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Chapter Text

Oh, you dark little grove!
Part your branches, give me a pathway.
Through the mist, and my bitter tears,
I cannot see the wide world.

- Sadko, Rimsky-Korsakov

September 1911

On the fifth day of this uneasy business, Pickering went to his club.

Indeed, let it not be said that the Colonel did not feel some sympathy toward his friend, but as Mrs. Pearce told him with no small amount of concern, the housemaids scarcely dared open the study pocket doors, let alone tidy in there, and she herself was now charged with the sweeping and straightening to be done, which would be so much easier if only Mr. Higgins would sleep in his own chambers rather than in a chair with his feet propped on the fender so close to the embers. He was always losing his slippers, and now he really would lose them, and more besides, if he were not mindful of himself. 

Perhaps the housekeeper harbored some secret hope that Pickering would be good enough to mention this to Higgins, that his influence would be enough to put her mind at ease. But there seemed little Pickering could say, few words he could offer to his friend, and the last thing to be done was to take over household responsibilities and give orders to the man’s servants. It was bad form, for one thing, and for another, it was hardly his place. 

At any rate, taking all of these things into consideration, Pickering began to wonder if it were perhaps better to allow the place some breathing room, as it were. To the very top of his list of personal attributes had long been affixed those of being a gentleman, a scholar, and loyal to King and Country, these three only beneath being a decent chap to his friends, particularly in times of great need. But even the most loyal fellow—even one as generous and collegially-spirited as Colonel Pickering—eventually wants relief from what had descended upon them all. 

And so: Colonel Pickering went out, intending to be gone only a few short hours, and returned the next midday to find his friend in the same general state where he had left him late the afternoon before: dressing gown, feet half in the fireplace, and all.

He asked Mrs. Pearce for a tea tray.

“I don’t think he’ll even look at it, sir, he only picks at them, and Cook is quite beside herself over it. She made a perfectly nice blancmange yesterday—you know how he loves them—with such a lovely shape right out of the mould, very beautiful.”

Pickering murmured his agreement that it must have been, and that furthermore Higgins would surely appreciate not only his favorite pudding, but a well-formed one at that. 

“I found it this morning where I’d set it for him, untouched and dried out.” She shook her head and sighed over the loss of it. 

This was indeed cause for additional concern, but Pickering rather thought he could use some tea, if only to fortify and shore himself up, and settled upon the sofa while Mrs. Pearce went to the kitchen. 

He would need a good bracing, he felt. 

Pickering had had a telegram from Eliza, dated four days prior, which he discovered upon arrival at his club. He could well guess that she had not wanted it to come to Wimpole Street where Higgins had of late taken to ripping into every piece of correspondence as though it contained a summons from the Royal Courts and then tossing it aside upon ascertaining who it was from. The telegram was nestled in the breast pocket of his jacket, and he was trying to decide whether to reveal its existence to Higgins. In it, Eliza apologized for leaving so abruptly without a proper goodbye, commented on how strange and new this telegram thing was, thanked him for his gentlemanly behavior toward her, and wished him all the well in the world. 

There was no mention of Higgins, or of how she had left him.

Eliza had quit the house entirely, as well as their joint venture, and clearly Higgins considered himself very hard done by the whole affair from beginning to end. Pickering conceded the man had a claim to it: six months of intensive education in order that the student should be lifted and bettered to a higher station in life would take its toll on any soul. 

Indeed, Pickering had seen it firsthand after coming through the door on that first day and finding Higgins sitting quite far forward on his favorite Queen Anne chair with a strange expression, as though he had had a great shock and only missed dropping to the floor because he’d hit it instead.

“Gone,” Pickering had said, “Gone where?”

“I’ve no idea,” had been the dazed-sounding answer. “She was here, and—and I thought—”

Higgins didn’t finish the sentence. 

“Well, is she coming back?”

After a long moment during which his friend gazed off into something only he could see, Pickering observed as Higgins slowly seemed to come back into himself, rather cautiously, his fingers flexing in stilted little jerks, fidgeting and finally picking at one another in an unconscious manner. It was a meaningless gesture, but somehow struck a chill into Pickering’s heart, and he could not say why. 

“I don’t know,” he had said at last, so softly that Pickering nearly asked him to repeat himself but for the expression on his face. 

And now this: the whole house holding its breath, waiting for something—for her to return, and to not be out when she did, although no one would say as much. 

On these matters, Pickering was dashed.

To be sure, it was very sad that their protege had been liberated onto her own recognizance, but young people will and do and must leave the places where they have learnt and grown, and go into the world beyond and make their own way. 

They had all grown used to her, after all, and the loss of her from the day-to-day routine would be understandably painful. 

The Colonel could easily picture Higgins raging and huffing and storming about for a day or two, all the while raining curses down upon dear Eliza for being so ungrateful, that he had turned her into a Duchess and now (Pickering imagined his friend would say) it was as though ‘he’d been running this house like some Italian pensione and she had the gall to think she could plunk down a few coins and have herself a lovely little misspent holiday before up and leaving without even a grazie’, etc. And perhaps in a week or two, Higgins would find some new folly, some new project to chase after and amuse himself with, perhaps a waitress he could turn into Bianca for the stage, and Eliza would fade into memory and become a charming anecdote at parties: Did I ever tell you of the time I turned a flower girl from Lisson Grove into Hungarian royalty?

But Higgins was so silent and idle, spending hours in the study with unread newspaper spread across his lap, and this above all else gave Pickering great pause as to the missive currently smoldering and trying to catch fire inside his pocket. 

Perhaps it had been all the hours they had spent together, all the long nights and rows that he’d had to step in and conciliate—perhaps it was the the length and intensity of the investment that had the man so low like this. Pickering reflected. Higgins had taught others, he’d said as much: American millionaires, yes, and the daughters of American millionaires who had set their caps at the English peerage for a title. 

This was surely no different, as girls from Boston and Baltimore alike, whose fathers who had fortunes in wheat and steel, could gargle the English language just as poorly as a dustman’s daughter and still come out the other side speaking and behaving like the Duchesses and Countesses they were slated to become. Did they in their turn necessitate a week’s mourning as well?

Unlikely, but perhaps, Pickering thought, this was just his way. The Colonel had only lived in this house for six months, after all, and how could he know?, and it occurred to him that Higgins did enjoy his little eccentricities. 

Yes, perhaps it was just his way, and the natural depression that comes about as a result of a great and exciting endeavor forming its conclusion, leaving one knocking about at loose ends and wondering what is to be done next, especially while not being able to enjoy the fruits of said hard labor. 

Still, though. Higgins—though he delighted and indulged in his own curious mannerisms—by all his words and deeds was not a melancholy sort given to deep and silent contemplation. That was the sticking point of it. Pickering had often thought of the younger man as something of a child: apt to pursue his singular fancies without regard for their outcome; thoughtless, without heed to the finer feelings and dignities of others, or indeed of himself; but devoid of hatred, and so generally affable and able to turn a situation or an argument about that one could scarcely stay angry with him for very long. 

But the strange mood of grief had persisted, and his habits had undergone a transformation—or perhaps it was better called a devolution. No one had rang to inquire about lessons, and Pickering suspected that only one person knew where the appointment book was. 

There were times during those four days that Pickering had glanced up at Higgins and had a shadow, or perhaps a germ, of a thought. But his was an old-fashioned sensibility, and the idea never coalesced into something that could be articulated or even discreetly inquired upon, and eventually, deprived of nutrients and unable to fruit and produce, it sank back into the recesses of the Colonel’s mind, where it eventually was forgotten entirely. 

Difficult as it was for him to lie about the note, even by omission, he rather thought it a mercy that Higgins not hear that she had cut him completely from her thoughts, and perhaps better entirely for him to hear nothing at all about Eliza. 

For his own part, Higgins had not noticed Pickering’s return to the house, or even his departure the day before. 

And when Pickering spoke to him now, he stirred and looked over at the man on the settee.

“What?”

“I said, I say, old man, you ought to get out of the house, you know. You can’t stay here forever.”

Higgins was not in the least persuaded by this feeble coaxing, thinking that he bloody well could stay at home forever if he wanted to—forever and forever, that he could bloody well do anything he liked, including using that phrase itself, though it no longer seemed to fit properly inside his mouth—and returned to his former occupation, which for the past several days had been sitting perfectly still, pressing one arm across his middle as though he had a deep slicing wound etched there. He felt as though he had been drawn but not quartered, the job left only half done, and his vital organs poised at any moment to spill out of him and onto the rug. 

He was in a bad way, with headaches and insomnia as he had never suffered through before. His muscles ached from being held tense, and when he moved, they complained of having sat in disuse for so long. His stomach protested if he did not eat, and even worse if he did. He was in a permanent state of falling ill, he was fated to be forever on the verge of developing a sore throat that never quite came.

Small wonder, then, that he’d awoken the day before—or perhaps the day before that—to find the street lamps shining through the windows, and wondered why there was no noise from the servants with the supper things. The clock on the mantel claimed that it was half past three in the morning, which meant he’d slept through an entire day and a night besides. 

And then he’d been unable to go back to sleep, which was the worst of it all. 

God, he was sick and tired. Sick and tired of being sick and tired, and sick and tired of everything. He wanted to be alone, and the thought made his stomach hollow and overly bilious in the same instant. 

Pickering was speaking again, and Higgins forced himself to surface once more.

“—surely that would cheer you up a bit.”

He must have been staring stupidly at his friend, and lucky Pickering was such a generous sort, because he repeated himself, enunciating clearly, patiently, and loudly as though to an invalid:

“I bought two tickets to a Gilbert and Sullivan review tonight. Rouse yourself and dress, we’ll go and then have a jaw over some late supper.”

“I’m not going deaf,” Higgins muttered darkly in reply.

Pickering either graciously ignored this or hadn’t heard.

Normally Gilbert and Sullivan was Higgins’ favorite way to pass an evening at the theatre—there was nothing better than comic opera, with its little satirical jabs, clever word play, and exquisite rapid-fire patter that, when done well, were perfect examples of how the English language could achieve its true potential for elocution and pronunciation. Sometimes he wished there were better recordings of the D’Oyly Carte Company, for he could make good use of them in the study and have some enjoyment out of it besides if he could make his students repeat his favorite songs back to him. The possibility had always amused him. 

As Higgins was mulling this over, Pickering rose and actually managed to exact a firm tone of voice brooking little room for argument.

“Higgins, you of all people must surely agree that it can’t be as bad as this. You’ve had other students who’ve left your tutelage and gone on to great success. The thing now is to be proud of what we have accomplished, and set your sights on future endeavors.”

He eyed the older man. Pickering had his version of the story, just as each of the players did. There was little use in recounting it fully in order to flesh out the narrative. The idea of returning to the scene, of giving a statement, of being interrogated, made him cringe, and very much want to melt all his wax cylinders in the fireplace. He was not a man easily embarrassed by social foibles, but there was something about it—something dark in the corner, as though if he were to go back there and blindly grope about, he would find something he had not known and would wish he could un-know altogether. 

“True,” he said at last. “Just so.”

They left it at that.

There was no joy in it. 

It did not ease his mind, or bring him any relief.

Instead, Higgins found himself wondering why he had ever thought he liked Gilbert and Sullivan. 

Was it the shallow conceits that had deluded him all this time? An orphan boy, adopted by a crew of pirates. Complete lunacy. An emperor’s idiot son wandering about pretending to be a blasted minstrel so that he might avoid a woman. What utter rot. Or perhaps it was the insipid plot lines that had gripped his attention, which focused overwhelmingly on romance, always romance between a bloodless swain and a beauty, who were youthful, pretty, and therefore automatically deserving of each other? They overcame ludicrous odds and villains trying to tear them apart, yet always seemed to conveniently wind up with each other whether it made sense or not. So many romantic outcomes seemed pulled from some dusty shelf where they were kept to be deployed at a moment’s notice without regard to logic or proper character development. 

He considered himself lucky that the highlights didn’t include the ending of The Yeoman of the Guard, where the jester Jack Point fell at the feet of his beloved Elsie, who throughout the course of the play had seen her chance for a more interesting life and shifted her affections from him to the handsome Fairfax. And then it turned out that Jack hadn’t merely prostrated himself before her to beg her to stay with him, or fallen insensate at the betrayal, but had dropped dead outright from the loss and heartbreak. 

Higgins massaged his ribcage and winced. He was probably developing an ulcer from all this. 

“For God’s sake, if the one on the right doesn’t wake up, she’ll be a whole measure behind,” he hissed, annoyed both at the pain in his middle and the singer currently mangling Pitti-Sing’s part in this godforsaken rendition of “Three little maids from school.” She had missed her first cue, clearly hadn’t warmed up her zygomaticus properly, and was not lively and crisp the way the role demanded. The girl was young, she had potential, she ought to make use of it and be glad. Instead, she seemed to be struggling as though wading through molasses. 

He groaned when she came to the line Three little maids is the total sum and couldn’t turn it back around into the first line of the refrain in enough time to smoothly join the other two. 

Someone in the audience nearby shushed him. 

Pickering coughed and fidgeted in his seat, which Higgins ignored.

“When I was a lad” passed without much to recommend it, although he rolled his eyes and muttered at how Sir Joseph slurred his way up the ranks of Her Majesty’s Navy. To this, someone cried in a hushed voice from a couple of rows back, “Do be quiet, sir!” which Higgins found far more impertinent than his own response, especially given that he was proving himself unwilling, as an audience member, to accept such low regard by the singers for the source material. When he whipped his head round to see who it was, several faces wore pursed mouths, but wouldn’t meet his eye. 

The company also managed to pull themselves together enough not to ruin “Dance a cachucha, fandango, bolero,” but when it came time to swing back round to The Mikado, Higgins could not stop a long sigh from escaping him when the young man assigned to stumble and pitch his way through the role of Nanki-Poo started in on “The flowers that bloom in the spring.”

Someone tapped him on the shoulder. Higgins would not turn around this time purely on principle. He hadn’t even said anything, it certainly wasn’t as though he were in church correcting the vicar’s pronunciation of Zaphnathpaaneah. 

Which he had done once, and which had been terribly entertaining, come to think of it. Too bad his own brother, who was a clergyman, had always spoken with perfect pronunciation no matter how obscure the name, well past the point of tiresome priggishness—Higgins had always wanted to see the look on James’s face behind his high and mighty lectern while being corrected. God, what a farce that would be. 

“Do have a care, Higgins,” Pickering murmured next to him entreatingly. His tone was not one of condemnation, but the old man was staring straight ahead, looking exceedingly stiff and unwilling even to look at his theatre companion. Right. Pickering couldn’t even be on his side in this matter. Higgins finally leaned back into his seat, crossed his arms over himself, and tried to call up some memory of a perfect set of vowels pronounced in full on an endless loop. 

At last the boy on stage had finished his little folderol performance that was better meant for his aging spinster aunts at Christmas and they had all been given a reprieve of the interminable evening, until the audience began cheering and calling out. One of the singers had returned downstage, and the violins were plucking the opening strains to the “List song,” which only increased the audience’s excitement. It was a patter piece, well-known for being quick and clever, the Lord High Executioner listing off all the types of people he’d personally send to the gallows without much concern from the public. A fine notion, really. There was the standard version as written, of course, but some companies would replace the lyrics to reflect current events, which was vastly more interesting. 

As someday it may happen that a victim must be found
I’ve got a little list—I’ve got a little list!
Of society offenders who might well be underground
And who never would be missed—who never would be missed!

The singer started off well, giving a few salient, if rather overly kind, remarks to the recent coronation earlier in the summer, and dipping in much sharper wit about local politics, which got him the general approval of the audience. There was enough amusement to the point of applause and a few cheers when he said that also on his list, he had

All complainers of the tardiness of airmail post ser-vice

—though Higgins thought it a bad show to let the company get away with a rhyme as half-cooked as that one.

But as he got close to the end, the singer looked out over the crowd, shaded his eyes against the footlights with one hand, and in addition to suffragettes who simply must persist, he’d include

Pedantic bores, who smugly correct your singing then insist:
They’d none of them be missed—oh, no, he’d not be missed!

And pointed right at Higgins. 

“Take it for what it was, old man: a joke meant to amuse for an evening, and nothing more,” said Pickering genially in the taxi after they left. “They won’t remember it by morning, I’m sure.”

Higgins sunk into the seat of the cab hoping that no one saw him as their driver crawled through the mobs on the street. 

That line had gotten the biggest reaction, gales of laughing and cheering from the whole hall, to the point that the next set of lyrics were lost entirely. He was fairly sure that his and Pickering’s quick exit from the theatre had been accompanied by more stares and snickers than were really necessary, and he’d overheard someone saying the singer had “rightly told off some fool in the stalls,” to which Higgins had practically broken into a run for the front of the queue, leaving a gasping and breathless Pickering to catch up. 

Pickering did not commend himself well to the act of reassuring his friend. Instead, he was very irritatingly in high spirits, and had been chuckling to himself as he remembered random snatches of other lyrics, like some secret joke.

And although Higgins prided himself on getting a rise out of people who were too stuffed full of their own importance, he was still a human with a soul, and one who had had a rather trying several days. It was with this in mind that he gave himself leave to feel even worse than he did already. 

“I think I shall beg off supper,” he told Pickering. “I wouldn’t be much good company, and anyway I think I’m coming down with something.” 

If Pickering thought this strange or concerning, he did not allow it to show. Instead, the driver stopped for him at the Carlton, and continued on to Marylebone. 

It was not until he unlocked his own front door and came through the darkened foyer that he realized all the staff had gone to bed, and he was alone. Not intending to remain in this troublesome state for long, Higgins laid his overcoat on the bannister, located his dressing gown over the back of a chair, and went into the kitchen to try to recall on how earth the stove worked so that he might have some tea, which was the only thing that seemed like doing at the moment. 

He leaned against the counter, chin in one hand and watching the kettle, still rocking slightly from how he’d set it down over the flame. He wondered where his pipe was—probably near at hand, but it was no great emergency, and the question left his mind almost as soon as it had come into it. 

It didn’t matter. 

The house was so still at this hour that he could hear a clock ticking somewhere, and half-fancied that if he listened hard enough, Higgins could hear his own blood flowing through his veins. The water began to hiss, but it was still a good many minutes away from whistling, and he was alone still.

It had all been wrong. 

Higgins shut his eyes and swallowed, waited for it to come crashing over him, but it didn’t, not quite yet. 

Perhaps this time the waters would rise slowly, little experimental ripples over his feet at first, then boldly lapping at his ankles and knees, and pretty soon he would be pulled out suddenly with a jerk, a riptide taking hold to deposit him out at sea, all alone, with no land in sight. 

(Merciless, it came late and all at once, and more the pity, for he was curious—in a sick-minded yet calm fashion—to experience the slow creeping onset. At least it would be a change.)

It had all been wrong, and he had done it anyway. 

He had been un-Christian with his charity. Probably too harsh with the everlasting soul of another. Blind to his own weaknesses. And now he was alone, watching the kettle neck bead over with condensation and begin to steam. 

The worst of his punishment by far was to hold a perfectly-preserved recording of that last moment in his mind, a wax cylinder that would turn itself on to replay snippets of it at him, all of its own volition. He spent his time waiting for it to come round again, almost as much as he waited for the sensation of the waters readying themselves to drown him anew with some other memory. 

Some other person with a voice something like his own, a short sharp shock. 

Himself, whispering. Where the devil are—

It was as though he had been outside of his own body in that moment, watching himself make the final mistake and unable to stop it, unable to clap his hands over his own mouth. The only remedy left was his present self, fumbling invisibly at his old throat, trying to choke it and hold it back before he could say it, but his hands couldn't reach through his mind's recording, instead slipping, a ghost through a ghost. All he could do was listen to himself, and listen to himself listening to himself, and know that his failure was predestined, done and dusted, and all of it a comical farce.

Always more observer than doer. 

He had awoken too late. Higgins watched the steam pour out in greater clouds. He had awoken too late and found the street lamps on at the wrong time. He had awoken too late, and now he was on the other side of a door that shouldn’t have closed, wondering how on earth he’d been so readily abandoned—no, left behind. Abandoned was too strong an intention, so active, so… premeditated. 

But perhaps—

He let it lie. 

He never would be missed, I’m sure he’ll not be missed. 

People who deserved the chopping block, whom society would well think deserved it, and would wash their hands of. There had been an idea drifting in and out of his mind, but he could hardly give it any value—he had always thought himself diffident, yet not without a good wit and sense of humor. 

But now it had occurred to him, and now that it had, he kept returning to it, looking at it as he would a foreign object whose purpose he could not discern. 

Were all the unorthodox characteristics about himself that he had carefully cultivated since childhood a set of charming traits that would alert the ruling class to their own hypocrisies, to the injustice of determining whether a person was worthy based on a cosmic gamble?

Or were they simply gaping flaws in a corrupt personality?

There was no accounting for it, for there was no one in the house to tell him plainly, and the person who had deigned to speak on the subject was gone, and he would never see her again, if her inscrutable last act were anything to go by. 

Her hand upon his face, yes, and with it, understanding above all else, but also: her strides out of the room and out of the house and out of everything. 

They were not of the same mind, would never be, playing different games, following separate narratives, stage directions that did not match. 

The kettle was finally screaming at him. Higgins let it run for a long time, well past necessity, until he thought he heard footsteps on a floor high above, and cut the flame. 

He looked at it there on the stove, still steaming and whistling a little, waiting for him. 

Had she actually been there at all? Perhaps he was losing his mind. 

For a long time, he stared at the kettle, hands numb at his sides. 

And then without even opening the tea caddy or fetching one of the pots, Higgins turned out the kitchen light and went upstairs to bed. 

Chapter Text

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

- Inferno, Canto I, Dante Alighieri

Sunday lunch with his mother occurred as usual, as though it were a law of the universe, not to be contradicted by anything. Higgins did not question it, and indeed, his mother did not ring him up to insist that he come or not. He simply did, as he had always done, and she received him in her drawing room with proffered cheek, as always, and mention of cold sandwiches.

Sitting inside the conservatory, Higgins held a spoonful of hot broth balanced on the edge of his soup bowl.

He had been considering what to do with his time now that—now that there wasn’t anything else to be done. There was always the expansion of the Universal Alphabet, and certainly his aspiration of recording every accent to be found within the boundaries of the Empire was the peak to be summited. But every time he held up a task in his mind and turned it for examination, it felt too heavy, or lacking in lustre, and he would put it aside, only to find himself still sitting at his desk, or in the wing chair, hours later and well past sundown.

“Henry, dear, I do wish you would stop sulking, it casts a pall and is bad for digestion,” his mother said.

“My digestion is fine,” he replied.

“I meant mine,” was the answer he got. He could tell from the low register of her voice that she’d set him up for it, had been waiting to pull it out of a drawer and apply a coat of placidity, the hallmark of her kind of sardonic humor.

I’m not sulking, he wanted to insist, but in itself it was too much protestation, something a small child would shout as he stamped his feet, and she would use that very fact to prove that he was sulking. And as he could not marshal his faculties to plan a response to her response, Higgins did not bother with any of it.

“Lord and Lady Boxington had their country shooting party.” Mrs. Higgins played her opening salvo in the officious way that she used for describing events she wished her son would attend, like a decent and normal person. Too many invitations turned down and one day they’d stop altogether. She’d said it a hundred times, a thousand times.

A day without directing Mrs. Pearce to say no to the invitations—one could only dream.

Higgins looked down. His spoon was still balanced on the edge of the bowl.

“Did you go?”

“Of course I went,” she replied, playing at sounding surprised that he would even ask; she went every year, if only to observe the proceedings, for she did not ride or shoot at her age. “Some very lovely young people there, too.” This she said rather archly, but if Mrs. Higgins were insinuating something, it was lost on her son.

“How interesting.”

A long pause caused him to look up. She was gazing at him shrewdly, and Higgins replayed his response in his mind. Something about his tone had been too… complacent, or too sarcastic, or too…

“If you don’t wish to be here, you are certainly welcome to take your leave,” she said in her best imitation of an honest voice, and he knew instantly. Bored. He’d sounded bored. Dismissal from his mother’s presence was an option she only floated when he was too far out from shore for her cast line. He could go the usual route of reassuring her that of course he would stay, darling, and then—and then he’d come up with some outrageous or sardonic remark, and they’d be on their usual back-and-forth.

But he couldn’t muster it, just kept staring into the clear broth. He was very much on the verge of his lip wrinkling into a sneer, could feel it flickering, and not because the food tasted bad—as a matter of fact, he wasn’t entirely sure he’d eaten any of it.

“You haven’t eaten a thing,” his mother went on.

No, it was this awful business of being ordinary and tiresome, of having been dragged down below himself, that had suddenly disgusted him. When was this going to end so that he could go back to whatever he’d been doing before? He wanted to be free of it, he wanted very much to not be doing this, any of it, it was antithetical to all that he comprised. There had to be a way out.

Higgins finally lifted the spoon and tasted the soup. A general suggestion of prawn.

By subtle sign, his mother indicated that she was finished with this course, and the footman attending them came over to relieve her son of the still-full dish.

“George,” murmured Mrs. Higgins, and the footman removed the plates and himself from the conservatory without serving the next course.

His mother dabbed her napkin at her mouth, and then looked at him, straight on and without palliation.

Placing both hands into his lap very casually, Higgins took some of the fine hairs on the back of his wrist into the finger and thumb of his other hand and pulled. It was an old trick, one that caused a sharp and high-pitched sensation. From it came a clear sense of focus, free of distraction, and it allowed him to observe distantly, as though he were looking through the wrong end of a telescope.

How neatly one could reduce a world of mystifying conflicts and irrationalities down to its most observable and calculable. When he was a child, summoned before her for a scolding about some ill behavior, he’d once palmed one of his mother’s creweling needles and tried pressing it into the flesh of his thumb behind his back, but had overshot his mark and wound up with blood all over the rug and a visit from the surgeon, for it had gone through one side and come out the other.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Henry,” his mother began, and he tugged again, keeping his face neutral, his best defense lest she be rewarded for the way her eyes swept back and forth over him. “But perhaps you ought to take this whole episode as instructive.”

Higgins waited and twisted, and she went on.

“You’ve never suffered from disappointment or had to learn to cope with it, you know—the path has always been cleared and smoothed ahead of you, even after your father died.” Mrs. Higgins fidgeted slightly in her chair. “But you are at a stage in life where you must know something of it, even in the smallest way. How one can reach your age without the sadness of wisdom is beyond belief.” His mother leaned back and looked him over.

“I have always done my best to search for the good in your rather exceptional ways. But all this capering about, toying with a person’s life—little wonder it should bring you no end of grief. I won’t tell you that it was immoral; that is something for you to determine.” She paused, swept her gaze over the fancy hothouse palms growing along the glass wall, and back toward him in a wide arc. “You did show surprising patience and diligence—Heaven knows it granted you very little in the first place—and I applaud you that much.”

But—Higgins thought.

“But if you are going to behave like this from now on, I shall have to insist upon concluding these Sunday luncheons that I might be allowed some other social engagement, for I cannot condone or even tolerate all this brooding over something you brought upon yourself.”

Higgins kept his face very still.

“Well?” Mrs. Higgins demanded.

He looked down at the tablecloth, opened his mouth, then closed it again.

“I’m sure my advice isn’t worth a pittance against such genius as yours,” she continued, and it was the sarcasm that always stung more than his wrist. “But I ask you to consider: seek some other outlet for this… hobby, or profession, or whatever you call it. Working from a bet,” she said it with prim disgust, as though the word itself was filthy and currently threatening to crawl beneath her skirts, “Honestly, Henry.”

There was a pause, during which he attempted to find something to say that could convey the right idea.

“I don’t know what to do with myself,” he said at last, in a desperation that he muted as best he could, for they had already been round this Cape, he had already heard that he must learn to do without, and that had not helped him at all. No one would tell him what, precisely, he was supposed to do, what specific tasks must be completed. How was it even conceivable to take action against absence, against a void?

“That is exactly what I have been saying,” Mrs. Higgins continued, as though she had not heard him. “Find an alternate avenue. Make yourself useful in the day-to-day. If you had been a banker, or a solicitor, there would be no room for any of this. Seek a way to occupy yourself, and let your mind be satisfied, for that is what it really wants.” His mother tilted her head to the side. “This sullenness does you no good, you are far too clever.”

He realized slowly then that she was only talking about the day-to-day of his life. His mother knew he was troubled by what had transpired the last time he’d been here; the chilly repartee, the threats and ultimatums, the dignified turn and grand exit. And yet she spared all her words over it. Of course: he could have anticipated no less, and should have known better than to have wasted energy longing for something new.

But for once that his own mother might risk the harder of two paths, might eschew taking refuge in sarcasm or cutting him straight to the quick—that he might be granted a small handful of authentic and soft words. Always cynicism masquerading as wit. Anything true or sensitive would wither and die in the exacting sharpness of this bright room, of his mother’s hard shine.

“I know you don’t like it when I bring this up,” Mrs. Higgins said.

And he didn’t, for he well knew what came next. “But I shall: you ought to get married.” She took a sip of claret, words gentle and appealing, but her eyes scalding with knowledge. “That will be a useful step in a better direction as well.”

Charles, James, and Vicky all alike were married, with children in a wide selection of ages to choose among for her amusement, and yet it never failed that his mother should behave as though she had not a single grandchild to speak of. Higgins had long thought it an agreeable and auspicious thing that he’d been born last, for there would be no real expectations, and he could do as he liked, which he always had.

“Someone your age, someone—”

She went on to describe at least six or seven women of her acquaintance, only a few of them widows, and how handsome they were, how this late season of life was a calm time for a woman, making her less prone to emotional outbursts or excitability, which would suit him perfectly well. And separate lives were practically de rigeur after forty-five. He managed to avoid pinching the headache at the bridge of his nose. Forty was still two years away—he was hardly some elderly shut-in, and he’d not done half the things he had set out for himself, which certainly meant that having a wife underfoot who wanted his attention would only derail him, for he could not be expected to divide himself—

“You have only to say what it is you want, after all,” his mother concluded, her voice firm.

The pain that burst in sparkling jolts up his arm and into his jaw had ceased to be of any use, and giving it up for lost, he turned his head to look over the plants along the far side of the conservatory wall.

What he wanted, Higgins thought. What he wanted was to switch all this off. To go back to being himself, back to owning his life outright, to no longer be a landlord to an unwanted and unpaying tenant making so much noise in the upper attics of his mind. What he wanted was for someone to steer him through, a pilot, someone who would join and guide him through this strange and unwelcome episode. Pass through, make it out the other side, and then they two could part forever.

His mother had always been there, but she was no Virgil.

She was not enough for it, he realized with an unpleasant start. She had no sense of the way.

The sadness that came with that thought he tried to brush aside, only to have it replaced by the fact that a mother was a mother, and one couldn’t repudiate her altogether.

She was what he had, and that was the fact of it.

After making vague promises to consider what she had said—and both of them knew it for a lie, though his mother was, as always, gracious enough to keep her expression fit to the high standards of her own dignity—Higgins took his leave of her and went out into the fading afternoon light. He’d gotten nearly two streets over before he realized he was heading in the direction of Covent Garden rather unconsciously.

Wimpole Street was to the north, and though he felt up for a good walk to clear his mind, the only place nearby was Hyde Park, and he had much rather avoid the place if it could be managed, for Sundays were always crowded and filled with the fashionable set.

Anyone could be there, and everyone usually was.

There was St. James’s, and he could easily avoid Piccadilly—the Sunday matinees probably hadn’t let out yet, and the outermost traffic would not be so bad. Higgins set off in that general direction.

The difficult thing of it was that he seemed unable to set his mind on anything with his customary enthusiasm, which was highly unusual and not a position he often found himself in. He’d always committed the act of study with such single-minded pursuit, dedicating and throwing himself violently into the things that animated and interested him. But everything felt a chore, flat and drab, with no… something. Verve, perhaps. The right word was at the edge of his mind, but he kept losing it.

He walked on, jingling the change in his pocket.

If he were being completely honest (and he liked to think of himself as the sort of man unencumbered by the need to constantly paper over his own opinions or falsely flatter others to cope with the daily business of life), the last six months had been an interesting test of technique, and little more. At the very least, Higgins conceded, he now knew that his scientific methods could be rearranged to accommodate variations in progress, that a subject’s motivating drive (such as a high-value treat like chocolates) had its limits, and that he ought to restrict himself to an office schedule rather than devote himself mind and body to a lesson that might last until three in the morning.

Higgins looked about, somewhat surprised to discover that he had gotten all the way to Embankment. He found an empty bench to settle upon—there were just enough people strolling beside the river this time of day that he could hear several seconds’ worth of conversation, just enough, but not too much. He had not gone out in nearly a week, and did not remove the notebook and pencil that were always in his overcoat pocket.

Sacrosanct. Inviolable. Soon, he promised himself, but not yet.

Two men in bowler hats with walking sticks passed him, and he let their (Yorkshire) voices exist independent of analysis.

One young lady with her arms crossed over her middle came stamping by, her boots clomping against the cobblestone surface in an angry march. She wore a hand-knitted shawl and was very dirty, but did not speak, for which he was immensely glad. It would have made this headache even worse, after all, and then there would be that to contend with, in addition to everything else.

A squadron of young men lingered on the upper portions of the sidewalk behind him, smoking cigarettes and speaking in low voices from Brixton—Higgins did not go deeper into the map, he made himself stop there—about movement at the docks later. Criminals plotting in the shadow of Westminster, apparently. He opened his eyes to see a bobby strolling closer. The men sensed the approach of the law, and dispersed.

More people came through, from both directions. The matinees let out, and more matinees let out, and the clock chimes grew longer until the lights flooded the Houses of Parliament.

Shadows cast over the waters gave the Thames a dark blue and then a brown and black appearance. The lamps at the river’s edge stuttered and slowly glowed into being, setting off flashing licks over the thick greasy roils below. A woman whose face he could not see but whose dress appeared in the half-light to be a riotous clash of black and white stripes tilting at odd angles strolled up to the barrier overlooking the water and leaned forward to gaze down. When she left at last, Higgins sat for a very long time, alone. It was only when the chill rolled a fog in over the waters that he rose and made his way to the top of the street.

How quickly the summer had faded into crisp and dark autumn.

Only a month ago they’d been at Brighton, decamped to the Grand Hotel in an effort—bankrolled by Pickering—to cheer her up after the incident at Ascot. The Colonel had been so generous as to get one of the larger suites in the tower with a sea-view, and managed it even at the high season, though he’d spent a good deal of the holiday at some regiment reunion, only joining them for supper and some theatre.

In the heat of the daytime, Higgins had settled at the desk in the suite’s sitting room and began applying himself to transcribing several conversations he had recorded in shorthand while they’d strolled along the Pier the night before, Pickering arm-in-arm ahead with her.

And while he’d done that, she rose from the settee, paced up and down the length of the room, sat down again, and then repeated the process. Several times.

Finally Higgins said, without stopping his writing, that if she must do that, perhaps they ought to go outside, for at least then he would be able to collect more conversational samples, and she would save so much wear to the rug.

She was silent at that, and he finally looked up to find her expression rather cross, but upon questioning she insisted there was nothing wrong and no reason to go out in public, which he knew to be a falsehood, for every time she crossed the room, the activity on the street below the balcony window was of great interest to her.

So he took the two of them to see the Pavilion, and all the while she glanced around them as though every member of the peerage who’d been at the races that day would come bounding up and point at her like some curiosity in a museum (which was hardly possible, as Higgins knew nobody whose name was in Burke’s had ever extended a single finger at any moment in their life). The long walk to the Pavilion Gardens finally winded and calmed her a bit, though, tempering the furtive and sinister look she’d inadvertently adopted in her attempts to go unnoticed. As they came up over an incline and the grand pleasure palace revealed itself to them at last, she remarked in her old way that it was, in fact, awfully lovely.

Or—no.

Higgins paused beneath a lamppost in the fog, rearranged his muffler, and tried to remember how she’d phrased it.

Something in awed tones about how the saints and Jaysus couldn’ta made a better stack of bricks with them own blessed ‘ands. He’d written it down in a different notebook, which was now in some desk drawer.

Anyway, that fascinating piece of dialect had clawed its way out of her in one last desperate gasping attempt at resurrection, and she’d clapped both gloved hands over her mouth and looked at him in horror, as though he was about to shoot her for high crimes and misdemeanors. And perhaps he would have, if it had been a month previous, but as it was, he only laughed and said,

“I suppose the old king might find it in himself to take that as a compliment, were he still among us.”

Gazing at the building and all its minaret-like spires and onion domes with a gloomy expression, she replied that it seemed fit far more for the eyes of a king than any old commoner. Sensing that she was feeling her failure at the races very keenly, Higgins took her arm and told her—

“The Earth has been granted to all of us, and we may all look at anything we please, king or not. Your eyes are no better than old George’s were, and the same is true equally when it is switched round. Though you are younger, I suppose, and may have better eyesight than he did.”

This did not have its intended effect of reassurance, and Higgins sighed and went on to say that she must not take the result of a few tentative steps quite so hard, for there was a recognized and in fact observable gulf between theory and praxis, and as they were getting into the advanced stages of this experiment, she really need only add to her present course of study the act of now thinking in the proper English linguistic terms rather than merely parroting them—

She interrupted to gently ask whether he thought any of this would actually work. Higgins was a bit stunned by the question, and indicated so.

“That is entirely up to you,” he told her. “Whether you work hard enough, and etch it all onto your own soul to ensure its permanence.” They passed a small group of gentlemen and ladies, and her eyes tracked past him to follow them. “My advice is that you don’t allow yourself to forget the initial feeling of success. Allow that triumph to bear you up and lift you higher.”

Her eyes flicked back to him and stayed there.

They had danced about the study that night, that morning, spinning, half-mad with exhaustion, giddy in the sure and certain knowledge that it was possible, and not only that, but the thing was achieved, and all three of them had borne witness to it. No collective fever dream, no fluke, it was real, and now was the moment when it would all come together more rapidly.

As they continued strolling, she mused that that had been the night—that was when all their efforts had felt worthwhile, had been of the greatest satisfaction to her.

“You must take care, though, that you enjoy the act of learning itself as much as you do the victory,” he made sure to note, for there were certainly enough people in the world who celebrated themselves for the smallest bit of progress, who settled down among laurels and never got up again to finish the journey.

To wit: Karpathy. Or Nepommuck. Or however he was styling himself. Liar.

Higgins frowned at the errant thought, and continued up the street past unlit houses.

Later in the afternoon, they ventured closer to the beach, and he bought them both a lemon ice. She paused at the glass window of a shop selling souvenirs, and insisted against his better judgment that they go inside, for she wanted a paper fan with a scene of the Pier, that she might remember Brighton.

“Half the bins in this town are filled with those things, they are designed to develop holes as soon as you open them,” he warned her, but she disappeared inside anyway, leaving him to follow.

She looked over everything, running her fingertips across the usual: tea sets, cow-shaped creamers, painted spoons, picture postcards, and even an amulet with a photograph of the King and Queen to commemorate the recent coronation. Higgins left her to it, and went to leaf through a rack of photographs showing the Clock Tower that was near the shop’s proprietor, who was having a bit of dialogue with someone who was almost certainly from Ramsgate, in Kent. Why the devil someone from another seaside resort should come all the way—

He stopped spinning the rack and listening, and looked down at the wooden box laid open on the counter before him. Higgins plucked one of the items free and went over to her with it cupped in his palm, nearly tripping over a cast-iron elephant’s leg filled with lace parasols along the way.

“There, you should have that. It will last far longer, and suit you better than one of those cheap trinkets,” he said. “A Duchess, not a flower girl, remember.” She took it from his hand, removed one glove, and slid the little gold ring onto one of her fingers.

“Oh, no,” said Higgins, chuckling, “Not your fourth finger, you aren’t a married woman,” and took her hand to gently wiggle it free and replace it onto her middle, where it fit better. She held up her hand to inspect it, and seemed to find it acceptable, although she hesitated.

“Dear me, now what?”

Well, she wanted to know what it cost.

He bought her the ring, and the fan besides, for she wanted it badly enough not to budge, and they nearly quarreled right there in the shop over whether Higgins should buy the ring and the fan, or if she should be made to bear the burden of spending her allowance on a souvenir for herself. But Higgins insisted that he had promised her food and taxis and chocolates and money, and would not be made a liar, she would have it all, to which she gave a very odd quirk of a smile and raised her eyebrows at the same time, to which he replied,

“What!”

—and she would not give him an answer, no matter what he said.

She lost the fan the very same evening, but wore the ring every day after, as if to prove a point.

Until she presented it to him ever so archly, so that he could chuck it straight into the fireplace. Higgins stopped his perambulations and wondered, for a moment, whether she had plucked it out of the ashes.

The servants would have long since cleaned it up, he thought, and eased his grip on the notion.

Looking up, Higgins found himself on his own front step, but before he could get the key turned in the lock, the door flung back suddenly, and there was Mrs. Pearce in a wrapper and curlers, looking quite sharpish and as he had never seen her before. His own face must have been impressive, for she reddened, pulled her already-snug outfit closer, and stepped aside to let him in. Her features had softened once she realized the master of the house had arrived, and she turned her head to look down the hall.

“Colonel!”

Higgins removed his overcoat as Pickering set down the telephone receiver and came over, looking relieved and expectant.

“Has something happened?”

Nobody answered him.

“Well, what on earth’s the matter? Here you are meeting me as though the barbarians were at the gate,” Higgins said.

Colonel and housekeeper both exchanged a look, and the woman stepped forward.

“Sir, we weren’t sure where you’d been.”

“At my mother’s for lunch,” he replied, fishing the end of his muffler from where it had pooled on the floor to drape it back over the bannister. Though it had hardly gone well, which he now remembered, and felt a low mood come upon him again.

“For ten hours?” Mrs. Pearce looked very conflicted at needing to point this out.

“I wasn’t gone that long, was I?” Higgins shook his watch and held the face up to listen before giving it a dubious look.

“It’s nearly one in the morning, old boy,” Pickering said. “I was on the horn with Boozy, ready to send out some chaps to look for you.”

“Ah,” said Higgins, genuinely surprised at this. “I hardly think that would have been fruitful, but I suppose you must ease your conscience. I was only out for walk, you’ve been insisting all week that I must get out and go somewhere, and here I’ve done it, and now you don’t want me out of your sight. You must decide what it is you want, and not send Scotland Yard after me if I go about like a free man.”

They exchanged another look.

“Oh, sir,” said Mrs. Pearce.

“Well,” said Pickering reluctantly, “I suppose that is true.”

“Of course it’s true, I have been here and made to listen to everybody harping on about it, you know.”

“Would you like tea or coffee in the morning, sir?” Mrs. Pearce said quickly, for Pickering had opened his mouth as if he had been about to say Now see here—

“Tea,” he replied. “Or—no, coffee.” He paused, suddenly angry at being made to choose like this. “Oh, who knows if I’ll even be awake before dark, perhaps you’d better dismiss the staff at this rate,” Higgins said, for now he had remembered that his mother had once again threatened to marry him off, and he was very much put out by it. He gave a long sigh and began tromping up the staircase to his bedchamber, but stopped at the landing, though he did not turn to look at the pair below.

All the afternoon lost, and with nothing to show for it. 

“Tea,” he said at last. “Thank you, Mrs. Pearce.” Higgins made to go, but paused again. “And you as well, Pickering.”

Chapter Text

[T]here they him laid 
Gnashing for anguish and despite and shame 
To find himself not matchless, and his pride 
Humbl'd by such rebuke, so farr beneath 
His confidence to equal God in power.

- Paradise Lost, Book VI

“You could always go abroad, you know,” Pickering said, and turned the page of his newspaper.

Higgins actually looked up from where he sat on the library balcony, fixing a metronome, to lean forward and stare down at his friend. This odd statement had come apropos of nothing. He looked about himself—had they been talking about him traveling, or even travel generally? Had he somehow been participating in an entire conversation and not known it?

“I’m—what?” 

Pickering did not look up from the paper, merely continued in the same breezy, unassuming way. 

“Says here that travel is good for body and mind, helps strengthen one’s sense of self, and can even ‘reverse the aging process’. Nearly miraculous, according to this fellow.”

Higgins set the metronome on the herringbone pattern of the balcony floor with a thump and came down the twisting wrought-iron staircase from the upper floor of the study, squinting in disbelief all the while.

Pickering chuckled to himself, then looked up to see Higgins standing before him, arms akimbo and the same expression.

“Oh, not that you’re getting old, mind, old chap—I mean, dear boy—do I mean dear boy?” He paused to rifle through his mustache and ponder this. 

Throwing his friend a rather jaundiced look, Higgins decided to nip this curious line of conversation in the bud and went over to the sideboard to pull a dusty bottle of deepest red from within.

“Try this new port I’ve got, it’s supposed to be quite good,” he said, and poured a crystal glass. Pickering gladly took it, raised it to his friend, and just as Higgins was satisfied enough to begin making his way back up the staircase, said in a musing sort of way,

“Perhaps you could try Portugal, come winter. Ripping good port there, of course.”

Higgins reversed himself from the staircase and came over near the large leather sofa, now crossing his arms. 

“Why should I want to try Portugal this time of year? What is in Portugal?” He was more curious than irritated, and wanted to know the logic behind this persistence.

“Well, I only say because it’s not—” Pickering’s face betrayed him: clearly what he had been thinking was not something he wanted to say aloud, and he looked as though he had been caught out by a schoolmaster. He set the glass down, stood, cleared his throat, and muttered something about having promised a telephone call, before making a hasty exit.

“What is not in Portugal, Pickering,” Higgins called loudly after him. “Pickering!” 

But the man had disappeared, leaving him to climb back up and continue reassembling the springs and wires he’d laid out so carefully. The metronome had been one-sixteenth of a beat off since July, possibly owing to the heat and drought this year. Pickering had sworn he hadn’t been able to hear it, that the blessed thing was perfectly fine, but Higgins had heard it, he knew he had—

Portugal wasn’t Spain.

The thought, unbidden, came to him in sudden cloudbreak, and he looked down through the wrought-iron bars to frown at the door Pickering had disappeared through.

Utter foolishness, to think he was so fragile that he couldn’t bear to visit an entire country because he’d heard weather variations repeated so often. Besides, the rain in Spain was simply a verbal diagnostic phrase, a tool, just like this metronome, something devoid of value or significance and meant only to determine a pupil’s progress. For all he knew, the Iberias were nothing but desert, and would remain so whether he visited or not.

Higgins fidgeted where he sat.

Of course they would remain as they were without him. 

Although—now that he thought of it, setting the metronome case down again and frowning—Pickering had of late taken to perusing with greater enthusiasm than usual the travelogue sections of the Times, and noting exotic locations with great interest. At first it had been Eltham, Sandgate, Lyndhurst: places of local interest that one could visit for a day by bus. Then his narration expanded to Nice, Budapest, Genoa, St. Moritz and Juan-les-Pins, and pretty soon he’d started waxing poetic about the joys of seeing the Suez, or perhaps Samarra. Next thing he knew, Higgins would be at the docks waving off a cruise ship bound for Port Adelaide. 

That gave him pause, and he sat with it for several moments.

Pickering would have to move along eventually—he had his life back in India, and his own scholarly pursuits. Surely the old man would want to get back to the study of Sanskrit and its dialects sooner than later. After all, he had picked up the Universal Alphabet with admirable speed, and now that their joint project had concluded, the only thing keeping Pickering in London was… Higgins. 

He fiddled with the tiniest of springs, concentrating to fit it back to where it belonged, though it wanted very badly to escape altogether. 

Of course he did not want his friend to leave. But he could not allow himself to carry on about it, or even attempt to prolong the Colonel’s stay, perhaps by design of some new venture. No, they’d been down that road, and Pickering had never taken much interest in the close vagaries of how a phoneticist actually taught lessons. Polite observation was as far as he’d ever gone. 

At least it would not be a great shock when it finally happened. 

And indeed, it wouldn’t be, Higgins thought, briskly setting the mechanism aright and winding it to test its accuracy. Men didn’t behave as women did, boo-hooing over things that were well within the realm of possibility and ought to be considered and accounted for in advance of their happening. He need only anticipate it, accept it, and when the thing was done, he would be able to wish his friend and colleague farewell with clarity and good will for his future endeavors. No fuss, no great upset—merely a handshake and the promise to write.

There.

In perfect working order, ticking away with its correct purpose, and complete in under an hour. 

Having finished the task at hand, Higgins gave a sharp exhale and retired to the main floor of the study, picking up a stack of his old notes and looking them over. He rang for tea, and settled in to his usual station in the wing chair before the fire, sifting through the papers mildly and reminiscing over his past work. 

He was in fine spirits this way, being fully occupied, even if the things were a year or two old. There was some backlog to work through, after all. Higgins chuckled over a bit of marginalia in his own shorthand, which called attention to a good bit of humorous slang that the speakers he’d recorded had been using to describe another man’s wife. 

One of the housemaids brought his tea tray and set it nearby, but stopped short of disappearing silently the way she ought. Instead, she hovered without speaking, and Higgins looked up.

“Well, what is it?”

“Your feet are on the fender again, sir,” she noted correctly, for he looked, and indeed they were, and he congratulated the girl on her perspicacity.

“Thank you, sir,” she continued, causing him nearly to bark out a laugh, “But I am to mention that you mightn’t’ve done it.”

Mightn’t’ve, what a convoluted nesting contraction. 

This one was called Isobel, he thought, trying to remember; she had a somewhat horsey face and overly large teeth for her mouth, creating a drawl which did not recommend itself to an authoritative tone. She seemed to be enjoying very much the nearly obscene latitude she fancied herself granted in this scenario, for the girl had drawn herself up like a pious and fussy hospital matron.

They had taken to ‘mentioning it’, as she put it, with increasing insolence, he’d noticed. The head housemaid, Hannah, had actually picked up his feet to set them onto the floor while he’d been resting one afternoon, causing an absolute uproar which had ended only by the intervention of Mrs. Pearce—although she’d surprised him by not sacking the girl right there on the carpet. Instead, she had given him a bit of a pleading look and remarked that it had been for his benefit. Higgins thought the aftermath meant he would have some peace and bodily integrity in the privacy of his sanctum, but clearly not, and he well suspected who was behind all this. 

“And just who is giving leave of you to bring this up?” He demanded of her. 

“Mrs. Pearce,” Isobel replied without breaking eye contact, utterly unafraid of him. 

Dear God. Fighting a proxy war in his own house with the servants—it was like something out of a Chekov play. Perhaps he’d been too lax of late. Well, if he needed to thunder and storm about for a few days to bring them back under sovereign rule, he could be depended upon to do it, for his fine spirits had disappeared altogether. 

“Yes, that’s very well and good, but you ought to mention it discreetly, for it shows a more proper feudal spirit and all that,” Higgins said, and only reluctantly slid his feet down onto the brick hearth so that they were merely one ankle over the other, shaking his head as she finally curtseyed and left the room. 

That little exchange had dampened his enjoyment of a turn of phrase that seemed to come from combinations of Cockney rhyming along with a line from a dance-hall song. Higgins had been keen to follow the thread of logic, like Theseus in the labyrinth, but now it was spoilt, and he could only set the work aside. 

He drummed his fingers on the arm of the wing chair. No new research. Students were right out, and anyway he hadn’t the foggiest idea where his appointment book was. It was a sunny day, but the thought of going upstairs to dress and then leaving the house Higgins regarded with a kind of premonitory exhaustion. 

To the Times, then. He skipped the travelogues, having heard them in great detail earlier that morning, found nothing of interest in politics, then paused at a bit of verse written by an “A. Harringdon,” likely a pseudonym for a famous author who didn’t want their “real” work associated with a bit of doggerel that paid a farthing a line. He knew verse well, as any gentleman did, and he could tell it was not worth his time. Higgins’ eye went over the rest of the page to find that the poetry had been printed solidly in the middle of the Society columns. A catalogue of who was who and who went to what, and where the King was, and who was getting married, and Higgins turned the page again.

Here was an article about “A Question of the Russians,” another philosophizing of “America’s Promise on the World Stage,” and another page with a photograph of the old Kaiser. Racing forms and sporting results had never interested him, and the stocks and bonds always felt like more of the same. Numbers and charts designed to encourage people of all economic strata to waste their money as though they had even a slip of a chance of expanding their pocketbook. He sipped his slightly-forgotten tea and settled back, looking out the great window on the other side of the room. 

Life a year ago had been routine. Dawn spent reviewing the previous night’s research, a student or two before breakfast, applying himself to correspondence, luncheon, followed by self-improvement through reading, another student before tea, dinner with another book, and some sort of light entertainment in the evening, before his nightly perambulations. All of these elements together had crafted a mind diligent and ever-expanding, and had done so in this uninterrupted order for many years; Higgins had identified and implemented the best practices toward his own efficiency, and found that this was the most precise way to complete his work and be at the foremost of his area of expertise.

He had not been bored, he had not been unhappy. As matter of fact, he’d been working on the second edition of his book a year ago, and the edits had sat neglected all the while, somewhere in the bottom of his desk drawer.

His mind turned backward and onward.

There had always been so much time, so much time once he freed himself from the idea of being a useless drain hole of a so-called gentleman who shot at defenseless things that servants had to frighten out of the bushes, who said things like Excellent sporting weather, eh what and Well certainly Kent will take another championship this year, a member of Society who had a wife that sat dripping with jewels that sparkled more than her eyes, so much time not wasted, that he’d begun wandering about at night to listen to people talking. Academic insight of theoretical linguistics was one thing, teaching students with pound notes in their pocketbooks was another, but it was the sudden realization that nobody was required to speak the way they always had, and that nothing was stopping them from changing it but the work itself, that had snagged against his mind and been his constant companion for fifteen years.

