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Del (![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} big_bad_wolf) wrote,@ 2007-08-09 19:06:00 |
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Title: Not Much Like Father, Like Son.
Fandom: Dr Who/Torchwood (tangentally)
Word Count: 13,895
Rating: NC-17
Notes: Thanks toderryderrydown for prompt and close beta and I suspect some research monkeying as well – any mistakes in there were probably ADDED by me in the final edit. Lattiford House is a real place, although details on the layout have been slightly massaged/vagued out – it's the building that I went to school in for five years so I know it and the area quite well. Stourhead is also a real place. Everyone in this apart from Jack and the few dead poets mentioned is my own creation.
Lattiford House was not a particularly imposing pile, as stately homes went. It was neither especially stately not, if one was honest, much of a home. It was low and modern in red brick and squatted rather in the grounds like an angry toad, although the approach was impressive enough a sweep despite this.
The main building had adequately housed the soldiers training there during the conflict, and the building's owner, the Lady Diana Beckett, had been swift, gracious and almost eager in her assistance whenever needed. Jack Harkness (formally without rank until the next big skirmish, but he always thought of himself as Captain Jack, and it showed) suspected from the gleam in the old lady's eye that her motives were as much prurient as they were altruistic, but he could hardly hold that against her.
Indeed, three weeks after Armistice he sent her a letter thanking her once again fro her kind accommodation and assistance in the war effort, and not entirely to his surprise she responded with modesty ("just doing my duty"), fulsome praise for the Army and enquiries after his health (Jack opted not to tell her about being shot, blown up, gassed, hanged when he was mistaken for someone else and burned alive when he was correctly identified). Two more letters were exchanged and she invited him to visit.
It was clear, had been crystal all along, what Lady Diana (a mid-fifties widow with what had once been shockingly black hair, a broad mouth, and the kind of strong chin aristocracies only wished they could breed for) sought from dashing Captain Jack (he declined to give his age, she guessed twenty-seven and he laughed and thanked her, since the truth was he was older than her). Jack did not mind – there was something about women of Diana's age and status, a confidence unfettered by socialised coyness, married to a cynicism that could fell trees. Lady Diana Beckett had been around long enough to know that life was all about death and sex; now that the former was drawing nearer she was determined to get on with as much of the latter as she could, and Jack admired that goal.
What did surprise him was that his role apparently carried the welcome addition of confidant with it too. Lady Diana had been a gossip and a bitch in her heyday and now that she was stranded in Somerset without a soul with her calibre of wit within miles she took to Jack like a duck to water.
By April 1920 Jack and Lady Diana's geriatric butler were on nodding terms, if not exactly very friendly, and he had walked Lady Diana's four lumbering dim-witted wolfhounds (Monty, Algy, Fred and Phoebe, named for her ex-lovers and "a girl I had a pash on a very long time ago. I suppose I should be glad nothing came of it – she married the Earl of Gloucester and became quite unbearable") around every inch of the neighbouring countryside.
"Bad news, I'm afraid," Lady Diana said abruptly as Jack returned from the kennels with dog hair stuck to his coat. She gestured at a telegram on the table, stuck between the toast rack and the coffee pot. "My idiot niece and her dreadful husband are imposing themselves upon us for a month. A whole month. Can you imagine?"
Jack shook his head sympathetically. Lady Diana rarely had anything good to say about any of her few remaining relatives, but she did seem to harbour an especially deep contempt for her niece Angela, who had married "some Colonel or other" and "buggered off to India" only to spend her time "sending me whingy letters about the heat. If you will move to the tropics you must jolly well learn to put up with things like dysentery and tigers and lepers trying to steal your purse."
"The only alleviation to this burden is that after they leave they're going back to Madras and there will be no further threat of them 'popping down' from London. 'Popping down', I ask you. How middle class. That man's been a terrible influence on her."
Lady Diana gestured for him to join her at the breakfast table. Jack hastily removed his coat and passed it to Staveson, who managed to combine a disapproving sniff with a put-upon sigh, all without attracting Lady Diana's attention. Jack sat and helped himself to toast. "When are they coming?"
"In two weeks. But I'm afraid our little tête-à-tête breakfasts –" Lady Diana nodded to the small table with its very restrained and Continental spread, " – will have to cease as of Friday as they're sending Johnny down before them."
"Johnny's their …" Jack wracked his brains. He was sure Lady Diana had mentioned him, but he couldn't recall her precise insult so perhaps not – it was unlikely she'd have held off on bile over a family member. "Their son?" he hazarded.
"Angela's one and only decent contribution to the world is her darling boy," Lady Diana confirmed, glaring at her soft-boiled egg. "He's been in hospital since Armistice, more or less. Neurasthenia. Apparently the doctors think his nerves will benefit from some rest out in the countryside, unspoken implication being 'and away from his parents'. First intelligent thing I've heard from a doctor in years." She turned her attentions to the coffee. "Personally I think he'd get on a lot better if there was someone around who knew what it's like out there in those dreadful fields." She eyeballed Jack steadily from over the top of her glasses – Lady Diana only wore them to read the mail and to admonish people – "You will keep an eye on him while he's here, won't you, Jack?"
"Sure," Jack said easily, spreading about a foot of crab-apple jelly on his toast in the mistaken belief that it was rowanberry. "Johnny, was it?"
"John Clemens Fairford the second," Lady Diana said with more than a hint of sarcasm. "Captain with the ________1 Regiment, if I remember correctly. The silly bugger arrives in England, promptly enlists and as soon as he's trained ships off to France and nearly gives his poor mother a heart-attack. Of course that man thought it was marvellous – following in his father's footsteps, as though Colonel Sloth has ever done anything more taxing than having a few natives peppered for looking at him sideways."
Jack gave her a tentative smile. "I promise I'll take care of him, Lady Diana."
"You better bloody had, he's all this family has left." Lady Diana sipped her coffee, grimaced, and returned it to the table to tip another three heaped sugars into it. "Neurasthenia," she repeated, giving Jack a shrewd look. "Now how do you do it, Jack? Why aren't you waking the house up with night terrors and hallucinations and all that nonsense?" Her eyes glittered, and Jack realised he was going to have to tread very carefully to avoid insulting her great-nephew's constitution.
"Just lucky, I guess."
"Hmm," Lady Diana said rather suspiciously, stirring her coffee.
Friday morning was cold but, after the dawn fog had cleared, bright and promising. Jack had risen at sunrise to shoot rabbits (Lady Diana's gamekeeper having been claimed by the soil of Ypres), returned in time to acquiesce to Lady Diana's whims regarding uncovering the tennis courts – "maybe I can keep the blighters occupied with sports" – and was taking the dogs for their mid-morning constitutional when the unfamiliar sound of a motor car sent Algy, Fred and Phoebe into a barking, bouncing frenzy (Monty was deaf). Jack leaned over the fence to the drive, a collar in each hand and his thigh inexpertly holding back a third dog, and watched the new-looking car struggle up the drive laden with trunks. Evidently the Fairford family didn't believe in travelling light.
He caught a glimpse of their visitor as the car passed slowly by where he stood and was a little surprised to see the young man looking so healthy; he'd been expecting a thin, pale example of the chinless classes who looked like he might buckle at any minute – the kind of captain Jack had carefully shepherded as first a sergeant and then a lieutenant – but aside from a certain pallor to his cheeks from being too long indoors the only signs of ill-health from John Clemens Fairford the second were the dark circles under his eyes.
Jack started back towards the kennels, dogs lolloping aimlessly around his legs. There had been something awfully familiar about the young man's jaw line, about his thick brown hair – familiar and handsome. Jack dearly hoped this wasn't going to be one of those awkward situations where he'd met the guy before (known him before) and simply forgotten all about him. He opened the gate to the kennel yard and patted the dogs inside; he'd have to have a pretty good excuse for forgetting a face that lovely so quickly. If he'd met him it wouldn't have been long ago, the guy was – what had Diana said? – twenty, twenty-one. Very young.
The dogs safely locked up, Jack washed his hands in the courtyard basin and bounded down toward the house, wiping his palms on his cock. He arrived by the front door just in time to see John Clemens kiss his aunt warmly on the cheek and enquire after her health.
"Oh, moderate," Lady Diana sighed, and caught sight of Jack. "Ah, there you are. Johnny, this is Jack Harkness, formerly Captain of _________2. J – Mr. Harkness, this is my great-nephew Johnny, John Clemens Fairford. Mr. Harkness is currently very kindly filling in for about five of my household staff for me and providing protection, Johnny."
"Protection?" the young man asked incredulously. He had fine, strong bone structure, Jack noticed, a slightly cleft chin and very blue eyes. He still looked achingly familiar but Jack couldn't place him and he was beginning to suspect it was merely wishful thinking.
"I'm a weak old woman and easily frightened," Lady Diana snapped, not sounding perhaps her most convincing. She smiled at her nephew and took his hand. "Do you still play tennis, my dear? I had the courts opened up especially after your mother's telegram." Jack noticed she didn't say who by.
"Did you?" Johnny looked momentarily embarrassed, his cheeks flushing. Jack bit his lip and forced himself not to stare. "In that case I certainly still play."
"I suppose you must have trained her?" Johnny asked, radiating a polite lack of curiosity as he handed Jack a racket. Jack began unscrewing the frame as the thought how to correct this assumption without resorting to mentioning Lahore or the dreaded 'I'm older than I look'.
