Work Text:
There was nothing wrong with Peter Janossi. He wasn't very good-looking, but there was nothing wrong with his face; he wasn't especially well-born, but there was nothing wrong with being a successful carpenter's son; he wasn't witty, but there was nothing wrong with his brains.
"The only thing wrong with you, Joss," Mrs. Gold was saying, "is you see too much and you let yourself get distracted. You miss the forest for the trees."
"We're supposed to be building up his self-confidence, Es," Mr. Day said, which was probably worse. Thank God Saint wasn't here. Mrs. Merrick, that was. She'd be laughing at him outright, and it was bad enough she'd married an unskilled servant three times her age. That still smarted. There was nothing wrong with Peter, but she'd turned him down and accepted this other fellow, and there was definitely a lot wrong with the other fellow.
"I'm fine," Peter said. "It was just a surprise. You were telling me last week how much I still have to learn."
"You always will have," Mr. Day said. "Unfortunately. You know how it is. You'll never get caught up to the old case files or your own training. It won't be any different, except the council will yell at you directly instead of having Esther or me do it."
"Lovely."
"Don't sell yourself short, Joss," Mrs. Gold said. "You're not just your eyes and you know it. You can teach Tredarloe a lot about resonance as the opportunity arises, and of course you're the one to help Hall."
That was blatantly incorrect. Peter could do very rudimentary acoustic resonance by looking at the colors coming out of his mouth, but that was the limit of his magical ear, and Hall was all ears. Peter put his head in his hands. "The newest senior justiciar, and I get those two for juniors? Who's my partner, then?"
Mr. Day and Mrs. Gold exchanged looks. "We don't know," Mrs. Gold said. "Macready's trying to seduce Nodder down from Hertfordshire-"
Mr. Day choked.
"Poor choice of words. We're trying to hire Miss Nodder and find her a couple juniors to make up a third team, and then we'll hopefully have people we can promote to fill out the senior positions."
Peter was legitimately afraid that he was going to die within the month. "A team of three indefinitely. Me, an apprentice warlock, and a flit."
Mr. Day shrugged. "Tredarloe's powerful enough. It's not that bad."
It was that bad. Tredarloe was three months older than Peter, and Hall a few years older than that. Experience or no, Peter was going to need far more charisma than he actually possessed to assert authority over them. Not for the first time, Peter thought about quitting. His parents would take him back. They let him help out in the shop on his half days as it was. He could do their books and perhaps study some old woodcraft or something. Put some magic into sturdy chairs and comfortable beds instead of killing people. But it was bad enough never quite fitting in among practitioners, who were all odd ducks anyway. A daily routine of facing that his own parents didn't really like him was unbearable.
Macready had handed him off to Mrs. Gold after a month, saying he just wasn't a good fit for the team, which was news to Peter because he had liked Macready and Arbuthnot a great deal. They were straightforward fellows without all the complications you had to deal with working with women and Jews and what-have-you. (He wasn't sure what sort of what-have-you Mr. Day was, because no one but Jenny Saint ever shared gossip with Peter, but he bet there was something. Probably some sort of sect, with Mr. Day's intensity.) He just never fit, that was the problem. The only reason his team were friends with him was that none of them fit anywhere either. Except Mr. Day and Saint (Merrick, dammit) had found friends to travel with, and Mrs. Gold was making some people for her to belong to. The hard way, admittedly, and he wouldn't go through what Mrs. Gold was doing for a hundred friends and a wife, but still. The three of them had always been closer to each other than any of them had been to Peter, anyway. He didn't know why. It was the same thing that always happened.
"I know you'd do it yourself if you had to," Mrs. Gold said, as the two seniors stood to go. "I know you think it would be easier. But learning to lead a team will make you the strongest justiciar we've got, and I'm not excepting Macready."
"If I live."
She waved a hand. "If you live."
***
Their days settled into a routine, such as it was. When no one was obviously committing warlockry in the open street, they met in one of the offices and looked at the back cases. Hall proved to be astonishingly adept at shifting piles of paper without sending them sliding everywhere, a skill Peter had not mastered in three years as Day and Gold's junior. Hall and Tredarloe had argued about it, because for some reason Tredarloe seemed to think manual labor was beneath a justiciar or something, but although Hall's argument was not something Peter followed or would have put forth himself, it did the job, and so they had Hall to do the sorting and filing. He was literate, at least, although that was about the only thing Peter didn't have to teach him. He couldn't even call witchlight when they started, and it had been like pulling teeth to even get him to try, big stupid African that he was.
Tredarloe, having, of course, the best handwriting of the three of them, wrote out legible summaries of old interrogation notes or made indexes of whatever they were keeping, in between the drills Peter set him. After the first week, Tredarloe started putting little inscripted markers on the corners of the most important things, so that Peter could identify them from across the room. Hall, again, proved extremely useful in the matter of the vast quantities of paper they weren't keeping. They weren't as efficient as Macready's team in getting real work done, but, dammit, Macready's juniors only had a few months' less experience than Peter had. Anyway, having an office where all three of them could sit and talk through a case, or where Peter could try haltingly to explain the magical theory behind whatever they'd just done, was worth it. The time was justifiable in the eyes of the council because they really had solved a couple of old cases.