And then this fancy of actually doing it, of being presented with the possibility and the opportunity, and why not? Why shouldn’t it be achieved and proven? The English had sailed around the world and discovered places never dreamed of, what else was this but another horizon to be crossed and conquered? He’d imagined a wax record playing on stage before the Royal Society of English Linguists and Phoneticists, and then a young woman stepping out into the light and opening her mouth, and the two voices being the same pitch, recognizable, but utterly transformed.

No one chained to their birthright. Every corner of London filled with beautiful, articulate expression of self, of great ideas. He glowed with it, as he always did, a warmth catching him—everybody had asked what the great thing of the new century would be, what the 1900s would be remembered for, and he felt sure it was the democratization of mankind, a leveling that could purge so many bad instincts, that could sear away prejudice and judgment, his muscles all jerked suddenly, and his mind stuttered for a moment—

Higgins awoke, drenched in water, to the awful sounds of someone hollering, and caught sight of Hannah, who was absolutely thrashing him with a large gold-tassled cushion.

“What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?!” he thundered at her, thoroughly unhappy to find himself not only pinned to the rug by the upended wing chair, but one of his own servants beating him. She hit him several more times, then whacked him square in the torso, nearly knocking the breath clean from him. At last he reached out and wrenched the thing out of her hands, the satin braid dangling from where it had come loose. He threw it across the room. 

The girl stood over him, breathing hard. Her cap was dislodged, and quite a lot of hair had come out of her updo. 

“I asked you a question,” Higgins said in the same loud voice. “Before I call the police to bundle you off to the asylum, explain to me just what in the hell you’re on about.”

Hannah’s usually calm and sometimes nearly pretty face was wild, savage. It occurred to him that servants were never happy about a looming threat of dismissal, and that perhaps instead of allowing Mrs. Pearce the latitude and discretion he’d afforded her in the matter of staff retention, he should have insisted the housemaid be turned out before she could do him harm. 

“I was saving your life,” she said with great emotion, and he saw that she was trembling. Before he could cut in, she gestured with both hands to his feet, which she stood astride like the Colossus of Rhodes. Hannah doubled over to shriek in his face. “You were on fire, you great bloody idiot!” 

Higgins was so shocked that he could only gape at her for a moment, and then managed, in a bit of a wheezing voice,

“How dare you speak to me like that—!”

Hannah made a sound somewhere between a groan and the screech of a feral cat in reply.

It was then that he registered scorches up the length of his favorite dressing gown, the strange smell of burnt feathers in the air. His raw feet were covered with soot and there, knocked onto the hearth, were his slippers. Leather did not burn, but they’d obviously taken some prolonged damage, slightly curled up and crescent-shaped now, as though he’d developed pretentions of living like a Turk. 

“What—” he might have said. Hannah bent down to collect the pitcher she’d apparently baptized him with, and stomped over to the study door, but was met by Mrs. Pearce, who took in the scene before her. Before anybody could say anything, Hannah took a few damp breaths and told the housekeeper that Mr. Higgins had fallen asleep with his feet in the coals again, and they could sack her for insubordination and language like that, but at first she’d come in to collect the tray and thought he was smoking his pipe and then saw little flames and didn’t know what else to do and that she was terrified and had grabbed the pitcher but that hadn’t done anything, and—and, and this speech ended incoherently in a sudden fit of tears. 

Mrs. Pearce took the maid by the elbow and told her,

“That’s all right, girl, go downstairs, tell Cook to make you tea, and wait for me there.”

Hannah gathered up her dignity and left, but did not look at Higgins as she went. 

Mrs. Pearce crossed the room to briskly re-right the wing chair from where he’d extricated himself out beneath it.

“Regardless of whether she saved me, that girl certainly put her arm into giving me a wallop,” he said, finally standing and giving his legs an experimental brush. “You may give her a reference, I suppose, but I shall be direct: she cannot stay in this house.” He winced as he inspected himself—no blistering, nor damage enough to send him to hospital, but it was deucedly painful now that the initial excitement had passed. 

“You may leave your clothes where Mason will collect them,” said Mrs. Pearce in a very formal tone, “And I shall ring up your tailor to order new ones in the morning.” 

“Could it be repaired, I wonder,” Higgins said thoughtfully, looking over the blackened and badly wrinkled edge of his dressing gown, “I’ve had this one for nearly five years, it’s a very old pattern and I should be sad to see it go, really.”

Mrs. Pearce did not reply. 

“Don’t tell me you’re angry because I shouted at her,” he said, somewhere between astonishment and resignation, but she had begun moving about the study, picking up the truncheon of a cushion and inspecting it with the impartial air of a judge at a county fair. “Mrs. Pearce!”

“Would you like me to have a fresh tray sent upstairs, sir? Toast and a boiled egg, perhaps?” 

The insinuation that he was a child being strong-armed into good behavior by Nanny did not escape Higgins, but he refused to grant the pantomime any sway. 

“Upstairs, woman! I—” He noticed now that it was well past dusk, that the afternoon had slipped out from under him once more. “No need, I shall do perfectly well right here, thank you,” the man conceded darkly, dragging one palm over his face. 

“Is that wise, sir?” she went on.

Higgins muttered that of course it was wise, it was his house and if he had deemed it so, then it was. The housekeeper patted at the cushion, and kept on doing so, her back turned to him. Collecting what he could of himself, he crossed his arms and gazed flatly at Mrs. Pearce until she looked up at him.

“I have had a very great shock, madam,” he said in the calmest voice he could muster. 

To his private relief, she sighed, and her shoulders relaxed an inch or two. 

“No one in this house wishes you harm, sir,” Mrs. Pearce said after a moment. “We are all of us loyal, and perfectly happy to be in service to you.”

He fidgeted at this bold display of sentimentality, and if there had been change in his dressing gown pockets, it would have rattled. 

“Yes, well,” Higgins said under his breath.

“But you have charge of ten souls, including your own, and—” She paused, apparently overcome, and he looked down at the floor so that she might let it pass with dignity. “Well, I would beg you remember it, that is all I mean.”

Before he could be prevailed upon to come up with a sufficient response to that, Mrs. Pearce drew herself up, and with a deep breath was once more brisk and efficient. 

“You will of course want a bath, and the study will need to be tidied and aired.”

She did have a point there. The rug was covered in ash, as were the legs and seat of the wing chair, and the hearth wanted a thorough scrubbing, for the contents of the scuttle had been emptied everywhere. 

Higgins sighed, trying to figure out what to do with his hands suddenly.

She looked at him, halfway between compassion and resolution. 

“If I may, I do not think it advisable for you to sleep in the study anymore, sir, and if I overstep in saying so, then so be it.”

He let a moment’s pause go by, during which he remembered how long ago she had come to this house. 

“No, quite right, quite right,” Higgins murmured. She moved to take up the tongs beside the fireplace, then picked aside the largest chunks of coal and began stirring the ashes to dampen the fire. “Don’t bother with a tray, Mrs. Pearce, you all have a good deal of work ahead of you tonight.” He said that last bit as he strode from the room, to which the housekeeper blandly replied,

“Very good, sir.”

On the landing upstairs, he passed Pickering coming out of his bedroom while tying the sash of his robe with a befuddled look. 

“What’s happened, then?”

“It’s nothing, go back to bed, Pickering.”

“Right, then,” was the Colonel’s amiable response. 

And as Higgins tried to make his ever-churning mind silent so that he might fall asleep late that night, he was vexed to realize that there were only nine people living in the house at that moment.

He had lost control of his life.

Everything that had happened since that night at the beginning of September had violently capsized the former contentment and quietly happy routine that Higgins had enjoyed for many years. And he wanted a return to sanity, to the life he had built in direct and pointed opposition to the expectations of everyone around him.

And perhaps the world had generally gone back to the way it had been a year previous. Perhaps the storm had passed, the waters had stilled, and the flotsam from this great avulsion mostly cleared away, save for a few bits of string, a piece of wood. But he alone was now living a life that was just slightly off, perhaps one-sixteenth of a beat or so. He ate, and sometimes slept, and sometimes read, and he had taken to dressing again, for after he had lost his slippers, Higgins had gone about the house for two days in woolen socks, and had been going up the staircase one afternoon and passed Pickering, and caught the strangest look on the man's face. He didn't recognize it until later, when he'd seen himself at the end of a hall in a long mirror and wondered who the Devil that person was. It had been an expression of pity, and it was one thing to be ridiculous and eccentric in order to draw the attention of the snobbish upper-class to their insufferable airs, another entirely to evoke and endure sympathy for such prolonged distress, for though Higgins knew that he was a bit absurd, he was not a dramatic type. 

So, then: Higgins set the new dressing gown and slippers from his tailor at the back of his closet and wore his usual suit, and shoes, and the domestic sphere sighed in relief that at last the master had returned, and all was right with the world.

(And was it? How little it took for anyone's mind to be at ease over him, how easily it was accomplished. How eager they all were, Pickering and Pearce and the housemaids and the footmen, for this silly episode to pass, and they would be put out and inconvenienced no more, could return to routine and order, all coming together to pour concrete atop shifting silt in the night and then declare the construction done by sunrise.)

Things didn’t seem right, and he could not put his finger on exactly why.

It was with this in mind that he reached for his copy of the complete works of Milton one rainy afternoon. His second great touchstone in life next to language and speech—if there had not been linguistics, then Higgins indulged himself thinking he could have been a Miltonian. The leather-bound volume was not large, but the words invoked in him the awe he reserved for what the English language could truly accomplish when put to its loftiest and purest use.

He turned to the first piece of verse and read through to the final line:

They also serve who stand and wait.

Higgins set his chin in hand, considering the idea. Standing and waiting, observing rather than doing. Perhaps he’d been spending too much time indoors lately, but this was not comfort, reading the words of an aging and dying man who was going blind, losing his ability to write, losing his passion and happiness in life, and expressing the hope that he would be able to bear the darkness by devotion to his faith. It had not chilled him, exactly, but it was not what he was looking for on a day like today.

He skipped Samson Agonistes and headed for the bulk of the text block, which was Paradise Lost.

And even though it was merely an interpretation of and expansion on the word of God, it was a source of peace both in language and in the maintenance of his soul. How many times had he read of Satan’s fall from grace and subsequent temptation of mankind, the war of Hell against the Son of God, filling in so many details missing from the Bible’s account. How stunning to know Adam and Eve written as individuals with minds of their own rather than a few opaque lines in Genesis—and be both moved and dismayed by the knowing choice the First Man made to commit sin alongside his wife, declaring himself bound to her, and bound to their shared fate. And yet: always a promise of redemption and possibility. Always the light.

Nothing was so terrible in this life that could not be forgiven.

He flipped at random, as one does when knowing a text and its meaning well, and landed somewhere in Book Three.

—ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair
Presented with a universal blank
Of Nature’s works to me expunged and razed,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.

More on Milton’s own blindness. And this time the material threat of being denied access to everything around him, separated from the world itself, shut out from knowledge and wisdom. Higgins screwed up his mouth and flipped forward again, intending to begin where “Heaven stood mute” and the Son alone declared that he would die to save humanity, but his aim was off.

Now conscience wakes despair
That slumber’d,—wakes the bitter memory
Of what he was, what is, and what must be
Worse; of worse deeds worse sufferings must ensue.

He sat staring at the words on the page for another moment, absorbing Satan’s dark thoughts on himself, and with a slow hand made himself flip forward a few pages, past where youthful and innocent Adam and Eve spoke lovingly of how they first met, how they were two halves of one whole designed for each other, and how Eve submitted joyfully to Adam’s connubial overtures, forward to the lines where Satan watched God’s most beloved creation in the Garden.

Sight hateful, sight tormenting! Thus these two
Imparadised in one another’s arms,
The happier Eden, shall enjoy their fill
Of bliss on bliss: while I to Hell am thrust,
Where neither joy nor love, but fierce desire
Still unfulfilled with pain of longing pines.

He’d once had a tutorial in his Oxford days under a Fellow who made the assertion during one of their meetings that Satan was not the villain of the piece, but an antihero, who could be both awful and evoke sympathy, who was charismatic and clever, a skilled manipulator, and ultimately doomed. The Fellow had thought this was Milton’s greatest achievement: making someone so twisted and damned seem… human, and worthy of examination, not of fear. He didn’t deserve to be superstitiously avoided. Higgins had been young and filled with grand opinions and ambitions, and had argued most fervently that it couldn’t be possible—that Milton was only using Satan’s alluring and twisted rhetoric as a device to try to trap the reader before leading him back out at the end; all the better to demonstrate temptation, a test of one’s soul without risk. The Devil was always to be rejected and firmly safeguarded against, without giving him a chance to pour poison into man’s ear.

Looking over the words now, he wasn’t sure who was quite right.

Now he was turning the pages back toward the beginning, imagining himself blindfolded, spinning a globe and throwing a dart.

He laid the pages flat, knew exactly where the story had gone, but read anyway, tired and beyond much caring.

Satan had just returned to the gates of Hell and discovered two figures guarding it: one a woman whose lower half was a hideous writhing snake, the other a shapeless black void in a false crown. The woman reminded the Devil that when he had been among the rebellious host of angels above, planning their treason against God, she’d suddenly burst out of his head, and the others had named her Sin, the daughter of Satan himself—

but familiar grown,
I pleas’d, and with attractive graces won
The most averse: thee chiefly, who full oft
Thy self in me, thy perfect image viewing
Becam’st enamored, and such joy thou took’st!

—And Satan had gazed at her, had seen himself and his powers and ambitions reflected within her, and lusting after his own creation, had forced himself upon her within the very light of Heaven itself. He’d brought up something new to the world through an act of arrogance and blasphemy, and she’d given birth to his son Death, the crowned beast with no face.

Higgins shut the book with a thump and held his palm flat against the cover as though to keep what was inside from crawling out.

Chapter Text

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience. If we could learn from mere experience, the stones of London would be wiser than its wisest men.

- “Maxims for Revolutionaries,” George Bernard Shaw

October 1911

He went to church and had only silence. 

No reproach, no reassurance, neither peace nor discord. Not the Almighty commanding him to give up his money to the poor and live the life of a wandering penitent, nor the voice of Reason telling him that life itself was a series of ups and downs that would ebb and flow, and that his actions would either exacerbate or mitigate the strong winds of change, and he was a man born of free will and therefore his choices alone dictated the state of his soul. 

Higgins sat in the pews of St. Marylebone Parish each morning as the vicar came and went, as ladies of the social committee opened the side door out into the courtyard and carried armfuls of white clover, quietly murmuring of how the autumn harvest festival could best be made an event to gather the local children’s interest.

It was someplace to be other than the study, other than the tenement sections, other than his mother’s house, other than anywhere. He sat in the same section of the same row in front of the same copy of the green English Hymnal with the top right corner torn off and had, as yet, not dissolved into a puddle of acid, or been struck by divine lightning, and so Higgins could only conclude that either he was not quite irredeemable just yet, or he was so far gone into damnation that he ought to just do as he pleased anyway, which he always had. 

Still.

He went, and something about the barometric pressure inside, or the stained glass panels, or the massive amounts of empty space overhead, or perhaps all three combined—something about it emptied out his mind, and for once in his entire life, he did not think about anything; he could sit and exist, and that was all. 

Allowing one hour for this, Higgins then would stand at precisely the same time and walk back to number 27A, without deviation. A yoke must ever go back on, and if he were being honest, he learned nothing, knew nothing more than he did the day before during these hours. But to sit and be separate from his recognizable life and all the things that had always been… 

To and from, and again the next day, and the next after that. 

Had he wandered, meandered down through Hinde Street rather than taking the most direct way, he might have chanced to see the shop girls who gathered in the cafe before their work every morning. Or if he had gone as far as Duchess Street, he might have seen the housemaid who had late developed a habit of sneaking back in after a night out with her beau. But Higgins kept his head down and walked the same number of steps along Upper Wimpole to Wimpole and to his own front door. 

Which was just as well, because Pickering met him coming in one Tuesday morning. 

“Southampton to Bombay on the SS Persia,” he said once they’d convened in the study, rocking back and forth on his heels, waistcoat pockets filled with thumbs, and a jolly expression bristling beneath his mustache. “I am sorry to go, London is splendid as ever, but of course…” he trailed off, “Well.”

“Beastly winters,” Higgins finished for him, rubbing his own eyelid with the pad of one finger. He’d had a nuisance the last few days, something in his eye that wouldn’t go away, and he couldn’t read sometimes for the distraction of it. 

“Quite right,” Pickering said, pleased that his friend understood him completely. 

“I see, I see. And when do you embark?” Higgins blinked a few times to try to get the gray clouds to dissipate from his vision.

“Saturday next.”

“Saturday next! Good heavens, we shall fete you out while we still can,” Higgins said. “Mrs. Pearce will probably cry, and order Cook to make you every dish you’ve ever said you enjoyed, and if the woman objects, Pearce will probably make it herself, all at once.”

The Colonel chuckled heartily at that and said he would be glad to have anything, but they two ought to sup one last time at the Carlton, for Tannhäuser was playing at the Royal Opera, and Pickering was feeling witty, if not a bit sentimental, and Higgins could hardly deny the man a last request, even if it meant his own unease at the possibility of any awkward or unwelcome meetings. 

Still.

The Colonel had a good time of it, that last week and a half, Higgins passing books from his collections into Pickering’s possession, the old man contentedly protesting all the while that he hadn’t a bit of room in his steamer trunk for even one thin onionskin page more, but oh, was that Rugielevsky’s Rhetorical Grammar in Oriental Languages ? He was dashed, he hadn’t seen it since university days. And to the large tottering tower they’d built next to the pocket doors another tome was added with a great ringing thump . 

“Well, I’m dashed,” Pickering said for about the fiftieth time, hands akimbo as he looked over the stack of literature. “I’ve no idea how to transport it at all—are you sure you’re willing to part with all this, old chap?”

“Of course, of course,” said Higgins from where he sat up on the library balcony, leafing through On the Nature of Prosody, Fourth Ed. “I hardly ever read some of these, they’ll only sit here and gather dust, and you could make good use of them. I don’t imagine there are any good libraries in India, apart from some British major with a decent education and half a brain, and even then you ought to have as much as you can manage, you know.”

There was a pause, and Higgins glanced up from the book for a moment to find his friend tilting his head and looking at him with a curious expression. There was something melancholy about it, as if the man were entreating him to something, but he couldn’t be sure what, and was at a loss for it. 

He’d never been in the habit of studying expressions. It was the least reliable indicator of a person’s mood or intentions, Higgins had found from an early age, and he had no practical need for it. His social peers were all stoic ciphers with eerily steady pulses and granite faces, whose titles and Oxbridge educations kept them from emoting more than a mild exclamation now and again, and usually out of mixed company. Hollering, screeching, whooping, roaring with laughter—these were the purview of the lower classes, and marked immediately any outsider or interloper. 

It was always easier to ignore whatever ornate traps the faces around him were concocting in favor of listening, for though the well-heeled could keep their expressions flat and bored, their voices rarely lied. They put no effort in it, for they’d been born into their voices and accents, and had no need of self-consciousness there. The aristocratic set were lazy in their way, taking shortcuts to identify one another—it was all in manners, and dress, and things he had never found as interesting as the way someone might blur together the alveolar approximant with a vowel and say Victorierend Albert . He’d studied, and perfected it down to a science, down to street level, which kept him peering into his notebook to ensure that his shorthand was neat and would not betray him as a sloppy scrivener upon later investigation. 

If he’d ever really looked at a person’s face, it was to watch for individual elements that might be inadvertently working to impede development of appropriate speech patterns. Cheek muscles, lips, tongues, teeth. All the patterns of how they functioned in the combined whole. His aim was, after all, to correct bad habits, and for this Higgins was close in his observations. But never a pupil’s expression, or whether their mouths were slanted this way or that, whether their eyebrows were raised or knitted tightly together to indicate what they thought of his methods. Opinion did not enter into scientific enquiry, or the entire conceit would be blown up. It would be like asking a cripple if he were enjoying his leg braces: that wasn’t the point. 

And so it was with all this at his back that Higgins peered down at his friend. Pickering had returned to a mild look as he bent at the side to read some of the titles in the growing stack.

It was nearly as tall as the Colonel. Higgins looked back at the built-in shelves of the library behind him. Some of them were half-empty by now. He’d given Pick too many books, more books than his polite refusal could accommodate, so many books that now it was a burden, and his gift a millstone. Well, why couldn’t the man have said something instead of insisting on being so bloody delicate about it? Didn’t he know whose house this was, and wasn’t he acquainted by now with Higgins’ attitude toward matters of manners, the ridiculous unintelligible dance of how many times to refuse a gift before acquiescing, and why anybody would pretend to not want something when it might do them some bit of good?

He sighed.  

There was something else: something peculiar about giving away half his library like this, as though Higgins had been trying to send himself along as well. 

“I suppose we could be slightly more selective,” he remarked. The Colonel raised his eyebrows and shrugged. That seemed better, and Higgins came down the twisting staircase to reach for the topmost volume and begin weeding out the chaff. 

The last night, they went and had German opera hurled at them; Higgins couldn’t keep his mind from wandering through the whole thing, and at one point he looked up to find Pickering dozing. But they had a fine late supper, reminiscing over what little could be talked of while sparing him from too close an inspection of memory. 

And the next morning they both rose early to see Pickering off from Waterloo; Mrs. Pearce was in quite a state, but managed to wring out her handkerchief enough to wish the Colonel a very safe and pleasant journey, and many other things, but Higgins frowning down at his watch pulled her up short. 

Before the Colonel boarded his train to the Port, they stood on the platform and Higgins tried to find something to say. 

“Well,” he began. 

“It has been a pleasure,” said Pickering with all the warmth of a stranger who has become a true friend, extending his hand. They shook. “I do hope—” the Colonel went on, but stopped, and gave a little half smile. “I do wish you all the best. You are a dear fellow, and this has been a most happy and productive visit to the homeland. I am glad to have met you, Higgins.”

“And you as well,” Higgins replied, feeling a bit awkward, for what had been about to come out of his mouth was more along the lines of study that book I gave you, it’ll expand your ideas on the use of rhetoric. 

“Do write,” said Pickering, turning to glance as the locomotive gave a burst of steam. “And if you ever happen to be in the East,” and here he did something that set a keen sadness over Higgins, certain suddenly that they would never meet again, for the Colonel reached out with one finger and waggled it with each word, “Let me know, for you will never be without a home.”

The trunk was loaded, Pickering stood at the entrance to the first class car, and Higgins raised a hand to wave goodbye. Flags went up, whistles blew, and it pulled away with such a great cacophony and fog that it was impossible to tell when it was truly gone. 

And then he was alone on the platform, and there was only to find a taxi, cross the river, and go home. When he got there, he paid the driver and stood on the street with the toes of his boots against the kerb. What was there inside? The staff scattered about, cleaning out fireplaces, dusting, beginning to work on lunch, on supper. Mrs. Pearce, still drying her eyes. 

Higgins fidgeted, and then turned and set off for the parish church. 

He’d been sitting in the pew for five minutes when a woman in a suit with large green buttons mimicking a waistcoat came out of the vestry, saw him, and stopped. 

“Ah, Mr. Higgins,” she said, removing her spectacles as she approached, and he thought he knew her vaguely as the secretary or some such, Miss… something. “How often we’ve been seeing you lately—I had commented to Mrs. Driscoll at the committee meeting last night that you’ve been so faithful in your attendance, it is moving to see your devotion firsthand, you are quite the subject of talk around here at the moment.” Before there was a pause long enough for him to have to come up with an answer to that, she prattled onward. “We talked it over last night, although I think perhaps it may be better to broach the matter with you first, since you may be able to use your powers of persuasion.” The lady smiled in an odd way apparently meant to signal an appeal. “Do you think your mother would be interested in heading our fundraising efforts to refurbish the altar frontal?”

With a promise to mention it to her, and an apologetic smile and gesture at his watch, Higgins exited as quickly as he dared without rousing the woman’s indignation. 

He stood on the front steps before the street, looking one direction and then the other.

It had been the instant she’d said his name—or even before that, when the look of recognition had crossed her face. 

Silence. He’d wanted silence, not someone jabbering away at him, asking about him, asking about his mother, asking of his devotion to God, asking after the status of his soul, asking for fellowship, for love, for things he did not have. He chose, and set off to the left, walking, passing houses and shop fronts, until he came to a church he’d never seen before, and tossed his hat into the pew at the very back, where the balcony cast a great shade; no one would know him or disturb him. The stained glass windows were dark and ugly and indecipherable, the altar somewhat broken and neglected, and he was alone again, and himself. 

Two people gone, and in such a short amount of time. He had been exactly this poor all along, and not known it. 

Sitting there at length, Higgins felt himself once more begin to quiet and separate from the things that cluttered the study at home. He could picture the large model of the human ear, the xylophone, the singing bellows, the bottomless dish of fruit and chocolates—all of them, think of them, and they were simply things, there and not here. 

And he was here, and yet not here. One thing, and another simultaneously. He turned the curious statement over and around in his mind. Here, and not here. Himself, and a stranger. In this space, this pew, this church, he was anonymous. Present, but without the yoke of himself. The two ideas held together at the same time, but they did not cancel out, instead twisting, wrapping their tails together, and joining into one. 

“Sir Dunsany is hosting a salon with a guest lecturer from—”

“No.”

“The Moral Reform League—”

“No.”

“Mr. Martener of the Linguists and Phoneticists Society of London bids you congratulations on your invitation to join their esteemed—”

“Ugh, no. That’s the seventh time with him, I ought to call the solicitor and see about a protective order.”

“Mr. Hubert Bland of the Fabian Society—”

“That fatuous bore. Tell him his wife ought to write something other than fairy stories.”

“The Women’s Social and Political Union would like you to offer a few remarks to introduce someone—”

“What?” Higgins looked up from his work in disagreeable surprise. “Absolutely not, have that one sent back for a mistaken address, I cannot think of any other reason that would come here. Mrs. Pearce, is it really necessary to read out all of these?”

She continued unabated. 

“Mrs. Gorringe,” Mrs. Pearce began, and Higgins immediately broke into an impulsive and irresistible grin, “Wishes you to know that she is hosting a tea this Saturday afternoon, and that your mother will be previously engaged.” The housekeeper frowned and flipped the card over. “Why would she bother to send this if it’s not an invitation?”

“My sister the saint,” he drawled, marking his place in the book before him. “She thinks I’ll be jealous, or imposed upon, but would insist under questioning that she’s merely being scrupulous in her etiquette.” The smile returned to his face, and he drummed his palms on the surface of the desk. “I must admit I like getting post from Vicky, it is very satisfying to hear that hideous married name read aloud and know that she loathes it.”

“The Royal Society of English Linguists and Phoneticists—”

Mrs. Pearce paused in anticipation of his answer, but she glanced up to find her employer with his head tilted to the side. Indeed, Higgins was not so much listening as he was thinking. Every other one of these invitations were trips into the unknown, and as to what they expected of him and who would be there, he’d learned from experience that the details were invariably left until the last moment.

The Royal Society, though—that was a known entity. There was a sense of guarantee to it, based upon who had been denied admission to their ranks, and it was Karpathy. The imposter had applied so many times they’d finally come up with a clever rule about membership requiring status as a natural-born British subject, and they had all looked forward to the outcome of this new policy. Either the blackguard would be exposed for his lies about being a Hungarian, or he would slink off and finally quiet down.

It was to the general disappointment of the membership that the second of these occurred, and no scandals were overturned. 

Karpathy would absolutely not be there, nor any associates, such as students or… assistants, or otherwise.

“—where they shall be having their bimonthly meeting, tomorrow night at seven, the usual location,” she finished. “Shall I confirm this one as always, sir?”

“Yes,” he said without hesitation, and nearly waved her on, but paused. “Any other messages? Telegrams, anything of that sort?”

“Only the circulars,” she replied. 

He nodded after a moment, and she went out, closing the pocket doors behind her. 

The next night, Higgins left the house in a taxi, just as he did every two months. 

Coming through the archway of the group’s headquarters, a red velvet drawing room in Kensington belonging to a baronet named Ranklin, who had written thirty books alone on the topic of speech defects of the soft palate, he heard the unmistakable sounds of lively discussion, something no meeting went without. In fact, it often seemed that the arguments were the crux of all their gatherings, for the members were spirited debaters, and there was not a man among them who had not published several treatises and stood as a recognized expert in whatever particular niche of their common study he had chosen as his specialty.

“Ah!” cried a voice as Higgins entered the room, and fourteen heads turned, some murmuring greetings and others saluting with their crystal glasses. The voice had come from Ranklin himself, the oldest of the group, apart from the Oldest Member, a man who had been old when Higgins had joined as a young graduate, was even older now, and who usually had to be steered into an easy chair, handed a glass of something, and told when the evening was over and he must be off, for he was so hard of hearing and nearly blind that he could not tell of his own volition. 

The butler took the damp overcoat from Higgins’ hand and immediately replaced it with a snifter, which was the very fine sort of service one could expect without variation at Ranklin’s place. Off with one, on with another. He lifted it, and addressed his assembled colleagues.

“Dr. Johnson said it best: ‘Claret for boys, port for men, and brandy for heroes,’ eh?”

There was good cheer and collegial laughter at this, and a moment’s pause while they all took advantage of the toast. And then Ranklin, the old codger, came forward to shake his hand and instead of saying how are you, old chap, or blast this rain he immediately said, much to the delight of Higgins,

“You’re just in time, Bainbridge has the barmiest ideas!”

“Nonsense!” Bainbridge cried, rising from an overstuffed chair near the fire. “And if you want to have a real discussion, we ought to have it out with Union rules, and no persuading Higgins before he’s even had a chance to hear both sides!” 

As his response, Ranklin leaned in and gave Higgins a conspiratorial wink and an ironic look, as though they were both fellow sufferers of Bainbridge’s carrying on like this. 

“Well,” said Higgins, finding himself a good seat, “Let’s hear it, gentlemen.” He was frequently called upon during these soirees to hear both sides of an argument, consider all the points, and hand down a judgment. It was a most pleasant task, and one of which he acquitted himself spectacularly. Most often it was between Ranklin and Bainbridge, the latter being a medical specialist who apparently saw it as his moral duty to thump against Ranklin and his lifetime baronetcy, which was earned for service in the Boer War. 

Bainbridge leapt into the void left by Ranklin being a good host and issuing orders to the butler. 

“It makes no difference how a person is born, for any infant may be taken from one situation, brought up in another, and if he knows nothing else, then that is the entirety of his world. Without being educated of possibility, he will only ever fit within those established boundaries, whether that is a natural match for his personality or not. But given great latitude and exposure to more parts of the world, any human mind would expand and grow to the point of permanent alteration.”

“Hah!” Ranklin gave a short, derisive bark of a laugh, and stood as a man fully at the helm of his own domain. 

“There’s no true replacement for how a person is established at his core. Every impulse goes back to that original version of the self. We are all of us innocent—”

Bainbridge opened his mouth and pointed his finger in Ranklin’s direction, but the old man interrupted.

“And before you start in on me, original sin is out of bounds tonight!” There were a few chuckles, for the last time these two met and tapped gloves, the night had nearly ended in a row, and with no pronouncement of who was right. “We are all of us innocent, wicked, good, and bad, and we return to those base elements in moments of extreme stress and emotion, which tells us that those characteristics can never truly be papered over. Behavior may be altered to some degree, but breeding sets the stage—it determines when the alteration succeeds or fails, whether the seed may germinate, or if the field is ruined from the outset.”

“And yet we hear all the time of savages from the farthest reaches of the Empire being brought to London and up into civilized behavior as they gain an understanding of what is possible for them in this life.”

“If they were given a choice, they’d return to their primitive ways, for it is what they know in their blood. It is impossible for anyone to escape the truth of their birth.”

Someone in one of the overstuffed chairs—Fotheringay, the one with the country house—spoke up.

“Higgins, last we convened, you said you were at the crucial stages of your project, that it would wind up changing the course of a person’s entire life.”

Everyone looked at him.

“Oh, yes,” Higgins said, and went back to looking attentively at the two Captains. But they were looking at him in turn.

“Well?” Ranklin said.

Higgins blinked. He’d not heard enough to really make a decision, there had been no conclusions presented as yet, and he noted this aloud.

“No, no,” said Bainbridge briskly, “How did the experiment turn out? You were very obscure with the details.” 

“Yes, I should like to hear how it turned out as well,” said Ranklin, jockeying forward impatiently as though he were about to be denied some key fact pattern that would win him the night. 

“If there is primary evidence given by someone deciding the outcome, shouldn’t it be considered a form of partiality and therefore be excluded?” someone asked. Both of the men at the floor turned and shushed him. 

Everybody turned back to looking at Higgins. 

He had been vague about the experiment, true, but thinking back, it had been with secretive smiles and arch promises to make good on a full description and presentation once the thing was done—and once his triumph was of course, of course , utterly complete to the fellow men who understood his greatest interest the best, and to whom this exhausting work would make sense, would matter. 

But what conclusions could be drawn of it? What could he say?

One thing, and yet something else entirely as well.

July had been so exceptionally warm and dry that the papers were calling it a ‘once-in-a-lifetime heatwave,’ and much was made of the fact that workers were dying from exhaustion, to the point that Pickering became bit fixated on the Deaths by heat column within the Times . Factories toiled at unusual hours to avoid the sun, which was so prevalent that London began to feel as though it had relocated to the south of France, or perhaps western Java. 

Higgins was troubled, but not by the strange weather, and certainly not by the way the experiment was going, for he was doing the work of four on his own. There were still the races to be faced, but not for another two weeks, and he was duly unconcerned. 

“Damn and blast,” he announced to the study, sinking into a heap on the sofa and letting the stack of papers in his hand flutter to the rug. 

“What’s the matter, old chap?” Pickering said without looking up from his paper.

“It’s the most godawful thing: I keep hearing this tune from somewhere, but I can’t remember the name of it, nor how it goes on past a certain note. Of all the bloody things, I’m being haunted by music.”

Pickering laughed aloud.

“A sign of genius, I grant you.”

“If this is genius, every madhouse must be full of intellectuals.”

“Well, perhaps if you listen to something else, it’ll dislodge itself,” Pickering murmured. Higgins knew his friend was merely being indulgent and mild out of boredom, which was his way. 

“I do need a new phonograph needle,” said Higgins, mostly to himself. 

Pickering made a small noise and looked down at his watch. 

“I’m due for an appointment near the shop anyway, I’ll pick you one up before I go.” He rose and straightened himself. “Good luck with the song,” the Colonel continued cheerfully on his way toward the doors. “Perhaps you heard it outside a music hall and will have to spend more time at the vaudevilles to try to identify it.” He laughed to himself, shaking his head as he went. 

Higgins leaned all the way back into the sofa cushions and hummed what had been going through his head for days on end. It was a waltz, he knew that much, and what was more, the melody was elliptical and kept turning over on itself. He could hear the notes and rhythm of the thing perfectly in his mind, but could never seem to finish the phrasing—it was always just out of his reach.

Giving a tremendous sigh, he pulled himself upright and went to the desk to locate the copy of Coronal Consonants he’d been rereading of late, but it wasn’t there. He pulled out all the drawers and was about to empty them onto the floor when he remembered that he’d taken it upstairs to read in bed; it was on the side table. He went, humming again in irritation, and thumped his way up the staircase. 

Having located the thing precisely where he’d remembered leaving it—his bedchamber was always tidied to a specific degree, which meant the usual sorts of little things, but without the maids touching or moving anything that didn’t belong, for if he left a book on the night stand, remembered it being there, and went looking for it only to find it gone again, Higgins had no compunctions about tearing the house down to find it, and well the staff knew it—he was on his way down the staircase when he heard the piano. One of the maids cleaning the keyboard, perhaps, or—

No, that was a real melody. It was still being picked out, but there were connections and harmonies between the notes.

She was in there, he realized. She'd been in there while he'd been talking to Pickering, and thought him still above stairs looking for his book. 

Higgins stole forward through the foyer on the balls of his feet to peer through the gap in the doors. He and Pickering had of late been taking her to musical reviews or the theatre every night of the week, which she had said over and over was terribly exciting, and more than she’d ever seen in her entire life. But the important thing was that when they brought her home, she could recreate any of it. 

In fact, they’d had a bit of an argument over which was more important: Higgins of course found it fascinating that after watching a play, she could imitate any of the accents with absolute clarity, while Pickering was, predictably, charmed by her ability to play by ear, which Higgins had never thought all that interesting anyway, for it didn’t involve language unless there was singing, and they had yet to take her to the opera.

Continental accents, African dialects—things that had taken him years to get hold of, she picked up and took off with like a shot. It was uncanny, exciting, and gave him the eeriest feeling. 

Still, he listened, and tried to see what Pickering found in it. The girl had never touched a piano six months ago, and now (the Colonel was fond of saying) it was as if she knew all the octaves and chords the same as she could recognize the backs of her own hands. And indeed, such utter and complete natural skill; Higgins knew that people paid huge sums of money and spent years studying, to wind up understanding it only half as well. She was playing softly, cautiously teasing something out, spinning clouds of wool into a thin strand of yarn, and then it came together, and was suddenly whole. 

Higgins leaned against the doorjamb. 

It wasn’t just anything—it was the song he’d been humming all week. Firm and confident, pausing where it mattered, where it gave the thing tension and structure. She pushed past the part he’d gotten stuck on, only to find more elegant space to twirl around and gather up inside of, and he felt a strange kind of relief, as though the heat had broken and the rains come at last. God, she remembered the whole thing. That was it, that was the song he’d woken up with every day, that he’d turned over endlessly during tea and hummed in the bath and had to stop his ears up from hearing while he was trying to fall asleep, that was the song that was driving him mad. 

That was how the melody resolved itself, right there in her hands. 

He gave one gasping, disbelieving laugh, and slid open one of the doors, the better to observe her by. He overshot, it slammed, and the sound made her start, look up, and flush. 

Higgins stepped into the space left by her continued silence, and then came all the way to the grand piano.

“You know, I may have to concede to the Colonel on this one—you do have a most remarkable ear, and quite an exceptional hand for this,” he said, looking down at the keys. “The piano has never got as good attention before.” He’d mostly used it for toying with linguistic tones when he’d tired of the xylophone, and for the fact that it filled up so much space in the study. 

She eyed him, her face curious, and then seemed to be waiting.

“What?”

The girl reached for the keys again, but stopped, withdrew, and eyed him again, this time squinting with marked suspicion.

He nearly said: If you’re going to look at me like that, you ought to be getting back to your studies , but he didn’t.

Instead, Higgins crossed his arms, lifted his chin, and said with great dignity:

“I can give a compliment without conditions, you know.”

Now she pursed her lips, looking amused, and then she turned on the piano bench, folded her hands in her lap, and sat up very straight and expectant. Apparently she was going to suss him out and wait for the inevitable correction, the other shoe to drop. Several moments ticked past on the clock, and they waited in silence. 

Finally, he sighed gently.

“Aren’t you going to play the rest of it?”

Her face shifted into soft surprise, and she turned back to the keyboard, lifted her hands, and started over. 

Watching her fingers move back and forth effortlessly, Higgins found himself fully impressed with how easy she found it. She would never need a music master; another six months—no, another three months, and she’d put anyone at Albert Hall to shame. And very likely she wouldn’t need lessons in any language she heard spoken aloud, either, or—Higgins tilted his head to the side.

He wondered how much longer she’d need any instruction at all. She drew the song to a close, and he realized that even though it had been a pleasant tune, there was something at the back of it, sad and strange. 

“Well?” 

He looked up. 

Ranklin and Bainbridge had leaned in very closely and were peering at him with great interest.

“Was it a success or a failure, old boy, do tell us!”

Breathing in, considering, weighing the evidence and the options presented to him, Higgins said at last, in an impartial voice:

“Neither.”

Bainbridge sank back, while Ranklin drew himself up self-importantly. 

“And both, I suppose.”

Now Ranklin looked annoyed.

“Oh, blast, that’s just a cheap way to circumvent calling it a failure,” he said, quite put out. “What happened, did the girl give it up halfway through?”

“She left after the bet was won,” Higgins replied. 

“Whatever happened to her?” Bainbridge asked.

He’d made a lady of her, she’d said, and now she wasn’t fit to sell anything but herself to some upper-class twit. 

“I don’t know,” he said honestly. 

“That’s a woman for you,” said Ranklin, “Something in their genetics keeps them from being able to see a thing through.”

“Quite so,” Bainbridge nodded, sipping at his snifter. “Even the educated ones lack something in the willpower. There is a case where it is far better for an entire species to remain at their natural station, and they are the happier for it.”

Higgins worried at the inside of his lower lip, half-listening, half-remembering the way the piano had sounded.

Fotheringay sat down in the easy chair nearby while Ranklin and Bainbridge continued to talk. 

“Dear me, it is pleasant to be surrounded by one’s peers, even if some of them do quarrel too much,” said the older man, not unkindly. “Nice to have found an escape from a world that pays far too little heed to us, and discounts our calling entirely.”

Higgins looked about the drawing room. Ranklin’s place was well-appointed, meant for socializing, without a single instrument for practical instruction or corrective measures. Bainbridge had his place in Harley Street, but he was an otolaryngologist. Fotheringay wrote monographs on the sibilant fricatives. These his colleagues, he thought; none of them gave lessons, but mostly published and spent long hours engaged in purely theoretical analysis. 

“That it is,” said Higgins, giving a small half-smile, swirling his glass.

“Too bad we are all so far gone past university, or it would be nice to all go back there and be locked into one of those ivory towers to work and settle into a quiet life of endless debate and lecturing. Our happiness and luck, to be able to cloister ourselves away, passions in service to academia.” Fotheringay smiled. “Well, this is good too, even if it is just for a few hours every now and again. I remember when you joined, how young you were, so full of vim and ideas,” he went on.

Higgins hmmed.

He had been the youngest ever admitted to the Royal Society, and congratulated and welcomed with much fanfare. And nearly twenty years on, he was still the youngest man here. 

“Ah, but you still are, and so lucky to get to do it as your profession, with so much ahead of you.”

“I’d look into the family,” Ranklin was saying, gathering his lapels with fists as though he were about to deliver a campaign speech. “Very likely something as early as one generation back would cause it, the mother unable to comprehend the essential rules of speech, or the father never having completed anything to satisfaction—”

Higgins realized with a start that Alfred Doolittle was probably the only person who might know how the experiment had turned out. 

Chapter Text

There was the Door to which I found no Key; 
There was the Veil through which I might not see: 
Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee 
There was—and then no more of Thee and Me. 

- The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam

In the end, Doolittle was not difficult to locate.

Higgins knew the address to be in Pimlico; memories surfaced of Mrs. Pearce commenting upon it when she read aloud the wedding announcement in the paper, which included where the couple planned to reside after their honeymoon trip to—

“Yorkshire and its many environs,” she had recited in a most pained voice, “So that the newly united pair may endeavor to see as many of the great and venerable… turfs as possible.”

And thence to visit the bride’s family in Ireland, or something—he could not be expected to remember—and anyway the point was not Ireland, or even a post-marital trip to look at horse race tracks, but that the man could be found at all.

Or at least that his house could be found.

Even then, the possibility that the man was not speaking to his daughter (or the other way round) was strong, given that the only time Higgins had ever seen the two of them together had nearly involved coming to blows. 

But things changed.

Money had a way of bringing people together.

And so though it made his insides twist a little, he set himself to the task of locating the man in order that he might put a close to the entire adventure. In the interests of science, and the future of his own endeavors. For the sake of what had taken so much time and energy and expenditures, Higgins felt even in a very small way that he had a right to know the answer regardless of whether the outcome was a sign of his success or failure as a teacher.

He would perhaps know, and that would be enough.

Higgins eyed number 47 Ponsonby Terrace in a manner that could accurately be called askance. It was not a beautiful building by any means, and neither was this a rising neighborhood, though he supposed it was miles above wherever Doolittle had been keeping himself and his simultaneously ersatz-and-newly-minted wife.

Still. For four thousand a year, it was too near the Vauxhall Bridge, with every house the same shape, size, general character, and shade of yellowish-brown in the bricks. The London School of Architecture probably dumped its worst-performing students out the back of a van into the top of Ponsonby Terrace at midnight and let them dash about clutching at their heads in terror and confusion for a bit, just to liven things up and remind them that death came by a thousand tiny cuts.

Which was something close to the sensation of staring at it for Higgins.

Untrustworthy. Filled with useless prattling and patter that would extend this into a longer night than absolutely necessary. He’d accepted that a conversation with Alfred Doolittle would be unpleasant and long. Possibly even a fool’s errand.

Better to corral the other man as best he could, keep his own answers brief, and hope to escape with even scant information. Just a bit. That was all he wanted, that would satisfy his curiosity.

It had not occurred to Higgins until he’d found the correct number plate that the residents might have been entertaining guests, or had visitors of some stripe, which was why he’d been leaning against the wrought-iron fence across the street for the past ten minutes. But there was no movement in the front drawing room, and so he finally peeled himself away and went over to ring the bell.

A frazzled young housemaid, her cap nearly at the side of her head, answered. There was someone shouting from upstairs, growing more agitated by the moment and giving a general impression of pandemonium even though there was no one else directly visible from the doorway.

“Mr. Doolittle?” She repeated over the din that was rising from the housemaid’s failure to appear immediately at the caller’s request. “At the White Swan, just so.” In the moment before she shut the door, Higgins rather thought the girl threw a look of longing at the street behind him and escape beyond.

To the White Swan, then, one of those odd pubs that was neither down-market (an ideal place of research) nor of good standing (boring), somehow instead striding the line between the two in a way that unpleasantly called to mind fifteen or twenty cheap little porcelain dog figurines lined up across a mantel in a furnished house.

A cursory survey of the dark and sedate room found Alfred Doolittle, Philosopher, seated at a table near the back, a short empty glass before him.

Higgins had it in mind to play the whole thing off as though it were a chance meeting and approach offering apologetically belated congratulations on the occasion of the other man’s wedding, but before he could say anything, Doolittle glanced up and recognized him.

“Damn my eyes if it isn’t the King of the Swells,” the man said in his distinctive voice. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest, shaking his head. “Was beginning to wonder when you’d come looking.” He clucked his tongue, and spoke the next words as though he were delivering tragic news. “I was almost worried you’d forgot all about us, the life you ruined.”

“Us?”

Momentarily, Higgins felt his resolve to see this through falter in a kind of mental stutter, which caused him to stumble a bit as he drew near. He was always cursed to be tripping over his own feet.

Doolittle slapped one hand on the table and chuckled.

“Look at ‘im! What, The Gallery chuck you? Or no, don’t tell me—the Marquis of Westminster up Warwick had to give you the boot. Isn’t that how it goes, tippling at a place named for that old teetotaler. And now you come stumbling in here. Sweet revenge!” And he dissolved into a gale of laughter that slowly turned into a fit of coughing, drawing the attention of a table of figures at the other end of the room. Higgins made quick work of seizing a chair before Doolittle could either continue mocking him or object to his seating himself. The man recovered, and muttered, “Oh Gawd, ‘e wants to sit anyway.”

A glorious beginning, with so much promise, Higgins thought darkly.

“What do you mean, us?” He remembered to repeat, and then looked about to see who else was here, who else was about to walk up to the table, who’d been here before he’d walked in and conveniently disappeared at the right moment, only to return at the worst. The barman caught his eye instead, and made up two glasses of whatever Doolittle had.

“I mean us,” said the man in question, gesturing up and down over his gaudy suit, far too much for the Proms, let alone a mediocre public house near the river. He’d come from somewhere, or was going somewhere, or—no, more likely, he had no sense of proportion. “Who’d’ye think I meant, the Lord Exchequer?”

“You… don’t seem like the type to spend an evening by yourself, I mean.”

“By meself!” Doolittle looked horrified, and leaned in a little. “Look here, this place may be dull enough to make a man want to end it all, but it’s not that ruddy house, and that’s a miracle if nothin’ else.”

He sat back again.

“Would you do us a favor, Governor?”

Higgins lifted the short tumbler before him and eyed it, trying to tell whether it was rotgut whisky or several ounces of petrol. The scent was not illuminating on the matter, and he set it aside only to catch sight of Doolittle knocking his back in one throw. Apparently his taste in alcohol hadn’t improved with his lot in life.

“What’s that?”

“Pay the barman.”

At this, Higgins slouched in the wooden chair, frowning.

“What?” He said, becoming more annoyed by the second. “What? Why?”

Doolittle responded to this brisk line of interrogation with a very tragic groan, and rubbed at the bridge of his nose.

“So I can have one last reminder, one happy memory, of what it feels like to soak another fellow for the price of a drink,” he replied in a manner most dramatic, and sunk his face into his hands.

Higgins found himself staring flatly at this charlatan’s display, and sure enough, after a moment Doolittle’s fingers parted and one eye peered out before he gave up the act.

“Aw, come off it, you’d deny a simple request like that?”

“What in God’s name are you on about? You’ve more money than you can even know what to do with,” said Higgins. “Here you are, set up with nothing to do but be garrulous and interesting, in a comfortable middle-class existence, and married as well. My congratulations, by the way,” he finished a bit lamely.

“That’s the trouble of it, y’see,” said Doolittle, waving one hand dismissively, “One simply can’t go ‘round giving up money when it falls out of the sky like that, but it drains all the fun out of life.”

“Drains all the fun out of life,” Higgins muttered, “Nonsense. If that’s the case, you ought to find something new to do with yourself. Find a hobby, or take up a cause. And if you’re really bored, you could find a profession, though I imagine—” Higgins stopped himself before he went too far. Insulting the man outright wouldn’t get him any answers. “I imagine you have plenty to do, giving lectures on morality.”

There was a pause as they looked each other over.

“I feel as if I’ve a new appreciation for folks such as yourself, you know,” replied his companion in a thoughtful sort of way. “I get it, eh?”

Higgins eyed him skeptically and waited for the rest of that thought to materialize.

“Toffs are always jealous about guarding their station in life—they put up cab fare for fancy nights out and it’s nothing, but oh-so-mysteriously don’t have tuppence to give to someone who’ll make better use of it. Can’t share worth a whit, never a good excuse behind it, but I see it now.”

“Oh?”

“It’s hard to feel for someone when you ain’t in their way of things. In their shoes. Unless you live through it, you can’t know what it is that makes a man think the way he does.” He shifted in his chair. “There’s plenty o’ folks back in the old neighborhood who wouldn’t change even if it would get ‘em to the debs ball or something—they like things just as they are, and whether it’s their disadvantage or not don’t even come into it. And more to ‘em, I say.”

Higgins frowned.

“They want to stay the way they are?”

Doolittle shrugged by way of reply.

“But that’s a thoroughly miserable way to live. Everyone ought to at least have the opportunity to be the best possible version of themselves, don’t you think?”

His drinking companion widened his eyes and tilted his head in a kind of mocking innocence.

“Oh, every best possible version of every soul out there oughta look and sound like you? You make us all into lords and ladies, and who’ll they feel superior to? Who’ll they be lords of, Governor?”

“That isn’t the point,” Higgins retorted waspishly, “It’s to do away with that sort of nonsense, to prevent people from marking each other out as greater- or lesser-than. Haves and have-nots, it’s absurd.”

Doolittle threw back his head and laughed, and Higgins felt very distinctly that they’d gotten far off the mark of where he’d meant for this to go.

“But that’s how things are, no matter the money you’ve got. Everybody’s willing to claw and fight to keep things as they are. I once saw two blokes knock a fellow’s teeth out what got himself enough money to buy a buttonhole one day,” he said. “All he wanted was something pretty, and they nearly put him down for it.”

“Well, that’s their—”

“Ah, that’s just their way, eh? That’s their lack of education and morals, because the middle class has got a lock on that, don’t they.” His voice had taken on a broad sarcasm. “You’ve got your ideas about how folks talk as being a way up in the world, and might be it is, but you’re still living in your big house with your fancy servants who bow to you but still make sure they got their noses in the air, and you ain’t giving all that up to move house to some den in Charles Street, and put yourself in one room with three other families, and hand them all your money and things, are you?”

There was a momentary pause, and Doolittle sighed, slumped back in his chair, and gave a winning half-grin carefully designed to cut any tension.

“You can’t save everyone, Professor—everyone don’t want to be saved.”

Higgins was struck for the second time ever that there was something interesting in the patterns of how Doolittle thought, and he wondered vaguely whether the whole family was full of savants in one area or another, and were only wanting a bit of care, guidance, or channeling to give fruit to hidden genius.

“You sound as though you don’t believe any self-improvement to be worth the effort, and yet—” Higgins gestured about.

The man shrugged.

“I’ve no experience with it, as I can’t see as how I’ve improved meself. The only difference is now I’ve got money, and a tailor, and that’s all the trouble any man needs, let alone making a woman a wife, and all that.”

“But it’s more comfortable and reasonable than your previous situation,” Higgins said.

“To be sure, it is,” replied Doolittle, and nearly made to pull at his cap deferentially out of old memory, but it wasn’t there, and he dropped his hand and sighed. “It’s the other side for me now, friends and relations and strangers all coming to touch me for a fiver here and a tenner there, and it’s not as though I object.” He held his hands up in self-defense. “Certainly it makes everyone happier, and Alfred Doolittle a friend to all, but some days it’s more being a patron, y’know?”

“Patron,” Higgins repeated.

“Like a I-talian with paintings,” Doolittle explained. “The man of the neighborhood, so rich he’s got nothing better to do but spread the wealth around, generously depend upon the service of those beneath him, and maybe slip a holiday or two for the barman and his missus on the side—” He lifted his glass and nodded over Higgins’ shoulder, “But it’s the sob stories I don’t need.” He looked deeply pained. “It’s disrespectful, especially as I’ve heard ‘em before. I used to make ‘em up meself, the best ones of all.” At Higgins’ look of query, he went on. “Mothers dying, fathers dead, uncles in jail, you know the stuff—a little moving tale to pull at the tender heartstrings, and widen a pocketbook a little more. And now I’m the other end of it, and it’s still bloody awful. I’m respectable, and now I’m responsible for people.”

