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He didn’t tell Aziraphale. The angel might think he’d gone soft, or something, and Crowley’s pride forbade him reveal his vulnerability. So he didn’t announce his trip to St. Dinnery’s International School, just outside London, almost six months after the Apocalapse.
She signed in, using the twisted, magical sigil that encompassed her demonic name, and which worked as well on humans as Doctor Who’s psychic paper. The humans reading it saw, “Miss Funicula Ashtoreth, friend of family.” The student she’d come to visit? Warlock Dowling.
It was the boy’s first year at boarding school.
Properly morphed and englamoured as the brisk Scottish nanny, Crowley click-clacked her way along the halls of the school, following the little second-year who’d been put in charge of taking the visitor to Warlock. She assessed the school as she went, serpent eyes sharp behind her black glasses.
Modern, really. Someone had bought up some ghastly late Victorian mansion from the days when every jumped-up greengrocer or factory owner wanted their own estate. It was solid red brick trying to pass itself off as grey granite Neo-Gothic, and failing. The original building had never known a time without plumbing or electricity, and though there were signs that these utilities had needed an update or two since, it lacked that “garderobe and rush light” feeling of the real old learning institutes. The newer buildings were even less convincing, presenting everything from faux plaster and crossbeams to sleek modern brick and plate glass, either of which would have sent poor Prince Charles racing for the nearest loo in a muck sweat of offended aesthetic horror. And, yet, in spite of all its failings, it had the comfortable, worn-down aura of a place that was…what had Aziraphale said of Tadfield Manor? A place that was loved. Crowley struggled to sense it, understand it.
It was easier than it had been only months before. She had changed from the demon he had been that day. Her world was wider, now. Broader and deeper, too. S/he could, if s/he worked at it, sense the sanctified aura of the well-loved.
Crowley was, then, unsurprised to see “Master Warlock” looking exceptionally happy, given all that had occurred in his life recently. The boy actually smiled as his former nanny approached, and to Crowley’s amazement risked hugging the bony, brisk woman who’d largely raised him.
“Nanny A,” he said, using a nickname he never would have dared during the days she had actually cared for him. “It’s been for-EV-er!” He let go quickly enough not to seem mawkish, and then risked a truly scapegrace grin. “You see? I got my Hogwarts letter!”
Crowley raised one pruned, sardonic brow. “And what house were you sorted into, young Master Dowling?”
“Well, they call it Griswold House, here—but I think it’s really Hufflepuff,” Warlock replied, eyes dancing.
Crowley tsked and clucked her tongue. “Tush. Not Slytherin?” She’d introduced the boy to the Harry Potter books on the arguable grounds that it was an “occult influence” that offered many opportunities to bend the child to evil. At least, that’s what she had told Hell, citing many aggrieved Christian groups who insisted it was true. But in reality the set had been recommended by Aziraphale, who pointed out that the actual morality could serve Heaven's purposes far more decidedly than Hell’s, and as a two-fer came under their prior “arrangement.” In the end, though, she and the boy had simply come to love the books. They left Crowley so much room to exercise her serpentine, sinuous sense of humor…and for the boy to learn his own skeptical, wary laughter.
Crowley blinked behind her glasses, fighting off a sudden, unexpected longing for the days of the nursery, when she and Warlock had cheered for clever Slytherins, and speculated on the role they might have played in a resistance Rowling never fully demonstrated. It was a time redolent of fat brown tea pots filled with spiked tea (better the child learn to deal with liquor early), and stark and utterly delicious shortbread biscuits (a temptation passing as Spartan simplicity…). Crowley could almost hear the rain outside the window, and hear the faint hiss of the gas fire…
She and Warlock would speculate on the status of poor Brother Francis, out there in the rain with Brother Snail and Sister Slug… Those had been good days. Good days…
“So you’re happy here, lad?”
Warlock smiled. “Very.” He ducked his head. “Happier than at home.”
Crowley nodded. The lad’s parents had never been much use in the first place: that was why they’d been chosen to take the Antichrist, after all. But since the Apocalapse things had changed. He’d checked to make sure, nosy and sneaky serpent he was. Mr. Dowling had lost his diplomatic position and been shipped back to the States, but Mrs. Dowling had resisted, having grown used to England. She’d got a job with an advertising company, found a flat above a Tasty Chicken shop in Barking, and proceeded to twist her soon-to-be former husband’s arm off for additional support and alimony, including the cost of St. Dinnery’s. She would never know that Crowley had ensured she heard of the school, established in the early 1900s by the Dinnerian Brothers of Tumult, the brother order of the Chattering Nuns of St. Beryl.
It seemed that it had provided Young Warlock with a port in a storm—just as Crowley had hoped. Neither good nor evil, its association with the Brothers of Tumult having lapsed well before the end of WWII, it had seemed like the sort of place a boy might need coming off of the highs and lows of being both unaware Antichrist presumptive and son of an American diplomat.