Tredarloe worked hard, Peter had to give him that. Peter didn't know what the fellow's family were, but he was obviously Cornish and just as obviously not a coal miner, so Peter, with his limited knowledge of Cornwall, concluded they were probably smugglers. Tredarloe seemed not to know that every practitioner in London had gone from slightly wary of him to stark terrified overnight, and he still jumped to do anything Peter asked as if he was grateful for the chance to show he wasn't a warlock. He definitely wasn't, at least. His magic coiled out from his ever-present paper in glittering arabesques and stylized vines, like sea spray on gilt. Only the pen in Hall's pocket had any of the red drippy glow of warlockry about it. This did not make Peter any less nervous. Tredarloe was new and without a proper teacher, which left room for all sorts of disasters even without malice behind them. At least he hadn't exploded anything recently. Too, you didn't have to source from blood to do serious evil with practice, and Tredarloe had the right to a grudge against far too many people.
On that thought, Peter saw Waterford slither up to their office door. To physical eyes, Waterford was ugly enough. He was about six feet tall and not at all slender, and even before Jenny Saint (Merrick, dammit) broke his nose he had looked more like a 40-year-old banker with a boyish face than like the 20-year-old gentleman he really was. Now he looked like a St. Giles crimelord dressing above his station. But to Peter's sight he was a disaster. Fairley had been, if possible, an even worse master than Tredarloe's vampire pen. At least the pen (not the one in Hall's pocket, the one that had taken out an innocent man when it broke) had taught Tredarloe how to do something, albeit sourcing from blood and without any grounding in theory. The coils of Waterford's thankfully limited power were tangled and matted like the fur on a feral cur, so badly that in three weeks Peter had been able to make Hall, a recalcitrant flit with no gift for spellwork, a more competent practitioner. Peter would have liked to credit his teaching, but really it said more about Fairley than anyone. Peter wondered sometimes whether Waterford had been deliberately sabotaged, or merely neglected. It hardly mattered now.
Waterford had been shifting his weight and almost turning away from the door for two minutes now. Idiocy, in Peter's view. The fellow was on watch, and avoiding jusiticiars wouldn't make him look any more innocent, but he did it anyway. The only reason he helped out in the council building at all was that he was pathetically obviously hoping Mrs. Baron Shaw would take him on as a student.
"Hall, see what Waterford wants, would you?" Peter said. Hall and Tredarloe exchanged one of those quick unreadable looks Peter was beginning to hate, and Tredarloe rose to open the door while Hall set down the stacks of paper he was sorting.
"Hullo, Waterford, what do you want?" Tredarloe said, which was far more polite than Peter would have been. Tredarloe also stood back so that Waterford could come in and take the spare chair, which Peter definitely would not have done.
Waterford offered all three of them a sad and somewhat disgusting attempt at a smile. "Did you mean it about my nose?" he asked, in his uncomfortable, flattened voice. Did you bead it about by dose?
Tredarloe smiled back, as genuinely happy as Peter had ever seen him, but then his face dropped again to its usual expression of awkward anxiety. "I'll have to ask Mr. Janossi if I can try, but yes, I meant it."
Waterford's glance met Peter's. He must have accurately read what he saw there, because he became immediately fascinated by his knees. "It's only, my mother wants me to meet a lady in two weeks, and she's threatening to have my nose broken again so they can set it."
Peter, who had had his nose set by Dr. Gold twice, winced in sympathy before he remembered how much he hated Waterford. He pitied the lady, nose or no nose. "Oh, a lady?" Tredarloe asked, leaning forward a bit, and Peter was shocked to recognize his own lessons on keeping a suspect talking at work. Why the fuck would anyone want Waterford to keep talking? "Do tell."
Waterford flushed. "I know I'm too young, but Mother says this is our only chance to steal a march, before everyone else realizes what we know and Miss Vaudrey gets snapped up."
Peter jerked in his chair at the name, but apparently it meant nothing to Tredarloe. "Sounds exciting. Is she inheriting a fortune?"
"No, not exactly. Well, yes, but better. Her brother--there's just the two of them, by all reports they're very close--her brother is a cousin of Lord Crane's. Next in line, you see."
Even Tredarloe recognized that name. "Wait, Lord Crane? The Lord Crane who-" he cut off, because the Lord Crane in question was the one who had denounced Fairley for a warlock, and had also, although Peter thought this was not common knowledge, beheaded him with his bare hands. Somehow.
"That Lord Crane, the one whose servant Miss Saint married. I was at the wedding, you know."
