Chapter Text
“So many of the loveliest things in England are melancholy.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
There was a dead bird in the dining room fireplace.
Baz had, in fact, found something dead in his house every day that week, and though not usually prone to superstition, it was beginning to feel a bit like a bad omen. Cracked mirrors and broken ladders were all well and good, but when the universe started taking lives — well, that’s the point at which he began to worry.
He supposed this bird had gone like the two others he’d found that week; trapped in the chimney when he’d had the stout man with the comically large beard come through to clean them. Or perhaps it wandered down looking for an escape from the rain and found itself trapped in the house, unable to leave. He knew what that felt like.
He still hadn’t determined where the large rat corpses in the library and kitchen had come from — perhaps shelter from the rain as well — but he treated them with the same care he gave his newest find; wrapping them up in toilet tissue and carefully walking them through the loud, echoing halls of Pitch Manor and out into the back garden, where he buried them under a tree at the far end of the garden stairs.
At least the persistent rain had stopped, so that the little bird’s last rites came with sunshine and fresh air. But unfortunately the sun had done nothing for the mud, or the distinct impression that the Manor had been freshly drowned. Everything looked heavy, weighed down. Waterlogged.
He could relate.
Twenty-three years old and already waterlogged. Simply soaked with fat droplets of responsibility.
The wildly overgrown back garden appeared to have come through the storm depressed but relatively unscathed (which was another decent metaphor for his life), but he’d heard a crash during the night that sounded like a tree come down. Yet another project for the list — but one that should ideally be dealt with sooner than later.
After pulling on a mouldy-smelling Barbour field jacket (which may have belonged to his great uncle, if the greasy pipe in the pocket was any indication) and exchanging his sensible high-street Oxfords for a pair of oversized, mud splattered wellies, Baz slipped out of the kitchen door to set off along the drive.
Dev, the family labrador, followed at his heels, inspecting each hedge and leaf, occasionally taking off like a black streak along the drive ahead of him.
Like all of the park, the drive needed clearing. The trees needed to be trimmed back, the overgrowth pulled up, the nettle contained and the stone walls lining the side rebuilt. Pitch Manor had always had a kind of wild beauty about it — from the rambling rose bushes to the scattered yew trees — but these days it was trending more toward wild than beautiful.
He had known, when he first arrived from London, that the house wouldn’t be in the best condition. But he hadn’t realised how quickly something once loved could turn to rot when abandoned. Pitch Manor hadn’t been a full time residence since he was five, and clearly the summer visits and occasional Christmases spent in residence hadn’t been enough to beat back the creeping feeling of disuse and disrepair.
His father had never cared for the house. It had belonged solely to Baz’s mother and her family, and Malcolm Grimm, being from a small farming village himself, had thought he could adapt to the quiet countryside.
Maybe he could have, if Baz’s mother hadn’t died. He was never sure whether it was distaste for the crumbling Elizabethan relic or protection from the memories that resided within it which drove Malcolm to London, but whatever the case, he hardly spared a second thought for the house once they were gone.
Baz idly wondered if, now that he was in possession and residence of the house, he would go the same way in his father’s mind.
He tried to beat back the bitter thoughts; Malcolm had tasked him with stewardship of the house an attempt to be kind. He’d trussed it up as a congratulatory gift to celebrate Baz’s licensing as a barrister, but both father and son knew what it really was: an excuse.
Malcolm had handed Baz the keys, the deed, and the ownership to his ancestral home two days after his graduation (and one day after Niall had broken up with him), and told him in no uncertain terms that the old house had sat vacant too long, that it really needed to be seen to, and that Baz deserved a break after all his studying. Go see to the house for a bit, get out of London, enjoy the restorative country air before he came back and took his place in Malcolm’s own barristers Chamber.
In other words: get out of the city, get it together, and get over it.
And Baz — overworked, overburdened, overemotional — had packed up his clothes, taken the dog, and gone. The Plan for his life had changed, and he followed the new one blindly.
Kicking a rock out of his path viciously, a small thrill of accomplishment raced through him as it soared squarely through a hole in the wall to his left side. His life may have been in shambles, but goddammit, he still had his leg.
It wasn’t that he didn’t love Pitch Manor. He did. He loved it terribly, viciously, horribly, with a wriggling possessiveness deep down in his belly. It was his home. His mother’s home. He was a Pitch, and the Manor was his. He was a Pitch, and he was the Manor’s.
But it was never meant to come to him like this. He didn’t think he was meant to come home like this.
“Oh you’ve got to be kidding,” he drawled, pulling up short as he came around the bend in the drive and caught sight of the gates. He was right; a large branch had fallen, landing squarely on top of one of the large iron gates that swung inward and gave access to the Manor. It was the size of a small tree, having formerly been the largest limb of the oldest oak on the grounds, and was larger than about three of Baz.
Upon closer inspection it wasn’t as bad as it could be, though; the branch wasn’t overly thick, and it hadn’t dented the iron — simply knocked it out of its hinge. A burst of relief raced through him. It was an easy fix. He would have to get help — call down to the village, or maybe he and Fiona could tackle it together, or maybe even....
He climbed over the field stone wall awkwardly, his long legs getting tangled in the rough, and set down in a squelch of mud on the other side, his foot sinking into the muck up past his ankle. He stopped, turned his face to the sky, closed his eyes, counted to five, and then pulled it out.
On the other side of the wall, Dev watched him for a moment before catching sight of a squirrel in the distance and breaking off at a sprint.
“Fucking dog,” Baz muttered, bending down to survey the damage.
The branch fell at such an angle that it was partially obscuring the road as well, which meant he needed to move it as soon as possible. Not that it was a busy lane — nothing in the area was busy — but the lane was the only reliable way in and out of the village, and was the best way to meet up with the M3. Tyre tracks on the other side of the road showed that more than a few motorists had clearly swerved to avoid it already that morning.
Bracing his shoulder against the branch, he dug in his feet and pushed. It wobbled slightly, almost giving way, and he readjusted and tried to push up, to lift it off the gate. His ears rang with the buzz of his exertion and the mechanical hum of an approaching motorbike, and he caught himself just moments before his footing gave way, narrowly avoiding face planting in the muddy gravel just as the motorbike passed.
“Son of a bitch,” he hissed, wincing at the pain in his hands where they were scraped by the rough bark. He was a barrister. London raised. He didn’t have hands for manual labour. Everything about this was ridiculous, and in a fit of momentary childishness he wanted to say damn the branch, damn the gate, damn the whole thing, and send it up in flames.
“Oi, do you need help with that?”
Baz looked up with a jolt, his eyes landing on the motorbike parked across the road. Its rider cut the engine and swung off easily, pulling his helmet off to reveal a ruddy faced man with sweat-soaked auburn hair.
He was disgustingly good looking, sweaty hair and all, and as Baz stood in his mud-splattered, oversized, borrowed clothes, he hated him immediately.
“No, thank you,” Baz said stiffly. The rider glanced both ways and then dashed across the empty road. He looked like he’d ridden through the rain; his denim jacket was soaked and sticking to him, and mud was splattered across his jeans. But he was younger than Baz had initially assumed — far closer to his own age, in fact.
“You sure?” the stranger asked, tilting his head and frowning. “You definitely can’t lift that yourself.”
“I’ll be fine, thank you,” Baz snapped, ruffled. Fuck this good looking stranger and his absolutely correct assessment that Baz was not actually strong enough to move an entire fucking tree himself.
The stranger blinked at Baz’s sharp tone and tilted his head, confused. The wind picked at his bronze hair and ruffled it slightly, and he gave Baz a hesitant smile.
“I don’t mean offence, I just meant that with the two of us we could probably lift it.”
Baz hated him for being right.
“It’s knocked the gate off its hinge,” he explained stiffly, looking away from the man. “If we push up and then over, that should dislodge it.”
“Right,” the man said, nodding. “I’ll take left, then.”
They split off, each taking a side of the branch and bracing themselves against it.
