Chapter Text
Summer of 1871, and beyond.
Thank God that Jonathan could never recall much about his accident, the injury, and the subsequent operation. He must have dipped out of and into consciousness, for only certain moments stuck out to him, such as his father carrying him into the house, or his mother bent over him and stroking his hair. What he remembered most clearly, though, was David Prevost standing in front of his father the Earl of Spokeham and pleading on Jonathan’s behalf to let the doctor use chloroform, expensive though it was. As Jonathan would come to realise over the next few years, the Earl could very rarely resist his only child, and so the drug was administered and Jonathan fell fully unconscious. His last thought was one of admiration for the other boy, who had so cleverly manipulated a grown man.
For the rest of the summer, Jonathan stayed in the house. The first few days after the operation, he spent in a sedated stupor. After he came back to full consciousness, David would pop into his sickroom occasionally and ask how he was feeling.
‘Fine,’ Jonathan would reply, and David would ask if he was in a lot of pain, and Jonathan bravely replied he was not, though he knew David was not fooled. David was never fooled.
One day, David came in with a book under his arm. ‘Whenever I’m ill,’ he said, as if Jonathan was laid up with nothing more serious than a headcold, ‘I get dreadfully bored, so I thought I should bring you something to occupy your time.’ Beaming, he held out the book.
Jonathan stared at it in silence.
‘It’s an adventure story,’ David said.
‘I can’t read.’
David looked blank for a second or two, as if that contingency had not occurred to him. It probably hadn’t. ‘It’s got someone hunting a lion in it,’ he said in a non-sequitur. ‘That’s my favourite bit. Here, I’ll read it to you.’ He flipped through the book until he found the right page, sat down in the chair by Jonathan’s bedside, and began. Enraptured, by both the story and David’s voice, Jonathan listened.
This kind of class-boundary defying camaraderie didn’t last very long – about a week after David first read to Jonathan, David returned to boarding school. By the time he came home for Christmas, David’s interest in Jonathan had waned – Jonathan now blended again into the background of domestic service – and Cartwright had fully taken him under his wing. Once more, the divide between the two boys was uncrossable.
But Jonathan was also learning to read under Cartwright’s stern tutelage. David had left him the adventure book he had read from and airily told him he could keep it for himself if he so desired. Every night, he slowly and laboriously read a page or two, even when he was exhausted, even when he’d been chastised and castigated all day, even when his leg hurt so much he wished the doctor had amputated it. Eventually, after a few weeks, he finished the book.
After that, his appetite for the written word turned voracious. Once Cartwright realised it, he supplied him with a carefully curated stream of literature. Some books were edifying, some were entertaining, and a few rare ones were both, though as Jonathan grew older and his taste more refined, he found the entertaining in the edifying, too, and vice versa.
The seasons wore on. Jonathan’s leg healed to a certain degree, until he was able to walk without crutches, though not without a limp or pain. Whenever Doctor Crewe came to the house to attend to one sick member of the household or another, Cartwright made sure he examined Jonathan’s leg, too. The verdict was usually that it was healing well enough, but after a year or two, he had to confirm that the process had stagnated. Jonathan was never going to walk without limping. When Jonathan tremulously asked if the pain was going to go away, Doctor Crewe had to shake his head. It might get lesser, or he might get more used to it; but fully go away? No.
Then, he told him to exercise his legs regularly to keep himself limber, which really amounted to working as a footman, even though Jonathan was not fast or flexible enough to make a good, or even passable, one. But Cartwright had set his sights much further into the future. Jonathan and the young Lord David were very close in age, and Lord David would need a valet one day, so, while David was at Eton, then Oxford, Cartwright trained him to be the best valet in Spokehamshire. ‘Adequacy won’t do,’ he’d kept saying. ‘You need to excel.’ What he didn’t need to explain was why Jonathan would have to excel – his valeting skills had to completely overshadow his disability, or he could be easily replaced. It was one thing to have a charity-case footman; a valet could not hold his position on his employer’s goodwill alone.
In these younger days, Jonathan often found himself wondering how his life would have turned out if his knee had never been injured. He recognised that the injury had opened doors for him that would otherwise have been shut firmly. He could read and write now, while his older brother William could barely write his own name. He ate better food, and wore better clothes. He slept in a bed with linens that were laundered regularly. When he was ill, he was attended to by Doctor Crewe, who had studied in prestigious Edinburgh. However, he wasn’t always sure if a life in constant pain was a fair price.
But he was thirty-two now, and had lived with it for longer than he had without it. Over time, as he applied himself to being David’s valet, and became his lover, and built an international organisation of vigilante art thieves, he’d made a conscious effort to focus on the opportunities he’d been afforded and the good he could do with them.
It took years, but finally, questions as idle as ‘what if’ had faded. He was Jonathan Benson. Son of the old Prevost gardener and brother of the current one. Valet to Lord David Prevost, and his lover. And the most wanted criminal this side of the Atlantic. Both despite of, and because of, that accident in the summer of 1871.