Doolittle looked at him entreatingly.

“I’m an ordinary man, Professor,” he said in appeal, “Just wanting to live my life the way that suits me best—I don’t ask much, I really don’t. But all this, it’s—” Doolittle waved his hand in a little circle and looked very much put upon.

Higgins hmmed, still frowning. With the barman’s approach, the cloud lifted, but momentarily.

“Luxury is a trap,” Doolittle said, the words sounding back at them both as he spoke into his new glass before bolting it. “Wealth, comfort, the middle class… it’s pretty bars on a cage, and we go right to it, blinded by the very danger we’re in.”

“You wouldn’t go back to the tenements,” Higgins said reproachfully.

“Nah,” Doolittle replied. “Not me. You’re right, it’s safer at the top.” Higgins had said no such thing, and opened his mouth, but Doolittle charged on. “If I were a braver soul, I’d live free and wild. That’s the real thing. Escape, and be tied to nothing, to no one. Not to some ruddy house, not to the maids drilling me over what I want for tea, where I want my slippers put, and not to Mrs. Doolittle running up a tab at Whiteley’s like she’s Princess Louise.” He tapped his fingers against the edge of the table. “You never want any of it, but once you’ve got it, there’s no un-knowing it.” Doolittle gave a short laugh. “I s’pose that makes me glad I never changed the way I talk—at least I’ve got meself true in the end, eh? I know who I am, and what I think in my head matches with what comes out my mouth.”

And with that, he leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over himself, nodding once as though that settled things.

After a moment of silence, Higgins pushed his own glass across the table with one finger.

“Oh, thank you kindly,” the man replied, and downed it again in one.

Higgins took a moment to look around them. The patronage had not shifted in the time he’d walked through the door, either to enter or leave, and it did indeed seem a quiet and even dull sort of place to pass the evening, particularly if it was every evening for months on end.

“So,” said Doolittle breezily, but there was a hard little twist at the end of the word, and a strange gleam in the man’s eye, and Higgins had lost count of how many drinks he’d knocked back, “What brings you all the way riverside, anyway? Can’t imagine you’d pick the exact pub where Alfred Doolittle spends his evenings on pure accident, and if it’s to ask me if I want a seat in Commons, I make my thoughts on that subject known to all and sundry.”

And then he pronounced aloud two words which were only audible to the two of them, but were frank and vulgar enough to make his point quite admirably.

Higgins was a little taken aback by this sudden curve in the evening’s flow, and attempted to regroup.

“I heard of your wedding, and wanted to wish you well, though it’s been a month or two, I gather.”

“As you said, Professor, as you said.” The man looked at him through narrowed eyes, and Higgins did remember having said something to the effect already, well at the beginning of this endless conversation. “Odd, though, since last we met you wanted me gone and done, and pulled a nice one over on me with that Wallingford fellow. We left it not as enemies, but not friends either.” Higgins fidgeted in his chair, suspecting something rotten at hand. He didn’t like Doolittle addressing him as Professor, as though it was leading to something determinate. “Now, I don’t know about you, but it’s an interesting case before us: a man lives with a girl, unmarried, for six months after buying her for five pounds—”

“I did not buy her,” Higgins spat back in a heated undertone. “For God’s sake, you were the one who—”

“But upon a disquisession does not bring her up even once, nor even ask after her. Very curious, very curious indeed,” said Doolittle, rubbing his hands together in what he apparently thought was a conspiratorial manner.

Higgins opened his mouth, but the other man once more beat him to it.

“What else is there, d’you see what I mean? To talk about?”

“The American millionaire,” Higgins offered, for it was true.

If anything, the man across the table looked… somewhere between disgusted and disappointed. At any rate, he screwed up his mouth and dug his manicured thumbnail into the table surface.

“You and the millionaire. I never met the bloke. Might not have been real. He was nothing more than a summons from a solicitor telling me it would be to my advantage to visit his offices. Makes me wonder,” continued Doolittle, asking himself more than anyone else, “When do you stop being responsible for what’s happened?”

There was a very long pause while Higgins digested this.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I only ask it: when in the course of my life does the credit no longer go to you for turning me a profit like this? When do I come up on my own, I mean?”

“Wallingford gave you the money, not me. That was entirely his decision.”

“But you started us both on this path. D’you see what I mean? Are you always gonna be the origin of Mr. Alfred Doolittle? This, I mean?” He gestured over his ornate person again. “When does that stop, you getting to tell folks at parties that you made a dustman into a respectable philosopher, married and off lecturing a woman’s caucus in a union hall? If I invested every pound I get and make something of it, is that part of your doing, too?”

“I haven’t taken credit for your windfall, nor do I mean to,” Higgins protested. “Isn’t your fortune conditional on continuing to give talks? If you can cut off a cash flow with your actions at any point, my hands are out of it.”

“Maybe so, maybe so. But the implication is there, the consequence is there. As I say, it can’t be un-known. I think of it like this: the world’s a complicated place these days, ain’t it? They can trace where exotic flowers come from in fields in the Orient, track the sea voyages, tell you exactly how it got to England.  If I buy my missus an orchid, do I tell her it came from So-and-So of the East India Dutch Company?”

“Of course not, you’d tell her it came from the flower markets, and the East India Company went defunct forty years ago,” replied Higgins, feeling exhausted suddenly. The effort of trying to parse through Doolittle’s manner of speech, following his twisting and rambling rhetoric, as well as not getting himself tied up in too much of either of those for the sake of his own sanity, had grown past what he had expected when he’d walked in. Lord knew how Doolittle could go on, and here it was, again in clearest evidence.

The man chuckled dryly, once.

“If you go about writing letters telling the rich to leave it all to someone such as myself for jokes, that’s your business, Professor, and not mine. But I am not your interest here, as I say.” 

And there it was: Higgins found suddenly that though they had come to the crux of the matter, his entire reason for coming down here and waiting against a fence until he was sure she was not there and finding the right public house and sitting through all this—he found suddenly that he could not subject himself to the indignity of even asking in the first place.

And he wondered suddenly if he even really wanted to know the answer, whether it mattered.

“It’s funny, y’know—I never gave you much thought before,” Doolittle continued. “But sitting here, as it ‘appens, it occurs to us that you and me are very similar.”

Now Higgins felt his brain throb once, his vision nearly blurring, as though he had somehow pulled the mental muscle.

“Are we,” he managed in a bit of a wheeze.

“Yeah, sure,” was the easy reply, “Only I’m the one with the bitterness of sense instead of book learnin’. I don’t know much about companies and trading, y’see. Nor do I want to: it was only an example, sir.”

Higgins was very careful to ask his next question in a perfectly neutral tone.

“How, exactly, do you see the two of us as being similar, I am curious to know.”

“Ah, well, as I say: we’re all of us stuck in the trappings of luxury, of course, but that’s quite a bit of London, as it were.” He sat back and looked very thoughtful. “And neither of us needs Eliza, in the end—she’s resourceful enough to get on without us, thank Gawd, and she knows we don’t want more trouble than we can safely get away with. That’s two.”

Higgins quietly let that last bit move across his consciousness without close inspection.

“But if you are here to ask for her, I’m terrible sorry, but I can’t help you there,” the man went on, “She hasn’t spoken to me since I married her stepmother.” His expression suddenly changed to one of realization. “That’s the third one—neither of us has an idea where she’s got herself to. Slipped through, she did.”

“How do you know I don’t know where she is?” Higgins was put out by the assumption, certainly, but his insides were writhing. Doolittle drawing the two of them together by association. And the ridiculous theatrical smugness, this patently dishonest vaudevillian routine, playing some roguish character even when he was vastly beyond where he’d spent so much of his insignificant life; the man couldn’t even have the decency to obscure his arrogant triumph even a little.

The man hmmed, and smiled a little.

“Well,” he drawled, having the unmitigated gall to actually drum up the expression of humility, and Higgins felt another sharp pulse at the back of his head that would lead to a headache in no time, “At the end of it all, I’m still her dad.”

This bizarre statement had nothing to do with anything, and his face must have said so, for Doolittle continued.

“I look at it this way,” he began, and Higgins wanted to beat his head against the table. Every other sentence out of the man was some kind of observational aphorism, “There’s them in life who are born hungry, and there’s others who’ve always had too much on their plate.”

The man leaned back.

“She took my advice, as it were. I told her, I said she ought to double-cross you for everything you did to us under my good name, and if she left and here you come looking to me for her, well…” He raised his hands in a kind of conciliatory triumph. “Who am I to not take my credit as her father. I’m right proud of her for it, o’course—she can stand on her own two feet like she ought, putting me in no obligation, and it’s free lessons and months of work she got out of you swells, and if you fell for it, it’s nothing personal, only getting her own back from the snobs of the world.” Doolittle rotated the glass back and forth between his hands. “Eliza’s always been a clever one,” he went on. “Too much of a smart mouth by far, but a clever one in the end. But you knew that, didn’t you?”

Higgins stared at Doolittle for a long moment, probably too long. At last he gave a brief chuckle, and nodded.

“Well,” he said at last, and before Doolittle could do it, he rose from the table. “I must be off. Take care of yourself.”

“Ah, and yourself as well—and don’t pay too much mind to any of it,” the man said, “As I say, nothing personal.”

“Of course.”

He went to settling the tab for both of them, and as he stood there waiting, Higgins gazed at the nearly empty bottle of dark-brown alcohol that Doolittle had been drinking from all night. The barman came over to him, and Higgins nodded at it.

“Do you have another of those? Something better, unopened, perhaps?”

“Certainly, sir.”

The door swung open and a rum-looking trio came sauntering in. They cried out when they saw Doolittle, who jumped up from his table with raised arms and began slapping each of them on the back in turn. Higgins looked from the grubby foursome back to the bar, where a new bottle of whisky had transpired.

Higgins tilted his head and looked at it, the sounds of the carousing men shrill and harsh in the background.

“I’m afraid I won’t see my friend over there again for some time, and I want to make sure he has a night of it on me,” he told the barman. “Would you see to it that he has the new one, all of it? Only—” and here Higgins leaned over the bar, “These other chaps will take advantage, and, well—” He made an apologetic face, “Don’t leave the bottle.”

“Of course,” replied the barman. “Alfred brings us good business,” he said conversationally, removing the top from the new whisky and admiring the label. “This’ll put the night out of his mind, though—between you and me, money alone can’t improve tolerance for distillation like this. Probably won’t remember his name after a few slugs of the good stuff.”

Higgins moved his mouth in something like a smile.

“I’m sure it’ll all be fine.”

Wrong: it wasn’t a family of geniuses, it was a barely-strung-together clan of confidence tricksters, dubious in their lineage and faculties, all licking their stinking wounds, kicking and thrashing at anyone who lifted a hand to help them.

How dare she take advantage of him, of his goodwill, his private home, and money, and his knowledge—worst of it, worst of all—knowing all along that she’d pack anything of value at the first chance and disappear, having gotten her own. Getting their own back, that absurd notion that seemed to be passed between generations of the family like a mental defect, a grasping and low obsession, as though every insignificant grievance was reason to exact vengeance on the unassuming.

But was it really surprising? Truly, given what he’d just witnessed? Fruit from a poisoned tree withers and rots on the stem before dropping off, only to be left festering in mold and flies and the filth of the ground below. Taught her everything he knew, her father had, and to double-cross him and leave him a bewildered fool: that was the pièce de résistance for them both, their great collective triumph, to have pulled one over on a great idiot.

Petty, childish ingrates—

And you fell for it—

Using him—of course she had, hadn’t she shown up of her own volition after having eavesdropped when he’d given his address to Pickering? Always looking out for herself, the arrogant little liar, and he’d simply gone along with it as though it had been some light entertainment, mere folly. How laughable, how hilarious, to take a scorpion into one’s hand as though the act of generosity itself would be enough, would prevent the creature from its own natural impulse to deliver a fatal strike.

Higgins hadn’t yet looked into the guest bedroom where she’d had her little holiday, but now had a good mind in the morning to have the entire room emptied, the drapes and linens and rugs burned, the walls and floors deloused and sanitized. Resurrect it as a study room—vowel charts and anatomical illustrations hung and the chair that corrected for posture and breathing installed, there was a good place for it, he could close the door and let students recite aloud and soon enough it would never have been a bedroom in the first place.

Two hundred pounds, Pickering had paid for them both to be conned on a lark. Well, perhaps she would see a tenth of that when she went out to sell the dresses. At least the hired jewelry had been seen properly back into black velvet cases behind safe combinations.

And the father, luxuriating in his humiliation from the moment Higgins had walked into the pub. At least there you knew what you had in front of you—a violent, erratic drunk whose only aim was to throw away the good fortune that had fallen into his lap on horse racing. At least his life’s companion and angel of the hearth had the dulcet tones of a shrieking fishwife. May he be blessed with her for many, many years.

He’d been angry before, in the immediate shock. And he had thought that with the weeks, the dust had settled and with time, he’d been able to gain some sense of where things had gone end-up to begin with. Higgins had concluded that the strenuousness and dedication of study had all been too much for someone unaccustomed to putting in good work toward a lofty task. She had never been given structure in life, and so of course she whined and complained enough to try his patience very sorely indeed. Wasn’t the point of having a teacher to be given a course of education designed around the student, for them to be guided even through the most difficult and unpleasant aspects of learning something new?

That was the point, and as difficult as it was, it was how the foundations for a transformation were laid.

Old habits had to be broken, new ones set in carefully, scientifically, lest it all go wrong.

Perhaps she was with Karpathy these days, popping marbles into the mouth of a bank clerk from Leeds for a rounder pronunciation. The poor soul would wind up sounding like a Frenchman, and wouldn’t that be hysterical. The look on her face when she realized that instruction wouldn’t come as easily as mere imitation had—oh, that would be delicious. The girl had no concept of proper technique beyond what she’d done (and hated so richly and loudly and constantly), no sense for how the anatomy of vocal chords functioned. She’d gotten her own, and wasn’t that enough, hadn’t she taken enough? God help her if she attempted to teach using his methods the way that Hungarian imposter had, he would see her in the Royal Courts docket—

He’d been angry before, but now he was baptized in his own fury afresh, and this time it was not that she’d run off with some worthless, empty-headed idiot who’d ruin her life, who’d put her on maternal bedrest for the next ten years when she wasn’t working to support him (what would he do? Sit around looking young and handsome until he wasn’t? And then what?), and render meaningless everything he’d taught her, all the hard work, all the late nights and the hours, the investment he’d made into ensuring that she could do something, be someone—

The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated.

Was that not true of everyone?

Was that not true of him, too? Did he not deserve to be treated on the level, and not by means of subterfuge, of deception and trickery? Of sneaking down the staircase at three in the morning, taking care that no one should hear her footsteps on the staircase, or the hinges at the front door? Did he not deserve to be spoken to, to have an actual conversation—

I can’t talk to you, you turn everything around on me—

Suddenly exhausted, Higgins pressed the heel of one palm to his forehead. So much anger, it cost him nothing, and yet—and yet.

He was so tired.

Tired enough that the fight had gone out, the passion drained from him suddenly and he was left with only the sensation that the chemicals coursing through his brain had been cut off without warning, and it was all left half-finished, unsatisfied, and as though he had wasted the energy. Cut off so quickly that his hand ached, and nearly trembled. The rage spent, it seemed now like something that had happened years ago, a vaguely shameful memory for how much of himself he had devoted to it, nurtured it, and for what.

To what end, all this complication and turmoil? It yielded nothing but sleeplessness and more anger, circling back on itself in an inescapable loop.

Perhaps none of it mattered.

She could do as she liked.

She could sell what she had taken—or not, likely she wouldn’t, that wasn’t a reasonable or rational assumption, for she was good enough now that she wouldn’t need to. She was off and married, or not, or teaching, or not, she was nothing, she was everything, she was one thing and she was something else entirely.

Perhaps he would never know. Perhaps that was what there was to face, in the end.

Higgins tried in the darkness of his bedroom to calm, to separate himself, the way he could in the quiet of church, and when that failed he went into the bath room in search of a bromide powder.

Chapter Text

In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world.

- Henry David Thoreau

December 1911

I thee— see thine image through my tee-ahhs tonight
And yet to-day I thaw— saw thee sssmiling. Haah-oo
refehh the cawse?—Beloved, is it thahh-ooh—thou
Oah I, who maketh— makes me sad? The acolyte
Amid the chaahn-ted joy and thhhankful rite
May so fawll flat, with pale inthen—insensate brow,
On the altar-stairr—

“Stɛə,” Higgins murmured. “Draw out the vowel and elide the consonant.” And the man sitting in the chair placed across from the sofa repeated the soft pronunciation. 

Sir George Macready was living up to his name, to some degree. No, he wasn’t entirely “make-ready,” but he was giving his all to slow and steady progress through the thirtieth stanza of Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese when the hall clock struck four. The tall red-bearded man’s eyes flicked toward Higgins, who gave a slight nod toward the book the student was holding, and the resulting effect was an obvious and instantaneous relief. A handful of lines, and then freedom. 

Macready worked as estate agent to a gentleman farmer, but had recently come up in life to a baronetcy through the death of an elderly uncle or distant cousin; he and his wife were eager to debut themselves into polite society through judicious use of their money, and correcting a slight lisp was the goal he’d come in with, although Higgins had made a far longer list of things that also wanted fixing. Keeping themselves in a Gloucestershire village had been one thing, but now it was time for Macready and his well-meaning, if ambitious, wife to face facts head on: rhotic r pronunciations were a quick way to be ostracized for life.

Beloved, dotht— dost thou love? or did I see awl—oll
The glory as I dreamed, and fainted when 
Too vee-uh-ment light dilated my ideeuhhl,
For my thoul— soul’s eyes? Will that light come again,
As now these teahhs come—foll-ling hot and ree-oll?

“Thank you, Sir George. That’s all for today, I think,” Higgins said, setting the cup of tea he’d been nursing on a side table as he rose.

In cases of speech defect corrections, the white lab coat was appropriate, but Macready had been so overwhelmed that he developed a spontaneous stammer during their first meeting. Higgins wore only his ordinary suit coat after that, which produced smoother results, and the pupil showed at least the consistent desire for improvement. Indeed, the repetitive grind of work itself was not onerous to Macready, for he never spoke a word of complaint or mentioned growing tired. “And remember, not next week—”

“Christmas Day, of course,” his pupil replied in his booming, jovial tones, momentarily forgetting that it was cohse and to not lean in to that hard r sound. He had the good decency to wince a bit, grin self-deprecatingly, and then repeat it the way they’d practiced. 

Macready was not good. Nor was he great. He would never be, even for all his dedication and enthusiasm. The fellow wasn’t a bad sort, though. When he wasn’t going too carefully and haltingly over poetic meter and rhyme, he was all ruddy-cheeked good humor and easy friendliness. He made you almost want to hear about how many head of cattle a working farm supported, and what sort of grain was best to bring them up right for the success and health of the British public. 

And judging from the way he chattered, lispless, about the Tube and the crowds and the lodgings for himself and Lady Macready with a cousin and the fancy cinemas after each lesson, Higgins was quite certain Sir George only needed to relax, and the rest would likely work itself out. The man seemed more interested in being awed by London than truly concerned about the scientific precision of his sibilant tongue action.

Higgins did not wish his pupil ill—but neither did he offer suggestions, or even encouragement, as that seemed as though it would be a false promise. Either the Macreadys would discover the endemic and iron-clad snobbery of Society and, a little ashamed and abashed, find friends of more limited reputations and social clout who would accept them, or they would continue to try, to their oblivious detriment and social humiliation. Likely it would be the latter. Which was a shame, as they were awfully nice people, and hard-working. But Higgins chose not to say so.

Instead, he gave a brief smile, and Macready reached for his overcoat on the sofa. He’d rejected Isobel’s offer to take his coat and hat in the foyer—to her profound irritation, evident in the way she’d snapped the pocket doors shut behind him an hour earlier—but now it seemed he had kept his effects on hand for a reason, for he produced from within his coat pocket a bright blue square tin with a quaint gold border and a very neat red bow.

“The Missus insisted,” he said by way of apology-tinged explanation, “She’s been doing all sorts of Christmas baking, says it helps her think. It’s mince pies,” Macready went on, switching back and forth between hard and soft “r”s manically as he spoke, “And she did mention it was… frangy-panny, I think. I’m sure they’ll be delicious, she’s always been lush at baking, if I say so myself.” He looked embarrassed suddenly. “Er… no. I mean she’s very good.”

“Oh,” said Higgins as his student pressed the heavy tin into his hands, feeling suddenly awkward and uncertain, for he had nothing to give in return, not even from a pile of nondescript gifts in a hall closet set aside for just such a social situation. Did people do things like that? That seemed like the done sort of thing among clever types with loads of friends who dropped by to warm themselves before the fire, have a tipple of sherry, and leave a little package in brown paper and string before heading back out into the quiet of an afternoon snowstorm, on to the next friendly hearth. 

No one ever gave him unexpected presents, though, and he was not only unprepared to reciprocate in deed, but in words. 

“Thank you—very much, Sir George,” he said after a long and complicated pause. Higgins had—as gently as his patience would allow—reminded his student several times over the past month that the baronetcy entitled him to certain measure of respect, and it was not appropriate to inform someone that they could “just call him Macready” and leave it at that. Social rules were both a shield and a sword, and both somehow always managed to be offensive weaponry, Higgins thought darkly. 

“Ah, well,” the man replied, looking particularly ruddy about the ears, very rustic and like he was the sort of person who could not only do up figures and statistics about calvings but also throw hay bales for a few hours just for some healthful exercise. “My Alice is always saying how she wishes she could come with, even just to look in on the celebrated Professor, but—” He motioned in a rueful way, and Higgins nodded slowly. “You are a very busy fellow, and the lessons are more important than gabbing on with a housewife, certainly, as I tell her. Er… Lady, I guess, now.”

“Still—and I don’t believe I told you this,” Macready went on as they ambled toward the study doors, lifting one forefinger to make a particular point, “But she’s found a teacher who’s taken her on so she can get a more luxurious accent, and he’s got an assistant working with Alice, and she says, it’s a very nice young thing who you—”

“Do wish Lady Macready a Happy Christmas from me, Sir George, and you yourself,” said Higgins, putting out his hand for the man to shake. 

“Happy Christmas to you and yours, thir—sir,” said Macready, chuckling a bit. “Spending time with the family, are you? Not sitting around a great house like this by yourself, I hope,” he said as they lingered in the foyer, looking up at the grand staircase and all its paintings and lithos. 

“My brother throws a party every year,” Higgins replied, and gave that brief smile again. 

“Well,” said his student, settling his cap onto his head and making for the door which Isobel held open, “I’ll see you in the new year, then! New yeah, I mean—”

Higgins raised one hand in farewell and when Isobel had shut the outer door and come back through the second one, he looked down at the tin of mince pies, and then held it out to her.

“Take this downstairs so the staff might enjoy them,” he told her, and she lifted one corner of the tin as she went, a pleased expression developing over her features at the good fortune. 

He returned to the study and idly sipped at his tea, winced and poured himself a fresh cup, then wandered over to the desk where his black smoking jacket was still hanging on the back of the chair. Higgins switched his coat for that, and was about to go in search of his pipe—for it was not in the front pocket as he’d assumed—when he heard the telephone ring in the hall.

Soon enough, Mrs. Pearce materialized in the doorway.

“Mr. Higgins wishes to speak with you, sir,” she said. “Shall I say you are out?”

Normally he would allow her to go forth and sin some more in telling a lie, but it was the week before Christmas, and likely this had to do with his mother in some capacity. What to get her, or what to do with her, or some such. He had an appointment later in the week to address the matter of a gift. 

“No, I’ll speak with him,” he answered, and she went out into the hall. He found the telephone receiver on the front table.

“Yes, Charles, what is it?”

“Are you coming to the party this year?” His eldest brother always sounded as though he were trying to cause a row in a Commons debate, or shout loudly enough to get everybody’s attention over the PMQs. Charles always spoke first, quickly, and last as well. Always. “You didn’t respond to the invitation.”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” Higgins said, opening the drawer to the table and peering within. No pipe there, although there was a piece of melted penny sweet stuck to some very fine cream notepaper in the back. He pulled it out, inspected it rather grimly, and set it back for one of the maids to deal with. 

“Reconsider,” Charles told him, sounding like a Naval captain at the helm of His Majesty’s fleet, “Mother’s complaining about not seeing you enough, to me. You owe her a visit. The church service is at ten. Meet us there.” He rang off, and Higgins let the arm holding the receiver drop to his side. 

“Mrs. Pearce, have you seen my pipe?” Higgins hollered loud enough for her to hear down in the kitchen. The green baize door around the corner opened, and one of the footmen stuck his head out. 

“She says it’s in the desk drawer where you left it, sir,” the young man told him, and Higgins clattered the phone back into its cradle and went back into the study, muttering to himself. Now that a direct order to attend the Christmas party had come down from above, he was annoyed, and it was growing by the minute. Usually he spent the holidays alone in blissful silence, reading in his pyjamas and dressing gown before the fire and enjoying an uninterrupted stretch of solitude. Now he would have to think and consider and plan and procure gifts—actual individual gifts.

Dear God, what did children want? Sweets? He had plenty of those. Chocolate truffles, and oranges, even when it was snowing outside. Higgins looked up from yanking out the middle left drawer of his desk. No, they would be stuffed full of sweets and puddings and custards before the holiday had even begun. That was no good, for they’d be expecting that sort of thing as a starting baseline. He went on. Trains? Did they like something to do with trains? Or… dolls, perhaps? Were they too old now? How many children did James even have?

He rose to his full height and stood in the midst of chaos and a thoroughly askew set of desk drawers. A faint panic began to rise in him—his mother he could contend with, he had only to make a choice among a limited selection, it was all this other nonsense that he’d never had to consider before. Mrs. Pearce usually assembled a box of fruit, and the staff would pack it up and send it over. And then that brought on a little more panic, for didn’t other people give Christmas boxes filled with fine things to their staff instead of envelopes of cash and three paid days off from work? Oh God, what if three days wasn’t enough? Did they want more? Would it be rude to ask for their help if he’d been making them pack gifts all these years and they hadn’t gotten anything from him? Was it even possible to acquire acceptable gifts with mere days before the holiday itself? What if he couldn’t find anything? He couldn’t even remember how many nieces and nephews there were—there was a Grace in there somewhere, named for his mother, and a Rupert? Or was it Raymond?

Higgins dropped into the desk chair as a single page fluttered to the rug. He forced his eyes shut and made himself think. 

Charles and Ruth. Grace… Percy… and… who was the other one? Another boy, who always seemed to have such an unfortunate haircut. Bertram. Or Bill? Higgins shook his head, kept his eyes closed, and went on.

James and Sarah. Twin girls, a single boy, and then another girl… or three. No idea on the names, something ludicrous and biblical. He could probably point in their general direction, say “Hezekiah,” and one of them would answer to it.

Victoria and… He waited, and then groaned in frustration. Patrick. No, Joseph. God, the man had such a memorably odious family name, but an utterly forgettable Christian one. It didn’t matter, he decided, he’d stay away from the fellow. They had a son—that was Rupert—who was off in India being a Lieutenant, and one daughter, Honoria, very athletic, taking swimming lessons. The only reason he knew that was because his mother had mentioned it and then went on to tell him of the new natatorium at her girl’s school, where young ladies learned the proper techniques by fascinating methods: they stayed out of the water entirely, and practiced while suspended by harnesses and cables in the air, and didn’t he think that was more salutary in its focus on precision and correct form?

No, but it was absolutely hysterical to picture this, and he’d laughed uproariously even as Mother had said in a scolding way that she wouldn’t tell him anything else about what any of his family were doing, ever, if he were going to behave like that. 

And that was all of them—that he could remember, anyway. And all of them would expect cadeaux, certainly, and he had but days to go before shouldering the burden of playing the beneficent, if somewhat distant, uncle and brother. Higgins reassembled himself from where he’d crumpled back in the chair and pulled open the pencil tray to his desk.

Bang in the center of the tray was his pipe. Marvelous. Rolling his eyes, he plucked it out, only to discover that a few burnt flakes had fallen out and were mixed in among his good writing tools. With a sharp sigh, he pulled on the tray handle and prepared to empty everything onto his desk when something stuck at the back. 

Higgins leaned over and squinted into the dark corner where the tray ended. There was a small case or box, which he fished around to dislodge before pulling again, harder this time, and then there was a pencil tray in his lap, along with mahogany oblique holders, straight pens, and the fine needlepoint nibs he had to order specially, all spilling about on the carpet and beneath the desk, and it was just about time for him to go upstairs to bed and hold a pillow firmly over his mouth and nose until it was all over, he thought. 

The small black case was still sitting in the tray, and he picked it up before tossing the wooden drawer onto the blotter with a small crash. 

It opened with a soft pop and a crackle in the hinge, and Higgins found himself looking down into a black bit of velvet lining where there lay a rounded lock of pale yellow hair, secured at its cut end with a faded scrap of red ribbon. 

He stared at it for a long time, a very long time, until the maids came through the doorway, and then he snapped the case shut and tossed it into one of the other drawers as they began asking him if he was all right. 

Alas, I have grieved so I am hard to love.
Yet love me—wilt thou?  Open thy heart wide,
And fold within, the wet wings of thy dove.

The entire congregation rose at the sounds of the organ playing the opening strains to “As with Gladness Men of Old” and Higgins realized that they’d already gotten to the part where the Magi were adoring the Christ child before glancing about to see if anybody had caught him daydreaming.

He’d been assigned a place at the far right end of the pew, down past his sister and her husband, for they were all arranged according to the hierarchy of age—he couldn’t remember if they were trained this way particularly, or if it was an unspoken rule. He could see over the tops of everyone else’s heads if he turned his face and looked down the line. The Higginses were generally a rather short bunch, but somewhere in their lineage had been an absolute giant, for he’d turned out exceptionally tall compared to the rest. Charles looked bored. James’s wife Sarah was picking at loose threads in her gloves. Vicky was wearing a brand new ensemble of a green velvet dress and matching stiff-sided turban with a pheasant feather that jutted straight up and trembled as she sang. And to cap off all this grandiosity was a self-satisfied expression as she urged herself and others to display humility toward God in what was probably thirty-five shillings’ worth of new togs. Splendid.

Joseph, Vicky’s husband, was the closest his sister would probably ever get to being a member of the landed gentry, barring a death or a murder or something—and Higgins would never bet against his sister on that count. He was the third son of a baron, with enough money to turn out his wife beautifully for the holidays, but remain a gentleman of leisure who spent his time writing revolutionary tracts about… it had to do with installing Bolshevist values in Britain, or something? Higgins couldn’t remember, but seeing the man’s face had dredged up memories of the man’s principal hobby being a great nuisance to practically everyone. He inspired strong opinions.

The children were relegated to the pew one row back, and they had all turned out to be a few years older than he’d initially suspected. He’d had to enlist the help of Mrs. Pearce in that regard, and she was never off the mark. It had all been enough to try his very dignity as he’d stood, cup of tea in hand, while his housekeeper had directed the maids and footmen in how to achieve a solution to the situation in the study.

“Who even knows how many of them there are,” he’d said aloud, mostly to himself.

“Nine, if you count the twins separately,” replied Hannah from beneath the desk, picking up little silver pen nibs. She paused. “And if you aren’t counting Rupert, of course, since he’s grown.”

Now how on Earth could she know a thing like that? he’d asked.

Well, sir, she’d been the one to wrap his gift every year while Mrs. Pearce wrote out all their names for the card.

He’d rapidly packed off the two of them down to Regent Street in a taxi, and at the last moment dug about in his trouser pockets to press more money, he had no idea how much, into Mrs. Pearce’s hands in case they wanted Hatchard’s instead of Hamley’s, and to get themselves a bit of tea as an incentive, before he shut the cab door on them. Hannah had burst out in a ridiculous laugh as the driver lurched them forward, and Higgins had waved as Mrs. Pearce turned and gawped at him out the back window, piles of coins still in her upturned palms.

It was all taken care of, and he’d gone to an art broker later in the week to purchase a charcoal study of A Convalescent by Tissot for his mother, as it had long been one of her favorite paintings. She studied oils in Paris while being finished, and always had a fine taste for art. It was the main reason she often commented upon the disaster of a piece he kept above the fireplace—at once both childish and brutal, was how she put it. He ought to have a good seascape, a Courbet, perhaps, or at least a Vernet, for that would set his clients’ minds at ease over his reputability, never mind that he always had to tell her they were students and not clients, or god forbid—patients.

Higgins looked up again at the sounds of the organ and was surprised to discover that it was over, the bishop and other administrators in charge of the Christmas spirit were in the midst of making their processional down the aisle, Vicky was hissing at someone to hurry up and straighten that tam, and soon they all began making their way outside.

And now the part that he had dreaded in secret all week: luncheon with his entire immediate family. That would be followed by a writhing mass of children opening presents, which was more cause for alarm, because Higgins imagined this day going badly in so many ways.

Everything—the gifts, the wrapping paper, his unusual presence—would be embarrassing, desperate, needy, and they would all spend the afternoon in a tense silence broken only by Vicky turning to whisper to Mother now and again. He guessed that their expectations were towering at the possibility of his appearance for Christmas, either heightened beyond all reason or so low as to be insulting, and he would fall short either way, the gifts would be too wrong or too young or too something, and then the children would have that written indelibly on their memories now that most of them were old enough to remember him, it wouldn’t merely be his siblings and mother who thought him strange and irritating, but all of them, these people whom he barely knew, strangers—

Higgins stopped.

This was all precisely why he stayed away in favor of a nice, quiet Christmas at home, alone, with a pot of tea and a very dense book. It didn’t inspire all this… uncharacteristic anxiety.

With that, the car pulled up in front of Charles’s Knightsbridge address, and he sighed and made himself get out.

Lunch was an exercise in anthropology, Higgins sitting blessedly down toward the end of the table where he had the best vantage point and could observe all the little mannerisms and traditions they’d formed amongst themselves, utterly foreign to him. Charles got up to answer a distant ringing telephone, Ruth excused herself mere seconds after he left the room to go trotting off after him, and nobody even looked up in surprise that their hosts had disappeared. The children were made to go around the table and declare what they’d enjoyed the most about their year. Charles returned, offered a toast to Mother, and upon putting the punch glass to his lips ran off again to answer another call, Ruth eagerly following in his wake.

James was far thinner than he’d been the last time Higgins saw his brother. Something about a diet of extreme abstinence intended to reflect what Jesus had eaten while in the desert, which did not seem in the spirit of a season that involved so much food. He did not eat much, for there did not seem to be much he could choose from, Mother noted aloud, which of course made the Reverend’s expression ever more pious and holy. Higgins had always guessed that his brother’s ambitions bent toward the upper reaches of the church, of becoming Archbishop of Tooting Something Or Other before long, but this new program of restriction seemed almost calculated to ensure that he would remain in the parsonage of some poor collection of lost souls in the outskirts of London.

When Charles returned at last for the third time, one of the footmen—for there were still servants at table, Higgins realized, which did put his mind a little more at ease about his own staff and the lack of Christmas boxes—dimmed the lights and brought out an enormous Christmas pudding the size of a cannonball, speckled all over and with a sprig of holly on top, flaming away in about a quarter-inch of brandy, to polite applause from the assembled.

“Everybody remember their wish?” Ruth said, and the children all dutifully screamed that indeed, they had. The Sunday before, the family had gathered together and each taken the spoon in the mixing bowl from Cook, given the unboiled mass a stir, and made a wish. He looked round the table and pictured them all standing in the kitchen together, Charles having to be reeled back in from his study and made to do it, James giving the briefest of flicks with the handle, Vicky closing her eyes and wishing for more than anyone else could wish for.

He couldn’t recall doing the Stir-Up with his siblings, ever, Higgins thought with a frown. Not in all his life. Perhaps they used to do it when they were younger, before him.

“Gosh, I hope I get the sixpence this year,” said one of James’s daughters, and a few of her siblings agreed.

In the end, it was Charles’s youngest son who bit the coin—“Oh, Bertie, how lovely, but be careful of your teeth!” Ruth cried—another of James’s girls found the lucky wishbone, Mother rather amusingly found the thimble, and indeed, Higgins looked down at what his fork had touched on the plate and found a small silver anchor between the tines.

“What does safe harbor mean, anyway?” asked—he took a stab at identifying her—Grace on his right. Higgins picked up the anchor and brushed away the crumbs.

“It means you’ll have a safe year, free of danger,” he replied, and offered the little toy to her. She held it between her thumb and forefinger and squinted through her glasses.

The last of the dishes cleared away, the party were released into the grand parlor, where they all sat around to observe the children’s attempt to restrain themselves from violently shredding everything within a ten-foot radius in their eagerness. The parental bounty did not disappoint. A hockey stick, chemistry set, piles of books with gold-foiled stamped covers, a wooden train, several dolls, and a sewing basket later, one of the girls held up a small lacquered case patterned with red, white, and pink petals, and said,

“Who is this from? I don’t recognize the handwriting.”

“Let me see, dear,” said Vicky, who was nearby, and she peered down at the card. “Oh, it’s from your Uncle Henry.”

Everyone in the room turned to stare at Higgins, who blinked rapidly a few times and fidgeted with his glass of claret.

“It’s a jewelry box,” he said in the ensuing silence.

The girl looked at it anew, turning it this way and that, opening it and looking inside.

“There’s nothing in it,” she remarked, and Higgins thought there was always a mistake, and there it was.

“You put jewelry in it, dearest, it is for your little necklaces and rings and school pins,” Vicky replied, but Higgins didn’t miss his sister’s vicious glance up at him.

When it was all over, he had no idea of the verdict, and this did not release the terrible pressure in his chest at all. The adults looked over the things he had given their children, and looked at him, and their expressions meant nothing, said nothing, gave away nothing—not even Vicky—and they meant it that way, he knew. Higgins poured himself more wine and was making his way down the hall, trying to remember where the library was in this godawful palace, it must be ten times bigger than what he kept himself in at Wimpole Street, when he passed another room with the door slightly ajar.

“—but I’m worried, you know,” his mother was saying in a soft voice, very low.

“Whatever for?” That was Vicky, speaking with the voice she only ever used on Mother. Her tone was not a genuine question, but a foregone conclusion—why would you bother with a thing like that?

“He’s so like your father,” their mother sighed, and Higgins immediately moved along on silent feet.

Refuge awaited him in the library, where there was a wing chair before the fireplace, and he sat there letting the light and heat flicker over his face, turning the glass and letting the details of the room fall away until he could nearly pretend this was his own house, his own fireplace, his own chair. He was just taking a sip when a slight creak from the door caught his attention, and Higgins very slowly rotated to find a dark group of heads clustered together in the slim gap.

He’d thought about how the afternoon could end in disaster, how it could be another decade before he’d attend another Christmas party. They were not a close family, all his siblings had been older and remote; he’d really only ever known Vicky, and that had not lasted long before she had a governess. All week he’d turned over in his mind the possibilities and had come up with no fewer than three escape plans, and that was not counting just outright diving through one of the windows and legging it down Sloane Street.

Adults do try in their way to apply the consistency of tradition to ease the way toward safe and happy memories. As a counterpoint, children will find ways to scuttle that through a deep, unshakeable fascination with anything off-book, for that is where the great adventure of life must surely lie—not with routine and order, but with mysterious uncles who swan up to the front door bearing loads of cracking presents and terribly grown-up detachment from everybody and everything, as though fussing over children or asking them silly questions in that irritatingly high-pitched voice that one’s relatives use at holidays were for lessers and mere mortals. Fascination blooms into curiosity, which provokes boldness of spirit and the seeking-out and questioning of such interesting new relations.

Higgins had not considered this alternate possibility, and now gazed upon his nine nieces and nephews with mounting horror.

“Hello?” he ventured at last. The dam broke; they all filed in to hover at the foot of his chair and have a good long collective look at him, like a clutch of geese with worryingly amorphous intentions.

“Who are you?” One of them—another of James’s daughters, or perhaps the same one from earlier, he had no idea—said.

“What?!” Higgins cried, for he was fairly certain they’d just reviewed this, that he had been declared their uncle merely an hour ago in front of God and everybody, and if they’d missed that not insignificant detail, he really was going to buy Charles a new window. “Who are you?”

“I’m Rhoda!” she cried, sounding as though they’d been over that, too, and it was an equally unjust query.

“I remember you,” declared the stout girl with dark pigtail braids who looked as though she’d be at home flattening someone on a sports pitch, “You came at Easter to Uncle James’s house. That was many years ago, most of you weren’t even born yet,” she declared to the rest of them proudly, as though she were terribly important for having this bit of ancient wisdom. Honoria turned back to him. “My father thinks you’re a loon,” she said breezily.

“And I think your father is an unprincipled hack,” Higgins replied in a cheerfully wise way.

To her credit, the girl crossed her arms over her chest and nodded. “That’s fair,” Honoria replied.

“Why haven’t we seen you in so long?” This was young Bertie, soft-spoken and looking like the sort who wanted to spend a rainy day indoors by the window, paging through a book of Monet’s watercolors. “Mum says that Christmas is supposed to be about family and spending time together. Don’t you think that?”

“Well, yes,” said Higgins after a moment. “Which… is why I’m here now.”

One of the girls settled herself onto a sofa nearby, and he felt himself rankle at the idea that they were all going to do it, to settle everywhere and crawl all over him and ask him a thousand prodding questions.

“Shouldn’t you be in the parlor playing with… something?”

“Perhaps,” said Percy, who’d rather insolently draped his arm up to the elbow over the back of the chair Higgins was sitting in. His voice vacillated between confidence and timidity. “But we’ve got all year for that, and who knows when you’ll come round again. Some of them have never even seen you before.” He gestured at his younger cousins, an act of preening to put himself on the level with Honoria in terms of seniority.

“You aren’t with the other adults,” said the girl on the sofa. The firelight caught her glasses, and Grace went on. “We see our parents every day, there’s nothing exciting about them. You could be anybody.”

“Oooh, a cat burglar,” said Honoria immediately.

“A secret agent!”

“Matinee idol!” The twins squealed in unison.

“Maybe he invented Monkey Brand, and that’s why he’s got so much money!”

“No, he’s not a tradesman,” Percy shot back self-importantly, “He’s one of us.”

“What does that mean?” Higgins said, glancing up at the boy with a hairy eye.

“A brush salesman!” They all turned to look at Bertie, who flushed a little. “I like the brush salesman, he’s nice and he lets me play with the samples from his case.”

“Look here, all of you,” said Higgins, lassoing them back in, “I don’t do any of those things, I’m a phoneticist and linguist.”

At this revelation there was silence.

“I teach people how to speak properly,” he said, exasperated.

“Everybody knows how to speak,” said Rhoda, “Why would anybody need lessons about it?” Her eyes widened suddenly. “Do you teach babies how to talk? Is that how it’s done?”

“No!—I teach people who speak but speak badly, who say owww instead of ohhh and drop their aitches and have the gall to screech garn and things like that. Or perhaps their mouths and throats don’t work quite properly, so I teach them how to deal with that—I did once have a case that I was sure was auto-echolalia, and that was quite interesting, for it presents almost like a stammer does, and to the untrained ear they can sound nearly identical, but of course if you’re a professional they’re no more the same than a duck and a wicket.” He chuckled at the utter absurdity of mistaking one condition for the other.

There was another moment of silence, this time accompanied by a stunned group expression.

“I had tonsillitis last month,” announced James’s son.

“Which one are you?” Higgins demanded of the hoarse little boy.

“Raymond.”

Dear God, there actually was a Raymond. He nearly passed a hand over his face.

“Right, well, tonsillitis can cause dysphonia, as you can hear for yourself, but then—” He paused, and fished around in an inside breast pocket before a look of eureka came over him, and he produced a metal loop with a handle, which he wound his handkerchief around. “Open your mouth and stick out your tongue,” Higgins said. The boy did, but Higgins pulled back first. “Didn’t one of you open a pen torch set?”

Percy produced the slender thing from his pocket with a flourish. Higgins switched it on, and shone the light into Raymond’s open mouth, who was bearing a pleased and proud look at being suddenly so useful. They all crowded round him to peer into their cousin’s gaping maw.

“All right, tongue—obviously—that up there is the hard palate, that’s the soft palate, you can see the uvula is a bit red, and of course it’s difficult to miss Raymond’s tonsils, for they are still a bit swollen and in the final stages of exudation—that’s that white stuff along the sides.”

A chorus of eeeeuuuughhh went up from them, but the children pressed closer round him, and Raymond’s eyes grew huge and round.

“Now, I am not a specialist in dentistry, but you can actually see where his first permanent bicuspid is coming in. Some people develop a nasty habit of sliding their tongue along a tooth that’s set wrong or at an odd angle, and the only way to correct their speech is to pack them off to a surgeon. Lift up your tongue, Raymond. No, all the way to the roof of your mouth. There. You can see the lingual frenulum there, which is that very fine strip of tissue connecting the base of the tongue to the floor of the mouth. You all have that yourselves, and may be surprised to hear that some unlucky people have very short ones, which causes another speech defect called—”

With a loud bang, the library door swung back against the wall, and Vicky came bounding over to seize Honoria by the shoulder.

“What exactly do you propose by this, exposing all these children to each other’s infectious germs right before the school term begins?” she demanded of him.

“It was just a laugh, Mum!” Honoria cried, wrenching her arm out of her mother’s grasp and rubbing at it sullenly. “He was telling us all about echo-labia and frenulums.”

“Echo-lalia,” he hissed under his breath.

The look with which Vicky fixed her younger brother said all it needed to.

“Using language like that in front of children,” she said in a low, dangerous tone. “Rhoda, Raymond, you lot, out—your father is looking for you.” Vicky turned and swept out with the full confidence that there were nine children in her wake. Higgins wrapped the tongue depressor in his handkerchief and put it back in his breast pocket, then looked about for his glass of wine.

“It’s quite a good book,” said Grace, who was deliberately slow to leave the room. She had a copy of something called In Desert and Wilderness in her hand. “Much better than The Railway Children. And I read The Secret Garden when it was serialized, but it’ll be nice to read through it again in one go.”

“Oh,” said her uncle, a bit awkwardly, but cautiously pleased nonetheless.

“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to find a murder mystery next time, or something about mass plagues? I’m terribly interested in mass plagues. I wish there were more books about things like that—I’m not at all afraid of them,” Grace said, and Higgins did not doubt her, for she had shades of being the cleverest of the lot. Still, he hesitated.

“Not really the sort of thing a parent would want, I expect,” he said, looking out the doorway as though Vicky were about to storm back in and haul Charles’s daughter off as though Grace belonged to her instead. He glanced back to find her giving him a look of appraisal, as though reassessing her initial opinion of him. Higgins gestured faintly. “Good thing I’m your reprobate uncle instead, eh?”

Grace’s face shifted, and she looked pleased at this bit of conspiratorial insolence, but paused in the doorway.

“You don’t have any children, do you?”

“No.”

“Not married?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Higgins let the question lie for a moment.

“Recently I was informed that I am extraordinarily difficult to live with and impossible to get along with, and so I ought not to inflict myself on anybody,” he replied.

His niece lingered, but it was too much, and she was too young to be able to come up with a response to that, and when she finally did leave, it was to a mixture of relief and something else he did not name.

Higgins elected to leave before things really could take a turn for the worse—likely he’d used up the last little reserves of goodwill he’d ever had with these people. Vicky met him in the foyer as the butler was helping him into his greatcoat. He’d poked his head into the parlor and managed to make a further hash of the afternoon by telling the children a final Happy Christmas as James was reading from the Book of Mark, and of course that meant the quiet was disrupted and they all bolted to their feet, eager to get away from another dull sermon, everybody was asking questions, demanding in their whining voices why he had to go, trying to throw their sticky little arms around him, and finally he’d peeled off one of the twins and made a run for it.

“Always have to inject yourself where it’ll cause the most pandemonium, don’t you?” Vicky said. Higgins heaved a great sigh and turned to his sister.

“Charles ordered me to show up. What am I supposed to do, hide in a broom closet? I tried that, and they found me anyway,” he told her sharply, for he was very tired, and did not want to be nagged by anybody, least of all her.

“Oh, I’m not that angry, Henry,” she said placatingly, her arms wrapped about herself. She looked up at him, and opened her mouth as though to say something, and then the parlor door opened and James stepped out.

“I think they’re all settled, Sarah does have a way with children,” he remarked in his quiet voice.

“Henry was just leaving,” Vicky said, flicking an irritated gaze over her elder brother.

“Christmas is a time for love of all mankind, Victoria,” James said gently, and took his brother by the elbow to stand off a little distance. Higgins could see out the corner of his eye his sister raise one hand to fuss at her hair; she didn’t like being cut out of conversations.

James looked him in the eye when they were far enough away.

“It has been so good to see you again, Henry, and my sincerest hope is that the spirit of Christ is with you this season,” the Reverend told him.

Higgins made a sound that was something like oh, er in response.

“A needful reminder for the future: that you not bring out things like tongue depressors; children mustn’t get into the habit of examining themselves.”

With that, James turned and steered them both back over to Vicky.

Just then, Charles appeared, a pencil between his fingers that he was waggling up and down as though he were expecting a pad of paper to materialize in midair.

“Anyone seen Ruth?” he announced to no one in particular, then looked up and saw the three of them together. “Henry,” he said in blunt surprise, “You’re still here?”

Higgins responded by letting his hands dangle at his sides and clicking his tongue softly against the back of his teeth. This was an old joke that never failed to hit the mark it was intended for: Vicky immediately turned away with both hands clamped over her mouth, trying not to laugh but failing to conceal a girlish snort, and then of course she could not mask the faint giggling that overtook her.

“For now,” Higgins replied drily.

“Oh,” said Charles. He looked befuddled, then suspicious, then as though he were trying to remember why he’d wandered into the foyer. “Happy Christmas,” he said abruptly, and rumbled off back where he’d come from.

“One and all,” said Higgins blandly, rocking back and forth on his heels. James took this opportunity to silently make his way back into the parlor, and his younger siblings watched him go.

“God, both of them are more insufferable than ever,” Vicky said when the door closed.

“I think I need a holiday after that,” replied Higgins. Vicky took in a deep breath and eyed him.

“You’re lucky, you can leave whenever you like,” she told him, reaching up to straighten his coat lapels. “Charles is making a play for Prime Minister,” his sister went on in a low voice, her lips hardly moving. “I overheard him and Ruth talking—he’s put together some discreet choices for a cabinet.”

Higgins looked at the study door where his eldest brother was plotting and planning, and wondered vaguely if it constituted something of a government overthrow, in the broadest sense. What a strange family they all were, and him the only one willing to admit it. Or the only one crowing about it. Or… the only one who wasn’t normal.

“Not as though he hasn’t been making lists of allies and enemies since he was in the nursery,” Higgins said, matching her in that same low undertone. Vicky pursed back a grin and swatted at his arm.

“You weren’t there, what do you know?” she said. And then her face did something else, she kept folding and unfolding and refolding the lapels, back and forth, and she said nearly in a whisper, not meeting his eye, “Is it going to be all right?”

He took her meaning instantly, and the answer nearly came out of him, but he paused, and then she did look up at him, fierce little Vicky with a permanent frown, who’d once slapped him in the face when he’d put a live frog on a saucer the first time Nanny had let them have their own tea.

Higgins said, nearly in a whisper,

“Why wouldn’t it be,”

And it was not a question.

“Are you leaving, Henry?” his mother said, entering the scene. Vicky pressed the heel of her hand against his collarbone through his coat once, and stepped away, not to the study or the parlor, but continued down the hallway.

“Yes,” he said brightly, “Done enough damage for the next six Christmases, I expect.”

His mother hmmed in her very dignified way.

“And you’ll join me next week?”

“Yes, of course, of course,” he replied, and leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek. “Happy Christmas, darling, I hope you enjoy the drawing very much,” and he exited through the great front door. When he’d got all settled into the car and it was pulling away, he looked back to see the silhouette of his mother in the doorway, a small dark figure surrounded by warm amber and golden light from the entrance, still watching him.

When he got home, Higgins realized he’d forgotten to leave any of the lights on for himself when he’d left that morning. The hearths were cold, the servants were all off doing whatever it was they did at Christmas, and he was alone in a completely dark house.

Instead of switching on the electric lights in the entry, he sought out and found the taper candle that Mrs. Pearce always kept in a side drawer. Its light didn’t quite reach into the corners and open balconies of the house—he drifted into the study to see what it looked like, and it was not the same room at all. He’d not used a candle in ages, and it was a very curious thing, for he could not remember what the place had looked like before the wiring was all put in.

How small the light made the room seem; how tight and close to him.

For once, the house on Wimpole Street was not a huge place, a grand cavernous place fit for a tremendous person, but a cocoon, and he thought that perhaps life ought to be fitted to the person rather than a person fitting themselves into a life and everything that comes with it.

Chapter Text

We improve ourselves by victories over our self. There must be contests, and you must win. 
- Edward Gibbon

New Year’s Eve 1911

Higgins awoke, clammy and wretched.

There had been a girl, twisting her way out of the curls she was put into every morning, and she knew it all, knew more than she ought to, and he was very generous and forward-thinking for not minding about that. She’d kept one hand on his shoulder, smiled up at him, and said something, but he lost it very quickly. He studied the curves of her throat, kept time with her pulse, and knew her by her sighs and soft sounds, for there was a language in there, and he taught himself to fluency. 

