Work Text:
The house in Flaw Valleys does not, strictly speaking, exist.
She had volunteered the house for its purpose in first month of 1940, after her husband Gideon had died. I can contribute too, she’d said to the somber men at Downing Street when they’d offered her their doleful murmurs. Her eyes had felt hot, had doubtless been red-rimmed, but she hadn’t wept. Not on the front lines, maybe, but I can do more.
They’d sent her away gently, but a month later Adam Blacklock had arrived on her stoop, looking half-apologetic. We have something we’d like you to do, if you’re willing.
She’d been willing.
The house had been erased from public records. Its address became need-to-know. A week later her daughter Philippa, fresh out of nursing school, had moved home to the property that no longer existed.
Adam had moved in, too, to help keep things running smoothly: to manage a line of communication between the house in Flaw Valleys and the dark flocks of suited, faceless men in London, to announce the arrival and departure of guests, and to monitor those same guests during their visits.
A week after that, her first patient -- no, guest -- had arrived. Her guests aren’t injured bodily, most of the time, just in need of rest, or needing to be hidden for some reason determined by men who will never consult either her or the pawns in her home about any particular move.
And that is fine. Kate loves them all, her blackbirds, no matter why they have come to her. That is how she thinks of them: her blackbirds. She tends them until they are ready to leave her and then sets them loose to fly again, as she has always done for people she loves.
Often they never return.
She only mentions her distress at this to Adam once. It’s what they signed up for, he says. He says it gently, looking up from the desk where he handles the correspondence from London. She knows that’s true. She doesn’t bring it up again.
But Adam does, a couple of weeks later.
Kate is standing on the portico, sipping tea, watching the sunset. Adam emerges from the house, stops a few steps behind her. I’d like to sketch this view someday, he says. She suggests he can do it whenever he pleases. Hardly feels right to take the time, with so much else needing to be done, he says. Kate doesn’t reply to that. After a few moments of silence, he says: I don’t like it when they don’t come back, either, you know. None of us do.
And she knows that’s true, too.
---
They settle into a pattern. The guests -- they never use the word patients at Flaw Valleys, not even with the ones who need close tending, who need pills to sleep and spend long sessions with Doctor Bell -- come and go, quiet and unobtrusive as dormice. They guard their secrets even among friends. It’s a funny profession she’s stumbled into, tending to the convalescence of spies. But it suits Kate, truly. She is empathetic and interested in people, but never uncouth enough to be openly curious. Her empathy has always extended far enough to let her know when silence and distance are the better part of love.
Some of the guests are more memorable than others. Danny Hislop, for instance, who tells marvellous tall tales of his own exploits and, on occasion, softer and more believable stories about a woman he married. Archie, who can blend in with any group of people sufficiently hard-used and hard-worn, and spends most of his time wooing the animal inhabitants of the property as if he were a snake-charmer. ( Archie, please, you’ll catch rabbit fever — Kate overhears Philippa saying with exasperated regularity. Archie answers: don’t you mind my business for me, little Pippa, I know what I’m doing. )
Some of the guests are perfectly mannered, and tolerable in the extreme. Fergie, Alex, and Hercules, for instance, who sit together and discuss -- whatever they find interesting that day. Doctor Bell sometimes joins them.
Some of the guests are troublesome. One, in particular.
She’d met him once before; Gideon had introduced them at a party in London. Kate, dear, this is Lieutenant Crawford, Gideon had said, introducing her to a man young enough to be her husband’s son. You can call him Francis. She’s surprised to see him arrive as a guest, but only for a moment.
She doesn’t have to guess what his assignments must involve. There’s a cold, hard cynicism to him, a bitterness; his looks are of a certain type, gold-and-ivory, and his German, which he speaks with poisoned, ironic relish, sounds flawless. Men she is supposed not to notice, not to see, come speak to him; they look serious when they arrive, and more serious still when they depart. When the men leave, he behaves… spectacularly.
Never has Kate met a man more devoted to performative misdirection. Sweet Kate, he calls, letting himself into the kitchens where guests simply do not go and helping himself to the liquor that guests are expected not to drink, what stars spangled heaven with such beauty?
Each time he helps himself to the liquor she invites him to, please, return to his quarters: this is usually the prelude to a petty and half-hearted sort of fight, a fight he barely picks, and that she escapes with only pinpricks.
He reminds her terribly of Gideon: the way Gideon had talked of him almost like a son. The memory is like a knife in her heart. And seeing Gideon’s almost-son, determined to drink himself almost to death, determined to have no companions and keep no friends, ever-ready with a cruel jape, hurts worse than the memory of her husband. Of all her guests, she wants to mend him worst, and can help him least.