“Why don’t you show me around,” she suggested, radiating the firm command of Miss Ashtoreth. She offered the boy her hand, and then pretended to pretend to feel slight affront when the boy refused, now too old to hold Nanny’s hand. The fact that she felt a real pang of regret was none of the boy’s business.
Adam Young’s hand had been warm and square, with all kinds of scabs and calluses, and less than perfectly manicured nails. He’d smelled faintly of fox terrier and mud and green grass and leaf mould. Young Warlock had smelled of expensive body washes, and fine wool and cotton. Of hot irons and cool, crisp lavender ironing water. Of toothpaste and shoe polish. Looking back Crowley could see he’d been a child over-tended and over-supervised, never free to run in the wild dells and groves of Hogsback Wood in Tadfield.
He now had the faint locker-room smell of a boarding-school boy who put off laundry as long as he could, and kept his manky PE uniform crammed into the bottom of his trunk in the dorms. His soap appeared to be plain Castile. His uni was poly-something blend. He had scabs on his bare knees, and a smudge of something quite nasty on his school tie. It was clear as Crowley followed him around the campus that he was happier than he had ever been, attended by a small but fond rabble of other first-form boys.
He was free. Crowley, more free himself, now, than he had ever been since the Fall, understood Warlock's happiness entirely.
Nanny Ashtoreth and the boys got on perfectly well. She was tart and rude and bossy and fond, and they were cheeky and puppy-like and willing to be fond in return, all of them pretending, rather like Crowley, to be too cool to live, and all of them, rather like Crowley, never quite bringing it off to eyes that knew how to see.
In this case, bright, cheerful blue eyes set over a massive overbite protruding like beaver’s teeth.
“Brother Francis!” The shout that went up from Warlock and his little pack of friends, as they rushed the man—no longer dressed in the smock and hat he’d worn as a gardener, but only slightly more fashionable in a huge, cream-colored Aran-knit fisherman’s jumper, baggy trousers, and canvas boat shoes, all topped with a mind-boggling white ship-captain’s cap. His accent was no less Panto West Country than ever.
“Nah, nah, lads, be off wi’ ye! All that yammerin’! Do na fash yourselves. Ah, look, I see, Young Witsunday—that sarpint I gae ye is thrivin’ in your pocket just fine. And what are ye’ feedin’ him?”
“Bugs and little pinkie mice,” said a skinny blond lad who appeared to be Warlock’s best friend, holding his pet snake up to be admired. “He’s grown three inches since you were here last, Brother Francis!”
Brother Francis reached out and tenderly took the twining, writhing serpent. “Aye, he’s doin’ well for ye. I can see you’re takin’ good care o’ he. As fine a grass snek as I’ve seen in a good decade!” He looked at Miss Ashtoreth, blue eyes glittering, and smiled, his huge horse teeth seeming to gleam. “I see th’ lass bain’t afraid o’ a sleekit snek, bain’t she?”
Crowley, caught between embarrassment to be caught out visiting their former ward; amusement that Aziraphale did, too; and blushing, heart-shaking insecurity that he was flirting with her, went prim, and said, “No, I bain—Er, No. I’m not.” She risked glittering smile of her own. “Snakes are cool.”
“Aye, tha’ they are, lass,” Brother Francis said, grinning mischievously. “But, then, you’d always a bit o the sarpint in ye, didn’t ye, lass?”
Crowley sniffed. “More than a little, as well you know.” Teasing her like that! Crowley was stunned--and, oh, damn. Tempted. Definitely tempted...
The ramparts of Eden seemed to rise up between them, where a gentle angel shielded a snaky demon from the rain.
“Brother Francis is sweet on Miss Ashtoreth,” one of the boys whispered to Warlock.
“He never!” retorted Warlock, still too young to see the appeal of the mushy stuff. “They’ve just known each other a long time.” To Warlock, the seven years he’d known the nanny and the gardener seemed like infinity…
“Well, maybe just a tad,” Brother Francis said, “If she baint too sassy, the Jezebel.” The tender sound of Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell whispered in his voice, rich with the settled affection that crusty man had these days for his not-so-wicked common-law wife.
“I’ll Jezebel you,” Crowley snapped, and blushed. He’d not yet dared “Jezebel” in the least. Especially not at Aziraphale.
This role playing was dangerous, he thought, as the other spirit grinned at him, made bold by his own camouflage. Earthy Brother Francis, at home in nature, a country man, was more daring than would be Principality Aziraphale. Miss Ashtoreth was less free to evade the implications, more proper than serpentine Crowley. She blushed, and havered, and took out a bag of peppermints and handed them around to avoid too much attention. She pretended not to notice Brother Francis’ rough fingers on her own, when he too took a peppermint, or the near-salacious sucking and tonguing that ensued.
“I still say he’s stuck on her,” the observant boy whispered. “And she’s stuck right back.”
