Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There were duties when leaving a narrowboat, but Diana wouldn’t allow him the time and he didn’t intend to ask. Let that old barfly drone of rationalisation begin, feeling like a boy skiving his chores. What was the worst that could happen, leaving her, really? She was moored. No old yokehorse these days to be unhitched or watered or fed. No load to secure against inclement weather. Hatches and doors could stay unlocked for all he cared, there was nothing of value inside to mind. The highest risk, the stove was lit.

But he’d made the fire well. The stove door was shut. And he’d asked Charlie Strong to clear out the chimney after his last trip out with Lizzie and the kids, so he probably wouldn’t cause a fire and burn down the whole thing. At the worst, the fire might suffocate and simply go out.

At the worst, or even at his best, this still shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.

In the car, Tommy nearly laughed at the focused silence of her driver, because there was no other reason for Diana to be bringing a man dressed like him to a hotel. They didn’t talk. They didn’t indulge the driver’s ears. Then Tommy stood in the hotel foyer, shirtsleeves rolled up and cap tugged low and he took his time with his cigarette. Right to the fingers, leaf laced with the smoke of the leaf burning before, tasting almost as bad as smoking the discards they used to scrape together from the street outside the pub.

Diana watched. Tommy watched Diana, too. Wondered if this would be easier if she’d been dark like Lizzie. The blonde looked too much like what he’d buried those years ago, glittering like cut glass to bloody his hand. Running out of women who didn’t look like other women. If Lizzie found out, he’d have only redheads left to fuck in his old age.

No. No old age. Only this.

Lady Diana Mitford was patient while he made the moment stretch. He wanted to make Diana say it, God swallow that unsteady rage, he wanted her to fucking say it. Order him. Make it obvious. The rage went away. Only a tiredness, this push and pull at the thought of being recognised with her in this busy foyer. The increased risk something might get back to Lizzie. But the other side, too, a hope they were recognised, because it scratched at him uneasily, this particular proving, her dressed like that and him dressed like this. If Mosley was somehow contriving to hit him with a charge of rape, or to blackmail him with this somehow, there might be some doubt if people witnessed him and her together at peace.

It hurt so much to think that word for some reason. Tommy Shelby, gone down at last for rape. The one thing he’d never done. He was so careful about that. He knew there was a line. It was barely a thread.

Tommy withdrew another cigarette. Charlie Strong’s packet lifted from his pocket in the yard because he’d forgotten his own. Kept forgetting things lately. The fourteen days of the American’s visit nearly complete. Nelson would be at Arrow soon, spirit of fellowship, anchor their deal, then Tommy would drive him to the train station and it would be nearly done. Everything wound up like clockwork, and all Tommy had left to do and risk was in Miquelon.

Almost everything.

Tommy shook the cheap paper packet to loosen the cigarettes and offered Diana one.

The problem was. The problem was Diana. Scoped her before he knew she was fucking Mosley. He'd imagined her halfway between Tatiana and May, with her titles and emeralds and amphetamines and parties, playing, playing with people. Another woman who’d be delighted to scandalise by sponsoring her bit of excitement into their circles. They’d do what he wanted out of interest and amusement and from their position of power, as beguiled by him as if by a talking dog. He would be that dancing dog to get what he wanted. Guinness would either donate the land for status or allow Tommy to buy low. Then there were all the others he’d found, landed aristocracy who could no longer afford their land. They would sell, too, once he could get his approach legitimised by Lady Diana Mitford. His housing bill implemented with the greatest of ease, with the usual government objection, the unfeasibility of procuring that much land, resolved by these means only available to such as him. He who knew nothing of virtue.

That was his plan from before.

Before he’d known about her and Mosely, before what Diana said to Ada, before Egyptian fucking vases, before so emotionally mutilated, before I fuck women too. Before and they ate grass. Before he’d listened to this woman say all that while glittering like ground glass in the light while he stood hidden in the shadow in his own house and the recoil of a submachine gun still bruising his bones.

But there was no reason to divert from his plan. Just because there were difficulties. Just because the lines were crossed. More reason to stay the course, those difficulties. He couldn’t risk an unexpected consequence, both for the housing bill and for his plans for Mosley and for the connection with Nelson. His own death was scheduled on his fucking calendar, now. There would be no time to recover again. No recalibration of plans. No more long play.

That barfly drone of rationalisation.

But this was what he did. What he'd always done.

‘No,’ Diana said to his stolen cigarettes, calm. ‘Thank you for the offer. But that’s not what I want. Perhaps after.’

She turned and walked away.

Keep moving forward.

Tommy followed.

In the elevator, which was a modern one with no operator, Tommy put his arms around her and went to kiss her and put his hand up her skirt, a little rough, letting the familiar movement tug at him, the pulse to thicken, because this was what they wanted and this was what you did, and this way you could get something out of it too, because fucking always felt good.

Diana let him lift her skirt roughly and looked into his eyes and said, ‘Oswald said you go like this with him. When he fucks you. So very quiet.’

It fucking went through him like—

Like—

‘He likes the quiet. Your compliance. Your submission. I’m not sure I do. Tell me your thoughts, Thomas.’

They all come together at the point where she stands, those tunnels in your mind. Then the walls collapse.

The war he’d never properly come back from, and this coming war she and those people would start, send him to start, send him to fight, send his sons, send his brothers and family and friends to that terror, that mud. A childhood that never should have been that way, and she could be a bridge to a future he’d painstakingly contrived to be written in the near-immutability of legislation, and maybe some child could avoid a life like that again. All the things he’d done and worn and carried to get to where he was, and all those things she’d never have to do, or that she did only as a game, because filth and shame didn’t stick to the upper classes no matter how many they fucked, how many they killed. And it was petty, God, he was so petty, but he hated so much that she even looked that bit like Grace, alive and about to be in his arms when Grace wasn’t. She was everything, Diana. Everything came to her.

Now there was that other thing, too. Mosley. Fucking her. Fucking him. Fucking Lizzie. Now this. Everything came together in Diana. Then it would all come apart. He couldn’t let it fall apart.

Should’ve let Mosely fuck Lizzie instead. It would have been easier, she would have found a way through it like everything else and wouldn't have lost herself. They wanted to use her to put him in his place. They only wanted her to show him what he was. It was nothing to do with her. His own fault for daring to think he really could have everything. But he already knew he was nothing except what they gave him. The sooner they understood that, these games could stop and he could get on with the work.

No. No more work. He was finished. He just had to get through this.

‘You take my breath away,’ Tommy said instead. ‘From the first time I saw you.’

He was dying. He didn’t want to die. He was unspeakably furious about it. He would fight and beg and crawl through rivers of vomit for every last breath. Done it in the war, done it in the tunnels, refused to die in the collapse. He dug his way out, so many little deaths of fear and striving along the way. So many times now and he was still fighting, become a habit. He couldn’t seem to convince himself there was no way out this time. Still digging, a reflex.

‘That’s so sweet, Thomas. I wasn’t expecting that.’

Tommy tried again. Reframed it in his mind. Every time I see you. I can’t fucking breathe. That's what he should have said. But he'd never been one for words with women.

Diana swayed into him, clawing at his hand, her skirt bunching. Pushing him into her thigh, rubbing herself on his cock through the trousers.

‘You are difficult to read. Oswald warned me. I would have sworn you looked like you were throwing yourself to the lions.’

‘I am. This is what you want.’

‘But this is what you want. To do what I want. So who is the lion?’ Diana pulled him close. ‘I know. I will anoint you and clothe you like an emperor, cape and crown. You will preside over it all. There will be cigars and cocaine. Then you will spread your wife on a table as a starter dish and let the commoners at her all night. That’s what you like.’

The cigarette to his lips. Up and down. One hand doing one thing for her and the other doing this. ‘And for mains.’

‘You’re the mains, Thomas.’

Of course he was.

‘We can’t forget to invite your sister. Such a sharp and clever tongue. I shall clothe her as an Egyptian queen. For dessert, you and she will marry each other in my bed. The way it used to be done. Then we'll all fuck. It can be our little secret.'

The elevator doors opened. Diana stood in that threshold, wiggling her skirt back into place for modesty for the distance between here and the room’s door.

'I’m not sure about your brother, yet. Unsuitable for a civilised table. But Oswald has thoughts about a collar for him. And a leash. Perhaps Oswald will let you hold that leash.’

He should move now.

‘Here we are,’ Diana said.

Here they were.

She took his hand and led him on.

The hotel was middling cost. The carpet in the corridor worn down the centre by years of feet. He was annoyed, and darkly amused at his annoyance. He would have taken her to somewhere much higher quality. In the room he looked at the cheap purple bedsheets which probably hadn’t even been washed and let himself indulge that hint of disgust. Better than remembering Tatiana’s hand on his brother’s sizeable erection. Better than remembering the whipping every time his sister fled the girls’ dormitory into his bed.

‘So you like playing pretend. Dress-ups.’

‘I thought it might interest you,’ Diana said. ‘Given you’ve been playing it yourself for so long.’

She sat on the bed’s edge and unbuttoned herself. A sign he should remove his clothes. He couldn't.

‘You looked surprised that Oswald told me that he fucked you. You must know he tells me everything. I also enjoy fucking both men and women.’

Ripe, round breasts, flat nipples that never fed a desperate baby. Tommy stared. Didn’t hold a bar to Tatiana’s breasts, he’d still be dreaming about those if he could be sure it wouldn’t slide into nightmare. Enough flesh he could cup her and fuck his cock between if he wanted. He could come between those breasts all over her throat, then cut her throat. How funny that he’d reached this age having done the latter and never the former. Something to add to the list of things to do before he died.

Lizzie was so slight, though. A mouthful and no more.

Tommy smiled. It was that funny.

Diana smiled at his smile. ‘Though for Oswald, it’s less generic enjoyment than something specifically about you. You inspire it.’

The feel of his lips moving wider, deep and crooked. Aching in the muscle of his cheek. All his life. This magnificence of being so fucking special. He must wear it on his face like his father's Glasgow smile, what he couldn’t stop being done to him.

Then Diana beckoned him, she hooked him in, away from that half step of retreat he’d nearly made, she pushed him down, he went to his knees, so it would be like this, it would be easy.

He slid off Diana’s shoes. She took the cigarette from his lips, touched it to hers, watching him. He moved his hands higher, found the absence of undergarment between the garters. All tucked up and tight and shallow, flat as the pages of a book with a broken spine, a straight silken seam down the middle and hairless in the way of an expensive Chinese whore, this fashion adopted by the aristocracy. Tommy licked the tips of his fingers, one hand, tasting faintly his cigarette, the oiled rope from the boat. Heard her breath catch when he did the other hand as well.

Both hands back under the skirt to peel her open.

She made a very nice noise when he put his fingers in her. So wet. Impossibly wet.

‘The way you opened to him, Thomas.’ Diana lay back on her elbows, that arch of her back in pleasure to invite him to look between her legs. But he’d forgotten his glasses, it was all a blur. She walked her feet along his thighs, up to his shoulders, flexed. Curled to look at his face again. ‘As if you took cock every night. As much cock as your wife. Do you?’

Couldn't speak. Shook his head with a trace of rue, as if he wanted to take cock every night, but, alas, his particular circumstance would not permit.

‘So it's special for you too. With Oswald.’

Special was one word for it.

Then Diana laughed, almost snorting, giggling, uncouth.

‘Oh, Thomas. I do appreciate you trying. This game you and Oswald play of plausible deniability. It doesn’t matter. We can see you running in those circles behind your eyes. All your rationalisations, around and around. The lies you tell yourself. You’ve fought so hard against what you are, but it’s in your body. It's in your blood. You need this.’

Her nails along his nape then up into his hair, finding that lump of the old scar.

She said, as if delivering revelation. She said, as she'd said it in his house while he stood in the dark. ‘To be told to eat grass. The relief you feel when it's all made clear. No more struggle. Let it go. We know what you are. You are free to enjoy the grass.’

Tommy pushed his face against her inner thigh, the right one. Put his teeth around the garter strap and ripped it free, the stocking beneath tearing and laddering down the knee to the ankle. Saw the pale flesh earn a small red stripe from that tiny piece of his violence.

Now he was hard. He could undress. Harder than he’d been able to get for Lizzie in a while, somewhere in his cracked skull letting that dark shadow of himself run an imagining of this fucking bitch helpless and split apart around him, around his hands, his wrists, his cock, changing that bland featureless cunt to one which would never know itself again. Couldn’t leave a mark on her, though. Felt guilty even about the stocking. This same odd ringing trepidation from before, that word like a bell. The one thing he’d never done. Why did he keep thinking it? Imagine leaving Charlie with that for a father. Not that on top of everything else.

But Diana narrowed her knees, held him half-crouched between her legs.

‘Open your mouth, Thomas. Open to me, as you did for Oswald. Balance in all ways.’

He didn’t fucking want to put his mouth on her, realised only right then. Something plaintive in him crying about it. Something pathetic. He wanted to keep something for Lizzie, and that was a thing only done for a wife. If he couldn’t fuck Lizzie again between now and the day he died, he could still use his mouth and it would be enough for him, cradling her through her pleasure while her hips rocked his head and feeling it with her, the way familiarity allowed, softer and kinder than what he deserved.

But he was in this moment. In this room. Too late. No conditions. Tommy leaned forward.

Diana let him get close enough his nose touched the bare skin between her legs. Then she pushed him away with a palm on his forehead, it sounded like a slap, you stupid boy, and he flinched.

‘No.’ She took another drag on the cigarette she took from him earlier, the ember glowing in the dimness like a single eye. ‘Listen, Thomas. I said open your mouth.’

A moment of foresight. Scant protection for when she ground the cigarette out on his tongue, pushed it in, then pressed his jaw closed.

He was in this room, and he had a plan. He couldn’t fucking remember a plan, but there was always a plan. Had to trust he’d put himself here for a reason. He couldn’t leave a mark on her. That was also important. The rest of his mind was blank.

This used to be easy.