How had this begun? He couldn’t remember—by subtle sign, by the flick of her eyes, by the way her bare fingertips drifted across his lips as he read aloud to her. They’d been one thing, and then they were another, and she’d promised him over and over, insisted in the study with his face in her soft hands, that they two would go on as they were, as they had been. 

And they had, until they hadn’t.

He forced himself upright rather than linger face-down among the pillows, sat on the edge of the bed, and pressed his feet flat against the cold floor, breathing slowly until the pressure in his chest finally surrendered and disappeared to wherever it had come from.

No need for any of that. He had things to do, work to be done. 

There was a letter downstairs from an editor at The Daily Telegraph about some of the columns he’d penned once on the finer points of proper speech and grammar. They wanted to reprint them throughout the early days of the new year—people liked to feel they ought to and indeed could improve themselves, Horace Brinkley had written most deferentially, and even through the Professor had made recommendations throughout, and described his methods, the public would never truly follow a course of study unless they’d put money into it, and this would be a fine way for the Professor to gather some interest in private elocution lessons, and at no real inconvenience to himself.

Higgins had taken a random guess at the truth beneath all this, decided that Horace Brinkley would propose at the end of the letter a rate of less than half what they’d originally paid him (“seeing as how the work has already been done and the only thing that remains is the printing, sir, I am sure that you will see our position—”), scanned the missive for the pertinent section, and found himself absolutely in the right. Brinkley had even the gall to write out numbers in longhand, the better to obscure his plan a little. Insulting, really, and beneath him, but then…

They were already written, weren’t they? And there was little harm in promoting his life’s work. As long as people spoke correctly , that had always been the driving purpose.

And so he rose, shaved, and went to answer Horace Brinkley in the affirmative. 

The business concluded, he spent the rest of the morning and afternoon reading a new monograph on possible treatments of post-apoplectic apraxia. And when Isobel brought his tea into the study, he bolted it and went upstairs to dress, for he and his mother were going to the opera that night. 

“—Of course Charles thinks that the Horburys would be far too indecorous a choice given the current climate in Westminster,” Mrs. Higgins was saying in the cab as Higgins watched the street lamps pass by. “Henry? Are you still in here?” 

He turned toward her.

“Charles and Ruth want to throw a party and they aren’t sure whether to invite everybody they know from the Tories or if they ought to play both sides a little and have some Liberals along too—and to answer your earlier unstated question, of course inviting Asquith is an idiotic notion.” Higgins fidgeted beneath his formal cape. “But it’ll turn into a damned nuisance if he doesn’t.”

“Precisely what I told him,” his mother replied, gratified that someone was in agreement with her logic and reason. Higgins turned his face out the window and went back to his thoughts. 

Another appointment with Sir George later this week. He needed to give the second edition a full appraisal, it was getting on too long since the publisher had heard from him. Did he owe a letter to someone at a place called Hoxton House? Higgins couldn’t recall if something had come in the post from there, or whether possibly a student from his lecturer days at Oxford would have ascended to a place with a name like that, and that was what he was remembering. Did they—

“—to go and see Madame Butterfly,” his mother concluded, and Higgins turned back to her.

“What?” 

There was a pause.

“Henry, I am beginning to wonder whether you ought to see a specialist about your hearing,” she replied tartly, but did not expect him to answer, because she went on, “I said , that was the reason we are going to see Madame Butterfly.”

He looked back out the window as the cab pulled up outside the Royal Opera, and indeed, there were placards with the name PUCCINI visible amid the sea of fashionable opera-goers. 

“Ah,” he said. It was not a pleasant sound.

“Oh, you haven’t been listening to anything I’ve said,” Mrs. Higgins said, exasperated. “What your students must think if you don’t give them the courtesy of paying attention while you make them talk nonstop, I cannot begin to fathom.”

Provoked to equal irritation, Higgins replied,

“Of course I was listening! I’ve simply got a lot on my mind, that’s all. End of year business and all that.”

Still, he got her out of the cab, took her arm, and looked up at the building and its lit columns with something like reluctance. 

He’d planned to spend the evening sifting through his own thoughts while whatever was onstage went on, but now this, and the unpleasant association with it, and… well. He could ignore it. It was only music, after all. 

The opera box was a nice little thing. His mother had always had her nice little things—a box at Ascot, plenty of beautiful artwork surrounding her, good taste and breeding. She had never had a sense for the full breadth of disappointments that life provided: apart from her husband’s death, the only thing that had ever truly affected her was an ever-so-slight descent in social standing, but then she’d married for love and had gotten lots of money from it, as well as what she’d brought into it. 

At the strains of the opening prelude, he settled in to the velvet seat beneath him and tried not to fidget. Higgins had not been to see this opera in a very long time indeed, and the faint sense of... excitement, or agitation, that had started up as he’d decamped from the car was now tempering itself very quietly into a sense of dread. He frowned, and opened the box of chocolates he’d brought—a long-standing tradition between himself and his mother which had always amused her. He stared down into it as Suzuki the maid observed of Pinkerton in her poetic fashion:

A smile conquers all,
defies ev'ry trouble.

And his attention wandering in boredom, Pinkerton sighed in languid response that

When they begin to talk,
alike I find all women.

—and Higgins fiercely tried to distract himself by discerning which had the caramel center and which were cream. 

He knew the story well enough—an American naval officer married a young Japanese girl on a lark, returned to the United States for three years while she pined for his return, and then he came back, only to collect their child for his newly wed American bride to raise. In the end, Cio-Cio San committed ritual suicide and it was a terrible tragedy, surely not the way to ring in the new year. He would even put up with something as mawkish as La traviata , for at least it had a champagne toast even as tuberculosis took out the leading lady, but this? He wouldn’t have chosen it in the middle of June. 

At the interval, he asked his mother if she wanted to take a turn about the lobby, for it was a long performance, but she declined, leaving him bound by manners to sit in the box with nothing to do. Higgins had no particular caution or care for whether he flouted the rules of etiquette, but the first order of going out to the theatre with a lady was to stay beside her at all times, even at his own inconvenience, and he could not be induced to break it against his mother. 

“Do stop hammering your leg up and down like that, it’s unseemly,” she murmured, peering through her opera glasses at the boxes across the great hall and down into the stalls below. Higgins suppressed a sigh and flipped through the program in futile disquiet until the house lights went down again and the next act began. 

It was the second song.

That was all that had to be borne, all that he must buffer himself against, and then the rest would pass over him like the tail end of a storm, the worst of it gone. 

Higgins swallowed, and watched the lead soprano lift one graceful hand as she stood before the open panels of her little home, looking out over the beautifully-painted scene of wind-swept Japanese pines that trailed down to the bay beyond. Cio-Cio San paused, and then those terrible notes of anguish and love and foolish, hopeless longing rose out of her in perfect clarity as she told her maid that one day, one fine day, they would see a ship on the horizon, and the love of her life would return to her.

He could feel himself gnawing the inside of his lip so that it was nearly raw, and pressed his fingernails into the edges of the chair beneath him until she said, fantasizing and imagining the lovers’ reunion—

See you? Now he is coming!
But I do not go to greet him. Not I. 
I stay upon the brow of the hillock, and wait there
and wait for a long time, but never weary
of the long waiting.

—and then Higgins was standing, his mother hissing at him about where on Earth he was going, and he said in a cheerful whisper carelessly thrown over his shoulder as he left the box,

“Just going to get something to drink!”

And he was through the velvet curtains and heading down the hall before she could say anything else. 

The lobby was empty, the waiters and pages sprang to life out of their slouches as he passed by, and Higgins did not pause for his cloak and hat but went out into the cold night and a thin layer of glassy rain that couldn’t decide whether to freeze over everything in Covent Garden and kept going, kept going until he rounded a dark alley corner and found a wall and collapsed against it, gasping as his throat fought the shock of cold air.

He doubled over, clapped one hand over his mouth, and then the other, both of them crossed, and then his breath hiccuped into a sob, and surely, surely that was enough, but another came, and then more, and then he couldn’t stop, and he pinched his eyes shut, but the heavy pressure had marshaled its forces in the deepest recesses of him and returned tenfold, and something awful was clawing its way up his throat, he was choking on the desperate noises coming out of him and the tears, there were tears, this terrible humiliating weeping wouldn’t stop, and he held his hands tighter to force it back into his mouth, gulp it all back down before it got worse, it had all come over him so quickly, and he’d had no warning, it had been involuntary—

And that was the word that finally calmed him, ending the episode as suddenly as it had begun. 

He hadn’t done this; it was involuntary, and he had only to put himself back together. 

Higgins leaned back against the wall, still holding both hands to his mouth, not quite trusting that he could pull them away just yet. His chest felt like it would burst, and he held his breath as his pulse beat on him from the inside out, pounding savagely against him before it died down and the pressure sank back once more to be forgotten. If he concentrated, even while shaking like this, he found he could gradually slow the convulsions, and then his hands dropped to his sides and he sagged slightly before pulling out his handkerchief and passing it over his face. 

He stood there for a moment with his eyes closed. There was no need for any of this, he thought viciously. Again, louder: no need for any of this. All this carrying on, all this… he stuffed the handkerchief back into his pocket rather than look at it. There were better things to do, loftier aims, higher purposes to his life and causes to be fulfilled. He would not be brought so low by sentimental, cloying nonsense—what utter rot, it was only a performance. Playacting. People pretending. It wasn’t real. 

The bricks behind him held their grip on the cold so tightly that it was beginning to seep through his tuxedo jacket. Higgins looked about, leaving steaming clouds of breath as he turned. No one else had been out on the courtyard pavement—it was still too early for the flower sellers and others begging for coins. He’d been alone. 

With that, he was quite composed again, and straightening with a deep breath, went back inside. Striding through the warmly-lit lobby and down the hall, he decided that if his mother looked at his face and found something suspect, he would say that there had been a man with a cigar in the lobby and the smoke had gotten into his eye. 

But when Higgins reached the box again, his mother did not look away from the lit stage, and did not ask where he had been. Just as well. 

“Well!” he proclaimed brightly in the cab on the ride to Mayfair, “Happy New Year, I suppose, darling—that’s one way to spend it, eh?”

Mrs. Higgins gave a soft hmm sound. 

“Did you like it?” Again, that same cheerful voice. “It was a good production, certainly, although I always think Pinkerton was never given enough to do. He shows up, behaves like an ass, and then that’s the end of it, really, which does seem such a waste of a character. You want to know what’s inside the man’s head, and get nothing. The girl in the lead—I’ve quite forgotten the singer’s name—she was very good, wasn’t she? So many sopranos misinterpret the directions for emotion and trade it for a kind of shrieking, I think. But she managed to pull it off,” he sighed, “And that’s what matters in the end.” He stretched his legs in front of him. “Oh, it’ll be time for a brandy, a bath, and a bed, and in that order.”

She murmured something, and Higgins turned toward her.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing,” his mother said, and gave him a bland smile. He looked out the window and watched the street lamps go by once more. Perhaps he ought to make enquiries among the Royal Society about locating a pupil with a Yorkshire accent. It would be interesting to spend the rest of the year performing a more thorough survey of regional accents, for while he was very good at pinning a man down to the street where he was born, he had yet to be able to identify an accent from another county to quite the same minute level—

Higgins had turned to glance through the other window and caught his mother watching him with a strange expression on her face. He might have used the word searchingly to describe it, but the curious thing was that she seemed to have found whatever it was, but was still looking, as though there must be more there, and he almost flinched, nearly reached up to see if there was something left on his face that he had not accounted for, before he remembered he was wearing gloves. 

Mrs. Higgins turned away from him abruptly as the driver reached her residence. 

“Perhaps you ought to consider getting out of London for the winter,” she told the window beside her. “Go on holiday someplace warm and relaxing—Italy, say, or Greece. They do have such beautiful art there, and you would be beside the sea.” She moved her shoulder—his mother did not actually shrug, as a rule, for it was beneath someone of her station, but she moved her shoulder—in a gesture which suggested… if not ambivalence, the illusion of it. 

Higgins gave a soft chuckle, not unkindly. 

“Whatever for? You know I dislike holidaying, it always seems like such a waste of time. Besides, there’s too much to be done here, and certainly it isn’t as though I haven’t enough coal to keep me content til spring,” he replied, and with another little laugh reached for the door handle to haul himself out and help his mother to her front door. When she had arranged herself and her butler had come out of the house, Mrs. Higgins said to her son over her shoulder,

“Think about it, at least , Henry,” before she was bundled off into her great house. 

In his bath, a glass of brandy at hand, and with the gas heater in the wall lit to a nice high roar, Higgins heard the distant chime of the clock striking, and realized it was next year already, and what a strange one he’d put away behind him. 

April 1898 

Caroline said it was physically unhealthy, not to mention a waste of a perfectly good spring day, to spend all this time indoors, and that they ought to go out for a walk.

“And accomplish what, exactly?” He closed the copy book he’d been scanning and eyed her over the top of his glasses. A trip out of doors did not thrill to his heart. Instead, he leveled a flat gaze against her, arching one brow suspiciously.  

They’d not had the best of beginnings. 

Upon being ushered into the study two months ago, her first words to him as she’d looked about the room were—

“Are you the assistant, then?”

—and he felt the top of his head nearly light on fire.

He’d told her in no certain terms that he was, in fact, the expert who’d be deigning to give her elocution lessons, that it was only under extreme protest and duress, that he’d been conferred a Professorship before most university students had even thought about whether to go out for postgraduate, that he was the chair of Phonetics at Balliol College, and for God’s sake to stop swinging her feet on that sofa like some bloody rhesus macaque. 

Caroline’s eyes had been huge as dinner plates at this, and as he’d retreated toward the wing chair, satisfied by having made his point and established authority at this appropriately early stage, she found the means to reply in a careless, breezy sort of way,

“Well, maybe I’ll go deaf before we figure this out, and it won’t matter after all.”

And he had felt the full promise of the thing that had been pressed upon him against his will and dragged him away from quiet and peaceful Oxford back to the noise and crush of London, and sighed, hoping vainly that this obstinate creature had a good ear and he could be done with her before the summer was out.

But now the girl on the sofa thought a moment as she considered his demand, winding the end of a long curl around her finger, a little habit he found annoying, a game she played to make herself seem more fragile, more feminine, more pliable—more appealing. He did not find it appealing; she would dislodge all the pins from that confection atop her head, the whole thing would collapse, and then where would they be—in a state of dishabille and with a lot of explanations to be made when she got home.

“You’re always going on about other accents,” she said, leaning against the back of the sofa and looking up into the ceiling, still fingering the curl, “And I hear people talking non-stop in this city, but they all sound different from each other.” 

“It isn’t likely that you’ll ever hear anything other than the upper class speaking.” He opened the copy book again and gestured for her to begin reading aloud once more. 

But Caroline paused. Her neck was long and very white, and she would have made a beautiful portrait. He’d passed a shop window filled with packages of soap the other day with the face of Mrs. Cleveland on them, now having finally made their way across the Atlantic, but although their First Lady could be a model for clean and youthful beauty, it did not seem to him that it would have quite the same effect from the girl before him. She wouldn’t fit or suit something as low and fleeting as that; she was far too much for them, he thought—and then frowned. 

She sat up. “I think I should be able to match the names to the accent so I know what you mean.” She waved a hand. “Come on. We can eavesdrop on people, you’ll be able to take notes on their conversations and tell me about your alphabet.”

It was tempting, and he was anxious to get in some transcriptions, and so Henry traded his lecturer’s robes for a black frock coat and hat, tucked his pince-nez and its thin cord back into his waistcoat pocket, and he and Caroline went for a little stroll down to Bond Street. It was not the sort of district likely to produce any truly interesting vocal examples. But she’d been stubborn, had sent the chaperone who’d been packed along with her out of the house, his house, on enough occasions that eventually she’d begun turning up in the carriage alone, and so he felt himself charged with more than simply her education. 

“You grew up here, right?”

“I grew up in Mayfair.”

“Where’s that?”

He turned and pointed where they’d come from.

“It’s farther north from where I live now.”

“Tell me about your accent,” she said, looking particularly sunny and cheered by the escape to out-of-doors. 

“Technically speaking, I don’t have one,” he told her. “It’s Received Pronunciation, which is considered neutral.”

Caroline gave him a look of utter disbelief. 

“ You don’t have an accent,” she repeated, “That’s rich. You tawk as thew yew ahh royalty itself.”

The look on his face must have been very pained indeed at her impression of him, for Caroline began laughing.

“ You have an accent,” Henry said. “Your vowels are very flat. We shall strive harder to round them.” He bit his lip, thinking of how he ought to revise the list of corrections her speaking voice would want. What would be appropriate for someone of her station. With that thought, he folded his hands behind his back, lest she get some idea in her silly head and decide to take his unattended arm as an invitation to loop her own through it. 

“And sound more elegant,” Caroline said, smiling and turning her gaze into a dressmaker’s window. He was afraid she’d do something like this—suggest an outing and then spend the whole time poking her fox nose into milliner’s shops until he was loaded down with hat boxes and little parcels and would be expected to pay for a cab to get her back to Wimpole Street before her carriage home arrived, and then the entire afternoon would be wasted and they would be set back an entire week. It wasn’t as though they had all the time in the world—

“—and it was absolutely a splendid performance, I must say,” declared a well-appointed woman to her companion as they left the shop. Henry stared at the two of them, fascinated by the woman who was surely from Belgravia—Wilton Row, most likely, until he remembered to tip his hat, and received a dignified, chilly nod in response. The two women looked on Caroline admiringly, however, as they approached the coachman holding their door open. As soon as they pulled away, Caroline turned to him with round blue eyes. 

“You heard that, right? How many vowels can one person produce? That was amazing; I wouldn’t even know how to write the way she said that.” She watched the carriage move on in the distance. “ Eeeaaaagghbso-leuwt-leeh,” Caroline said in a grand, affected manner. “That sounded very upper-class, but you don’t talk like that, do you? Say absolutely.”

He did, and she gestured.

“There, see? Completely different.” 

“Some among the middle class push the limits of RP,” Henry said, a little dismayed that this had happened at all, that she had been allowed to hear a bastardization of what he was trying to effectuate, “Drawling their words so they seem even more exclusive and… luxurious, I suppose. Attempting to sound like the aristocracy.” He rolled his eyes at the thought of affecting a false accent as a shortcut for climbing the social ladder. Those people would never make anything of it. 

She pointed after the carriage, now long gone.

“I want—”

“Absolutely not,” Henry told her, and crossed his arms. “That woman sounded ridiculous and as though she was some new money upstart with no class or breeding. Remember why you are here, because nobody is going to believe that you came to this country speaking as though you were born on Pont Street. No one will ever forget, or allow you to forget, that you are an American, no matter how long you live here, Miss Osborne.”

In response, she sighed and gloomily went back to looking in the shop window. Sensing he’d been a shade too harsh, Henry asked her in a gentler voice, 

“Don’t you want to see how her speech would be spelled out?”

She obviously meant to look at him out the corner of her eye, very archly, as though the answer were already no and there was no possibility of inducing her to be interested after he’d so flagrantly told her off. But she was curious, and relented, biting her lip, to which he pulled out his notebook and pencil to give a rough sketch of all those vowels the woman had produced in the style of the alphabet he’d been developing, and when she leaned over to watch, one of the long pale blonde curls slid over her shoulder to rest in the hollow of her throat. 

Chapter Text

We also know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling.

- Henri Poincaré

January 1912

One morning after breakfast, he came into the study to find the usual fan of newspapers spread across his desk. Mrs. Pearce did not particularly like it when he read at the table, for he tended to linger there until nearly lunch if he got into something especially entertaining in its idiocy and reductiveness of argument. Higgins dug out the Telegraph to see if Horace Brinkley had made good on their agreement, and to satisfy his curiosity as to whether any edits or changes had been made that he ought to contest with the publishers.

There, on page five, was the first of the three articles he’d written, this one giving a brief but rigorous explanation of why elocution mattered in English society. The next would describe persons for whom formal lessons and a course of study would be suitable, and last was an overview of the sorts of methods he used—without too much detail, for that scoundrel Karpathy was a mynah bird, scavenging what scraps of technique he could and passing off his students’ poor parroting of accents as progress stemming from a genuine understanding of the pathology.

Here it was, the crucial line on which Higgins prided himself, at the very end of the piece:

The thing has to be done scientifically, or the last state of the aspirant may be worse than the first.

And that was the whole of his life’s work, as elegant a statement in its simplicity as possible: it must be done properly, or it ought not be attempted at all. Charlatans and those calling themselves “dialect coaches” be damned—training a person required a full theoretical and practical understanding of where their habits arose in the anatomy, and comprehensive knowledge of how proper sound and syllable could be refined and made permanent rather than remain an imitation forever arrested in its development.

Having found the column and his reputation not in a state of disrepute from the editor’s scalpel, Higgins gave the paper a satisfied nod and let his eye wander idly across the rest of the page.

And immediately came upon a column next door to his own, twinned in length and width.

PRIGGISH ACADEMICS HAVE NO MONOPOLY ON THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Slowly, he laid the broadsheet flat onto his desk, then bent over it, resting his palms to either side of the page edge.

BY E. DOOLITTLE, the byline read.

He stared at that name for a long, long moment.

Irresistibly, without an ounce of his own free will rising to pull him back from the edge, he began to read.

We have all of us at one time or another been under the guidance and tutelage of a schoolmaster or nun charged with the education of young souls to be moulded and sent out as productive members of society. Perhaps there are even a few of them in this world sympathetic to human feelings. Given the current state of economic factors as well as great societal change, people are increasingly interested in how to better themselves and their station through manner of speech. To this end, they may seek out individuals claiming to be skilled at alteration of the voice or accent who call themselves by a diverse and rather flamboyant array of titles: elocutionists, phoneticists, or linguists.

When one goes about arranging the services of such august and revered men, it should be of no surprise to discover that here is the schoolmaster or nun writ large anew—that arch and punishing figure looming with a long shadow out of one’s childhood memories. And how many of us truly look back on our time spent in the schoolroom with fondness? The ruler snapped over the knuckles, the barked order to stand with one’s nose in the corner? Yet there are those among the ranks of the populace who would seek out and even pay to resume their education as though it were mere folly, something to pass the time when there are perfectly amusing musical revues and theatrical performances to attend.

True, the outcome and the student are to be heartily congratulated—but the cost, and the path to reach such heights, are demanding indeed, requiring strength of character and great courage, and so it is incumbent upon one who has embarked on this journey to give as clear a view as possible of what awaits those who wish to improve their accent and, it is hoped, their lot in life.

Repetition of vowels and syllables between eight and twelve hours a day, mechanical inducement and manipulation, strenuous exercises for breath control and posture: these one may look forward to, if one pursues these studies and stays the course for six months at six in the morning until midnight. Such hours may intrude upon the working day, but this indeed is the fastest means of transformation, and six months are a fair estimate of length if one not only has the fortitude for such extensive dedication, but a sharp ear and a quick mind as well—all others might expect upwards of a year spent in schooling. Add to all this the usual “encouragement” from an exacting tutor, and one may wish to remain in their current state!

There is, of course, no real criticism to be made of those who honestly strive to “do better” in a world that increasingly demands polish, even among shopkeepers and those in service. How curious, then, that there exists no universal standard to control the practice. No credentialing body, no methods submitted for vetting or review—indeed, one wonders if the techniques have simply been invented out of whole cloth for mysterious and tedious exercises that are rarely justified or even explained to the bewildered initiate. The phoneticist might as well be a magician or an alchemist for how these methods are kept secret, as though they are ancient spells to be closely guarded.

There is only the master to be trusted, and blind faith that he will do right, and that is the climate in which those of a self-improving bent must take their futures into their own hands.

To this end, certain discerning readers may find themselves more disposed to the idea of conversational education. That is, learning proper sounds and syllables of refinement through listening and speaking in a relaxed and mannered atmosphere, for the great appeal in speaking is the feeling of camaraderie and friendliness—

It went on from there. Scanning the rest of it, he found the final line, which read

E. Doolittle is a former pupil of Prof. H. Higgins and currently—

But he did not read on.

From where he’d been hunched over the table like some sinister vulture or Sister Superior or schoolmaster, Higgins pulled himself up straight and went over to stand before the great window that looked out onto the tree in the garden square behind the house.

By all rights, it should have been rage.

He should have telephoned Horace Brinkley and shouted the man down the phone, demanded that the Telegraph print a retraction and apology, cancelled his subscription, written to everyone he knew to insist that they do the same, rang up the head editor and yelled until he was hoarse, summoned the paper’s owner and publisher to his carpet and eviscerated them for their audacity to print such barely-literate, clearly unrevised pablum in what had heretofore been a reputable paper. How dare they all, how dare they, how dare they.

This unprovoked attack. This public humiliation. This… he didn’t have a word for it. It demanded a reply, that he sit down and pen something, anything, some counter-argument to defend himself, his livelihood, his life’s work. Say that he was not a liar, he was not a fraud, an illusionist waving his hands and making it up as he went, he was not an impostor, that it had all been worthwhile, that he had made something from nothing, that she was, she was—

But Higgins stood there gazing into the garden with his hands in his pockets. The tree had only been planted a year or so ago, and it was still very young. It was unlikely to be fruit-bearing given the climate and noxiousness of London air. He did not go into the foyer and pick up the telephone, and he did not sit at the desk and take up his pen.

Instead he made himself find the large pair of silver scissors from the desk and cut in long, slow, careful strokes the column with her name at the top, parting it from the one nearby. He went over to the fire and dropped the folded remnants of the rest of the newspaper onto the flaming coals; it lit orange and gold, the letters blackened and seared, and the pulp twisted and flaked into ashes.

She hated him.

Eliza hated him. As elegant a statement in its simplicity as possible.

From the top left drawer he pulled the black case; setting it next to the clipping, very calmly, remotely, he looked at the tokens side by side.

Here was one, and here was the other, and he had gotten the same outcome with both, in the end.

Higgins folded the column carefully, making certain that the headline and her name were on top, and placed the slip of newsprint inside the black case before returning it to the drawer.

Mrs. Pearce appeared in the doorway a few moments after he touched the bell.

He told her that he did not wish to be disturbed for the rest of the day—no telephone, no callers, and if there was any post, to bring it directly.

She agreed, closed the pocket doors behind her, and he absorbed himself in editing the manuscript pages that had been too long languishing in the bottom drawer.

The housekeeper brought him the post before lunch, and it was letters proclaiming allegiance, telegrams excoriating her, a note asking what must be done in collegial protest, all of which he set aside. Isobel brought tea, cleared away the papers, and after several hours he rose and went in for supper. This completed, he had a pipe, and when that was done, he tucked a book under his arm and went to the staircase, but changed his mind at the last moment and went downstairs instead of up.

He was met by the usual murmurings of servants in their native domain, but his footfall on the stairs was not enough to immediately rouse their attention, for there was a sudden gasp, and then seven faces gathered near the wooden table in the middle of the room were all turned and looking up at him with strained expressions, guilty at being caught.

And on the table behind them—for he could see it, even as they were all together in a clump, trying to hide it behind their number—was a copy of the morning’s Telegraph, and he could surmise that Isobel had collected the papers, Mrs. Pearce had counted them and found one missing, sent Mason out to buy a new one in case he would want it again, someone wondered why it had not come out of the study, and they were all reading it, and now they knew.

Living alone meant living with seven other people, and living with seven other people meant fumbling for his dignity while they all watched in painful silence.

“Coffee at breakfast, I think,” he said, before turning to go back up the stairs, and all the way up to his bedroom.

(“The ungrateful impertinence,” Cook said when he was gone, “Him having wasted his precious time, and not a penny she paid for room and board in six months! Where else can a soul find a situation like that without something funny, eh? Swishing about like the Queen of Sheba, insisting on her fancy soaps and extra pillows, and then sneaking off before slipping us all a knife to the ribs—you mark me, if she learned manners in this house, she forgot ‘em soon as she walked out.”

Hannah opened her mouth, but Mrs. Pearce brought them sharply back in hand, for she had one eye on the baize door, and was vexed that any talk below stairs had been allowed to drift upward.)

The Telegraph did not appear among the fan on his desk after that, and if the cheques from the payments department appeared, they did not cross his hands, and it did not matter anyway, for they were unnecessary in the end. He had always money enough.

Sir George came on Tuesday, bringing with him the breezy boisterousness that Higgins dreaded as he faced the mirror that morning. The man had been to a tailor, clearly, for he continually tugged at his cuffs and collar in that way that revealed the newness of bespoke cuts, foreign fabrics, and a feeling that one was not in one’s own skin anymore.

“Dear things, cost an absolute packet, but Alice says it’s all in service, whatever she means by that,” he said, grinning. “And you, did you enjoy…” Macready paused, stumbled slightly as though he’d only just realized there was a potential trap to be wandered into, “Did you get anything nice?”

“Er…” Higgins thought a moment. “I confess I’m very difficult to find gifts for; I always purchase a thing as soon as I think of it, and then everybody complains,” he remarked with a slight laugh. “Oh, I did get a rather handsome book of Rimbaud’s poetry.” He frowned, briefly. “But I think I might’ve ordered it before the holidays.”

Macready looked slightly disconcerted, and Higgins shrugged.

“Well, shall we begin?”

The lesson was acceptably done; Macready was invigorated and renewed in his determination, did not slip during the preparatory exercises, and made it cleanly enough through the pertinent section of the copybook as well as “Porphyria’s Lover” before the hour was up. Of course, had they been focusing their efforts on the shape and sound of a single vowel, or doing intensive work on those rhotic rs that Sir George was still so fond of, then Higgins would perhaps not find himself with a tiny doubt in the back of his mind that this was devolving into something almost Bohemian, mere drawing room conversation, only dialogue and dialect and not a scientific correction—

“Getting better than I was even before Christmas, I think,” Sir George said cheerfully as Higgins rose from the wing chair, and then the man’s expression changed and he said, “Oh!” as though he were remembering something unpleasant. “Er, I’m asked to mention—that is, I ought to say…” he began in an uncertain way, and Higgins had almost forgotten, but of course it all settled back upon his shoulders just then, and he squared them as best he could to hear this out, readied himself to hear that their time must be at an end, apologies, excuses, etc.—for Lady Macready, like all women, was more concerned with appearance than with substance, and now any association would be ruinous to her ambitions and expectations, and she was already insisting that Sir George end it neatly, this would be the last of all students and now the book, the book would have to rush in to fill the gap in his time, he could get through five chapters a day, dedicate himself to a schedule and have the second edition by April at the latest—“Alice would like—and I would like too, of course—to invite you to come to tea.”

Higgins stopped, his thoughts tripping over themselves, as this was wholly unexpected.

“Not now, of course,” Sir George rushed ahead in the brief silence, “But when the weather is fine. I didn’t want to forget. I suppose it is rather early,” and he colored a little. A bit forward, more than a little awkward, bringing it up in this abrupt way, apropos of nothing. But tea. As though they were friendly, and this was not merely an arrangement or a transaction. Professors and students were that, must be that, exactly that, nothing more. Macready was an endearing sort of person, though, with his flaws and eagerness to do well and be liked, and it was terribly difficult not to like him in his way. Higgins nodded slowly.

“Well,” he said. “You must tell me when.”

“Ah!” cried Macready, “Brilliant, we’ll plan for something, then.”

With that, Higgins moved them both toward the pocket doors that he might see his student out, and it had all been easier than he’d anticipated, and not so bad after all, but Sir George said apologetically as they went through,

“I was awfully sorry to see that article in the paper, by the way. I’m sure it’ll all be forgotten soon—you know how people get so up in arms over a thing and then forget it by the next week. Alice was certainly surprised to see it,” and he twisted his cap between his hands anxiously. “I did want you to know that I haven’t had a bad time of it at all, and in fact I told her, I said, I insisted on coming back. It’s been very enjoyable, and I don’t see the fuss at all, honestly.”

Higgins told his student how good of him it was to say so, and returned to the study and once more to the work of editing his book.

The first pass-through ended, he began the second in earnest, and this time Higgins focused his efforts on precision of language in the preface. Sir George came again, and they worked through “My Last Duchess” at an even pace, although Macready declared it “a bit grim, eh?” upon inquiring what it was actually about. Higgins briefly toyed with the private notion of making the man read the entirety of The Brownies at Home, then rejected the notion, for it would only try his own patience, but was also likely be taken as very sarcastic. Mrs. Pearce sent out Higgins’s hat to be blocked, and it was returned by courier the week after. Sir George asked to read “Jenny Kiss’d Me” and “A Night-Rain in Summer,” for he wanted to recite them to his wife, and Higgins indulged the requests. He sent Mason out for a fresh bottle of ink, for he’d found an old copybook from his university days when he’d taken an interest in Spencerian script and had given it up in a fit of pique, and he nearly did now as well. Americans had no sense of history; all this innovation was apt to erase what was solid and reliable. He worked on the book. Hannah took a bout of influenza, and went to stay with her mother for a week so that nobody else caught it. The weather shifted, and great showers of rain flooded the streets and streaked the huge window in the study with sheets of water.

And one afternoon, as Higgins was going from the study in search of his glasses, he happened to pass the door to the vestibule. It had been left open, and he could see, just through the frosted lead glass at the front door beyond, an indistinct figure on the step outside. He waited for them to reach up and press the bell, but whoever it was remained motionless. Had it already rung? Perhaps it was broken and he ought to inform Mrs. Pearce. And then the figure turned its head, and he realized he was looking at the blurred shape of a woman standing outside, dressed in a dark coat and a small, close hat with a long feather on top.

Higgins froze, somewhere between dread and fatal curiosity. Who stood at doors in this part of London and did not ring the bell? What did the woman want? Could she see him through the glass from the other direction, standing there watching her and not coming to open the door? Who was she? He was suddenly seized by the wild and irrational terror that she would raise one gloved hand to the glass, shade her eyes, and peer in, a pair of all-black eyes emerging out of the miasma, a ghostly face looking in at him, the mouth and nose mere hazy suggestions, and she would look in, inspecting and observing him inside his little box, spying on him, mouthing something at him, but remain out there, ill-defined and unidentifiable, where she could walk away at any moment.

If he stayed very still, she would not notice him. She did not need him, none of this needed to be happening, he could not help with whatever it was the woman wanted. No unexpected visitors—by appointment only. He ought to have a sign made and cemented to the bricks above the bell. He would not answer the door; he held his breath and hoped she would not lift her hand, whether to ring the bell or to look inside and find him there still bolted to the spot, hoping the door was locked, hoping she would go away and leave him, alone.

The woman looked over her shoulder, turned briefly toward the house and Higgins inside one last time, and then shifted on her heel and moved aside.

“Is someone there, sir?”

He jumped slightly, and found Mason bearing a silver tea service, about to take it down for a polish. Higgins turned his head sharply. The step outside was unoccupied; the only thing visible at the glass in the front door was the grayish-white of late January light.

“No,” he said. “Do make sure the vestibule is kept shut up, Mason.”

“Yes, sir,” said Mason. “Sorry, sir.”

He looked down to find that he’d been holding the sheaf of paper from his latest round of edits against his chest, and his fingers ached from gripping into the edges.

A few days later, Higgins awoke to a brilliant white window and snow on the ground, and went downstairs to find his breakfast rather more elaborate than usual, with pastries, a pot of drinking chocolate, a precise pyramid of apples decorating the table, and everything served on the blue and white china. When he trod out into the hallway he found Isobel there, but before he could ask her what that was all about, she said,

“Good morning, sir; happy returns.”

And he gave a soft “Ah!” and returned to the breakfast room to consider how curious it was, that it was the 8th of February again already, for January always felt interminable somehow. He was tucking into the last bit of streaky bacon and staring off into space, thinking about how to clarify and elaborate on the shorthand for fricatives in the fourteenth chapter, when he realized that Mrs. Pearce had entered and was talking to him, quite without his participation or permission.

“What?” Higgins said, interrupting her.

Mrs. Pearce recoiled, clearly taken aback by this, and stared him down with an expression that was slightly offended and more than a bit reproachful. Or was it concern that was written there? She had something in her hand that she ought to hurry up and give him.

“What?” He said again, desperately. Insistently.

She began from the beginning.

“Happy birthday—”

“Thank you,” Higgins muttered automatically, abashedly, looking over the spread before him.

“This letter arrived for you first thing, delivered by hand. It’s from your mother,” she said, and passed him the envelope. He opened it and glanced over the message—Mrs. Higgins had been visiting Vicky at her country house for the past few weeks, and she had written to say that she hoped he had a fine year and that she was very sorry she could not be there, etc.—

“Sir, if I may speak plainly,” Mrs. Pearce interjected gently.

“Of course,” he replied.

I do hope, Henry, that you will take into close consideration the momentous significance of this last year before the halfway point of your life. Think of this as the end before the beginning—not as a finality, but as the intake of breath before a great act—

“—but I feel a duty to tell you that I have noticed, as have the rest of the staff—”

“Mmm-hmm,” he said.

It is every mother’s greatest pleasure in life to see her children successful and happy, but we both know what I’m really saying here, which is that you ought to get a wife. It really is so very hypocritical of me to insist on it in this way, isn’t it? Here I have kept you by my side for so much of your life, right here where I needed you, always needing you, while I despaired of being alone, and now I have decided that I am sick of you, anxious to be rid of you, and aim to cast you off into the arms of someone, anyone, so that I may ignore you, for I cannot abide seeing your father in you, although we both know that in reality I would never admit to such a thing, certainly not in writing, and here you are doing all this paraphrasing and putting words into my mouth when all I have done is send you a letter on your birthday—

“You have not left this house in four weeks, sir,” said Mrs. Pearce’s voice, ringing with a resolute clarity to strike out his mother’s voice in his head. “And I do not think that this extended solitude has been good for you.”

Higgins set the letter down next to his plate and gazed off across the room for a moment, hearing Mrs. Pearce sigh distantly.

It was not usually within his bailiwick to imagine things that were not so. Not in this manner, anyway.

“I agree,” he said at last.

“You do?”

“Mmm,” he replied. “I am going out.”

She took a tentative step back, as though to let him pass, and Higgins looked up in surprise.

“Oh—” he began, “Not now. Goodness me, no. Tonight.”

He dressed, and went to the Royal Opera through the sleet and snow along with anybody else in the thin crowd who dared venture out on such an evening, for it seemed oddly to be the only rational thing to do. And despite having no idea what was playing, and no permission to do it, he strode down the hall to find his mother’s vacant box and sit in the dark, and was surrounded by everybody there, yet at a safe distance, just so, removed. Like a reintroduction to society after quarantine for some pathetic illness; gently, delicately, and well out of the way of causing any trouble, he thought in dark amusement. If only it were always so.

It was Sadko. Rimsky-Korsakov. Russian fairy tale.

Higgins did not know this one, and squinted down at the program in his lap to find the description.

A young gusli player (apparently some sort of guitar) leaves his wife and home in Novgorod. He sails around the world, amasses a great fortune, marries the daughter of the King of the Ocean, and eventually returns home to the comfort of his loving wife.

Very well.

It was certainly a fairy tale, with elaborate sets and costumes. Music of that experimental bent which the Russians seemed to take to so readily, and without much of a plot to speak of. The young man was misunderstood and mocked by those around him, and he apparently lamented that nothing would ever go right for him, until he won some sort of contest or bet which granted him three ships made of gold. He sang a song which clearly asked where he ought to take the blasted things, and three foreign merchants stepped up to offer their opinions: a Viking, an Indian, and a Venetian. The Viking’s song was stormy, proud and dramatic, and called to mind a ship tossed about on the waves of the sea.

And then the Indian guest stepped forward to lift one hand as though gesturing in a dream.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to explain the effect of music on a person through words, but what may be said is this: Higgins sat bolt upright in his chair as he listened. Once, he glanced down to see what helpful notations had been made in the program, but found the description lacking as usual:

The three visitors each sing of his nation and his countrymen. Sadko decides to travel to Venice.

Venice barely registered. As for the rest of it, it was forgotten as soon as he heard it—ignored, even, for the distant strains of those notes running through him still. Had the composer been through a fit of madness, of genius, and then tried to build something around that? It was all so bland, so pale, otherwise. And when he awoke the next morning, Higgins lay in his bed for a long time with it as it twisted that strange and tense melody through his head. Those words meant something; the other two had obviously spoken of the beauty and majesty of their native lands, but this held something inside itself.

He did not speak Russian, but there was an emigrè by the name of Voznesensky in Tottenham, on Lorenco Road, who had written a few articles about the differences in abecedariums between Western and Cyrillic languages. Higgins wrote to the man to inquire as to the possibility of a translation, and the next day received a polite and obliging reply.

And upon reading to himself the man’s interpretation, sat back in his desk chair for quite some time before going upstairs to dress once more. He went again for his mother’s box, and spent the whole first half of the thing with the letter burning away in his breast pocket, at once writhing with impatience and perfectly still. At last, the Indian stepped downstage and lifted his hand once more, and this time Higgins pulled the words from his pocket:

Do not count the diamonds in the stony caves
Do not count the pearls in the southern sea
of distant India full of wonders.

In the warm sea there is a marvelous ruby stone
and on that stone the Phoenix
(a bird with the face of a maiden
all the while singing heavenly songs)
unfurls its wings and covers the sea.

Whosoever hears that bird
shall forget everything.

Do not count the diamonds in the stony caves
Do not count the pearls in the southern sea
of distant India full of wonders.

A warning, a word of caution to those who ventured too far with their greed, their desire, who strayed from their purpose after being fooled by the siren song. Higgins nearly laughed out loud. Of course—of course. A bilious pigeon crooning and burbling nonsense in the courtyard; a phoenix that could burst into flames and rise from its own ashes, only to fly away.

Directly as the song was over, he tucked the translation into his pocket and went to the cloak room.

This was a mild evening, the recent snows having melted in the sleet and rain that had come afterward, and now the weather was merely chilly, and Higgins did not return home but went straight down until he came to the Embankment, where it was once more very quiet. In the great muchness of tall buildings, and in the flat rolling expanse of the river, he could think.

What was the opposite of a warmth of feeling and sympathy: hatred, or indifference? If he pictured a straight line in his head that ran from left to right, and on the left was the word LOVE—love for the sake of clarity and efficiency only—then the word on the right naturally formed into HATE. But where, then, did indifference sit? Between the two?

Or somewhere else entirely?

He drew another line in his mind, this one going from north to south, and at the bottom he positioned the word INDIFFERENCE, and looked at it, not turning it this way and that, but steadily, as a direction key to a map.

Boredom, a lack of feeling, absence of concern, a state of not caring or particularly minding. It had a mediocre taste, a sort of dry texture in the mouth. How could it possibly sit between two passions as though it were a fulcrum? Pull it the other direction, and what did it become in its opposite state? What was it, to constantly wonder about a person, to think of them at waking and while the table was being cleared? To wonder how they were, if they were content or miserable or somewhere nearby, all the time, even when one’s mind was otherwise occupied? What was it, to have someone always there in the background?

OBSESSION, he thought, and obsession was a circle at the north end of this new line, a circle drawn around the line bridging LOVE and HATE, which in turn was much shorter than at first glance, for love and hate were not opposites but a whole category, a spectrum of the same base impulse and intensity of feeling, and therein was the answer.

It was not hatred. It was indifference.

Love, or the warmth of regard, or the sense of fondness, whatever it was, was something everybody talked about, was so concerned with, and you could wait your whole life for it, catch just a taste of it in the air with someone, and think that it was all set from there—and then it turned out they knew you now, knew you because you’d slipped up and made yourself known, and found you unbearable, and it had all been for nothing.

He suddenly felt exposed, for had he not smiled at her? Revealed something true and tentative beneath himself? She had not been quite so muddled in her thinking, so thoughtless and stupid as to be unreserved and unguarded and risk the danger of being known, but he had, and then she knew, knew with clarity and the full presence of self and decided: no, I think not.

Which—of course, yes.

There were oceans of time between them, and no crossing to be made, that went without saying. He did not need to dwell on waters he knew were dark.

But now this, this dressing down, this thing out where everyone had seen it, so many months later? It called for such coolness of the soul, such careless indifference, to rip open barely-healed wounds like that. It evidenced a lack of feeling one way or the other. He could not account for it otherwise.

Well, then. Now he knew, and he had preserved the evidence and could pull it out any time he needed the reminder, and the remedy for it all would be to let time pass and his own regard turn cold and indifferent as well. Precipitate it along a little faster, go to his mother and tell her she was right, let his hecatomb be her contentment once more, marry some girl who thought spinsterhood would last her til the grave and could only see him as a stroke of luck, who would keep to her sitting room, who would negotiate the specifics of cohabitation with contractual exactitude. This, but not that. Never that.

And he could go on as he had been, only now with a shield who could speak and pour tea and be a garden wall between him and the world outside and anyone in it who would want to venture too close, and to them this imaginary woman would say—I’m sorry, he doesn’t take social calls, and that would be a usefulness.

He tried to picture her, what this woman would look like, got as far as her hair, but sighed suddenly, writhing on the bench where he sat, and instead stood to go look over the heavy chains separating the walkway from the dark waters of the Thames.

All change was painful somehow—but this felt like punishment for having gotten away with an unburdened heart the last time. And the time before that, come to think of it. Higgins huffed into his opera scarf to try to unnumb the lower half of his face. Probably it was getting late. Probably he ought to go before it got any colder. Probably he—

“There you are,” said a woman’s voice from the left.

He turned to find a figure approaching, and squinted to see who it was, then looked about himself to make sure she wasn’t addressing some other person, for she sounded oddly glad.

“I didn’t think you’d be out here with the weather. You didn’t catch a cold, did you?” she went on in that same breezy way, and came closer to where Higgins was staring at her with a frown.

“Do we know each other, madam?” he said in a forbidding voice meant to cow or warn her off. He had much rather be alone with his thoughts, and an interloper was not part of the ingredients for the night he’d expected to have. She was tall, with a regal profile, large dark eyes, and black hair beneath a rather outrageous fur hat. The woman stood next to him and bent to look over into the roiling mass of river.

“We pass each other all the time—you come walking down here on Tuesday and Thursday nights around seven like clockwork, only you haven’t been here in a month, and I was beginning to think you’d moved house or left the country,” she said, stretching her neck a little to get a better view, and then straightened to look at him up and down critically. “Good thing it isn’t cold enough this winter for the river to freeze over. I heard that used to happen.”

“Nearly a hundred years ago,” he answered, vaguely hoping she’d move along, but peering in as well.

“Well, either way, don’t throw yourself in, because I’m not going to fish you out, and that log over there has a rat riding it like it’s Cleopatra’s barge,” said the woman, gesturing to a dark mass floating past and looking faintly revulsed.

“Don’t be absurd,” said Higgins waspishly, disgusted that a perfect stranger should even suggest such a thing, “It would merely be cold and wet, and a massive waste of time.”

“I’m glad you agree,” she replied mildly, “I wanted to ask you something, and I know—I know that it’s a tremendous thing to ask, and on a night like this, but—” she plucked a card from the inside of her glove and paused a moment, considering how she would proceed.

“If it is money, the answer is no,” said Higgins drily, “That hat is as fine a creation as your cape, although both make you look like a fallen Russian princess, or at least a very bad imitation of one. You ought to study your accents more closely if you’re about to give me some poor tale of going on the lam with your jewels in your hem.”

To his surprised annoyance, the woman laughed appreciatively.

“Ah, now I know you’re the person I should ask—there’s a… salon, a soiree, a sort of... party that I have to attend next Thursday, and I don’t want to go alone.” She handed him the card, which had a small address printed on one side in tiny black block letters. “If you feel up to it, or you don’t have anything else to do that evening, be there at seven. Nothing formal, don’t bother dressing up.” She shrugged. “And then, I don’t know, dinner afterward at the Criterion, or something.”

Higgins stopped, and gave her an extraordinary look.

“Hang on. I want to have this absolutely straight and ensure that I have not thrown myself into the river and am currently experiencing this conversation as a hypothermic delusion before dying,” said Higgins.

“Oh, absolutely,” the woman replied brightly.

“You are a woman out walking alone after dark, and you have waltzed up to a man who is totally unknown to you—”

“No, I recognize you; you just haven’t been paying attention. You seem very absent-minded, because I’ve said hello to you before.”

“And you have flouted all social conventions to ask me, again, a man you do not know, to a social event, an occasion necessitating some prior acquaintance.” Higgins nodded sarcastically, and eyed her outfit in an obvious fashion. “Clearly this technique has gotten you everything you want in life.” The insinuation of her having a hidden unsavory profession out in the air between them, he prepared to hand her back the card, but the woman gestured strangely, bringing two fists up near her chin, not as though to fight, but as if she were excited.

“—it is interesting that you bring that up, yes,” she responded, nodding and squinting at him like he was saying something terribly intriguing and not criticizing her to her face, “Because what it has gotten me so far is my required presence at a party that I do not want to attend alone. Which will be at that address.” She reached out with one finger and tapped the card in his hand.

Higgins let out a long breath and shook his head, and the woman’s fists changed to flat palms, which she threw up in a gesture of surprise or finality, or both, he could not detect. She turned, her skirts twisting about her frame, and began to stride away in the direction she had come from.

“Don’t forget, seven!” she cried as she got a few steps away. “And the Century Club! Or the Criterion,” and soon the shade from the trees along the promenade obscured her from view.

Higgins watched the empty walkway for several minutes, and then looked down at the address on the card before putting it into his pocket with a frown and turning to walk in the direction of home.

Chapter Text

HIGGINS: What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn't come every day. 

- Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw

Higgins was writing. 

No mere act of putting pen to page, he’d cleared the blotter from the desk, rolled up his shirtsleeves with surgical precision, and donned the spotless brown draftsman’s apron that was kept in the study cupboard for this exact purpose. It lent the process an air of industriousness, despite him not having gotten even an accidental drop of ink anywhere on his person since childhood. Before him was a sheet of glazed white paper with very sharply cut edges, and open on the wooden cradle stand was a book of poetry from which he was copying, in the Spencerian hand. 

He had yet to find much in the artistic appeal of it, but while searching for something to occupy himself with all week, the practice seemed as good a task as any. Sir George had come on Tuesday, and the book edits had been wrapped in brown paper and sent to the editor, carried to the postal window by the careful and trustworthy hand of Mrs. Pearce herself. The week was nearly done, and now there was a kind of strangeness to the house—a sense of wanting to be useful, and knowing what there was to be done, but the utter inability to do it. A thousand things, all of them plucking at his elbow with jittery little fingers, and none of them attractive enough to draw his whole attention. 

Anticipation; the before and after. 

He’d spent days in a state of frantic inactivity, pacing from room to room, toting things back and forth, setting them down and then going to look for them again, and all the while being met by housemaids and footmen offering their services and the implicit reminder that not only was it beneath him to clear up and straighten, but a great nuisance to them all as well. At last even Mrs. Pearce appeared and asked him if someone couldn’t help him with whatever mission had him going up and down the stairs ten times an hour? Of course she didn’t phrase it that way, but the sufferance in her voice at his restlessness was clear. 

And so he’d forced himself to sit down and begin practicing what the old copybook referred to as independent action of the entire arm from the shoulder, beginning with looping drills before finally he rummaged about in a desk drawer to find some paper and a ruler to begin drawing guide lines. 

He finished the last flourish with a thin hairline, nearly invisible, and sat back to judge the piece on the whole just as Isobel entered, bearing a tea tray. Setting it on the low table between the sofa and the wing chair, she stood once more and, upon seeing him there as he was, uttered a soft cry. 

“May I, sir? You have such fine penmanship, everybody downstairs always says so,” she declared, and he sat back so that she could take a look. She made some admiring noises and went on. “That’s a new way, isn’t it?”

He hummed an assent, and set the piece flat on the desk. “Just practice, really,” and Higgins waved a dismissive hand over the thing. It was rather good for a first go.

“Well, it’s very lovely—I can’t read French, but I’m sure they always say such beautiful things,” Isobel said, bobbing before she went over to the doors. “I’ll tell Mrs. Pearce; she would be sorry if she didn’t see it.”

She disappeared without waiting to hear what he thought of that, and soon the doors parted once more to admit both Mrs. Pearce and Hannah, the pair of them trying to conceal a kind of excited obsequiousness, and Hannah failing outright.

“Oh, good Lord,” he said, mostly to curtail the need for either of them to lie about their reasons for venturing into the study when Isobel had only just attended him. He hadn’t even the chance to pour himself any tea, and rose to do so now and allow them to approach the desk without reservation or obstruction. 

“Oh, now, sir, Isobel says you’re trying something new,” Mrs. Pearce remarked, bending to peer at the title. For one long moment, he had the sudden worry that she could translate it, would know what she was looking at, would straighten and blink several times in rapid succession, then take Hannah by the elbow and usher her from the room before either of them could read any more.

But the same bland expression of pleasantly ignorant curiosity remained on the housekeeper’s face, and when she did stand upright, it was to allow the housemaid at her side to bend forward and admire as well. 

—Un soir, j'ai assis la Beauté sur mes genoux. - Et je l'ai trouvée amère. - Et je l'ai injuriée—

“Like cobwebs, sir,” Hannah said in the hushed and awed tones of someone in a portrait gallery. She stood full and looked over to where he was seated on the tea table with his cup and saucer in hand. Higgins searched her face as well, for Hannah had something naturally mischievous, almost elfin, in her eyebrows, but she betrayed nothing. “You ought to add a bird,” she said suddenly. Brightly. 

“Oh!” Mrs. Pearce cried. “Yes, surely—a bird would be such a nice thing.”

Sometimes at the bottom of a page of poetry, or when he was merely bored, he would draw birds by way of flourishes. A penman’s skill—they weren’t realistic sketches, but abstractions intended to demonstrate uniformity and masterly control of pen strokes, swirls, and line widths. The bird itself was something of an afterthought, really. He’d once done a particularly fine pheasant, which still hung in one of the bedrooms upstairs—it had won him a certificate of commendation. 