Peter hadn't known, although it hadn't been that big a wedding. He had been, well, Saint insisted on calling him her maid of honor, because Mr. Day was giving her away and Mrs. Gold's ankles were too swollen for her to stand for the length of the ceremony. He had stood blindly beside the odd Chinaman they had instead of a proper priest, watching the girl he'd wanted to marry walk down the aisle towards him, and been all too aware that what he felt was embarrassment and not heartbreak. He hadn't noticed any of the guests.
"But- you and Miss Saint-" Tredarloe waved a hand at Waterford's nose.
"I stayed out of her way, believe me. But my mother is a great friend of Mrs. Bathlington, you know."
Tredarloe looked like he knew about as much about London society as Peter did, but he nodded.
"And Mrs. Bathlington's niece is Mrs. Blaydon, Mrs. Hart she was then, who is some sort of old friend of the groom. But she wasn't remarried yet, so she had to have someone respectable with her to go to the ceremony, and she was, as my mother had it, threatening to bring her aunt along hogtied. Because I heard there was some unpleasantness in her house, Mrs. Bathlington's house I mean, and she won't go anywhere near Lord Crane now. So my mother offered me as an escort for Mrs. Bathlington, assuring her I could handle any odd trouble, and I hadn't anything to say about it."
Peter, who had been in a cellar filled with the unpleasantness, laughed aloud at the image of Waterford trying to hold off a tide of giant rats. Waterford flushed. "Well naturally your mother believes in you," Tredarloe said, "and I'm sure with Mr. Janossi and Mr. Day there, not to mention the bride, it was quite safe regardless, but Mrs. Bathlington could hardly be expected to understand. How kind of you to go and reassure her. But what about this Miss Vaudrey? Was she there?"
Peter blinked at the word kind, as applied to Waterford, who was an abominable bully in his experience. "What? No, her brother has a small estate in Yorkshire, they're hardly ever in town at all. Oh, I see." Waterford glanced at Peter again, and scooted a little closer to Tredarloe. "No, the thing is, everyone knows about Lord Crane, of course, he's infamous, but we all assumed he was going to do his duty anyway. After all, so many of his sort do." Peter did not know about Lord Crane, whatever it was, but Tredarloe was nodding warily and, in the back of the room, Hall had gone silent. Waterford glanced at them, and his voice dropped almost to a whisper. "But he's formed an attachment. It was shockingly obvious, the way they looked at each other. They've got rings just as if they were married. It's no wonder they're leaving the country, they could hardly stay after that." He took a breath, and his voice was almost normal as Peter tried to make any sense of that. Crane and- Mrs. Blaydon? Mrs. Bathlington? "So I told my mother her friends had better not set their daughters after that earldom, because a certain red-headed individual is able to create a great deal of unpleasantness if he's crossed."
"Mr. Day would never-" Tredarloe started, but stopped at Hall's hiss.
"Maybe not, but Lord Crane's not going to be siring any heirs, is he? So his cousin's sister is a catch no one knows about. That's why-"
"Stephen Day is not a sodomite!" Peter bellowed. "How dare you imply such a thing, you cowardly piece of shit! You wouldn't dare say that to his face and by God you will not say it in front of me. Stephen Day is a good man, he would never do something so vile. Disgusting lies about a better man than any of us. Stand up, damn you. I don't need practice to pound you into the wall. I'll make what Jenny did look like a kiss!"
Waterford did not stand up, but mostly because he seemed to be frozen in terror. Oddly, instead of focusing on Peter, who was right in front of him, with a fistful of his shirt and a finger in his face, he kept flicking glances to Tredarloe.
For a moment all four of them were silent. Peter wasn't sure he could actually punch Waterford while the other man sat unresisting, and there was something strange going on anyway. He had that feeling he was so used to, that he was missing something. He let go and stepped back to look around. Tredarloe was beet red, and Hall had stepped forward with his hands balled into fists, but glaring at Peter, not Waterford. "What the hell?" Peter asked. "Did you all make friends and decide to slander your betters while I wasn't looking?"
Surprisingly, it was Waterford who answered. "Mr. Janossi, I know you're no coward, but- you- you do know Tredarloe is the most obvious molly in London? And he's right there, holding a pencil?"
The pencil hit the desk with an audible click. Tredarloe shook out his fingers, shedding power like water droplets back into the ether. For a moment Peter thought the man might cry, because that pencil said more than Waterford. Instead, after a moment, Tredarloe tossed the gold-brown hair off his forehead, leaned back in his chair, and crossed his legs. He didn't manage to speak, but his eyes were defiant in his flaming face.
Peter looked to Hall. The big African had unclenched his fists, and when he spoke, it was calmly enough. "I liked Mr. Day, when I met him," he said. "Took his job seriously. Tried to do his best by everyone, not just them as paid his wages. Decent about the awkward business with the ghost." Peter took a relieved breath, because that was just what was needed to start smoothing this over, but then Hall added, "I'm glad to hear he's found someone," and sat down at the desk across from Tredarloe.