But it was easy. She had a lovely body which had never known hardship. She was soft and wet and warm, and so smooth. It was sex. Sex felt good. Even roiling in shame and humiliation and wrongness, it still felt good because bodies were built for it. An old lesson well learned. Take what you can, even a cock up the arse. And look, there it was in return: Diana’s glittering eyes softening in surprise, a flush in her cheeks, nipples warming and pinking and she tucked him in close and really held him. There it was. How to make her feel, her body finally making sense to his hands and his cock. There it was. Diana shook and heated and came apart for him, oh, look at her creaming thick around him as he moved in her, getting on the hair of him, wet all over her thighs. Look at her arch and moan and pull pleasure and air from him, too, because that’s how you knew it was good, you had to feel it, too. If Mosley fucked her the way he’d fucked Tommy, that fucking in-out Freud-sanctioned thrust with no thought for the pleasure of stretch and none of the grind, no wonder this poor little rich girl with her shallow bookish cunt was surprised at what Gypsy cock could make her feel. This tiny little glimmer like pride, look at you, look at you go, eat your fucking grass and love it, pleasure building and building—

Tommy pulled out before he came. Concentrated on the pain in his mouth until the inevitability faded. Leave nothing, not even a mark. Diana was still heaving beneath him, legs around his hips and breasts on point, eyes mostly closed. Maybe she wouldn’t notice with how wet she was, sheets already damp beneath her.

The realisation of why she was so wet. She’d come to him with Mosley in her.

Diana reached up, gentle. Kissed him.

Now came the after. Tommy tried not to begrudge it.

Because one day soon there wouldn’t be an after. He didn’t long for it, but he was tired. If only he could be sure there was rest on the other side. For now, Tommy resigned himself to that after. Put the rage aside. It had nowhere to live. He rubbed his wedding ring on his finger and felt the ash between his teeth.

He'd thought it would grit, like dirt. But the ash was soft. The ash was forgiving.

Tommy dressed. Naked and louche, Diana pulled him to sit next to her on the bed, gentle and affectionate. She smoked another cigarette and used his mouth like an ashtray. He felt like they must have talked about something during that. Probably they spoke of more sex, the next time this would happen, because she didn’t know there were no more afters. Another game for the lady player. He thought he might have said to her: if she couldn’t guarantee Guinness giving him Solihull, then he would give her a list of names instead, some of her set, she could broker a deal between them and him for the sale of their land, where he'd play the new money who would solve their current financial difficulties with minimal public embarrassment. The cigarette moved forward and back, and his mind skipped a few seconds forward every time her finger hooked between his lips so it could be done in his mouth and he didn’t have to be there for it, only the softness after. Such a clever devious thing, this mind of his, keeping him sane with these little tricks and traps and mazes and mines, finding ways to let this happen, himself lying to himself, to his body, to let it get on with it, this version of a truth, so he could be that useful man just like it'd done during the war, when he'd been buried alive.

Tommy thought Diana might have agreed this time, to help him. He might even have fucking begged her to help him in one of those skipped moments. This was important to him. He had to leave something behind. This had to be worth something.

Her eyes were full of that shining wonder throughout, almost awe. No one had ever looked at him like that before. Like he was some precious thing. Stroking his hair, his face, his neck, his lips. He was still thick under his trousers, not hard anymore but heavy and unspent, a deferred urgency. Her nails dragged over that as well, through the fabric, through their conversation, through her slow torture with Uncle Charlie’s cigarettes. The awe in her eyes glittered so cruel and wonderful.

Look at him. This thing he’d become.

After.

Tommy found himself on the narrowboat. Sprawling on that narrow bunk where his father slept with his mother and fucked her willing and unwilling for years while they all listened and did nothing. Where Dad built that cupboard in the slender space overhead to hold all the books that only Tommy was interested in. Where Mum sat with her pointwork stretched between her knees and Tommy read those books to her, and she was so very pleased at how proper he sounded, so proud, that he never had the heart to tell her.

Where it was so warm, it was always warm from that stove no matter the weather outside. Something they never told you, something you didn't expect. How warm it was under the ground where there was no air. Because he was in the tunnels. He was the tunnels. He was that unclean water of shit and mud and the parts that were once men and fear and regret. He was the rats, the rats who thrived. No more dread. He knew what he was. He knew what he could survive. In any bath he would no longer be clean. He leaned over the side of his tub, God, but he'd loved that bath, now unclean, soiled black from the filth of him. He considered his pile of bodies. It would grow much larger before he was done, no more lying about it. No more pretending. Only that grand slithering regret, he was disembowelled by it, this feeling of a cock pulling out of him after too long in, and everything that came after, hollowed and made useless. There was only one clean thing left, this fragile silvery thread of water connecting him from sky to ground off the peak of his cap, and it was the same thread from the rain from the storm from the night Ruby died. It was a thread. He knew where it led.

Chapter Text

Tommy tried to lift his head, found his neck bowed and frozen, muscle locked. Between his feet, this familiar scuffed wood with no trace of filth or dirty water. How many times he and Arthur scrubbed that wood clean. How many more mistakes that couldn’t be unmade until everything stopped in disgust with a firm no more?

Ah, he’d forgotten. A mortal man. That was why the dread was gone.

On that well-scrubbed wood floor, Arthur knelt between Tommy’s knees, blood in strings from his nose, returning by the day to that desperate bone and wire as he had been in their hungry youth. Ever since sons took the father’s offering and turned it to shit and thought that meant it was done.

It wasn’t Dad who’d done that to Arthur this time. It was Tom. Five tonnes, seven, enough for veins to run brown.

On that narrow bunk, Tommy held Mum against his chest despite her fighting and forced her blouse open. The baby was starving to death. She had to feed it, that was her job. He'd done what he could but he couldn't do this for her; wouldn't give a baby to the priests and the nuns while milk wept through her clothes in want of a mouth. Tommy forced her to the baby, trying not to look.

This was what her body was for. Willing or unwilling.

You did what was needed, Mum said to him seven months later, that dying infant become named brother, plump and smiling, reaching for faces. A good thing you did, Tommy. Your hand the one who does what has to be done for us.

Her eyes to his, mirrors. She said, as if there were to be no consequence.

The hand could do what needed to be done, moving between unclean to the clean, lower to upper, touch the impure and yet cradle the face, the head, where they couldn’t be let in; what must be kept from the filth, the head the furthermost from what was done and took down there. Of course they cursed him. She blamed him and he blamed her.  She returned on a white horse with no words. He departed on the same.

She was the one who found the way through.

Mother. It was in the water all along.

That unclean water where she told him to send her infant dead, where she would have cast Finn away before he had more to him than a day's breath and their father’s name. Oh, it’s in the blood, Pol, it is. The blood you let out, the blood you let in.

They curled together on that bunk, Ruby that baby with kitten-soft hair between them, this impossible fit. They dozed to the sound of Charlie running above in delight, feet like little thunder. Chasing dragonflies, Tommy knew, carefree, as he had done before.

‘You promised,’ Lizzie murmured. ‘Now look at us.’

Her baby was dead, not sleeping.

She blamed him.

‘You know what I am, Lizzie.’

They came for her because of him.

Tommy blamed Lizzie. She should have remembered who he was, the elder and more terrible. That’s what he blamed her for. She didn’t know him.

‘You never change.’ Lizzie kissed the dead baby, stroked the hair. The way the naked corpse lolled and moved at her touch split him like that spear. ‘Dead men can’t, I suppose. That was my mistake. Thinking what you sold me was real. Was I ever family? Was I only ever that outsider while you carry on with no shame for the snake oil you sold me?’

She looked at him with blonde hair and ruby lips and hard-cut eyes, glittering.

‘In the interests of absolute clarity,’ Diana said, ‘this is absolutely your fault, Thomas. Raven-haired truth climbs from the well of blood in which you tried to drown her. The ceremony of degradation begun with that impure act seeding you on this very narrowboat now reaches its apogee. Before it ends, know this: you shall grovel before the Prussians in the full knowledge that concealing your pollution and foul acts also denies your virtue.’

Unclean. Let it in, touched and let it in. Hand to filth to mouth. Cock to filth to—

Something like a smile. ‘What does a thing like me care about virtue?’

‘These touches of human conscience you think you feel. Your occasional surge of moral superiority for those moments of shame and honour. But they never divert you, Thomas, those moments. They never change you or your path, because you know the truth you try to hide: you will never have the opportunity to appear honourable to those such as us. If there is no honour there can be no shame.’

Diana put her slanted mouth against his and spoke in time with him.

‘The things I do for the cause. All for the plan. Remember. This is business.’

The boat welcomed a familiar step, which meant Tommy must have brought her safe along the leg to Uncle Charlie’s yard. These gaps and spaces in his mind like missing teeth.

Tommy stared at the stove. Another duty to be done, so he checked the stove. He’d been worried about the fire going out, but it was all right. Threw in another lump from the scuttle and with his bare hand he turned the coal into the heat, sparks flying. A hundred glowing cigarettes, his hand recoiling before thought. It never used to hurt. His hand had been tougher when he was used to the work.

The call came from above. ‘You all right, Tom? Been here a while.’

‘Just thinking.’

‘Get you into trouble, that.’ A mutter barely heard. ‘Especially that head of yours.’

Tommy smiled at his hands, which were black with coal.

There were only two directions to go, so Tommy met Uncle Charlie above. At the boat’s rail, mooring rope coiled about his shoulder, Tommy stopped before crossing over, rocking on his heels as if struck. Charlie went ahead at that pace before realising, turning.

‘What colour was Mum’s hair?’

Uncle Charlie frowned.

A finger pointing, keeping Charles Strong pinned. ‘Keep thinking white. But that was the horse, the one I rode when I took off with Dogs. The one I sold. Can’t be right, Mum going white that young. I have a photograph of her and us kids and she was dark, black as truth. After Ada but years before Finn.’

‘I know the image.’

‘It’s in my office, that picture. I can’t remember which office. What a problem to have, eh?  In which fucking office did I leave my mother’s photo. I need to find it, it’s important I find it, find them. Make them ready, what needs, what needs to go. Dad’s vardo, too, get that wheel repaired. Why can’t I remember the colour of her hair when she died?’

Charlie Strong put out his hand as if about to take Tommy by the shoulder. Comradely. Instead, Charlie took the mooring rope away from him and turned to the task at hand. ‘She went away, returned with the pony. She’d gone full grey.’

‘Grey like salt.’

‘Grey like a gun,’ Uncle Charlie said, coiling. ‘Or a good steel knife.’

‘Grey or white. It's the same when it comes to horses.’

Quizzical over the shoulder. ‘You should go on, Tom. I’ll see to her, lock her up and put her to bed.’

For a moment, Tommy thought Uncle Charlie meant Mum. But he meant the black barge.

Tommy nearly said, I’ll help you.

will you help me will you help me help me

not that not that not again

i know what virtue is you fuckers you fuckers

you can’t know until you’ve had to crawl for it

on his back, on his belly, always the mud

once he killed them all, what’s left was

not virtue, Polly hissed, you fucker

Something released, near giddy.

‘You must have known how he fucked about with us.’

Uncle Charlie waited with rope at the other end. Waiting for Tommy to come through. 

‘Yeah. He was useless. A useless man.'

And what were you what didn’t stop him?

Tommy heard the doubled words from a grand distance, more than one voice, chained together, leaden and horrible, no gap between the one and the other, the reoccurance of their flesh.

‘How about her, eh?'

'What about her?'

What she planted in their heads, her children. Cracked them open like those coconuts and put it right in. What they were. What they deserved. What he deserved.

‘No paragon,’ Uncle Charlie said eventually, quiet, ‘But she got you through, didn’t she. You don't know what she took.’

Our superior mothers, our holy fathers. The sacred family brought together under God with no man to cast that asunder. Only those within could do that. If they had no limitations, if they were as that god and had no shame.

‘We got each other through. My brothers and sisters and I.’

Uncle Charlie’s gaze dropped, tongue moving over his teeth behind that closed mouth.

‘Not your fault, Uncle. You could not stop it then and you cannot stop it now. The inevitability. Then, now, and what will come to be. It doesn't follow us. It is us.’

Said too much from this uncaring distance. But it didn’t matter, Tommy decided. Because Uncle Charlie knew, he always knew, and he never did a thing about it. Tommy could reach for the shoulder, conciliatory, paternal, clap his hand around Uncle Charlie’s narrow bones and rock him back and forth, gentle.

Charlie stared from his cap’s shadow with eyes gone glassy. ‘Tom.’

‘You look to Duke now. Useful decision he’s made. He’s a chance, and now he can be your chance. A fucking chance you never had with me. This time you won't have a hair of worry lost on thought for his father.’

Ragged. ‘Where will the Gypsy boy’s actual father be while he gets his shovel into the horseshit and learns lessons you never did?’

‘I’m to Arrow, Uncle Charlie. I’ve a guest tonight. There’s business.’

Blinking, rapid, Uncle Charlie bent to moor the narrowboat. ‘Always some fucking business.’

There was only business. Once the business was done, there would be nothing.

On a brisk pace to the car when it caught up with him again, rolled over him, flattened him and fattened him, yawning at him like a pit or the slack loop of a rope. The old rhythm of his pace through these familiar streets took over, the body took over. Those easy, simple demands. It knew what to do. Business, the oldest business, his body lying so well for him that even he couldn’t tell what was lies and what wasn’t any more. Diana tried more than once to have him on his back, to ride him. Each time Tommy handled her in heat and fury and passion to put her on her back instead. Her delighted laugh at his gentled force, his insistence that he be the one to cover her, please, he said, let me, let me fuck you, I'll fuck you, because he couldn't take it on his back, these women looking down on him.

These stinking familiar streets until he stood at the door, the liar he was: dressed as a working man, hands black with coal, cock wet with another woman and her man. This shitty six-room brothel posing as a club where Lizzie once held a room.

He tugged his cap low.

How many more mistakes –

It was done. Didn’t matter.