“Nah, leave t’ lass alone,” Brother Francis cut in, with a kindly smile. He linked his arm through Miss Ashtoreth’s. “Near time for us to be goin’, I reckon. You’ll have games and then dinner time, right?”
“Right!” the boys shouted, and followed the two adults on a lazy walk back to the entry room and the sign-out sheet.
“Can you bring me a pet, too, Brother Francis? Next time you’re here?” Warlock looked enviously at his best friend, who was still playing with his serpent.
Pocket snake, Crowley thought, and tried not to break out into scandalous, filthy giggles. Aziraphale’s sense of humor was more coarse than Crowley had reckoned. Or, at least, Brother Francis’ was.
“Have him find ye’ a dormouse, laddie,” she said, amused, “Or better still, a tiggywinkle. They like the creepy crawlies and the pinkies, too. Your pets can eat together.”
“Practical lass,” Brother Francis said, approvingly—and embarrassed Crowley completely with a fond arm around her waist and a hearty squeeze. Then he signed out, and turned to give Warlock a hearty hug. “You know where to reach me, lad, if you need help?”
“Yes, sir, Brother Francis. Mr. A. Z. Fell’s bookstore, in Soho,” Warlock said, smiling. “I’ve got the phone number memorized and everything."
“That’s right. You need someone, you just call, lad.” He stepped back—not leaving, Crowley noted.
Crowley herself signed out, again using the twining, serpentine sigil—noting that Aziraphale had used a similarly occult solar flare, as wild and bright as his halo hair. He risked touching it with his finger, feeling the faint, faint echo of the fire of Creation itself—the itching warmth he’d felt from the Holy Water that had taken Ligur. Holiness…
And love.
His Angel.
He gathered his nerve and turned back to Warlock. “And me—you know how to reach me, lad?”
Warlock nodded, and quoted back a phone number for a very private phone in London. "Ask for Crowley,” he said. “’Tell ‘em Tony sent you.’” That second phrase he mimicked a South London tough—and grinned. “You do know the oddest people, Nanny A.”
“That I do,” Crowley said, and swept the boy up in a hug he himself had not expected to give.
They clung together.
“I miss you, Nanny A,” Warlock said, forlorn all of a sudden. “It’s all different, now.”
“I know, laddie, I know,” she murmured back in the boy’s ear.
She remembered young Adam—Adam Young. He and Aziraphale had held the boy’s hands, had stood at his side, had backed him to the very end of the Earth and beyond. But this was their real child. Their ward. The “wrong boy” they’d shared for seven years.
Brother Francis hovered close, a hand on the lad’s shoulders. “There, there, son. We’re wi’ ye’. Now and forever. You’re not alone, m’ boy. Not ever.”
The boy’s hands gripped deep into Nanny Ashtoreth’s trim, wasp-waisted jacket. “I love you,” he barely whispered, as his friends all pretended not to hear.
“We love you, too,” Crowley husked, heart on fire. “We’ll be back.”
“Good.” The boy drew back, then, hiding his snuffles and wiping his uni-jacketed arm over his eyes. He glanced at Brother Francis. “A hedgehog really would be nice, if you can. I don’t think they’d take a hedgehog away from me.”
Brother Francis gave a merry salute, and nodded. “Oh, aye. I’ll see if Sister Tiggywinkle has a promising youngster to send along to ye.”
And then somehow, in seconds, they’d all said their goodbyes, and the boys were gone, and Brother Francis and Miss Ashtoreth were walking down the long drive, a safe three feet apart—all that was proper between a boy’s nanny and the estate gardener.
“I didn’t know you stayed in touch,” Crowley said, gruffly.
“Nor I you,” said Aziraphale, morphing back to his ordinary form as they went around the bend of the drive and passed from sight. Then, softly, he said, “I’m glad you do. Poor lad.”
“He’s better off than he’d have been if he had been the Antichrist,” Crowley said, morphing into his own form and trying to regain his composure. But then, equally softly, he said, “Someone has to look after him.”
They walked together. Then, to Crowley’s surprise, Aziraphale’s elbow hooked his once again, and a voice almost as fond and merry as Brother Francis’ said, “And who better than his real parents to look after him, eh?”
They both remembered Adam Young, shouting at Satan himself that your real father was the one who was there for you. Warlock’s real parents—his birth parents—lived in a bubble of ignorant, otherwise-occupied obliviousness. But Aziraphale and Crowley had overseen his upbringing from birth until that final, terrifying birthday party, when the Hell Hound had failed to arrive.
Crowley smiled to himself, and failed entirely to recover his cool. Instead he squeezed his elbow close, pressing against Aziraphale’s. “I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather share him with,” he said.
Aziraphale smiled, and glanced back down the drive over his shoulder. “Nor I,” he said.
When they arrived at Crowley’s Bentley, Aziraphale accepted a ride, and they drove home together. Families are what you make of them.