"I was training new recruits," he said eventually, removing the frame and giving the racket a couple of experimental swings. "I wrote to your aunt after the war to thank her."
"That was uncommonly polite."
"Your aunt was uncommonly kind." Jack flexed the muscles in his back. It had been a long time since his last game, and there was something about the tennis clothing of the time that made him feel in equal parts ridiculous and sexy, when what he was hoping for was ridiculously sexy. He swung the racket again and caught Johnny giving him an amused smile out of the corner of his eye.
"You don't play much."
"Not for a while," Jack admitted, "I'm more of a pugilist myself."
"Really? I'd have taken you for rugger myself." Johnny gave his racket a few strings, testing the weight, and Jack felt a small bubble of envy – Johnny was leaner, lither, and much more at ease on his feet. "Do they have rugger in America?"
"Not exactly, no," Jack smiled.
The game was over more quickly than he'd have liked – Jack won by an unexpected hair's breadth, giving him the opportunity to offer a rematch, and what with one thing and another and the odd conversational titbit they forgot lunch and played right through 'til five.
"I'm afraid," Johnny panted, scooping up the balls between his foot and the racket and tossing them into his hand, "I really can't go on. Would you mind if we postponed until tomorrow? I don't have your stamina."
"My stamina for losing," Jack said cheerfully, fitting the frame back over his racket, "which I'd happily trade for some of your skill. Did I win any of those games, barring that fluke of a first?"
"No," Johnny smiled, tightening the screws, and as he walked past Jack he added, "Because you were letting me win. Don't think I didn't notice."
Jack threw his hands up in mock despair. "I thought it would be the decent thing to do with a new guest! I can promise to give you a sound thrashing tomorrow, if that's what you want3 ?"
"I don't want to be coddled," Johnny said warningly as they started up towards the house. "Mother and Father have been tearing themselves this way and that – well, mostly Mother, Father has been busy trying to pat my shoulder into some manly oblivion or other – trying to keep tiptoeing around me as though I'm made of china. And all over a few bad dreams." He laughed somewhat bitterly.
Jack suppressed the urge to give him a fierce hug and tell him not to be so fucking brave about it.
Dinner was a quiet, restrained affair – Johnny had evidently inherited the same appetite as Lady Diana, bird-like and picky, leaving him and the woman in question to carry the weight of the conversation while Jack made heavy work of the lamb chops and ate twice as many potatoes as the two of them put together.
"My dear Mr. Harkness, you shall be quite the rotund gentleman in your old age if you continue like this," Lady Diana said with considerable, if shielded, amusement. Her mouth tended to purse when she was having fun at someone else's expense.
"I look forwards to it," said Jack, who rather doubted it, "as we can't all age as gracefully as you, m'lady."
"Your lady?" Lady Diana said with raised eyebrows and a decidedly vinegar-laden tone. "Your nationality is showing, Mister Harkness."
"I beg your pardon," Jack said gravely, as much for Johnny's benefit as Lady Diana's. "However can I make it up to you?"
Lady Diana raised her eyebrows a second time and gave a quick, pointed look at her nephew. "Perhaps when we have finished you would be so good as to employ your talents on the piano in the drawing room? I hear music aids the digestion."
"As good as done, Mrs. Beckett," Jack said cheerfully, ignoring her frown as he bisected another potato. He was showing off badly, he knew he was showing off, but it was one of those habits he couldn't seem to knock on the head.
Sat behind the little upright half an hour later he regretted somewhat his blithe offer. All the songs he could remember how to play were deeply anachronistic – he was almost certain that Jerry Lee Lewis had not been a household name in Somerset in 1920 – and of them all The Green Fields of France was not only out of its time but also grossly inappropriate too, but it still stuck in his head like gum to a shoe sole and he found himself humming it as he tried to think of something else.
"It appears you're not quite the virtuoso you've been leading me to believe, Mr. Harkness," Lady Diana said rather cattily. "If you're stuck for inspiration there's a stack of primers in the piano seat. I'm sure Johnny and I can suffer through Three Blind Mice played with one finger, although goodness only knows what effect it will have on our digestion."
Jack made a face and played the opening bars to The Dance of the Cygnets. "I trust Tchaikovsky is acceptable after-dinner face?"
"He will serve, although I rather wish you'd pick a different ballet. As long as you don't descend to the level of Brahms at any point I'm sure we will be adequately entertained." She settled back on the high-backed chair and steepled her fingers, looking for all the world like some gender-bending Bond villain.
Just to be spiteful, Jack played The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy and Lady Diana threatened to throw a slipper at him if he 'indulged in any further twee caterwauling'. Johnny rose abruptly and joined him at the piano seat, scuppering Jack's intention to switch to Holst by derailing his mind entirely, the warmth of Johnny's thigh pressed inadvertently against Jack's causing him considerably more respiratory distress than it really ought.
"Something a little less intellectual?" Johnny suggested, and he offered the name of a music hall song that had been popular about thirty-five years ago, one about a fish-monger's daughter and her ghost, which Jack had only ever heard sung since by soldiers with most of the already worrying lyrics substituted for even more lewd ones.
He played, Johnny assisted with the occasional note further up the scale, and they sang a little out of time and a little out of tune, both with the melody and with each other; all along Jack felt the steady warmth and weight of Johnny's leg against his own and found it almost impossible to concentrate on the keys.
"Well," Lady Diana said when Molly Malone had wheeled her wheelbarrow off to heaven at last, "I don't know if I shall be able to sleep after that atrocity, but I intend to try an early night for the novelty value." She rose and gave Jack the smallest of nods.
"I'm afraid my sporting exertions and long losing streak today have worn me out rather," Jack said, addressing Johnny, "so if you'll excuse me?"
"Help yourself to the library," Lady Diana told her nephew as she left. "I seem to recall your mother lamenting your bookishness."
The pathetic fragments of moonlight from an underfed moon glittered across the landing as Jack made his way stealthily back from Lady Diana's rumpled bed to the hard single one in which he habitually slept; he was only a foot from his bedroom door when he heard the screaming. Frantic and hoarse and desperate, like a siren, but senseless.
For a moment he was back in the trenches, crouching despite himself, Private Welland's4 arm twitching feebly by his face. The rest of the Herefordshire lad was nowhere to be seen, the deafening blasts of shell after shell rocking the earth like a giant's hand had seized the foundations of the world and was giving them a good rattle. The scream had the same feverish pitch and inhuman cadence as his Lieutenant's when the poor boy (because if he was nineteen then Jack was a Judoon) lost his head and had to be pried out of a latrine and packed off to Craiglockhart; Jack knew where to look for the source of the sound.
He ran into Staveson on his way to the guest bedroom. "This way?"
"It would be preferable if you returned to bed, sir," Staveson said through his teeth. Jack had never met a man who could make "sir" sound so much like "scum".
"Leave this to me, please," Jack growled back. "He's suffering from War Neurosis, okay? I know what to do about that, I know – "
"I have been in service for forty years," Staveson said sharply, "I think I know how to console a distressed guest."
Jack glanced at the vial in Staveson's hand. "Is that laudanum?"
"Yes." Staveson sounded like he'd have happily punched Jack's lights out had he been a younger man. How anyone made one syllable sound so venomous was quite a mystery.
"Won't work," Jack said shortly. It might work, sure, but it was never a good idea. Drugging yourself out of the way of bad dreams was the kind of thing he did. "Will just make it worse." He pushed the door open and, taking the candle from Staveson without receiving a protest, threw light on the night-shirted figure huddled by the wardrobe with his arms over his head.
For a moment now the memory was so complete that Jack could smell gunpowder in the air. He passed the candle back to a perplexed Staveson and reached into his jacket pocket for the small metal whistle he still carried there.
The shrill peep had precisely the desired effect: Johnny stopped trembling like a blancmange and went rigid instead, squatting to attention. "You did fine," Jack said, crouching beside him and putting his hand firmly on Johnny's hunched shoulder. "Drill's over. I need you to get back to barracks now."
Johnny nodded dumbly but otherwise gave no indication that he had any idea where he was or what was going on.
"C'mon," Jack patted Johnny on the back as jovially as he could. "You did well – " shit. The lad's surname had completely slipped his mind. " – son," Jack substituted, not missing a beat. "You did well."
"Thank you, sir," Johnny muttered, and went limp. Jack nearly panicked, but it appeared that he had just lost consciousness, passed into a deeper sleep that didn't allow for dreaming.
"Give me a hand here, Staveson," Jack murmured, hefting Johnny back into the bed with some difficulty (he was a lot heavier than he looked) and with very little assistance from the aged butler.
"Very impressive, sir," Staveson said dryly once the door had closed behind them.
"I hope all that yelling didn't wake Lady Diana." Jack smoothed his jacket down. It smelt faintly of someone not him, and the unfamiliarity of it was unsettling.
"I believe, sir, that Mr. Fairford's nightmare has probably awoken most of Somerset. Biers will doubtless be tending to her ladyship," he added, giving Jack an ugly look with his jaundiced eye. "So you might wish to return to bed."
Jack rolled his eyes and saluted. "Yes, sir."
"Don't make fun of me, sir," Staveson said coldly. "Her Ladyship considers me indispensable. Can the same truly be said of you?"
"Don't threaten me, Staveson," Jack said with a dazzling and icy grin, "I am mighty hard to dispense with."