“One, two, three,” Baz counted, and then pushed up. The tree gave way easily, and the two scuffled their way to the side of the road, pulling the branch with them as they went, grunting out brief directions before dropping it in a sloping ditch.
“Thank you,” Baz said, huffing slightly. It had been longer than he realised since uni football. He held out his hand to the man, who looked even more winded, to his relief. (There was nothing worse than attractive people who weren’t affected by physical exertion.) “I’m Baz.”
“Simon,” he grunted, gripping Baz firmly with one freckled, calloused hand. “You need help with the gate?”
He nodded to the iron monstrosity behind them, and Baz considered it.
“I’m not sure if we can lift it,” he responded honestly. Simon shrugged and threw him a lopsided smile, apparently completely unfazed by the mud and the gravel and the stupid fucking gate.
“We can try.”
The resulting effort found Baz scrambling back over the stone wall in order for them to brace themselves against either side of the monstrous gate, and push up once more. The gate proved far more stubborn than the branch, and for a moment Baz worried that Simon’s face had turned so red that he was about to explode. But just as the two seemed to reach their absolute limit, the iron prongs slid into place with a clank, and then both gave up their hold immediately, collapsing back onto the muddy ground.
“Wow, fuck that,” Simon muttered, running a hand through his curly hair. It wasn’t improved by the exercise, but Baz found he didn’t care.
“Indeed,” he murmured, steadying his breath enough to pull himself to his feet and push on the gate. With a creak, it swung smoothly inward, sounding for all the world like it hadn’t been on its last breath mere moments ago. Baz hated it.
Simon clambered back to his feet with an easy grin and shoved his muddy hands in his pockets.
“Thank you again,” Baz said, feeling suddenly awkward about his need to be polite. “You saved me a trip to the village for back up.”
Simon shrugged again. Was this his only mode of communication? Baz’s mother would have killed him if he shrugged that much. Baz would kill himself if he shrugged that much.
“Any chance you can point me at the village, actually? I’m looking for food and somewhere to stay,” Simon asked, tilting his head to the side. He had moles on his neck, Baz noticed, before shaking the thought away.
There was no time for gayness right now. No time for gayness ever again, honestly. Gayness was why he was here to begin with.
“Keep on the way you were going,” Baz said, gesturing down the lane. “I’d recommend the Watford Arms for food and Ebb’s Guest House for lodging.”
“Are they the best?” Simon asked, smiling. Baz shook his head.
“No, they’re the only options,” he responded, wiping his hands off on his already muddy jacket. They slid against the olive canvas fabric unpleasantly.
“Right,” Simon said, nodding. His blue eyes darted around, taking in the overgrown trees, the weeds pushing up through the gravel, the Pitch Manor chimneys poking through the trees, and came to rest on Baz. Tired, muddy, waterlogged Baz.
“See you around,” he said, flashing one more smile full of stubby, ill-spaced teeth, and then darted back across the lane, swinging up onto his motorbike and kicking it easily into gear. The bike roared to life and quickly disappeared behind the tree line, sending several birds up into the sky.
Baz pushed his gate in and started back up the drive, his boots squelching as he went. Dev appeared from the underbrush halfway up the drive, his belly streaked with mud and his black coat covered in leaves.
“You look ridiculous,” Baz told the lab sternly. Dev didn’t respond.
Half an hour later, upon walking by the bevelled mirror in the main hall, Baz realised that he too had mud streaked across his cheek and several leaves stuck in his long black hair.
{+}
Simon blinked. The room was certainly… well, it was a room. And it was warm, and dry, and the bed looked extremely comfortable, even if it was surrounded by eyes.
“Aren’t they just the funniest things?” Ebb said from the doorway, smiling. “I’ve been collecting ‘em for years. I just love goats.”
Simon noded, looking around at the staggering collection of goat figures that filled the small room he’d rented from the B&B. He liked goats enough — maybe not this much — but Ebb was friendly and warm, and he didn’t want to be rude, so he smiled brightly at her and dropped his pack to the floor.
“They’re brilliant, really,” he said, and Ebb rewarded him with a blinding smile. He noticed for the first time that the knit cardigan she wore over her football shirt had little goats on it.
“Well, the match is on so I’ll be downstairs, feel free to come join or hunt me down if you have any questions!” Ebb said.
“Yeah, yeah, will do,” Simon said, smiling at her right until she was out the door, and then his smile dropped.
He was exhausted. He barely suppressed a groan as he looked at the bed, but he resisted and instead headed to the small ensuite shower. It was raining when he left London that morning, so what should have been an easy two hour ride had turned into a sopping wet three hour ordeal. The rain had let up around Chawton, but everything had turned to mud, and by the time he reached Watford — or whereabouts he assumed Watford was, as it was outrageously small and located on the outskirts of the New Forest park — he was frozen, aching, and regretting everything.
The pit stop to help the bloke pull the tree out of the road hadn’t exactly helped his aching muscles, either.
He wanted to lie down on the bed and wonder what the hell he was doing with his life and never get up again. The bed looked lumpy, but the quilt was cosy enough. Maybe if he got in the bed and pulled the blanket up he could pretend that he wasn’t recently single, newly without a flat, and taking time away from work to, as his best friend Penny called it, “find himself, like a recently divorced white woman.”
He wasn’t a recently divorced white woman, but he was determined. He had a plan, and Watford was item number one on that plan, and now he was here, in a room full of goats in a B&B run by a woman who seemed to be half butch lesbian and half elderly grandmother, and it was a very good thing that he long ago gave up trying to think things through.
After losing a battle with the shower (why was the water heater box different on every single shower in Britain?) Simon emerged back into the goat room, soaking wet and thoroughly chilled through. His fingers were semi-shaking whilst he pulled on clean clothes as fast as he could, and he wondered for the first time why he didn’t plan this little soul searching activity in the summer. Why did he have to do it in November ?
Looking through his bag for a fresh pair of socks, his hands fell on the small tissue-wrapped bundle in the corner of his duffle. It was the only thing in the bag that had been packed with care. The reason why he was there.
Pulling out the bundle, he gently unwrapped it, peeling away layers of tissues to show the soft white fleece of the baby blanket inside. The white had dimmed a bit, the edges were pilling from years of use, and there was damage to the bottom left corner, but he’d kept it in decent condition, all things considered. It was the only thing he’d ever really had, to be honest. It was kind of crucial that he not trash it.
Unfolding it, he fingered at the small patch in the far corner, sewn in just next to the blue silk stripe edging.
Watford Wool and Silken Goods
EST: 1886
Hampshire, England
A blanket. A surname. A pregnant girl named Lucy.
It was hardly much of anything to go on. Twenty-three years and this was the most he’d ever managed to learn about where he came from. But it should be enough, shouldn’t it? Whoever left him (at a convent, of all things, like a babe out of some story book) — one day old and wrapped in an expensive, hand-made blanket — had come from somewhere. And Watford was a good start. A blanket like this felt like an important clue, the best chance of locating where his mother had come from. At least, that’s what Penny had said.
It was his ex-girlfriend, Agatha, who had suggested the blanket might be an heirloom.
“You know how these things go. That’s the kind of blanket that gets passed down through families,” she’d said to him, as kindly as she could, while they both pretended to ignore that the reason he didn’t know those things was because he never had a family.
Clearing his throat, he rewrapped the soft little blanket and set it carefully in his rucksack, then pulled his boots back on. His back twinged as he bent down, but he ignored it. He’d come all this way for a reason, and he wasn’t going to waste a moment of it sitting in bed and being lazy. Even if it was disgusting out, and even if he was freezing.
Deliberately not looking at the grey haze building outside his window, Simon shrugged his — still damp — jacket back on, grabbed his rucksack, and headed out of his room, determined to track down Watford Wool and Silken Goods.
{+}
“If you’d told me you don’t have anything to eat, I’d have stopped off before I walked all the way here,” Fiona scolded from her position in the doorway of the master bedroom. Her arms were crossed and she looked fit to kill.