A bird—how insipid and flippant next to these words, he thought with a sudden violence. Gaudy and self-indulgent next to this poor attempt at a new script. But Higgins said instead,

“You think so? Well, perhaps,” and rose to reclaim occupancy of the desk and its contents from the two of them. They moved away, and Hannah was smiling as she closed the pocket doors.

He balanced the saucer in the palm of his hand and looked down to read the rest of the words he’d painstakingly inscribed, with the finest and lightest hand he could muster. 

Et le printemps m'a apporté l'affreux rire de l'idiot.

The address on the calling card had yielded nothing in the way of useful information. He’d telephoned round to the clipping services and asked them to cross-reference any articles or notices they might have had about the location, but nothing surfaced. Enquiry of public records regarding ownership turned up a name that meant nothing especially. No infamous associations, no court records, no police raids, no inches of column dedicated to sensationalizing some den of iniquity that had been festering and rotting away London’s core.

Higgins eyed the card still laid out upon his desk as the hazy white light through the study window dimmed.  

Perhaps it was all a ruse, a design by some corner of His Majesty’s government. Agents in Lisbon requiring the services of a specialist to untangle a linguistic code. 

Or a secret society of those with unique genius in underrated subjects, a group dedicated to originality of thought, a place for nuanced discussions of topics that were too often overlooked. 

Whatever it was, it had snagged Higgins’ curiosity to the point of drowning out his usual desire to stay at home on a cold winter’s night. 

And this was how he found himself at the doorstep of the address indicated, looking dubiously up at the door and jingling what would have otherwise been change in his pocket but was now a penknife, for although he felt very keenly the desire to know what lay beyond that door, he was not so intrigued as to risk life and limb if it came to that. 

The bell was answered by the oldest-looking butler Higgins had ever seen, and who did not ask what the stranger on the doorstep wanted, but merely stood with a kind of vague and slightly confusing expectancy particular to the elderly when their more nuanced cues become muddled and caught in the folds of experience and haze of stupor. Higgins withdrew the card from his pocket, but before he could turn it over, the man’s wooly eyebrows bobbed, and he stepped aside to allow admission. 

A dim foyer, decorated with the usual sort of things. He was led down a brief sojourn to a receiving parlor with wood paneling, an absolutely roaring fire in the hearth, and a single wing chair before it. It was on careful steps forward that he approached the seat, only to find it empty, and so he unburdened himself of the damp-heavy Inverness and hat, for the butler had disappeared and left him alone, tossed them onto a bench near the door, and looked about. 

The fireplace was flanked by two doors, but the room was otherwise very nondescript, except that the heavy velvet drapes were drawn close. 

Higgins was only a moment or two in looking about himself when the door to the right of the hearth opened, and a figure dressed in a shapeless frock or a loose cassock entered. 

It was the woman who had accosted him by the river. 

“Ah!” she said softly, “The butler said there was someone here. You came after all.”

“This is your party-or-soiree-or-salon?” Higgins inquired sardonically, gesturing about the empty room for effect.

“Yes, well,” she replied, speaking in a quick undertone as though she did not wish to be heard, “Like those things, except that you aren’t invited, because you aren’t a member, which you don’t want to be, so if you’ll just wait here for a little while, maybe an hour or so, then it’ll be over, and we’ll go and have something to eat.”

The frock—or robe, as it turned out to be, now that he could see her a little better in the firelight—was a dark red gown with two long panels of elaborate gold embroidery winding over each shoulder and dropping all the way to her hem. Higgins frowned at it, trying to decipher the symbols between large oak leaves.

“What do you mean, don’t want to be?”

She clasped her hands together and ignored him.

“Listen, why don’t we find you a glass and a nice bottle of something, and you can sit and think about whatever it is that you think about and do all day?”

He opened his mouth.

“Splendid,” the woman whispered vigorously, and left through the door she’d come in by.

In another moment or two, the wizened butler reappeared through the foyer door, carrying a silver tray which held a decanter of something amber and a crystal-cut glass. Slowly, painstakingly, the man stooped and bent with cracking and creaking joints to set the arrangement on the parquet flooring next to the wing chair, as there was no table anywhere in the room, Higgins all the while desperately looking about himself to see if he might fetch one to relieve the old man’s gasps and wheezes of exertion. 

This thoroughly embarrassing interaction done, the butler righted himself, and disappeared.

Of course he tried the door that the woman had used, but it was locked, as was its mate, and he could hear nothing behind either of them. So Higgins sat in the wing chair, took up the bottle, and poured an experimental finger. This clearly being a house of some munificence, it wasn’t half bad. 

And he waited.

His curiosity had not lessened in the slightest—now he was invested, now he had shed his overcoat and taken up a drink and was in this for the night, apparently. God knew this had all better go someplace interesting if it were going to take up the pretense of being memorable. If there had been books in this parlor he might have read them, even if they were in some language he did not know; at the very least he might have picked up something. But there was nothing to do but sit here and wait for time to pass, which was not an agreeable task, to his mind.

He went over lists of things that needed doing at least five or so times. Things he ought to ask Mrs. Pearce about, little things with the house and if any of it needed repairing—wasn’t that what responsible people did, hire workers to inspect the roof and the gutters and whatnot? Thank God for people to deal with people, he couldn’t imagine having to actually remember any of that on his own. Whether to check in with his publisher, or if it was still too early. Ask the solicitor if anything new had come up with the trust. Probably he ought to go and see his mother soon.

Perhaps he could take a holiday and go someplace. Not too warm—Vienna? The Dolomites? Did people go to the Dolomites? Did he even want to set foot in Italy? Madeira, or Corfu, or maybe now that he was getting expansive and ridiculous, Biarritz—

No, not Biarritz. Then it’d be Monte Carlo, followed by Venice, and then directly Hell, if he weren’t headed there already. And not for his vices and sins, no—Hell was all those people. Their obsessions with all the monotony of luxury and indulgence, with meaningless fashions and intrigue, who had the latest this and that, and who was gambling away their fortunes as though life was a thing to be spent. Thank God, thank God everything in his own life was settled, there were no questions of things like that, he wasn’t one to risk unnecessarily—

No. That was a lie.

He chased follies right off a cliff.

Higgins stared into the fire until his eyes were dry and hot.

Anyway, the point was not to go off half-cocked, but to think of someplace to visit that would be enjoyable, that he wouldn’t hate the moment he arrived.

And that was a daydream in itself, not to mention the fantastical notion in the first place of ever leaving London.

Maybe he could go back to Oxford for a bit. Just a few days, or even an afternoon, see the Garden Quad, visit the Old Library, go along Love Lane and view the college from just a distance—go and reclaim that sprezzatura that rested lightly about the shoulders of every man who passed through Balliol’s gateway.

Yes, that would be nice, he thought, and looked down into the glass in his hand. Nice enough.

The fire in the hearth crackled and popped, but hadn’t taken a breath since he’d walked in, and did not seem to require attendance or more firewood. It grew no higher, but fell no lower, either.

Didn’t Venice flood in the winter? Or was that only during October rains? He wondered if the masquerades were really as grand as it was said, or if it was an exhausting slog, all that preparation that required sleeping during the day, then waking up well after dark and dressing in silks and a mask, bribing gondoliers, all the balls and parties and pairing off for dances, helping young ladies to sneak out of the house where they were staying for a liaison—

Higgins clicked his tongue and winced.

God, he was tired of thinking. It was all he’d done for months on end, and for the first time he could remember—for the first time in his life, perhaps—he was sick of the sound of his own voice inside his head, and faintly he could detect it: the needle clicked into place, a fuzzy schuff started up somewhere far away, the reeling empty sound readying itself.

He kept his teeth together, waiting, seeing if it would hold at bay, trying to think of something to recite to distract himself, but it found a crack in the wall and came right through, blacking out his vision, for he was not as absolute as he’d been months ago, not as unassailable, not quite so certain.

Eliza, where—

Yes, yes, he’d been through all that a hundred times, a thousand score—he’d drunk that poison every morning and afternoon, and survived each dose until now. He was not afraid of what he had said, or what she’d thrown back at him. Didn’t this parasite have anything else to inflict upon him? Or was it finally weakening and shriveling away? Perhaps if he went through it line by line, he could perform an exorcism, cast it all out, banish her, re-mortar the chinks, lock the garden door, and cover it with thick vines.

What else was there? Go on, try it, what can you possibly—

—you’re magnificent, five minutes ago you were a millstone around my neck, now you’re a tower of strength, a consort battleship, I like you like this—

Not exactly an aura of light around his head, no, but it did not send him reeling to Pandemonium. Higgins went on.

Now I don't care that for your bullying and your big talk.

Ah, she’d deigned to grant him an appearance, and what did he think of that?

Higgins reflected.

Well, her mathematics was atrocious—she’d declared her plans to charge a thousand guineas (a thousand damned guineas!! Higgins bellowed inside himself) to turn commoners into duchesses inside of six months, an outrageous sum, even at his rate. Croesus himself would have burst into hysterical laughter. Who in the name of God had that kind of money yet lacked everything else? Americans? They weren’t marrying into the titled gentry these days, that venture had dried up years ago. And what would she do to prevent herself from accidentally slipping into her old ways, the little bad habits, the mistakes she couldn’t resist the moment she became a little too emotional, a little too worked up—

No.

He’d been down this road before. This path was well-trod and covered in the ugliness of too many footprints.

What did he think of that, was the question he’d posed. What was it, to be confronted with the distant sound of her voice telling him he was a bully, that he was all words and no sincerity, telling him she could just as well do without him, that the sun would shine on, that there was nothing truly frank in their comradeship, and that her soul would stand without him?

He’d examined this question so many times that Higgins did not think there was an answer anymore. If it once had been, he’d turned it over so many times that he had worked it threadbare, and then into nonexistence. Her words did not wound him, wound his vanity, or if they did, it failed to produce a shock or make him recoil, and that was the thing of it: it was no longer some inconceivable audacity. It no longer felt like an unpardonable crime.

It was just facts, now. Lost its power, or its lustre, or something tangible, in the repetition over many months.  Things she’d said, and things she’d gone away from, and that was simply the way it was. You were desperate, and miserable, and then you looked up one day to find you’d already been getting along all along, you’d gotten this far, and it was already done, the getting along without somebody, and you might as well keep going.

What I did was not for the dresses and the taxis: I did it because we were pleasant together and I—

Silence, because—well.

Sometimes he dreamt of drowning something, of holding it unrelentingly tight in his arms and letting it thrash in a few inches of water until it was over. And sometimes he dreamt that he was looking out of one of the upstairs windows at the back of the house, watching himself bury something in the garden below.

Perhaps the way out was straight on, recalling the particular inflection of every word, every turn of her head, every time she’d risen from the ottoman or sank into the chair at the writing desk, until it meant nothing, until they were mere facts. He leaned over and set the empty glass on the floor beside the chair. Endlessly beating at his own breast, wearing a hair shirt to do penance for a wickedness he was not even certain was wickedness in the first place. If he was right, then he was right—and if he steered to turn hard about, to “get around her,” as she always put it, what of it?  Better than buying into the tired, tired, tired old cliche of a man and a woman standing at odds, hands on their hips, screaming at each other until they were red in the face and exhausted and nothing was resolved, and they had to go on with each other, manacled together, chains running up and over and down their graves. Better always to be different. Life was so short to be quarreling about anything. There were better things to do, and always the work to be done.

Straight on wouldn’t get him anywhere, least of all back to where he’d begun. Maybe the trick was to duck out, to dig a hole beneath the wall, to tunnel out and leave his ghosts behind, still knocking at the door and peering in through the cracks in the bricks. Higgins looked at the door beside the fireplace. Were people owed a fresh start? A new association and path forward, something else to think about, a welcome distraction—

There was something else still in here with him. The needle still crackling, and it was not the fireplace. He could feel it hovering at the back of his mind, and remained unmoving to let it creep forward and make itself known.

Goodbye, Professor Higgins. I shall not be seeing you again.

That searing white light. He never failed to flinch. One day it would finally dim, and when it did, it would surely leave him a little paler, washed out, the colors slightly gone from his hair and clothes. He thought the words again, and it was a delayed by a hair’s width, and was a little less painful. It would always hurt, but he would still be here—he would not be erased altogether.

He would always be a hyena, Higgins thought with a grim kind of amusement. He’d joked to Pickering, but it was no longer just a charming and flippant thing to say as he shrugged indolently, enjoying his own little performance—it was out there in the world, proof positive where it held weight, that he was not a very pleasant soul. He was all bump and go, he was a tyrant, he was crowned with poppies by the devil himself, and any woman foolish enough to stumble into his path ought to be warned for her own good, for he was old now, halfway into life, and too old to change his ways.

How keen the sensation was of knowing it, of being aware that while in youth there had been the staircase step between childhood and being an adult, there was no more evolution after that—only decay.

He needed to think of a way to tell this woman off before too long, he thought, and the right door opened then, and she was there, but dressed differently. She held the door open, and said,

“Well, then. Shall we?”

As Higgins rose from the wing chair, he caught a glimpse of the room behind the door before it swung shut, where there was a group of people standing together, and a man among them facing him, staring at Higgins with a terrible gaze that he recognized from somewhere.

He knew that man.

But the door closed, and he and the woman went together through the foyer door.

“You aren’t Helena Blavatsky, are you?”

It wasn’t a serious question. The mystical con artist had been dead for twenty years—he hoped the woman before him would take offense and then her leave, and he wouldn’t be forced to stay long. They were in the Criterion, at the far side, overlooking the other tables as though from a great height, although there no changes in altitude here.

His dining companion turned from where she’d been gazing out with a distant eye, was startled for a moment, then scoffed and chuckled once or twice.

“That would be interesting,” she remarked, and went back to her watchfulness. She was not offended, even though she clearly fancied herself belonging to some school of Theosophy or whatever they were calling it these days—Golden Order of This Or That, those eternal grifts on bored rich people—for the men in the room beyond had been wearing robes as well, and Higgins knew he knew the shocking, blistering stare of that man with the awful eye.

Something had happened in that room beyond the parlor that had laid upon her a brooding, perhaps even melancholy air, but Higgins did not know her well enough—or know her at all—to understand it. Vaguely, he went on his guard lest this be some sort of persuasion. She was back in usual dress, but he had seen her in uniform, and was careful to layer his curiosity with skepticism.

“I shall be direct, then: who are you?”

She lifted the wine glass to her lips, and considered him carefully as she drank. Weighing him, putting him in one hand and then in the other, and she said,

“Cecily.”

And then suddenly she came into focus and was now not merely a collection of anonymous attributes, but a functional whole. Black hair in an almost indecently simple chignon—no braids or curls, not at all fashionable or even acceptable for public life—large eyes, and a nose suggesting something like a kookaburra’s beak. Was she pretty? He couldn’t tell. She was interesting, admittedly. Cecily, all together, he thought, annoyed that this was happening, that now he knew her.

“I’m being a terrible dinner companion,” she said abruptly, straightening but frowning. “I’ve had too many endings lately, and for once I thought I’d try a beginning.” And she looked at him, sharp, without blinking or looking away. “Who are you?”

He spun the stem of his own wine glass between his fingers, wondering if the same phenomenon would occur to her, whether he would begin to coalesce into something else, whether whatever shook out of that potential act would include hints of his being something to stay away from, the way that vipers and other animals wore vivid colors. Or if he would be forced to come up with a way to say it without sounding insane, without inducing pity or an entreaty for explanations.

“Henry Higgins,” he said, and Cecily’s eyebrows went up, which was interesting. She didn’t look like the sort of person who followed the nuances of who was who in academia and the science of speaking.

“Like the ink?”

He stared at her, stunned and in a state of dismay.

“What?” he said, sounding disagreeable even to himself.

She waved a breezy, careless hand and told him never mind, it was nothing, in that graceful way that social people did.

“And what do you mean, you want a beginning?”

“My husband died last year,” she said in an observational sort of way, the way one would remark that someone’s napkin has fallen to the floor.

He supposed he was meant to say how sorry he was, and Higgins made an effort at it, but it did sound a bit as though he was chewing on it when it came out of him.

“Mmm,” she said in reply. “Everybody says so.” Cecily leaned back in her chair and continued watching the rest of the people at their tables. “It’s been months, and I still don’t have a grasp of to feel about it. What it is, exactly, that I’m supposed to be doing.”

Higgins frowned at her. Knitted his eyebrows together.

“It’s like a hole that’s there, that wasn’t there before, and what are you supposed to do with the presence of an absence?”

“Grief is such a strange affliction,” she went on, “This… performance that you act out, that’s not quite the thing itself, but a mere representation of it. As though there’s a public version for the benefit of everybody around you—oh, good, she’s devastated, that’s how she ought to be and all’s right with the world—but it isn’t anything like what really happens to you, because that’s the part that no one wants to see, and least of all face.”

She turned, and seemed to realize again that he was still sitting there, staring at her.

“I wouldn’t know,” Higgins said honestly.

“You’re lucky if you haven’t had much experience with death,” replied Cecily.

“I have,” he said, “But grief is something I’ve always managed to skip over.”

And that was true: he’d gotten away with it, with an unburdened heart the last time, and the time before that, too.

Cecily sighed, and seemed to wrestle with the way she was sitting, or some emotion, and kept her eyes trained out at something that was not him. He followed her gaze at last, and found a man and a woman leaned over a table toward each other in very intimate conversation, oblivious to the room.

“Have you ever been in love?”

What an easy question to ask a stranger. What a fair thing to pose to somebody you didn’t know, to whom no part of you had been revealed yet, to whom you were a blank slate, for whom your words could only be the truth, for what could they possibly know of you? And what could they judge of you? And what could they hate?

He wanted suddenly to get up, take his coat and hat, and go away, go home, but—she knew what that meant, to have a hole in the middle of the room where there hadn’t been before, that you had to remember, and walk around, suddenly. Higgins stayed where he was.

“I thought I was,” he said slowly, “Or—I was, once. But they are past me now.”

She looked back, tilted her head to one side, and eyed him.

“It’s strange how people can never really know each other,” said Cecily.

“What do you mean?”

“You can spend your whole life with someone, but even if you tell them everything, there are some things that stay buried inside you, and you might not even know it yourself. And just the opposite: you can’t plumb the depths of another human being and expect to get it all. And certainly not the honest truth, for everybody has their own version of their own secrets.”

Higgins adjusted the knife before him, then moved it back.

“It’s enough to know enough of someone, I think. That’s all we can really expect of one another.”

“And yet people will always find a way to disappoint each other.” Cecily watched as the waiter approached to set down the Lobster Thermidor before moving away again. “What are we but our actions,” she intoned as though she were quoting something, and then reached for her fork.

He thought about it all the while they were eating, and when they were finished, he looked her over. She seemed in want of a sympathy he did not know how to properly construct, let alone submit for perusal, and had not mentioned even a breath of the strange hour they had passed separately in the same house. Higgins leaned back again, and crossed his arms over himself.

“I do know what you mean,” he admitted.

There was a pause before she spoke, a soft oh?, an invitation to go on, then. Lay it all out.

“It isn’t… grief, not really,” he said, not looking at her now, “It’s not the same thing at all. But it was, as you call it, an ending, and one I had not anticipated, and…” Where was he going with this? He’d begun it in the wrong place, the wrong part of the story. “The reality of it, the manner of it, is as though she is dead and gone.”

Cecily had her hands folded on the table before her, listening to him with her head cocked to the side again.

“And…” He unfolded his arms, sat up at the table, looking all the while down at the empty dishes. “I—” And now he flexed his fingers this way and that, grasping the air as though he could manipulate it, form it into something that he could hold up and say here, just look at this and it’ll make more sense. “There wasn’t anything really bad, nothing untoward or reprehensible, but… was there good in there, somewhere? Anywhere?”

Strangely, she let it hang in the air, and said nothing, which was of course intolerable, and he went on.

“What good did I put into this girl’s life, really?” Higgins asked himself aloud. “What I did: I taught her how to speak, and told her what to talk about, and—” He fidgeted. “She was a rough block of stone, all unhewed angles, and I meant to carve out a masterpiece.”

He could picture it in his mind’s eye.

“And while I wasn’t looking, one day she reached over, picked up the hammer and chisel, and did the rest of it herself, and now—”

Higgins threw up his hands.

“And she was, she is, a credit—my God, a deputy-queen, someone worthy of that much work. The best pupil I’ve ever had; a better ear than mine, even. I told her that.” He worried the inside of his lip. “I said that to her.”

Along the far side of the room was a group of men all sitting together at a table smoking cigars and laughing, thoroughly satisfied with their lot in life, with themselves.

“This is what I do for a living,” he said at the look Cecily was giving him. “I’m a professor; I teach phonetics and grammar.”

The men were laughing uproariously at some joke, it came to a fever pitch, one of them lifting a cut glass of wine in a toast, and somewhere was the faint sound of a woman crying, or a woman speaking—he couldn’t tell the difference in here.

“But where does it leave me if my students can do it themselves?” he said. “And don’t need me? What is the teacher, if instruction and guidance are merely ancillary to the techniques?”

There was another pause.

“What happened to her?”

“What?”

“What happened to her,” Cecily said, “If she didn’t die?”

He knitted his fingers together before him on the table, and tried to find the truth somewhere deep in the middle.

“She graduated,” he said. “And moved on.”

Cecily hummed, and there was a silence that was neither awkward nor chilly, but sort of… companionable, or easy, as though they had both agreed upon it.

He had meant to warn her, Higgins remembered suddenly. To tell this woman that while he appreciated the novelty of a peculiar night out, that he was an ordinary man who only wanted to sit before his own hearth and read his books and stay at home, in truth. Or that he was a tyrant, greatly learned of the world, deeply gripped by a genuine concern and love for humanity but unable to reconcile it against his disgust and disappointment in the low, petty, stubborn grievances and squabbles which kept it from achieving anything real.

“I had not meant to speak so much of myself,” he said suddenly. “You will forgive me,” and he began looking about for a waiter to summon for his coat and hat.

“I’ve thought about my husband for the past six months, rain or shine,” Cecily said. She had draped her elbow across the table and was resting her chin in her palm as though she were on a chaise-lounge. “I wake up and he’s there next to me on the pillow. I ring for tea and he’s there at the bell. The worst part,” Cecily said with a smile that was more of a grimace, “And they say this, but I never believed it was real until I experienced it, because it’s impossible to know until you know, of course—the worst part is when I find something in a book or the newspaper, and I think oh, he’d enjoy this, and I can’t tell him.”

There was a pause in which he had no idea how to respond to such a bold series of words. It felt as though she’d pulled him close and spoken them directly into his ear, making it buzz, making him turn red.

“I think some people go to graveyards and address the burial plot as though the bones below could hear,” Higgins said drily. “Oh, that’s a thought: You could have the morning edition delivered to his headstone, and read through the interesting bits, tell him the racing results or who died, and all that.”

Cecily snorted out a laugh, and he was surprised to find it more gratifying than if she’d reproached him, or drawn herself up and coolly left.

“He’d probably enjoy that,” she mused. “Goodness, it’s a nice change talking to someone else, and not this ghost that’s been following me around.”

The waiter approached, bowed, and addressed the pair.

“Would her Ladyship desire— ”

Cecily turned with a baleful frown and fixed it with great precision upon the man, who straightened after a moment with a look of too-late horror, to which the maitre’d came rushing over and shoved him aside.

“Sincerest apologies, of course, Mrs. Anstruther, pray do not concern yourself with—”

When the maelstrom of regrets had died down, Cecily threw a sardonic look across the table at him.

“I didn’t want to be anyone tonight,” she said, and what they both knew what she meant was for God’s sake don’t be deferential all of a sudden.

“Ah, well, you needn’t worry on my account,” said Higgins with a shrug. “I shall absolutely call you Cecily, regardless of whoever the hell you are.”

“All right,” Cecily replied agreeably, taking up the thread of it and speaking in the same careless ironic way, “I suppose it’s forward, and far too soon to be anything approaching polite, but you’re Henry, whether you like it or not.”

“You may do as you please,” he went on, waving an arm over the table as if to perform a magic trick. “And I shall not mind, for I am insolent, mannerless, unable to control myself, and use the worst language at the slightest provocation. It’s what I’m known for. That, and going in to the dining room with no shoes on.”

“Really,” said Cecily, lifting her eyebrows in mock surprise, “That must be tedious.”

“For me, or for anyone who has to put up with me?”

“Hmm. For whoever has to clean the rugs, I suppose.”

He rolled his eyes at her as she was laughing, and he’d bungled it, he thought, for out of this they would likely become friends.

Chapter Text

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

They fell in together, too fast, too close, too soon. They had known each other nine days and Higgins was sitting on a large cushion on the bare floorboards of what could be described as a drawing room. There was a crystal-cut glass beside him, and the room could be described as a drawing room because it had once been used that way, only now it was emptied of furniture. Cecily was sitting on the other side of the glass, both arms wrapped around her knees, long cigarette holder in her mouth, and a spluttering candle at her feet throwing false firelight and fog shadows onto the ceiling and walls each time she exhaled. 

He was not certain that he was happy, but he was not unhappy. 

The usual pantomime of retreating into the safety of bloodless stock phrases as to their people and history and worth was supplanted and discarded entirely when, upon reaching the far end of the northernmost gallery of the Tate, Cecily gestured up at the painting on the wall and asked what he thought of her. 

Like a wooden plank of a medieval icon, it was of a woman doused in gold, drawing in any interested viewer with the deception of religiosity by the thin sparkling halo around the mass of black curls. But the myth dispelled once you got close enough. Below her haughty expression was a gold collar of stacked rings, and even the bone-white hand holding aloft the base of a chased bowl ended in fingernails capped with gold leaf. A saffron-colored serpent had wound its muscled girth around her forearm to rest its head in the bowl, and the dress split open to reveal her breasts, the shadowed curve of her navel, and the high contrast between her pale firm flesh and the black at her core. 

Glancing up into the painting’s eyes, one found in her piercing gaze the challenge of knowledge. 

A test. To suss out his steadiness, his sensibilities, his opinions. Certainly it was better than inane talk about the weather, or who had been at a party the week before. No—this was an amusing bit of absurdity, a little spit in the eyes of propriety. A test, yes, but also, she was offering up her own principles and ideals for his perusal. They were checking each other’s teeth after all, but without the boring bits. 

“It’s one way to get to know a person,” Higgins remarked drily, and Cecily briefly shrieked out a laugh. No one came running at the sound, for the place was empty; private galleries and collections had begun the work of snapping up the new styles coming off the Continent, and older pieces, pastoral landscapes or painstakingly realistic portraits, had fallen quite firmly out of fashion. To wit: the likeness of a military officer on the other wall, done up on a canvas so huge that the man’s groom and horse had been slipped in at the background, discreetly peeking as though to inquire when this would be done so they could get back to Russia, or Napoleon, or something.

“I was the Earthly expression of the divine for this one,” she remarked with a breezy sigh, her gaze back on the rendition of herself-as-goddess. 

“It is rather worshipful,” he answered, looking closely at it again, for he’d found that the pattern in the robe was made up of eyes of varying sizes, all seeming to observe the pair. “How was the Tate induced to put up such…” 

“Shameful obscenity?”

“I was going to say—”

“—no, shocking obscenity sounds grander. And you know perfectly well what money and a title will get you these days,” said Cecily with a sly smile, and turned about like a great ship gliding into the next room, leaving him to follow, curious, in her wake. 

The Right Honourable The Lord Sudcliffe had been so gracious in his patronage as to gift the Tate with such a richly-appointed sampling of his best work, and in real gold leaf at that, and who were they to refuse a peer of the realm, anyway, even if it was an almost-nude portrait of his wife? Who would even suggest a refusal, or breathe word that anybody thought it might really be her? What newspaper would dare print that sort of scandalous accusation and withstand the aftermath?

“And if they put it in a back room somewhere where no one will see it, he’s none the wiser now,” Cecily said. “Though he would have been a little disappointed; the man functioned on sheer force of charm and a willingness to dress up and pretend to be normal when called to it,” she continued. “We had such great fun together, Lewis and I, every brushstroke and change in the light.”

“The endless cycle of sittings and waiting for varnishing day,” Higgins replied, and he veered from her suddenly to venture closer to another piece, standing still before it for several moments.

“Ah, Tissot and his pretty women and their pretty gowns,” she said after a while, cocking her head to the side. “Your tastes run toward the aesthetic.” There was more than a little hint of irony in her voice.

Higgins shrugged.

“Not mine; he’s always been my mother’s favorite.” 

Gazing back at them was a young woman reclining on a sofa, a red knot of curls piled atop her head, the hazy suggestion of a seaside in the open window over her shoulder. She wore a tiered dress with loads of pleats and miles of yellow ribbon, but what Higgins had been looking at for the longest moment was the way her arms were positioned: one elbow laid along the back of the sofa to end in a hand curled lazily against her temple, the other draped across a cushion nearby. 

A confection, an almost impossible gown, and the woman sitting so casually, nearly slouching, her eyes a thousand miles away, daydreaming. The fantastical ideas of a couturier made real, the hours of design and stitching—contrasted against the reality, for that was how young women sat on sofas when no one was looking or when they did not have to be ladylike for the sake of another.

“I think she still harbors a fancy that she could’ve gone to St. John’s Wood and sat for him,” Higgins said wryly, hands in pockets. “Apparently the rumor was that he kept champagne in the waiting room for all the fashionable type who showed up to have their portrait done.” He went on. “She never did it, though—it would have sorely tried my father’s patience.”

“What do you think of Tissot?”

“Pretty enough work, and he was a master of understanding the physics of fabric, but overly sentimental. It’s all endless repetitions of beautiful, useless people, doing beautiful, useless things.”

Cecily peered at the woman on the sofa. 

“Why the interest in this one if you don’t care for the artist?” she asked him. 

He nodded toward the piece.

“It’s Mrs. Newton. Do you know the story about her?”

“You know, irony of ironies, I’ve never seen the point of pretty dress paintings. But go on.”

Higgins looked again at the subject. Tissot did have a command of setting, but seemed always to lose his sense of reality when it came to faces—in particular, the way noses connected to brows. It was as though the man had never learnt how to soften the effect of the first sketch, and so they always came off looking like harsh Greek statues with marble ridges beneath pliable flesh. 

Mrs. Newton had been a thoroughly disgraced Irishwoman. She was packed off to India by her father to be married, only to engage in a seduction with one of the ship’s officers. Upon discovery, her husband sent her back to England under the ignominy of divorce, where she and her illegitimate daughter lived with her sister’s family for a time.

Then came Tissot in a chance meeting, by pure fate, at a postbox in the neighborhood—the French artist and  revolutionary who gave up his ideals, changed his name and left his homeland, only to find fame and wealth among the beautiful set in London. They fell in together, she moved into his home with the beautiful park and the reflecting ponds; he began painting her furiously, exclusively, and where there had once been scenes of grand balls and parties, Tissot shifted to keyhole glimpses of private life, of their domestic bliss together. 

Mrs. Newton with a parasol. Swaying gently in a betassled hammock. Mrs. Newton on holiday, by the shipyard, smiling in the Louvre. Mrs. Newton playing with her daughter, with their son. The children playing hide and seek in the drawing room while she read the newspaper. Her face nearly as big as the canvas, lips cherry red from the cold on a winter walk. Mrs. Newton, la ravissante, her face over and over again, becoming more stylized and perfect with time.

Mrs. Newton contracted tuberculosis, and began to appear with shadows beneath her eyes, weakening. Sleeping in a conservatory chair piled with furs. Propped up deliriously on a chaise-lounge. His work all reflected the agony and despair of seeing his muse and mistress slipping further into illness, toward loss. Seeing herself on his canvases, she couldn’t both die a slow death and watch her lover grieve her even as she was still alive, and so Mrs. Newton took a long draught of laudanum and her own life, and Tissot abandoned the house with its lovely cast-iron colonnade and the grand conservatory and returned to Paris directly as the funeral was done. 

His subsequent works tried to mount a return to beautiful social scenes, but the critics said the ladies have all the same face, it is always is that Englishwoman Mrs. Newton, and his efforts would not sell, and Tissot lived in an abbey, tucked quietly away to devote the end of his life to painting scenes from the Bible. 

When he’d finished telling her all this at the cafe around the corner, Cecily pressed her tea cup between her palms and hmmed. 

“For someone who claims to dislike sentimentality and mawkishness, you certainly know the whole of the narrative,” she said, and Higgins turned his head to look out the large glass picture window. “It’s curious; I’d never take you as knowledgable about art. I mean—look at you.”

He did.

“All tweeds and English respectability,” Cecily announced with a shrug, but he was still taking this in and hadn’t even begun to come up with some rejoinder to lob back before she went on. “Where does it all come from?”

There was a longer than slight pause, during which Higgins looked down at himself again. 

“None of it has anything to do with me,” he said, eminently reasonable, “I have a tailor. He makes things that fit. I put them on and don’t give a second thought to it.”

The woman set her teacup into the saucer with a too-loud clack.

“You insolent ass,” she told him, broadly, brilliantly, “You know what I meant.” And then she did something very strange and which he did not expect at all, which was that she gave a throaty chuckle and shook her head, half in indulgence, half in reproach. 

Higgins closed his mouth and rubbed his thumb and forefinger together for a moment, too absorbed in her response to answer. There was a sensation of brightness, and he did not know whether it would fade or linger a little. 

“I was brought up on it,” he replied at last. “My mother had the means to collect, plenty of well-stated opinions on the subject, and so it was part of my education from the earliest.”

This being a sufficient summary of the thing, he made to sit back and find some other topic of conversation to settle upon, but Cecily tilted her head to the side, waiting for him to go on. 

“And… certainly my father encouraged it.” Higgins turned the delicate little handle of the cup before him one way, and then back. “He was an artist himself.”

Cecily had raised her own cup as though to drink but was immediately arrested by this, for she gave a soft cry of surprise.

“What was his discipline?”

“Painting.”

“Which medium?”

“Oils.”

“Portrait or landscape?”

“Portraiture, mostly. He tried his hand at miniatures, but gave it up for larger canvases. He always said they framed better.”

“Have I ever seen any of it? Who did he paint?”

Higgins curled his toes inside his boots several times, whom, whom did he paint, and Cecily laid her forearms flat upon the table and bent forward until he had to look her in the eye.

“I can go on forever, you know,” she said, needling him a little on purpose, and thoroughly unapologetic over how it was picking away at him. “I’m very good at interrogations.”

He relented, but only to make her stop.

“The gentry, diplomats, officers, those sorts. I doubt you’ve seen any of it, it’s all hung in the stairwells and galleries of great houses—that was how they met. When she was presented at court, she asked her father for a painting to commemorate the occasion, instead of pearls or whatever girls got back then.” He considered pouring himself another cup, but settled for digging the edge of his thumb into the side of the table. 

“Did he ever paint you?”

Higgins frowned deeply.

“Several times. I think the final one is in her house somewhere,” he said, trying to remember which room it was in. “Mother keeps it at the end of a dark hallway, probably. He painted her most of all.” And the others only once or twice. 

“Was she his muse?”

Higgins paused, and tilted his own head to the side. 

“I couldn’t say,” he replied honestly, “And anyway, what a muse is, or how one goes about getting one at all, are not matters I concern myself with.”

“It’s a good deal of work, I think,” Cecily said, “Being the essential force behind a person’s whole creativity.” She smiled, but it turned a bit rueful. “Sounds romantic, but it’s a responsibility.”

He affected a charming half-smile.

“Sitting still was never my strong suit, either.”

“Oh, I don’t mean that. Half the time I wasn’t even the subject!” Cecily cried. “People always seem to think that being a muse is just getting dressed up a certain way and draping oneself over fine furniture, and the whole thing about sex, but it doesn’t work that way, not if you’re really doing it. It isn’t the same thing over and over, like an obsession—that’s where artists get tripped up, I think. The muse isn’t there to be venerated or worshiped or made love to, but to remind the artist that something out there apart from himself is alive, that he isn’t the only real thing in the world.” She scoffed. “Sort of the opposite of the slave whispering memento mori into the emperor’s ear.”

Higgins sat in the wake of that for a long moment, silent. 

“Still, I suppose it would be something to have a partnership like that,” he said at last. “Someone to be relied upon entirely, who knew you thoroughly. So many people seem to settle for what they don’t deserve; for the safety of the present, but which is ultimately beneath them. And they can claim to be happy, but everything bends toward a flat line, doesn’t it? You’re in love, you’re on fire, and then one day you wake up and the routine has been there the whole time, only now the steam on the mirror has faded and it’s not passion, it’s mediocrity.”

“Don’t you mean monotony?”

“Mediocrity is monotony, and monotony is mediocrity,” said Higgins. “Er, no—not the second one.” He watched people passing on the street outside for a moment. “I teach the same principles, and I write the same books and have the same conversations with the same people, but the work, all of that, can’t be encompassed by mediocrity. It’s too exceptional, too important by far to fall into the column marked average—good enough. How can anyone live with the knowledge of being only good enough, when self improvement is possible?”

“I suppose some people find it exhausting to be extraordinary every single day,” Cecily replied. “And the worst part is, they’ve got something in it, because everything fades with time, and levels out in the end anyway—a flat line, as you say. Intelligence, vivacity, a lust for life—even love. And if it all evens out, why ruin your own expectations?” She sat back in her chair. “I don’t think I could stand it, if I had to be with someone I wasn’t madly in love with. I’d probably die of boredom.”

“I would rather off myself than live in mediocrity,” Higgins said quietly, staring across the room at nothing. He sensed Cecily shift somewhere past his elbow, but he kept going, the sudden wildness, the darkness, aside. The tea room was such a bright white, curlicues and flourishes writhing out of the spindly chairs, pink striped wallpaper and doilies, that it was almost raucously, hysterically wrong, in addition to all the other reasons. “I wonder if that’s why people do it.”

When he turned at last to face her, to see what had transpired on her face, he found her pressing her chin into the palm of her hand, watchful, assessing him not unkindly. 

“I don’t know if that’s why,” she said, “But if one is unhappy, one at least ought to be unhappy on one’s own terms.”

Nine telephone calls, three telegrams, the papers had come, and did he want those? Several invitations, including one from the Eugenics Education Society to come and speak about his experiences with specimens of the working classes—

“No,” Higgins said, rifling through the stack of letters distractedly, “My business is correction of flaws, not eradication of them through breeding programs. What’s next, Crufts for infants?” He had a look at their missive and sighed. “My God, do these people not study history? Even Charles II couldn’t hide that Hapsburg jaw from his portraits, which ought to be proof enough that they don’t know what they’re on about.”

Mrs. Pearce nodded very sympathetically, and said that certainly he’d been an improvement over Cromwell, which prompted him to turn to her with a look that wavered somewhere between desperation and outrage before he gave up and waved her off under the usual instructions.

He slashed open the telegrams with a letter opener and cast an uninterested eye over them, then went for the thickest of the correspondence, wrangling his glasses onto his face with one hand. 

It was a letter from Pickering.

He expressed the usual ebullience, having such a marvelous time, dear boy, reporting on regimental gatherings and who was there and who he’d seen and the charming peccadilloes of the gomashta who’d been assigned him at the compound. He’d been on a cracking good hunt and bagged a tiger, and proceeded to spend a page and a half’s worth of writing paper musing on the merits of either having it stuffed and mounted, or turned into a rug, at last concluding that perhaps the rug was better in the end, for it would be easier to transport if he moved house soon, and to store as well.

Higgins flipped toward the last page, only to find that was all there was.

Dances, parties, quirks of the servants, a hunt, and detailed commentary as to an ongoing cricket rivalry among the officers. Nothing substantive or otherwise to indicate that Pick was working on anything related to Sanskrit dialects. Hadn’t he mentioned writing another book on the topic? Where were the updates on that? What new research had he done, into which marketplaces had he ventured to gain insights into regional vernacular? Higgins had never been especially interested in it, but that ought not give pause to an expert. It was the sort of thing he would have included in a letter to Pickering, certainly. 

Instead, what he’d gotten all the way from the subcontinent by means of months’ worth of ship movements were updates on the Colonel’s social calendar. And perhaps the man thought his friend would like to hear about what a nice time he was having, that he was hale and well in his advanced years, but surely—surely there was something else to write about than Mrs. Addison’s quite spectacular diamond necklace, sourced from a royal temple in Uttar Pradesh and set in with quite a lot of really stunning sapphires. 

It occurred to him suddenly to wonder, after all the conversations they’d had about how the experiment was going and what should be done next, what it was, exactly, that Pickering had done while they were all together. Taught proper usage of the soup spoon? For all his stated interest in dialect and linguistics, what was the Colonel’s purpose in it all? Giving her grand ideas about how she ought to be addressed in a courtly manner, and then sitting on the sofa to knock back for the rest of the day and peruse the newspaper?

Higgins flipped through the pages again, hesitant to let himself slander the memory of a man who had been friendly toward both him and the profession, but… it was difficult not to think of it in the face of a letter filled with empty niceties. As though he were doing it merely out of obligation. And that made him wonder, further, what sorts of letters Pickering generally wrote, what true confidences and revelations of himself did he put in his letters to her—?

He squared his shoulders. That was not his concern. If they’d been closer, had been bosom pals merely because the Colonel called her Miss, that had nothing to do with him.

The very last bit made overtures to ask after Higgins’ own work, how his mother fared, and ended with an exhortation to remember that if he ever found himself traveling abroad, to come to India and see the breadth and grandeur of the Empire’s jewels.

He folded the pages back together and wedged them into the envelope. The task of replying was a millstone around his neck at the moment, for it would be a monumental thing, a high peak to be summited—to analyze, assess, study, understand, to craft an answer that would make sense.

“What do you suppose they’re talking about?”

It was a handful of days later, and the two of them were seated at the very back wall of an auction room at Sotheby’s. Cecily was leaning forward and to the right, his left, and murmuring low enough for only him to hear over  the auctioneer. Higgins glanced up to find that she was watching a couple about halfway toward the front, the young man whispering into the ear of the lady next to him. The oversized hat she wore rendered her features indecipherable, and the man fairly disappeared as though he were sheltering behind an umbrella. Or wearing the damned thing himself. 

“Whether they can afford any of these things,” he said, returning to the auction catalog in his lap. “Where does one even get a…” Higgins flipped back and few pages. “Japonesque curio cabinet?” 

That was quite obviously not what the cabinet actually was. He’d wandered past where it had been placed at the farthest corner of the viewing room, paused to take a closer look at the deep gloss of the wood, and discovered that the finely-hewed and minuscule patterns around the edges were actually erotic carvings of a rather instructive and astonishingly open-minded nature. Apparently no one else had put this together, or if the collection’s curator had, it was certainly not included in the item’s description, nor was it front and center among the pieces on offer. 

“Japan,” Cecily declared, and it was impressive how she did it without a hint of irony. 

“What did you keep in it?”

She swiveled her head on her neck very slowly and stared at him without blinking. 

Higgins stared her down, po-faced, then licked his thumb and paged on. 

“Why are you here, anyway?” he murmured, looking over Lot 310, Tea tray in the style of Hepplewhite. “If I were selling off the contents of my house, I wouldn’t want to sit and watch it happen.”

Lot 274, Bookcase constructed of mahogany, which was rather fine, actually, very sturdy and handsome, and he was always in need of new places to keep books, perhaps it would fit in the—he looked up, suddenly cognizant that his companion hadn’t answered him. Turning, he expected a look of resigned irritation, or perhaps tears, but instead found her leaning forward, watching a small bidding war take place at the front of the room. The gavel came down, and she sat back, looking very thoughtful. 

“People have the most unusual taste,” she murmured, and he thought for a moment she hadn’t heard him before, but she said, “There’s a piece in here that everyone wants to see—the new style. It’s the only reason they’re really here.”

The next lot went to the front of the room, some sort of Rococo Revival chair, and while this went on, he paged through the rest of the booklet to figure out what she meant. A full bedroom set, a collection of miniature plaster busts of English authors, a mounted trio of quail—but none of Lord Sudcliffe’s art, which Higgins found to be an interesting omission.

But it wasn’t until the auctioneer announced Lot 450, Original pendulum table clock, designed by Paul Follot that the crowd murmured and sort of heaved forward, everybody talking amongst themselves and straining past ladies’ hat brims and ostrich plumes to see the thing as it was carried out by an assistant in white gloves. Higgins stretched his neck to catch a glimpse as it was set on a pedestal, then leafed back through the book to find it. 

A very unusual style, the square clock held aloft on either side by pillars inlaid with ebony and brass. The pendulum was shaped like an owl’s face. 

“He only got it a couple of years ago in Paris—the French are trying to get people away from cheap German furniture and bring back something unique and to their liking in style, and this is what they’ve come up with. Utterly exquisite.” She sounded suddenly very angry, and he could not tell why. 

“Very strong lines,” he remarked as the bidding was opened, and the place descended into something like chaos, if chaos were actually possible within the walls of a London auction house. He couldn’t see any of the patrons, but it seemed to come down to three people, with a “gentleman in the gray hat” making exceptionally stubborn work of it. 

On it went—nearly ten full minutes passed before the gavel came down. It was a far higher final price than he’d expected, and he turned to her once the furor and excitement had passed.

“Perhaps you should’ve donated that to a museum,” Higgins said. 

Cecily rose, an odd look upon her face, and said to him, nearly under her breath, that they should go. She had gone very white in the face and was twisting the palm of one glove in her other hand.

Sitting there, looking up at her, it occurred to him briefly that she had a private life, chaotic and inexplicable, a life that was entirely her own and which existed inside her head. There was no word Higgins knew to describe this sudden realization, nor the wistfulness that came over him as he stood and followed her out of the auction room. 

“Surely you don’t plan to live like this for long,” Higgins said to her now, still on the red velvet floor cushion in the emptied-out drawing room as she sat and smoked. The furniture was packed up, auctioned off, and all that was left were the two of them. 

“It’s only for one night,” she replied. “I’ve not forgotten my origins; I can sleep on a smaller bed.” And she picked up the cut glass to bolt what was left. 

“You wouldn’t rather stay in a hotel?”

She paused, still smoking, and then said,

“I live in a hotel now. Or I will.” She stared off long across the room, and her voice dropped. “Lewis has kindly seen to that, and I refuse to spend more time there than I absolutely must.” Cecily sighed suddenly, and reached up to press her thumb against her forehead. It left a bright white mark like a thumbprint when she dropped her hand again, and there was something rather more haggard about her. “This entire thing is simply…” But she did not finish the sentence, did not tell him what it simply was, but rather stabbed out the cigarette with a vicious grind into the bottom of the glass.

Higgins fidgeted in the usual way, flexing the hand that was propping him up against the floor in and out, and in and out. This was… he was… he ought to stretch, he thought, stand, make a pretense of looking at his watch, yawn about how late it was getting, how the housekeeper was probably wondering where he’d gone off to. Chewing on his lip, he looked at the woman sidelong, suddenly conscious and alert to how bizarre it was, sitting in an empty house with a veritable stranger. 

But to his even greater mortification, he found that she’d dropped her face onto the back of her hand and was crying. 

He did not inspire people to blossom forth with great emotions—nothing outside of the difficulty of lessons, anyway. And if he were being honest, he found them profoundly disgusting, those exasperating people who, upon locating a crying person, began crooning sympathetically in a high-pitched voice. They always seemed so pleased with themselves in their little performance, self-congratulatory, as though it was the height of moral victory to give a pat on the hand and a soothing platitude. Perhaps someone who was good with these things, another woman, a sister or a daughter, would have some knowledge, some innate skill, of what to do now, and he could be off, give the breakfast order and go to his bed, comfortable and content. 

Higgins remained where he was, though, and Cecily took one or two sobs in the meantime. 

“He wasn’t unfaithful, clearly—you’re much too in love with him still for it to be that.”

She writhed in a gesture familiar to him, and Higgins sat back, a metallic taste in his mouth.

“God, but it’s awful to love someone and hate them at the same time,” Cecily said, or rather—hardly she said it, for it seemed to erupt from between her clenched teeth in a kind of guttural moan. She took in a long breath, let it out again, and was calm once more, to his relief. 

“We got on together so well,” she murmured, “Lewis was lovely. And intelligent, and funny, just a little odd, and everything he should have been. She snuffled thickly, and he passed his handkerchief to her with a silent farewell to the thing. Having applied herself to the making use of it, she stared off long again into nothingness.

“And it’s all such a muddled up mess,” Cecily continued in a thoughtful way, “I miss him so much that I’m not sure I’m the same person I was—as though his dying has ruined me beyond what’s usual. I keep thinking would happen if you were to shatter two vases, and then gather up all the shards to figure out which pieces go to which vase, but both of them are the same color and the fragments all seem to connect, so in the end you aren’t sure if you’ve reassembled the two of them on their own or if they’re so mixed up now that they’re completely different and there’s nothing left of their natural state.”

Eliza sighed somewhere, faintly. 

I can’t. I’m so tired. I’m so tired.

All this, said Caroline’s voice, and he was surprised to find he still remembered it, quiet and firm, unobtrusive and yet fully aware. All this artifice, all this acting, and it’s only a beginning. So much work, simply to live up to the bare minimum. It isn’t natural.

“We cannot always afford to be perfectly natural,” he intoned quietly. A bit of advice he’d given to so many students. It was a mark of vulgarity to be theatrical and dramatic in delivery; it was better to sound at ease, in command of one’s voice, but the English language was such a pastiche of sounds and connections that the rules existed for a reason. And the rules always held fast in the end, over every bit of unwarranted variance. 

If Cecily heard him, she gave no indication of it.

“And in spite of everything, he was still, fundamentally, a good person, but I can’t—” Here she broke down again, and it took a very great deal of effort not to move about too much while this was going on. Cecily lifted her head once more, and spoke resolutely, though very damp. “I’ve had to conceal the truth to his family just for decency’s sake, and —”

“What happened?” he asked, more out of curiosity than anything else.

“Opium.”

And there it was, one word she tossed out with a shake of her head, as though she were saying that it had been a sailing accident, or a dog bite.

She continued:

“I didn’t think it was very bad, you know—people get on with things in ways you don’t quite realize until it’s very bad, and when it’s very bad, there’s nothing to be done.” Cecily folded the silk handkerchief across her lap and smoothed the edges. “And of course to really put insult to injury, the money’s…. Not good. Not bad, but not good, either.”

They both looked around the empty room.

“I know what you mean,” Higgins said quietly. “About people getting on in spite of themselves, against all their worst temptations and impulses.” He was trying to remember what that last painting looked like, what he’d been doing as his father had done the charcoal study, then shook himself and sat up. “But they will have their way, won’t they? And do as they please, inflicting it on everyone around them. Forcing it on the rest of us, leaving and then… getting away with never seeing the aftermath. Never having to face what they’ve wrought. And you have to wonder what it was all for—any of it, if they were simply going to toss everything away like that.”

There was a long pause, at the end of which he sighed, and looked up, only to find a curious expression on Cecily’s features. Not quite a frown, and not quite concern, but slightly pinched.

“You’re right,” she said.

“I mean, who truly—”

“—you really are rather cruel. Or—mannerless, however you usually put it.”

As Higgins absorbed this, Cecily twisted the spent end out of her cigarette holder. His skin felt too tight over the backs of his hands, suddenly, and there was a curious sensation running through his veins like champagne bubbles, high and cold.

Well! I suppose you’ve certainly got me there, haven’t you? Didn’t I warn you? You’re clever at least to address it now, before we go in on anything too soon.

“Well! I suppose you—” But he stopped before he could even make himself stop, and they were silent once more.

When at last he could bring himself to glance at her face, he thought she looked as though she were coming up with the words to turn him out altogether, and perhaps he might have fashioned an excuse to get ahead of her, but it was all still very fresh, still happening, and he was not keen with it.

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” Cecily said. “To another person, I mean.”

Was this still the same bizarre set of circumstances? Were they still here? Had he gone home after all, and was he dreaming? The candle was waving back and forth, throwing him against the wall, and he had no idea what time it was, and there was no fire in the fireplace but he was very hot. Higgins breathed in, breathed out, and considered.

There was a debt here, he owed a debt, and she was holding out her palm, ready to take something and clench it in her fist where no one would see it. One take for another.

He said it without hesitating so that he would say it at all.

“I drove off a pleasant and intelligent woman who was in love with me, and whom I adored.”

“Why?”

He decided on a word to describe it.

“Incompatibility.”

“Of personality?”

Higgins shifted his shoulders as this conversation became more and more intolerable.

“Sometimes. But of our… stations in life, as well. There were miles between us, you see.” A sigh, and then, “And it would have done much harm—to my practice, for one, and her situation in life, as well, which would have been monumentally difficult, or rather, outright impossible, to overcome.” He clenched his fingernails into the palm of his hand, making little crescent moon marks that turned red and white. “Not to mention—and I’m not flattering myself—that there would have been a scandal. If there hadn’t been already. So… it was more convenient to end the thing and be done with it.”

Cecily hesitated, ever so slightly rocking back and forth where she was kneeling now, trying to get the feeling back into her legs.

“What was her name?”

“Caroline,” he said gently.

She did send him home after all, advising to give her a week or two to settle in at The Goring, and they did not part with smiles or a handshake—it was with a finely assessing gaze and an ever-so-slight crease between the eyebrows that Cecily told him goodnight and closed the front door herself.

It took Higgins a long time to fall asleep that night.

Chapter Text

Absent—that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there.

- The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton

March 1912

I am grown peaceful as old age to-night.
I regret little, I would change still less.
Since there my past life lies, why alter it?—

“May I ask you something?”

Higgins turned, roused from where he stood by the window.

“Hmm?”