No one said a word about the incident the next morning, though everyone looked preternaturally tired and Lady Diana kept shooting worried glances at Johnny as though he might explode or start screaming again. Johnny, for his part, seemed to remember none of it, which fitted with what little Jack could remember of War Neurosis and night terrors from his long-ago reading. The three of them sat in silence, chewing gamely on slightly raw toast.
"I had considered," Lady Diana said suddenly, making Jack nearly drop his coffee, "inviting a few of the more bearable people from Yeovil around for dinner on Monday." She gave the air in front of her a speculative look. "What do you think?"
Jack did not say, "I thought you said the only bearable being in all Somerset was a pony," just looked to his left and pretended to think she was talking to Johnny.
Johnny swallowed his toast and gave his great-aunt a slightly aghast look. Evidently he was far from thrilled by the notion, but he merely lifted his coffee to his lips and said, "I'm sure it will be delightful."
"Excellent," Lady Diana said grimly. "I shall tell the Cunninghams that Elizabeth is especially welcome." She narrowed her eyes across the table at Johnny.
Jack winced at his expression, the realisation dawning swiftly across the young man's face like a weather front that he had only two days of relative freedom and one of church before painful match-making started in earnest.
You didn't think you could escape it forever, did you? Jack thought with a little twinge of sympathy as Johnny excused himself. Of course Johnny must have thought that – young men rarely gave a nod to the idea of the future until it was upon them.
The day's tennis passed quickly and, for the most part, without conversation. Johnny did not appear to be in a chatty mood, and Jack was having difficulty dragging his gaze from the young man's pale legs as he ran for shots, enough trouble that talking would have been beyond him anyway.
Over dinner Johnny asked if they'd either of them – Lady Diana or Jack – had the chance to read much of Sassoon's poetry, and Lady Diana said, "Wasn't Sassoon that little egomaniac who sent that awful declaration?" and announced that poetry began and ended with Pope and Dryden.
Jack, who had snatched a few strangely beautiful moments in a barn with the dark-haired author of Anthem for Doomed Youth only to have himself addressed as "Siegfried" at a crucial moment, tried not to pull a face. "I always found it a little flippant," he said eventually. "Much preferred poor Owen."
Poor Owen and poor Owen's stutter and poor Owen's small, steady hands on Jack's naked back, that he certainly took in preference over continual tales of What A Great Captain Sassoon Is.
"I was thinking of one piece in particular," Johnny said rather stiffly, "which I do not believe is at all flip. Have you ever read The Dugout?" Johnny toyed aimlessly with his largely unfinished meal, "Jack?"
Lady Diana's eyebrows more or less shot up into her hairline at this and had Johnny not been regarding him keenly Jack would have shrugged at her. First name terms, out of nowhere. Well, well. Evidently Captain Sassoon had his uses.
"I'm not familiar," Jack admitted. He sensed Johnny was gearing up to a recitation, and with a pang of regret pushed the remains of his rabbit pie away to indicate he was listening. Lady Diana frowned.
"Would you object terribly to being introduced?"
"Perhaps after dinner," Lady Diana interjected, much to Jack's relief, "I can't imagine that Captain Sassoon's finest is likely to settle the stomach or increase the appetite."
In the sitting room, a small fire spluttering and popping a little indignantly in the grate, Jack tried to keep his eyes open despite the stupefying influence of apple crumble and a thick custard; truth be told he didn't care one way or the other for poetry – the only words Jack traditionally had any interest in were "yes", "more", "all of it" and "I'm arresting you on suspicion of –" – but he felt he should make the effort, especially as Johnny looked uncommonly like a Renaissance saint, stood there in painful earnestness with his top shirt button inadvertently come undone.
The mere fact of this accidental indecency was in danger of making Jack light-headed. That was the thing about this era of straitened morals, Jack mused as Johnny spoke very seriously of Sassoon's incredible wit and talent, because everyone was so trussed up all the time even the tiniest exposure took on an erotic charge. If they'd all just walked around naked …
" – begin. Is that all right?"
"Oh do get on with it," Lady Diana said in a bored voice. "My foot has gone to sleep and I think my head's about to join it." Jack stifled a snort of laughter and Johnny flushed.
He cleared his throat. "Why do you lie with your legs ungainly huddled – "
A fierce look stole over Johnny's face as he resisted like flame licking at a piece of newspaper, and Jack listened with rapt attention as Johnny stopped stumbling over the words and finished with his, "and when you sleep you remind me of the dead," ringing like a cathedral bell. Jack had half a mind to applaud, but Lady Diana seemed less impressed.
"That cheerful fare is hardly going to take your mind off things, is it?" she grumbled, lightning a cigarette. "Hie thee to the piano, the pair of you, and play something upbeat." She pointed the spent match threateningly at Jack. "Any more Tchaikovsky and I'll knock your block off, too."
Sunday dawned bright, clear and cold after a night free of terrible yells; Jack did however encounter a harassed-looking Biers hustling along with ammonia-scented sheets in her arms, and a few seconds of Harkness Charm soon confirmed his suspicions. Johnny still looked guilty after breakfast, when they set out for the two-mile walk to the nearest church, a tiny little thing squirreled away in a village whose name Jack had forgotten the moment it was told him.
Jack hadn’t actually been to the little church before – "Tongues will wag," Lady Diana had said sourly, "if I show up accompanied by some American serviceman," – and had been instructed to tell curious parties that he was a pal of Johnny's, visiting with him. That apparently wouldn't induce tongue-wagging; an indication to Jack's mind, that the country still lived in more sheltered times. Whether that was good or bad was hard to say, although it did make buying linseed oil a less fraught experience.
They were half-way to the village, Lady Diana walking on ahead with Staveson in tow for moral if not physical support (and her cane held discretely in his hand), when Johnny leaned closer to Jack and whispered, "Are you sleeping with my aunt?"
Jack thought about this for a while; trying for the most part to ignore the smell of talcum powder on Johnny's skin and the way his eyelashes got lighter towards their tips. He said in a low voice, "would you be very perturbed if I said yes?"
Johnny made a face, looking uncommonly like an overgrown schoolboy in his Sunday best – very overgrown, for he stood an inch taller than Jack, making him nearly six foot tall – and said very, very quietly, "she is rather old."
"Age is merely a matter of perspective," said Jack, who had been thirty for forty-eight years now.
"Are you sleeping with my aunt?" Johnny persisted, digging his hands into his coat pockets and utterly ruining the line of his rather nicely-tailored (if for someone with a little more weight on him) suit.
"No, Mr. Fairford, I am not sleeping with your aunt," Jack said with a thin smile. It was not exactly a lie – Lady Diana had been firm from the start of their adventures on the subject of who slept where, and Jack was more than happy to comply. For one, the old lady snored like a warthog and for another he knew himself to be a very fidgety sleeper. His male lovers may have just about put up with an occasional elbow in the stomach or knee in the groin but usually girlfriends tired of such things quickly and made him sleep on the floor.
"Will you two get a move on?" Lady Diana snapped from ahead. "I'm a cripple and I'm still outpacing you. Anyone would thing you'd lost your ruddy legs. Quick march!" She led them at a near-canter down to the little church, getting there just in time to get to their seats in the front pew and not look too obviously rushed about it.
Jack fell easily into his Church Survival Routine (part of the appeal of Christianity, Jack had often thought, was that you didn't really have to pay attention or even stay awake but you still got to feel pious about it): stand when everyone else does, sit when everyone else does, amen whenever the vicar does, try not to concentrate too hard on the actual words in case you feel the overwhelming urge to laugh about their talk of everlasting peace and heaven.
Beside him, to his left, Lady Diana droned quietly along to the hymns – her singing voice was not exactly dulcet – and to his right Johnny's Sunday suit brushed occasionally on Jack's, the friction of wool on wool sending parks through spots of Jack's brain that unfortunately were all too active even in a place of worship.
By the time they had stuttered through to the final amen Jack's stomach was growling again and Lady Diana looked dangerously bored; Johnny had surreptitiously dozed off, Jack noted with some satisfaction. All in all their row was far from the most devout, but to hear the vicar greet them one might have been excused for thinking them the family of some archbishop.
Jack watched with a faint smile as Lady Diana skilfully navigated difficult social waters and invited the vicar and his wife to what was rapidly becoming a dinner party; luckily they declined. For his part he answered the questions put to him – "Paschendale, Ypres, the Somme, Anvers, Arras … yes, I think I did just about," and "no, Canada originally," and "I'm afraid they're no longer with us," – and only lied a little; Johnny answered in more subdued tones, "not yet," and "foot soldiers," until the reverend finally left them to trek back to the house.
Half-way through the journey rain set in, and they arrived on the steps of Lattiford House soaked and cold. As Johnny set off for his room for a change of clothes, Lady Diana remarked apparently without guile – although it would have been the first time for it – "You know, he puts me a great deal in mind of you, Jack."
Jack watched Johnny's retreating form meditatively, realised that he was simply ogling and not observing, and pulled himself up short. He forced a smile. "You think so? I was hoping I had a little more meat on my bones than that."
"Give him time," Lady Diana said cheerfully as Biers appeared with a blanket and a worried expression, "I'm sure by the time he's your age he'll be the spit of you."
"Poor chap," Jack smirked. "Still, I suppose the exercise will do him good."
"Exercise?" Lady Diana grasped the balustrade carefully. "What exercise?"
"The beating women away with a stick, or fleeing their amorous advances," Jack grinned.
"You are entirely too full of yourself, Mr. Harkness," Lady Diana said, her smile so ghostly as to be almost invisible.