The club’s business model worked well enough then, and so it worked well enough now. Large ground floor of tables and drinks, less than half the size of the Garrison's public bar and selling drinks twice the price and half the strength. New furniture, fewer windows. Near empty at this hour but opening in readiness for the evening rush, one girl worked behind the bar with loose blonde hair bright as Grace, sweeping filth with a soiled rag, sweat stains on the shirt’s collar. Only one other man within, his shaved skull blank and facing away, the two girls with him laughing loud.

Dark-haired and narrow, crown barely reaching his shoulder, she moved to his side and placed a hand on arm. ‘Buy me a drink, soldier?’

Too young. ‘You must see it on my face.’

She moved her own in response, but he couldn’t have guessed the expression. ‘Sure. Your face.’

‘You’re not what I’m looking for. No hard feelings.’

Her eyes dragged along him, up and down, and for a moment a spark transformed her. ‘Shame. Hard feelings are what it’s all about.’

Inwards, deeper. Two girls in a booth at the rear entertained themselves with cards, Spite and Malice, by the looks. Years past, he’d sat here with John and Arthur and too many women for three men. With Lizzie before he’d known her name, in those dead hours neither the night before nor the day after, buying her drinks, lighting her cigarettes, because a soldier who once called him Sergeant-Major punched her in the face when she’d tried to soothe him back to English soil.

Short hair, ashy blonde, in a contemporary, well-set cut. Into her middle age and plush. Her nails were clean, and her hands were skilful on the cards. Tommy put his offer on the table and pinned it with a finger.

The flick of their gazes at the coin, the wedding ring, then the man.

Tommy held the blonde’s eye and ignored the other. No recognition. He’d been hoping for recognition but couldn’t remember why. He needed to be known.

‘I’d like a drink. Get one for yourself, too.’

There were rules in places where everyone pretended they weren’t a whore.

The other abandoned her cards, scattered and exposed.  The blonde’s smile turned practiced and bright. ‘Of course, love. What are you having?’

‘Let’s drink in your room. I’m in a hurry. You lodge upstairs?’

The nape was Diana’s, the column of throat. The curve into spine and jaw. That must be why. A red drape stained the light in her room, softened her body and the gentling touches of maturity. Tommy pulled a chair from the small dresser and sat facing the bed, knees wide. Words might slide into strange places, so he gave a circling motion of his hand. She showed him her back while she undressed, steady motion not quite a dance but easy invitation. He watched the nape the whole time.

Lizzie last night in one hotel. Diana in another. This. A little effort and he might well knock off seven before sundown.

Naked, she made as if to turn, saying something he didn’t hear. The hiss out of his own mouth surprised him, finger up, cutting her off. Pointed. Shouldn't look at her nudity front on, though he didn’t know why. She stopped mid-motion and again understood what Tommy hadn’t said. Reading things from him unrelated to words. Hands and knees on the bed and on display, facing away, while he couldn’t yet move from the chair.

How about that. Red hair down there, nothing like the blonde above.

If he touched her, something would happen. He needed to touch her. He shouldn’t touch her. Just stick his cock in, let her deal with lining him up. Not even his hands on her hips. This congestion coiling in him, wretched, feeling like—

Holding a loaded gun. Just point and shoot, Michael—

—except he hadn't, neither of them had. Fucking impotent cousins. The cost, the fucking cost those extra moments of life and breath they'd left in that holy father, this chain of consequence looping them together—

—waiting, shivering, wanting it to happen because it was always better done. Anything but waiting. He could make it happen faster and it felt like he was the one controlling the happening, that tipping point, if he opened his mouth, if he pushed them into it, the consequences—

She wept into the pillow, his hand on her head because he couldn’t risk the neck, pushing her face away and blonde hair awry. His cock forced into her—

The slash of that blade opening an eye, opening flesh like mouths, a gash.

Blind and frozen, the only motion came from those relentless thrusts as if pumping a corpse. The sheen of a mirror in firelight. Sweat-sheen on pale stippled skin turning the body unfamiliar, as if it were someone else.

Fucking break, break that unseeing mirror, never again, he was fucking past this, wasn’t he, all worth fucking nothing if it couldn’t guarantee that never fucking again—

‘Am I your first for today?’

She was that whore and Tommy had money. Shop shutters were open and goods were on display, oiled and ready for the workshift to start. He looked at her cunt like a normal man.

‘Lucky you,’ she confirmed, moving in that practiced mechanical way. ‘The early bird.’

‘The early bird catches something.’ She didn’t appreciate the joke, movements faltering. ‘Do you want to fuck me?’

‘Sweetheart,’ she said, unsteady voice, ‘that’s what you and I are here for.’

Reading things not in words.

There were thimbles on display in odd spots around her room. Porcelain with tiny, delicate paintings, blue and white china, lattice. More than a few done with the familiar roses-and-castles, small and fine, but those same colours and shapes on black enamel. Arthur used to touch up the paintings on the boat, that surprising patience he had with brush or chalk, that steady hand.

Every part of her shouted unease.

Wrongness was rolling off him in waves, boiling away, Tommy knew that, he knew when it happened. Gone too far for him to do anything about it, lay on that manner that horses needed for handling or they'd kill you: calm, controlled no matter what roiled inside. He'd been better at it during the war. He could lay it on in the House. But here, in a whore's narrow room, it was beyond him.

He needed to get it out of him. As for the prostitute and her worries, they were in the heart of Peaky territory. A man who reeked of blood with filthy hands in a whorehouse was hardly unexpected. She needed to get on with it.

She stayed on the bed. He stayed on the chair.

Tommy kept seeing more of them. An ivory cluster beneath the lamp, silver ones lined up like marching soldiers on the windowsill. Must a joke with herself. What does a thimble offer a working girl?

Protection from the pain of a prick or a poke.

He had to remind himself to look at her cunt. Like a normal man.

Maybe she enjoyed travel, bought the thimbles when she went about instead of the commemorative plates, the spoons. Easier to move if she was moved along. Couldn’t have much certainty in accommodation with her work.

Jesus. Maybe she just fucking enjoyed sewing. He didn't fucking care.

‘Make yourself come,’ Tommy said.

The hesitation sliced through her again. No. Be honest with himself, if no one else, if he could remember how to be: it was fear. She craned her neck to look at him, at his wide-spread knees and the erection spoiling the line of his trousers, the twist of her head spoiling the line of what looked like Diana. She might trust his intentions if he had his cock in hand, thumbing the wet from them caught under his foreskin.

‘You must know how to please yourself. Go on. Enjoy yourself.’

Her earlier welcome, those knowing tones now something tremulous. ‘That what you like? To watch?’

‘Doesn’t matter what I like or what I don’t, that’s what I told you to do. This is the order of things.’ Tommy reached for his billfold, dropped a scatter of notes on the floor. ‘There you go. Take the shilling, ease your conscience. Get on with it, yeah?’

The opposite happened. Abrupt, she sat, staring wide-eyed at him for a beat. Scrambled to clutch a robe from the side table over her tits and nearly forgot her cunt.

‘I don’t play games, mister. I’ve been in this business for a long time. One scream and the lads are here in three seconds. Take your dosh and go.’

What had he done except sit and feel? Was he not even allowed to feel? He would behave, he always did. He’d even asked, even though he paid. Making doubly sure. Tommy trembled, clenching hands to fists to stop it.

‘Look at me. Do you know my name?’

She fled from the bed into a corner, trapping herself, because in that chair he was too close to the door. She slid down the wall a little as if her knees were weak. ‘No games. Please. Get out. I have—I have a gun.’

‘What a coincidence.’

She had no gun, Tommy knew, but neither did he. Wild as horses, her gaze lurched to where he’d left his cap on her dresser, considering the brim.

They were reflected together in that small round mirror on the wall above the dresser.

Come, Diana said. On the boat. In the bed. As if it were to come on her command.

No, he thought. No, fuck you. No. I will not.

This petty fucker he was.

Writhing and arching in something that might have been pleasure. Did she see? God, did Lizzie see he couldn’t help fucking moving with it, on it, he couldn’t help himself? Christ, but it’d been hours, sweat and come-slick, relentless, cock heavy between his legs as if turned to stone, the unfeeling, dragging weight of it, and Tommy wanted, fuck, but he wanted to come—

‘I am always that devil, it seems. Who paid you well to enjoy your work. What a crime. You don't want to please yourself, that's eight bloody—’

It wasn’t eight pounds scattered on the floor. Nor ten.

‘That must be near a hundred quid. Not enough? What are you worth then, eh? What I am worth?’

Her eyes moved across the money. She chewed her lip white. Her face made no sense to him, but the robe dropped slightly as she stared at the money, one tit unveiled, a hand sliding along the thigh, inching in to her red-dusted crotch.

So shy he could almost believe it was real.

Then she looked at him. Not the money. A mistake. A shudder went through her, colour dropping from her face and fingers curling to a fist.

‘No,’ she croaked. ‘Please, sir. Please. I don’t want no games, I don’t want no hurt. I have a child. I don’t want this. Please take it and go. Or I can,’ licked her lips, ‘I could find you another girl, the wild ones. But I can’t.’ Near a wail, ‘I know it won’t stop there, I know, I don’t want no fucking games I can’t ever win—’

Tommy stood. Put on his cap. A vague gesture at the floor. ‘For your trouble.’

Should have been night, rain slashing through his vision, a rolling storm. He drove through an idyllic afternoon, sky white and smooth as milk, insects singing in the fields. Charlie didn’t run for the car this time. Never again, Tommy suspected, and suddenly missed what used to vex and please him together, his boy with that critical eye and those demands of his father, demands what faded over time to these things which were easier for Tommy to do for him.

Narrowed these days to the buying of gifts.

But that was all right, too. Gifts were important because he gave them, he could afford to give them, and he couldn't afford more. He couldn’t hold Charlie ever again.

Jacket and cap to Frances, who met him at the door. ‘Preparations are in hand for tonight's guest, Mr Shelby. Is there anything else I can do for you?’

His cigarettes were on the console where he’d forgot them. Tommy thought, wildly, of Mary coming down the stairs in response to the mad duchess’s bell. The one in love with the master.

‘Whiskey.’

‘Mr Shelby?’

‘A thimbleful, Frances. No more. Thank you.’

Weariness overcame him on the third step and he couldn’t climb further. Tommy could hear Lizzie’s voice, Charlie’s response, because they were in Ruby’s room with the door open. He sat on the stair and listened to the sweet nonsense sounds of real people too far away for him to touch. Stared at the unlit cigarette in his fingers. Took the tumbler from the tray Frances offered, that full measure despite his words, and didn’t look at what he’d see on her face or what she might see on his.

Whiskey would burn going down after so long without. He couldn’t quite feel anything real just yet, only tired, only that deferred, aching inevitability that kept men moving. If he drank, if the whiskey burned, he would know he was still alive. He didn’t want to test that yet.

The wreaths from Ruby’s funeral were gone, the way these pieces and parts of her would go. Her room would empty eventually because Lizzie was pragmatic about these things. At some point, Lizzie would wake up and find herself capable of saying goodbye, and she would let Ruby go. Tommy wouldn’t have to worry about that. He knew the count of days left in a year.

Not many men had the chance to do what needed to be done before the end. He was grateful. Enjoying his grass.

He’d known what he needed to do before he started the car. Just didn’t want to. Thinking it through, testing the angles. Testing his script. There were those days left to get through. And there was Lizzie.

Swallowed what he could of the whiskey, coughing, wretched, and the world reeled around him. Blind and clutching. Something stung, something burned.

Something felt really fucking good to still be alive.

By the time Tommy steadied, Lizzie had come to the stair, sat by his side on the higher step. She’d took the glass from his insensate hands, placed it safe by the baluster; he had spilled between his knees and on his thigh. Took his cigarettes, too, and was in the process of lighting up.

Tommy moved as close to Lizzie as he could, shoulder touching her leg. His head dipped despite himself, cheek brushing her arm. Lizzie only looked at him, the oddness of what he was doing, sitting so close like that. Suspicion with a hint of amusement.

There would be life again, said that amusement. There was grief but it would pass and there would be life again. Only Tommy knew this was a lie, and she didn't know because he wouldn't tell her.

Gathered her hand, pressed her fingers to his lips. ‘Tell me to get on my knees.’

Lizzie raised an eyebrow. ‘On the stair?’

Tommy collected her other hand, examined closely his rings on her, her elegant little wrist and narrow bones against his blunt ones. Her cigarette held between two fingers, he caged her fist within his. She let him move her the way she had her other hand, trusting, though it must be clear he wasn’t going for a kiss this time.

He turned her hand so he could put the cigarette out on his tongue. Did a good job of it, hearing to his shock the sizzle and a lancing pain.

Instead of running, hitting him, screaming at him, Lizzie snorted. ‘That kind of day, was it?’

That was in no version of the script he’d tested in his mind. Tommy reached across her for the whiskey to buy some time to think, then realised he couldn’t drink any more than he could have brought himself to fuck the whore or smoke that cigarette.

‘John used to do that when he was playing young cock-of-the-walk, remember? Showing off to his table of champagne girls in the old club or in all that posturing before a fight. The trick—’

Lizzie lit another cigarette, puffed to searing with the ease of long practice. He watched, bemused, as Lizzie tilted her chin high and put the cigarette out on her tongue, long bare neck lascivious, the thick flutter of lashes and hungry look towards him. The look swept away, sad and prosaic again, as if she’d been possessed by a ghost of Lizzie’s past he'd nearly forgotten.

‘Mouthful of spit and it’s nothing.’ Lizzie lit the cigarette again with a frowning effort for the wet at the tip, resumed smoking.

‘Ah. That’s my problem. Not enough spit.’

Not enough preparation. Forgetting performance was performance and living it instead.

‘I’m such a useless whore,’ Tommy said. ‘After all that. Not enough spit.’

Expressions raced across Lizzie’s face again, side-eyeing him, Lizzie who wore everything on her face. Her knee knocked into his, her palm on his thigh. How had he ever thought it difficult to know what she wanted from him? It was obvious.

‘Not usually your problem.’ Lizzie settled on concern. ‘Did you really burn your tongue?’

‘Might have.’

'I thought you didn't want to be hurt any more.'

He had never wanted hurt.