Sir George set the copy of Browning’s poetry to the side and frowned, apparently thinking of just the right way to frame his thoughts, and while he paused, Higgins went back to where he’d been gazing at the tree in the back garden. Something Cecily had told him a few days prior had stuck in his mind, and as laughable as it was, he was turning it over, musing against it, actually giving it some consideration.

She’d run his numbers.

“One and eight and seven and three,” she said, both of them sitting at the table near the window of her suite while he watched her with the pencil and notepad. “One and eight is nine, and seven and three is ten. Ten is reducible—one plus zero is one. One plus one plus eight is ten again, which we know is one. Then we come to your month, which is two, and the day, which is eight, and the year, which is reduced to one, which all make… eleven.”

“And what does that mean?” Higgins sat back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest in indulgent amusement.

“Eleven is one of the master numbers,” replied Cecily. “Very strong—Mozart was an Eleven.”

He made an ohh! sound and rearranged his face in an exaggerated imitation of surprise and fascination.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” she replied with a breezy shrug, as though none of this particularly mattered, but went on in a most genuine way. “Deeply involved in communication and interpretation—there’s your phonetics. Eccentric, visionary, lifting and inspiring others, but there’s always the tradeoff of greater hardships within the self. Eleven serves as a bridge between the low and the high, bringing them together, pulling ideas into the physical realm like a magician with the hat and rabbit, but he always stands alone, ever the conspicuous alien and outcast. Known for diplomacy and tact—”

He snorted indelicately.

“Well, that’s utter tosh! You nearly had an iota of something before that,” he drawled, and leaned back to look at the ceiling.

“—of course you’ve heard the saying physician, heal thyself—Eleven feels called toward professions of medicine or aiding others. They have a very specific purpose in life, but it takes a long time to come to fruition. True success is later, after a particularly difficult first half of life, which is why Eleven is referred to as the Wounded Healer. Always trying to make up for his own losses and tragedies.”

“Do you think people will find me strange for speaking like this?”

Higgins started, and turned.

“What?”

Sir George was sitting far forward on the sofa, contemplative in his concern.

“Well, it’s just—well, I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately, and Alice tells me it’s nothing, that people do this sort of thing all the time, but I can’t help but wonder what my old friends will think of me for talking differently than I did before.” The gentleman farmer practically wrung his hands together, but on such an imposingly tall figure it looked more philosophical than nervous.

Higgins folded his hands behind his back. It was not the first time this question had been posed to him—in fact, there was a fairly predictable set of thresholds that students went through. Initial excitement over the thrill of possibilities; internal and external promises to put in genuine effort; a disillusionment and growing frustration with the enormity of the task before them; and finally, once they’d grown used to the yoke of routine and begun seeing results, pupils began to turn their eyes inward and engage in close examination of what these alterations truly meant.

Such thoughts were typically focused in how others might perceive and judge them, speech having social roots, of course. But one time, there had been a strange and unexpected analogue to the Ship of Theseus thought experiment.

Were they the same person, and if so, how much of them was quantifiably different? And if changing something as small as manner of speech shifted or solidified the trajectory of their prospects, and those prospects led to greater wealth, or a title, or any number of other unpredictable events, could that eventually and someday mean that nothing of their original self would be left? Didn’t that mean they were an identity in flux already? Were they now simply watching themselves be taken apart, plank by plank, and replaced by something else that was both them, yet not them?

(You certainly have a great many questions for someone whose fate is already decided, he’d remarked to Caroline once she’d finished saying all of this to him. She’d paused in twirling that single thick curl over her finger, let it fall against her collarbone, and turned to him with a lush smile, as though she hadn’t said anything at all.)

“You mustn’t cut your old friends once you’ve risen in the world,” Higgins said after a moment. “That’s what we call snobbery.” He motioned for Sir George to continue reading.

“But what if,” Sir George went on without moving, “What if they’ll think I am a snob for sounding so…”

“Correct?”

“Well…” Macready drew the word out reluctantly. “I’m not sure if the upper classes have a word that means swell or toff, considering, but…” He trailed off sheepishly.

“We have a variety of words for that,” Higgins conceded, and removed his glasses with a sigh. “Not the least of which is, actually, snob.”

“There you are, I suppose,” Sir George murmured.

“Look,” said Higgins, drawing near, “You’ve a duty, and I should say, a right, to speak in accordance with your station in life—it’s only natural that you should think about what the future holds. What you’re accomplishing isn’t a comforting anchorage; you are traveling through uncharted waters—those of yourself, and the possibility of what may come. But I have taught dozens of students, and they have all gone on to great things. If your friends choose to drop you after this simply because you choose to better yourself, then they are hardly your friends, are they? Slighting someone because they have changed and risen to something new speaks not only of jealousy, but of a lack of faith and trust in the first place. It’s disloyalty, and doesn’t deserve to be met with continued overtures of goodwill.” He paused, and then said gently: “You will find new friends, who will take you as you are, and you will be happier for it.”

Having delivered this reassuring speech, Higgins straightened in anticipation that Macready should finish the poem and the lesson for the day. But hearing only silence, he found Sir George giving him a warmly assessing look.

“You’re so wise, Professor. With all the famous and influential people you teach,” the man said, “I imagine your pupils must be well pleased that you’re experienced not just with words, but considerations of social class.”

And he returned to Signor del Sarto and his musings on life.

Well, certainly that was a fanciful way to think about it. Higgins had always seen it as it was: students came, completed a course of study, and left. Their voices turned alchemically into those suited for either oration in great halls or the candlelight of a witty dinner party, they moved onward and upward; whatever students did with themselves after he had deemed them worthy to be released into the world was not his concern.

As much as Higgins loathed and rolled his eyes at the utter ludicrousness of social pomp and machination, people were people, no matter who they were. Filled with foibles and misunderstandings about the fundamentals of communication, for the English did not teach their children the native language at all. In fact, they refused to.

Captains of industry, doyennes and debutantes of the Season, shopkeepers and dustmen and such—all the same, and all deserving to be treated the same, for at their very heart, they were ghastly. Hell, some non-ranking member of the royal family itself might know how to shape her vowels properly, but if she couldn’t form sibliants, or insisted on saying lay instead of lie when she talked about the manner in which her cat sat in a window, her value was no greater than some fishmonger in his stall who dropped his aitches. It was all the same: wrong, wrong, wrong.

He held out his views on the speech patterns of the general public quite freely, content to let them knock however painfully against the heads of the woefully miseducated upper-classes, who ought to wake up and realize that the intellectual gulf between people born only a few streets apart from one another was not a point of smug pride that so many of them carelessly bandied about.

Higgins eyed Sir George, still running through the poem.

The man thought he had friends in high places, as it were. And that he remained… chummy with them.

Truth be told, most of the people who’d come through the doors of 27A regarded the whole business as one might a delicate surgery, or time spent in a sanatorium for nerves. Healthful and certainly helpful, but worthy of a certain dignified modesty. Higgins agreed, standing firm in this regard: he did not crow about how wealthy or well-bred or -connected his pupils were, and that was that. It was not inviolable conviction of maintaining professionalism, or of remaining beyond reproach, which drove him to this upright stewardship of his pupils’ privacy. He did not have some secret oath or moral code which rivaled those sworn in religious orders.

Quite simply, whatever went on within the private space of his study—whatever humiliating problems students brought to him, whatever lisps and stutters and slurs and hackneyed tones crept over his doorstep, whatever he faced with each new case—was not fodder for the gossip-mongers, or disposable entertainment for the idle rich.

All the attention, the breathless rumor-mills, the shocked murmuring behind gloved hands, the bullying at fancy parties and supper tables, was a waste of time and energy. It was merely a way for those who felt they were best to enshrine their presumptions in steel and dip them in gold, to be able to whisper with a falsely clean conscience: well, you’ve heard about the breeding on her mother’s side, of course or I knew he wasn’t everything he claimed to be, there was always something that set him apart—

The vaguest whiff of outsider, and they were out like vultures, feeding and consuming, gleeful and gluttonous. Professional discussion of difficult or interesting cases was one thing, but to allow the busybodies their grist was low and common, and only played into their awful game.

He’d had plenty that was worthwhile, after all.

If he’d been a less scrupulous man, Higgins reckoned he could’ve reshaped the Empire to his whims with what he’d heard, and from whom. Everything outed eventually, and never through any conscious striving of his own. More confessions of romantic yearning than he’d ever cared to hear, hints of government activity, and certainly enough stock tips to make himself an even greater fortune than he already had—or perhaps a bad enough investment to lose it all—along with contemplations on the nature of the universe, hesitantly-expressed doubts about God, tittle-tattle on scandals of every stripe, and even one or two tearful outbursts, which had been profoundly embarrassing for both instructor and aspirant.

But there he remained, inside the study on Wimpole Street, never breathing a word of these secrets, his purview the liminal space between potential and final success. And if his path happened to cross with an erstwhile student at some gathering—a garden party or thing of his mother’s to which he been dragged or nagged into—the fullest extent of interaction between they two was a brief nod, easily taken for the requisite greeting between strangers.

Or perhaps no acknowledgement whatsoever.

It was no repudiation of him or his methods, merely the ordinary course of his business. People came into his house, learned what he had to offer, carried it along with them into the world beyond, and made something with it. And then the next person came along, took another little part of him, and they, too, would leave for the last time. He sometimes read about particularly famous men or women in the papers, but beyond that, students were not in the habit of returning for a heartfelt reunion to gush with updates as though he were some long-lost relative.

Higgins had a private joke with himself about it. There’d be plenty of people in attendance at his funeral, but they’d all say the same thing to each other: Oh, I never met him, you know, never needed lessons myself in how to speak, but I hear he did good work for plenty of poor souls out there who did. A church filled with mourners all claiming to be strangers, and not a single former pupil to eulogize him; what a laugh.

Macready dutifully began reviewing the lines he’d stumbled across, which were growing fewer in number each week. Ere long Sir George would be out the door, devising something else to do with himself—find London society too distasteful and return to the West Country, perhaps, or else manage to make friends as genial and unassuming as he, and be content with his lot in life, a possibility which had grown in Higgins’ estimation as the months had passed.

He went back to the window. The hazy whiteness clouding everything had been replaced by bursting showers of rain, lasting only a few moments before disappearing in apparent surprise that they’d ever materialized. Even the tree in the back garden was beginning to hint at the shapes of buds on its branches.

It had been winter for ages, since it had been hot too, perhaps, and now spring was suddenly upon him, and he thought it very strange that the earth should come back with such audacity; a small child with muddy cuffs stomping in puddles and splashing everywhere, stretching and shifting into the summer Season, shrieking delightedly with a piercing keen as anybody of sound mind winced and hurried off to find a moment’s peace.

With the weather turning once more, it would soon be clement enough to go out with his notebook, to linger beneath awnings and at lampposts, to press his shoulder against the corner of a building as though he were waiting for a cab or someone he knew, to listen to the shapes and texture of words without heed for their meaning—for the exchanges were all the same; no one said anything remotely intelligent anyway. Time to go out, to be among strangers once more, to wander anonymously amidst the bustle and fill another notebook. To be accosted by a vagrant demanding her palm be crossed with silver, or cornered by some meddlesome nosy parker who refused to believe Higgins was anything but a spy or informant for the police.

To be a scrivener, an instrument of transcription, a moving finger writing, and having writ, moving on. 

Although… perhaps it might snow one last time. Perhaps they’d have a final insolent overnight freeze, with plenty of howling winds to rattle the fire grate and spit embers out onto the hearth, to shake at the windows and sob down the chimney—not the damp gusty winds batting cheekily at daffodils, but bracing knuckle-cracking cold down from Scotland; a reminder.

Six—no, eight inches of snow. One foot or two, maybe more. A blizzard that made you tug on an extra pair of woolen socks before bed, had you calling for the kettle to be put on once an hour, pulling the drapes tighter to shut it all out except for a brief glance now and again, just to check how dreadful it was before turning back to the snug warmth of the blessed indoors.

Snow pouring down, enough to keep the whole of London inside by the fire, where you could fantasize about those long sunlit hours of summer without the eerie loneliness of a June sunset, there inside where it would be all right a little longer.

Mrs. Pearce inquired the next morning how the meeting had gone, to which Higgins replied that Sir George was doing very well, as was to be expected with him as the man’s teacher, but it was hardly any of her concern.

She looked very confused at this, and he was a bit confused at that, and finally, after some back and forth which Higgins tolerated with no small amount of consternation, his housekeeper informed him that the latest meeting of the Royal Society of English Linguists and Phoneticists had taken place only the evening before, and she had responded to their invitation in the usual way, just as he’d instructed her last week.

When she’d left the study, a fresh pot of tea steaming on the table, Higgins felt a brief pang of guilt, but it passed quickly, and he occupied himself with copying a bit of phrasing out of De rerum natura instead.

“Oh good, there you are,” Cecily declared the next time they met. “I’ve finished your birth chart, and it’s terribly exciting—I understand you completely now and know all your secrets.” She winked ostentatiously. Higgins came through from where he’d had to open the door himself, for she’d called from within that she was too busy to get up from where she sat, and he came over to the table, which was covered in papers with quite a lot of scrawling and geometric angles.

“Now, really,” he told her, “You know just as well as I do that none of this has any basis in rational fact. Next you’ll tell me you want to hold a séance, and would I go buy some candles and a bell, or something.”

“Nonsense, I already have those,” she replied with a dismissive wave of her hand, and he thought of course she did, the ridiculous creature. “Besides, if you’re going to bring up reason and logic, then stop trying to read what I’ve written upside down.” Cecily gathered the papers to her person with an archly amused expression.

He straightened, gave her a good bit of a glare, and sat down.

Cecily clapped her hands cheerfully.

“Excellent! Always such fun, learning about someone new—and I’m a dab hand at this sort of thing, for it’s much more grounded than casting spells or battling psychic attacks and whatnot. Never was much good at them; I couldn’t see where anything actually happened.” She wrinkled her nose, as though there were any difference amongst such things.

Higgins rolled his eyes.

“My God,” he muttered. “I should’ve gone to the park alone.” And to drive this point a little further, he glanced at his watch.

“Well, park aside, why else are you here?” said Cecily, all annoyingly bright arrogance. “I was right last time, and you’re simply dying to hear about yourself again, aren’t you? People always are, which is how you know there’s something in it — ”

“All right, if you’re going to do nothing but go on about how these facile, rote lists of characteristics are God’s own truth, I’m leaving,” Higgins announced loudly, making to stand.

“Your numbers align with your astrological aspects in a way that’s almost uncanny,” Cecily said in the same loud voice that made him sink back down into the chair with an air of saintly patience. “Eleven is very strong in communication, dedicated to helping people, and yet has a feeling of being largely set apart from, or outside of, normal society.” She flipped around a sheet of paper upon which she’d traced a large circle, and inside of that, drawn multiple angles with degrees and alchemical symbols. “But see here: Aquarius is also the sign of communication, philanthropy, and trying to improve the world for the sake of others.” She looked at him with great curiosity. “The idealist eccentric, with unorthodox ideas that everybody throws back in your face now, but will gladly grab onto a few years ahead, when they catch up to you.”

To this, he scrunched up his mouth.

“There’s a whole society of phoneticists and linguists who’ve been working and advocating for the improvement of English speech for decades, it’s not as though I made it up from whole cloth a week ago—”

“There are still elements of diplomacy and tact, but manifesting as an aversion to conflict; Aquarius is often called cold and selfish, because he’s so logical and detached from qualities of emotion that he can’t think why other people get so upset over anything.”

Cecily knitted her fingers together and leaned over the table to squint at him in what she apparently thought was a very mysterious manner.

“And I see this in you—”

“Oh, Lord above,” Higgins began.

“—but the funny thing is, Aquarius can be short-tempered, a quality stemming from restlessness. Independence prized above all else, a love of travel—I’m surprised you even own a house, but then you live alone, I think, and there are other influences at work here.”

“Technically this is blasphemy—”

“You are speaking to an adepta minor, so invoking religion is a bit of a moot point,” Cecily replied smoothly with a sly glance in his direction, “And I’m sure there are enough lifelong bachelors in the whole of London to make the Church reconsider their stance entirely. Here’s the other thing: Aquarius has the distinctive quality of being more observer than active participant—watching everybody else experience life through a glass wall, as though at a museum or the zoo.”

Higgins stared at her, eyebrows drawn down into a frown that kept trying to contort into something else which he suppressed.

“These are hardly written in the stars—I’ve told you what I do for research.”

“No, you haven’t,” Cecily replied gently.

He was thinking about his notebook, and how it had always been in his breast pocket. At every party, every social occasion he’d gone to, dressed (pointedly) all wrong, leaning against a door jamb, absorbed and occupied by the noise but never the content, always recording, always going home at the end of the night to sit at his desk and analyze, summarize, make something of it, pull sense from the incomprehensible, clarify the mystifying and irrational into something calculable, observable.

“Didn’t I?”

How was it possible to survive being the center of attention? He’d never been able to figure that out. At a ball given specifically in one’s own name, or a surprise party thrown by friends—what was it like to be immersed, to lose oneself in the pleasure of an experience? To let one’s focus be on the correct thing, the event at the heart of it all. To not observe the expressions of the orchestra players as people danced, to not constantly check the curtains near the wings to see if a stagehand might slip up and stand where he was visible. Life was filled with those fleeting details, and the people stupidly letting themselves be taken in and consumed by a performance were the ones most likely to have their pockets picked, real and otherwise. The most mortifying ordeal he could imagine was the possibility of being fêted, being watched by a roomful of people, their faces humiliatingly expectant, open mouths and raised eyebrows, watching for just the right emotion, the one that would reassure them that he was one of them, he was just like them, eager to be fleeced by illusion.

“I think you aren’t as cold and unfeeling as all that, though,” she continued.

He would not give her the satisfaction of hearing what his voice would do if he answered.

“I wonder whether you find it very difficult to live day-to-day, or if perhaps it’s easier, given the proscriptions of English social rules. You chafe against tradition, but this world is so narrow that it doesn’t allow for a great deal of emotion, or really any at all, which you probably don’t mind, or may even find tolerable.” She pointed to a spot on the circle where two lines came together in a close angle. “Your internal life, the person you are when you’re alone, is placed in Cancer, and there’s tension radiating from this throughout the rest of the chart.”

“How so?”

“The head and the heart are at war, and if you want any peace, you’ll figure out how to reconcile them. Where Aquarius is the intellectual revolutionary refusing to be chained by convention or the ordinary, Cancer embodies love of home and family, and an especially close relationship with his mother—with whom few women can ever hope to compete. He’s sentimental, with good recollection and memory, which means that if he’s wounded, he’ll not only never forget it, but be able to recall that moment perfectly.”

“Obviously one wins out over the other. Shall we go?”

“Aquarius is always facing the horizon and the future; Cancer is a slave to his moods and remains comfortably mired in the past. It would take a great deal of effort for them to be in concert with one another.”

Cecily turned the chart toward herself and gazed at it for a long moment.

“What must your house look like,” she murmured. “Filled to the brim with all the luxuries, I imagine, but deliberately dressed to provoke and overwhelm visitors.”

Higgins couldn’t help himself, and pounced on the opportunity, if only to get her to stop talking.

“Well, that’s not such an occult thing—I’m a professor, and make use of rooms for my own purposes, not whatever suits my students or some idiot who can’t imagine a drawing room as anything other than a tableau kept on ice for company.”

“Where do you spend the most time?”

“I never had any use for some silly drawing room, so I had it converted into a rather nicely efficient combination of study, office, laboratory, and library,” he replied, pleased that she’d asked and he’d had the chance to put that forth.

“Mmm,” said Cecily, smiling cat-like. “And what sorts of things are in there?”

Sensing that he was well into the process of being caught out, and a little annoyed at this, Higgins frowned.

“A sofa, a tea table, a wing chair, and a piano,” he answered, haughty and stubborn. “It’s all perfectly ordinary.”

“Liar,” she threw at him easily.

They waited in silence for several moments, until finally he couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Fine,” Higgins said. “It’s filled with anatomic illustrations, phonetic pronunciation charts, and there’s a plaster model of an ear this high,” and here he held his hand about two feet above the tabletop. Unable to stop once he’d started: “There are crystal-cut candy dishes filled with chocolates and fruit on every surface, and at least ten pairs of slippers floating around beneath chairs for when I lose track of them. Is that answer sufficient for whichever demon is commandeering your physical form out of Hell itself?”

Cecily was unfazed.

“How many servants have you got?”

He fidgeted, and fidgeted some more, and finally Cecily said,

“Is it more than ten?”

“Seven,” he replied, only because his answer managed to be lower than her expectations, then cringed anyway when her eyebrows went up.

“For one person?! You aren’t even a baronet!”

“Shut up,” Higgins snapped without any vitriol, hunching back in on himself. 

“You like to be looked after, like a housecat,” she noted thoughtfully. “What a lovely set of contrasts you are,” the woman went on, and cupped her hands around the edges of the image she’d drawn. “Every time I uncover a new facet, you and the chart become more complex.” Cecily paused. “Do you want to hear your romantic prospects?”

“No,” he said immediately. “None of this is real.”

She hmmed.

“Capricorn rising, which in your case makes perfect sense.”

“I have absolutely no idea what that means,” he cried, irritated now beyond measure.

“When people first meet you, they see an obsessive perfectionist who can’t resist the urge to control others,” she declared, and rose from the table, gathering the sheaf of papers together. “You’ll want to watch that, it can be malefic, and you’ve got a bit of Saturn throughout your chart anyway, which is awfully dangerous.”

“What?”

Cecily was already standing and moving to fetch her coat and hat. Higgins stayed where he was.

“What in the name of God are you talking about?”

She finally came to stand over him, halfway in the process of doing up the buttons, and looked at him very seriously.

“Malefic? It means it can give… a bad influence.”

“Oh, is that all?” he said quietly, soaked in sarcasm.

“People—men especially—under this ascendancy often attempt to mold those around them to a way that… makes sense to them, a way they find preferable, comfortable, acceptable. But it often goes awry, and turns into a power struggle that drives away friends or lovers. If they begin to enjoy manipulating a person, it can turn to torture and cruelty.”

There was a long silence.

“Then again,” said Cecily, “Those with Capricorn rising are also usually rather short of stature, and tend to be reserved and not speak very often, and neither of those are true. Other aspects may have a stronger positive influence over you; it’s not as though you’re guaranteed to absolutely be tyrannical over someone you’ve set out to help.”

He did not say anything, and felt keenly the irony of it.

“Oh, really, Henry—there’s the human element to be considered!”

“Yes, well, you’ve had your fun, and now I suppose we’ll go off to the park and forget all about this, or let a dark cloud cast a pall over the afternoon,” Higgins replied heavily.

“You aren’t going to be angry, are you?”

“I’m not angry,” he said in truth, “I’m…” He looked out the window to the cars and carriages passing on the street below. “I don’t know.” This was not a phrase of uncertainty, but of weariness.

“Sometimes it does touch too closely,” Cecily said, and seated herself once more. “And yes, I heard you,” she went on quickly, holding up a hand before he could protest, “It isn’t real, it’s all flattery, but… Nobody talks about feeling detached from their own life, or… take me, for example, my Venus is positioned in Sagittarius, which, according to ancient wisdom, means that I get tired of a lover and have to be constantly distracted by novelty and distance in order to remain engaged. And yet that’s not true at all—Lewis and I were very happy, and constant, together. He took me exactly as I was. You can make whatever you like of these things. But it’s the idea behind it, all those possibilities, something other than the chocolate box happily-ever-after that gets forced down all our throats. Something different, something out of the ordinary. People like to hear about themselves that way—we all like to hear from someone else how unique we are.”

“That’s not quite true.”

“Oh?”

“People don’t enjoy being told who they are—they want to talk about themselves, endlessly and without interruption. It’s… social mores that prevent us from doing it.” He scrunched up his mouth again. “From my experience in dealing with people, anyway.”

“Perhaps that’s all anybody really wants. I keep thinking that this ought to be the defining feature of the new century—getting your chart closely read and analyzed, and seeing yourself in your entirety. Being able to see our faults, our exaltations, from the highest possible position. Gaining the greatest understanding of who we are and why we do what we do.”

“I suppose.”

“You don’t think it should be attached to the occult, or cosmology,” Cecily guessed.

Higgins sat silent for a moment, making a decision within himself.

“The thing is…” he began, and stopped himself, then started again. “The thing about being different, about making certain that you are different from everybody else is that… in spite of the satisfaction of being your own person, you have to live with the consequence of being misaligned with everybody else. You are perfectly unique, but must search all the harder to find someone to relate to, with whom you share even one trait or experience.” Higgins watched a lorry veer around a pair of men crossing the street. “You aren’t a face in the crowd, but you’re set apart, and that has more than one angle, and you don’t see that for a long time.”

He heard, rather than saw, Cecily rise from the table once more.

“Come on, it’s a lovely day and there’s no point spending it in here,” she said.

When he got home much later, Mrs. Pearce was very flustered, for there’d been four telephone calls from his mother, who had been expecting him for lunch all afternoon, and he’d quite forgotten and caused a small uproar.

Chapter Text

Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter—and the Bird is on the Wing.

- The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam

“—And so, with this feverish, operatic rise of orchid hunting and collecting came vicious competition. Many explorers, who were sent by ardent and wealthy enthusiasts on journeys around the world to collect the rarest specimens, faced hardships which we will never experience in our lifetime. One man, sent to the darkest reaches of the globe, would survive a volcanic eruption in the fulfillment of his quest; another watched his ship, with its hull filled with exquisite flowers, sink after catching fire. He cabled the news of this to his employer, only to be given instructions to return to the jungle and begin the arduous and Sisyphean task anew…”

Cecily leaned over to speak quietly in Higgins’ ear. 

“Are you going to Aintree next week?” 

He frowned, but did not look away from the speaker at the front of the room, who was trying to describe in appropriate terminology the infamous Colombian trip undertaken by Micholitz, who had hired a group of natives to help him collect plants. The German lost the men’s assistance when their tribe objected and descended into a fight amongst themselves so fierce and savage that several were beheaded, and one Indian lost both his hands and his manhood. 

“I’d rather boil myself in lye than have anything to do with the Season,” Higgins muttered. He settled in once more to listen to the rest of the lecture, but Cecily uncrossed and recrossed her ankles, giving him eager little glances out the corner of her eye. 

“Were you kicked in the head, and the sport was forever ruined after that?”

“Something like that.”

“Let me guess: you object to the inefficiency and excess of wardrobe standards.”

Higgins ground his teeth together, but she stubbornly went on.

“I suppose I could sit here and imagine a scene of you preparing to dunk your head into a laundry vat as though you were about to go bobbing for apples—”

“Shall I explain what a farce it all is? Fine. The whole thing is a complete and utter waste—”

“I knew it,” Cecily whispered to herself in fierce triumph—

“—all that pageantry and self-congratulatory preening. Not to mention the towering hypocrisy: merely an excuse to spend money and go into massive debt as you desperately try to convince everybody else that you’re rich.” He looked around to see if anyone was glaring at them. “They’re all lying to themselves, steadily becoming morally and financially bankrupt, merely to maintain the illusion that they aren’t clinging to the status quo with their last ounce of strength. This country is rotting from the inside out, people are dying in squalor, but oh—we simply must have new togs for a bloody horse race lasting all of five minutes.”

“Well said,” Cecily replied. “You should’ve been a preacher.”

“You are not the first person to tell me that.” Although he did think it would only have been an interesting profession for as long as it annoyed James. 

“Well, I wouldn’t have marked you for a firebrand in that waistcoat,” she remarked, lifting her eyebrows at it. “You’ve disguised yourself fairly well.”

“Oh, believe me, it’s not possible to disguise oneself among pale lavender silk top hats in… whatever this is,” he replied, looking down at himself. 

“Windowpane check,” Cecily said automatically. She was watching the speaker, but tilted her chin toward him with a very concerned expression bordering on disgust. “I’m sorry, do you actually know someone who wears a pale lavender silk top hat?”

“A wanted escapee from the idiot ward at the asylum,” he drawled, picturing the scene quite well, and Cecily laughed, a bright sound that pulled him back. Someone a few rows up shifted in his chair, making it creak.

“How funny—normally I would advocate for men to dress in such daring ways, you lot being such slaves to fashion, but I can’t think that pale lavender silk did much for his complexion, whoever he was. That’s a difficult thing to pull off by anybody.”

“What do you mean, slaves to fashion?”

This was apparently too much, for someone else in the audience turned to glance pointedly at them before settling back into his seat. 

Higgins leaned in and whispered hotly. “Fashion shall ever and always remain fully the dominion of females—your entire sex does nothing but talk about what you’re going to wear, and who made it, what it’s made of, and how much it cost, if you’re truly uncouth,” he went on. “All a man must do is put on a suit, ensure his socks and shoes aren’t mismatched, and there you are.”

Cecily looked at him head on, unencumbered by enlightenment through his wisdom.

“Day in,” she said in a low, funereal voice, “Day out. Shirt. Waistcoat. Suit jacket and trousers. Shoes. Brown. Black.” Her chin dipped, bobbed, dipped again, and Higgins fidgeted wildly as she imitated falling asleep.

“My wardrobe is professional, with a proper degree of restrained elegance—it lets a person know who I am upon first sight, and doesn’t stand on pretension.”

“Oh, ah,” said Cecily in a deceptively light tone.

“Besides,” said Higgins, now beyond exasperation, “If I went about with a violet buttonhole I’d never be taken seriously as an academic. And you’ve forgotten a necktie in your little list,” he observed haughtily.

“Oh, yes, the necktie—a veritable palette of experimentation, and certainly not an afterthought chosen in early morning darkness by the valet who can rely upon the fact that everything in your armoire is the same outfit rendered in slightly different neutral colors, as overseen by an unimaginative, if clever, tailor,” replied Cecily, who now had the unmitigated gall to reach out with a finger, pull the length of silk between his lapels like a limp rag from the gutter, and cluck her tongue. 

Higgins crossed his arms over himself and gaped at her in horror.

“I will go sit up front,” he warned her.

“Not until you answer my question,” she shot back.

He stared at her for a moment.

“The Grand National!” Cecily hissed. 

“No!” Higgins cried. “Obviously! I have made my thoughts on this abundantly clear!” 

He said all this through clenched teeth, but after several seconds of silence they both looked up to find every head in the place turned to face them, along with the speaker at the lectern lifting his glasses to have a better look at the two.

Someone coughed.

Cecily folded her hands in her lap like a small child in church and cleared her throat.

“Sorry,” she said in a charming voice to the man at the front of the room. “Do continue.”

Higgins had just made up his mind to hightail it out the back door the moment the lecture was done when she leaned over again during a lengthy passage being read from an orchid collector’s memoirs. 

“Are you sure?”

He suppressed a long-suffering sigh. 

“Why are you harping on about this?”

“I hate these things as much as you do, but my nephew has a box now that he’s Lord Sudcliffe, and he’s trying to ‘rehabilitate the family name,’ so I’ve been invited.” She shifted in the chair. “And it’s been made clear to me that this isn’t optional. So rather than be bored to the point of wanting to hang myself, I thought perhaps you could come along and be a decent distraction.”

“What a touching endorsement of me, I’m quite tempted now.”

“Well, it’s either you, or I’ll be forced to spend the next week locating a source of cocaine, because either way, I’m not spending three days with that insufferable boy-king and his sister without some means of entertainment.”

He eyed her with uncertainty.

“Oh, come now—you could use a change of venue, probably. When was the last time you left London?”

“It has been a while,” he conceded. A long while, actually, he realized. He’d been up to Cambridge for a symposium on linguistics two or three years ago. And none of the ones that had been held at Oxford in the intervening time. Higgins frowned.

“So you’ll come?”

“Mmm,” he said, still thinking of Oxford.

“Well,” said Mrs. Higgins, and he knew it for what it was: the sign that lunch was drawing to a close and that now they would begin to move toward saying their goodbyes. She delivered it the same way each time: warmly, with a hint of a smile in her voice, and during an expectant lull in the conversation, as though she were stepping in to rescue everybody at the precise moment when the question of taking their leave arose in her guests’ minds.  

His mother had always been accomplished at managing and directing the flow of social engagements. He’d no idea how she’d learnt it—whether by purposeful design or if perhaps it was something innate to her being. If it were something heritable, he certainly hadn’t caught it, though perhaps it only passed from mother to daughter. Vicky, seated at his right elbow, was reaching for the coffee pot as though she had the run of the house. 

He was under probationary watch, and the warden had elected a secondary jailer to help keep an eye on him. After the earlier luncheon debacle, he’d been strong-armed into putting in twice as many appearances a week, with his sister appearing on the doorstep at 27A twenty minutes before the appointed hour, to ensure compliance. 

And yet if he’d decided to drop in unannounced on her at-home day, Mother would surely complain as though it were an absolutely unacceptable burden upon her time and social connections. Certainly neither of them cared if he were being imposed upon in all of this. 

“It will be a fine spring if it doesn’t rain too much,” Vicky murmured in a pleasant low tone. 

“Of course, rain is always a certainty in this country,” their mother agreed with an indulgent chuckle, and now it was his turn to say something inane and obvious about the weather. How he longed to raise the topic of the mass suffragette arrests—there was something impolite, shocking, and inappropriate for proper digestive conversation. All those women in prison being force-fed—

They were both looking at him, heads slightly tilted in increasing expectation, Vicky’s coffee cup still lifted halfway to her lips.

“At least the ducks and daffodils will be happy,” Higgins said, and both women looked satisfied at that.

Henry Higgins had been awarded both his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Balliol College, Oxford University, granted the title of Professor, and was spending his precious time chatting idly about the weather and how it would please the local flora and fauna. 

Lovely.

“Oh, Henry, before you leave—” and goodness wasn’t his mother skilled at that, “I’ve a social engagement Wednesday next. You may come to lunch on Thursday instead.” A nod passed from Vicky to her mother—Vicky, of whom the same demand masked as gracious permission had not been made. 

“Afraid I can’t; I’m going to Liverpool next week,” he said, if only to enjoy the power to reject, but immediately regretted the terminal mistake. Both of them perked up at this news; their eyes grew wide, oddly hopeful, and bright with attention. Vicky actually straightened, and it took every ounce of strength he had not to descend into a wince, a cringe, a glower. God, if they would just leave him be. 

“You’re going to the National this year?” his mother cried, pouncing on it. “Goodness, Henry, do have a care about your wardrobe, if nothing else—”

“I say, what fun,” said Vicky with her usual sardonic drawl, although she was making it brighter, more interested, more artificial. “Such a great deal of people there; so many parties and little gatherings that one scarcely gets a moment to oneself. A grand opportunity to see everyone, certainly.” Ah, yes, because the sister who’d married a revolutionary was in such high social demand that she’d been invited to join an old pal from her debutante days a few years ago and hadn’t shut up about it since then. 

“Perhaps you’ll meet the Pritchards; they always go—”

“Are you going to place any bets? They’re saying that Jerry M will take it—”

“Of course, they’ll be in a pavilion-tent on the grounds with their granddaughter; she married a viscount last year, you know.”

“—if you do, place a bet for me and I’ll give you something for it when you get back—”

“—although perhaps we ought to go sometime, it has been so long—”

“Oh—!” Vicky cried out at this suggestion, as though she were ready to go telephone a booking agent for the railway so they could all trek up there together, all eighteen of them snuggled together in a first class carriage, every single one of his immediate living relatives.

The silence coming from Higgins’ slice of the table was what finally put a stop to the chatter. He was looking evenly into the reflection of himself in the tall silver coffee pot, his features warped and unrecognizable in its bell curve. 

Vicky shot a glance to their mother, flashing the whites of her eyes, and seeing his sister nervous and uncertain rather than her usual state of sly and arch gave Higgins a small flare of satisfaction. 

Finally, Mrs. Higgins spoke.

“Are you going for your work? To continue recording accents?” Her voice softened a little. “I remember you saying how you wanted to make a full survey of every English accent, and index it all by county; are you still doing that?”

“Liverpudlians are said to be such a curious-sounding lot; what a ridiculous name they suffer—” She caught herself, just as her mother turned a glance on her, and fell quiet. 

“As long as people can speak, there will be work,” he remarked, and remembered at the last moment to push the edge of his mouth upward slightly so that it would be construed as something like a smile. 

It wasn’t a lie; merely the sort of evasive answer fulfilling the social obligation to be mannerly while not taking up too much of the listener’s time with explanations of which speech patterns were more likely to occur in the northern counties, or why, for example, there were strong variations between certain sections of Liverpool itself, and how it was all rooted in economics and history—but, Higgins conceded privately, he had not recorded anything in months, and was not likely to do so from inside a box. 

But he did not say this. 

His mother had knitted her eyebrows together thoughtfully, and for a single moment, something faint thrilled to the idea that she had pieced this information together, that she knew after all that he had been neglectful, and something would come out of that, out of her, to answer the absence. She would speak, and the flow, the nature of things, would rearrange, he would rearrange, it would all go back to where it had been before. The possibility felt irresistible. 

“You used to send me copies of conversations you’d taken down in shorthand, and then a full transcription a few days later,” she said at last, and he felt a little throb of disappointment that she was moving toward it so slowly, for she was sharper than that, and they were supposed to be closer than that. “I have a whole drawerful of them in my writing desk; whatever happened to that?”

Whatever happened to that? As though it had been a charming quirk from a child away at school who’d grown out of the silly act of spying on his playmates instead of joining them. As though she hadn’t complained to Pickering of his sending her things, saying she didn’t understand why any of this mattered, why her son thought she had the time to sit around trying to pick out the differences between the way a greengrocer from Sydenham and one from Farringdon spoke. 

He wanted to say:

You’ve never liked them, and you always complain, so why do you bother with asking?

—but that wouldn’t do. She’d play judge, up his sentence to three and four times a week; and while their effervescent, if narrow, philosophical treatises on waterfowl made for stimulating discourse, Higgins didn’t think he could stand this much prawn soup and theatrical politesse. 

How to convert that thought into something that would pass muster, at least long enough for him to get out the front door. Even if it meant a stern talking-to at Sunday’s luncheon, at least he would have a few days to fortify himself first. 

“I’m sure you don’t want to be burdened with all that,” he said in a carefully-crafted tone of voice: it indicated the low tones of self-deprecating amusement designed to preemptively put another person at ease, along with the breeziness which said that it was all right, he didn’t really mind. 

“It isn’t a burden,” his mother said quietly. She sounded a bit hurt, and Higgins realized in belated frustration he had missed the mark somewhere and it had not had the intended effect. “I only asked because you’ve said so many times how important it is.”

“Oh,” he said, and tried to gauge whether she would draw this out, make it larger, turn it into a reason to keep him here longer, make certain that he agreed with her, that it was not a burden (it was definitely a burden). But that seemed to put a blessed end to conversation for the afternoon.  

He didn’t realize until he’d nearly gotten to his waiting taxi that Vicky had followed him outside. She wouldn’t meet his eye, and instead wrapped her arms about herself and wiggled slightly, as she’d left her coat inside and it was a dreary afternoon. They stood squinting at the street in silence for a while. 

“Is this about a woman?” she asked at last. “The missed appointments, the trip to Liverpool. Why you’re being so secretive all of a sudden, I mean.” Vicky crooked the corner of her mouth, and it was impossible to tell what that meant. 

Higgins considered. He detected the slight implication, a tang in the air, that he was gun-shy,  reluctant to reveal whether there was anyone new among his acquaintance after last summer, lest he cause another uproar, make his mother go to trouble all over again, then wind up ruining that association anyway. They just wanted to know, he thought. Merely wanted to know whether there was or wasn’t someone else—but they could do anything with that information. 

Tell their friends. Tell his brothers. Tell his brothers’ wives. Sit in judgment of him, throw it back into his face and wonder aloud to one other over tea why he wasn’t doing anything about it, why he was wasting his time and not out combing for jewels, why he couldn’t just do this one little thing, and be done with it, so they could all breathe easily.

He was about to give her an answer, his mouth was open, when he happened to catch a figure at the window behind her, and the thick drape twitching with a guilty shudder. Higgins looked at his sister, steel and clear eyes. 

“So she’s deputized you to report back on my personal affairs on top of everything else, has she?”

And he climbed into the cab without waiting for her answer. 

Aintree was crowded.

At least it looked that way from inside the box. The glass muffled the crowds to a distant hum, like hearing a wasp’s nest inside a tree hollow from across an expanse of lawn, and the crushing press of bodies in every direction, rippling and turning in waves, were the ancient patterns of bird flocks at sunset, or schools of fish in the depths of the ocean. It was difficult to remember that anyone down there was an individual, with his own thoughts and free will, when they moved that way. 

A box at a racing track seemed the sort of thing that one would own only if he literally had a stake in the race, which the new Lord Sudcliffe, whom Cecily introduced as Alexander, apparently did. Or rather, he was old friends with a horse trainer and they’d gone in together on the splashy seating, or they co-owned a horse that wasn’t in the race today, or… something. He hadn’t bothered to pay much attention.

The odd truth was that Cecily had been right; her nephew was not terribly interesting. The sort of chap who’d attended Cambridge by birthright rather than on any particular merits, who’d coxed a winning eight while he was there, followed cricket, who enjoyed tweed and hunting and all the usual trappings of Englishness. Reasonably intelligent, reliable, but not possessed of any real purpose or usefulness beyond a reassuring presence at these sort of events, proof that the universe still functioned the way it ought to, the way it always had. Steady on, upright, and normal. Probably wished he were an Earl, but content to be a Baron nevertheless. Likely he’d marry some girl who’d take up gardening as her primary occupation, growing prize roses and having the under-gardener shape shrubs into interesting topiaries; they’d have a few children, drift off into the pockets of their own lives a year or so after the wedding, and remain in this state of arm’s-length perfect union until one of them corked it. 

“Any further descent into boredom, and I may scream,” Cecily murmured, low enough that the men off to the side couldn’t hear. She was dressed differently, and there was something off about her hair, but Higgins did not ask her what. “I half-wish Mariah were here, but I’m rather glad she’s off with friends; such an excitable thing. I suppose that’s the nature of being a young lady at her first grand social outing, but the truth is I haven’t much patience to play the knowledgeable matron to an eighteen-year-old.” 

Higgins did not reply, but agreed with Cecily, and welcomed this unexpected reprieve as well. The frivolousness of the whole occasion was barely tolerable as it was; suffering through a debutante gushing over everything from the lace trim on her hat down to the buttons on her shoes was outright insupportable. Girls on the marriage market had such a distinctive way of comporting themselves, too, that if he’d been made to speak to one of them, he’d probably be unable to suppress the old embarrassed, awkward tilt of his own shoulders, slightly turned in recoil from these creatures who held themselves out to be so ineffectual and vulnerable, but were teeming with unspoken wants and demands that were nonetheless communicated through some silent array of expressions and gestures, a whole secret language that he’d never been meant to detect or draw attention to, with no intelligible rules and which made no sense. 

Lord Sudcliffe’s acquaintances—school chums, newly wedded social connections (for His Lordship was probably only a few years older than his sister was, by Higgins’ estimation)—came and went, their attentions only for the living Baron, and every time the door opened it was a direct shock to the ears, for the utter wall of noise which came through was so sudden, so overwhelmingly made of mass and people, that a box was an excellent choice, a fine way to exist, to be able to breathe unconstricted in the midst of so much, separate and unobtrusive, high above. 

These post-matrimonial ladies muted themselves slightly, sleekly pleased to be within the safe harbor of a wedding band. They could be witty and gay, but there was no longer the pressure to sparkle, to catch the light like a strand of rare jewels, to draw the eye of a collector. They talked in low, thrilling tones of where they’d been and who else had been there, and rather than obsessing over their toilette for a lack of anything else to say, they spoke of fashion more artfully, sprinkling it throughout their conversation, a spice to complement rather than overwhelm. 

Life tried to wrench you hard about, tried to seize the reins or the wheel, but if you were strong enough to resist the usual track, you could steer away from it and set forth, all bump and go over the rocks and logs underneath, in the direction less traveled by, and you would be smacked in the face by low-hanging branches, and wind up in places you hadn’t expected, wind up teaching and researching out of a house in London when you were a Professor, and wasn’t it funny how nobody asked about that anymore? Did they all believe he went down and came home during terms, and did he encourage them, did he take refuge in assumptions and falsehoods he avoided correcting?

Running all roughshod, and sometimes even going in circles, but in the end, it would be a route all yours. Not your mother’s, not the college master's, nor anyone else’s. Yours and yours. Alone. And the years of work and thought, writing and research, sleep and boredom, the time you’d wasted, and everything else—would be distilled and fossilized into a symbol when it was all over, and that would be the whole of your life’s representation, a heavy stone no bigger than your palm. 

They were old, Higgins thought suddenly—Cecily and he—they’d stepped past an unspoken threshold, were marked by something to make the clever young eyes slide over them, for people became supernaturally invisible past a certain age. (—that wasn’t fair, he thought with a frown, that wasn’t how his mind worked—) Wasn’t that what people said, what his mother said? The word Dowager, held out before Cecily like a standard, only strengthened the spell, and he was glad, for he need not slather himself in greasepaint, pull on a costume reeking of someone else’s sweat, and try to remember his lines and cues. There was only to watch. It struck him as strange, though, standing there next to her sipping champagne, that Cecily had sorted through so much of what life had put on the table before her, that she was married and then not married again, and he had done neither of those things—and this ultimately put them on the same level as one another, he thought. Not the same, not equals, but within the same realm. They could stand shoulder-to-shoulder without qualms.

He looked out the window and far, far down to the grounds, as the well-heeled gathered to their stations along the track fence in unruffled anticipation. The fashionable thing was black and white this year—what immense creativity and expansive imaginations they all had. Did they form a committee to decide each winter, then send round a letter dictating how everybody ought to be dressed to fit in? A long and tiresome mystery to his mind. 

All those beribboned hats bobbing in discreet conversation, lace fluttering in the breeze. Perhaps with a pair of binoculars or opera glasses he could pull them closer, draw them all up into the box with him, pick through them and see if he knew anyone, if he recognized any of the women in the tilt of their heads, whether they stood a certain way, whether he could see the color of their hair, the line of their cheek, perhaps that one there—

No.

He’d kept it as a point of pride thus far, his resolute determination not to look carefully at faces he passed in the street, not to go searching, not to frequent the sorts of places where there might have been a meeting. In short, not to be pathetic, not to stoop so low, not to demean himself like that. Looking and searching—as though he’d succumbed to wild delusions. For God’s sake, a man of his stature and intelligence ought to be able to manage that much at least, and if he couldn’t exercise restraint in that regard, then perhaps it was time to check in to a sanatorium after all. Higgins straightened, and the crowd was a mass once more, black and white and faceless, all with their heads turned away, and Cecily said to him, murmuring,

“I see why you do it now—there’s something fascinating in it, as though you were God Himself sitting high up in the heavens watching us all scrabble about in the dirt.”

Chapter Text

But the wicked are like the troubled sea; for it cannot rest, and its waters cast up mire and dirt.

- Isaiah 57:20

April 1912

He woke late one morning, and on his way to retrieve breakfast, paused in the study to pass an eye over the headline at the top of the spread of newspapers on his desk.

And then Higgins flipped the entire paper over to find the next. 

And the next.

And the one after that.

The sound of sharp sobbing in the hall caught his ear, and he looked up to see Mrs. Pearce enter and shut both pocket doors at her back. She was not the source of this unrestrained emotion; rather, she merely looked a little pale. Eyes closed, the housekeeper slumped against the doors and took one long breath, released it, and then took another. Ordinarily, Higgins thought he might have been embarrassed at bearing witness to such a private and unguarded moment, but he stood in quiet observation of this unusual phenomenon. 

She caught sight of him, snapped upright with a self-possessed elegance to stand very correctly, and folded her hands before her the way she always did. 

“I do apologize, sir,” she began, and before she could set about trying to explain, he said:

“Is anyone downstairs connected?”

“I don’t believe so, no,” replied Mrs. Pearce. She considered the question in greater depth. “It does seem to have taken hold of Isobel’s imagination quite keenly, but then, she’s always been an overly emotional sort of girl. You needn’t worry or trouble yourself on account of the staff.” And with a crisp nod, she turned and disappeared back out into the hall, where the crying had faded. 

He settled for eggs, Marmite on toast, and tea, and returned to the study to gain the particulars of the thing. Such a great loss of life, and in one fell swoop, at that—Higgins could not recall an equal disaster occurring within his lifetime that had not been under conditions of war. The information acquired and the task complete, he eschewed the other breathless reports and their sensationalism, folded the stack, set them aside for one of the servants to retrieve later, and located a book on the history of Esperanto that he’d been meaning to read again. 

Upon ringing for tea that afternoon, he was surprised to look up and find Isobel bearing the tray. She appeared to have composed herself in the intervening hours, and Higgins went back to his book, only to look up once more and find her gazing down at the papers he’d folded, her fingertips sifting among them silently. The maid bit at her lip, her face crumpled, and all at once she was crying again.

Higgins whipped his head round toward the pocket doors in desperation, but she’d closed them upon entering. If he rang for Mrs. Pearce, it would cause an embarrassing scene for them all, and if he tried to calm the poor girl himself with platitudes, likely that would only upset her more. He briefly entertained the idea of a strategic retreat up the library staircase and out into the first floor hall, but something about it seemed… morally dubious. 

Finally he settled on a neutral remark, one that wouldn’t overstep the feudal relationship between employer and servant, and said,

“This certainly has taken its toll on you.”

Isobel gave a few hiccuping sobs, drew a great shuddering breath, and fished about in her apron pockets. Higgins advanced to offer his handkerchief, which she pressed to her red and swollen eyes before folding it about her nose and decimating the poor thing. So many women crying in his presence over the past year; he’d need to create a line item at his tailor’s about replacing all these handkerchiefs he was constantly prodded into giving away as though they were sweets. 

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said in a quavering little voice. Before he could answer there there, and perhaps she ought to go and make herself some tea and find a nice quiet corner to sit in for a few minutes, Isobel blurted out, “It’s just that I can’t stop thinking about all those people, dying and drowning in that freezing cold water! All of them going to bed thinking they were safe and the trip would be done soon, and they had no idea they were going to die so horribly.”

Immediately his bland suggestion receded into the mists. Reluctantly, Higgins sat and poured himself some tea, then as she broke into a fresh round of tears, diverted his hand at the last moment and held it out to the maid instead, who accepted it and impressively downed the thing in one go. He tried to think of how to reply to this new set of astonishing statements, but before he could even begin to hash it out, she was talking again.

“Hannah and I tried sticking our hands into a basin of ice water to see what it felt like, and it was unbearable, and awful tragic at the same time to think of those people feeling their fingers and toes, and then their arms and legs, all go numb, and knowing that there was no hope, and no help coming. Nothing but flat, open water, all black and cold, and the lifeboats gone, and men drowning when they tried to go down into steerage to help. And I did read about the men who did good things, made sure a lady had a seat on one of the boats and such like, but every time I try to do something below stairs, polish the silver or get on with a bit of mending, I mean, I just keep seeing bodies floating in water with blue lips and their eyes wide open, because that’s what they do, isn’t it? Turn blue and get all covered in frost.” 

Isobel twisted his handkerchief between her hands, eyebrows kinking too, as though she could hardly believe it, but it had all happened. 

“That’s what Carter says. That they get all frosted over like the bottom of a window in January. I wonder if pieces of frozen corpses break off the way icebergs do,” she said. “All those happy people waving goodbye at the docks, looking forward to the trip, never knowing that they’d be dead inside a week, fish nibbling on their fingers and toes, and they’d never see New York.”

“Isn’t it funny,” and Isobel wasn’t talking to him anymore, she was in a trance of some kind, staring into nothing, or staring at ghosts convening at the other side of the study, “They lived their whole lives, had things they liked and didn’t like, had jobs and families, but it’s all they’ll be remembered for: missing from a ship. They won’t even be able to say how most of them died exactly, but that’s the only thing that’ll matter to people a hundred years from now.”

Entering just then, Mrs. Pearce must have seen the extraordinary look on his face, because she set about the task of dispatching the maid from the room without sending her into another emotional outburst quite competently, tucking the silk handkerchief into her pocket for laundering and gathering the empty tea cup and saucer as though it were a stray slipper beneath the chair. 

“I am so terribly sorry, Mr. Higgins—”

“Perhaps she ought to stay away from the papers for a little while,” he said, hearing himself distantly.

“Of course, sir; that girl won’t be allowed upstairs until she can manage herself appropriately. I shall speak to her directly, and there’s to be no more of this,” she said with an apologetic bow, and left him, still perched on the tea table, feeling as though an automobile had just crashed through his front door.

“Someone who wasn’t there has no rational reason to behave in such a dramatic manner,” he said to Cecily over supper that evening. “She should’ve run away from home and joined a theatre troupe, or become a gloomy fortune teller, instead of going into service; honestly, the things she was saying were quite outrageous. Utterly ghoulish, fixating on and obsessing over all that death.”

He’d tried to finish the book, but soon gave it up to wander over to the piano and pick his way through what he could remember of Satie’s first Gymnopédie. That only served to put him in such low spirits that he turned his hand toward organizing his desk, then grew restless and began writing out a list of things which needed doing for the year, and in the end wound up sitting on the sofa staring into space, trying not to become submerged in Isobel’s morbid fancies. A total loss of the day, with nothing to show for his efforts.

“Sounds like an overactive imagination piercing a tender heart,” replied Cecily. “Girls like that have a hard time of it with these sorts of things. Some people are like a sponge, soaking up all the emotion around them indiscriminately, whether happiness or tragedy, and not always because they seek it out by a sense of theatricality. She may not be able to control herself because it’s such a powerful burst of psychic energy and sympathy from the whole world, and there’s only to wait out the worst of it before it passes into memory.”

Higgins was surprised, and then irked, at her response.