She was also entirely dry, which meant that she was lying and had not walked. The previous day’s brief respite from the storm had not lasted; rain was lashing against the window, and there would likely be another downed tree today, which Fiona would most likely not help with.
Fiona was horrifically mean, extremely opinionated, an awful housekeeper, and Baz loved her excessively. She was a cousin of some sort — distantly related, from far enough back in the tree to a point where the Pitch line was still entirely white — and she was the best thing to come out of his time in Hampshire. Sometimes he secretly wished there were a way to bring her back to London when he finally went home, so he could keep her with him and let her make mean comments about people he hated.
“Isn’t it your job to know whether we have food?” Baz asked, scrubbing at a particularly vile patch of mould in the far corner by the fireplace. The room was almost fully back up and running — it was in decent shape to begin with, and was the first one he attacked when he started this project — but that one spot of mould was resisting him. He found himself back in there at the same time daily to try a different concoction of chemicals on it. He was suspecting that he was on his way to creating Cillit Bang-immune super-mould.
“There’s nothing to eat. Someone will have to go to the village,” Fiona said in a tone that made it very clear that “someone” meant “Baz”. A glance out the window at the rain confirmed it. Fiona wasn’t going anywhere until her boyfriend Nico arrived at the end of her shift to pick her up in his covered vehicle.
Baz had a vehicle — two actually; his beloved MG, which he didn’t fancy scratching up further on the drive, and a rusted old ‘78 Land Rover that ran on dreams and spite. He hated driving it. It still smelt like his grandfather’s tobacco and his great-aunt’s perfume and sitting in it felt like being sucked back in time. He refused to use either vehicle to help ferry Fiona to and from her job.
“You realise I pay you a large sum of money to make my life easier, right?” he scolded, straightening up and adjusting the cuffs of his shirt.
Fiona snorted.
“You think I’m paid a large sum? I should have the Queen’s jewels for putting up with you, boyo.”
Baz fixed her with a level glare.
“I’ll go this afternoon, once I’ve tackled the Green Room,” he responded. “Make yourself useful in the meantime and make me some coffee.”
“What’s the point,” Fiona scoffed. “We’ve no biscuits to go with it.”
“Life isn’t about biscuits, Fiona,” Baz said, marching briskly from the room and across the hall to the Green Room.
He was making his way down the bedrooms one by one; having finished the left wing, he was now on to the right. He planned it specifically so that the Red Room — which had sat empty since his mother died — would be last. Because he really didn’t want to do it. Maybe he just… wouldn’t.
After that came the cleaning atrocities of the downstairs rooms, and the inevitability of having to tackle the conundrum of the Egypt Room. The collection of dubiously verified ancient artefacts didn’t upset him, necessarily, but it did confuse him, and slightly annoy him. He was never sure if the statues and masks and urns were meant to be boastful exotic collectables or some strange grab at family history, and everyone had largely treated it as a combination of both, which left Baz feeling like it was most likely neither.
But that wasn’t on the item today. He could sort through the remains of his ancestors’ Egyptomania and strange tangle of his family lineage some other day.
The Green Room proved to be in better shape than he had expected. The dust was easily dispatched with, the cracked tiles on the fireplace able to be adequately fixed with epoxy, and though he did have to throw out the duvet and matching pillows, the mice hadn’t gotten to that bedroom as badly as he thought. It was gloomy and cold and empty, just like the rest of the house, but piece by piece, Baz was determined to force some cheer into it.
He’d beat it in if he had to.
Fiona eventually wandered in with extra rags and a ceramic carafe full of coffee and together they set about cleaning and wiping down the large windows, scrubbing between the tin fastenings that criss-crossed the panes, and then wiping down the casings, the baseboards, the mantel and the hearth.
The house was an odd mishmash of styles — Grade II listed, dating back to the Elizabethan era, but heavily redone during the Victorian craze — which led to intricate wood screens set next to Gothic revival windows. Each room was a mystery of style, made only worse when his grandparents had updated the Manor when his mother was young. It lent itself to architectural whiplash, but, fortunately, it meant many of the rooms had been spared the full degradation of time.
It was a relief, to say the least. He had the money for the repairs — unlike most families burdened with such a glorious beast — but he wasn’t eager to sink his life and trust fund into the roof of the place.
“This room might not actually need paint,” he mused aloud as he emptied the dregs of his third cup of coffee. His hands smelt of wood polish and window cleaner, and the whole room had taken on a dusty, citrusy scent that wasn’t entirely displeasing. If he were to light a fire, it might even be downright homey.
Dev lay curled up next to the hearth, snoring quietly, his jowls puffing out in his sleep, and Baz was struck — not for the first time — by how much the house needed these things; a coat of polish, a nice fire, a dog.
“Add it to your serial killer list,” Fiona said, flicking at his trouser pocket where he kept his small notebook of projects to be done on the house. Baz’s eyebrows twitched in annoyance. It was not a serial killer list. He just had very small handwriting.
Baz pulled it out and produced a pen from the other pocket and made his notations on the Green Room.
- Needs new duvet
- No paint
- Recheck tile on fireplace
- Almost completed
“What are you going to do when you finish all your projects? Wither up and die?” Fiona asked over her own mug. Baz fought the urge to snarl at her.
“Find a new one, I suppose.”
He should, in reality, finish his projects and then go back to London. Pick up his boxes from Niall’s flat. Take up a spot in his father’s Chambers. Figure out what to do with his crumbling family home; ideally, figure out a way to maximise his inheritance.
But the idea of going back to London sounded exhausting.
Staying in Hampshire was exhausting too, if he stopped to think about it.
So he deliberately didn’t stop long enough.
“Right, I’m for the village then,” he said, standing up and dusting off his trousers. The rain had died down enough to be a light mist, and the biscuit situation was truly pressing. “You want to join?”
“No, I’ve decided to clean that stove of yours today. I tried to turn it on last week and it exploded and made me look like Oliver fucking Twist,” Fiona said, waving her hand. Despite her general meanness, Fiona had been wonderfully useful. She’d been on staff for ages — the only staff, really — but when the family wasn’t in residence her job had largely been to walk through and make sure the house hadn’t fallen apart and the gate wasn’t smashed in. Baz only kept her on when he took ownership because he felt it was rude not to.
He initially regretted it, because she was so unbearably mean to him. But she cleaned the kitchen and made the rooms liveable before he came to stay, and had helped the renovation process by largely keeping him in coffee and sometimes biscuits, and gave him someone to talk to.
Even if that person was horrible.
“You might want to change, you look as though you’ve been through a sewer,” she called, and Baz tried not to make a face. He did not look like he’d been through a sewer. He was just slightly dusty.
Still, there were worse things than making an effort to look decent, and so he changed quickly before he left, swapping his work shirt for a soft jumper and putting on a cleaner pair of trousers. Glancing out the window at the misting rain, however, he sighed and pulled back on the field jacket and a different pair of boots, and collected the keys to the Land Rover.
{+}
Watford was, to be honest, not exactly what Simon had been hoping for.
It wasn’t that it was tiny. He may have been born in London but he knew London was not indicative of England in general. Hampshire was green and vast and not very full of people.
But Watford was… muddy.
Maybe musty was a better word for it. Everything was waterlogged from the rain and the streets were made of slicked old cobble and every store front looked like it was decades old, and all of them were identical in their shabby, grey, slightly twee-rundownness.
It had taken him forever to find Watford Wool and Silken Goods, despite the size of the village. He’d spent the afternoon searching and asking around and being told to go to the Weeping Tower, take a left at White Chapel and then Watford Wool would be right there, nestled in a storefront that he couldn’t miss.
He’d thought, when he left London, that starting the search for his parents was going to be an adventure where he put together clues each afternoon and did soul searching while crossing the country on his motorbike. He’d go to new places and meet new people and have An Experience.
Instead he’d wandered around in the misting rain, stalking the tiny church on the corner of the main street for almost an hour looking for the storefront or a tower of any kind, before a woman in wellies pushing a pram told him that White Chapel wasn’t a church; it was a butcher’s. And the Weeping Tower was a clock tower that was slowly crumbling with age.