"If I was full of anyone else you'd complain," Jack retorted without thinking.
"If you were full of someone else I should call the police," Lady Diana said sharply from a little way up the stairs.
Stupid backwards decade, Jack thought peevishly, dripping wool-filtered rainwater onto the polished wooden floor.
The day grew steadily wetter after lunch, until all the windows were streaming and Lady Diana and her guests were forced to mill about inside without aim or thought until the hostess was moved to snap, "oh for goodness sake, go and play billiards or something."
"I didn't know you had a billiards table, Aunty," Johnny said with some surprise and, Jack thought, perhaps a little sarcasm.
"I don't. Just …oh, go and do something elsewhere. You're beginning to grate on my nerves, the both of you." Lady Diana pinched the bridge of her nose. "Ja – Mr. Harkness, there are some badminton rackets in the attic, if you would be so good? Else find something to entertain you that isn't too noisy. I feel a headache coming on. Probably this bloody weather."
Jack made a mental list of the things he could do to entertain himself with Johnny, crossed off the ones that hadn't been invented yet, and with some regret crossed off the ones that would land him in prison too. The remainder were not exactly enthralling.
"Would that preclude tinkering with the piano?"
"I don't know, I don't care, go away," Lady Diana said shortly, "And if you run into Staveson tell him I want two aspirin and a large scotch."
The piano was currently set up in the sitting room, which seemed a little too close to where Lady Diana was currently sulking her way through an afternoon headache, so Jack very awkwardly collected up the "portable" gramophone in his arms and gave Johnny a nod, "my piano repertoire is running low," he said, "I figured – thought – this might be better. Maybe in the ballroom."
"I only have Musetta's Waltz and the Blue Danube," Lady Diana said in a low voice, "if you play them more than once within my earshot I will set the dogs on you and you will be duly licked to death."
"You shan't hear a thing," Jack assured her as they left.
The meagre ballroom (barely large enough for four couples, or five if they were feeling intimate) was darkened by rain and smelt faintly of mushrooms and soldierly flatulence; Jack surmised that it hadn't been aired out since it was used for training. The room looked very different without the maps and lists tacked to the wall – all that remained of the three year occupation were scuff marks on the floorboards. He settled the gramophone clumsily on the edge of the stage (and the echo brought back memories of long-winded speeches, of boot polish and stiff backs) and smiled awkwardly at Johnny.
It ought to be easy. He ought to just ask him to dance; there was however something missing, something which he usually regarded as cheating but which would make the whole process a lot easier and give the lad a healthy case for plausible deniability should the whole situation come to light later: alcohol. Jack held up his index finger. "Won't be a minute – " and bolted out of the room.
He skidded out of the side-door in the vestibule by the sitting room, took the short-cut to the kitchens through the stinging nettles and brambles he had not yet cleared (not to mention the aggressive rain), dived into the pantry and picked up the nearest bottle he could find, which on inspection turned out to be apple cordial. Jack swore, grabbed a bottle of gin, and bounded back through the weeds like a steeplechase champion. Almost at the door he realised he hadn't any glasses and had to dash back for them.
When he returned to the ballroom Johnny was fiddling with the gramophone but not actually playing anything. Jack pointed the bottle at him in silent inquiry.
"I'm afraid I take after my mother," Johnny said abruptly, and this non-sequitur left Jack floundering somewhat until Johnny helpfully added, "She can't take her drink very well. It loosens her tongue, then she flops all over the place like a landed carp." He grimaced "I probably shouldn't have told you that. However, I'm much the same –" Jack began pouring him a small-by-Jack-standards measure regardless, "- used to be something of a figure of fun for it in the mess. Out By Eleven, they called me," Johnny said ruefully. "Of course, one doesn't pay much attention to these things," he continued, although it was very clear that he did. Jack handed him the gin and Johnny clasped the glass between his hands without taking a sip. "I mean," he went on; "while I was training they all called me 'Sussex'."
Jack nearly choked on his drink. "Is there a story behind that name?"
"Not a particularly edifying one," Johnny said a little sourly, swirling his glass as though he were drinking (or rather failing to drink) scotch instead of gin. "When I arrived I couldn't correctly identify Sussex on a map of England. They took it as an indication that my intelligence was below par."
"It's not," Jack was very careful not to phrase it as a question, but Johnny answered it as one just the same.
"No, it's bloody not. I was born in Lahore, I grew up in Kerala – the first time I'd ever set foot in England was when I started training, more or less. I'm sure they couldn't have found Bangalore on globe, but you know how people are." He smiled suddenly into his drink, which was (to Jack's irritation) still untouched. "Sorry. Silly thing to be annoyed by, isn't it?" His expression grew grave. "Most of them, most of the chaps who called me 'Sussex' and 'Out by Eleven', they're dead now."
"You're not," was the best comfort Jack could think of.
"And neither are you," Johnny said, looking up with a very Diana-like expression. "I heard that list you gave the vicar. You seem to have been everywhere without once getting shot. Do you have 'Death's Appointment Book' too?"
"Huh?" The phrase sounded familiar but Jack couldn't pinpoint its origin.
"Ambulance-driver I met used to claim he had Death's appointment book, and that was why he stayed out of trouble and out of the way of bombs and bullets," Johnny elaborated, sniffing at the gin but not drinking it. "He was a queer one. Very fair hair, but dark eyes. Called – "
"Latimer," Jack blurted as the name came back to him. "Timothy Latimer."
Johnny started. "You knew him?"
Biblically, Jack thought, but all he said was, "Arras."
Johnny nodded. "Strange. Perhaps you stole the appointment book from him," he added rather flippantly.
An early bluebottle buzzed and skated around the room, echoing against the rain-glossed windowpanes, as Jack recalled crawling on his belly through mud and corpses, his left leg attached only by skin, the world exploding around him again and again, and still thinking it easier than that first war he'd been in, far away in time and space. "Just lucky, I guess," he said without conviction. He'd woken up half-slumped over the lip of a dugout that time, being used as a makeshift sandbag – scared the piss out of the poor lad who'd been using him as cover.
"Lucky," Johnny echoed, finally taking a sip of his gin and pulling face. "Funny how one's view on luck change."
"We're alive and in one piece and there's even music," Jack said philosophically, risking a nudge to Johnny's ribs. "For some people that's luck."
"That's a very pragmatic attitude, Mr. Harkness."
"Anything else would make it impossible to live. And please, I thought you were calling me Jack now?"
"I don't think I should," Johnny put his glass down on the stage with a dull click. "Much like the gin, it's a tempting but risky proposition." He got to his feet without grace. "You're a charming and interesting man, Mr. Harkness. Jack." He offered his hand for Jack to shake, which Jack did with a sinking feeling. This was not going the way he'd intended, not in the least bit. "And I suspect a very dangerous one to know."
"Not in small doses," Jack said with his most devilishly suggestive grin.
Johnny sighed. "Which is why." He put his hands in his pockets. "I should like to be your friend, Jack, but I don't think that's possible. I don't think I make it possible." He rocked on his heels and said in a low, shamed and hollow voice, "Neurasthenia is not the only reason I have been enjoying the attentions of a psychiatric doctor, Jack. Mr. Harkness. Think about that before you accept any overtures of companionship from me."
With that, he was gone, leaving Jack alone with a gramophone, two glasses of gin and the sense that he'd missed something vitally important and fucked up rather badly.
Under the circumstances he might as well get drunk.
Jack passed out on his bed an hour later, having consumed the remainder of the bottle, thinking vague thoughts of Siegfried fucking Sassoon and, for some reason, boeuf bourguignon. He woke sometime after dinner with a headache and had Biers raid the pantry for him.
Because he had a blinding hangover and his thoughts were now doggedly pursuing Havelock Ellis around some internal bookshelf to no real end, Jack spent an hour cajoling the maid into sucking him off and once he'd finished the remains of the shepherd's pie from the pantry he was still no closer to knowing quite what it was he'd done, but he felt a little less like he'd been mown down by the twentieth century all at once.
Lahore, his brain said urgently, and something quite horrible occurred in the back of his mind. Was Johnny twenty or twenty-one? It was suddenly a very important distinction.
Lady Diana hit him impatiently in the shoulder at least three times during that evening's love-making and accused him of being distracted; Jack charmed her off the subject but, as he was pulling his trousers back on, was struck with another unwelcome thought.
"What was your name before you were married?"
"What kind of question is that?" Lady Diana asked, rather surprised. She groped for something to throw at him, and he ducked automatically.
"Just curious," Jack hedged. Angela Fairford was, if he remembered the interminable conversation correctly, Diana's brother's daughter, and for some reason the woman he'd known back in India had insisted on going by her maiden name when she was with him – to minimise the chance for him to cause a scandal, he supposed – though he did recall her being called Anne or Annabelle but probably not Angela.
A strangled, sobbing scream split the night in two and Lady Diana sighed expansively. "Go and do your thing, your trick with the whistle," she said crossly, "I want some sleep tonight."
"Your wish is my command," Jack said, giving her a mock salute from the doorway.
"Oh and Jack," Lady Diana called after him as he left.
"Yes?"
"It was Parker."
"Parker?"
"Parker."
Parker, Jack thought guiltily. Still, it didn't prove anything, necessarily. She might have been an entirely different Miss A. Parker. It was a common enough name.
All the same, when he came to manoeuvre the comatose former young captain back into his bed with Staveson's minor assistance, he was certain – scrupulously so – to refer to him as "Fairford".
Fandom: Dr Who/Torchwood (tangentally)
Word Count: 13,895
Rating: NC-17
Notes: Thanks to
derryderrydown for prompt and close beta and I suspect some research monkeying as well – any mistakes in there were probably ADDED by me in the final edit. Lattiford House is a real place, although details on the layout have been slightly massaged/vagued out – it's the building that I went to school in for five years so I know it and the area quite well. Stourhead is also a real place. Everyone in this apart from Jack and the few dead poets mentioned is my own creation.Lattiford House was not a particularly imposing pile, as stately homes went. It was neither especially stately not, if one was honest, much of a home. It was low and modern in red brick and squatted rather in the grounds like an angry toad, although the approach was impressive enough a sweep despite this.
The main building had adequately housed the soldiers training there during the conflict, and the building's owner, the Lady Diana Beckett, had been swift, gracious and almost eager in her assistance whenever needed. Jack Harkness (formally without rank until the next big skirmish, but he always thought of himself as Captain Jack, and it showed) suspected from the gleam in the old lady's eye that her motives were as much prurient as they were altruistic, but he could hardly hold that against her.
Indeed, three weeks after Armistice he sent her a letter thanking her once again fro her kind accommodation and assistance in the war effort, and not entirely to his surprise she responded with modesty ("just doing my duty"), fulsome praise for the Army and enquiries after his health (Jack opted not to tell her about being shot, blown up, gassed, hanged when he was mistaken for someone else and burned alive when he was correctly identified). Two more letters were exchanged and she invited him to visit.
It was clear, had been crystal all along, what Lady Diana (a mid-fifties widow with what had once been shockingly black hair, a broad mouth, and the kind of strong chin aristocracies only wished they could breed for) sought from dashing Captain Jack (he declined to give his age, she guessed twenty-seven and he laughed and thanked her, since the truth was he was older than her). Jack did not mind – there was something about women of Diana's age and status, a confidence unfettered by socialised coyness, married to a cynicism that could fell trees. Lady Diana Beckett had been around long enough to know that life was all about death and sex; now that the former was drawing nearer she was determined to get on with as much of the latter as she could, and Jack admired that goal.
What did surprise him was that his role apparently carried the welcome addition of confidant with it too. Lady Diana had been a gossip and a bitch in her heyday and now that she was stranded in Somerset without a soul with her calibre of wit within miles she took to Jack like a duck to water.
By April 1920 Jack and Lady Diana's geriatric butler were on nodding terms, if not exactly very friendly, and he had walked Lady Diana's four lumbering dim-witted wolfhounds (Monty, Algy, Fred and Phoebe, named for her ex-lovers and "a girl I had a pash on a very long time ago. I suppose I should be glad nothing came of it – she married the Earl of Gloucester and became quite unbearable") around every inch of the neighbouring countryside.
"Bad news, I'm afraid," Lady Diana said abruptly as Jack returned from the kennels with dog hair stuck to his coat. She gestured at a telegram on the table, stuck between the toast rack and the coffee pot. "My idiot niece and her dreadful husband are imposing themselves upon us for a month. A whole month. Can you imagine?"
Jack shook his head sympathetically. Lady Diana rarely had anything good to say about any of her few remaining relatives, but she did seem to harbour an especially deep contempt for her niece Angela, who had married "some Colonel or other" and "buggered off to India" only to spend her time "sending me whingy letters about the heat. If you will move to the tropics you must jolly well learn to put up with things like dysentery and tigers and lepers trying to steal your purse."
"The only alleviation to this burden is that after they leave they're going back to Madras and there will be no further threat of them 'popping down' from London. 'Popping down', I ask you. How middle class. That man's been a terrible influence on her."
Lady Diana gestured for him to join her at the breakfast table. Jack hastily removed his coat and passed it to Staveson, who managed to combine a disapproving sniff with a put-upon sigh, all without attracting Lady Diana's attention. Jack sat and helped himself to toast. "When are they coming?"
"In two weeks. But I'm afraid our little tête-à-tête breakfasts –" Lady Diana nodded to the small table with its very restrained and Continental spread, " – will have to cease as of Friday as they're sending Johnny down before them."
"Johnny's their …" Jack wracked his brains. He was sure Lady Diana had mentioned him, but he couldn't recall her precise insult so perhaps not – it was unlikely she'd have held off on bile over a family member. "Their son?" he hazarded.
"Angela's one and only decent contribution to the world is her darling boy," Lady Diana confirmed, glaring at her soft-boiled egg. "He's been in hospital since Armistice, more or less. Neurasthenia. Apparently the doctors think his nerves will benefit from some rest out in the countryside, unspoken implication being 'and away from his parents'. First intelligent thing I've heard from a doctor in years." She turned her attentions to the coffee. "Personally I think he'd get on a lot better if there was someone around who knew what it's like out there in those dreadful fields." She eyeballed Jack steadily from over the top of her glasses – Lady Diana only wore them to read the mail and to admonish people – "You will keep an eye on him while he's here, won't you, Jack?"
"Sure," Jack said easily, spreading about a foot of crab-apple jelly on his toast in the mistaken belief that it was rowanberry. "Johnny, was it?"
"John Clemens Fairford the second," Lady Diana said with more than a hint of sarcasm. "Captain with the ________1 Regiment, if I remember correctly. The silly bugger arrives in England, promptly enlists and as soon as he's trained ships off to France and nearly gives his poor mother a heart-attack. Of course that man thought it was marvellous – following in his father's footsteps, as though Colonel Sloth has ever done anything more taxing than having a few natives peppered for looking at him sideways."
Jack gave her a tentative smile. "I promise I'll take care of him, Lady Diana."
"You better bloody had, he's all this family has left." Lady Diana sipped her coffee, grimaced, and returned it to the table to tip another three heaped sugars into it. "Neurasthenia," she repeated, giving Jack a shrewd look. "Now how do you do it, Jack? Why aren't you waking the house up with night terrors and hallucinations and all that nonsense?" Her eyes glittered, and Jack realised he was going to have to tread very carefully to avoid insulting her great-nephew's constitution.
"Just lucky, I guess."
"Hmm," Lady Diana said rather suspiciously, stirring her coffee.
Friday morning was cold but, after the dawn fog had cleared, bright and promising. Jack had risen at sunrise to shoot rabbits (Lady Diana's gamekeeper having been claimed by the soil of Ypres), returned in time to acquiesce to Lady Diana's whims regarding uncovering the tennis courts – "maybe I can keep the blighters occupied with sports" – and was taking the dogs for their mid-morning constitutional when the unfamiliar sound of a motor car sent Algy, Fred and Phoebe into a barking, bouncing frenzy (Monty was deaf). Jack leaned over the fence to the drive, a collar in each hand and his thigh inexpertly holding back a third dog, and watched the new-looking car struggle up the drive laden with trunks. Evidently the Fairford family didn't believe in travelling light.
He caught a glimpse of their visitor as the car passed slowly by where he stood and was a little surprised to see the young man looking so healthy; he'd been expecting a thin, pale example of the chinless classes who looked like he might buckle at any minute – the kind of captain Jack had carefully shepherded as first a sergeant and then a lieutenant – but aside from a certain pallor to his cheeks from being too long indoors the only signs of ill-health from John Clemens Fairford the second were the dark circles under his eyes.
Jack started back towards the kennels, dogs lolloping aimlessly around his legs. There had been something awfully familiar about the young man's jaw line, about his thick brown hair – familiar and handsome. Jack dearly hoped this wasn't going to be one of those awkward situations where he'd met the guy before (known him before) and simply forgotten all about him. He opened the gate to the kennel yard and patted the dogs inside; he'd have to have a pretty good excuse for forgetting a face that lovely so quickly. If he'd met him it wouldn't have been long ago, the guy was – what had Diana said? – twenty, twenty-one. Very young.
The dogs safely locked up, Jack washed his hands in the courtyard basin and bounded down toward the house, wiping his palms on his cock. He arrived by the front door just in time to see John Clemens kiss his aunt warmly on the cheek and enquire after her health.
"Oh, moderate," Lady Diana sighed, and caught sight of Jack. "Ah, there you are. Johnny, this is Jack Harkness, formerly Captain of _________2. J – Mr. Harkness, this is my great-nephew Johnny, John Clemens Fairford. Mr. Harkness is currently very kindly filling in for about five of my household staff for me and providing protection, Johnny."
"Protection?" the young man asked incredulously. He had fine, strong bone structure, Jack noticed, a slightly cleft chin and very blue eyes. He still looked achingly familiar but Jack couldn't place him and he was beginning to suspect it was merely wishful thinking.
"I'm a weak old woman and easily frightened," Lady Diana snapped, not sounding perhaps her most convincing. She smiled at her nephew and took his hand. "Do you still play tennis, my dear? I had the courts opened up especially after your mother's telegram." Jack noticed she didn't say who by.
"Did you?" Johnny looked momentarily embarrassed, his cheeks flushing. Jack bit his lip and forced himself not to stare. "In that case I certainly still play."
"I suppose you must have trained her?" Johnny asked, radiating a polite lack of curiosity as he handed Jack a racket. Jack began unscrewing the frame as the thought how to correct this assumption without resorting to mentioning Lahore or the dreaded 'I'm older than I look'.
"I was training new recruits," he said eventually, removing the frame and giving the racket a couple of experimental swings. "I wrote to your aunt after the war to thank her."
"That was uncommonly polite."
"Your aunt was uncommonly kind." Jack flexed the muscles in his back. It had been a long time since his last game, and there was something about the tennis clothing of the time that made him feel in equal parts ridiculous and sexy, when what he was hoping for was ridiculously sexy. He swung the racket again and caught Johnny giving him an amused smile out of the corner of his eye.
"You don't play much."
"Not for a while," Jack admitted, "I'm more of a pugilist myself."
"Really? I'd have taken you for rugger myself." Johnny gave his racket a few strings, testing the weight, and Jack felt a small bubble of envy – Johnny was leaner, lither, and much more at ease on his feet. "Do they have rugger in America?"
"Not exactly, no," Jack smiled.
The game was over more quickly than he'd have liked – Jack won by an unexpected hair's breadth, giving him the opportunity to offer a rematch, and what with one thing and another and the odd conversational titbit they forgot lunch and played right through 'til five.
"I'm afraid," Johnny panted, scooping up the balls between his foot and the racket and tossing them into his hand, "I really can't go on. Would you mind if we postponed until tomorrow? I don't have your stamina."
"My stamina for losing," Jack said cheerfully, fitting the frame back over his racket, "which I'd happily trade for some of your skill. Did I win any of those games, barring that fluke of a first?"
"No," Johnny smiled, tightening the screws, and as he walked past Jack he added, "Because you were letting me win. Don't think I didn't notice."
Jack threw his hands up in mock despair. "I thought it would be the decent thing to do with a new guest! I can promise to give you a sound thrashing tomorrow, if that's what you want3 ?"
"I don't want to be coddled," Johnny said warningly as they started up towards the house. "Mother and Father have been tearing themselves this way and that – well, mostly Mother, Father has been busy trying to pat my shoulder into some manly oblivion or other – trying to keep tiptoeing around me as though I'm made of china. And all over a few bad dreams." He laughed somewhat bitterly.
Jack suppressed the urge to give him a fierce hug and tell him not to be so fucking brave about it.
Dinner was a quiet, restrained affair – Johnny had evidently inherited the same appetite as Lady Diana, bird-like and picky, leaving him and the woman in question to carry the weight of the conversation while Jack made heavy work of the lamb chops and ate twice as many potatoes as the two of them put together.
"My dear Mr. Harkness, you shall be quite the rotund gentleman in your old age if you continue like this," Lady Diana said with considerable, if shielded, amusement. Her mouth tended to purse when she was having fun at someone else's expense.
"I look forwards to it," said Jack, who rather doubted it, "as we can't all age as gracefully as you, m'lady."
"Your lady?" Lady Diana said with raised eyebrows and a decidedly vinegar-laden tone. "Your nationality is showing, Mister Harkness."
"I beg your pardon," Jack said gravely, as much for Johnny's benefit as Lady Diana's. "However can I make it up to you?"
Lady Diana raised her eyebrows a second time and gave a quick, pointed look at her nephew. "Perhaps when we have finished you would be so good as to employ your talents on the piano in the drawing room? I hear music aids the digestion."
"As good as done, Mrs. Beckett," Jack said cheerfully, ignoring her frown as he bisected another potato. He was showing off badly, he knew he was showing off, but it was one of those habits he couldn't seem to knock on the head.
Sat behind the little upright half an hour later he regretted somewhat his blithe offer. All the songs he could remember how to play were deeply anachronistic – he was almost certain that Jerry Lee Lewis had not been a household name in Somerset in 1920 – and of them all The Green Fields of France was not only out of its time but also grossly inappropriate too, but it still stuck in his head like gum to a shoe sole and he found himself humming it as he tried to think of something else.
"It appears you're not quite the virtuoso you've been leading me to believe, Mr. Harkness," Lady Diana said rather cattily. "If you're stuck for inspiration there's a stack of primers in the piano seat. I'm sure Johnny and I can suffer through Three Blind Mice played with one finger, although goodness only knows what effect it will have on our digestion."
Jack made a face and played the opening bars to The Dance of the Cygnets. "I trust Tchaikovsky is acceptable after-dinner face?"
"He will serve, although I rather wish you'd pick a different ballet. As long as you don't descend to the level of Brahms at any point I'm sure we will be adequately entertained." She settled back on the high-backed chair and steepled her fingers, looking for all the world like some gender-bending Bond villain.
Just to be spiteful, Jack played The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy and Lady Diana threatened to throw a slipper at him if he 'indulged in any further twee caterwauling'. Johnny rose abruptly and joined him at the piano seat, scuppering Jack's intention to switch to Holst by derailing his mind entirely, the warmth of Johnny's thigh pressed inadvertently against Jack's causing him considerably more respiratory distress than it really ought.
"Something a little less intellectual?" Johnny suggested, and he offered the name of a music hall song that had been popular about thirty-five years ago, one about a fish-monger's daughter and her ghost, which Jack had only ever heard sung since by soldiers with most of the already worrying lyrics substituted for even more lewd ones.
He played, Johnny assisted with the occasional note further up the scale, and they sang a little out of time and a little out of tune, both with the melody and with each other; all along Jack felt the steady warmth and weight of Johnny's leg against his own and found it almost impossible to concentrate on the keys.
"Well," Lady Diana said when Molly Malone had wheeled her wheelbarrow off to heaven at last, "I don't know if I shall be able to sleep after that atrocity, but I intend to try an early night for the novelty value." She rose and gave Jack the smallest of nods.
"I'm afraid my sporting exertions and long losing streak today have worn me out rather," Jack said, addressing Johnny, "so if you'll excuse me?"
"Help yourself to the library," Lady Diana told her nephew as she left. "I seem to recall your mother lamenting your bookishness."
The pathetic fragments of moonlight from an underfed moon glittered across the landing as Jack made his way stealthily back from Lady Diana's rumpled bed to the hard single one in which he habitually slept; he was only a foot from his bedroom door when he heard the screaming. Frantic and hoarse and desperate, like a siren, but senseless.
For a moment he was back in the trenches, crouching despite himself, Private Welland's4 arm twitching feebly by his face. The rest of the Herefordshire lad was nowhere to be seen, the deafening blasts of shell after shell rocking the earth like a giant's hand had seized the foundations of the world and was giving them a good rattle. The scream had the same feverish pitch and inhuman cadence as his Lieutenant's when the poor boy (because if he was nineteen then Jack was a Judoon) lost his head and had to be pried out of a latrine and packed off to Craiglockhart; Jack knew where to look for the source of the sound.
He ran into Staveson on his way to the guest bedroom. "This way?"
"It would be preferable if you returned to bed, sir," Staveson said through his teeth. Jack had never met a man who could make "sir" sound so much like "scum".
"Leave this to me, please," Jack growled back. "He's suffering from War Neurosis, okay? I know what to do about that, I know – "
"I have been in service for forty years," Staveson said sharply, "I think I know how to console a distressed guest."
Jack glanced at the vial in Staveson's hand. "Is that laudanum?"
"Yes." Staveson sounded like he'd have happily punched Jack's lights out had he been a younger man. How anyone made one syllable sound so venomous was quite a mystery.
"Won't work," Jack said shortly. It might work, sure, but it was never a good idea. Drugging yourself out of the way of bad dreams was the kind of thing he did. "Will just make it worse." He pushed the door open and, taking the candle from Staveson without receiving a protest, threw light on the night-shirted figure huddled by the wardrobe with his arms over his head.
For a moment now the memory was so complete that Jack could smell gunpowder in the air. He passed the candle back to a perplexed Staveson and reached into his jacket pocket for the small metal whistle he still carried there.
The shrill peep had precisely the desired effect: Johnny stopped trembling like a blancmange and went rigid instead, squatting to attention. "You did fine," Jack said, crouching beside him and putting his hand firmly on Johnny's hunched shoulder. "Drill's over. I need you to get back to barracks now."
Johnny nodded dumbly but otherwise gave no indication that he had any idea where he was or what was going on.
"C'mon," Jack patted Johnny on the back as jovially as he could. "You did well – " shit. The lad's surname had completely slipped his mind. " – son," Jack substituted, not missing a beat. "You did well."
"Thank you, sir," Johnny muttered, and went limp. Jack nearly panicked, but it appeared that he had just lost consciousness, passed into a deeper sleep that didn't allow for dreaming.
"Give me a hand here, Staveson," Jack murmured, hefting Johnny back into the bed with some difficulty (he was a lot heavier than he looked) and with very little assistance from the aged butler.
"Very impressive, sir," Staveson said dryly once the door had closed behind them.
"I hope all that yelling didn't wake Lady Diana." Jack smoothed his jacket down. It smelt faintly of someone not him, and the unfamiliarity of it was unsettling.
"I believe, sir, that Mr. Fairford's nightmare has probably awoken most of Somerset. Biers will doubtless be tending to her ladyship," he added, giving Jack an ugly look with his jaundiced eye. "So you might wish to return to bed."
Jack rolled his eyes and saluted. "Yes, sir."
"Don't make fun of me, sir," Staveson said coldly. "Her Ladyship considers me indispensable. Can the same truly be said of you?"
"Don't threaten me, Staveson," Jack said with a dazzling and icy grin, "I am mighty hard to dispense with."
No one said a word about the incident the next morning, though everyone looked preternaturally tired and Lady Diana kept shooting worried glances at Johnny as though he might explode or start screaming again. Johnny, for his part, seemed to remember none of it, which fitted with what little Jack could remember of War Neurosis and night terrors from his long-ago reading. The three of them sat in silence, chewing gamely on slightly raw toast.
"I had considered," Lady Diana said suddenly, making Jack nearly drop his coffee, "inviting a few of the more bearable people from Yeovil around for dinner on Monday." She gave the air in front of her a speculative look. "What do you think?"
Jack did not say, "I thought you said the only bearable being in all Somerset was a pony," just looked to his left and pretended to think she was talking to Johnny.
Johnny swallowed his toast and gave his great-aunt a slightly aghast look. Evidently he was far from thrilled by the notion, but he merely lifted his coffee to his lips and said, "I'm sure it will be delightful."
"Excellent," Lady Diana said grimly. "I shall tell the Cunninghams that Elizabeth is especially welcome." She narrowed her eyes across the table at Johnny.
Jack winced at his expression, the realisation dawning swiftly across the young man's face like a weather front that he had only two days of relative freedom and one of church before painful match-making started in earnest.
You didn't think you could escape it forever, did you? Jack thought with a little twinge of sympathy as Johnny excused himself. Of course Johnny must have thought that – young men rarely gave a nod to the idea of the future until it was upon them.
The day's tennis passed quickly and, for the most part, without conversation. Johnny did not appear to be in a chatty mood, and Jack was having difficulty dragging his gaze from the young man's pale legs as he ran for shots, enough trouble that talking would have been beyond him anyway.
Over dinner Johnny asked if they'd either of them – Lady Diana or Jack – had the chance to read much of Sassoon's poetry, and Lady Diana said, "Wasn't Sassoon that little egomaniac who sent that awful declaration?" and announced that poetry began and ended with Pope and Dryden.
Jack, who had snatched a few strangely beautiful moments in a barn with the dark-haired author of Anthem for Doomed Youth only to have himself addressed as "Siegfried" at a crucial moment, tried not to pull a face. "I always found it a little flippant," he said eventually. "Much preferred poor Owen."
Poor Owen and poor Owen's stutter and poor Owen's small, steady hands on Jack's naked back, that he certainly took in preference over continual tales of What A Great Captain Sassoon Is.
"I was thinking of one piece in particular," Johnny said rather stiffly, "which I do not believe is at all flip. Have you ever read The Dugout?" Johnny toyed aimlessly with his largely unfinished meal, "Jack?"
Lady Diana's eyebrows more or less shot up into her hairline at this and had Johnny not been regarding him keenly Jack would have shrugged at her. First name terms, out of nowhere. Well, well. Evidently Captain Sassoon had his uses.
"I'm not familiar," Jack admitted. He sensed Johnny was gearing up to a recitation, and with a pang of regret pushed the remains of his rabbit pie away to indicate he was listening. Lady Diana frowned.
"Would you object terribly to being introduced?"
"Perhaps after dinner," Lady Diana interjected, much to Jack's relief, "I can't imagine that Captain Sassoon's finest is likely to settle the stomach or increase the appetite."
In the sitting room, a small fire spluttering and popping a little indignantly in the grate, Jack tried to keep his eyes open despite the stupefying influence of apple crumble and a thick custard; truth be told he didn't care one way or the other for poetry – the only words Jack traditionally had any interest in were "yes", "more", "all of it" and "I'm arresting you on suspicion of –" – but he felt he should make the effort, especially as Johnny looked uncommonly like a Renaissance saint, stood there in painful earnestness with his top shirt button inadvertently come undone.
The mere fact of this accidental indecency was in danger of making Jack light-headed. That was the thing about this era of straitened morals, Jack mused as Johnny spoke very seriously of Sassoon's incredible wit and talent, because everyone was so trussed up all the time even the tiniest exposure took on an erotic charge. If they'd all just walked around naked …
" – begin. Is that all right?"
"Oh do get on with it," Lady Diana said in a bored voice. "My foot has gone to sleep and I think my head's about to join it." Jack stifled a snort of laughter and Johnny flushed.
He cleared his throat. "Why do you lie with your legs ungainly huddled – "
A fierce look stole over Johnny's face as he resisted like flame licking at a piece of newspaper, and Jack listened with rapt attention as Johnny stopped stumbling over the words and finished with his, "and when you sleep you remind me of the dead," ringing like a cathedral bell. Jack had half a mind to applaud, but Lady Diana seemed less impressed.
"That cheerful fare is hardly going to take your mind off things, is it?" she grumbled, lightning a cigarette. "Hie thee to the piano, the pair of you, and play something upbeat." She pointed the spent match threateningly at Jack. "Any more Tchaikovsky and I'll knock your block off, too."
Sunday dawned bright, clear and cold after a night free of terrible yells; Jack did however encounter a harassed-looking Biers hustling along with ammonia-scented sheets in her arms, and a few seconds of Harkness Charm soon confirmed his suspicions. Johnny still looked guilty after breakfast, when they set out for the two-mile walk to the nearest church, a tiny little thing squirreled away in a village whose name Jack had forgotten the moment it was told him.
Jack hadn’t actually been to the little church before – "Tongues will wag," Lady Diana had said sourly, "if I show up accompanied by some American serviceman," – and had been instructed to tell curious parties that he was a pal of Johnny's, visiting with him. That apparently wouldn't induce tongue-wagging; an indication to Jack's mind, that the country still lived in more sheltered times. Whether that was good or bad was hard to say, although it did make buying linseed oil a less fraught experience.
They were half-way to the village, Lady Diana walking on ahead with Staveson in tow for moral if not physical support (and her cane held discretely in his hand), when Johnny leaned closer to Jack and whispered, "Are you sleeping with my aunt?"
Jack thought about this for a while; trying for the most part to ignore the smell of talcum powder on Johnny's skin and the way his eyelashes got lighter towards their tips. He said in a low voice, "would you be very perturbed if I said yes?"
Johnny made a face, looking uncommonly like an overgrown schoolboy in his Sunday best – very overgrown, for he stood an inch taller than Jack, making him nearly six foot tall – and said very, very quietly, "she is rather old."
"Age is merely a matter of perspective," said Jack, who had been thirty for forty-eight years now.
"Are you sleeping with my aunt?" Johnny persisted, digging his hands into his coat pockets and utterly ruining the line of his rather nicely-tailored (if for someone with a little more weight on him) suit.
"No, Mr. Fairford, I am not sleeping with your aunt," Jack said with a thin smile. It was not exactly a lie – Lady Diana had been firm from the start of their adventures on the subject of who slept where, and Jack was more than happy to comply. For one, the old lady snored like a warthog and for another he knew himself to be a very fidgety sleeper. His male lovers may have just about put up with an occasional elbow in the stomach or knee in the groin but usually girlfriends tired of such things quickly and made him sleep on the floor.
"Will you two get a move on?" Lady Diana snapped from ahead. "I'm a cripple and I'm still outpacing you. Anyone would thing you'd lost your ruddy legs. Quick march!" She led them at a near-canter down to the little church, getting there just in time to get to their seats in the front pew and not look too obviously rushed about it.
Jack fell easily into his Church Survival Routine (part of the appeal of Christianity, Jack had often thought, was that you didn't really have to pay attention or even stay awake but you still got to feel pious about it): stand when everyone else does, sit when everyone else does, amen whenever the vicar does, try not to concentrate too hard on the actual words in case you feel the overwhelming urge to laugh about their talk of everlasting peace and heaven.
Beside him, to his left, Lady Diana droned quietly along to the hymns – her singing voice was not exactly dulcet – and to his right Johnny's Sunday suit brushed occasionally on Jack's, the friction of wool on wool sending parks through spots of Jack's brain that unfortunately were all too active even in a place of worship.
By the time they had stuttered through to the final amen Jack's stomach was growling again and Lady Diana looked dangerously bored; Johnny had surreptitiously dozed off, Jack noted with some satisfaction. All in all their row was far from the most devout, but to hear the vicar greet them one might have been excused for thinking them the family of some archbishop.
Jack watched with a faint smile as Lady Diana skilfully navigated difficult social waters and invited the vicar and his wife to what was rapidly becoming a dinner party; luckily they declined. For his part he answered the questions put to him – "Paschendale, Ypres, the Somme, Anvers, Arras … yes, I think I did just about," and "no, Canada originally," and "I'm afraid they're no longer with us," – and only lied a little; Johnny answered in more subdued tones, "not yet," and "foot soldiers," until the reverend finally left them to trek back to the house.
Half-way through the journey rain set in, and they arrived on the steps of Lattiford House soaked and cold. As Johnny set off for his room for a change of clothes, Lady Diana remarked apparently without guile – although it would have been the first time for it – "You know, he puts me a great deal in mind of you, Jack."
Jack watched Johnny's retreating form meditatively, realised that he was simply ogling and not observing, and pulled himself up short. He forced a smile. "You think so? I was hoping I had a little more meat on my bones than that."
"Give him time," Lady Diana said cheerfully as Biers appeared with a blanket and a worried expression, "I'm sure by the time he's your age he'll be the spit of you."
"Poor chap," Jack smirked. "Still, I suppose the exercise will do him good."
"Exercise?" Lady Diana grasped the balustrade carefully. "What exercise?"
"The beating women away with a stick, or fleeing their amorous advances," Jack grinned.
"You are entirely too full of yourself, Mr. Harkness," Lady Diana said, her smile so ghostly as to be almost invisible.
"If I was full of anyone else you'd complain," Jack retorted without thinking.
"If you were full of someone else I should call the police," Lady Diana said sharply from a little way up the stairs.
Stupid backwards decade, Jack thought peevishly, dripping wool-filtered rainwater onto the polished wooden floor.
The day grew steadily wetter after lunch, until all the windows were streaming and Lady Diana and her guests were forced to mill about inside without aim or thought until the hostess was moved to snap, "oh for goodness sake, go and play billiards or something."
"I didn't know you had a billiards table, Aunty," Johnny said with some surprise and, Jack thought, perhaps a little sarcasm.
"I don't. Just …oh, go and do something elsewhere. You're beginning to grate on my nerves, the both of you." Lady Diana pinched the bridge of her nose. "Ja – Mr. Harkness, there are some badminton rackets in the attic, if you would be so good? Else find something to entertain you that isn't too noisy. I feel a headache coming on. Probably this bloody weather."
Jack made a mental list of the things he could do to entertain himself with Johnny, crossed off the ones that hadn't been invented yet, and with some regret crossed off the ones that would land him in prison too. The remainder were not exactly enthralling.
"Would that preclude tinkering with the piano?"
"I don't know, I don't care, go away," Lady Diana said shortly, "And if you run into Staveson tell him I want two aspirin and a large scotch."
The piano was currently set up in the sitting room, which seemed a little too close to where Lady Diana was currently sulking her way through an afternoon headache, so Jack very awkwardly collected up the "portable" gramophone in his arms and gave Johnny a nod, "my piano repertoire is running low," he said, "I figured – thought – this might be better. Maybe in the ballroom."
"I only have Musetta's Waltz and the Blue Danube," Lady Diana said in a low voice, "if you play them more than once within my earshot I will set the dogs on you and you will be duly licked to death."
"You shan't hear a thing," Jack assured her as they left.
The meagre ballroom (barely large enough for four couples, or five if they were feeling intimate) was darkened by rain and smelt faintly of mushrooms and soldierly flatulence; Jack surmised that it hadn't been aired out since it was used for training. The room looked very different without the maps and lists tacked to the wall – all that remained of the three year occupation were scuff marks on the floorboards. He settled the gramophone clumsily on the edge of the stage (and the echo brought back memories of long-winded speeches, of boot polish and stiff backs) and smiled awkwardly at Johnny.
It ought to be easy. He ought to just ask him to dance; there was however something missing, something which he usually regarded as cheating but which would make the whole process a lot easier and give the lad a healthy case for plausible deniability should the whole situation come to light later: alcohol. Jack held up his index finger. "Won't be a minute – " and bolted out of the room.
He skidded out of the side-door in the vestibule by the sitting room, took the short-cut to the kitchens through the stinging nettles and brambles he had not yet cleared (not to mention the aggressive rain), dived into the pantry and picked up the nearest bottle he could find, which on inspection turned out to be apple cordial. Jack swore, grabbed a bottle of gin, and bounded back through the weeds like a steeplechase champion. Almost at the door he realised he hadn't any glasses and had to dash back for them.
When he returned to the ballroom Johnny was fiddling with the gramophone but not actually playing anything. Jack pointed the bottle at him in silent inquiry.
"I'm afraid I take after my mother," Johnny said abruptly, and this non-sequitur left Jack floundering somewhat until Johnny helpfully added, "She can't take her drink very well. It loosens her tongue, then she flops all over the place like a landed carp." He grimaced "I probably shouldn't have told you that. However, I'm much the same –" Jack began pouring him a small-by-Jack-standards measure regardless, "- used to be something of a figure of fun for it in the mess. Out By Eleven, they called me," Johnny said ruefully. "Of course, one doesn't pay much attention to these things," he continued, although it was very clear that he did. Jack handed him the gin and Johnny clasped the glass between his hands without taking a sip. "I mean," he went on; "while I was training they all called me 'Sussex'."
Jack nearly choked on his drink. "Is there a story behind that name?"
"Not a particularly edifying one," Johnny said a little sourly, swirling his glass as though he were drinking (or rather failing to drink) scotch instead of gin. "When I arrived I couldn't correctly identify Sussex on a map of England. They took it as an indication that my intelligence was below par."
"It's not," Jack was very careful not to phrase it as a question, but Johnny answered it as one just the same.
"No, it's bloody not. I was born in Lahore, I grew up in Kerala – the first time I'd ever set foot in England was when I started training, more or less. I'm sure they couldn't have found Bangalore on globe, but you know how people are." He smiled suddenly into his drink, which was (to Jack's irritation) still untouched. "Sorry. Silly thing to be annoyed by, isn't it?" His expression grew grave. "Most of them, most of the chaps who called me 'Sussex' and 'Out by Eleven', they're dead now."
"You're not," was the best comfort Jack could think of.
"And neither are you," Johnny said, looking up with a very Diana-like expression. "I heard that list you gave the vicar. You seem to have been everywhere without once getting shot. Do you have 'Death's Appointment Book' too?"
"Huh?" The phrase sounded familiar but Jack couldn't pinpoint its origin.
"Ambulance-driver I met used to claim he had Death's appointment book, and that was why he stayed out of trouble and out of the way of bombs and bullets," Johnny elaborated, sniffing at the gin but not drinking it. "He was a queer one. Very fair hair, but dark eyes. Called – "
"Latimer," Jack blurted as the name came back to him. "Timothy Latimer."
Johnny started. "You knew him?"
Biblically, Jack thought, but all he said was, "Arras."
Johnny nodded. "Strange. Perhaps you stole the appointment book from him," he added rather flippantly.
An early bluebottle buzzed and skated around the room, echoing against the rain-glossed windowpanes, as Jack recalled crawling on his belly through mud and corpses, his left leg attached only by skin, the world exploding around him again and again, and still thinking it easier than that first war he'd been in, far away in time and space. "Just lucky, I guess," he said without conviction. He'd woken up half-slumped over the lip of a dugout that time, being used as a makeshift sandbag – scared the piss out of the poor lad who'd been using him as cover.
"Lucky," Johnny echoed, finally taking a sip of his gin and pulling face. "Funny how one's view on luck change."
"We're alive and in one piece and there's even music," Jack said philosophically, risking a nudge to Johnny's ribs. "For some people that's luck."
"That's a very pragmatic attitude, Mr. Harkness."
"Anything else would make it impossible to live. And please, I thought you were calling me Jack now?"
"I don't think I should," Johnny put his glass down on the stage with a dull click. "Much like the gin, it's a tempting but risky proposition." He got to his feet without grace. "You're a charming and interesting man, Mr. Harkness. Jack." He offered his hand for Jack to shake, which Jack did with a sinking feeling. This was not going the way he'd intended, not in the least bit. "And I suspect a very dangerous one to know."
"Not in small doses," Jack said with his most devilishly suggestive grin.
Johnny sighed. "Which is why." He put his hands in his pockets. "I should like to be your friend, Jack, but I don't think that's possible. I don't think I make it possible." He rocked on his heels and said in a low, shamed and hollow voice, "Neurasthenia is not the only reason I have been enjoying the attentions of a psychiatric doctor, Jack. Mr. Harkness. Think about that before you accept any overtures of companionship from me."
With that, he was gone, leaving Jack alone with a gramophone, two glasses of gin and the sense that he'd missed something vitally important and fucked up rather badly.
Under the circumstances he might as well get drunk.
Jack passed out on his bed an hour later, having consumed the remainder of the bottle, thinking vague thoughts of Siegfried fucking Sassoon and, for some reason, boeuf bourguignon. He woke sometime after dinner with a headache and had Biers raid the pantry for him.
Because he had a blinding hangover and his thoughts were now doggedly pursuing Havelock Ellis around some internal bookshelf to no real end, Jack spent an hour cajoling the maid into sucking him off and once he'd finished the remains of the shepherd's pie from the pantry he was still no closer to knowing quite what it was he'd done, but he felt a little less like he'd been mown down by the twentieth century all at once.
Lahore, his brain said urgently, and something quite horrible occurred in the back of his mind. Was Johnny twenty or twenty-one? It was suddenly a very important distinction.
Lady Diana hit him impatiently in the shoulder at least three times during that evening's love-making and accused him of being distracted; Jack charmed her off the subject but, as he was pulling his trousers back on, was struck with another unwelcome thought.
"What was your name before you were married?"
"What kind of question is that?" Lady Diana asked, rather surprised. She groped for something to throw at him, and he ducked automatically.
"Just curious," Jack hedged. Angela Fairford was, if he remembered the interminable conversation correctly, Diana's brother's daughter, and for some reason the woman he'd known back in India had insisted on going by her maiden name when she was with him – to minimise the chance for him to cause a scandal, he supposed – though he did recall her being called Anne or Annabelle but probably not Angela.
A strangled, sobbing scream split the night in two and Lady Diana sighed expansively. "Go and do your thing, your trick with the whistle," she said crossly, "I want some sleep tonight."
"Your wish is my command," Jack said, giving her a mock salute from the doorway.
"Oh and Jack," Lady Diana called after him as he left.
"Yes?"
"It was Parker."
"Parker?"
"Parker."
Parker, Jack thought guiltily. Still, it didn't prove anything, necessarily. She might have been an entirely different Miss A. Parker. It was a common enough name.
All the same, when he came to manoeuvre the comatose former young captain back into his bed with Staveson's minor assistance, he was certain – scrupulously so – to refer to him as "Fairford".
PART TWO!
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