“You think sitting around imagining it in vivid detail, inserting yourself into an horrific tragedy, isn’t cause for concern?” He let the nonsense about psychic energy and worldwide sympathy lie, for there was no approaching that with both logic and dignity. “I nearly asked her if she’d worked as an undertaker, the way she was describing dead bodies and musing ever-so-casually on decomposition. Really. No one needs to be thinking about that.” 

“Plenty of people do it,” she said, “It’s discomfiting, to be sure, but…” Cecily paused and set down her fork and knife. “It makes you feel better.”

“Oh, come now,” said Higgins. “You can’t believe that. She was practically raving—how is letting her imagination run wild better than simply going about her work?” He paused to balance his soup spoon at the lip of the bowl. “Scour the kitchen floor, soap the windows, my God—anything to take your mind off it. Certainly preferable over giving in to temptation like that and wallowing.” Higgins tasted, then set the spoon back down, sighed, then injected a sensible tone into his voice. “She doesn’t even know anyone who was on board, and has no connection to it other than having seen the headlines.” He sipped again. “And so have we all; and the rest of us aren’t collapsing into hysterics. The world must go on, for it will whether anybody likes it or not.”

Cecily tilted her head to the side, gazing at him through drawn eyelids. 

“I think there’s something in the idea of putting yourself very close to it,” she said slowly. “As though… not a delusion, as though you might have been there in reality, and saved them, but… as though you could know what they were experiencing in their last moments. The things they felt and must have thought about.”

He remembered belatedly that her beloved husband had been dead in the ground less than a year. Higgins crossed and uncrossed one leg, squeezing his toes tight inside his shoe all the while. 

“Because then… then it isn’t a mystery,” Cecily said, clear and calm. “Death is something we all have to go through—and alone, to make it even more difficult—but nobody really knows what it’s like. Perhaps someday we’ll know, but for now, some of us must simply be left behind to mourn and wonder, to speculate and be frustrated that there is something common to all of humanity which we cannot know until we know it.” 

A long pause sat between them. 

“I suppose that is why we all have our devotions to religion, that we may understand even the smallest iota before it’s too late,” Higgins said quietly. 

Cecily was smiling at him in a strange way—ruefully, he thought. 

“Life is but four days of joy,” she said, sounding as though she were quoting an ancient text. “Each breath of life we draw is at the same moment a breath of death, bringing us closer to the inevitable.”

Higgins thought that sounded awfully morbid, and certainly not conversation for supper, but did not say so.

“Well,” he remarked instead, hoping to change the subject, “No doubt this will put people off traveling for some time.”

“I do hope not,” replied his companion, “One incident, however immense and tragic, doesn’t prove we all ought to stay at home with the covers up to our noses. There’s always been a risk that we might be forced to suffer in some way; the only difference today is that we are more aware of it.”

“Would you sail on a liner tomorrow? Just… go down to the docks and climb aboard?” Higgins let the question lie, pointedly. “No one will be able to look at one of those things without wondering, what about this one? Have they really got those rivets in tight, or am I taking my life into my own hands?”

“Or perhaps… it’s the best time to travel,” Cecily said lightly, and with a wryness to her mouth. “Everybody’s asking themselves if it’s safe, and every company the world over will be inspecting and reinforcing their own fleet.”

“You’re as wretched as my maid,” Higgins said, shaking his head at her.

Cecily lifted her glass of wine in a salute.

“The only difference between me and the girl who dusts your piano is that I’ve got this useless title,” she said, and he laughed despite himself.

Someone was singing close by, and it woke him very late that night. The song lyric didn’t match the dream he was having—

You’ve a very good bargain in me!

—and he realized it wasn’t some servant out in the hall, but inside his own head. It had been repeating in that sing-song patter, so many times that his stomach felt queasy.

Higgins winced and lay prone in bed for a moment, willing himself (wanting himself, waiting for himself) to go back to sleep. But he found (you’ve a very good bargain in me!) that the unsettling pain in his middle was not going away, and so he rose, and without bothering to locate his dressing gown and slippers, went into the bathroom in search of something for it, flipping on the light as he went. 

For some reason—Higgins thought, frowning deeply as he dug through the medicine cabinet—his mind was set on treating him to a full performance of The Mikado, beginning with the final song where the company joined together to admonish the villainess for resisting and objecting to the final outcome for the happy young couple.

For he’s gone and married Yum-Yum
(Yum-Yum!)
Your anger pray bury
For all will be merry
I think you had better succumb
(Come, come!)
And join our expressions of glee!

Even the villain of the piece joined in, converted to goodness and subsequently defanged, shrugging his shoulders and offering her a lukewarm proposal as a consolation prize, for why not? What else was there to be done in the face of happily-ever-after?

On this subject I pray you be dumb
(Dumb-dumb)
Your notions, though many
Are not worth a penny
The word for your guidance is “mum”
(Mum-mum)
You’ve a very good bargain in me!

Releasing a tight sigh of discomfort, Higgins bent over to rest his elbows on the edge of the sink and continued his search through the cabinet. He didn’t need a bromide; perhaps a bicarbonate preparation would help settle—

A sharp and cold sensation passed through him like ice water poured over his shoulder, and he realized the palms of his hands were beginning to dampen with perspiration. That was not good: a sign of gastrointestinal distress, and now he was worried on top of being annoyed, because the last thing he wanted was to suffer through the distinct unpleasantness of being sick. So much unnecessary nuisance involved with the act; it was better to try to get ahead of it and avoid it altogether, which was still possible (you’ve a very good bargain in me!). 

He was turning the dark brown bottles round and round inside the cabinet, faster and faster, trying to read the fuzzy script on their labels and guess which one would be suitable as though he were working against a ticking clock. Did Mrs. Pearce keep the really potent stuff under lock and key somewhere? He could go back into the bedroom and ring to ask what he ought to do, or request something to be made up, but of course having servants about when one was under the weather was always a dicey thing, didn’t want someone seeing the wrong thing at the worst possible moment, no faster way to upset the balance of authority in the house—

Whatever was happening inside of him was reaching a moment of crisis, his mouth salivating too fast, pooling it beneath his tongue, a darkly sour feeling down below, and his palms sweating, sweating, sweating, and perhaps if he gave in, allowed it, made himself retch, he could trick his stomach into thinking that it was done, and it would pass, and he could go back to bed. 

He leaned over the sink bowl, cautiously experimental, and his stomach gave a dry lurch, like a fist to the gut, sudden but slow and thorough. 

(And join our expressions of glee!)

But it only increased the sense of urgency about the whole business, his heart now racing, his stomach having been given leave to freely make use of a repulsive solution without his permission, and he wanted so very badly for this to be done, to be on the other side of it, back in bed, with the fizzing acidic sensation in his throat that always marked the after, but at least then it would be over—

And with that, he pitched forward, practically into the sink itself, and was sick for a long moment, capping it off with a choking cough. He opened the taps and breathed himself back down, feeling somehow exhausted, spent, and yet very alert. Something he ate at the restaurant must not have sat well with him. Higgins splashed a bit of water onto his face and turned to pad softly back to his waiting bed. 

But when he got there, and lay down and closed his eyes, he found—

You’ll find there are many
Who’ll wed for a penny
Who’ll wed for a penny
There are lots of good fish in the sea
There are lots of good fish in the sea

—that even though it was done, he couldn’t sleep, and it was twenty minutes before he realized that his stomach was going to empty itself again, which seemed illogical, if not impossible. But apparently his body did not agree.

Once more wearily out of bed, and once more without dressing gown or slippers, once more the light, and this time he made it nearly past the bathtub before gripping the edge of the sink and heaving up more of supper, and he saw, with great displeasure, a flash of undigested something, before he twisted the taps once more. 

It was odd, certainly, but not exactly cause for outright alarm. Usually once was enough—and enough for several years, even decades, to be sure—

(We’ve years and years of afternoon!)

Higgins shuffled off back to bed again, resolutely refusing to give up the fight for sleep. 

And twenty minutes later only made it to the bathtub. 

Had he eaten too much? Mixed the wrong liquors? They’d only had two glasses of wine each. Whatever this was, it was not merely an upset stomach or reaction to an overly-rich meal, because there was none of it left inside of him; the only thing coming up now was bile and—he rested his chin on the ice-cold porcelain. A little streak of blood, there along the outside edge. 

Sinking down further, he tried to make himself as comfortable as possible against the tile and porcelain and grout, none of which was feeling very nice all of a sudden, none of which had the cooling effect they’d had only a few moments before, and—

And again. 

God, he didn’t want this. He didn’t deserve this, whatever was going on, but it was happening, and he’d finally caught on to the fact that it was going to keep happening, against all sense of decency and what ought to be, the arrangement of the Nature of Things, the expectations with which he’d turned himself in for sleep earlier that night. He held on to the curve of the tub and tried to gain a bit of purchase against the tile beneath his knees. 

There’s lots of good fish, good fish in the sea
There’s lots of good fish, good fish in the sea
There’s lots of good fish, good fish in the sea

Fish to nibble on their fingers and toes, and a thousand souls who’d never see New York.

Higgins leaned his forehead into the bathtub and frowned, deeper and deeper and deeper, as though he could purge it from his being, along with everything else. 

No. No, no, no. He didn’t need that on top of this, there was already too much right now, and he barely had a grip on any of it to begin with—

In the sea, in the sea, in the sea, in the sea
(We’ve years and years of afternoons!)

Did any of them have premonitions about it? Perhaps a chill, a worry, as a solitary man stood on the deck outside with a pipe, watching all the chunks of ice floating just past the railing. Did they awaken in the night with a queasy sensation deep in their stomach, their bodies having felt the metallic shudder that had echoed through the cabins, but not knowing that the boat had already been smashed open, unaware that frigid saltwater was rushing in to fill the bulkheads?

I think you had better succumb
(Come, come!)

Higgins leaned over the side of the bathtub and vomited again, almost carelessly, not bothering with the water now. Too late, panting and shuddering, he realized he should have pulled the bath towel from the hook on the wall. He needed a bath. Perhaps someone would hear all this noise (he’d once heard someone colloquially referring to the act as ‘speaking Welsh’ and he’d never been able to decide whether he found it funny or disgusting) and come find him, and with the most admirable composure, he would bravely make his way back to bed for a few days’ noble convalescence. Pillows and books, plenty of tea, and the good chicken consommé they made at Waitrose’s. Mrs. Pearce always sent out for it specially when he had a cold, three or four gallons’ worth. And he could sit and read, and even have the phonograph sent up. The usual business of his day, merely conducted with grave and hushed solemnity.

At what point did people begin to realize definitively that they were going to die?

What did that feel like, to have that clarity? Was it a rush, like a sudden gust of wind, or a beam of light narrowing into a pinprick, everything else dropping away, leaving you inside an echoing tunnel?

For a moment, he stilled, his weight pressing through his shoulder and into the belly of the claw-footed tub, and imagined himself on the deck of the Titanic as the ship began to list. Lifeboats full and cast off to distant waters, the people remaining on deck beginning to murmur in dismay, fretting but still civilized and orderly, neatly lined up to meet their doom, the band playing a hymn, and a group of men nearby planning a final descent into the steerage to risk their lives in the hopes of saving anyone left below. Would he join them, or—

Again, he pulled himself up and over the edge, coughed once, then sank.

That wasn’t the point of the exercise, trying to determine what he would do in a life-and-death (mostly death) situation. It was impossible to know unless you were there, experiencing it with no other options.

The threatened cloud has passed away
And brightly shines the dawning day
What though the night may come too soon
We’ve years and years of afternoon!

He hated Gilbert and Sullivan and their stupid, stupid bloody songs. Idiotic twenty-two-year olds (He’d been working on his dissertation when he was twenty-two; and what was the name of the Master's daughter? Helena—no, Eleanor, there was a name he hadn’t thought of in years, a name that life had used to wrench him hard about, all bump and go off the path) with no sense of the world, singing gloriously about how they had the rest of their lives together, crowing about how they were decades away from decay and death, how they would live and love and produce a big writhing brood, a whole clutch of sticky mewling children who would turn their mother’s hair gray and her voice shrill and tyrannical, not beautiful and melodious the way she’d been taught. 

(Oh, you’ve a very good bargain in me, he wanted to record himself saying over a recording of himself saying—)

Who in their right mind wanted children?

Children were one thing, but… where was he? 

Where had he been? 

He was trying to open enough, dilate the aperture, to let in something dark at the back of his mind that he’d run through a thousand times, like worrying his tongue over a bad tooth, but he was very tired and he’d forgotten what he was doing. Higgins lifted himself up onto his knees once more with a shaky sigh, unwilling to baptize the tile floor, for the servants were already inconvenienced; they simply didn’t know it yet. 

All those people waving toward the Southampton docks beneath a sky of streamers and confetti, off on a grand voyage, already dead; they simply didn’t know it yet.

—something common to all of humanity which we cannot know until we know it—

Cecily whispered at him.

He was going to die, Higgins thought. 

(He vomited, once more, for luck.)

One day.

(We’ve years and years of afternoons!)

That was always at the end of that sentence: he was going to die one day.

One day he was going to be put into the ground, and perhaps there would be mourners at the funeral who would claim his acquaintance, and perhaps there would be nothing but strangers. Perhaps his siblings would show up—perhaps his mother would still be alive—but he pictured himself, what he knew of himself from looking into the mirror every now and then, perfectly angled nose, ears a bit too big, serious brows straight across, pictured himself from above, inside a casket with his eyes closed, and the lid creaking shut, and handfuls of dirt thumping and knocking against the outside far more loudly than you thought they would.

Mother had kept the casket closed at Father’s funeral. There’d been no question of it, no mention beforehand, simply—inside the church, a polished wooden box with brass handles, and he’d had to take it at her word that what was left of the man was in there, inside that thing. For a few years afterward, he’d held an unspoken certainty, a little secret just for himself, that if they hadn’t seen anything, then anything could have been inside the casket (rocks or bricks or gold nuggets or a stranger no one could recognize), which meant that perhaps Father hadn’t been found after all, and perhaps he wasn’t even gone in the first place, perhaps, perhaps—

But that was another time, and he was older now.

Older, on the evening of the third day, and every breath bringing him closer to death, and was he more than halfway there, and had he used up too much of his time, and used up, what did that mean—?

What had he done?

He’d an awful headache now, and felt cold and then hot, and then as though a great invisible hand had come down through the ceiling and was pressing down, pushing him, but against himself, not against the floor or the bathtub but himself, his flesh wasn’t enough to contain him, he’d burst before long.

Suddenly he was breathing very hard and fast, his pulse thundering through his veins so hard he could hear it pounding inside his skull, what was going on, why the sudden rush, and just as quickly he couldn’t breathe at all, his throat, worn away to sinew and burnt tissue after this reckoning, was now constricting and all he could do was tip over and be against the tile floor, his cheek flat and icy, and he knew, he knew, that just as he was trapped here in the eternal present (for there was no such thing as the past or the future, that was all a lie, there was only this, there was only the floor, nothing would come for him after this, it was all-encompassing and without boundaries), with absolute certainty he knew:

He was going to die, right here, tonight. 

They were going to find his body in the morning, in blue and white striped pyjamas, cooled blood pooling in the parts of him touching the floor, curled up like he was ready to go back where he’d come from, he was going to die any minute, he was certain of it just as he was certain that he was going mad, finally, finally, he’d finally eased over into something no fancy chicken soup would ever cure, and if he came through this his mother would put him away somewhere safe, and he was breathing fire, making a gentle sound at the back of his vocal chords like a violin tuning up and up and up, and then he was gone.

Higgins woke again—he’d developed of late a nasty habit of waking just at the cusp of disaster, he needed to figure out a way to stop that—with someone’s hand on his shoulder, shaking him, and Mason was saying

Sir? Sir? Are you all right? Can you hear me, Mr. Higgins?

Why was Mason in his bathroom? Mason should have been setting out the breakfast sideboard, not all the way upstairs. He lifted his head, then set it back against the hard tile, pain dense through his midsection, preventing him from further movement. Higgins tucked his chin in and found Hannah standing in the doorway, drawn and pale.

Oh, he saw it now—she must have come in to light the bedroom fireplace, discovered the light on and his corpse spread upon the tile, and summoned Mason for aid. 

(The Carpathia sprang to action, covering more distance and at far higher speed than its size should have allowed, bravely and heroically coming to the aid of the luxury liner—)

“I’ll get Mrs. Pearce,” he heard the footman say, and the young man dropped his voice, “Don’t let Isobel in here—” and the rest of it was lost to Higgins’ ears, still pulsing thick and muffled between the floor and his blood.

And when Mrs. Pearce did arrive, she asked him if he wanted to stand on his own, and the question was so bizarre, absurd, that it was as though the woman had breezed into the bathroom and asked him offhandedly,

Ĉu vi perdiĝis?

In spite of the long night, in spite of his exhaustion, in spite of the deep ache across his entire front that would make drawing anything deeper than the lightest breath (would a shallow breath of life hold death at bay a little longer?) a shot of agony, Higgins laughed once, laughed again, and then shattered into a kind of prolonged, barking, shouting laughter, with a piquant and lemony little note of hysterics at the very top, that ended with him letting a few tears fall, and if he could have, he would have reached up to brush them away. 

“No, no, no, Mrs. Pearce,” he said, lapsing into a strained cough, “My God, woman, no,” and he was calming now, and he was very tired, and he told them he simply wanted to sleep.

Did he want breakfast? Should they call the doctor? they asked, exchanging glances amongst themselves very obviously, taking his hands and tilting the walls of the bathroom nauseatingly around him. They would call the doctor, he would come and have a look, and then they would have the chicken soup brought straight away, and he would rest on a sofa in the adjoining bedroom while they switched the linens on his bed to the ones for only when he was ill, and the proper pyjamas too (Mason already dragging the damned things out of the armoire, bearing them aloft like hand-wrought gilded armor), and Mrs. Pearce would get out the special list to send to the grocer’s, and have Cook begin readying herself to make up a whole casserole of toad-in-the-hole after he tired of the consommé (for Mr. Higgins never asked for toad-in-the-hole unless he were ill), and lay out the extra hall runners to muffle any sound outside his door as well as on the staircases, and disconnect the telephone, and the bell at the front door, and restrict upstairs access to the lower servants until this was all over, she knew how he detested when the staff made any noise while he felt the slightest bit poorly, and he would have newspapers and his books, they’d bring the bed tray out so that he could keep working—

“No, don’t do any of that,” Higgins answered, sounding very far away from where he’d collapsed haphazardly onto his bed and drawn up the covers, tucking himself nose-first against them, “Just let me rest. And I ought to—I ought to—” But whatever he ought to have done, they never found out, for he was asleep again. 

People came and went, continually asking him if he wanted anything (“I’m fine, leave me be,” he said at one point, wondering some unidentifiable measure of time later whether he’d been shouting or if it had simply seemed that way, for none of them would listen to him) and his stomach was empty and aching, but the sensation didn’t quite reach him the same way, merely hovered in the air, unable to touch him, or his mind was slow to register it and therefore this existed only as a cold fact and nothing else: his stomach wanted food, and really, how interesting, was his brain’s indifferent reply to that. 

(Mrs. Pearce finally came upstairs to test whether the bell in his room was working properly, for nobody had heard it all day.)

He wasn’t dying. At least not from starvation; indeed, he would continue on in this way, his body still functioning as best could be expected. 

But something about all this felt like a betrayal to his mind, which had turned away from him, crossed its arms, deeply wounded and insulted, and struggled to come back to recognize that the hand on his shoulder now was light and yet seemed to feel it had a deeper claim over him than the servants did, and he smelled her perfume in the air, and realized that his mother was there in the room with him.

They were supposed to have lunch together. 

“Are you awake, dear?”

He could pretend to still be asleep. 

Mrs. Higgins drew her hand up and down over his back, her voice in a soft register that he hadn’t heard in a long time.

“Henry,” she said gently. “Henry.”

He had the vague notion that it would be fun, rather exciting, to not exist anymore. Something new, something different, and then it occurred to him that it was an unforgivable thing to think. 

Avoiding her would be costly, but he was forty or nearly forty, they were the same thing really, and it was a foolishness to contemplate, needing his mother with a houseful of servants who only existed to look after one person. How did a woman her age survive with only three of them?

He wanted to say something—you’ll never guess what happened to me, frame it as hilarity, a one-off to make her laugh. Couch a thing in just enough hyperbole, make the right faces, mimic the right voices, and you could melt any horror down into comedy: the lesson of his youth. Should’ve written a dissertation on that. He ought to tell her, confide and say the truth. Mother I dreamt I was dying and then I really was and also did the maids scour the bathtub with disinfectant?

Death hadn’t had the face of a stranger in many years, but now it was nestled up in the rafters, with a bulging and watchful eye upon him, and how would it go, explaining this to his mother? The morbidity would only shock and concern her; then she’d have cause to send him somewhere to be treated and balanced and returned to her, normal and placid and content, my celebrated son, who might finally have some manners. 

No, he thought. Mother wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t go to extraordinary lengths, imprison him somewhere where people would look after him for her, ensure that he would make pleasant and unemotional conversation at a luncheon or tea, smooth his edges so he would be polite and agreeable and sociable, so he would restrict his remarks to health and the weather. 

Had Vicky come to the house first? Had she been waiting outside, lobbed suspicious queries at the staff and then retreated to Mayfair to give a report that would actually give his mother cause to not only leave her house, but set foot inside his own?

Reluctantly, he rolled over and pushed his palms against the mattress to lift himself up and look at her.

“What is it?”

—this, softly, but his throat was still burnt: it came out scratchy, and he had not the energy to care whether he was meant to say other words in another voice, say something that might placate and satisfy her. 

A little cry of surprise, as though a magician had materialized him out of nothingness, as though she’d no idea he’d been there.

“Oh, you are awake; your housekeeper—” and here Mrs. Higgins turned to acknowledge her in the bedroom doorway, “—said that you’d taken ill suddenly, and so of course I had to come and see for myself what sort of condition you were really in.” 

He could well imagine the scene that had transpired in the foyer before she’d come upstairs to find him genuinely brought down with something. 

“Dear me, a cold this late in the season,” his mother went on. “Vicky says that several girls at Honoria’s school had one, and young healthy girls certainly don’t need that sort of thing going about.”

Higgins turned his head to see the housekeeper, who, with her hands clasped before her, had turned her gaze dutifully to the floor.

“Thank you, Mrs. Pearce,” he said, and she flashed her eyes up at him briefly before tilting her head and discreetly exiting the room. She always kept his secrets, no matter how he teased or annoyed her, and loyalty came from somewhere other than a pay packet, but where, he couldn’t pinpoint. Now they were the two of them in a little conspiracy together; a little lie. 

“Now, Henry,” said his mother, rising to the occasion of acting the part of an indulgent and expansive mother-empress, standing to nudge him closer to the center of the bed so that she might sit more comfortably, “It probably falls to me to tell you that you absolutely must rest. With nobody around to look after you, you ignore and neglect your health, and you will have your way and go about your work regardless of how bad it is, for you are stubborn and quite coarse with the servants when they try to warn you.”

“Mother—”

She reached out with a graceful hand to fix a stray lock of hair that had fallen into his eyes, and continued briskly as though she hadn’t heard him speak, for once not sarcastic and witty but fulsome and enjoying the subtle tip of balance between them. He writhed weakly.

“Do stop fussing so, Henry, you’ll only agitate yourself—I shan’t stay long, for I’m putting together a little party for some friends and other acquaintances tomorrow and must finish settling the details. A trifle, merely; you’ll get over it in just a few days.” She looked him over carefully, as though she were unsure whether the decision to allow him to skip their luncheon had been a good idea.

“Mother—”

But Mrs. Higgins had opened to the full blossom now, for she was pressing the back of her soft hand to his forehead and cheek, pressing and moving, pressing and moving, ready to issue commands to her youngest child, pleased to have come upstairs to find him reduced to something she could smooth and prattle at, their old routine. Another five minutes and she’d insist that he be packed off into a taxi to convalesce in one of her extra bedrooms—oh, but that would spoil the gathering if he happened to appear unexpectedly before guests, unshaven and in a rumpled dressing gown.

“You still feel a bit feverish, you know. Best to get back to sleep. I shall have Mrs. Pearce send for Doctor Rhodes, my own physician; a case like yours mustn’t be made to wait. She told me in the foyer that no one’s been to the house yet, and you might rethink your choice in these matters if you are made to wait like this. Oh, my dear boy—” 

She reached out to card her fingers through his hair again, but this time he couldn’t help but shrink back against the pillows.

“You’re barely in a fit state to be sitting upright,” Mrs. Higgins said, her chin lifted importantly, “Really, you ought to have—” 

“I’d like to be left alone,” he told her, and immediately his mother drew back her hand in surprise. Then an expression of placidity overtook her features, and she was disguising her offense, hurt that he wasn’t willing to play their usual game. His protestations at being fussed over weren’t for show this time, and Higgins lowered himself back among the pillows and bedclothes with a pained groan, where he remained even as he heard the rustle of her skirts, and then the front door close a few moments later. 

Two days of quiet passed without any communication from his mother or appearance from his sister, and so that Friday he rose, dressed, and went downstairs. 

Hannah was dusting the marble-topped table in the foyer. She eyed him, hesitating as he retrieved his overcoat and hat from the rack. 

“Begging your pardon, sir,” she said, “But… it’s tipping down out there. Is it wise to go out so soon? You certainly won’t want to catch cold.”

“Inform Mrs. Pearce that I’ve gone to see my doctor—in a taxi, if you please,” he replied gravely, lifting the collar of his coat in preparation for the downpour and adjusting the flannel muffler he’d wound about his neck. 

His man in Harley Street was called Savernake, a tolerable fellow with his head on straight, who kept his practice vigorous even as he devoted himself to the research of a cure for Bazalgette’s Disease. 

“Food poisoning,” the doctor announced confidently when Higgins had finished his recitation of what had transpired. “No fever, and luckily you aren’t still dehydrated. Your cook giving you plenty of clear broth, that’s good—” and proceeded to thump around on the professor’s person. “Although I expect you’ve a very sore throat from it.”

Dr. Savernake held up the stethoscope and listened. “Lungs clear; your heart is sound, too,” he said, unhooking the cups from his ears. “Well, apart from a ghastly night and loss of sleep, any other complaints troubling you?”

During the examination Higgins had been watching the goldfish in a bowl across the room. The glittering scales over its body seemed to shift and glow, now opal, now fire-orange, now begowned in gold and champagne. And at its end was a beautifully long tail like a train of watery silk, flowing and flipping about as it swam languidly back and forth.

“No,” he said, rousing himself finally. “Nothing else.”

Savernake advised him to not exert himself overmuch, and to introduce bland foods back into his diet slowly—porridge, toast, that sort of thing. There was even a list in his pocket to the effect, as though the physician had been unable to resist writing a prescription for the proper sort of food, as though Cook didn’t already know.

The appointment done, he could simply go back home and to bed, but he’d grown restless the past day or so, and had no desire to open himself up to being clucked over by the servants if he spent the afternoon reading in the study. Plumping his pillows and bringing more tea, checking whether he was rotting on the parquet, that sort of thing.

He went to the Goring instead, where Cecily opened the door herself and said immediately,

“Good God, you look a fright.”

—and he was strangely relieved to have earned this reaction: neither the spoils of luxuries offered by his staff, nor the pablum his mother tried to spoon into his mouth, and not the efficiency with which his doctor had measured him out, either. Direct, a bit sardonic, and with an arch little smile when she admitted him, as though her cat had bolted and then made a sudden and miraculous return three months later. You devil you, and where’ve you been?

Exactly the way he would have done it.

“I thought perhaps you’d died, or ended our acquaintance and forgotten to tell me,” she said in her airy way. 

“That damned restaurant,” he replied, and related the story. 

“What a shame,” she mused at the end of it, “I really did like the cheese there. Well,” and this with a gesture as though she’d washed her hands of the accursed place, “And how are you feeling now?”

It was a question no one had asked him. Not the inimitable Pearce or any of the others, not his mother, and certainly not Savernake, for he barely knew the chap.

“Fine,” he said, and even as he said it, he could feel his face drawing down into a frown that kept going, went from disapproval to dismay and slid, slid into misery. “But something—something you said the other day,” and he chuckled mirthlessly, “Sort of got stuck in my throat. The business about… life only being a few days long, was it? Or four days long. I thought, at first—that’s nonsense, there’s nothing in it, but when you’re down, and it takes hold of you, you think, or perhaps you just realize—”

The words were there, before him, hovering in the air, letters a foot high each. He could put his hand through them. He didn’t think them inside his mind, they were not on the tip of his tongue—they simply existed in a kind of aether, where they’d been waiting, biding their time.

“I— ”

He tried, experimentally, his throat easing as though it could let go, let them out, and then it grabbed it all back, tried to shove it back down—

“I’m so unhappy,” Higgins said, nearly in a whisper, because if he didn’t say it now, he would never find it again.

To her infinite credit, Cecily said nothing. Neither did she coo at him in a high-pitched voice while patting his arm, nor change the subject to something more appropriate, more genteel, for even though health was nearly acceptable for civil conversation (About our insides! Perhaps about our outsides! How could you be so silly, Henry? his mother cried in his head), the only polite option was to say that you were fine, that everything was fine, even if it was a lie, and if you were not fine, then you had better say it was certainly good weather for ducks these days, wasn’t it?

“And—and I can’t understand why,” he went on, sounding wretched. “There’s no reason for it—I’ve everything I want, and live my life precisely as I please,” he went on. “By all rights, I ought to be perfectly content, and happy exactly as I am, and yet…”

He’d never gone on for this long in the presence of a woman without her piping up with assurances that it was all going to be all right, or interrupting him to fill space with her voice. And yet Cecily seemed in no rush to do either of those things; indeed, she sat at the other end of the sofa watching him with a steady expression.

“I spent the night on the floor of my own bathroom, convinced for the first time in my life that I was about to die, and not once—not once—did it occur to me to utter up a short prayer, nor think of my religion, right there, at the end of it all.”

He hadn’t known it was bothering him until he said it aloud. How could a person spend his life in church, devote the treasures of his mind to the greatest work an Englishman had ever produced, on the very subject of Genesis and the Fall of Man, and… forget God in a long night of darkness? How could the convictions of his very soul go out the window the moment his body was in peril?

Who was he?

He didn’t have a right to be unhappy—he was a Christian, a subject of the greatest Empire of the modern age, a man whose work was essential and which provided him with intellectual stimulation, stability, purpose. Everything he could ever want, and the best of it, too, right there at his fingertips. And he had the gall, the cheek, the audacity, to call himself unhappy. Higgins looked down at his palms. They were sweating again—or, no, those were a few stray tears. Good God, now he was crying again, and in front of a woman?

There was something wrong with him.

Higgins balanced his elbows on his knees, and pressed his forehead into the heels of his upturned hands, breathing himself, willing himself, to be himself again.

Finally Cecily came to life, shifting on her end of the sofa.

“Something about the deaths of fifteen hundred people does put one in a contemplative mind,” she remarked drily, to which he cupped his hands and put his face in them. The woman reached out to touch his shoulder, and he sat up, sharp.

“I’m not in the mood to be petted and talked down to,” he said, ice cold. “And yes, that was sanctimonious, to go on about the maid’s reaction and then stay up all night frantic about the same myself, very good, you’ve caught me out, hurrah to you, Lady Sudcliffe,” and sat, still half bent over his knees, picking at his fingernails bitterly.

A long pause.

“There’s no cure for it,” she told him gently. “Once you know, you know. But if it makes you feel any better, some people go their whole lives without contemplating their own death, walking about in a kind of stupor.” Cecily reached behind herself and adjusted one of the sofa cushions. “And most, I daresay, even believe that it ought to be that way, that no one should suffer from talking or even thinking about such dark and horrible things, even with the certainty of religion at their back, even for all their comforting beliefs about the afterlife.”

“Well, what is your solution, then,” said Higgins, who was now hammering his knee up and down frantically, “If you know so much? Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, or whatever you were all telling yourselves in your little cult?”

“Perhaps you’d find it helpful to reflect upon why you are unhappy, and why death unsettles you,” Cecily said, flowing with a maddening patience. “Find the thing that is so vexatious, then address it, get rid of it.”

He turned toward her.

“What if it’s something I can’t get rid of?”

Cecily moved her shoulders in an elegant shrug.

“Then alter it.”

“And what if I can’t change it?”

Oh, my dear boy—

“Then change yourself.”

The expression on Cecily’s face was something akin to a slyness, he thought suddenly, as though she’d beat him at chess.

“No,” Higgins said firmly. “I’m not interested in changing myself to suit other people.” That had been the whole of the law for his entire existence thus far.

“Because you’re so very happy the way you are,” she pointed out, and caught between whether he ought to break out laughing or to storm out of the hotel altogether, Higgins sat silent at this. Cecily continued peaceably. “Most men are afraid that what they leave behind for others to remember them by won’t be enough. Perhaps it’s your legacy you’re worried about.”

He considered this for a moment.

“I think my work will speak for itself,” he replied, “I’ve no qualms about that, or my accomplishments.”

“What’s bothering you, Henry? Ask yourself that, and find the answer.” She moved to sit facing forward on the sofa, smoothing her hands against her skirts. “Perhaps you’re in a stupor yourself and need some fresh air to wake up. Oh!” Cecily cried, thunderstruck by something just occurring to her, “You ought to come to Paris with me. I’m going in a week to see an old friend.”

Higgins tilted his head back and forth, tipping and weighing the idea with a grimace.

“Do come,” she urged him, “It’ll be such a nice thing this time of year, and it’ll get your mind off all this nasty business.” She thought a moment. “And if you’re worried about the ship sinking in the crossing—”

“Cecily—”

“—it’s only the Channel, you can’t possibly come to any harm there. Hardly even open waters!”

“Perhaps,” he said, slowly, reluctantly, “Perhaps.” He ought to start at home, he thought, and perhaps he could go to Oxford for a few days, test the waters, for he hadn’t been in so long, and he’d thought of the university of late.

“I am sorry you were so ill,” said Cecily, and in her voice there was a cadence of truth, of meaning. “And I do hope you feel better.” He felt curiously sympathetic toward her now; how had her patience with him been maddening?

And then she did something, and he did something, that they would never again talk of, for they both knew it was a secret they should keep together: Cecily turned to sit shoulder-by-shoulder with him on the sofa, and took his hand in hers, and they watched the sunset, pink and red and orange, come through the clouds and go down over the tops of the buildings across the street.

Chapter Text

Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.

- Dance Dance Dance, Haruki Murakami

Oxford was an exercise in failure.

A kind of mania stole over the house, and perhaps it was that which gave Higgins a running start, so to speak, in that he hove himself through the little attic door against the protestations and warnings of Mrs. Pearce. He flicked on the handheld torch that Mason had proffered, and was rewarded with the dingy sight of cobwebs, trunks, and a few cartons arranged in stacks beneath canvas drapes. The old luggage had gone so long in disuse that the servants had relocated it, and the latest guess as of breakfast was that it was up here somewhere. A simple Gladstone had been enough for the few days in Brighton last summer; the return to his old college haunt would be a week long, and require something a little more substantial.

Higgins approached the pile, the dim circle of light wobbling all about as he picked his way over the crossbeams and tried to keep his footing, bent nearly in half by the low ceiling. The worst possible moment to trip over his own feet. Perhaps one of the housemaids would have been better suited for it; they were much shorter than he, and accustomed to dust and the management of a house, of the doing of little things. He couldn’t quite recall what had compelled him so much to come up here, what reason there was for him to be anywhere other than his usual proper place. Perhaps he’d find himself with a broken neck and no more reason to go anywhere, least of all—

“Are you absolutely certain, sir?” Mrs. Pearce cried in a distant wavering voice. Without turning his head, he hollered back that it was all right, damnit, and if he fell and cracked his head open they’d certainly all hear it and call for a doctor, wouldn’t they?

He found the steamer trunk still covered in faded and peeling hotel labels, remnants of old journeys, but it was the middle bag, the one meant for weekend trips into the country, that he wanted. A tentative brush at the top of the trunk threw thick clouds of dust into the air and induced a nasty fit of coughing, then sneezing, then coughing again. He dropped the torch and swore under what little breath he had. Somewhere below, he heard Mrs. Pearce start up again as though she had a premonitory sense for the use of foul language.

“I’m fine!” Higgins managed to bellow or perhaps wheeze, and spat out several teaspoons of grey fluff before returning to the task.

Apart from a few things here and there—favored artwork, little boxes—he wasn’t really the sort to keep trinkets or mementos. Ephemera from childhood were either deaccessioned from his own holdings or stored with his mother, and the present nature of his life was entirely focused within the walls of the study. Directly contra Cecily’s assessment of him, there was no secret wellspring of sentimentality in his character—why would there be? There was no need for it, there was no source for it, if ever there had been one. He’d no wife to insist that they store the old furniture after a costly redecoration scheme just in case, no children to accumulate toys that might pass down to other children, then grandchildren and so forth. 

Little reason enough, as a matter of fact, for the attic storage to have anything in it at all, apart from these few boxes—and hopefully the blasted hand luggage, so irritatingly at large. Mrs. Pearce was now taking the opportunity during the great search to conduct a particularly thorough cleaning and general straightening of the house, and if that managed to upend the place enough to locate his own belongings, then he could tolerate it, he supposed. Much of the day-to-day business of the house he allowed as long as it did not inconvenience him overly much, but clearly his housekeeper had been lying in wait over a chance like this for a month of Sundays, given the alacrity with which she dispatched the staff.

The servants had, as directed, turned out every inch of the house and come to him in the days prior bearing in their hands little gifts for his appraisal. Here was a pen from between the sofa cushions; a crumpled list of ideas for books, written in shorthand upon waking from an inspired dream; the smallest screwdriver from his set of metronome tools, missing so long that he’d forgotten about it and had been making do all the same. An old pocket watch fob. A torn sheet of stamps. The other xylophone mallet. Mrs. Pearce making a rather amusingly sour face as she presented him with a slipper that had somehow gotten behind the stove in the kitchen. Collar stays, three sheets of a far inferior writing paper bond than what he himself used, one lonely sock crammed into the back of a drawer (how curious to discover now, months later, that Pickering had thought mustard yellow a sound choice). A bent and broken hairpin, found beneath a mattress. Some little chunk of glass from a cheap bit of costume jewelry. A posy with flowers so dried that it had already crumbled in Isobel’s cupped palm, colorless and unidentifiable.

Higgins told them he wasn’t running an hotel, and anything which obviously didn’t belong to him was for the bin or a burn pile. He didn’t need to see everything; he needed to find that bag. Frowning now at the trunk before him as though it had betrayed him in all this, he set the lid back and began stirring and pulling objects from within, hoping that it had been carelessly stuffed in here and the whole thing could finally be done.

Instead, he discovered that it contained work—repurposed writing paper cartons filled with monographs and articles bearing his name, a whole case of wax cylinder recordings, and a few copies of his first book which the publisher had sent along in case he wished to distribute them amongst his colleagues as gifts. And family too, perhaps, but Phonetic Shorthand in Spoken English had been an unlikely contender to be the hit of the 1900 Christmas season.

Higgins plucked out one of the volumes to admire the cover, only to discover cracks at the spine and then an orange powder left behind on his palm. The leather, evidently a cheap choice by the binder, was rotting from being up here in the heat and cold—and from the other items inside the trunk, it was contagious. He looked back at the one in his hand, sticky and shedding. A discomfiting thing, to even consider a book to be rubbish, and he did already have his own well-kept copy of this downstairs in the library, but it was always a good idea to keep seconds and even thirds of things, in case a student should want one, seeing as how this was out of print, but then again he’d written on the subject of proper shorthand at least twice since then, and it wasn’t as though Higgins at twenty-seven had been the final authority on the matter, and—

Fitting the book back into its hole among the stack of identical copies, he dropped the lid close and shoved the whole thing aside with the toe of his boot, disgusted that a clear and decisive plan was not revealing itself with ease, and that he’d so readily lost the thread. The bag, for God’s sake, the bag.

A carton nearby was filled with things brought back from abroad. Japanese robes, Chinese silk tunics, a reproduction copy of the Jikji from Korea, and loads and loads of picture-postcards of Sweden, Finland, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Balkans, and Greece. Higgins went through them one by one. Souvenirs, by Jove. He’d completely forgotten these. What a laugh that trip had been—a welcome one, too. Mother had been annoyed with him for finding it so hilarious that he could say he’d been to all those countries in just one grand tour (Just like that, all in one go!), when he’d simply gone down to the Exposition, with the foreign pavilions there in one clump. And here was everything he’d dragged back, packed away and ignored at the instant of his return. Apart from the folk embroidery, which he’d given to his mother and sister. Ah, but at least the kimonos had proved useful. Dressing gowns for a small female figure, and then clean and decent morning robes, at least until Mrs. Pearce had been able to put in a proper list to Whiteley’s—

Onto the next. This one was a trunkful of old suits wrapped and folded carefully in tissue paper. Higgins couldn’t recall why any of them had been preserved like this until he reached the middle and found his graduate gown and board. 

Carefully, he released the stack of suits, dusted his hands together, and then buffed them against the sides of his trousers for good measure before lifting the robes once more.

To think he’d enjoyed all of it, once—the pomp and decorum, dressing in gowns and subfusc for examinations, lectures, chapel, anything truly worthwhile. To be part of a long and grand tradition; the weight of it on your shoulders, solid and comfortable, but always manageable, and shot through with glimmers of tantalizing possibility. Of the long road of the future. Of success, of prestige. Of becoming oneself.

Education—no, knowledge. The one thing that could never be taken away. Never be erased. One could lose everything: family, money, position, reputation. But never what you’d learnt.

Higgins pulled the yoke of the gown toward himself, supporting the garment in both hands, to see the silk hood draped down the back. Its thick green stripes were still in fine condition, but the white ones had faint yellow spots here and there, not the snowy blued silk as when he’d worn it. His thumbnail did nothing to scratch them out, and he had the idea of inquiring as to how Mrs. Pearce might go about having it cleaned and restored, but the feeling was ultimately fleeting. It wasn’t as though there would ever be occasion to wear it again. He replaced it slowly, like helping an invalid to lie back in bed, and shut the lid, making certain that none of the fabric or tissue paper were caught in the hinges or along the clasp.

Moving on—and apparently back through time—he found a small but thick valise filled with portfolio cases, and opened one before he suddenly recalled what it was in toto. University papers, stacked and neatly ribboned, preserving his earliest research and writing for future generations to come. He thumbed through them.

A treatise on the assessment and diagnosis of rhotic tongue action, including a diagram of commonly misused strike points within the oral cavity that he’d worked up on his own. Very well done indeed. Early theories on therapeutic exercises—he’d undertaken exhausting revisions in the years since, of course, but even these rough and rudimentary ideas had still been so useful over the years. Amusing—he’d once posited, quite vehemently, that dental surgery was no quick and easy method for correcting speech impediments, and the rash of quacks promoting such nonsense ought to be imprisoned. There were no shortcuts along the path—the work wanted devotion. You were literally reconstructing portions of your innermost self, who you’d always been; you had to give yourself to it entirely. Class notes, phonetic transcriptions of fellow students, of townies with interesting or unusual accents, and in the deepest part of the case, even drawings and experiments from anatomy and dissection work: a very different set of ambitions had lived there. It was all here, all the old manuscripts written in his rooms, desk wedged against the oriel window overlooking foggy fields at dawn, or in the library between the silent stacks of ancient and sweet-smelling books, scribbling away with a ferocity and singular purpose—

Notes had begun to appear in the margins of his coursework.

Well stated! Perhaps you’d consider connecting this theory to the historical summation of your theme?

The vaguest sense of familiarity crept over him. Higgins paged through the rest of the document to find other stray thoughts and sentiments. What an idea, Henry! and This will be better summarized after another pass, I think. But very good, very well stated!

No Fellow or Professor charged with his education had ever addressed him in such an odd manner: fulsome with praise, deferential, yet somehow bold with criticisms and suggestions before snapping back into a kind of artful guilelessness.

These were Eleanor’s editorial revisions, in that flowing, romantic hand suited for the delicacies of love letters that most girls seemed to develop. Reading her notes then, and even now, made Higgins strangely awake, alert. He’d never especially liked how she formed lowercase descenders before reaching upward into one of the round vowels—the bottom loop always looked too full, so eager to please and desperate for approval. She never had that problem when the next letter was an i. Such a mysterious inconsistency, but one that he’d never failed to find just a bit jarring.

The peculiar handwriting went on and on, appearing here and there, Eleanor always having something to say, some little encouragement, filling in the gaps and silences with chatter as though she was afraid she’d be forgotten if she weren’t constantly making herself known. Sometimes simply an exclamation point, its full stop not a simple dot but an actual circle. She’d taken the time to draw a little swirl, like a child practicing her letters.

Oh, dear, you are too too funny, you know—

The professor sat back on his heels, staring down at the stack of papers. He’d never before caught that comma between oh and dear, but it certainly altered the message. Now he could see it, years later. And these: These were the copies he had kept? Perhaps they were the only drafts he’d managed to salvage after all that dreadful business with the dean, and the committee, and—Higgins stopped himself. More likely, though, he’d simply tossed it all together for a servant to sort out, and here was the result. Papers for him to sift through, years later, remnants after the flood.

He wondered for a moment what had become of Eleanor, whether she’d ever found her academic in spectacles to pet and compliment, to offer her revisions and her ear for ideas and arguments, to take notes, to make his transcriptions and tell him he was ever so dreadfully clever, someone to moon over and simper at—

There, just behind one of the boxes, was the luggage. He could see the handle poking out. When he retrieved it, Higgins found that it, too, hadn’t been properly cared for: someone should have covered the thing with a cotton drawstring bag to prevent it from looking so battered and pathetic. The leather hadn’t gone off as the book had, but there was a dinginess to it, a beat-down look that it hadn’t had last summer.

Higgins let the thing drop to his side and looked about himself, the wide expanse of empty attic, of dust motes floating through unbroken beams of watery sunlight coming in at the slatted windows, and then at the stack of boxes in the middle. His very own deserted island, exactly as big as he was, containing all that he was, and all those little notes from Eleanor, pressing him, cajoling him, all wide eyes and expectations. He swallowed, uncomfortable suddenly at how little there seemed to be up here. How easily those hours, those years, spent sitting at his desk writing and thinking, could all be tucked out of the way and forgotten.

Without looking at any of the trunks, he put back the canvas drapes and took the bag downstairs.

In the end, he bought a very fine new portmanteau, and Mrs. Pearce saw him off at the front door early one morning.

“Have a very pleasant journey, sir,” she told him. He was trying to decide whether he ought to take a pair of gloves, and set the luggage on the foyer table before undoing the still satisfyingly-fiddly straps and fishing through its compartments.

“Good God, did Carter pack this?!” he cried after a moment, for he’d plunged his hand into a stratum of neckties.

Carter emerged from the study in a green work apron and matching shirtsleeve covers, holding a wooden pole he’d been assembling into some sort of cleaning implement.

“Sir?”

“Carter, what is the meaning of this? What on earth are you doing?” Higgins had pulled out several pairs of folded socks, and was now rolling them together, correctly, the way they ought to be.

“Er,” the footman replied, and exchanged a look with Mrs. Pearce. “Just going back to my work, sir,” Carter said, and hoofed a retreat into the study.

“I believe Mason packed it, Mr. Higgins,” remarked the housekeeper. “He’s thought of everything you’ll need, to be sure.” She paused, then spoke delicately but with an unmistakable insistence. “You will miss the train if you don’t leave soon—”

“Is there a different umbrella I ought to take?” He set the thing down once more, drumming his fingers against the foyer table.

“Mr. Higgins—”

“Or perhaps some goloshes, even the high street gets torrential when it rains, and perhaps I should like to go listen and take notes—”

“Sir—”

“All right, all right, woman!” Higgins cried, though without much ire, and set about refitting the straps on the case. “Practically frog-marched out of my own damned house, and I shall tell you, I am beginning to wonder who is serving whom.”

“Sir!”

“Well!” The professor fidgeted a little, peevish. “One doesn’t like the idea of one’s comings and goings dictated by servants, or worse—the annual airing-out schedule. I might beg your leave to make my exit before the chimney-sweeps have the run of the place.” He straightened, regained his grip on the luggage, and affected an amusingly arch tone. “Now, listen—you lot behave yourselves while I’m gone. If you throw a dance and invite the neighborhood, roll up the rug and don’t break anything larger than a punch bowl. I should like to recognize my own house upon return.”

“Indeed, sir.”

“And don’t move my papers.”

“Yes, sir.”

“In fact, don’t even touch them. Don’t breathe on them. Don’t look at them. Don’t think about them.”

 “Of course.”

Higgins paused.

“And don’t be tempted to think I’ve forgotten your propensity for secretly hauling off my old clothing to the church charity box while I’m turned the other way.”

Mrs. Pearce opened her mouth to respond, her hand still on the front door from where she’d slowly maneuvered him toward it and out onto the steps, but at this bit of ironic teasing she gave him a disapproving look before moving to swing it shut. He reached up, pushed the door back open again, and stuck his head inside.

“I know how you feel about those slippers, Mrs. Pearce, and I shall know immediately if any go missing!”

Paddington was always busy in the mornings—Higgins supposed, for he could hardly be expected to know from the normal course of his days—but today as he stepped out of the taxi onto the curb, it seemed nearly a crushing press of people, all coming and going, all knowing the rules of how to be, where to stand, precisely how hard to shove one another without risking fisticuffs. He jostled against a few people with the generous, self-indulgent irritation of a man who does not spend much time in early morning public spaces, making his way toward a newsstand in search of something to read during the trip. The newspapers had all been read before breakfast; there was a nice book inside his bag, but that was for tucking into last thing before putting out the light at the hotel.

Whittled between the choice of a copy of The New Age (some Socialist rag boasting a cast of authors that made him roll his eyes) and The Strand, Higgins took his chances and handed over sixpence to see if Conan Doyle still had anything left in him. Trains always did seem like the best places to give free rein to utter tosh. Anything remotely intelligent was best consumed at home, in one’s own armchair before the fire.

And then he turned, and saw Freddy Eynsford-Hill buying a bouquet of flowers from the next stall, just a few feet away.

He stood very still. The young man hadn’t seen him, and indeed, a thought came to Higgins almost as a nerve impulse, a fact which arrived without analysis or the chance for reflection or prevarication: Freddy wouldn’t have remembered him anyway.

Young Frederick looked the same, which was to say, robust, youthful, and well-turned-out. The flowers now his private property after a pleasantries exchanged with the gnarled and dirty creature hawking them, he waded comfortably over to a waiting taxi, the contented expression never wavering from his features. Yet instead of opening the cab door and climbing inside, he paused.

And a woman’s gloved hand extended from the window to take the flowers from him.

The reception must have been enthusiastic, or at least pleased, for he could see Eynsford-Hill, in profile even from this vantage point, break into a warm and easy smile, the hallmark of a man who’d never met a stranger.

She was right there.

Right there, perhaps ten or fifteen feet away.

He could see—only just—the edge of a hat brim. Just the edge, just a hint, a taste.

Before he could decide what to do (and what was the choice between, after all? Nothing, and nothing), someone crashed into him, sending Higgins staggering to the sidewalk, and was absorbed into the anonymity of the crowd before he could even catch his breath.

“I say, that was badly done!” A man in a bowler hat with a cigar dangling from his fingertips turned from where he’d been glaring into the crowd and bent to help Higgins up. “Are you all right, my good man?”

“Quite,” the professor replied, checking himself for any damage.

“Here, your bag, sir,” said the man, and reached for the handle of the portmanteau. A little jealous of the newness of the luggage (and not entirely persuaded that the fellow wasn’t part of some swindle requiring a paired team), Higgins grabbed it first, and looked about, craning his neck to see if the commotion had attracted any attention. But apart from a fresh wave of bodies coming out of the station (there was a clock chiming somewhere overhead), he could see neither Freddy, nor for that matter any of the cabs along the sidewalk, even at the advantage of his height. More people, and more people, and the cresting, futile surge of humanity against him.

There was no reconciling the nervous tension out here in the filthy open air with all these bodies, hats, hands, feet.

“You’re welcome!” the man in the bowler hat cried after him, sounding vexed, as Higgins turned. There—a rapidly disappearing space between two people, a parting of the sea. He dived into it and escaped.

Higgins hurried into the station, found the platform, the first-class carriages, and was in a compartment lifting the bag onto the rack overhead when he saw the five-inch long mark, the scar, that the lumbering idiot had somehow carved into its smooth surface. Higgins ran his thumb along the length—now the skin was jagged and flaking at the outer edges of the gouge. It was too deep to buff out, likely, and there was no returning the thing; he’d spent more to have his initials embossed at the top, near the handle.

The professor sank with a thump onto the train seat. It was brand new. Brand new, and now it was ruined. Why had he not simply made do with what he already had? Buying new luggage—he hadn’t been anywhere in years, and now this would merely join the dusty trunks in the attic and slowly rot along with everything else. The shopkeeper had probably been snickering at him from behind his hand, some ridiculous old man dragging a fresh and unblemished thing about after him.

Leaning forward, he rested his elbows on his knees and pressed the heels of his palms into his forehead in an attempt to stave off a headache.

There was a long, sharp whistle, and the train lurched backward.

Higgins hoped with a viciousness that no one would join him, that no one would see him in here alone, slide open the compartment door, and cheerfully settle in for a nice long rambling discussion of their cousin in Eastbourne, or what line of business he was in. The hallway remained empty, and he slouched against the window to watch the buildings and electrical lines outside the station pick up speed. Houses turned into countryside, and the landscape took on a general familiarity. That hillside, he’d passed before. Or that stand of trees caused a twinge of recognition he neither understood nor could parse before it was gone.