Both were on the other side of the village.
Watford Wool and Silken Goods, as it turned out, was an extremely small shop front which was extremely easy to miss, and smelt of dust and mothballs and that acrid perfume women over eighty all seemed to wear.
And, like most of Hampshire apparently, it was deserted.
He’d ended up back in Ebb’s living room, receiving a gentle scolding for somehow not intuiting that the Woollen Mill was closed on Mondays, and had drunk several litres of tea before returning to his room to pass out.
Ignoring the stares of a hundred goats, he climbed under the quilt and pretended that he had never come to Hampshire.
The next day, he woke bright and early and braved the pouring rain to return to the Mill, only to find that it still wasn’t open.
“Oh, they’re closed every second Tuesday,” a man walking by with his dog had called, after taking in Simon’s intense confusion.
“But the door is unlocked,” he said, pointing at the round brass knob that jutted from the shop’s heavy black door.
“Well no one would be rude enough to go in when the proprietor isn’t there,” the man with the dog had told him, frowning. Even his scruffy yellow dog looked like it was frowning, and Simon had to bite down the very real desire to curse.
“But that makes no sense,” he grumbled, but the man and dog had moved on, leaving him to his confusion. He’d gone back to Ebb’s after that, and received two more cups of tea for his trouble.
“If you’re looking for information, try the pub,” Ebb had suggested. “The bridge club meets there on Tuesday. Dunno that they’ll have answers for you, but they may be able to point you in the right direction. Worst case scenario, I suppose you can play a bit of bridge!”
The bridge club, as it turned out, didn’t play much bridge.
The group of old women seemed to sit at the large table in front of the massive fireplace in the Watford Arms ordering copious amounts of club soda and tea while they ignored their cards in favour of talking shit about everyone in the pub.
And they loved Simon.
“Daniel hasn’t been the same since his wife left him,” a woman named Cora stage whispered in Simon’s ear, pointing at a man who was close enough to hear every word she said. “Come to think of it, wasn’t her name Snow?”
“Snokes,” said another woman — Katherine, apparently. She was younger than the rest of the women at the table by a decade or so, and was the only one trying to focus on the game. She was also the only one who wasn’t charmed by Simon, and kept giving him a stern, dark look, which he was vaguely relieved by. “Her name was Snokes.”
“Oh, well,” Cora said, waving her hand in the air. “That’s very close, you know.”
“Also, she was from Leeds,” chimed in another biddy with blue hair whose name may have been Doreen. She had been sneaking sips of Simon’s ale all afternoon but he didn’t have the heart to stop her, and she stole another sip before placing a hand on Simon’s arm. Several of them had been doing that as well, and he wondered if he was going to have old-lady hand shaped bruises on his biceps. “I’m sorry, love, but I can’t for the life of me recall any family named Snow from the area.”
“That’s alright,” Simon said. He’d pretty much come to the conclusion that the women didn’t know anything an hour ago, but he stayed to talk to them because the company was nice. And also it was warm inside the pub, and there was ale, and there were no goats staring at him.
“Katherine, would you pass me that salt?” he asked, gesturing to the bulldog shaker that vaguely looked like Winston Churchill, but none of the ladies around him were paying attention any more. They’d all focused on the tall, dark, lean figure that had just swept into the pub with a gust of rain, and were practically vibrating with excitement.
“Who is it?” whispered a wheezy old lady across from him who seemed partially blind, but had been unerringly sharp with her cards.
“It’s the Pitch boy,” Cora whispered back. “Katherine’s cousin.”
Katherine’s sour face lit up with smugness.
“Oh, pish,” Doreen said with a whistling laugh. “Fourth cousins at best. She doesn’t even know the boy.”
“Nobody knows him yet,” Katherine snapped sourly.
“Is Baz new to the area?” Simon asked, taking a sip of his ale as he eyed the newcomer with interest.
The ladies swarmed.
“You know the Pitch boy?” Cora asked, poking a finger at him. “Mary, he knows the Pitch boy!”
Mary, a half-asleep woman in a faded blue Adidas jacket, perked up.
“You’re holding out on us, Mr. Snow,” she cackled, suddenly springing to life and pointing a knobbly finger at Simon. “How do you know Basilton?”
“Oh, er,” he said, freezing. “I helped him with his gate yesterday, it got knocked off in the storm.”
The ladies chittered excitedly amongst themselves.
“You know, he just moved back to the village,” Doreen said, leaning in. “Now that is a story, the poor boy.”
Simon watched him order his food, his posture perfect, unchanging. He was in an all weather jacket and wellies, but he managed to look natural. Comfortable. Like he owned the place. Well-bred sophistication at home amongst sticky bar counters and dark wood.
Basilton removed a small notebook from his pocket and began flicking through the pages, a small frown forming on his face, pulling his dark eyebrows together. His hair — just a touch too long, and curly at his nape from the weather — fell into his eyes, and his brown skin glowed almost gold in the warm, fire-lit pub.
As if he could sense Simon’s gaze, Baz turned on his stool, one eyebrow already lifted in question. His eyes locked onto Simon’s for just a moment, and Simon’s stomach juddered in response.
Slowly — almost mockingly — Baz lifted his ale in the air in a small salute.
Simon broke the eye contact quickly and stared down into his own pint, his entire body filled with a sudden flush of warmth that had nothing to do with the ale in front of him or the fireplace by his side.
{+}
Watford was barely a village, but it had a co-op and a pub and a tidy little church — which kept it from being classified as a hamlet, even if the entirety of the village could fit in Baz’s back pasture — and it wasn’t very far from Pitch Manor. At one point, the village serviced the Manor entirely, and the inhabitants were all tenants.
But Baz had, regrettably, been born too late to enjoy the Pitch family’s feudal empire.
Baz parked in the same spot he always did, halfway on a grassy incline just in front of the post office, and he went in and had the same conversation with Miss Possibelf about the weather before he picked up his post and headed over to The Co-operative Watford.
He shopped quickly. Biscuits. More coffee. New tea, because he hated PG Tips, and supplies for sandwiches. He kept adding more and more items to his basket, because he was famished, and finally had to stop himself before he bought several sausage rolls, just because they were there. He didn’t even like sausage rolls.
Soon enough he was back out into the grey weather and trooping down the hill to put his purchases into the Land Rover. Two months ago he had lived in a world wherein he ate out for almost every meal and would run downstairs from his flat to the Halal market for any additional food he needed. In London, eating never required squelching through mud and fighting with an angry old car. It was one of the only things he actually missed about London, and triply so on days like this, when he was muddy and tired and cold and desperate to eat something warm that wasn’t coffee and toast.
“Fiona can wait for her fucking bikkies,” he mumbled to himself, slamming the door closed and heading across the street to the Watford Arms. It had barely gone 2 p.m. so he didn’t expect it to be full, but to his surprise a large corner was taken up by a table full of old women playing bridge. Sitting amongst them was the motorcycle stranger. Simon.
The pub was blissfully, incandescently warm. The large old fireplace was lit up and the flames threw happy shadows through the room, the warmth reaching to every inch. It smelt of grease and beer and the threadbare brown carpet was sticky, but it was so welcoming and warm that the idea of going back out into the rain made him want to weep.
Taking a seat at the bar, he deliberately did not turn around to look at the bronze curls directly behind him, and instead focused extremely hard on ordering his food and a pint, and then pulled out his notebook. He was halfway through his list of services he was going to have to break down and hire outside help for when he felt a prickling at the back of his neck, like he was being watched. He turned quickly, just in time to see the entire table of ladies — and Simon — deliberately look away.
Simon’s eyes, lingered though, and Baz raised his glass in a salute. It was the bare minimum of courtesy; the man had pulled a tree out of the road and fixed his gate, after all.
Simon’s face lit up red enough to rival the ugly maroon carpet, and he tore his eyes away from Baz as he leant back into the biddie’s gossip.