‘But why’d you do it?’

It was important. It was the plan. ‘I don’t know. Sometimes I do things. Necessary things.’

‘Tommy.’

‘I don’t know why. I don’t know why I did it.'

She never recoiled when he shouted at her anymore. Lizzie leaned in, stroking his hair away from his face. ‘Show me.’

Let her in.

Tommy gave in. His mind skipped.

Lizzie brought her cigarette close—

No, not her.

After a moment, Lizzie must have pulled her finger out. He returned to this in between place on the stair where his two wives and mother and lovers wore black and stood over him, but only one held her hand out to that recalcitrant, aching child and ordered him to come hither.

‘It’s not that bad. You’ll get an ulcer. Come on, we’ll do some salt water, clean your mouth out.’

When he didn’t move, Lizzie sighed and grabbed his wrist, pulled hard to bring him to his feet.

—she pulled him flush, vicious, wrist twisted high and painful, staring down from above as a milk-eyed angel. What are we to do with a coconut?

Tommy had the money safe in the pocket stitched into the inside of his trousers. He knew the family finances, had known since he was five, watching and learning, this way it was done that no school could do. Not to be wasted on coconuts and top hats. Tom was the watcher, so he'd watched the market boys mucking about with a crate of old coconuts, exotic things gone to waste near that back of house midden-heap, cracking them open for fun, which was how he learned the trick to get them open with no hammer and no force. Throw the coconut high with a spin on, and when it landed, the thing cracked open down the centreline, half-and-half. Easy enough to lift one with quick fingers from the crate in passing, given he already collected a prize he'd watched fall from the head of an inebriate gentleman in the crowd near the whorehouse. A top hat proved the perfect size to hide a coconut inside. Was only on his way to Watery Lane to stash his finds, too risky to carry a top hat about, before returning to his duties. Except Mum had been home as well, unexpected.

These things he found and added slowly to his collection. Red glass fallen from a ring in place of a ruby, silk and lace and lost earrings, a monocle, a quill pen, these tokens of ladies and gentlemen who passed through their territory as exotic beasts. Once, the so-very-elegant handle of a door he’d lifted from a construction site of a grand new manor across the grass, him and Arthur watching those walls rise higher every Saturday while they were working the boat, chancing a nocturnal adventure to raid the walls as if a ruin. The art and craftsmanship in that functional metal was unreal, the cost of it; imagine having a door handle that cost more than Dad’s boat. 

Truth wouldn’t appease a woman, though. Never did, Dad said; against women and outsiders, the only real defense a man had was his tongue.

This way Dad said things as if law, then did what he would. 

Consequence unavoidable, Tommy might as well say what he wanted.

Eat it, Mum, enjoy it. We deserve it.

Marched to the kitchen as if that child about to take a beating, readying himself for it. But there was no beating. Only hot water, this luxury, salted to rival the ocean's brine then topped to lukewarm from the coldroom cistern. Tommy rinsed and spat obediently on Lizzie’s order. Repeated. The third time it kept coming despite himself, stomach forcing out what filled him, Lizzie’s hand resting between his shoulder blades.

They stared together, speechless, at the wretched blackness swirling down the drain, cigarette butts crumpled and sodden in the swirl. Strings hung from his lips, thick and cloying. Frantic, turned on the tap and washed it down, washed his mouth until all the ash and brine was gone. Then he could steady. 

He’d expected one. Maybe two. He couldn’t have stayed in that room with Diana for that long.

‘How about that,’ he said, mildly.

After a moment, Lizzie pulled him close, fierce. She staggered in lockstep with him to the bench at the table where they came to rest, and he could only feel grateful he wasn’t sprawled on the floor. Tommy's hands were cramped, unable to uncurl. Tried to force it but failed.

‘I thought it was a business meeting where you were. Where did you go?’

After long moments, he managed, ‘The yard.’

Solihull. Small Heath. Home.

Fingers clawed through his hair, that Irish lilt, a veil of bright gold hair. ‘Is it that tunnel in your mind again, Thomas?’

‘How about some variety today, eh? Let’s say I’m in a hole.’

Thigh-deep in mud and parts, bodies disgorged from the walls every time it rained like teeth ejected from swollen gums, unwanted. Even the earth had enough of boys and men, filled up too much and spat them out again, rejected. A gash of sky overhead and fringed with tattered black, that sky that swallowed his scream and screamed back.

‘Right. You don’t want to be the horse in a crate? I like that one. Sometimes I can help that one.’

‘No. A hole it is.’

‘All right. Is it a nice hole?’

‘I hope so. Dug it myself. I’m good at digging. Never stopped.’

Not a claw, not that nightmare. Lizzie’s hand was so soft, gentle.

‘There’s a skill to it, or what you’ve done disappears and all that work's to nothing. The trick is. The trick. There's a time when it's stable or when the brace is in, but until then, can't stop. Lizzie. Can't stop. Or it’s to nothing. Do you understand? I will not stop.'

His whole body shook, not wanting to go on, but that came from the head. The body would perform if he put it there. It would keep digging until it was done.

‘A hole, Lizzie. That pile of bodies. You know the name of that fucking hole.'

Now she trembled, too. Tommy meant the words to be comforting.

'It's all right. It’s my pile this time. I am the whore.’

Her voice like a lash with these hands always gentling. ‘Christ. Throwing it about as if it meant nothing. You bring it up, you tell me to let it go. You’re the one what can’t let it go. Fucking holes. You don’t know what it was like.’

‘Don’t I?’

‘One man, Tom? Even if you—two, three, I don’t know with you anymore. If I ever did. No, you don’t know. Until they’ve fucked you one after the other, not ten minutes between. Every night, four years, five. Until that smell of it don’t wash off so easy. Until men carry that knowledge away from you and it’s out there, it’s in the eyes of the women in the bathhouse who hold their nose when you walk by, it’s in the market and dressmaker’s and those who will and won’t serve you, it's the way they clean the chair you sat on before they'll take that seat themselves, if they don't demand another. Sixpence we’re talking, Tommy, if you're lucky. Not even shillings. What you’re worth. You don’t get no medals, there’s no union. No certainty, no safety.’

What was she even saying to him? He knew. He knew all that. It was the same.

‘They will never let us in, Lizzie. Don't feel shame. Nothing you do or have done will ever make us any more acceptable to them.'

She looked at him, shimmering. ‘God, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry whatever’s in your fucking head. That mad horse.'

'Knew what I was worth once. I’ve forgotten. Have to remember.’

'It’s not your grave you're in, Tommy. You’re in a bed with silk sheets. Stand up. Walk out.’

They looked at each other.

‘Tell me why you won’t.’

'Legacy. For the family. I need to take care of the family.'

'You already have a legacy and it is enough. Everything Michael lost you made back in less than a year. Why is this still going? Tell me something I can understand.'

'Because they won't even burn us when they come. That's why.'

Bury me standing, Grandad said, if they won't let you burn me, bury me standing, for I've spent my life on my knees.

They'd crucify a few as examples but won't waste good wood on the rest. They use a rope that many times all that's left is a bloody thread. Then they use a bucket with five inches of water, just enough to hold a face under, just enough to drown, until the water goes black with the spit and death and curses of those who've gone before. They bury us alive, Lizzie, hundreds screaming in the same hole as wet earth rolls over like a blanket, babies hid in their mother's helpless arms and fathers who can't look at the upturned faces of their sons. And we both know what they do with the sisters, with the daughters and girls in times of war and mass extermination, don't we.

'It's a Gypsy thing,' Tommy said. 'But you don't need to worry. You're not Gypsy. You get to walk away.'

Cutting. ‘I said something I can understand.’

His mouth moved without thought, that scorpion on the tongue that stung both ways. ‘How about this, then, you want—what you know, what you understand: I enjoy it, Lizzie.’

The grass. He must do. He was still doing it, wasn’t he, night after night, ten years? Twenty. Thirty. Longer. This thing he was.

‘You enjoy it.’

‘Don't sound like that. Don't. You didn’t charge him either. We all forget the rules of conduct at times.’

‘What?’

‘Mosley. Paid for your drink then you didn’t charge him.’

Seaglass eyes filled with something, deeper than oceans and more wet.

‘A prince walked into that shithole and I was allowed to dream, all right? He's a fucking beautiful man and was even more so when he was young. How do you think I remember one man out of so many? He saw me and asked for me. We talked and laughed and he was, in the shitty way toffs often are, delightful. I didn’t want to be a hole for one fucking night. Wanted to be worth more than sixpence. Priceless. For one unexpected chance of a night. But it ends the way it always does, Tommy, me with the leavings while they walk away clean.’ Bitter, ‘Funny how that turned out, isn’t it? My birthday present.’

His tongue felt thick. 'It was in your eyes and I laughed. I thought, look at that. Didn’t even need to give up my eight pound. What a sweet, silly girl. What can she be dreaming in a world like this?'

Lizzie's hands wrung together on her lap. ‘I’ve not said it, I know. Made it this thing too big for what it was because I wanted it to mean something. I wanted it to stick in your side like a spear. Then it was after Dangerous, Ruby kept having dreams—she must have seen you with the gun to the horse and kept saying it was you. I asked Johnny, and he told me the words but his wives laughed, said he had it all wrong. Charles Strong said different words. Couldn’t ask Arthur or Pol, God, can you imagine? I went to that library in London that was no help, the things they write about you people in those books. Then I thought I might ask at that church near the old settlement grounds, but the priest there made me feel like a piece of shit on his shoe for asking. Told me there was no such speak, as if those times I heard you and Arthur go on were a hallucination. And so I felt silly, thinking I could make three fucking words mean something to a man like you.'

‘Lizzie.’ Shaking his head, helpless, a spasm.

'I couldn’t say it then. Too silly, too fucking small and silly. Not in English. Not in Romany. Made our deal instead, didn't we, because those are the sort of words you want. Even though you failed to uphold your end. Even though you've said it to me now, and I still can’t say it. I can't get it out. Even though I have the fucking words. Can I?'

She needed to stop.

'Because it'll hurt you. And I'm tired of the hurt.’

Hurting was being alive. But he was tired of hurting, too. It was nearly done, Lizzie. Just a few more days.

Gentle, nudging her shoulder with his. 'What am I worth these days, Lizzie? Remind me.'

Her lips writhed. 'This coin tucked safe between us. One shilling more.'

Tommy leaned in. His hand light at her waist, her hip, that familiar curve.

‘But what's a shilling except special rates for our Thomas.’ Lizzie stood, mouth shaping words she couldn't seem to get out until they finally slipped through. ‘Though it seems a shilling's enough to afford that lovely cheap perfume you must’ve put on for your morning meeting.’

Landed dull. Only so many spears a man could take before he was more blade and shaft than wound. 'The past is the past. We should prepare for the American tonight.'

Her eyes.

'Hope you have enough spit,' Lizzie said.

Chapter Text

That low rich voice and the sound of resounding heels; Diana entered some moments ago. Oswald set his cigarette into the ashtray. He turned his newspaper and unfolded, folded; he read the same article twice. Let her approach him.

Eventually, nicety resolved, who shalt wait on whom, she circled closer. Her nails tapped along the chair’s crest rail at his back with the rhythm of her heels, until her indiscreet fingers walked up the back of his neck and stroked his nape. A descending cloud of thick cheap perfume made him frown. Not her usual preference, that perfume. The smell tugged at his memory, notwithstanding the masking curl of cigarette smoke.

Not Sweet Afton’s, that smoke, nor the Sobranie Black Russians pocketed throughout house and case.

The absence of the expected set Oswald mildly adrift. ‘Where were you?’

‘Where I chose to be.’

‘As do we all plead.’

Mocking, ‘Solihull, your Honour, but not an ounce of guilt. If you must know.’

‘Will you elaborate or shall I speculate?’

‘A business transaction, Oswald, with our most dear mutual acquaintance.’

‘What was Churchill doing in Solihull?’

‘If you love me for my sharp mind, I adore you for your beauty and your ability to always make me laugh. No, it was our current deal-broker possessed of a suddenly very pressing, most urgent need for my counter-brokering abilities in support of his legacy. A daring move on his part, really, quite the nerve and all that. He must be feeling some time pressure. Desperate measures, etcetera. I wonder why.’

Oswald lowered the newspaper. Diana sat on the coffee table opposite, arms spread wide behind her and braced, knee of her crossed leg pointing at him. The posture reminded him sharply of the American’s brassy niece, immemorable but for novelty and ersatz.

Suddenly, he recognised the perfume, too.

A brief flare of rage settled into warm amusement. Her sharp mind, indeed. He inhaled deeply, with evident pleasure, watching Diana until he was sure she knew he knew she knew, and on, recursive.

Abrupt, ‘Call it a swapping of deals. Darling Thomas also showed me his boat.’

‘Was it a nice boat?’

The face cracked, laughing. ‘God, Oswald, he must be the loneliest man in England.’

‘And you the wet and dripping font of all charity in England, remedying the loneliness of the quintessential working man.’

‘How dare you,’ her mocking tap, ‘he was positively worshipful. You remember May after she put away half that bottle of champagne at Michael’s wedding. No man shall ever again look at me as he did. Of course, I reminded him of the need for absolute trust in this matter of changing the world. That is this is not about deals and counter-deals and conditions. But I do consider it is about balance, Oswald, and because of that, he will not have Guinness but I will consider his suit once I see that list of names. Particularly if there’s anyone on it that needs a little humility fed to them atop the boot of an upstart Gypsy. Our Thomas is in danger of becoming a very nearly socially acceptable tool.’

‘Pity,’ Oswald said, ‘considering.’

Diana leaned forward, pushed the newspaper into his lap and kept her hand there, spread, across paper and his crotch. ‘You aren’t possibly jealous, Oswald.’

‘Sex is so unimportant in life compared to social acceptability.’

Paper rustled loudly with Diana’s moving hand. ‘Are you mad at me?’

‘I was warned about you. How fast you move.’

‘So little time,’ that slight crookedness to the glittering lips.  ‘The dénouement being imminent, one way or the other, you must understand when the opportunity presented itself, of course I embraced it. I didn’t think that it would ruffle your feathers quite so much.’

The rustling of her hand would drive him mad first. ‘What’s to forgive, darling? Forever prey to your own impulsive nature. You must do whatever comes into your clever head. Such is nature.’

‘As if that nature never benefitted you.’ Her hand dug in. ‘You appear very ruffled.’

‘How was he?’

‘Handsy.’ This twinkle in her eye, and her hand stilled, heavy as he was, now. ‘These ethnic types. Kiss me, Oswald. You keep looking at my lips.’

A breath. Then Oswald touched those red lips, gentle. He had been staring, he realised, this colour of blood she wore, the flush in her cheeks.

The fucking excitement in her.

He was angry. He was ruffled. Her fucking games, endless; tested in the playing field of their social endeavours and those who would join them. Those who dared, etcetera. Her husband bored her in the end: a sexual bohemian would never be one to enact any revolution of which they might dream. It was power that drew her, his power, dreams to reality, and Diana’s limits of enacting her own dreams appeared to be only the opportunity to continue to do so.

The games he knew about, and certainly did benefit from. Rather, Oswald was angry at her delight, which could only be gloating; the warmth in her and that sickening mixed smell of cigarette smoke that, queerly, wasn’t Shelby’s, the perfume Diana bought to match the American tart to tell Oswald that he, too, had no secrets from her. Diana seduced Oswald that very morning before he’d even risen from bed, reaching for him with bright lust and peaked nipples. Had she brought herself off on his cock to the thought of Shelby waiting patiently for her at their appointment?

‘Did you take his cock in your mouth? As if some two-bob whore at the races?’

Her pupils flared. ‘Kiss me, darling, and guess.’

‘His gentlemanly pretence. Perhaps he mounted you from behind like a beast and spent in what hole he would.’

‘Kiss me,’ breath fast now, ‘where that might count, and guess.’

Oswald caught her by the chin, driving his fingers hard into her cheeks so hard he could feel her little pearly teeth. He pulled her face close.

‘Did you eat his arse clean of me?’

Her eyes were all pupil, barely a thread of colour around the hole. ‘Goodness. These things you must read.’

Oswald released her. ‘Remember, darling. It’s bestiality what you just did, spreading for that. I hope you’re gaping with his relief.’

Her rounded nail touched the edge of her mouth, the lipstick he’d slightly smeared. ‘If it serves the cause.’

‘My concern is that you serve yourself.’

‘You serve the cause, Oswald. But I remember when you did not serve the cause, when you were a desperate little socialist cooling his heels on Trotsky’s waiting list, begging Churchill’s interest and sending poor Cimmy mad with your political adultery. The tide of humanity that now lifts you to the stage and adulates upon you there come united by one thing alone, and that is the cause and the circle to whom I introduced you; you must remember that tides of humanity are rather uncompromising when it comes to changing the world.’ Gentle, ‘For all you and I mostly do what we want, you, under the eyes of all, must serve the cause very well indeed to stay upon that stage.’

The implication, of course, that the cause and her were one and the same. Amused, Oswald settled on indifference. ‘The cause and the matter of my ascendance are inseparable. As inseparable as you and I are and ever shall be.’

‘Oh, Oswald. I do so prefer the charming side of your tongue. You sound terribly desperate when you attempt to speak like a lower sort of man.’

‘All I remind you of, dear, is that there is a point when your reputation must become a past reputation. Our friend in Germany knows this, too: wars might be won on the backs of men, but nations are built and held upon the virtue of mothers and wives.’

‘Forbidding is forbidden. I remember your promise.’

‘That was a promise for a mistress. Not the wife of a Supreme Leader. After all, one cannot have one’s cake and eat it too.’

Diana tapped that finger on her lips, then leaned forward again, caught his lower lip between hers and let him feel her teeth. She cupped his face.

‘Do you know the difference between flesh and meat?’

‘Lady Diana returns to the comfort of the classics. Had enough of Freud, have we?’

‘On the contrary, in true modern type if we must be limited to archetype, Oswald, to queens, mothers, maidens. Then we shouldn’t forget the huntress.’

He considered, carefully. ‘Your question is a metaphor.’

She mimed the chiming of a bell. ‘Wrong! It’s a literal question. Come on, if you would play.’

‘Meat is for eating,’ Oswald said. ‘Flesh is for the caress.’

‘For the huntress, she shall devour what she desires, meat or flesh. The difference is only that flesh gets to keep its skin.’

Diana withdrew, standing over him. The heat and weight between his legs as he looked up at her.

In a voice he didn’t expect, she said, ‘You have no fucking idea what I did to him. A man like that.’

Silenced, unexpectedly, Oswald met her black eyes and thought about her games. Her endless fucking games with men, rejecting or flaunting, toying. This excitement rolling off her, boiling, now. If she had been heated before — and it was alarming, because Oswald misread it. Not for Shelby, nor even for sex itself. It was for what she did to him.

She had her taste and liked it. Oswald thought about what it would take to remind her that those games were not to be played with him.

Because it was about balance. About who held the power to tip it with nothing more than a suggestion.

Scornful, ‘You’re a cat toying with a mouse weeks dead. The man is spent.’

‘Mice do play dead rather well, and oddly enough, the flesh was certainly warm.’ Diana smiled down at him brightly. ‘I wonder, did you know Thomas hosts our American friend tonight? In his own house. Under his own roof. A full night of farewell in Thomas Shelby’s voluptuous manor before Mr Nelson departs England. Thomas was most anxious regarding his timeline and declined to extend our liaison. Overwhelmed by his hosting responsibilities, one might even say, though with his emotional mutilation who can tell, really. Nevertheless, there was a pressing need to return home to prepare for his next liaison: this was the apology he gave.’

Diana’s fire spread, driving Oswald from the chair, standing above her. Anger and lust and the irrational, insistent need to assert, the urge to do so near as pleasurable as the actuality, the outcome. That fucking Gypsy, still with some unknown card up his sleeve. As if the game were not already weeks won and all that was left: waiting out the clock and the last spastic throes of those kicking legs, one way or the other.

‘I take it the huntress has an appetite for dining out.’

‘Well, it won’t be boring. Nor even rude and ungracious, showing up uninvited, not after Thomas spurned your invitation, remember? And it is the house of a Gypsy. Though there is his guest—’

‘I’m hardly concerned about our reputation before an American.’

‘Thankfully, I am here to remind you that it is in America your reputation matters.’ A hand placed on Oswald’s chest, coy. ‘Liberated Elizabeth will be there. The wife he continues to ignore your orders regarding. Has it become a habit: clever Thomas ignoring you with no repercussion, in favour of these favours from his women?’

Oswald unclenched his jaw. ‘If we must return to archetype, there must be one whore in the ensemble.’

Rueful, ‘After everything you’ve made that man do, you continue to think it’s that poor, unarmed woman? It must have been quite a fucking she gave you.’

‘I am a modern man, and given the feminine company I keep,’ Oswald stroked a thumb along Diana’s cheek, ‘I would be most unfair to limit such a broad aphorism to the traditional sex.’

Chapter Text

‘Well said, Thomas,’ Diana announced brightly.  ‘Bravo. Oswald told me about your gift for oratory, but I've yet to have the privilege of hearing you speak so spontaneously and from the heart,’ and she moved the conversation on. ‘Now, Mr Nelson, I do hope you found opportunity to enjoy yourself on this trip, that it hasn’t been endless work.’

Nelson’s gaze lingered, dragged along Tommy slowly, heavy enough Tommy wondered that his waistcoat didn’t pull, buttons didn’t burst. Nelson tilted his skull towards Diana.

‘I find myself entertained, Lady Mitford.’

‘Do call me Diana. Us fuckers on our equal footing shan’t stand on formality. Isn’t that right, Thomas? Now. Jack. My sister Nancy was lauding her friend Noël’s latest divine comedy, a startling short run at the Globe before they canned it as too risqué. Can you believe it, all for a ménage à trois. As if they don’t happen every other day. Did you have a chance to attend before they closed it down?’

Mosely said, ‘Diana does enjoy her spectacles. Politics and pornography, isn’t it, dear?’

‘That'd be something to watch,’ Nelson said. ‘Unfortunately, I seem to have missed it. Perhaps I’ll have an opportunity in Boston. More appetite in America.’

Diana smiled that sphynx’s smile. ‘Noël is a homosexual, of course.’

‘Ripe subject matter for comedy,’ Mosley added.

‘Homosexuality?’ Nelson drawled, eyes slow, dragging, dragging.

‘The notion of sexual morality,’ Mosley said. ‘Of forbidding. Morality is a matter of relativism, as it were.’

‘I missed the show’s run,’ Nelson said, ‘now I appear to have missed the joke.’ That spearing gaze. ‘Did you get the joke, Mr Shelby?’

Tommy found himself counting Mosley’s slow blinks, the hook at the corner of that fucking mouth. A comma’s curl of punctuation to the gentle, almost affectionate smile.

‘Yeah,’ Tommy said.

‘And yet, at this table, no one’s laughing.’

‘British humour,’ Mosley said.

Expansive, Nelson leaned back, grinning. ‘Lady Diana. Is Nancy the communist one of you Mitford girls?’

‘Nancy’s the novelist. You’re thinking of Jessica. The communist daughter, though she and I don’t currently speak. A blessing, she was always a grand bore. But communism is, I find, rather boring.’

‘Nothing like politics between family.'

'Or pornography.'

'What do you think, Mr Shelby?’

‘Thomas wouldn’t know,’ Mosley said. ‘He’s all business. All the time. How Diana convinced him to rise from his desk long enough to consummate, I’ll never know.’

‘My feminine charm,’ Diana said. ‘Wouldn’t you say, Thomas? Unless you'd prefer to call it business. We know what that means.’

Politics, pornography, prostitution. Cleaner than whatever this was. Three pairs of eyes locked around him again.

‘Gentlemen do prefer blondes,’ Mosley said, ‘and Thomas does so like to think himself that working class gentleman.’

Nelson tutted. ‘Shelby, Shelby, it’s not gentlemen who have the fun. It’s the blondes.’

This chime like a bell or a clock as Diana and Nelson clinked glasses, champagne to whiskey.

Nelson went on, ‘Your wife, Shelby, that blonde one with the nose, she was Irish, wasn’t she? Was she more fun than the current Mrs Shelby?’

'Oh, they all have such noses.'

‘Don't judge poor Lizzie too harshly,’ Mosley answered for Tommy, ‘she is suffering from a great bereavement and the consequence of a terrible match. In my recollection, she was far more entertaining, and accommodating.’

‘Now,’ Diana said, mocking and wry, ‘unfortunately Grace Burgess was entirely the wrong sort of Irish for Jack.’

'Did you know her?'

'I know everyone. This is a fundamental feminine charm.'

'Knowledge?'

'The people a woman knows.'

‘You know, you know what,' Nelson swung to Diana, leaning in, conspiratorial, ‘maybe it was your perfume bolstering those feminine charms. I've been sitting here thinking, and then I knew, too. My niece wears the same. Compelling, isn’t it? The aroma, and Shelby knows, he knows Gina. Did you two meet?’

‘No,’ Diana smiled, spreading slow and broad, lush, ‘I don’t believe Gina and I have been formally introduced. I do feel I must know her through such close and shared association. Oswald, darling, do you agree?’

‘She’ll be delighted to know she wears the same perfume as a real-life English aristocrat. Sharing preferences with a real lady. That’ll tickle my favourite niece pink right where it counts, I’m sure.’

‘Oswald’s invited her along to our upcoming continental tour, so I found out. Given the new bonds of deep friendship between us fuckers at this table, I’m sure Gina and I shall get to know each other very well indeed.’

Warningly, long finger tapping his nose, ‘She’s in lust with Britain, you know, she'll pick you apart for what you know. So fucking exotic here. Your humour, what did you call it, Mosley: moral relativism. You people have it down to a fucking art.’

‘Dear, Gina is the one who married into Thomas’s family,’ Mosley explained. ‘The young cousin Michael. The son and heir of the Romany Queen. But we shan’t say her name, it’s some cultural thing: to speak the name summons the haunt. Your brother shared that superstition with me, Thomas, amongst other family matters.’

‘Did your aunt see the dead, too, Thomas?’ Diana asked gently, glittering, innocent and kind. ‘It’s a fascination of mine, hauntings. I would adore it if you and your sister and I might have a séance. Imagine all our living and dead chatting together. We might even speak to your wife. The dead one.’

‘Family,’ Nelson expounded, fist hitting the table, ‘all about family, such great families brought together. Gray between Shelby and Nelson; joined on that ocean between America and Great Britain. Everything happening in between. And that, Lady Mitford. Mosley. It's Gina’s ring that brought us together at this fine table Mr Shelby’s put out for us. It’s like poetry, you know?’

‘Politics, pornography. Now poetry.’

‘These are the bonds between great men. Shelby likes poetry.’

Diana’s hand moved, a glancing touch to Nelson’s sleeve. ‘Even an American appreciates whimsy, it seems.’

‘Whimsy,’ Nelson said, ‘yeah, I like that. Not as much as pornography.’

Then, finally, the whiskey Tommy drank caught up to the fits pills he’d taken earlier. Between one impossible breath and the next, the mix wiped him blank as a board.

A wave of fucking relief. Couldn’t swallow yet, mouth full of something burning, but he could breathe, this heave of his ribs, his lungs aching and desperate. The blackness in the corners of the room rolled forward like water, gently, a narrowing steady rise closing off the room. Numbness settled into his bones, into the very shape of his face. He couldn't feel his face.

If he couldn’t feel his face, he didn’t know what it might be saying to these people.

‘You fucking Brits,’ Nelson laughed, echoing—

Carefully, Tommy put one numb hand on the chair-back before him and blinked.

He didn’t understand why they were here. They were done. He was done. Everything was in motion now, and there was no more time for plans, for strategy, because before him was only that black wall. They’d done their worst, and so had he. Their worst was petty and inconsequential, and would do nothing to affect the materiality of his plans.

All they’d done was hurt Lizzie. For nothing.

Only because they could.

Fuck them all. Why were these people here, at his table, in his house? He didn’t want them here.

‘Get out,’ Tommy tried with his mouth on fire, but the words came as smoke, thick and mild, polite.

They could have left after they made their point. Left so soon after they forced that salute from him the first time. Mosley never lingered after fucking him, if he bothered to follow through with the effort of fucking after it was made clear that Tommy would. Even Diana let him leave easily enough, quickly enough. Get out seemed the thing to say. It was his house.

‘Fucking exactly,’ Nelson shouted, and slammed his hand on the table. He snapped his fingers, he pointed at Tommy, he pointed at Diana. ‘Get out of it, Lady Mitford!’ and they laughed, even Mosley flashing teeth.

Evidently Tommy must have said something terribly pertinent to the incomprehensible flow of conversation drowning him.

He wanted Lizzie. The light, gentling ease she’d learned to provide around social labour, etiquette, softening edges he couldn’t be bothered softening.

Couldn’t touch her, never should’ve in the first place—

Lizzie tried with Nelson, too, to soften those edges. Stilted and awkward because Nelson was American and had different rules. Because Tommy’s secrets, what he didn’t tell her about Nelson, meant he had to flash his teeth at Nelson every now and then. Reminders of who he was.

The primary purpose of tonight was to ensure Nelson left this room firmly convinced Tommy Shelby was motivated by ambition alone.

Smash the glass, spend their blood.

‘Eat the grass,’ Diana whispered, those glittering lips, eyes on his, the words slicing across the room, through the conversation—

Lizzie needn’t have bothered. Nelson took over the conversation in that uniquely American way; Lizzie barely had to nod to keep him going, astonished. Nelson saw what he wanted to see, a mirror, which suited the plan with much less effort put into the performance. Tommy was nearly relaxed about it. Lizzie sparkled a few times, too, rising out of her grief with those hints again that said the grief would pass, someday, that made him ache that he wouldn't be there for it.

They were friends with Michael and Gina again, Jack made clear: Lizzie stared at Tommy briefly, why didn’t you tell me. He’d rolled his shoulders in an attempt to ask her tolerance, because of course they weren't friends again, but already Lizzie returned to Jack, talking again, animated. Lizzie was happy about that. Family coming together; she’d so very much regretted Michael’s deep grief. Jack was sure Mr Shelby and Michael had enough common ground to rebuild, Mrs Shelby. We’re grown men, able to move on in favour of business. New blood washes clean the bad.

Was it a happy marriage, Lizzie asked at one point, quietly. Michael and Gina? Michael didn’t marry Gina only for the baby, Lizzie hoped. But before Nelson could answer, Lizzie gave a little gasp, pain rippling across her face and rapidly buried, lashes veiling the brief shimmering tears, and she went on—how is Gina enjoying London?

Almost the same questions Diana asked.

Etiquette: that pointless satire which sat somewhere in the space between politics and pornography. Politeness. Said even less than poetry.

Lizzie tried, she really did, even when Tommy gave her no reason.

Emotion moved him deeply, welling fondness rising from some hidden place he kept thinking he'd burned out, that was emptied, uprooted, buried, gone. Lizzie tried to find words in a language that wasn’t a language and that no one wrote down, that couldn’t be taught. Didn’t need language. They didn’t need fucking words, Christ.

Wanted to hold her hand, smell her hair, bury his face in her. Tell her, tell her he didn’t want to die. He’d left parts and lost parts of himself everywhere, but whatever scraps were left, they didn’t want to die, either. No matter how many times he told himself, accepted it, found some grim, unexpected satisfaction in knowing the conclusion: he didn’t want to die. He was furious about it. He was—

Tommy would tell her everything. Let her in. Because she was already in.

But it had to be after. This was the last leg, nearly done, and if he got through — there was always an if — then he would tell her on the other side, when the family was sorted and legacy resolved, when there was just him and her and maybe Charlie, no chance for forgiveness and he wouldn't ask for it, ever, he wouldn't be that man. But they could be there together, endless rolling hills of grass and sun. He would tell her everything, because that way: he would find whatever words were needed to make sure she could let it go. Really, truly, let it all go.

When I come back, I will know everything.

Lizzie's eyes shone at him in shock, a mix of horror and fear and hope, when the car’s unexpected approach was announced.

Mosley cut through. ‘Do you intend to play waiter much longer?’

Because there was to be no refuge in good intentions. Because there was nothing but for this timeless room where Thomas Shelby belonged with these fuckers forever, this room without corners and barely any walls, only an encroaching black, the absence of food, poison drunk from expensive crystal. Where he belonged, where he would do the most good he had ever done, seeding his destruction into this alliance between the people who’d sat at his table. Because Tommy recognised it at last, what Mum tried to make clear to him, the curse, what even Polly knew and tried to tell him: he was cursed to destroy.

All he’d ever needed to do was put himself among them. Let them embrace him and bring him in. Let them taste what Tommy Shelby was and know him not. Eat his flesh, drink his blood. Savour his terroir. Devour him.

Destruction would follow, because that was what he was. Even if he wasn’t here to see it through.

Tommy smiled at Mosley, warmed by that truth as unarguable as the moment he’d set a submachine gun to the service of the sapphire, this glittering purity of what needed to be done in this moment. All there was: this room, this moment.

‘Why not, eh?’

What was it Grandad used to say? Can't walk straight when the only road is bent. Tommy brought the whisky bottle to the table and topped Nelson’s tumbler. Before he could step away, Nelson tipped his glass into Tommy’s half-drunk measure in return, overflowing the glass.

They smiled at each other.

‘I like that,’ Nelson said. ‘Why not.’

A tilt of his chin, wry, Tommy refilled Jack’s glass.

‘Do sit down, Thomas.’

‘You called me Shelby for fucking years.' Years fucking. 'And what it takes for a first name basis was tumbling her, eh?’ Tommy pointed, ‘You having champagne, Oswald? Your glass is empty. I’ll get your champagne.’

Mosley said, ‘Sit. With us.’

‘I don’t think I will. David, did you bring more champagne, where’s the—’ Tommy turned, searching the blackness for his staff, the faceless forms in black and white themselves. ‘Ah, David. There’s the bucket, here, fuck, it’s slippery. Sweating. No, no, you go. I’ll do it—’

Diana was laughing as Tommy poured for her, sloppy, extravagant, spilling, ‘Thomas, you’ll do the help out of a job.’

‘Not much of a socialist, eh?’ Next it was Mosley’s glass overflowing. Tommy kept going until the bottle was empty, soaking the tablecloth, champagne dripping into Mosley’s lap while Mosley, on his laurels, ignored it. ‘David, you might as well clear off, the girls as well. No one’s in want for that sort of sustenance. The lions are well-fed tonight.’

Around the table to his place at the head, lifting the full glass and sipping carefully, whiskey burning through him. Hadn’t bothered to ask the doctor what the pills might do on alcohol, because he hadn’t been drinking, had he?

Living correctly.

‘By whose rules,’ Tommy said, ‘is living correctly measured when what we have here is a new moral relativism,’ and he raised his glass for Mosley, the fucker, ‘a world where virtue can only be known if all vice is revealed,’ raised his glass for Mitford, and drank again.

Every fucking swallow.

The room was a kaleidoscope of shattered vision, of glittering shards. Tommy kept drinking until the turns of the wheel brought the shards into alignment again, the room resolved into something that could be perceived. Conversation was apparently continuing, too, and some part of him carried a tune like a damned performer. The part that used to like the patter and banter, quick-talk: he was the Chosen One, didn’t they know? He could play. He knew this game. He was free to enjoy the grass. Diana laughed at him and maybe with him, crowing and delighted, because he was cutting and charming and exactly like the lunatics she enjoyed; Jack leered, and Mosley, black-eyed, staring at Thomas Shelby in subdued rage for how on earth Tommy could somehow control the room through sheer force of insanity.

Why not?

At some point, Tommy collected the new decanter of whiskey David left on the drinks cart and topped his glass.

‘This is a side of you I haven’t seen,’ Mosley said. 'Are you enjoying yourself?'

‘You’ve seen a lot,’ Tommy acknowledged, gesturing with the decanter in one hand and the glass in the other, ‘oh, you have seen a lot. But no one knows me, Oswald. You see, that’s the trick. It’s a mirror trick.’

Tommy winked, tilt of his head, this movement which felt like it came straight from his father. Drank straight from the decanter. He nearly choked in shock.

The whiskey was watered.

This. This new wave of it, nearly knocking him over: sudden welling gratitude. Then this swamping, overwhelming resentment. His staff, his people. Ashtrays placed every two feet down the hall. Watering the whiskey and taking the bottle from the room. Taking care of him in ways he didn’t want, when the act of them doing it made it clear that he needed it.

Now Tommy was furious, swallowing that watered poison down in lieu of any other. Fucking David, doing his job. Conspiring with Frances to save him from himself. Tommy didn’t want the night to go slow. He wanted to burn. Easier to let them eat him if he couldn’t feel the teeth.

So the night went on.

At some point, they spoke of Michael again. Oh, yes, he was looking forward to meeting his cousin in Canada; Tommy plucked his own eyes from their sockets and tossed them onto the table. They spoke more of Gina, Jack leaning over Diana, face into her neck to breathe that fucking profanity from a bottle: Tommy pulled his lungs out through his mouth and discarded them next to his eyes. Then there followed a vigorous debate about the need for charitable housing under fascism, during which Mosley laid out every single fucking step of Tommy’s last four years of manoeuvring to get his social housing act passed. The negotiating, petitioning, deals and concessions that no one should have been capable of knowing so thoroughly but for Tommy himself.

These things Tommy had done, seen and unseen, to secure his legacy. And he'd thought Mosley knew nothing.

‘It is important to you,’ Mosley said, ‘which is why I’ve ensured it happens, Thomas. No harm in these passion projects. You’ve always been one for the children. Domestic policy.’

Tommy reached inside and found that little weak pulsing thing that refused to die, that always wanted, flesh and knot and stem and stalk, ripped it free with a jerk and threw it next to the blackened heaving bellows and blinded eyes.

‘It’s that genuine sense of duty,’ Nelson said, ‘that drives the sacrifice. Debts owed, Shelby, paid back by public service at the post. I've done it, too.’

‘Politics, pornography, poetry,’ Tommy said, but then couldn’t bring himself to add the fourth—

‘Public service,’ Mosley said. ‘Servicing the public. That’s what you like these days.’

Tommy tugged free that knot in his throat, fingertips only, and placed the ball of bloodied gristle with the rest.

‘Let’s call it philanthropy,’ Nelson suggested. ‘When a man has everything, only then does it mean anything for him to give it up.’

‘I do believe Thomas is angling for a knighthood,’ Diana said, coy.

‘Ah,’ Mosley said, ‘but remember the investiture ceremony, darling. Picture Thomas going to one knee for his king. What an image.’

Tommy drank his watered poison. ‘I take the King’s shilling well as any other, Mosley. What’s a knee worth for a few more letters delivered to the deserving.’

‘You must move fast,’ Diana said, toying with the flute’s stem, ‘when two weeks sees us come so far, we can only continue our momentum. Who can imagine where we’ll be in a year, in eighteen months. In the new world, who knows if we shall keep a king. What does the American think, Jack? Shall we keep a king?’

Next to the tangle of organs on the table, there were three bottles of champagne, empty. Tommy wondered how much was inside Diana.

And to think, he’d sent away David. There was witnessing, and then there was witnessing. But Tommy sent them all away, his witnesses.

‘Now you’re talking treason, Lady Diana.’ Jack smiled that slow spreading smile. He kissed Diana’s hand. ‘A full demobilisation of democratic process, sure, that’s what you’re saying: not support, not connection, not political movements. To begin again, with the future of nations in the hands of people like these.’ Jack spread his own hands encompassing Mosley, Diana, expansive, and excluding Tommy from the spread. 'What a world it might be, Mr Shelby.’

Cold as a slamming door, Mosley said, ‘There will always be relevance for the aristocracy, Diana.’

Tommy wondered how much champagne there was inside Mosley.

‘What about us,’ Jack said. ‘Mr Shelby and me, our relevance. Us self-made men.’

Diana made a moue, a crooked slant to the shoulder. ‘The new aristocracy shall be made of those who dare to hold the future in our hands. That is how one determines one’s relevance: by daring. This is why our good friend Thomas is even at our table. Because he dared.’

‘So it’s a matter of moral relevance. Or relativism.’ Jack scoffed, mild and amused.

‘Though we do agree there is one moral absolute,’ Diana said, ‘if living correctly: this matter of Jews.’

'This, we agree,' Jack said.

A blade opened new eyes along Tommy’s tongue, in his throat. So many staring eyes in the dark inside him, a universe of knowing behind each eye.

Jack pointed at Diana and looked at Tommy. ‘You know she’ll speak for the Gypsies. She told your sister. Sweet of her, you think?’

‘Maybe a few queers,’ Diana said.

‘Or sisters, Lady Mitford?’

‘Civilisation needs its entertainers, Jack.’

‘It’s my table,’ Tommy said, instead of ripping out his stomach, that worthless sackful of ash and eyes. ‘Not yours. This is my fucking table.’

They looked at him again, more eyes, the three of them.

With a precision that betrayed the alcohol, Mosley lit himself a cigarette, an effete tap of the cylinder before putting to it his lips.

‘You appear flushed, Thomas. Almost feverish. I haven’t seen such a heat on you for years. Are you well?’

They continued to look at him, the three of them, seeing nothing. While the thousands and millions of all-knowing eyes that littered the insides stared through him and saw the truth—

That there was nothing to see.

‘Loosen your tie,’ Mosley said.

Tommy breathed out and nothing came back in. His chin went up despite himself, eyes rolling, wanting to roll, wanting to disappear into the maze in his mind. He loosened his tie. The blackness so close now there was nothing but the three of them and the plane of wood spanning between.

Keep going. Can’t stop, Lizzie, can’t stop yet. Slipped the knot, silk sliding free so easily. Tommy threw the noose atop the sagging pile of offal, fabric coiling like a snake. Hands to his waistcoat, unbuttoning clumsily, fine details difficult with unfeeling fingers. He stood and shed the cloth, his accoutrements, bestowed the lot onto the pyre he was building of himself, for himself.

They watched.

He was confused and bewildered as a child. He was on the wrong side of forty. He was a father. He had a child, he had lost a child. He killed and murdered without consequence; he'd been blooded and battered by the mothers of boys who died in his name. He had more money than the whole fucking Mitford family put together, though the blood on his was too fresh yet to let him use it as freely as they did theirs. He’d gone fucking grey, every time he shaved more silver caught on that edge than black. He was dying. He was dead. He’d given it all.

God, why did this keep happening to him? Why? When was it going to stop?

Oh, but he knew that now, didn’t he. A form of freedom, that date.

Braces swinging at his hips, Tommy put his hands to his collar.

‘Excuse me, Mr Shelby.’

The voice clawed its way out of the blackness behind him, diffident.

Tommy froze in terror.

Then, a hard breath, ‘David. I told you to get out.’

‘Yeah,’ Nelson said, ‘fucking David. Can’t pour a fucking decent whiskey. Doesn’t listen. What are you even doing here, David? Are you supposed to be a fucking butler?’

‘It's time. The reminder you asked me to give you, Mr Shelby, regarding the early morning that awaits you and Mr Nelson. If the train timetable shall be met.’

As if a bucket of cold water sluiced over, the horror of normality: the blackness burst and left only this unforgiving, drab realism.

He’d nearly fucking stripped.

There were no staring eyes, compelling him to public service. It was a proper room in a house full of rooms. There were walls and doors and his paintings, the photos on the mantle. There were three slightly inebriated people sitting at his table, watching the show with glee, interested to see how far the profoundly intoxicated could go. There was no creeping, menacing evil; there was no devouring dark; he’d torn no part of himself asunder and laid it upon the table, an offering up into smoke.

Only these petty, pathetic fuckers. And he was one of them. Undeniably.

‘If you’ll excuse us,’ Mosley said, ‘we shall take this gentle reminder and conclude our impromptu visit.’

Jack reached across the table and pulled Tommy’s waistcoat to him, going for the watch. ‘It’s only ten o’clock. We’ve barely even started. British fucking humour, hey, David?’

‘It seems it is,’ Diana said, smiling. ‘This night is done. Congratulations all. A friendship genuinely cemented. Everyone where they belong.’

Too much to drink. Tommy really needed a piss; a moment of grim satisfaction knowing Diana and Mosley would need to find a fucking bush somewhere on the long drive back to their neighbouring constituency.

In passing, Mosley stopped too close to Tommy, looking down with that benign, paternal smile. Put one hand on his shoulder, comradely.

‘Alas. I don’t carry denomination as small as shillings. Consider it a tip.’

Tommy didn’t move, so Mosley tucked the note into his shirt, in the looseness between two buttons.

After.

The click of heels.

A door.

Eventually, this scrape of a chair.

Slow and looming, Jack Nelson took Mosley’s position. With an odd delicacy, avoiding touching fabric or flesh, Nelson untucked the ten-pound note and let it fall to the floor as if dusting off a bit of filth.

‘A saint could learn a thing or two from you.’

‘Good night, Mr Nelson.’

At the door, Nelson lingered. ‘You know I got the joke.’

Pain, too hard to keep from the face. But he was facing away. ‘Yeah.’

‘Here’s another one, you’ll like this one. Before I met those fuckers, I thought the English aristocracy were subtle. Isn’t that worth a laugh, Mr Shelby?’

Despite himself, Tommy smiled, cracking, then dropped his head to hide what came after.

Chapter Text

Get out, get it out, what got in without being let. But Tommy invited it, hadn’t he? This thing he was. At least the shock and revulsion took care of the erection.

Piss and flush. Bend and heave.

Nothing came.

Fury. Body betraying him again, an ongoing refusal of relief. What good was it, what good am I—no, get that thought out, too. That it could ever be anything other than this, for him. Nothing else for it but to drown in a bath’s worth of canal water, the colour of filthy tea, perfumed with cigarette butts and shit, everything he couldn’t fucking get out.

After. Fever-sweat gone to an itching edge, to heat, wiping his mouth as if he could snatch the fucking treacherous thing off and throw it away. So many afters. Arrogance that he’d thought these afters would be nearly none, that he was nearly done; arrogance or hope, which were no different. Tommy pulled himself together.

Into the house, the hall, where he was master and there were orders to give with that fucking mouth. Send Sandra to keep Mr Nelson entertained, she wouldn’t mind. Call that accommodating kid from his pub in Nechells, Jesus, because who could tell these days: Russian or American, men or women, the things they wanted. Send Peter and Clara together. Go yourself, David. Name your price for these uncommon duties for your common master. Fucking send them all, because Tommy couldn’t tell what people wanted anymore when it wasn’t lust, but he was resourceful: a good Sergeant-Major addresses every eventuality.

Shame he didn’t have Alfie’s dog to send.

Funny. Oh, that was funny. Remember to tell Alfie, who was his friend who would meet him in Miquelon, who had burned the olive branch offered and ate the live dove whole – kosher, Tommy knew, as was the flesh of all biblical sacrifice. Don’t be bitter, Tom, it’s your fault, yeah? Only a Gypsy cunt like you buys a man’s forgiveness by selling him back his own pride, his authority, stolen from him years ago in a hotel room, on a beach, and painted a different colour.

At least Alfie set a fair price for forgiveness. Michael didn’t. What Michael wanted from him—

Fucking America.

Fucking, Tommy understood. Killing each other, he understood. Killing and murdering and stealing and fucking, he understood, but what they wanted from him—

No. Send no one, David. Only lock Nelson’s fucking door, bar it, nail the fucking door shut. Call Johnny to bring the fire and get me my fucking gun.

Lizzie, God, Lizzie, help me. Where’s my fucking gun? Arthur, you took it from me, who took it from me? I never gave it away. I never wanted to, I only wanted, all I wanted, I wanted, that was the problem, I want, please understand, I’m so sorry, this wasn’t what I intended. Pol? All I wanted was—

A bullet and razor-brim cap. My blade and my gun.

But not a word was said, because no one waited in that dimly lit hall.

Counting his steps, hollow, Tommy wandered. Ruby’s door pulsed and beat like a heart. Her door should have been open when they burned her. Bedroom, front door, garden gate, but he forgot to tell Lizzie the doors were important, and who else would have remembered? He needed to say the words he couldn’t say before. I open the way, Ruby, my darling. I open the gate. I release you from the fetters of my sorrow.

Except he didn’t want to. Tommy let the closed door beat. What else did he have except what remained?

Charlie’s door sat a hairline ajar, an old habit to avoid the tell-tale snick of the latch as Charlie snuck in and out. Except Charlie stopped this game long ago. Wiped his mouth again in self-disgust at the thought Charlie might’ve seen. The boy would pay for Tommy’s shame one day, what Tommy ignored, oh, these piles grown to mountains, the same way Tommy paid for his fath—

Daddy’s at business, my boy. That’s all. It won’t ever touch you. Charlie. I fucking promise.

A politician’s promise. Worth no more than a laugh.

Eventually, there was this door: the master suite. Lizzie was here because she had nowhere else to go. All the rooms within this hated house, this callous, indifferent house, this house what didn’t care who they were or what they did, rooms barred and locked over time, pointlessly, because ghosts didn’t linger in this house. They lived in the crate, in the cracked skull, in the place where the priest let the light in and let all sorts of things out.

Tommy regretted, vaguely, that he’d left his pills in the ensuite. There was no way to reach them. But what was he planning to do with them? He had enough.

Business as usual. Daddy went to his office.

The desk scratched at him, throne and shield and crown. Not enough time to do what he should, only what he could. What he could do was document their treason before he forgot the words, sedition, conspiracy, now treason. Committed to letters: witnessed and witnessing. But that would require he document the full context. Christ, how many nails did one cross need?

Tommy stood at the window.

Beyond the tarmac loop, night fell like a veil, the shadow of a cap, a wall of impassable black. A pastoral view, Lizzie mocked him, fresh air, endlessly fallow fields, and in every room, Tom Shelby sits with his back to the window and breathes only smoke.

And the smell of paint burning, Lizzie. Lighting new fires, because he was unable to watch the others burn out. Tommy knew what was outside. Bonfires and bodies, the roses, the roses he had planted for Ruby, fertilised by the dead.

Footsteps approached from the hall.

He was shocked awake at the sound, so he must have slept. Bewildered, blind, Tommy rolled to sit on that sofa where he’d curled, barefoot and shirtless, shivering in his vest. Hadn’t turned on the light. Hadn’t closed the door. He reached.

But he had no fucking gun, and the one locked in his desk was too far away.

Older habits than guns, in this house of old habits where once he’d promised no guns. Didn’t need a thimble to protect from pricks or pokes; under the coffee table was a razor hid in a joint. Tommy eased the blade free with his thumbnail, held the point and edge between the first two fingers of his fist. Enough to open a man’s cheek to teeth and bone, to take out an eye, enough to take brief advantage at no more cost than the risk of blooding his own palm.

Slow, without clear purpose, the footsteps came. No hesitation. No effort to hide. Creaked to a stop at the office’s open door.

Tommy waited. He might be an obvious silhouette against the starlight coming through the translucent curtains, or nothing more than a mottled patch of grey and white, pale skin and black intent, blending into the books and walls and paintings. He should’ve dropped to his knees. Belly to the mud, grovelling, covering his head, as if he had a chance of survival.

But action, too, could betray a man.

Framed by the door against the dark panelled wood beyond, the approaching shadow was a lighter shade of grey. That turning head moved as if the movement of a sniffing beast, following the thread of some profane perfume.

Only one reason for Jack Nelson to be out searching at this time of night, so far from where they’d put him.

Tommy waited to be seen.

But the head turned away from the office diorama and faced down the hall instead. This watching beast what carried his lair about with him, the beast claiming Tommy’s own house for that lair, that beast lifted his chin in mundane greeting to what approached him from the hall.

‘Mrs Shelby. Lovely house you have. I’ve been appreciating the art.’

‘In the dark, Mr Nelson? On your own?’

Lizzie sounded small and wounded, withdrawn. Only one reason for her to be in this part of the house, at his study door. Tommy felt his features crease and crumple, uncontrolled, which was all right. No one could see.

‘Not on my own, Mrs Shelby. Now you’re here.’

‘I suppose.’

‘Who’s the one with the eye, you or Mr Shelby?’

That catch of Lizzie’s breath. ‘Tommy and his sister. Ada. They share a collector’s interest.’

‘Seems a close family.’

‘You and I might think that. From the outside.’

‘Ada and I have met. Interesting girl. This interesting family you married into, Mrs Shelby. How far you’ve come. I find it admirable, you know, and in my opinion, Mr Mosley doesn’t appreciate—’

‘Not far at all.’ Lizzie was a sharper blade. ‘It’s a half hour drive to where Tommy and I grew up within spitting distance of each other. There was a lot of spit, Mr Nelson. Still the case, it seems. Do you want to fuck me?’

Nelson could have been staring at Tommy, or could have been staring at nothing, only considering his response. The head was featureless, eyeless, so who could tell?

‘Fuck triangles,’ Lizzie said, wretchedly.

Grand, avuncular sympathy, ‘Make it a fucking hexagram, Mrs Shelby? Why not.’

Tommy moved before he realised. This incandescent thing distorting him, face and body, ripping himself apart with tension, hard with more than fury, more than fear. Blood dripped from his clenched fist, racing to the door, to kill these endless fucking shadows.

The beast’s head turned and stared at him in full, split-mouthed, stilted smile and black eye, this oiled tail and the smell of him, Tommy forgot the smell, fury gone to sick drenching terror, but he couldn’t stop himself now, running towards it, gape-mouthed—

‘You have it in you to stop me, boy? Or is it another offering you have in mind?’

Tommy slammed the door.

The night lifted into something that wasn’t day, soft through the translucent curtains. Tommy sat on the sofa, heart racing as if he’d just slammed that door, breathing loud and shallow, hands cupped between his knees. He blinked the blindness from his eyes until he could see the source of that dull, secondary pain throbbing in counterpoint: blood clotted to seal the deep gash along his tremoring right palm.

Frances found him first. A short conversation conveyed sufficient meaning for her to bring the day’s clothes from the master suite to him in the ground floor bathroom, where Tommy dealt, begrudgingly, with the necessities of being alive. In the study, Francis waited with water, coffee or tea of his choice, his pills from the ensuite – essential if he were to drive, the doctor said – cigarettes and his lighter, a slice of toast.

Through the headache’s agony, Tommy looked at the offering on the tray between Frances’s hands. Even a budded rose in a vase.

He really did have it all.

‘Mr Nelson is breaking his fast in the formal dining. The American gentleman has a surprising appetite considering the time of day.’

A fourteen day trip, five days either side for transit, call it just under one month. And Nelson brought both his wife and his mistress. And his niece. And then he’d—

‘They are dogs with mighty appetites; they never have enough.’ The quote slid away from him, slippery. ‘Keep him well fed, Frances. But it won’t be enough.’

‘He’s reading the newspaper,’ Frances said, mildly censorious.

This numb movement of his face must be a smile. Tommy’s newspaper was not to be touched until Tommy declared himself done with it, first: they had their lines not to be crossed, his staff.

‘Ten quid he’s in in my seat, too, eh? Head of the table.’

‘Whoever exalts himself shall be humbled; and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted.’

Tommy considered her.

Seen him through the cracked skull. Heard what came spilling out helpless out when no one who said they loved him could bear it, not even Pol. Only a few of those worst weeks while Mary kept the house going, then Frances left. Hadn’t quite thrown Leviticus at her, naked or not, but when Mary retired, it felt like doing the right thing for once, writing to Frances, asking if she would do him the great honour of returning. Someone Charlie already knew. Someone who already knew the worst.

‘But when you are invited, take the lowest place so that when the host comes, he will say to you, friend, move up to a better place. Whoever humbles himself—’ Tommy lost the thread, the recitation, memory fracturing with pain. ‘Luke?’

‘All four gospels, if I remember correctly. It’s one of the common stories.’

‘Not paid much attention to New Testament. They didn’t bother to beat that part of the book into us, those holy sisters.’ With a wave, dismissive, Tommy let her set the tray down. ‘The meek inherit nothing. Not the wood of their own martyr’s cross, not the water to ease thirst from tears once wept. Even the fire comes only as gift from another.’

Frances lowered her eyes. Quietly, ‘Is it over, Mr Shelby? What you hoped?’

The silence stretched long enough that it became something other than awkward.

Frances went on, ‘David’s arranging for the Bentley to be warmed up and solution applied, and Mr Nelson’s luggage packed. David could drive Mr Nelson to the station alone. If you don’t feel the best.’

‘Is Lizzie—’

Froze. God. Couldn’t shut his mouth, no air. Couldn’t open his eyes, or he might see.

‘Mrs Shelby passed on her apologies this morning.’ Frances, too, clipped herself shut on the next words. David might not gossip, but there had been maids in that room at that point, watching the fucking show.

They were to have driven together. No reason, no sense in it, except Tommy wanted to keep Lizzie close when he could. He asked if she wanted to come along, she said she did. That was why. When there were only moments left, he’d take moments.

‘I’ll drive. Mr Nelson and I. Tell David he won’t be needed.’ Tommy looked at Frances, who frowned and nodded. ‘Take care of Lizzie. I’ll try, try to speak to her when I get back.’

The booze left him feeling more than rough: felt surreal, instead. Loosely rattling about, only believing in his body because he could feel the pain of it, head and gut throbbing in time with the ache in his hand. Didn’t take the pills, for whatever reason. Maybe he deserved it. A roulette spin, him and Jack dying at the random hand of chance, run off the road as the consequence of an uncontrollable seizure.

At the entry, gloves on, cap on, scarf on. Face on.

‘Sleep well, Mr Nelson? Fresh country air, apparently it works wonders on the American constitution.’ His words turned to mist, hung behind him. Tommy marched to the car in his usual cadence, not Jack’s slow, enforced saunter.

Nelson stood on the other side of the car, gazing through the fog. Turned and smiled. ‘Who sleeps in times like these, Mr Shelby. Did you?’

‘Breakfast meet your expectation?’

‘Forget the constitution. This country’s air works its wonders on my appetite most of all.’

Tommy took the driver’s seat and slammed the door. Outside, Nelson loitered, and for a moment it seemed he’d get into the rear seat.

Everyone where they belong.

But the moment and the fury and the humiliation slipped, and Nelson sat in the front passenger seat, within arm’s reach. Also funny, because Tommy felt disappointed. If Nelson had sat in the rear, the insult would’ve been a decent enough reason to ignore him.

Ignored him long enough, though. Through the gate and onto the country road, through the worst of the cattle ruts and rough roads and sheep crossings, enduring through the corresponding pain rippling through his skull, on this road to hell, to Birmingham, the city periphery and more, penned on either side by those marching black and grey facades, deep within the maze before Nelson finally said, ‘Hey, you ever meet Laurie?’

Took a while to place the name.

‘Michael’s son. Laurence Gray.’

‘Gina’s son. Laurence Arthur Gray. You must be pleased the name’s carried on. Another kind of legacy.’

Couldn’t help the spasm, gloved fingers creaking on the wheel.

‘Gina tells me the boy misses his father, Michael being in prison and all. I understand it’s a family tradition.’

‘Putting Michael in prison? Suppose it is. Seems you're in on the tradition, too.’

‘Michael was hardly even angry. So spaketh our Gina. I thought, what the hell, that crazy kid deserves the reputation boost, let him stay. His cousin's probably thinking the same. Family tradition. Safe as cells. A few solid runs behind bars does wonders for a young face, especially in our business.’

‘I doubt I’ll have the opportunity. To meet Michael's boy.’

‘You’re not missing much. My least favourite of the grandkids, grandnephews, grandnieces. Everything he wants, he has served on a silver spoon. On a gold fucking plate. It’s a thing about our boys, our sons in this world we’ve created, they never learn gratitude, do they? How to be grateful. Brassy little turd’s been spoiled shitless. If I can be frank.’ Nelson looked at Tommy’s profile. ‘Tommy, I feel I can be very frank with you after last night.’

‘Why not, Jack. You can be frank.’

‘I hate Jews. But you don’t hate Jews, you couldn’t care less about Jews, blacks. Chinese. Gypsies. The usual polarising politics, except you don’t care about politics, either. You’re about blood and money. Your blood to transform their money to your money, and your money goes to your blood. There’s your fucking spell, your schoolboy cursing. So I want to know, Tommy. For a man like you, what’s being served at that fucker’s table that you can’t just reach out and take for yourself?’

The road. Jack’s silence was a practiced one. A man who could turn the ear of a president. Accommodating, leading, inviting.

‘Five million. Weapons transport contracts, import and export—’

Kindly, ‘Stop shitting about. There’s nothing you need to impress upon me, I’ve seen it all, remember? The truth and eloquence in whiskey and witnessing. You and me, we’re being frank with each other.’

A light drizzle started, drops spitting onto the bonnet, flecking the windshield like so much dirt, like unclean water.

‘They want your sponsorship into America. I want my open door.’

‘Into America? What’s America, even? You want America, you’d fucking take America. You could try. But you don’t want America. This, I know. What’s five million to a man like you?’

‘Enough.’

‘No. It is not fucking enough. Nothing is enough for men like us. We toil for the mouth, Tommy, yet the appetite is never satisfied. What’s served at that table that keeps you there? I want to know. What do you need?’

Provoked, carelessly, ‘I don’t need anything from you. From them. I don’t need that.’

‘No needs, no wants. Thomas Shelby, more than mortal. And yet, at that table you are and in that room you stay. Tell me. Will it be served hot or cold, what you’re waiting for?’

They drove in silence.

Despite himself, Tommy glanced at Jack and was caught.

‘Cold,’ Jack said, black-eyed, breath misting. ‘So it must be. Oh, Tommy. Michael told me about you and Mr Mosley. Evil’s a strong word from a man with your reputation.’

He’d forgotten. Michael had been there when he said that about Mosley. Witnesses and witnessing.

‘That’s where moral relativism comes in,’ Jack added.

‘The car has heat. If you’d like it hot.’

‘Some do, I hear. But not you.’

‘I don’t get to choose.’ These things Tommy had realised. He was saying too much, this confessional of a car and a tall Catholic man who talked too much about himself and somehow the words drew forth others. Except Tommy couldn’t bring himself to care. ‘I'm nearly done, anyway, Jack. Nearly there.’

‘Don’t believe it. Neither money nor the devil finds peace.’ Jack stretched his legs against the car’s confines, grinning. ‘This road you and I take, Tommy, this road will fork. You shall go on to your bright and glittering future. Me, I have my own legacy planned. But let me say to you. I am very grateful you have shown me the true depths of the kind of man who holds the future of Europe in his hands.’

Then Jack said, ‘Telegrams. Wires. Letters, Mr Shelby. All can indeed be intercepted. This, my associates and I, we know.’

Tommy caught his breath.

Whatever fucking game was being played, dangling bait, fishing, global fucking politics while Tommy turned himself out for the madman in the constituency next door. Agony writhed through him, beating him. Had it been planted, that letter? Had Churchill known? Mass executions, kin and cousins and daughters, nightmares rolling over him like armies, burying him in his own madness. He was trapped in a room, in his house, and now in his car with another kind of madman. One madman made many; many madmen made madness—

‘What are your intentions regarding the British Union of Fascists, Mr Nelson?’

Jack said, slow, as if to himself, ‘I trust Mr Mosley. The only men you can trust are men with bad intentions. They tell the truth.’ Jack leaned close, arm across the back of the chair, just shy of heavy across the shoulders, that mocking, conspiratorial whisper. ‘This is why no one trusts you, Tommy.’

They were at the station. Tommy found a place to park, barely populated at this hour. He indicated the stationmaster at the boarding flags near the entrance.

‘We’re early.’

Jack hadn’t retreated, still too close. ‘While we’re waiting. How about it, Shelby?’

Tommy stared at nothing. He thought, in a strange kind of friendly, comforting, familiar anguish, of Lizzie.

Do you want to f—

Crossing these lines. So many of them, threads once followed now snarled and snapped, adrift. He was nearly untethered. Nearly without pain. Nothing mattered.

‘Don’t worry about Michael. I’ll send him a telegram from Liverpool. Might comfort him to know, a certain commonality he hungers for – but he won’t. You have my word.’

Despite himself, Tommy snorted. ‘You think he doesn’t know. That this would come as some surprise to Michael. How far I will go.’

‘A man with no limits is not a man.’

‘What am I then,’ Tommy asked, smiling, crooked, sidelong, ‘that horse?’

‘You tell me. You never did answer. What will you become?’ Spread palms, spread smile. Jack’s spread knees.

There was no becoming. There was only what was. ‘Thought you preferred blondes. Women.’ With an air of generous concession considering the contempt, ‘Kin.’

Nelson, too, glittered. ‘There’ll be somewhere in the station if this is too public for whatever you are. For your reputation. Mr Shelby. A bathroom. You can suck me off there.’

Suggestive, that big man spreading himself further, arms out now, glorious as that expansive future he offered, unaware it meant nothing when there was no possible way to collect on the claim. A pure truth which felt like freedom.

‘I don’t care about hot or cold,’ Jack said. ‘I don’t care about men, men bore me, but you don't bore me, because you're not a man. It’s the electricity. This is a gun in my hand, and it is a gun in yours. It’s Russian fucking roulette, it’s a duel, it’s ten paces then turn, and we’ll shoot at the same time. It’s a gamble, it’s all in. Can’t you feel it? It’s exactly like orgasm, when you can’t fucking stop that inevitability. You’re on the fucking edge right now, you’ve been on the edge the whole drive, and all the fucking night before. Just from words. I bet no one says the words in this fucking country, do they? Fucking suck me off. It’s on your face, that edge, so why not? End on a high. I’m being frank here, Tommy. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. And me, well. You know what I get from it.’

If he’d had any doubt Nelson intended to kill him since the church, one way or the other, it was gone.

‘What do you get?’

‘A blow job.’

‘Mind my teeth, eh?’

‘What teeth, I see no teeth.’

Jack smiled, paternal, affectionate, and inexplicably, Tommy smiled, too, that crooked thing becoming deep and genuine, bare those teeth that couldn’t bite; couldn’t stop it, broader, Jack watched, exceeded him, bright and American and unveiled. How far will you go for the farce, Mr Shelby, for five million, for fascism, for your chance to fuck Mosley into the ground?

For the lie that perhaps, if spoken to, Michael could bring himself to do what was needed to be done to choose to live, after Polly herself cursed them to worse. Sometimes living was worse. What it meant you had to eat.

Ah, but you let me know the answer to that, Jack, how far I will go. Because it says a thing about a man, too. How far he’d go to push another, especially if appearances might suggest he already had everything he wanted.

Christ. When was the last time he’d laughed? More breath than sound, head arching back, then forward, ducked, looking helplessly at his own lap, face half-hidden by the shadow of his cap.

This hole he dug and couldn’t stop digging.

Men in the shadows, women in the light. Didn’t expect it of women, even now; should’ve learned his lesson the first time around, trapped in that grey with the nuns where his father had left him, every fucking sin within those walls they’d taught him. They, too, taught him to be grateful. But it was a lesson already well learned.

So fucking special, the old man told him, gentle, the point of that dull silver dagger stroking a line shiveringly close to his eye.

Abrupt, Tommy leaned over his passenger, ignoring the way Jack shifted and lifted his hips. Opened the glovebox, took his spare cigarettes and lighter from within, muscle memory. Fag out, to the lips, lighting. Didn’t offer one to Nelson, fumbled the packet instead, landing on his own lap, between the legs, careless.

Forced the smoke in. Out. The old in-out. Soothed and engrossed, familiar, comforting. He hadn’t—not since Diana— ah, only a day. Not long after all. No time lost. Tommy settled the thought, cut it off.

Imagine it. Flesh in his mouth, the ache of his jaw open too long. The taste, thick and heavy. How his neck needed to bend. A wash of spit he couldn’t swallow, even now, softening the self-inflicted burns on his tongue. These people who thought they could do this to him and get away without paying. They would pay. They would all fucking pay.

Tommy smoked until the nearly uncontrollable urge to just fucking do it went away. He thought corpse-cold, Jack, in your case; paper-dry, in Mosley’s, the rattling unstoppable engine of British bureaucracy, the spark of whatever fucking righteous and fucked up American fuel you might decide to add to that pyre, because these were the comforts Tommy had, in his last hours. These outcomes he wouldn’t see. But he could hope, in his arrogance.

These things with which to combat two madmen in a car spinning webs of their own madnesses.

Nelson placed his hand on Tommy’s leg. The man would shit on him no matter what Tommy did.

‘Your wife’s sweet. Really fucking sweet. But sweet, Shelby? That ain’t ever been my preference.’

Said as if it were to be a comfort. Tommy wondered who he could sell that hand to. Find a good taxidermist, and Gina would probably outbid every other buyer.

‘Sorry, Jack.’ Trenchant, as if asked to tell the time when everyone knew he’d lost his watch. ‘Seems I have a headache.’

Steadily, that endless fucking smile, Jack moved his hand deeper, brushed past the halfway-erection that Tommy couldn’t fucking help, always too much or none at all. Collected the discarded cigarette packet from where it slid.

Jack held out his hand, and Tommy gave him the lighter. Jack lit up his own.

‘I’ll bet you do.’ A slow exhalation. ‘Shame.’

That was the word.

Smoking, they waited for the boarding flag. Something to tell the doctor at Tommy’s next visit, after all that. What shall be given up in the pursuit of eternal life, of living correctly: sex or cigarettes. Which might be the easier?

Tommy lit his second.