Kate takes to working more in the kitchens than normal when Francis is a guest. Adam takes to hovering over Kate more than usual when she does. He intercepts Francis when Francis’ balletic streaks of verbal terror bring him hurtling into Kate’s sanctuary, and corrals him away with old manners: a schoomaster’s manners, or an officer’s. Never fatherly: despite the way Kate sees the spectre of her husband’s ghost about him, the man Francis does not have a father like mortal men. Francis is a sui generis artwork of his own creation, and Adam treats him like it.
---
On his second visit, Philippa takes to tending Francis. She appoints herself the duty of disrupting his quest for the kitchens, and the liquor cabinet. Impatient, unsentimental, clear-eyed Philippa, who is unmoved by Francis’ indulgent dramatics and who answers his absurdities with slicing unromantic rebuff, poetry parried word for word with pragmatism. I’ve read Shakespeare, too, Mr. Crawford, and it doesn’t sound any better when you’re drunk, Kate hears her daughter sniping from the hall. Erudite Philippa, my own dramaturg, he answers back -- a prelude to something else Kate doesn’t pause long enough to hear.
---
She and Adam don’t celebrate the entrance of the Americans into the war, but Adam seems to bring a certain kind of relief along with the news when he returns from London.
It can’t be much longer now, Adam says, pouring her a glass of something bronze and sharp. They sit close together before a fire. There is snow on the windowsill. Their guests are resting: dead tired, or drugged half to death, or simply quiet as the dead. Kate almost shuts it all out: the origin of the moment, the circumstances, almost shuts out everything but the company, the stolid caretaker on whom their house depends. Then he says: Gideon knew the yanks would come around eventually .
Kate’s good manners keep her from excusing herself.
---
Sometimes a guest with an American accent will join them. Aside from that, they feel no change at Flaw Valleys.
---
Philippa and Francis snipe at one another with regularity; he baits her, and laughs at her. Never openly, but Kate knows well enough to hear.
Mistress Philippa, mother of weasels. Do your children bite? -- I’ll bite you if you don’t go back to your room.
She only hears half the melody, though. She is distracted with her own concerns.
---
One evening late in the summer of 1942, Adam sits beside her on the back porch. She is anxious, in the way she always is when Francis stays with them, a pattern she’s come to notice, if not quite to enjoy, over the four visits he’s made to Flaw Valleys. Adam says something and she doesn’t quite reply; the reply is half-automatic. Francis’ bitterness has grown, and she both wants to know and knows she never wants to know what new horrors he has seen. Adam lays a hand over hers and without thinking she clasps his fingers in her own.
And then she thinks of Gideon, and stands and leaves abruptly.
---
Kate avoids Adam. Every time she is near him it feels like a betrayal of her husband.
Late in the winter of 1943, Francis is with them again for the fifth time, hidden away to make some report, and to wait for his masters to decide what to do with him next. He notices the distance Kate is keeping from Adam.
Francis notices everything, always.
When he and Kate are alone together, which she cannot always avoid, he says I knew Gideon quite well.
She looks at him. Did you?
He takes a seat, talks about her husband for a while. She manages the entire conversation without crying, but only barely. Before departing, he says: Adam is a good man. And Gideon would want you to be happy.
---
Kate hears Francis and Philippa from behind a closed door the night before he leaves.
You’re not allowed to get yourself killed, Mother will cry, says her daughter, with something a little sharper, more complicated, than mere pragmatism.
And what of you, sweet Philippa? His mocking tone has a strange, sad and angry, edge. Will there be no tears from you?
I’d sooner weep for a serpent, she snaps back. And it’s Nurse Sommerville to you.
My apologies, Nurse Sommerville, he returns with high theatrics. I shall bring you a serpent to weep over when I return.
---
Francis leaves for a long time after that. For the first time, Kate notices that Philippa responds to his absence with an anxiety of her own. Now it is her daughter’s relationship with Francis that distracts Kate from her own feelings about Adam, rather than the other way around.
She was bound to fall in love with someone eventually, Adam says, sympathetic but practical. It’s the first substantive conversation they’ve had in some time. It is spring, 1944; Gideon has been dead for almost five years, and new buds of grass are pushing through the brown dirt in the courtyard.
She was bound to fall in love. And Kate can’t say that Adam is wrong.
---
Francis does not return until early in 1945. Philippa goes to him as if he were a normal stop on her normal rounds, but Kate finds herself hovering outside the door anyway.
I thought there would only be tears for my corpse, Mistress Philippa, he says. His tone is gently chiding -- and something else, as well.
I said it would be mother who would cry, Philippa says thickly.
Kate leaves them to their privacy, and goes to the portico. She stands staring at the late afternoon sun for a few minutes. Adam emerges from the house behind her: an old, familiar pattern. He puts a hand on her shoulder.
Francis is right, she decides. Gideon would want her to be happy.
She turns from the landscape, and presses her face into Adam’s chest.