Baz shifted slightly and strained to overhear their whispered conversation.
“...all alone up there, bless him. Used to live here as a boy, but left after—”
“We don’t need to get into that business, Cora,” another old lady hissed, cutting off the first woman who had spoken. From the corner of his eye Baz could tell that Cora looked ruffled, and she adjusted her blazer with indignation.
“I’m just saying, it’s nice to have young blood back in the area! I hear he’s fixing up that dusty old house, I do hope he stays.”
“I reckon he’s turning it into a hotel,” said another woman with a shock of grey curls.
“Nonsense, you don’t know the family like I do. They’d never open it up to the public,” said Cora.
“Oh, you don’t know anything,” said the woman with the curls. “Times change. And besides, there’s all that history there. I went there once, when I was girl. They have a whole room full of Egyptian mummies.”
“There are no mummies,” snapped yet another woman, looking up from her cards. Baz knew her — Katherine Pritchard, Fiona’s aunt. “Don’t be dim, Doreen.” She leaned in to Simon and nodded at him. “There are no corpses, boy, but there are plenty of local records. Best collection we have around these parts, anyway. That’s your best bet. I can put a word in with my niece, if you want.” Katherine beamed proudly. “She’s his housekeeper.”
“Or I could just go ask him?” Simon said, his voice hesitant. Baz smirked into his pint.
“Well, yes, I suppose you could—” Katherine started, but Simon had already stood up.
“Brilliant, thank you for your help,” he said kindly, and pushed back his chair with a scrape.
Baz quickly refocused on his notebook, making a small notation about flowers — flowers? Where did that come from — and tried to look like he was not just eavesdropping as the stool next to him was pulled out and Simon appeared, curls and moles and all.
“Alright?” he said cautiously, smiling. “Baz, yeah?”
Baz looked up from his book and surveyed the man in front of him. He was dry now, unlike yesterday, and instead of a mud splattered jacket, he was wearing a loose fitting white t-shirt that curled up around the sleeves. His arms were dotted with freckles, and when he leaned in to adjust the stool, he smelled like cinnamon and ale.
“Yes,” Baz said, then nodded, and gritted out, “Simon, was it?”
Simon grinned even wider, if possible, and nodded.
“Yeah. Simon Snow. How’s your gate?”
Simon Snow. Like a name out of a fairy tale book. It was ridiculous and whimsical, and it fit him excessively. Snow. He looked like a Snow.
Baz stared at him for a long moment, and Snow blinked, suddenly looking unsure. Why was this conversation so stilted? Baz didn’t normally have a problem with conversations.
“Still swinging,” Baz answered finally, and then immediately regretted his entire life. There was another long silence, during which Snow furrowed his brow, as if expecting Baz to say something more.
“Thank you, by the way, for your help yesterday,” Baz said, belatedly remembering his manners before taking a long sip of his pint.
“Oh, yeah, of course, no problem,” Snow responded. His easy smile was gone, and he looked suddenly unsure. He kept glancing back at the table of old women, all of whom were listening to their conversation intently.
“Is there something you need, Snow?” Baz asked, his words coming out far more clipped and severe than he had intended. He would have winced, if he weren’t trying desperately to play it cool, but Snow did lean back a bit, as if the sharpness of Baz’s words or the use of his surname had propelled him back.
“Actually, I was hoping you could help me with something?” he said, pulling one hand up to rub at the nape of his neck. “See, I’m looking for someone, and everyone said you might be the person to ask.”
“I’m not sure why.”
“I’m trying to find land records, census data, anything really,” Snow said, beginning to babble. “I’m looking for a family — the Snows? I don’t know if they’re from this area, but I figured it’s the first place to start. The women over there said they didn’t know of any families by that name, but they might not have been from the village, and that you’d have those records, for some reason?”
Baz stared at him for a moment, trying to catch up with the influx of information, then furrowed his brows and nodded.
“Oh. Oh, yes it’s possible,” he said slowly, pausing when Snow frowned in confusion. “The Manor became kind of the de-facto historical archive around here,” he explained. “During the war, my great-grandparents opened up the cellars for storage and shelter, in case of an air raid. They let the locals store valuables, records, etc. there. After the war, a lot of people just left their records there for safe keeping, and my grandmother worked with the WI to build up a historical database.”
“So, if there was a family by the name of Snow around here, there’s a chance you’d have those records?”
Baz nodded, but the look of hesitation didn’t leave his face.
“There’s a good chance.” He frowned. “But I haven’t seen those records since I was a boy. I don’t think anyone has been down there in years. I should warn you, I have no idea what shape they’re in.”
“That’s fine,” Snow said in a rush, nodding his head like a pinball in his eagerness. “Really, that’s no problem. Would you be alright if I looked through them?”
Struggling to remember the last time someone who wasn’t family or Fiona had been in the house, Baz paused. He wasn’t particularly proud of the state of things. Just thinking about the general disrepair of the dining room was bad enough; he couldn’t begin to imagine what the cellars looked like.
The house wasn’t meant to be seen like that. It had more pride than that.
But Snow did help him move the branch and fix his gate, and he supposed he did owe him. And the look of disappointment growing on his face was difficult to ignore.
“Fine,” Baz said finally, draining his pint and putting it back on the counter with a firm ‘click.’ “You can come by tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” Snow repeated, grinning. “Thanks, Baz. Really.”
“Come to the front door around 11, my housekeeper will let you in,” Baz said awkwardly, standing up from his stool and pulling back on his Barbour jacket. “See you tomorrow, Snow.”
{+}
Pitch Manor wasn’t actually that large.
It was huge in the way that fairy tale castles are supposed to be huge; broad and sweeping, with uneven stacks and sudden elevations and ivy that had grown over exposed brick and died and grown again over the dead. But it wasn’t egregious or oversized; it seemed to fit naturally within its overgrown surroundings, set off from the road by a long, winding gravel drive.
It wasn’t raining, which Simon was thankful for, considering he chose to walk that morning instead of attempting to navigate his bike up the twisting wooded drive and around the narrow fieldstone walls that had fallen into disrepair.
The whole house had a kind of shabby elegance to it, like an old dowager that had fallen asleep in her diamonds and whose tiara had begun to collect dust. Simon was entirely, 100 per cent positive that this house was haunted, and yet, he kind of loved it.
It was heavy and sturdy and had probably been there for a hundred or more years, and would be there for a hundred more.
The door knocker — black iron, carved into the shape of a horse head locked in an endless scream — thudded against the heavy wood door, and then there was silence as Simon stood, waiting. More silence as he looked back at the rounded drive in front of the house, dotted with skeletal rose bushes and trees. More silence as he contemplated knocking again, and then suddenly an explosion of sound.
“Dev, just fucking—” a woman shouted, only to be met by frenzied barking. “Dev, down! Down! Don’t—”
The door flew open to reveal a frazzled-looking woman with a shock of black hair, her hand wrapped around the collar of a flailing black Labrador Retriever. Its tongue was practically falling out of its head as it lunged toward Simon, and without thinking he dropped his rucksack and sank to his knees.
“Alright!” he said, reaching for the dog, who successfully broke free from the woman and slammed itself into Simon’s chest.
“Sorry, he’s a fucking nightmare,” the woman growled, straightening up and tucking her hair back into place. She had a shock of white streaked through it in the front, which made her look dangerous. “Are you the one who came to look at the shit?”
“Uh,” Simon responded while distractedly rubbed Dev’s ear, “yeah?”
“This way,” she grunted, and turned around and left.
Grabbing his rucksack, Simon hurried to follow her, Dev trotting at his heels and occasionally jumping up to lick at his hand. They moved so fast through the entry way that he barely had time to take everything in — the high ceilings, the walls covered entirely in dark wood panelling and portraits of frowning old white people that looked nothing like the owner in residence. The huge windows, criss-crossed with tin casings and with the occasional stain glass motif set into them. He’d never been in a place like it before, save for maybe a museum, and it was dizzying.
It was also in awful condition. The wood was pale and ashy and cracking in some areas, the stone floors had small fissures running through them, and there was a general layer of dust and disuse that did not in any way jive with the pulled together neatness of the man who owned it.
And it felt lonely.
“Cellar is down there,” the woman said, leading him down a sturdy staircase to a downstairs kitchen that felt substantially homier than the rest of the house and pointing to a green wooden door next to the pantry. “Just checked the lights this morning, so they do turn on. Don’t break anything. Don’t take anything out of the house. Scream if something goes wrong.”
“Oh, er, thanks,” Simon said, thrown off by the suddenness of it all. He quickly wiped the dog spit from his hand and held it out to her. “Uh…?”
“Fiona,” the housekeeper responded, eyeing Simon’s hand and then ignoring it. “I’ll be around the main floor. Sorry for the mould.”
And then she was gone, stalking off through the kitchen. Dev threw him a sympathetic look and then followed closely behind, and Simon saw nothing to do but turn to the slightly ajar cellar door and face his fate.
The lights flickered on with an audible hum and illuminated a rough cement staircase leading down into the shadowy cellar below, and for a moment Simon considered backing out and running extremely far away, because this was absolutely where the horror movie that was his life would start. He could smell the damp, the walls looked wet and slick from the moisture, and he absolutely didn’t want to consider what state the records he was looking for were going to be in.
“Right,” he said, hitching his rucksack and squaring his jaw. “I can do this.”
The cellar was huge, made of multiple rooms and antechambers, but — to his immense relief — only the first room was full of damp. The rest of the cellar sloped up and became dusty and dry, and that’s where he found them; boxes upon boxes of papers, suitcases stacked on top of old milk crates, a canvas bag stuffed with envelopes, a dozen or more shoeboxes and hat boxes, and more ledgerbooks than he could ever possibly count.
“Jesus Christ,” he breathed, taking in the sight. There was no order to it. There was no obvious place to start. The bridge biddies had lead him to believe there were land records stored there, but this… this looked like the personal files and keepsakes of a century worth of families.
And he was just looking for one.
He wished Penny were there. She’d know what to do and where to start. She’d have some system worked out, and she’d rig up a chalkboard or something to take notes with, or she’d have brought a camera or a scanner or something.
He’d just brought some pens and a spiral notebook he got at Asda.
He pulled those out, along with the thermos of tea and the clementine Ebb sent with him, and reached for the nearest ledger.
{+}
“Well, there was no point in going home, so we just slept on the street.”
“You’re joking! In February?”
“We were so pissed we didn’t even feel the cold.”
Baz paused outside the door to the kitchen and listened to the voices floating out of the room, almost not believing the kind and humourous tone in Fiona’s voice as she chattered away about her misspent London youth. She never talked that much or that happily to Baz. At least not without a few insults.
“More tea?”
“Oh, that would be lovely, thanks.”
Baz entered the warm kitchen — it was the only warm room in the house, to be honest, and the only truly cosy one, because he had made the kitchen his top priority when he first arrived — and surveyed the scene before him.
He’d come down to bother Fiona for some tea, because she’d never appeared upstairs with the tea tray like she usually did, and now he knew why. She had defected and given his tea to Snow, apparently. Traitors. Her and the bloody dog, who was curled up with his head on Snow’s ratty trainers.
“Oh there you are,” Fiona said, looking up from the kettle as Baz entered. “Wondered when you’d drag your sorry self down for some bikkies. How goes the mould?”
“Resilient,” Baz said mirthlessly, drawing out a chair at the table on the opposite of Snow and sitting down at the old pine table.
He loved this table — possibly more than anything else in the entire house. It was old and warped and covered in a century’s worth of scratches, but he could still remember sitting at it when he was younger, drinking milk and eating graham crackers as he watched his mother read and mark up papers. The cheery lights of the kitchen would reflect off the lenses of the reading glasses that sat perched at the end of her nose — his nose. By some odd twist of genetics, he had much darker colouring than his mother, but at least he had her nose.
He gripped his fingers around the edge of the table and looked out the window to the darkening afternoon sky.
“You should just give up on the mould. You’re not up to the task. You don’t even sleep in that room, so just make peace with it,” Fiona said, setting an old chipped mug of tea in front of him, which he took gratefully, wrapping his cold hands around the ceramic. There was dust caked under his nails, to his utter horror, and he didn’t want to imagine what the rest of him looked like. He knew he had to smell like a combination of dirt and citrus-scented cleaner.
“Pitches never surrender,” he snapped, leaning back in his seat and crossing his ankle across his knee as he finally allowed himself to survey Snow, whose easy demeanor had substantially stiffened upon his arrival. “Snow.”
“Er, hi,” Snow responded, pulling a freckled hand through the curls at the back of his head. He was gorgeous, Baz had to admit, in a rumpled, approachable way. Extremely different from Niall, who was always buttoned up and smirking and aloof. Baz quickly shut down that line of thinking, though. Niall was on the thought blacklist, and he absolutely would not stand there and compare this new stranger to his ex-boyfriend. “Alright?”
Baz raised an eyebrow. He hated that phrase. Niall would never say something like that, and this realisation had him suddenly warming to the word.
“Have you found what you were looking for?” he asked, ignoring the question. Snow put his own tea down on the table and shook his head, looking slightly guilty. There was a smudge on his nose that was either dirt or a pile of freckles; Baz couldn’t tell.
“No, not yet. There’s, er, well there’s a lot down there. And it’s not really organised.” The tips of his ears flushed suddenly, and he scrambled to add, “Not that I mind! I just needed a breather. I don’t, uh, I don’t think I’ll be able to get through it today.”
There was a heavy pause within the kitchen.
“You’re welcome to look as long as you need,” Baz said finally, even though he didn’t really mean it. The man was distracting and it felt odd having someone strange in his house. He’d been thinking about it all morning as he’d tried to wage war on the Blue Room, which was in awful condition. He’d nearly inhaled a bucket of dust because he was so focused on thinking about the man three floors below.
A month in Hampshire and he’d almost forgotten what it was like to be around someone other than older white women. That had been what had prompted the tea break, actually.
“Thanks, really,” Snow said, nodding. “It’s a lot to go through, and I know it’s a long shot, but…”
“What are you looking for again?” Baz asked, interrupting the rambling.
“Uh, a family by the name of Snow. Or a girl named Lucy who lived around here twenty-three years ago or so. Not a whole lot to go on, I know, but…” he spread his large hands out wide and shrugged.
“What are you looking them up for?” Fiona asked, not looking up from the nail she was picking clean.
“She was my mum,” Snow responded, looking down at his tea. “Well, I think. I dunno if her surname was Snow, but I don’t have a clue as to what it could have been. So I’ve just got her name and my last name, and I’m trying to piece it together.”
“Why Watford?” Baz asked. “We’re not exactly on the map.”
“Oh, well, I’ve got this,” Snow said, bending down to retrieve the rucksack at his feet, which Dev was currently drooling on. Digging around inside it, he pulled out a tissue wrapped bundle and placed it gently on the table. Curious, Baz reached forward and peeled off the tissue to reveal a soft white baby blanket with blue trimming.
“Oh,” Baz said, his chest squeezing tight. “Oh, I see.”
“What is it?” Fiona asked, frowning as she sat forward in a show of uncharacteristic interest.
“One of the Watford Wool blankets,” Baz responded sharply, rewrapping the blanket in the tissue and sliding it back across the table.
“I’m not following,” Fiona said, frowning. But Simon was leaning in, his eyes wide, a look on his face so hungry and expectant that Baz had the sudden, desperate wish that he could hand him all the answers in life he’d ever asked for.
“The Wool Mill used to make these handmade baby blankets,” Baz said. “They were very popular during my grandparents’ time. Lots of families in the area had one or two that got passed down. We have one.”
“You do?” Snow breathed, picking up the blanket to put it back in his rucksack. But he paused in the action for a moment, cradling the bundle to him, and Baz suspected Snow had no idea he was doing it.
“Yes, I believe so. It’s upstairs, somewhere.” He cleared his throat and sat back against his chair again, and tried to sound disinterested. He knew they had one. He’d used it as a child. And it wasn’t just somewhere. It was in the Red Room.
“Well, good luck,” Baz said, standing up quickly and taking his tea cup with him. He didn’t want to sit here and stare at Snow’s freckled hands or get sucked into another fit of memories. “Fiona, I’m in the Blue Room today. And likely tomorrow.”
“Oh, I’d love to help,” Fiona said, sounding extremely insincere, “but I’ve an audiobook I had planned to listen to today.”
“You can listen to an audiobook while you clean,” Baz said, frowning, and Fiona made a disagreeable hissing noise.
“Not this one. Sorry, boyo. It’s a really juicy murder book, I’ve got to really focus.”
“I’m sure,” Baz drawled, putting the hand not holding his tea into his trouser pockets as he turned to Snow. “Please leave things as you found them, if possible,” he said.
Snow gave a curt nod and stared up at him through wide blue eyes. Plain blue, Baz realised, nothing special at all, but the eye contact threw Baz off kilter for a moment.
“By the way, you have dust on your nose,” he said suddenly, without thinking, and then tapped the side of his own nose.
Snow’s face turned a bright red as he reached up to scrub at his face with the edge of his jumper, and Baz turned on his heel and fled from the kitchen.
{+}
Simon had felt good about his progress on the documents when had left the following evening, but upon finding himself facing down the stack the next morning, it seemed like it had multiplied.
He was in a shit mood. It was raining, again, because apparently all it did in Hampshire was rain, and he had had yet another unsuccessful attempt to talk to the owner of Watford Wool. Was the entire shop just closed up for the entirety of November? Did no one buy woollen goods anymore? Probably not, actually. Simon had always kind of hated wool. He thought it was scratchy and made his skin red and sometimes it made him sneeze.
Fuck wool.
The rain had chased a damp chill into the cellars, and even with his warmest jumper on and the thermos of tea that Ebb had sent along with him he was still shivering. And he couldn’t see for shit. The bulbs above his head gave off a steady static hum that was giving him a headache, and the dim yellow light he was trying to read by wasn’t helping much either.
And his hips hurt from sitting on the uneven cement floor.
Standing up and stretching out his back, he shuffled off through the cellar and toward the slick steps that led back up into the kitchen. From the open door he couldn’t see any movement in the kitchen beyond, but he figured Fiona couldn’t be too far — the previous day he’d heard her banging about upstairs the entire time he had been there — so he headed up.
She wasn’t in the kitchen, so he spread out his search, tentatively checking the large pantry and secondary rooms on the kitchen level that he guessed had been servant parlours at one point before moving upstairs to the main level of the house.
“Fiona?” he called, opening the double doors that let out into the main hall, where the square spiral staircase began its looping climb upward. “Er, Fiona?”
He heard Dev’s nails before he saw him, the Labrador panting down the staircase ahead of his owner. Baz was wearing a faded LSE crew-neck sweatshirt and had a dust rag slung over one shoulder, his arms full of dusty-looking books with precariously hanging covers.
“Can I help you?” Baz asked, stopping at the base of the stairs. His hair was pulled up away from his face, and it made his sharp cheekbones stand out even more than usual, accentuating his hooded grey eyes. It was the most casual Simon had seen him to date.
“Oh, er,” Simon said, suddenly feeling extremely awkward. “I was, er, looking for Fiona.”
“She’s upstairs polishing brass. It’s a miracle event, and I’d rather not jinx it,” Baz said, his tone dry, but a small hint of a smile pulled at his lips. It looked like he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to be amused or not. “What do you need?”
“Er, well,” Simon said, shifting slightly so he could lean down and scratch behind Dev’s ear. “It’s just, it’s a bit cold and hard to see in the cellar, and I was wondering if you’d, uh, mind if I maybe brought a few of the boxes up to the kitchen or something? Just somewhere I can go through them in the light.”
“What, you mean you can’t see in the dark?” Baz asked, the smile gone from his face. It left Simon unsure whether it was a joke or not, but somehow he managed to make it sound like this was a failure on Simon’s part.
“Uh, no,” Simon said. “No, uh, not that I know of.”
“You should work on that.”
“What?”
“Fiona will kill you if you clutter up the kitchen, we spent ages getting it clean,” Baz said, jumping off the topic as quickly as he’d stumbled onto it. “Feel free to use the library. It’s just through that door,” he said, pointing to a heavy wooden door at the end of the far hallway.
“Right, thanks,” Simon said. “Also, uh, you said take as long as you need, and I think it’s going to take a while. Like, definitely will not be done today.”
“There’s at least several decades worth of documents down there, I’d be surprised if you did,” Baz said, adjusting the books in his arm. “Even I don’t read that fast.”
And then he walked away, Dev trotting behind him, leaving Simon standing in the main hall of the beautiful, sad house and feeling very small and unaccountably stupid.
{+}
Lady Charlotte room; completed.
- Paint: completed
- Chip in plaster to be looked at
- Send portrait of Charlotte Pitch to storage, pending restoration
- Books to be sent for appraisal
What now?
Baz snapped his book closed and glared at the bedroom around him. Piece by piece, room by room, he’d made them clean and inhabitable. They weren’t cosy. They weren’t grand. They couldn’t begin to touch their former glory, but they were tidy and safe and probably the best he could do by himself.
There was nothing he could do for the plaster in the Lady Charlotte room, but he’d touched up the paint on the wall next to the fireplace and then had gone on to repaint the south wall as well, because he’d taken down several portraits to be cleaned and seen the horrifying difference in wall colour when they were removed, and then it bothered him, and well, three cans of paint and a partially ruined uni sweatshirt later, he thought it looked rather good, all things considered.
There was only one upstairs room left to be done, and Baz was not going to do it.
He’d realised that already, before he even started on this wing of bedrooms. The Red Room hadn’t been touched in almost twenty years, and, frankly, it could sit untouched for twenty more. He simply refused.
The rest of the bedrooms had been swept and dusted and mopped and shined, their statuses written down in Baz’s little notebook and their valuable contents catalogued in neat handwriting on the opposing pages.
He planned to polish and clean the stairwell next week, after the workman came to look at the cracked step on the second floor, and he didn’t feel like rushing that. It was too dismal to work outside, and he didn’t want to even think about touching the downstairs parlour, which would be freezing, or the dining room, which required a level of manual labour he wasn’t prepared to put in.
So the library it was. He needed to categorise the books and decide what was and wasn’t worth keeping, and give everything a strong dusting and polishing, besides.
The lights were on in the library when he got down there, and he paused at the doorway for a moment, confused as to why Fiona was working in there. Pushing the door open he stuck his head in and was greeted by the sight of his strange visitor sprawled on the ground surrounded by sloppy stacks of papers, a thermos of tea on one side and a sleeping Dev on the other. He was bent over a diary of sorts, his bronze curls falling into his face as his blue eyes roamed over the page, and Baz caught himself staring.
It was hard not to. Simon Snow was engaging. With his moles and his freckles and his bright expression and his lumbering footsteps and broad shoulders. He looked warm , like winter sunshine spilling out across the library floor, and he made the dusty, freezing room look warm all around him.
Baz cleared his throat, realising he had been lingering for too long, and the bronze head snapped up to look at him.
“I need to work in here,” he said stiffly. He meant to add a ‘do you mind?’ but it didn’t come out.
Something about Snow — with his scruffy hair and holey sweatshirt, sitting in Baz’s crumbling house and witnessing the strange tinges of Baz’s decrepit family — made him sharp, sharper than he had been in years. Sharper even than he had been with Niall — and those sharp angles had been the death of their relationship. Maybe if he had met Snow in London, at a pub or at school or walking down the street, he would have been able to to soften his edges.
But in Hampshire he was off kilter. He didn’t have the energy or the time or the inclination to dig out his uneven angles and smooth himself down.
“Oh, right, yeah, sorry,” Snow said, collecting his papers around him. Dev perked up, an ear cocked. “I’ll move.”
“No,” Baz said quickly. He wanted Snow to stay like that, warm and comfortable. “No, I can work around you. I have to…” he trailed off, and his eyes landed on the fireplace. “I have to check the fireplaces.”
“Want some help?” Snow asked, springing to his feet and stretching his neck out. The moles on his neck became more visible as Snow rolled his shoulders about, and Baz looked away.
“Aren’t you meant to be researching?” Baz responded, leaning down to reach the stack of firewood he’d set next to the fireplace weeks ago and never touched.
“I’m going spare,” Snow admitted, wandering over to take the split wood from Baz and place it in the fireplace. “I’m not great at just… reading for hours. I need to be moving, you know?”
“Not really,” Baz responded, handing him another piece of wood. “Reading for hours happens to be my main skillset.”
“Lucky,” Snow said, stacking the wood neatly on top of each other in a criss crossing formation. “Do you have a starter?”
Baz knew he didn’t, but he patted at his pocket anyway to give a show that he hadn’t just suddenly had the idea to light the fire because he wanted the room to feel as warm as Snow looked.
“Here,” Snow grunted, walking back over to his pile of papers and bending down. He rooted through the largest stack and came back with several pieces of paper, which he thrust into the fireplace.
“You can’t just burn people’s documents,” Baz snapped in alarm, reaching forward to pull them out, but Snow blocked his arm.
“It’s fine, they’re literally shopping lists.”
“Why would they store shopping lists?” Baz asked, pausing.
“I dunno, but it looks like people just shoved all kinds of papers into boxes and brought them over. And anyway, clearly no one is coming back for them. Some of those were pre-war. What’s the use?”
“Those are historical records,” Baz argued, digging out a crumpled piece of yellowed parchment. “This is a primary document, Snow. It gives us first hand insight into what life in the village was like.”
“Who cares?” Snow asked, his brow furrowing. “We don’t need to know someone’s butcher order.”
“You have no respect for history,” Baz sniffed. He expected Snow to snap at him — or even growl, or push him, or tell him to go fuck himself, but instead Snow just laughed.
“Nah. Not really. Do you care about someone’s butcher order?”
Baz glanced at the paper in his hand, which just said ‘2 x lamb chops’ and tried to determine how much he valued his pride.
“I’m going to fetch a newspaper,” he said, folding the butcher order neatly and slipping it into his trouser pocket before he left the library.
When he returned, he had several old newspapers, a packet of matches, and a tea tray of coffee that Fiona had shoved on him.
The fire was already going.
“Don’t tell me you burnt more historical documents,” Baz said, placing the tray on a nearby table and staring at the crackling fire with a flat expression.
“Yup,” Snow said, not looking up from massaging Dev’s ear. The dog’s tongue was lolling out of his head, and Baz wondered if maybe the two shared the same IQ level.
“I’ll kindly ask you to not come into my house and burn my possessions,” Baz said tightly, pouring himself a cup of coffee and then carrying it to the far bookshelf, where he placed it on a small writing desk.
“Technically they aren’t yours. They’re some old lady’s. Just because she didn’t come collect them doesn’t mean they’re yours. That’s the law,” Snow responded as he poured himself his own cup of coffee. Baz didn’t know where Snow’s sudden cheekiness had come from, and he hated the fact that he rather liked it.
“As a barrister, I assure you, that is most definitely not the law,” Baz said as he began methodically removing books from shelves and placing them in neat stacks on the floor. “But I encourage you to try that in a court of law.”
“You’re a barrister?” To Baz’s immense confusion, Snow had wandered over to where he was working and began to pull books off of shelves as well and add them to Baz’s stacks.
“That doesn’t go in that pile,” Baz said, taking two books out of Snow’s wide hands and placing them in the pile near his feet, before reshuffling several other books Snow had already put down. “And yes. I’m about to join a Chamber back in London.”
“So you don’t live here full time, then? You’re not here for good?”
Baz resorted three more of Snow’s books, then moved on to the next shelf.
“No, I’m just here temporarily to fix up the house,” he answered, taking another book out of Snow’s hand. “That doesn’t go there, just give it to me.”
“I don’t understand your piles,” Snow admitted, pulling three books off the shelf and handing them to Baz. Baz sorted them into their appropriate stacks, and then accepted three more from Snow.
“Of course you don’t. They follow my system,” Baz responded, settling himself into a seated position on the ground. He took another stack of books from Snow and glanced over each of them, testing the jacket on one and dusting off another with his sleeve before putting them in tidy piles.
“What are you sorting them for?” Snow asked, grunting a bit with the exertion of reaching the top shelf. He was just short enough and his arms just stubby enough that he couldn’t reach it with the same ease that Baz could, and Baz delighted in it.
“These piles get put back on the shelves after they’ve been cleaned,” Baz said, gesturing to the five large stacks next to him. “Those will be appraised for sale,” he said, pointing to two smaller piles. “And these I want to read,” he finished, patting the steadily growing stack of books just behind him.
“Are you selling the house? Or just some of the books?” Snow asked, waiting patiently for Baz to finish sorting his current pile before giving him more.
“You’re not doing a very thorough job with your research,” Baz countered. He didn’t want to answer a question he didn’t know the answer to. “Did you ever manage to speak to the Woollen Mill owner?”
“No,” Snow growled, cracking his fingers. “The sod never seems to be around. I check in every morning and I always miss him.”
“You’re going too early,” Baz said, standing and moving over a bit so he could have the room to start a new stack. “They never open until the afternoon.”
“Where is this written down?” Snow exclaimed. “It’s not anywhere on the store front!”
Baz shrugged.
“I suppose it’s just something you pick up from being local.”
“But you’re not local!” Snow argued. “You just moved here a few months ago, didn’t you?”
“I lived here when I was a boy,” Baz responded, his voice going cold. “And I visited several times a year after we moved.”
“Oh,” Snow said, his indignation fading. “Oh, yeah, alright. So why are you back?”
“You ask an absurd amount of questions.”
“Sorry,” Snow said, shrugging. “I’m used to working with little’uns. You get in the habit of chattering to keep up with them.”
“You’re a teacher?” Baz asked, surprised. He hadn’t put much thought into what Snow did. He’d just assumed he was a student.
“No,” Snow said, laughing. “Not at all. I’m a bartender. But I work at a nursery during the day.”
“Taking a break then? Seeing the country, one cellar at a time?” Baz asked, squinting at the book in his hands. He knew it was a limited edition, and he should have put it in the ‘to sell’ pile, but he really wanted to read it.
He put it in the ‘to read’ pile. He read fast.
“Nah, just, I figure if I’m going to do this, I should do it properly, you know? I’ve saved up, so I have some buffer, and I’m going to do my best.”
“I really don’t know if you’re going to find anything in those records,” Baz said, adding two more books to his reading pile.
“My best bet is the Woollen Mill, you know. I just hope they have some kind of records of what they sold.”
“Your blanket should have a maker’s mark on it with the year and number of blanket made,” Baz said, surveying his stacks. He took two out of the read pile. It was getting too big.
“How do you know that?” Snow asked, pausing.
“Mine has one,” Baz answered distractedly.
“Wait, really? I’ve never seen one on mine.”
“It’s under the nameplate,” Baz responded, frowning. “Mine came loose; my mother had to stitch it back on, but I remember seeing the stamp before she did.”
“That’s—” Snow paused, then thrust the books in his hand at Baz. “Sorry, I’ve— I’ve got to go. Thank you. I mean, yeah. Sorry. I’ll — I’ll pick this up tomorrow,” he said, nearly tripping over his words as he crossed the room and pulled his pack back up onto his shoulders.
“Sorry, thank you! Tell Fiona I said bye.” He swooped down to pat Dev on the head, and then he was gone, leaving stacks of books and papers and records in his wake.
“I wonder if it was something I said,” Baz dryly asked the empty room, adding two more books to his reading stack.