What had made him decide to go back to Oxford, anyway?

It was here that he sat up, pushed himself back, sat flush against the hard bench seat with its incongruous metal coils beneath, supposedly there for the comfort of the passenger, but all they ever really did was make you feel as though you were bouncing over rocks and logs, careening downhill, bump and go—

The pattern on the seat fabric in trains was awfully distinctive, wasn’t it? And what sort of material did they use, anyway? Like a very short woolen carpet, and it was both slick and prevented one from moving about without some effort, which seemed impossible, yet here it was. Who decided what sort of fabric to use? And how did they come to that conclusion? Did they take into consideration the possibility that passengers often fell asleep during their journey, and that the chance of a sudden stop was greater than zero?

He looked at the other seat.

A fellow like Pickering was certain to nod off during a train journey of a few hours—Brighton to London, for example. Military man trained to sleep anywhere, his age, the lateness of the hour and nothing to see out the window: it was understandable, if not predestined. So when a gentle snoring emanated from the opposite side of the compartment, Higgins had glanced up from his book to find his friend with chin dropped to chest, head lolling ever so slightly, and promptly returned to his reading.

Seated at the Colonel’s left hand, she inquired whether they ought to let him sleep like that.

“He’ll be fine,” Higgins murmured, “Probably wake at the next station, and ask what he’s missed.”

They went on in silence like that for a little while, signal lanterns outside flashing past in streaks of orange and red every few minutes. The dim lamp over Higgins’ head faltered with a faint buzz, and they both looked up. It came back on, then the light shuddered and went out altogether, leaving the three of them in darkness. He stood, aimed, and flicked his finger at it very hard; it made a ping sound, and came back stronger than it had been.

“Blasted silly things,” he was just saying, seating himself once more, “They ought to switch them all—”

The train braked suddenly, quite hard. Not enough to throw them about the compartment, but it certainly had him grasping for the wall, and when they finally came to a full stop Higgins looked about to find Eliza with both feet planted against the edge of the empty bench seat next to him, peering up at the Colonel, who was not only still asleep, but rather contentedly wrinkling his nose and sniffing a bit, like a dog having a nice little snooze.

Both of them released a sigh—hers in a kind of relief, while he felt an amused bit of exasperation bubble up. Pick was forever one of those men upon whom life would never make any permanent marks. Apart from a few mild bumps and scrapes that would be taken obligingly as simply the natural course of things (for nothing bad could ever truly happen to the Colonel), Higgins would always picture him facing any monumental catastrophe (Vesuvius erupting or London plunging into the Thames or an earthquake rending them all asunder) by folding his hands at his back, lifting himself up and down on the balls of his feet, and saying, “Ah, well,” in a pleasant, distracted sort of way.

Just as he was thinking on this, Pickering began to slide down the seat like a lead marionette.

General pandemonium as he and Eliza sprang to their feet, hissing and flailing, trying not to wake the old chap, grabbing for the brass racks overhead as the train jolted to life once more, scrabbling at the old fellow’s arms to try to uncapsize and prevent him the embarrassment of awakening in a slumped heap at their feet.

“Good God, why is he so heavy?!” Higgins cried as mutedly as he could.

“How is he still asleep?!” she answered in a shrill whisper.

They got him upright (mostly), and stood in tense and close observation, waiting, Eliza with one dubious hand outstretched and ready to catch the Colonel.

“Well!” said the professor at last, straightening himself and preparing to return once again to his book, “That was certainly—”

But he never got round to saying what that certainly was, for Colonel Pickering had decided to repay their largesse by sort of… bending into a heap in the empty seat next to him.

Once more, they gathered up and arranged him as best they could, and just as he was lifting beneath his friend’s arm to heave upward and secure him more permanently, Eliza stopped and said very quietly,

“Is he breathing?”

“Of course he’s breathing,” Higgins said with a frown. “Don’t be absurd.”

All the same, though, they both held their breath and listened for anything other than the train clicking over the rails. Her expression of suspicion and doubt dawned into wide-eyed caginess, which grew in strength enough to migrate onto his own face, until several moments had gone by, and then several longer moments had gone by, and then he said, nearly only mouthing it,

“Oh my God,”

And Eliza said,

“Oh my God—”

An almost-silent pantomime of panic went back and forth between them for a few moments before Higgins took hold of his senses once more.

“Now hang on a minute,” he said firmly, and managed to extricate one hand from behind the Colonel to feel at his wrist for a pulse, and then his carotid. Eliza was crouched next to him, still holding onto their friend by the elbow, watching the professor’s face for any indication, any possibility—

With a thundering and flourished noise that Higgins would have transcribed into the English as SKKNNX-X-X, Colonel Pickering gulped in a huge reviving breath, shifted his shoulders, and muttered something about the Punjab before sinking back into blissful slumber.

Having both leapt back in alarm at this startling proof of life, this time the two of them eased back onto the seat behind, and there was a collective giving of the gimlet stare, so to speak, at the old man. And when Pickering began to lean toward the window, Higgins did not bolt to his feet, but slouched low, reached up with the considerable length of his leg, and pressed his shoe flat against the seat just to the left of the Colonel’s head to keep him steady.

“There,” he remarked, crossing his arms over himself, quite pleased with his own ingenuity.

As though the universe refused to allow this to stand, the train went into a curve, and Pickering listed in the opposite direction, earning a thoroughly unquiet

“OH FOR GOD’S SAKE!”

from Higgins as Eliza instantly bent in half, exploding with uproarious laughter into her knees. At last she came up for air, and very breathless and pink in the face, told him she rather thought he was on his own as far as his brilliant solution went.

“Yes, well, apparently he needs a lie-down in the afternoons,” he replied, more amused than annoyed, really.

“Should we tell him? When he wakes, I mean?”

Higgins pulled a face.

“I don’t imagine someone his age would enjoying hearing that about himself. We mustn’t needlessly alarm him,” he replied.

“How old is he, do you suppose?” Eliza asked him after a few moments.

“Late fifties or early sixties,” he answered, for it did not matter to him particularly, the excitement having now come to a close, and he prepared to take up his reading once more, but Eliza went on.

“Not that much older than you, then,” she said.

“Good Lord,” Higgins said, recoiling with a start and turning to look at her, quite a bit more in surprise than outrage, “How old do you think I am?”

She guessed with the bald-faced innocence of a child to whom age holds no value or meaning that he was forty or forty-five, somewhere in there.

“Certainly not,” he said, maneuvering his voice so he wouldn’t sound quite so affronted or as though he cared about something so insignificant. “You and I are far closer in age than I am to him,” and he nodded toward the still-sleeping Colonel.

Eliza had no reply to this, and they spent the rest of the journey in silence as he went on with his book.

From where he’d wedged himself into the corner of the seat, Higgins faced the otherwise empty compartment.

He always seemed to be the wrong age for everything, always doing things backward or in the wrong order, coming at life by an odd angle rather than in comforting lockstep with everybody else. He’d felt terribly much older when he’d been younger, for a long time indeed, and he’d no idea, in truth, what it felt like to grow older. He’d never been able to feel really grown-up and tremendous, like other chaps. People were always saying (people, as if that hadn’t mostly been his mother and sometimes his tutors) that Henry was a precociously intelligent child, and nobody had ever contradicted that statement, and it ossified into an unerring truth over the years, the expectation generally being that he would find great success with that much genius inside his head. No one had ever told him otherwise, until the faculty committee made their decree, and had sent the Master to inform him that as a matter of fact—

Gazing out the window in the here and now, he found telegraph lines and houses beginning to appear once more in greater numbers, and then in clusters, and then he asked himself, really and truly:

Why had he come back to Oxford?

What was the point?

He’d had no particular aim in mind; it had merely occurred to him that he hadn’t returned in over a decade, and that perhaps by now it would be all right, more of an observational expedition than any sort of reunion, with that much time between all of that and himself.

As a matter of fact, the Master had said, as a matter of fact, while the committee is quite confident that you have acquitted yourself most admirably in your studies and research, they feel that your appointment to full Professor may have been slightly premature, and that with a few more years as Reader—and it isn’t a demotion, merely an adjustment—you will be far more suited to chair an entire department. Now, Higgins, I argued quite strenuously in favor of retaining you, given our association, and I daresay you’ve been the best graduate this department has put out in a long time, but I imagine you find academia a happier bit of work than the prospect of administrative duties, eh?

Suddenly he was too young—still intelligent enough, still with the right ideas, but too young, too inexperienced with the ways of the world (what did that even mean?), moving too quickly past the old ways; they’d faltered, weak and anxious and stupefied at the thought of someone revolutionizing what had been their stodgy domain for so long.

And wasn’t it ever so convenient that concurrent to their review of him, of his suitability to join the ranks of the (frankly anaemic, if not already decomposing) department faculty, that he’d finally grown tired of Eleanor’s constant insinuations and simpering and flattering and fluttering at him, and told her he’d no intention whatsoever of marrying her, of marrying anybody, and that she and her mother need not sit him in their parlor night after night, keeping him from his work, asking about his people and when they would finally meet his mother, and oh Henry, you would look ever so fine if you did your hair differently, and wore this rather than that, and had he gotten the necktie she’d had sent from the tailor’s? He didn’t give a damn one way or the other if Eleanor’s father was so important; he was finished being treated as a grown woman’s plaything to be dressed and coddled and petted, and always in that distinctive, manipulative way that never allowed for a simple no. Let yourself be treated like that, let a woman take the reins of your life, and it was over. You might as well brick yourself up inside your study lest you be constantly interrupted, nagged at, and hauled off to garden parties or teas or who the hell knew what else, with nothing but the idiocy of the idle rich to keep you entertained.

And so he’d made known his opinion of that suggestion that he waste a few years playing at being an academic instead of being one, packed his things, and returned to London. Stifled Oxford couldn’t withstand the Higgins oxygen, and so the sounding call of his early professional life had been: let them all rot inside their ivory towers, slowly turn to dust beside their blasted oriel windows looking down their noses at the rest of the world, and wonder at what they’d given up by dismissing him.

Why come back to that, when it had all been such an utter failure?

(Why sink into the comfort of an old man’s delusion at the sight of a gloved hand?)

The grand tradition. Black robes for examinations, all together in orderly lines and rows, initiates of a holy order, wrapped and ensconced in the glory of something as simple, and yet at once as complicated, as affinity. Collegiality. Loyalty, and all the little things. Belonging.

He was a Professor. He’d been a Professor. For a little while, but it was his, his very own, and that, at least, couldn’t be struck through in any record book. There were things that couldn’t be erased, truly. That thought failed to comfort him, though.

The train pulled in to Didcot, still miles from Oxford, and very slowly he rose, reached for the luggage, stepped out onto the platform, and drifted through the station.

Higgins could handle a good deal—quite a lot, he thought—but this was enough. Oxford was a hash; always had been. There had been enough, and he’d known that from the moment he’d gone into the attic.

On the return, he’d the strange thought that Eleanor had led to Caroline, and Caroline had led to Eliza, and now he was here, and there was no clear-cut path forward revealing itself. No, that wasn’t true—although of course he knew there was no going back to Wimpole Street, going back and subjecting himself to the curiosity and speculation of the servants and Mrs. Pearce’s frowns and concern, getting tangled up in the midst of their business, glad as they likely were to be rid of him for a week.

And it was that same certainty which turned him toward the ticketing agent at the booths to inquire about the boat trains when he’d reached London once more.

“There’s one leaves Victoria at the hour, arriving…” The fellow in the flat-top brimmed hat paused and glanced at a chart nearby. “Quarter-past seven.”

Higgins chewed on the inside of his lip, and bought the ticket straight through to the Gare du Nord, and hadn’t it always been what he was meant to do anyway?

Chapter Text

There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood,
Leads on to fortune.

- Julius Caesar, Shakespeare

It wasn’t until Higgins knocked at the door to suite 217 that it even occurred to him Cecily might not be within.

This was not a welcome revelation, as he was very tired from the long passage between Southampton and the French shore, the transfer from ferry to train, and then the rest of the journey on to Paris. It had been neither restful or peaceful, with the blasted ferry shaking so hard he thought it might come apart before he’d ever set foot on dry land again. And then there was the business of finding a cab from the Gard du Nord, rattling up to the hotel which Lady Sudcliffe had so pointedly named in their last conversation, then finally the usual tedious negotiations for a room of his own—it had all been nearly enough to send him striding purposefully out an upper-floor window.

He looked at the brass plate next to the door. She could have been out at dinner, or comfortably tucked in for the evening. Briefly entertaining the notion of heading that direction himself so that he could meet her in the morning, he was just shifting to the opposite foot to move away when the door opened to reveal not the Dowager Baroness, but a stranger.

“Oh—I beg your pardon,” he said to the woman in French. “Perhaps I have the wrong room.” Curiously, her response to this was to open the door slightly wider, the better to view him, it seemed.

“Are you seeking Cecily?” she replied. “Lady Sudcliffe?”

There was a surprised pause.

“I am,” said Higgins.

“She’s indisposed,” the woman continued. “But probably she’ll awake at five.” This was apparently amusing to her, for she couldn’t repress a slight smile. “Come back then, or before eight, if you care.”

And the woman shut the door with a soft click.

Rather an odd exchange—but he didn’t intend to stand uselessly about when the possibility of dinner, a hot bath, and a bed to himself was at hand. Higgins took easy advantage of this social reprieve, and slept very admirably that night.

The next morning, breakfast taken care of, he returned to number 217, and once more the unknown woman answered his knock.

“You missed her,” she told him. “In fact…”

There was a long pause while she gave some consideration to whatever she was about to say.

“In fact, I am going to her myself and will take you also.”

Inside the cab, Higgins got a better look at the stranger. She was rather plain, but certainly dressed smartly. This was the friend whom Cecily had mentioned being the reason for her visit, he could see. Last night in the confusion of surprise and over-tiredness, he’d thought her a maid or paid companion of some stock, but this morning something regal and even rather superior in her bearing gave the general suggestion of a finishing school friend or other well-heeled chum from the past. Or actually—it occurred to him that perhaps this woman ran in artistic circles as a patroness, or possibly even dallied with the occult nonsense Cecily had got herself into. Now he was a bit curious.

“I suppose there’s no getting around us having to introduce ourselves, as abhorrent as people find that sort of thing,” he said. “But I’m not in the habit of following much rules, especially when I’ve been packed into a cab to some destination unknown—I’m Professor Henry Higgins.”

She gazed back at him for a moment, apparently deciding whether this was offensive to her sensibilities.

“I call myself Countess Zubov,” she said at last.

“How are you and Lady Sudcliffe acquainted?” he asked, and to this the Countess spared herself yet another moment, before yet another mysterious smile.

“Everyone is always from school, I think,” replied the Countess. “Isn’t that the only way we have friends?”

Quite unsure how to respond to that, he lapsed into silence, thinking. At last, though, the driver stopped, and Higgins extracted himself from the cab’s interior to find that they’d been deposited before a building on a pretty little chocolate-box street, with plenty of wrought-iron balconies overhead bursting with violet blossoms, and an impossibly blue sky beyond that.

He’d forgotten how lovely Paris insisted on being, how it tried to infect you with romance and other froth and silliness around every corner. All these soft colors and buildings designed to look like cakes, cobblestone streets that were insufferably twee, and above all, the bloody Metro stations with their flourished entrances. Public transportation, done up like artwork. Absurd. Taken on its own, without all the Gallic frippery, it was a fair sort of place, all the moreso this time of year, but it still felt wrong somehow; no city had the need to look quite so appealing, and cities themselves ought not be hell-bent on cultivating glamour as though it were an entire industry of its own.

They entered, and stood in a small lobby until a young woman with dark curls and an olive complexion approached and inquired what they wanted.

“Madame Anstruther,” was all the Countess had to say, and they were guided not past the velvet curtains in a large arched doorway, but down another hallway, and then another, until Higgins found himself in a large workroom with windows that ran all the way up the ceiling. There were tables, sewing machines, and plenty of fabric draped everywhere, along with a handful of other women going to and fro: some bearing cases, one or two searching industriously through racks of clothing. And in the center of it all, fussing over another young woman and looking more than lightly frazzled, was Cecily herself. She was adjusting part of the girl’s dress, a pale green thing that was so sheer as to be nearly transparent.

Upon registering the sight of him there in the doorway, appearing no doubt confused and not a little discomfited by the sudden feminine nature of his surroundings, her harried expression was replaced momentarily by shock, and then ironic amusement, and then once more by delight, amplified by her upward shriek of recognition. She rushed at them, and Higgins braced himself for her to throw her arms about him or something like that, but the Dowager Baroness pulled up short, seized his lapels, and shook him gently.

“I knew you’d come all this way, Henry; Paris is too good for the spirit not to,” and straightened his tie for him, very firmly, at once overfamiliar but somehow endearing. Higgins took a step back and had a look at her.

“By Jove, what are you wearing?”

She made a soft ah! noise and took several steps back from him, then extended her arms to either side, revealing her robe to be sort of a large, shapeless bolt of black and white striped fabric, beneath which was a more fitted gown, for she had a pair of all-black sleeves tight about her arms and wrists. The effect was somewhat reminiscent of the old reform style, but rendered in the most shocking contrast. He’d never seen a dress like it—certainly it was nothing that could be paired with a picture hat the size of a vulture and worn to a garden party. At least not without plenty of scandalized clucking and tutting and that sort of thing.

Higgins made some noncommittal oh, er noises, which she luckily took as appreciative admiration.

“It’s one of the gowns,” she said, turning this way and that to put the thing to what she seemed to feel was its best advantage, though it was a bit difficult to tell. “I figured I ought to look the part; one can’t dress ordinary and then present a collection like this.” She twisted her hands together and looked uncharacteristically nervous all of a sudden. “Oh, golly.” And with that, she returned to inspecting the drape and form on another girl, who was kitted out in an outrageous mixture of black and white triangle print crossed with a William Morris floral that looked as though it’d been stripped from the wall in one of his mother’s sitting rooms.

“Viv, I’m really not sure about this one,” said Cecily. “What d’you reckon?” She snatched up a pair of gaudy earrings and held them to either side of the model’s head. “Paste is easiest, but I can’t help but think it isn’t very modern at all. We didn’t have time for anything else, apart from the necklaces, though.” There was a pause, inside which Higgins realized that she was addressing the Countess Zubov, who’d drifted over to one of the nearby tables and was sifting through a case filled with sparkling jewelry and huge chunks of coral that looked as though they’d been dipped in orange paint. Very slowly, the Countess lifted her chin, and biting her lip to keep from smiling in a guilty way, said in respectable English,

“Absolutely not. Go with as many necklaces as she can stand. Stacked collars, even. Spit in the face of convention, and don’t look back. The French love being insulted; they’ll find it outrageous and therefore appealing.”

“You think so? Not appalling?” Cecily said, holding up this jewelry and then that.

“No,” her friend went on, “Of course not.”

Satisfied and reassured at this sage wisdom, Lady Sudcliffe tripped along to find another dress model to inspect.

Higgins stood beside the Countess for a moment.

“Where are you from, in America?” he asked her at last, which she answered with a wry grin.

“San Francisco,” she said. “By way of Denver. And New York. And… lots of other places, I suppose.”

He cast an eye askance at her.

“Exactly long were you planning to keep up your little charade?”

She gave a short laugh.

“Cecily said you were a language expert—I was sure you’d figured it out in the cab. You talk faster than I can translate in my head.”

“Yes, well, you ought to have studied better; your grammar is noticeably atrocious.”

“Oh, well,” said the Countess, and shrugged. “I was never much for school, anyway.”

And with that, she swanned off in the direction Cecily had disappeared.

Curious, that he hadn’t known Cecily was something of a noted clothing designer, albeit for an extremely narrow set of clientele, but then—they’d never really discussed it, Higgins thought. Or rather, he thought they hadn’t, but couldn’t remember with any certitude, which was a bit unsettling.

And that bewilderment must have been evident on his face, for when he turned to glance at Countess Zubov while some girl togged up in about a hundred feet of black silk and tulle drifted about the showing room before the gathered buyers, the expression he was met with was an echo of the knowing amusement she’d been giving him all morning.

He was annoyed, and made little effort to conceal it, because at least then, perhaps, she wouldn’t look quite so smug. Cecily as a clothing designer. There were some female members of the peerage who dabbled in these sorts of fanciful pursuits—clothing design, or artwork, or even journalism—but it was always within acceptable boundaries, always conservative and muted, appropriate and tasteful. Cecily, on the other hand, was too outré to be so orthodox, so dull, as to run a ladies’ dress shop and hire a set of young shop-girls in black stuff dresses all inviting the wealthy clientele to hev a seet madum.

After it was all over and the efforts applauded and such, they three took themselves someplace for luncheon, and over the bouillabaisse, the Countess said,

“Well, it was fantastic; you were an absolute triumph, I thought,” and raised her glass in salute. “What did you make of it, Professor? A whole morning spent wrapped up in haute couture; certainly not the same as having your nose stuck in a book, huh?”

“Ah,” said Higgins, cursing himself internally for not having reasonably anticipated that of course a woman would ask him a thing like that. “Well—”

But before he could come up with an answer that might satisfy the two of them, the Countess began to chuckle, and Cecily cried,

“You had absolutely no idea why I was coming down here, did you!”

“I did so!” Higgins protested. “You said you were coming to visit a friend, and that the weather would be very fine this time of year, and it would be an easy crossing anyway. I remember our conversation precisely; you can’t accuse me of not paying attention if I remember that much.”

“I suppose not,” she conceded, flashing a strange little smile to her friend, “Except I distinctly recall the moment you began thinking of something else and stopped listening to me entirely—you get that odd look on your face. I told you all about the showing, and the gowns, and the designs, and you didn’t hear a word of it. My goodness, Henry, the whole world is in front of you, if you’d care to wake up and look around now and then.”

“Oh, well,” said Higgins easily, for Cecily wasn’t really the slightest bit upset with him, “It was very interesting, except it does seem to involve an awful amount of waiting around for something to happen.”

“Oh, without a doubt,” the Countess cut in, and there was an ironic cast to her voice, “All that sketching and planning, sewing the muslins, finding just the right fabric, and then all that cutting, and piecing, and sewing again, not to mention the negotiations with the clothier, and the buyers—”

“Have you heard from Vasily lately, Vivian?”

It was a good thing Cecily cut in when she did, for Higgins was beginning to detect that some joke was being made at his expense, and was not very pleased with this newcomer when the matter had already been settled.

The woman rolled her eyes and was about to answer, when a vague memory drifted to the front of his mind.

“Vasily?” Higgins said, and actually set down his spoon to point at her. “Vasily Zubov? Hang on—you’re that American who keeps getting divorced, aren’t you? The one who’s always in the papers!”

It was indeed, surely—he’d never bothered to look at her photograph, but the woman before him was no mere Countess Zubov. This was Vivienne Norton, The Most Interesting (And Incidentally the Wealthiest) Woman in the World, as the Boston Globe had anointed her some fifteen years previous.

Heiress to a California logging fortune and five-time bride to a succession of men whom she’d all managed to fell both at the altar and in the courts when it came to her ever-growing coffers, the details of her marriages (and the rumors of her extensive collection of lovers) seemed more like a playwright’s fever dream than anything close to reality, but it was all real—and widely known and reported.

The social columns of London were monotonous, worthless pablum to the prodigious mind of an academic—but Vivienne Norton’s exploits were always a fascinating read.

“It was only two divorces,” she replied, pretending to draw herself up primly, but easing into a thorough satisfaction at being recognized. “And one of them was actually an annulment.”

He looked at her for a long moment, taking in her features and how her choice of dress made (a little) more sense.

“Did Shootout Rogers really give you a pony and rifle as wedding gifts?”

“And a box of ammunition,” said Cecily, who seemed strangely pleased at this turn of the conversation.

“Told him I couldn’t use the damned thing otherwise,” replied the Countess as the two women exchanged another smile.

“Good Lord,” said Higgins, leaning back in his seat, for he was well and truly dashed—although perhaps dashed couldn’t even begin to describe the sensation.

Interesting, interesting, interesting, she was. A truly unconventional original.

The first fellow in the parade was George “Shootout” Winston Rogers, who’d been on the Wild West show circuit for two decades at the time of their union as a sharpshooter and expert equestrian. California was a wild and wooly place, but it was still rather shocking that a passing cowboy had stolen the heart of one of their young debutantes. He’d a small show of his own that had been subsumed into one of the more famous exhibitions, and when he died in a riding accident, his shares of the profits had come to her, in addition to her already significant finances.

Upon the second marriage to a wayward New York society man by the name of Harwell, she’d traveled east. And it was there that she worked magic tricks with her fortune on Wall Street; grew rapidly bored of being snubbed and shunned by the old families; befriended all manner of rum characters, opera singers, Bohemians, sheikhs, and the mistresses of robber barons; and became known and notorious for the salons she hosted. They were not, however, the literary and philosophical discourses for the edification of the learned, but absolutely outrageous parties, where dancers dressed in a silk ribbon and a dash of coconut oil were the evening’s entertainment, and where the hostess herself had once ridden in on a white horse, playing Diane de Poitiers as Diana, Goddess of the Hunt. Broadway producers made sure she had prominent seats on opening nights. Tin Pan Alley songwriters made references to her. And soon the moneyed names on the New York social register who’d once turned up their noses at her began craving and jockeying for their own invitations to these events—which invariably were in short supply, even though any gimcrack vaudevillian in town was guaranteed a seat at the dinner table.

Sued the second husband for divorce after his disastrous investments and profligate spending at the racetracks, which had nearly wiped her out, and the case was truly a national scandal. Not only did New York turn its back on her fully, but the divorce dragged on through accusations and counter-accusations with each edition of the morning papers. The whole thing reached a fever-pitch when, because of the parties and her string of notorious affairs, she was declared an unfit mother to her first child, who was turned over to the husband’s care in spite of his being a drunken gambler with several charges for gun-running. After such public humiliation, she went abroad and disappeared from the public eye, apart from a few unverified accounts. The papers claimed she’d consorted with voodoo priestesses in New Orleans, changed the spelling of her name from Vivian to Vivienne for a bit more panache, sailed from Florida to the Turks and Caicos with a disgraced British commodore, lived in the French West Indies with the natives for a time before the volcano erupted, was rumored to be covered in tattoos, and had only emerged once more in civilized society upon her recent emigration to the continent, where she married an exiled Russian count.

From her expression, however, he wasn’t exactly living up to expectations.

  “Basil’s in Vienna, doing God knows what with God knows who,” said Vivienne.

Whom, thought Higgins, reflexively curling and uncurling his toes before a little niggling feeling came over him that she knew he’d find that irritating and so had done it purposely, and made himself stop.

Cecily winced, either in solidarity or sympathy.

“But it’s fine,” the Countess went on with another of her elegant little shrugs, “Not like I haven’t been seen with someone else on my arm as well.”

She sighed, and looked out the great picture window of the restaurant out onto the cobblestone street and the frosted rooftops beyond, while he watched her.

“What was it that made you leave your entire life like that?” Higgins asked Vivienne. “Apart from giving up your child to your husband, I mean.”

They were walking side by side in the Parc Monceau, just rounding the colonnade and reflecting pool. The three of them had gone about Paris for three days now but were none of them strangers to it, and now Cecily had an entire day of meeting with whoever it was that clothing designers met with. And so the two of them were left to their own devices for the afternoon, and he wanted to know better, to understand, the circumstances which would lead a person to do a thing like that. Lead a life like that.

Again, that ease that came with asking a stranger—the blank slate, the overwhelming possibility that you’d never see them again and that a question so close to the bone fundamentally didn’t matter and couldn’t matter. He’d always preferred strangers; the everlasting beginning, Higgins thought. And never a day’s disappointment.

“For myself, I suppose it’s a lack of familiarity with even the prospect,” he went on.

“With which? Leaving your homeland behind, or losing a child?”

Higgins paused to cast a frown at the pathway beneath his feet.

“Perhaps abandoning something is easier the more you do it,” he remarked.

He walked on for a few feet before discovering she wasn’t with him, and turned to find Countess Zubov with her head cocked to the side, giving him an absolutely extraordinary look. Higgins went back over to her, hands in the pockets of his overcoat—not exactly agreeable in being made to do so, but neither was he vexed at her insistence upon planting herself where she was. Rather, he’d a streak of curiosity about her, and therefore in an expansive frame of mind.

“Cecily was right,” she said, sounding surprised. “You are a complexity.”

He couldn’t imagine what she meant, and said so.

“I wonder whether you even mean to do it when you say things like that,” the American continued, as though she were only talking to herself, as though he was merely ancillary, merely present for a conversation with herself. Higgins frowned again. “Or if there really is a little malice infused into everything you do, and you’re just so used to it that you can’t see it anymore.”

“Oh,” he said, disappointed. This.

For a moment, Higgins turned and looked off toward the rest of the gardens, where the reflecting pool extended in a winding kind of way, a flat and unmoving imitation of a river. How was it possible to so handily ruin yet another introduction, yet another set of possibilities? A record-breaking time he’d managed to score.

And on top of it, now he knew that he’d been a topic of conversation between them, that Cecily had expressed private opinions about him, and again—that mortifying ordeal of being known. What an ugly business it was, being alive.

“If only she hadn’t said it,” he sighed, distant. “I do wish—” He stopped, and after a moment began again. “I do wish there were some way, a better way, to simply be allowed to ask a question without any… threat, with all bravery, all genuine curiosity, and to be given an answer free of judgment.” Higgins turned back to see Countess Zubov with her parasol tip planted in the gravel, both hands on the grip, observing him with the heavy-lidded gaze of a military officer. “Frankness, without the need for—” He jingled the coins in his pocket. “Without all the hurdles one must overcome—rules, manners, social mores and all that, simply to have a bit of honesty.”

“A logical exchange of ideas, without emotion, you mean?”

She sounded nearly cynical about it.

“No, not just that,” said Higgins, a frustrated sigh emanating from him, “To be understood, really understood, without the long years. To know someone like that,” and he snapped his fingers. “Instantaneously, and with genuine camaraderie. Avoid all the misunderstandings and crosstalk.”

She took a few steps toward him, and when she finally got there, she was smiling a little.

“All the advantages, but none of the work. The age-old yearning,” Vivienne said, and threaded her arm through the crook of his elbow so that they might walk on once more.

When they’d got round to the rotunda, she opened her parasol, shaded them both, and spoke again.

“Not many have asked me why I travel—people either assume it’s because I just wanted to escape until all the humiliation and scandal blew over. Or that I wanted the indulgence of a new beginning.” She looked down at their feet and murmured. “You can’t just start over when you’ve given life to another person and are cut off from them forever, though.”

“But those aren’t the reasons you’ve done it?”

“I think,” said Vivienne, “That even if none of it had happened the way it did with Harwell, I would have wound up where I am anyway. Not everyone is cut out to sit at home like a proper lady. It’s a crazy thing to be alive, practically impossible when you think about it, and most folks are sleep-walking through the whole thing.”

“I don’t know that I could tolerate a full diary—parties night after night, the theatre, the friendships with a thousand people. Actors, literary types, friendships with all the leading lights. That sounds exhausting. One would think you’d want to settle in every now and again just to have a quiet night at home, reading in bed.”

“Mmm,” and here she squinted off into the distance, nodding. “Even a fast lifestyle gets tiresome. It’s about the novelty, though, the newness of experiencing everything out there, even the quiet. It’s can’t all be excess for the sake of excess—the life that can withstand testing is the one worth living.”

He cocked an eyebrow at her sidelong.

“Come up with that yourself?”

  Vivienne smiled.

“A literary friend told me that.” Her expression grew thoughtful. “It’s hard to even picture myself wanting to go to the same garden parties, sitting in front of the fire grate night after night, slowly getting older when this is the only shot any of us has. We’re up against the clock, but all anyone seems to care about is who wore what hat, or who showed up to what party.” She shook her head. “And nobody saying what they really mean; just talking in symbols around what they mean, like that’s a proper substitute for just… saying it.”

“Ah!” Higgins cried, “Now you’ve my total endorsement—I quite agree. Society is in a rut in every regard.”

“Oh, so you aren’t for top hats and morning coats?” Now she did sound surprised. “You aren’t nearly as stuffy as I thought you’d be. Here I was thinking of heading up this spring for one of the races, but you’ve got me having second thoughts.”

“Only if you’ve a fondness for cold winds—with your personal history, it’ll be a chilly reception.” Higgins gave her a significant look with this.

“Christ,” said Vivienne, and it came out of her so smoothly, so off-hand, that it took Higgins a moment before he looked about to see if anyone had heard her, then remembered that it didn’t particularly matter anyway. “Nothing’s more boring than complacence and status quo. It’s the New York bullshit all over again.”

At his raised eyebrows, she unsnaked her arm from his and held both arms out, elbows bent, before sinking low to the ground, half bowing, half curtseying.

Higgins folded his hands behind his back and tilted his head so that his ear nearly rested on his shoulder.

“Is it really true that you’ve been tattooed?”

Vivienne shot upright, threw back her head and laughed, a lush whoop of a sound that set a flock of pigeons skyward.

“Maybe you’ll find out someday,” she replied, still laughing, striding ahead of him with a scandalous—and frankly, impressive—wiggle.

“—And that’s when Yeats and the others began kicking their little feet at him, which made Crowley trip and go ass-over-head down the staircase, and he was in a kilt, which was the height of the whole thing,” Cecily managed to squeak out. She was giggling so hard that tears were running down her face. 

They were back in the hotel, and she’d somehow wrangled him into sitting still on a very sunny afternoon near the open window and the iron balcony bursting with scented flowers, for Vivienne Norton had left and gone that morning, and there was still a day to be filled and nothing to do.

Higgins finally burst out laughing. He’d managed to stifle it throughout her telling of this story, but the image she’d concocted of several men calling themselves “white magicians” and hollering Latin nonsense at an unrepentant lout until they were at last forced to plant their boots on him was what did it.

“So they were, ah—victorious, then? In their battle of magical arts?” he said, catching his breath a little. “And so was thwarted the usurper’s campaign of iniquity and attempts to penetrate the inner chambers of their sacred temple—located in a dingy room above a shop in West London, which is probably the best thing I’ve heard all year.” Higgins sighed in great satisfaction. “Then what happened?”

“Well, then they went back and forth attacking one another with spells, there was something about Yeats sending a vampire after Crowley, but really, at the end of their little spat, he simply called the police, had the man removed from the premises, and sued him for… something. Trespassing, probably, I don’t know.”

Recovering from another bout of hysterical laughter, Higgins said at last,

“Ah, dear God, these people,” and began chuckling all over again. “Magic, vampires, grown men fighting over poetry… I can’t believe you’re involved in this sort of thing. It beggars belief.”

“I always liked the occult,” Cecily answered. “And I was at that age of restlessness when I joined them—you know what I mean. The theatre can be an utter wasteland so much of the time, so you’d rather hang yourself than go on being so bored, and then soon enough and before you know it, you’re in the inner circle of a temple, practicing witchcraft. Hardly a logical leap. Just happened to be one run by petty little men with petty insecurities, that’s all—I suppose mortal problems aren’t truly escapable.” Before he could ask what, exactly, she’d had to do during the exit ritual, Cecily sat up straight and pulled both his hands from the bowls of water to lay them on the towel. 

“You know, I usually pay my barber for this,” he remarked, a bit skeptical, as she began working over his fingernails with a little wooden stick. 

“Don’t be absurd.” Cecily bent over her work. “This is far more sociable than sitting in silence while some assistant hacks briefly away at you and calls that a job done—not to mention the fact that you clearly don’t go as often as you ought,” this said with a significant critical glance up at him from his fingernails, a glance which Higgins chose to pointedly ignore, “And if that isn’t enough for you, you’ll be able to tell it down through the ages that you got a manicure from a former baroness.” She worked with the tiny scissors for a moment as he watched. 

He’d never paid attention to what the young man in the white smock did at his side—for one thing, there was little chance for observation while his view was purposefully obscured, as though he mustn’t be party to any of it. Haircut, shave, manicure, all in one fell swoop, and mostly done with a hot towel over his face. What was going on before him now seemed far more involved, albeit far slower—though the woman had the blade, and he thought it best not to contradict her.

“Why do you know how to do this?”

“One of those girlhood rituals among friends, I suppose.”

He eyed her curiously.

“You didn’t have a ladies’ maid for that sort of thing?”

Cecily looked up at him through her eyelashes in a furtive and smiling way.

“No,” she said in a very teasing drawl.

He matched her sly expression.

“How on earth do you know Vivienne Norton?”

There was a pause while she worked with no small amount of pressure, and he winced slightly. This was far more thorough than anything he’d gotten in Pall Mall.  

She was biting her lip, concentrating as she went, when at last Cecily murmured,

“Did she tell you where she’s from?”

“San Francisco.”

At last, she set the scissors on the cloth she’d used to cover the end table, sat back, and looked at Higgins for a long, long moment.

  “We grew up together.”

Cecily said this dead on, straightforward, in the most American accent he’d heard in a while. Even Vivienne had a nearly continental affect, which disappeared when she was cursing or laughing.

He found himself blinking in rapid succession, and then she took up the wooden tool once more and twirled it between her fingers aimlessly.

  There was a moment where he could actually feel the future bending before him, as though it were forking in opposite directions, and he’d a choice to make. Be offended, make quite a lot of noise, protest, go storming off to his hotel room and rant to himself how she’d done it, how she’d managed to trick him, the utter betrayal, and wasn’t this just like something a woman would lie about when she knew what his work entailed, etc., etc.

Or.

He thought very slowly about the way she’d greeted him in the workroom, grabbing his coat lapels in her hands and shaking him back and forth, glad that he’d come all that way in spite of having no idea why. And still, even now, sitting in front of him with a set of tools like this, merely to be social when there were perfectly good manicurists available downstairs, probably.

He compressed it all into that image in his mind, of her hands on his lapels.

“Look at you, keeping secrets from me,” Higgins said in gentle wonderment instead, and sank in his chair a little. “I must confess to being disappointed.”

She made a soft, small sound like oh and looked nearly apologetic.

  “At myself, not you, to be sure. I would have thought I’d be able to recognize something when I’ve taught so many of you—goodness, that does sting a bit.” Higgins only slightly meant the pressure from the little tool between her fingers. He was an expert in accents and hadn’t been able to catch the impostor in front of him, if indeed there had been any catching to do; he hadn’t much of an excuse for such a colossal blunder as this, but, Cecily had said—he’d been distracted the past few months. His face would take on a look when he wasn’t paying attention, she’d said. He’d been thinking, had thought himself into a stupor, and set himself on fire. It seemed simultaneously years ago and also impossible, but yet—he’d been distracted, and time had glided forward in strange, uneven movements. It had been seven months since Eliza had left, he realized.

The woman before him was chuckling softly, he realized, and his attention snapped back.

“I don’t come from a logging fortune, but my father was a lawyer for the railroads. Mother made sure I had a lady’s education, so I had the chance to be finished in Paris and do some artwork,” she said, covering his hands with the long edge of the towel and patting them dry. “And then I met Lewis.”

Listening carefully now, he could just detect it in the way her vowels bottomed out here and there, but she was very good otherwise, quite skilled, really.

“It really does take a trained ear to hear it, now that I know, of course.”

“Oh, that’s good to hear, at least,” said Cecily with a nod, releasing him at last, only to reach for the tray of tools and pluck out a brown file. 

“Do you ever slip back into it?” He was curious, in a professional manner. “Is it difficult to go back to?” Something he’d never wondered about any of his students.

“Sometimes I do,” she said, angling the emery board this way and that and letting the thing rasp over the free edge of his fingernail, “If I’m tired. But I’ve done it so long that it takes effort. Like reverse mimicry.”

“Is that what you’re doing?” Higgins asked her. “Imitating us?”

“Well, isn’t that what it is?” Cecily said, tapping the file against the table and moving to the next finger.

“My goodness, woman, no,” he said in no small amount of surprise, “It takes at least a year or more of training to fully appreciate how the muscles ought to function, to build shapes, how breathing contributes to sound, how roundness of tone and emphasis are to be actively employed—” He stopped, a bit perturbed in spite of his best efforts. “You’ve simply been… acting?”

“Well,” said Cecily, having the decency to sound a little abashed, but not much, “I’ve just sort of… picked it up by exposure, I suppose. I didn’t even do anything—you know what I mean, you absorb it by accident.”

He leaned forward across the table and let her take in his expression and gaping jaw. 

“I’m not claiming to be a genius, or some great actress!” she cried, defensive. “Lewis didn’t exactly move in the usual circles, so it wasn’t a pressing matter. I wasn’t from Boston, so there wasn’t much of a difference.” She dropped the tool with a sharp clank into the little tray. “And of course now that you know, you’ll be listening to me for inconsistencies and going on at me about how much better I could be.” A sulky expression came over her.

Higgins sat back and considered the accusation for a moment.

“If you’ve got another hidden talent for convincing an audience of your emotions, you might think about a career on the stage, you know.”

Another of those silent, penetrating gazes passed between them, and the sulky look softened and was replaced by… something he couldn’t identify. A kind of evenness, as though he’d confirmed something she’d only had a slight expectation of. Cecily brushed the edge of the hand towel over his nails and rose with the tray of tools, leaving him to inspect her handiwork.

They were short and bare, at least.

“I can’t believe you ever became a baroness, with all your myriad skills,” he said, for she’d done a decent job.

“Everyone has their mysteries, I suppose,” said Cecily.

Higgins wandered lonely as a cloud along the banks of the Seine, the better to lean against the long brick wall and watch the boats drift down the river past the cathedral. It was the last day of his week’s travels, as he’d told it to Mrs. Pearce, anyway, and had nothing better to do than stroll about in the sunshine. Cecily had left as well, on to Brussels for a week to visit someone else before she promised to meet him back in London on the Tuesday next.

A strange state to be in, like this—sort of a waiting room between experiences, and all the tension and anticipation of another train journey, another crossing, all the making sure that he got to the stations on time, but in the meantime there was…

Honeysuckle, cut grass, and new leaves, nearby.

The scent of spring, and the scent of a long, long time ago.

He tried to follow it with his nose, to see where it came from specifically, but it was in all directions, and had the city smelled like this the whole time he’d been here? Had it smelled like this the whole time he’d been away? The same vine, perhaps, climbing through the same trees, only bigger now, hardier, the more to perfume the air. Some things died, but invasive species were the most determined of all, to live, to survive, to flood the senses.

Caroline had begged him to come to Paris, used the very phrase itself, Henry I am begging you, and his mouth had quirked to the side as he’d read the little hand-delivered note, not for her groveling, but for the fact that she’d sent it in the written shorthand he’d developed. For the flattery of his vanity, a little drop of persuasion more potent than any sweetly cloying words could have effectuated. And he’d gone—of course he’d gone, what else could he do?—and they’d spent the week together.

One whole week of bliss, of Paris, of Caroline.

Champagne, dancing til sunrise, watching a few tender, sparkling tears drop softly down her cheek as Violetta sang the last frail notes of Addio, del passato bei sogni ridenti. The close scent of Caroline’s hair whenever she took it down in the evenings. Standing in the Palace of Optics at the Exposition as the colors and lights from the great kaleidoscope divided and multiplied over her soft cheeks and along her throat. A whole week without servants constantly checking on them, without chaperones or parlormaids or housekeepers. Just the two of them, playing house inside the walls of a hotel suite for seven days.

No, six. They’d quarreled on the night of the fifth. And it hadn’t been as much a quarrel as it had his pronouncement that he was returning to London, followed by her outrage, her tears, the hysterics—that she’d thought, she’d thought, she’d thought.

Leaning there against the low bricked wall he choked, just a little, on the memory of telling her it had all been an illusion, the idea of running away together—or had he said delusion? Which was worse, or were they both equally insulting? Were all his words spiced with a little malice no matter what?

Either way, Caroline’s answer had been the same: she couldn’t go back to the Duke, back to Battenmers, that place was Hell on earth, nothing for miles around but moors and lichen, and nothing but acres and acres of cold, forbidding rooms filled with moldering portraits of dead Hartleys, and did he really want her to go back to that? There was nothing to do all day but be saddled with the enormity of expectation, of the only purpose she truly had. Was he really going to do that to her, when her entire life had been wasted, and her youth and beauty sold off for a useless title, so an ugly old man could keep his ugly old house?

He let his hand drop to his side.

There was no point in thinking about any of the rest of it after that. He’d gone home the very next day, had all the foolish souvenirs he’d bought packed into the attic, and not thought of her again for a long time.

When he emerged from Victoria Station, Higgins was momentarily stunned to discover that London had lately experienced a dreadful series of devastating fires. Or at least it gave that distinct appearance. The buildings were all the same dull shade suggesting both soot and dirt in a crust so dense he could scarcely tell where one ended and another began.

As he stood in the middle of the walk, a thick sludge of people crowded about and past him, all dressed in the same overcoats and hats, the same cut, the same shape, the same look, the uniform of the anonymous masses. Every pair of eyes was down and forward, and why not? There was nothing to see except more soot-and-dirt covered facades beyond the endless sea of hats, or if not hats, then greasy heads of matted hair.

As a rule, Paris had an excess of affectedly quaint sentimentality, but he’d never thought London to be so…

Filthy.

God, had the sky always been that color?

He picked his way over to the kerb, managed to hail a cab, stepped over several other pools of unidentifiable muck as he climbed inside, and went rattling off toward Marylebone, wondering the whole way if he ought to press his handkerchief to his mouth or else risk a bout of bronchitis.

Blessedly, the house on Wimpole Street was quiet when he arrived, and he draped his overcoat and hat on the bannister, watching and waiting to see if anyone downstairs had heard the door open. But no one came, and he took the moment’s solitude to go into the study.

There on the desk was a package wrapped in brown paper and string, and when he opened it, Higgins found the second edition of his Universal Alphabet, fully bound and freshly sent from the publisher.

He sank into the desk chair, gazed off long across the room, and as he heard Mrs. Pearce enter the front hall from the servant’s door and call out to him, he felt an utter blankness wash over him.

Chapter Text

I’m restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.

- Anaïs Nin

May 1912

Sir George was good enough to courteously remind Higgins that the professor had promised to take tea with him and Lady Macready sometime in the spring when the weather was more clement. For his own part, Higgins was ambivalent on the idea, it being a long-standing promise borne of obligation and extracted within the depths of winter snow and ice, not one that he’d come up with voluntarily. It was also because he was no particular fan of small talk with anyone, least of all women, and even less so with the wives of his students in particular.

Not that he’d much experience with it, as a matter of fact, but in moments of boredom when his mind wandered, he often compared it to the hypothetical scenario of being forced to tell a small child’s parents that it was a good student, very agreeable and obedient, and my, couldn’t it spell ever so well and do arithmetic with such accuracy and wisdom beyond its years? That sort of thing. People tended to expect gushing compliments, and when they were unwarranted—well. He couldn’t help it if his genuine opinion didn’t meet with the standards of people who made social sport of lying to one another.

“Ah—let me know when, and I shall be there,” was Higgins’ reply as he began to usher his pupil toward the vestibule door.

To his momentary surprise, the gentleman inquired whether he was engaged next Wednesday afternoon, and so Higgins went to consult the appointment book, which was not the old one long since lost, but one which Mrs. Pearce had finally acquired and then presented to him with prim disapproval, along with the remark that she was amply prepared to open his post and pay his bills, but by every usual standard, keeping his appointments for him was a task suited for, perhaps, a private secretary, and she knew of a reputable agency if he were in want of a recommendation.

Higgins had given her a flat look at this, but taken the proffered book regardless. It lived on the surface of his desk, just to the left of the blotter, and no matter where he relocated the thing, it wound up there again within an hour, with neither delay nor comment.

“Previous engagement, I’m afraid,” Higgins said, running the tip of his finger along the dates listed there. Lunch with his mother plus sister would go on for several hours, and if he left early or mentioned he had somewhere else to be, the endless interrogations and tortures would probably make him late anyway. “How about that Friday?”

“We’ve got something then, too.”

Higgins flipped the page.

“The week after?” His calendar looked certainly scarce then. Hiring a private secretary—what an absurd notion, for what would the fellow do? Sit in a chair and wait for something to come up? Pencil in his annual dental appointment? Write in what the weather had been that day?

“Alice’s cousin is coming down for a fortnight,” Sir George replied, sounding apologetic. “I’ll ask whether we might shuffle around a few things, let the poor fellow have an afternoon to himself, as I imagine he might like—all this business about coming up in the world comes with so many appointments and gatherings I never knew about. At home days, visiting days, not to mention the dinner parties.” He chuckled and shook his head in a bit of amazement. “Well, I’m sure we’ll figure something out. Just a matter of getting all of us together at the same time.”

Higgins thought to himself that when it came to a woman’s calendar, a good wife ought to be amiable about accommodating her husband’s social engagements, and not expect him to rearrange his entire life to suit her tastes for gossip and warm fish paste sandwiches in a bee-infested garden whilst everyone pretended they weren’t sweating straight through their morning coats and taffeta, whatever taffeta was. Thank God the Macreadys hadn’t gotten it into their heads that they ought to throw a dinner party with seating arrangements and afterward the dreaded cards; the very thought nearly made him sit down and loosen his tie just from the memory of gatherings long past.

“Always the worst part,” he said with a bland smile, and bid the man farewell.

But looking back at that empty calendar, Higgins considered something which had been a fact for a long time but which was now in full written evidence: he didn’t exactly have a good deal to occupy himself with these days. The book edits, having so long languished, were fully taken care of, and the edition was newly for sale in the more reputable bookshops of London.

And Sir George was, to be frank, far better than where he’d begun, nearing the end of what he could reasonably be taught. Everything past this point was a matter of practicing, of maintaining, and of utilizing what he’d learned. Letting him continue to believe that he needed to come round to Wimpole Street every week would be dishonest at best, and greedy at worst.

Flipping the appointment book forward to more blank sheets and the rest of the year, Higgins let the pages fall, and leaned back in his desk chair, thinking.

He was coming down the staircase one morning, carrying a book to the study from his bedroom, when the usual thing happened, and Higgins tripped. It was not an uncommon occurrence; he always seemed to be catching the toe of his boot on some umbrella stand, or against the sofa in the study, or simply missing a step altogether (which he could readily admit was because he had a tendency to read while navigating his way up to bed—why waste time and his place in the text if the risk of bodily injury was really only minimal, probably?).

This time, though, it wasn’t his own foot that he stumbled over, but a large wrinkle in the staircase runner, which he realized only after he managed to nearly rip the bannister out of its posts as he lunged, nearly somersaulted forward onto himself about three or four steps down, and landed against his hip hard enough to give the whole bone a reverberating sensation, along with the feeling of certainty that he’d narrowly escaped what would have been a very bad accident had he not caught hold of something.

Higgins pulled himself into a somewhat seated position on the staircase, halfway up and halfway down, and with a nasty curse uttered beneath his breath, began massaging his knee, which had taken a bruising blow in the turn, feeling very sorry for himself indeed. It was always his luck to be doing this, to be a man grown, with a sense of dignity and control over his place in the world, yet forever fated to inelegantly flail his way through life. How he’d ever managed to learn to dance was a mystery. The only good thing that came out of his persistent magnetism toward these mishaps was a miraculous lack of twisted or broken ankles; at least he knew he wasn’t as fragile as a quarter horse.

The professor paused, listening to hear if anyone was running up to investigate the thumping noises from his sudden foray into gymnastics, but the servants were all busy below stairs, clattering about with lunch, no doubt. Whoever had cleaned the runner last, Isobel or Hannah, needed a good talking-to about setting the brass rods back correctly, about ensuring that the carpet was perfectly smooth and taut before declaring it a job done, or they’d all of them be out of work, and worse, if the master wound up at the bottom of the staircase with a snapped neck, arms at funny angles, eyes wide open staring into nothing—

Something about seeing the house from this viewing position was very curious, Higgins thought suddenly.

The lithographs on the staircase wall were practically unrecognizable, as were the wax flowers in the vase on the marble-topped table in the foyer. He’d never looked at them with any attention, had never taken a guess at what sort they were. From here, the blossoms were wide enough to obscure the greenish-black thing they were in, making them appear to be growing out of the table itself. Peonies were big, weren’t they? Was that what they were? Who had put them there? Had they come with the house? He wasn’t particularly fascinated by horticulture the way some people were—had never kept a garden or even anything in a conservatory the way his mother did. Plants grew somewhere, flowered at some moment in time, were picked by other people, and appeared in baskets and stalls for sale on the streets, almost as though they grew right there between the pavement stones. One need hardly obsess over the point in one’s own house.

But it was funny, seeing them from up here.

Even the telephone on the table by the vestibule door seemed odd, the light hitting it in a way that made it smaller than he knew it to be, like it belonged in a dollhouse, or onstage in a play, as though any moment an actress in a stiffly pressed maid’s costume would come along to lift the receiver and deliver her lines.

He’d seen these things, his things, before—had passed them a thousand times, knew precisely where they belonged within his range of vision as he went by. Was aware when the foyer rug had been cleaned and was off a degree or two. Straightened the litho of Christ and the disciples when it was askew. The others were reproductions of engravings, probably Hogarths or some contemporary.

If he tilted his head a little, Higgins could see, through the slats of the bannister, a bit of the study visible beyond the open pocket doors. The sofa, the edge of his desk. The phonograph from where he’d been cleaning it the night before. Part of the large plaster model of the human ear. But they were very far away from where he was sitting, and the light was odd from this strange new height, and he couldn’t stop looking at each item in turn, for they seemed utterly foreign.

And then he realized that he’d never known his own house this way; had never had cause to sit halfway up the stairs and look about himself. It was the sort of thing that belonged within the realm of a child, perhaps. Life had boundaries, areas common to his daily purpose. