbow to steady him, and then clambers up into the passenger seat.
James drives them to the pub without asking for confirmation. He recognizes the tense set look on Lewis’s face.
They settle into a corner booth, near the electrical flickering of the fire. There’s a dew-fried atmosphere to the pub, quiet and cozy as it is at times - the crackling of the fire and the rustle of the servers zaps away the fresh atmosphere of the river.
There is an older woman sitting in the corner opposite them, knitting semi-flex golden wires into an aureola of a shawl, a mad silk haze forming and falling from her needles. James thinks of the apocryphal watchers of the Revolution in France, the Fates with their tapestries and threads of weft and warp, the sharp scissors that claim men’s lives. Her face is pale and sharp-edged - this woman looks, he thinks, a little like Olivia must have looked in life.
Her eyes, when she looks up and looks straight at James, are beetle-shell black, nothing like the faded sightless blue of Olivia’s. He blinks, and looks away, down at the life-rings running through the wood of the table. He traces one with a finger, the path the sap used to take.
(O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.3)
Lewis sets a fresh pair of pints on the table and the back of his hand brushes against James’s, soft and fleeting as a butterfly.
“It’s not so bad as all that,” he says, and it is not true -- for Olivia, at least, it is not true, and it may not be true for the rest of the world -- but James turns his face up to look at him, banishing the threat of dreams from his mind.
“We’ll figure it out, sir,” he says.
*****
The engine is already humming outside when James wakes in the morning, the crackle of ions thrumming through the air. He can feel the sound of it vibrating through the thin walls of the building, but if that were not enough to wake him, there’s Lewis pinging his message-bell.
“On my way, sir,” he says, calling out through the window casement before ducking inside and shoving his arms through the sleeves of his coat. He takes a copper canteen -- piping hot -- from Mrs. Hudson’s hands, and takes a quick gulp. It is hot tea, blessed tea, and he descends the stairs at a breakneck pace, taking them two at a time. He hops into the gondola and hands the half-empty canteen to Lewis, and watches the muscles of his throat move as he swallows the tea.
James spends a half hour waiting in the mortuary for Dr. Hobson, in the calm and the cool and the quiet. When she comes, the two of them stare down on the table at Olivia Cuthbert-Cartwright, her hair as gold as the Elysian fields, all spread out on the steel table. Dr. Hobson, he notes, has weighted her eyelids down with two coins, and cupped her hands together over her heart.
James, in another life, would have folded his hands together to pray. Instead, he fishes in his pocket for a brass-bound tablet. The trick, he reminds himself (he knows this), is not to think in might-have-beens. “Do you have anything for us?”
“Nothing that you didn’t know already,” she says. Her short hair is clipped in place with two sleek electrum bangle clips, framing her face and reflecting the light the way that the copper coins do.
The light in the mortuary, James has often thought, is a merciless sort of light. It speaks in some way to the knowing at the end of all things, knowing and unknowing, and the long shadows cast near the close of the day.
“No obvious cause of death,” Dr. Hobson is saying, continuing even while James is lost woolgathering like an errant shepherd, “no marks on the body, nothing to suggest - to suggest anything, really. The ley lines were all jingle-jangle throughout the morning and the eve before, so there’s nothing clear to be read there.”
“That means--”
“Probably means that it was planned, yes. Premeditated.” Dr. Hobson smooths back a stray wisp of her hair and then scowls at James. “Probably. It could mean anything … a quarrel somewhere else in the village, any sort of psychic disturbance loud enough to brangle the lines. You’d have a hard time convincing the magistarium or a lot of jurors that it was specific to this … not without more evidence, at any rate.”
“Evidence,” James says, with the little twitch of his lips that makes him look smug, “is our speciality.”
The morning creeps by like a black beetle-bug inching its way up a white wall, tedious and
conspicuous by how much out of place it is. James rearranges various bits and bobs of parchment stacked up on his desk, finishes the requisitionary paperwork for the gondola repairs, and signs off on countless other forms while drinking countless cups of tea, while looking at Lewis’s vacant desk.
(I have measured out my life with coffee spoons…4)
The afternoon light through the window is faded to the colour of unburnished gold by the time that Lewis arrives.
“You’re with me, sergeant,” he says, leading James down the corridor and into one of the suite of interview rooms, second door on the left.
The man seated at the desk is Professor Sterling Goodbody, head of the Linguistics Department and Cuthbert-Cartwright’s supervisor. James and Lewis sit at the opposite side of the desk, their elbows brushing as they settle into their chairs.
The diode lamp flickers as Lewis puts the stenographer-clank in action, a happy little whirr escaping from its innards. James clasps his hands together in front of him, resting them on the smooth wooden desk.
“What was your relationship with Olivia Cuthbert-Cartwright?” Lewis asks, as calm and cool as can be.
The jingle of the ley lines is enough to tell James that Goodbody’s lying, even before he speaks, when he denies any sort of relationship. “Colleagues,” he says. “Just--”
Lewis raises a hand. “You should know better than to think you can lie in here.”
With one finger, James traces patterns on the smooth steel table -- a fleur de lis, a stylised nightingale, a rose. A trellis full of roses. Olivia’s trellis of roses was heavy with buds and due to bloom in the next few weeks.
Children can pluck petals off of daisies, off of daffodils, off of roses, and count the chances of love, the chances of love returned. It is the oldest of cantrips, and like any well-worn spell, has some power of its own. (James does not dare try it.)
Goodbody loved Olivia Cuthbert-Cartwright, probably loves her still. He will not admit it.
Linguistics includes the study of ancient runes, Goodbody tells them when Lewis questions him about the large number of runic dictionaries present in his office. It is, he says, something of a speciality of his.
James didn’t study with Endymion Farthingale-Fippingdon for nothing -- he leans back in his chair at this, one elbow over the back of it and pressing into Lewis’s shoulder. “Oh,” he says, as casually as he might buy milk for his tea. “That’s interesting, considering that all of your scholarly publications -- your opus, if you prefer the term -- has been on Old English. Chaucer, the Pearl poet, Edmund of Hadenham, John Mandeville…”
He denies it, of course, and they deal with the tedium of information requests, interdepartmental paperwork, the order to keep Goodbody overnight under suspicion. Before he leaves for the night, Lewis touches James - a brush of his hand across James’s shoulders, a well-done, a silent benediction.
(Oh, the cleverness of me.5)
*****
They take the dirigible to Cambridge, James and Lewis, the two of them sharp-elbow-angled into stiff uncomfortable seats for the duration. It is the quickest way to travel, and James spends the time that they spend soaring looking down over the world, at its spotted fields and village church spires. Lewis, at his side, is a constant pressure and warmth.
They land in Cambridge, emerging from the crowded confines of the dirigible into sweet fresh air and light. The daffodils have bloomed already, and faded. James leads Lewis along the river and to the college, his college.
(It seems somehow that he has gone back in time, that at every turn of a corner he might meet his old self, stiff and solemn in sub-fusc, that he might have to deal with the grave and wondering look that then-James would give now-James, the questions that he’d ask of himself.)
Lewis has been quiet all throughout their journey, sharing his canteen of tea and a crushed packet of custard cremes. Their fingers had brushed across a plate of crumbs.
(The quiet moments, the inadvertent touches, James keeps these like secrets close to his heart, like the electrum thrum of new heart-valves, like the zipzap of a new motor turning over, precious and new.)
Endymion Farthingale-Fippingdon is, miracle of miracles, in his office. At the tap on the doorframe, he gestures for them to come in, and holds up a manuscript to the light.
“Incredible, this is,” he says. “I don’t doubt that you won’t appreciate it, dear boy -- if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times, what do they teach them at school nowadays -- but it is, with or without your appreciation, a truly remarkable find. I hardly dare ask, but at the risk of being disappointed -- once again -- do you know what this is?”
James rocks back on his heels, and blinks, and smirks, and does his best impression of Holmes. The manuscript appears to be parchment, old enough to be from Professor Farthingale-Fippingdon’s favourite time period. (The Professor, James thinks, hasn’t changed so very much in the time that James has been away.) It is well-worn, the ink faded, the corners worn away. He inhales, smelling nothing more than the usual book-eaten odor of the Professor’s office - no tinge of must or decay.
“At a glance,” he says, “I’d guess it’s a newly discovered manuscript that you’ve dug out of the Bodleian, probably lost for years somewhere in the stacks -- it looks to be contemporaneous with the Pearl poet’s writings, but you can hardly expect me to guess at the author from this distance.”
Farthingale-Fippingdon drops the parchment as soon as James starts speaking. “James, my dear boy! Our bonny blond-haired prodigal son! I didn’t know you were back in town!”
“Briefly, sir, and only for an investigation. We have some questions for you, if you can spare the time.”
“For you, my dear boy -- and for your friend, of course -- I have all the time in the world.”
Speaking to Professor Farthingale-Fippingdon is like a guided tour of the famous glasshouse at Kew -- illuminating, in more than one sense. He is more than happy, once they have removed to the nearest public house, to elaborate on Sterling Goodbody’s research, the poets of the fourteenth century, and what he knows about ancient runes (very little -- presumably, as much or more than Goodbody does.)
He is also happy, once Lewis has left the table to get another round in, to lean close to James, conspiratorially. “He’s the one, is he? I knew that you’d find yourself a someone, James. Why, a bright young lad like you, and the -- well, I won’t mention the essay that you wrote on the Green Knight when you sat an exam with me, but I hardly need to say, you were positively wasted in the Theological and Teleological Seminary. Why, we all thought so--”
Lewis returns, then, and James is blushingly glad of it. He is glad, on the one hand, that Farthingale-Fippington, who does not see Lewis through the flame of desire that James does, has seen this nonetheless -- but he’s relieved not to have to discuss it with his old professor. He steers the conversation back to the crystal-tipped divining rod that they found with Olivia Cuthbert-Cartwright’s body. There, however, Farthingale-Fippingdon has no insights to offer.
“Not my field, you know,” he says, quaffing half of his pint in one long pull. “Better to make inquiries in the Selwyn College of Ruinic and Ancient Magic -- you might have guessed that from their name, you know. Not to put a blunt point on it, my boy, but I do believe that you’re slipping.”
He gives James a wink as if to say that he knows why. James pretends not to see it. (If he hasn’t seen it, he need not acknowledge it.)
They take their leave from the Professor, with repeated promises of expert testimony and return visits, and James matches Lewis’s stride as they walk down the road. They are headed, James realizes, towards the dirigible field.
“Not to Selwyn College, sir?”
“We’ll telegraph to Innocent before we go,” Lewis says, the faint northern burr coming out in his voice. He must be tired. “She can get someone on it down in Oxford … there are experts aplenty there … anyhow, it hardly matters if we can get a full confession. With this to confront him with, Goodbody’ll have to tell us everything.”
In the darkness, James and Lewis walk past a hunchbacked curve of copper piping that bends back over itself to shine a light down on a street marker festooned with cobwebby tendrils. The light casts eerie foggish shadows over them, sharp and glossy as a blackbird’s wing.
James thinks that he sees Lewis smile at him, and his heartbeat thrums faster, and he feels as fever-hot as an aortical pump running at full speed. It’s impossible to see Lewis’s expression in the shadows, James knows, impossible to see a smile, but he hopes--
The dirigible takes them back to Oxford, and the silence between them has the silken, heavy feel of a smooth pebble falling into a stream -- inevitable -- and through the darkness and the pinkening of dawn, oh, how he hopes.
*****
The older woman with the beetle-black eyes sits in her corner, knitting -- Endymion, she calls James when he goes past her.
He pauses, the brimful glasses clasped in his hand, a trickle of bitter escaping over the rims to run down over his fingers. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever6,” he says to her, his voice rising to turn it into a question.
She nods and smiles, her needles clacking away. (James wonders if she is waiting for her Ulysses -- the golden shawl that she’s knitting seems to be never-ending.)
Just as he starts to walk away, she gives him a quote in return. Her needles click-clack in counterpoint.
James walks on without replying, and brings the pints to the table -- the table that he’s come to think of as theirs, these past few months.
“Cheers,” Lewis says, knocking his glass against James’s.
They sit in silence, James tracing the patterns of tree-rings on the table with one finger. Their glasses are half-empty when Lewis finally says, “It’s always love, isn’t it?”
James stops mid-sip, his heart thudding, his lungs empty. With slow and deliberate motions, he lowers the glass to the table. “Sir?”
“Every case we solve, I mean. It’s love, or love of money, or something like that. Olivia would be just fine today, if that sod hadn’t fallen in love with her.”
James’s heart beats again, slow and sure in its usual rhythm. “Philosophy before your second pint even, sir?”
“Give me another of your philosophical quotes, then. You’ve got a quote for every occasion.”
(Gather ye rosebuds while ye may7, the knitting woman had said, and James wants--)
He curls his fingers around his glass. “I suppose--” he says, hesitating, not giving Lewis a quote, but his own thoughts. “I suppose it’s what we all want, at the end of the day.”
Lewis looks up from his pint and straight at James. “Aye,” he says. “I reckon you’re right on that count.”
Back from Cambridge, in this familiar pub with Lewis, another case closed -- this, James thinks, is what he wants at the end of the day.
(He will go home to his bowl of goldfish, and Mrs. Hudson clanking merrily at him, and his mandalay, and -- he holds his breath with a prayer -- and perhaps Lewis will have a pint too many, will walk back with him in quiet tipsy companionship, will stay...)
Lewis looks at him, and smiles, and James thinks that perhaps, finally, he sees.
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” James says again, repeating it -- more to himself than to Lewis -- and he reaches across the table, across the traceries of woodgrain, and brushes his hand against Lewis’s, soft as a passing butterfly.
fin
*****
Notes:
1in statu quo res erant ante bellum, "in the state in which things were before the war"
2John Donne, Holy Sonnet 14
3 Shakespeare, Hamlet
4T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
5J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
6John Keats, Endymion
7Robert Herrick, To the Virgins, to make much of Time
Author: chiralove
Characters/Pairing: Lewis/Hathaway
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 4k-ish
Warnings: character death (nothing worse than you’d get in an episode)
Summary: Lewis helps him strip the skin-tight leather gloves off without soiling his coat, and that’s enough to make James indulge in a quick internal grin. There’s no storm blown through the world yet that didn’t blow some wind through the turbines, as his gran used to say.
Author’s note: A complete AU, because I rather fancied the idea of playing with the characters in a steampunk universe. Apologies for any “anachronisms” -- a few of the quotes, I know, don’t belong here -- except that they do.
The tick-over of the ballast in the ion engine stops with a final phirrr, and James stifles his groan in the sudden silence. He pulls on a pair of gloves and tugs the laces around his wrists until they’re tight.
Without another word, just a nod to his governor, he hops out of the hyperbolic gondola, keeping his attention focussed on the scuff marks made by the struts in the dirt, and then after he’s made his way to the back of the gondola, on the ion engine.
He doesn’t look at Lewis. He’d been hoping -- if he’s honest with himself, he’d been hoping quite badly -- that this would be one of the quiet nights, no final call-outs or interviews or paperwork, just a pint in the pub at the end of the lane and (if he’s especially lucky) some quiet conversation to go with it.
After last week’s scuffle with a mis-programmed clank that kidnapped a first-year Balliol student, he’d hoped that they were due a quiet one. Filing the paperwork to convince their Chief Super that they need the funding to repair one of the Force’s precious gondolas … that wasn’t on James’s wishing-list by a long shot.
He fiddles with the matter/alpha ion transmitter until he hears a quiet clink, and then jumps back before the engine starts turning over again. Sorted -- at least for the moment.
Lewis helps him strip the skin-tight leather gloves off without soiling his coat, and that’s enough to make James indulge in a quick internal grin. There’s no storm blown through the world yet that didn’t blow some wind through the turbines, as his gran used to say.
When Lewis touches him, James always feels the thrum of magic brushing against magic, the sparkle of it, the warm comfort. He’d not thought that he could look for this in a partnership -- never dared to hope for it -- and yet…
“I’ll drop you at yours, and then leave this at the garage,” Lewis says. “No amount of tinkering’s going to get the engine back to where it was. Best if Hammersmy gives it a look-over and a proper fix.”
“The paperwork-”
“Can wait until tomorrow,” Lewis says. James looks at him sideways, peeking through the corner of his eye, and then fixes his attention forward. The cobbled road rattles under them at a more sedate speed than usual.
“Aye, sir,” he says.
That, as his gran would say, is that -- for with Lewis walking back from the garage to his, there’ll be no stop at the pub for them. James slouches a bit in his seat and shoves his cold hands into his pockets.
The gondola rolls to a halt with a slight shiver in front of James’s flat. He touches the brim of his hat and nods at his governor before hopping down and away from the sparking of the ions. “Goodnight, sir.”
His housekeeper is waiting at the entrance for James, as patient as only she can be. (James renamed her Hudson last month, in a fit of whimsy, and she’d accepted it with the same phlegmatic whirring as she’d taken all his previous inspirations.)
It is a long process, peeling off the layers that he wears to face the world, and Hudson stands still, accepting items as he discards them. His brass-buttoned coat, his tall-brimmed hat, his badge of office and his amulet of protection. James loosens his cravat and toes out of his boots, finally passing the oil-soaked gloves to Hudson. “These will need to be washed,” he says.
She gives the clanking bob that serves as acknowledgement and putters off, busying herself with the dispersal and disposition of his garments. James bends his own energies towards his dinner. (He has long since learned that his housekeeper, whether he names her Mrs. Hudson or Mrs. Beeton, is a terrible cook.)
Silence echoes through his rooms, but it is a comfortable sort of silence, one that James is well fond of. The high-arched windows offer a sweeping view of Oxford in all its aquatint glory -- strange, still, that he should come here to this other city, trading those old familiar greens and riverbanks for these, for another set of well-trodden lanes spreading out and circling and connecting the hallowed halls of colleges and cloisters.
Sometimes, when he blinks, he fancies that he can see the familiar outlines and shadows of Cambridge overlaid on the here and now.
He wrestles with the gas range until he manages to pour a respectable cup of tea, raising it in a toast to Mrs. Hudson. She bobs at him again with a happy-sounding clank, and lays out the table before retreating back to her corner.
There are times, James thinks, eating as he stands leaning with his hip against the counter and staring into his milky tea, there are times--
Lewis has the knack of looking at a person and seeing. There are times when James thinks that Lewis is looking at him -- and then there are days like this one, James dropped off without a word or a look good-bye, and those days, his heart ticks over like an ion engine, faltering sometimes as it goes.
(On the other hand, James sometimes thinks that Lewis doesn’t see anything at all.)
In Cambridge, the daffodils will be bursting out along the riverbanks, bright heads bobbing with the breezes -- they bloom also in Oxford, but James fancies that they are not half as bright here. Perhaps it is the sunlight or the speed of the river or the shade of the petals.
He keeps a glass pot, where two goldfish swim around each other in circles, kept well in the confines of glass and water. James sits and watches them for awhile, the infinite circles somehow soothing.
He breaks the silence in his rooms with a sigh and by taking up his mandalay, strumming it around the percussive ticking of the pendulum clock in the corner and the occasional accenting whirr from Mrs. Hudson. The sweet sound of the strings rises and falls, the improvised melodic line never faltering. There are times when it is best to be content. (In statu quo res erant ante bellum.1)
*****
When the call comes in the middle of the night, it comes with the alembic glow and the low mellow thrumming of the message-bell. James reaches out and fumbles for it, the thrum bubbling under his fingertips as he wakes. “Hathaway,” he says, holding the sphere up to see it.
He can hear Mrs. Hudson moving around in the kitchen, the tread of her wheels on the floorboards -- the running water that carries with it the rattle of cutlery, the promise of tea.
Once fortified, James rushes out into the faint and strengthening pre-dawn light. The world is gray at this hour. He waits at the kerb until Lewis pulls up, then hops into the gondola next to him.
“Any word, sir? The duty sergeant wasn’t very specific when he called.”
The deceased is one Dr. Olivia Cuthbert-Cartwright, professor of Natural Linguistics and Foreign Languages at Christ Church. When found, she was clutching a runic dictionary and a divining rod, crystal-tipped. Lewis is a steady presence next to James, warm and solid in the dimness. His shoulder bumps against James every so often as he steers the gondola through the empty streets.
The Leys, next to Blackbird, is like all the small villages James has ever seen or heard of. It has an indescribable, inertial, inescapable pull. The villagers orbit one another in the same sedate social rounds, moving at set paces from the grocer’s to the butcher’s to the mechanic’s shop and back again, pausing at the pub for social lubrication.
(Like an electric magnet, a village’s pull is sometimes simply shut off - and someone escapes.)
The ley lines that run through the area, from the meadow, down the river, and down through the village, may be part of the case -- Laura Hobson has already started mapping them. James can feel them thrumming in the background, a low electric murmur distorted by the recent violence. Lewis, he knows, is even more sensitive to them -- it looks now as though there’s an itch running through his veins and into his bones -- James knows that kind of feeling, deep-seated and hard to ignore.
Olivia Cuthbert-Cartwright, if she was at all sensitive to such things, would have felt the loud, strident, thundering jangle of the ley lines before she died. It would have woken half the village. The discordance of violence and murder still batters at all of James’s senses even now, even after so many cases. It is more than he can count -- more than he will be able to measure.
(Batter my heart, three person’d God…2)
James shakes his head -- it is not helping. Lewis gives him a quick empathetic look and then sends him off, scraping his knuckles along the line of James’s shoulders in a gesture of comfort. “Go on, then,” he says. “You know what to do.”
James could, if he sifted through countless conversations, work out the history of the village -- the year that Mrs. Prindlow wasn’t speaking to Miss Barrymore, the courtship of Hymenela Brinks and Theosius Goodwin, the year the apple crop failed, the year Ellen Parker’s cat escaped and ate one of the exotic fish kept in the village pond- everything from the arrival of the new vicar, last month, to the crowning of the church with a new steeple, in 1262.
He does not find any threads tying Olivia Cuthbert-Cartwright to the village. She lived in the house at the end of Blackbird Lane, kept tidy trellises that bore roses flowering in three colours, commuted to Oxford city proper for her lectures and tutorials at the college. She seems to have lived apart from village gossip and the everyday communion of secrets.
“Bookish, rather, I should think,” Miss Barrymore says.
“Quiet,” says Eleanor Green, her neighbor.
“Lovely roses -- I’m sure she will be missed--” the new vicar, who had met her twice, and half the village. (None of them, James notices, say that they will miss her for any specific reason, and none of them utter more than empty pleasantries.)
They are going nowhere when Lewis finally calls a halt to it for the day. He helps James hop into the gondola, one hand on his elbow to steady him, and then clambers up into the passenger seat.
James drives them to the pub without asking for confirmation. He recognizes the tense set look on Lewis’s face.
They settle into a corner booth, near the electrical flickering of the fire. There’s a dew-fried atmosphere to the pub, quiet and cozy as it is at times - the crackling of the fire and the rustle of the servers zaps away the fresh atmosphere of the river.
There is an older woman sitting in the corner opposite them, knitting semi-flex golden wires into an aureola of a shawl, a mad silk haze forming and falling from her needles. James thinks of the apocryphal watchers of the Revolution in France, the Fates with their tapestries and threads of weft and warp, the sharp scissors that claim men’s lives. Her face is pale and sharp-edged - this woman looks, he thinks, a little like Olivia must have looked in life.
Her eyes, when she looks up and looks straight at James, are beetle-shell black, nothing like the faded sightless blue of Olivia’s. He blinks, and looks away, down at the life-rings running through the wood of the table. He traces one with a finger, the path the sap used to take.
(O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.3)
Lewis sets a fresh pair of pints on the table and the back of his hand brushes against James’s, soft and fleeting as a butterfly.
“It’s not so bad as all that,” he says, and it is not true -- for Olivia, at least, it is not true, and it may not be true for the rest of the world -- but James turns his face up to look at him, banishing the threat of dreams from his mind.
“We’ll figure it out, sir,” he says.
*****
The engine is already humming outside when James wakes in the morning, the crackle of ions thrumming through the air. He can feel the sound of it vibrating through the thin walls of the building, but if that were not enough to wake him, there’s Lewis pinging his message-bell.
“On my way, sir,” he says, calling out through the window casement before ducking inside and shoving his arms through the sleeves of his coat. He takes a copper canteen -- piping hot -- from Mrs. Hudson’s hands, and takes a quick gulp. It is hot tea, blessed tea, and he descends the stairs at a breakneck pace, taking them two at a time. He hops into the gondola and hands the half-empty canteen to Lewis, and watches the muscles of his throat move as he swallows the tea.
James spends a half hour waiting in the mortuary for Dr. Hobson, in the calm and the cool and the quiet. When she comes, the two of them stare down on the table at Olivia Cuthbert-Cartwright, her hair as gold as the Elysian fields, all spread out on the steel table. Dr. Hobson, he notes, has weighted her eyelids down with two coins, and cupped her hands together over her heart.
James, in another life, would have folded his hands together to pray. Instead, he fishes in his pocket for a brass-bound tablet. The trick, he reminds himself (he knows this), is not to think in might-have-beens. “Do you have anything for us?”
“Nothing that you didn’t know already,” she says. Her short hair is clipped in place with two sleek electrum bangle clips, framing her face and reflecting the light the way that the copper coins do.
The light in the mortuary, James has often thought, is a merciless sort of light. It speaks in some way to the knowing at the end of all things, knowing and unknowing, and the long shadows cast near the close of the day.
“No obvious cause of death,” Dr. Hobson is saying, continuing even while James is lost woolgathering like an errant shepherd, “no marks on the body, nothing to suggest - to suggest anything, really. The ley lines were all jingle-jangle throughout the morning and the eve before, so there’s nothing clear to be read there.”
“That means--”
“Probably means that it was planned, yes. Premeditated.” Dr. Hobson smooths back a stray wisp of her hair and then scowls at James. “Probably. It could mean anything … a quarrel somewhere else in the village, any sort of psychic disturbance loud enough to brangle the lines. You’d have a hard time convincing the magistarium or a lot of jurors that it was specific to this … not without more evidence, at any rate.”
“Evidence,” James says, with the little twitch of his lips that makes him look smug, “is our speciality.”
The morning creeps by like a black beetle-bug inching its way up a white wall, tedious and
conspicuous by how much out of place it is. James rearranges various bits and bobs of parchment stacked up on his desk, finishes the requisitionary paperwork for the gondola repairs, and signs off on countless other forms while drinking countless cups of tea, while looking at Lewis’s vacant desk.
(I have measured out my life with coffee spoons…4)
The afternoon light through the window is faded to the colour of unburnished gold by the time that Lewis arrives.
“You’re with me, sergeant,” he says, leading James down the corridor and into one of the suite of interview rooms, second door on the left.
The man seated at the desk is Professor Sterling Goodbody, head of the Linguistics Department and Cuthbert-Cartwright’s supervisor. James and Lewis sit at the opposite side of the desk, their elbows brushing as they settle into their chairs.
The diode lamp flickers as Lewis puts the stenographer-clank in action, a happy little whirr escaping from its innards. James clasps his hands together in front of him, resting them on the smooth wooden desk.
“What was your relationship with Olivia Cuthbert-Cartwright?” Lewis asks, as calm and cool as can be.
The jingle of the ley lines is enough to tell James that Goodbody’s lying, even before he speaks, when he denies any sort of relationship. “Colleagues,” he says. “Just--”
Lewis raises a hand. “You should know better than to think you can lie in here.”
With one finger, James traces patterns on the smooth steel table -- a fleur de lis, a stylised nightingale, a rose. A trellis full of roses. Olivia’s trellis of roses was heavy with buds and due to bloom in the next few weeks.
Children can pluck petals off of daisies, off of daffodils, off of roses, and count the chances of love, the chances of love returned. It is the oldest of cantrips, and like any well-worn spell, has some power of its own. (James does not dare try it.)
Goodbody loved Olivia Cuthbert-Cartwright, probably loves her still. He will not admit it.
Linguistics includes the study of ancient runes, Goodbody tells them when Lewis questions him about the large number of runic dictionaries present in his office. It is, he says, something of a speciality of his.
James didn’t study with Endymion Farthingale-Fippingdon for nothing -- he leans back in his chair at this, one elbow over the back of it and pressing into Lewis’s shoulder. “Oh,” he says, as casually as he might buy milk for his tea. “That’s interesting, considering that all of your scholarly publications -- your opus, if you prefer the term -- has been on Old English. Chaucer, the Pearl poet, Edmund of Hadenham, John Mandeville…”
He denies it, of course, and they deal with the tedium of information requests, interdepartmental paperwork, the order to keep Goodbody overnight under suspicion. Before he leaves for the night, Lewis touches James - a brush of his hand across James’s shoulders, a well-done, a silent benediction.
(Oh, the cleverness of me.5)
*****
They take the dirigible to Cambridge, James and Lewis, the two of them sharp-elbow-angled into stiff uncomfortable seats for the duration. It is the quickest way to travel, and James spends the time that they spend soaring looking down over the world, at its spotted fields and village church spires. Lewis, at his side, is a constant pressure and warmth.
They land in Cambridge, emerging from the crowded confines of the dirigible into sweet fresh air and light. The daffodils have bloomed already, and faded. James leads Lewis along the river and to the college, his college.
(It seems somehow that he has gone back in time, that at every turn of a corner he might meet his old self, stiff and solemn in sub-fusc, that he might have to deal with the grave and wondering look that then-James would give now-James, the questions that he’d ask of himself.)
Lewis has been quiet all throughout their journey, sharing his canteen of tea and a crushed packet of custard cremes. Their fingers had brushed across a plate of crumbs.
(The quiet moments, the inadvertent touches, James keeps these like secrets close to his heart, like the electrum thrum of new heart-valves, like the zipzap of a new motor turning over, precious and new.)
Endymion Farthingale-Fippingdon is, miracle of miracles, in his office. At the tap on the doorframe, he gestures for them to come in, and holds up a manuscript to the light.
“Incredible, this is,” he says. “I don’t doubt that you won’t appreciate it, dear boy -- if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times, what do they teach them at school nowadays -- but it is, with or without your appreciation, a truly remarkable find. I hardly dare ask, but at the risk of being disappointed -- once again -- do you know what this is?”
James rocks back on his heels, and blinks, and smirks, and does his best impression of Holmes. The manuscript appears to be parchment, old enough to be from Professor Farthingale-Fippingdon’s favourite time period. (The Professor, James thinks, hasn’t changed so very much in the time that James has been away.) It is well-worn, the ink faded, the corners worn away. He inhales, smelling nothing more than the usual book-eaten odor of the Professor’s office - no tinge of must or decay.
“At a glance,” he says, “I’d guess it’s a newly discovered manuscript that you’ve dug out of the Bodleian, probably lost for years somewhere in the stacks -- it looks to be contemporaneous with the Pearl poet’s writings, but you can hardly expect me to guess at the author from this distance.”
Farthingale-Fippingdon drops the parchment as soon as James starts speaking. “James, my dear boy! Our bonny blond-haired prodigal son! I didn’t know you were back in town!”
“Briefly, sir, and only for an investigation. We have some questions for you, if you can spare the time.”
“For you, my dear boy -- and for your friend, of course -- I have all the time in the world.”
Speaking to Professor Farthingale-Fippingdon is like a guided tour of the famous glasshouse at Kew -- illuminating, in more than one sense. He is more than happy, once they have removed to the nearest public house, to elaborate on Sterling Goodbody’s research, the poets of the fourteenth century, and what he knows about ancient runes (very little -- presumably, as much or more than Goodbody does.)
He is also happy, once Lewis has left the table to get another round in, to lean close to James, conspiratorially. “He’s the one, is he? I knew that you’d find yourself a someone, James. Why, a bright young lad like you, and the -- well, I won’t mention the essay that you wrote on the Green Knight when you sat an exam with me, but I hardly need to say, you were positively wasted in the Theological and Teleological Seminary. Why, we all thought so--”
Lewis returns, then, and James is blushingly glad of it. He is glad, on the one hand, that Farthingale-Fippington, who does not see Lewis through the flame of desire that James does, has seen this nonetheless -- but he’s relieved not to have to discuss it with his old professor. He steers the conversation back to the crystal-tipped divining rod that they found with Olivia Cuthbert-Cartwright’s body. There, however, Farthingale-Fippingdon has no insights to offer.
“Not my field, you know,” he says, quaffing half of his pint in one long pull. “Better to make inquiries in the Selwyn College of Ruinic and Ancient Magic -- you might have guessed that from their name, you know. Not to put a blunt point on it, my boy, but I do believe that you’re slipping.”
He gives James a wink as if to say that he knows why. James pretends not to see it. (If he hasn’t seen it, he need not acknowledge it.)
They take their leave from the Professor, with repeated promises of expert testimony and return visits, and James matches Lewis’s stride as they walk down the road. They are headed, James realizes, towards the dirigible field.
“Not to Selwyn College, sir?”
“We’ll telegraph to Innocent before we go,” Lewis says, the faint northern burr coming out in his voice. He must be tired. “She can get someone on it down in Oxford … there are experts aplenty there … anyhow, it hardly matters if we can get a full confession. With this to confront him with, Goodbody’ll have to tell us everything.”
In the darkness, James and Lewis walk past a hunchbacked curve of copper piping that bends back over itself to shine a light down on a street marker festooned with cobwebby tendrils. The light casts eerie foggish shadows over them, sharp and glossy as a blackbird’s wing.
James thinks that he sees Lewis smile at him, and his heartbeat thrums faster, and he feels as fever-hot as an aortical pump running at full speed. It’s impossible to see Lewis’s expression in the shadows, James knows, impossible to see a smile, but he hopes--
The dirigible takes them back to Oxford, and the silence between them has the silken, heavy feel of a smooth pebble falling into a stream -- inevitable -- and through the darkness and the pinkening of dawn, oh, how he hopes.
*****
The older woman with the beetle-black eyes sits in her corner, knitting -- Endymion, she calls James when he goes past her.
He pauses, the brimful glasses clasped in his hand, a trickle of bitter escaping over the rims to run down over his fingers. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever6,” he says to her, his voice rising to turn it into a question.
She nods and smiles, her needles clacking away. (James wonders if she is waiting for her Ulysses -- the golden shawl that she’s knitting seems to be never-ending.)
Just as he starts to walk away, she gives him a quote in return. Her needles click-clack in counterpoint.
James walks on without replying, and brings the pints to the table -- the table that he’s come to think of as theirs, these past few months.
“Cheers,” Lewis says, knocking his glass against James’s.
They sit in silence, James tracing the patterns of tree-rings on the table with one finger. Their glasses are half-empty when Lewis finally says, “It’s always love, isn’t it?”
James stops mid-sip, his heart thudding, his lungs empty. With slow and deliberate motions, he lowers the glass to the table. “Sir?”
“Every case we solve, I mean. It’s love, or love of money, or something like that. Olivia would be just fine today, if that sod hadn’t fallen in love with her.”
James’s heart beats again, slow and sure in its usual rhythm. “Philosophy before your second pint even, sir?”
“Give me another of your philosophical quotes, then. You’ve got a quote for every occasion.”
(Gather ye rosebuds while ye may7, the knitting woman had said, and James wants--)
He curls his fingers around his glass. “I suppose--” he says, hesitating, not giving Lewis a quote, but his own thoughts. “I suppose it’s what we all want, at the end of the day.”
Lewis looks up from his pint and straight at James. “Aye,” he says. “I reckon you’re right on that count.”
Back from Cambridge, in this familiar pub with Lewis, another case closed -- this, James thinks, is what he wants at the end of the day.
(He will go home to his bowl of goldfish, and Mrs. Hudson clanking merrily at him, and his mandalay, and -- he holds his breath with a prayer -- and perhaps Lewis will have a pint too many, will walk back with him in quiet tipsy companionship, will stay...)
Lewis looks at him, and smiles, and James thinks that perhaps, finally, he sees.
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” James says again, repeating it -- more to himself than to Lewis -- and he reaches across the table, across the traceries of woodgrain, and brushes his hand against Lewis’s, soft as a passing butterfly.
fin
*****
Notes:
1in statu quo res erant ante bellum, "in the state in which things were before the war"
2John Donne, Holy Sonnet 14
3 Shakespeare, Hamlet
4T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
5J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
6John Keats, Endymion
7Robert Herrick, To the Virgins, to make much of Time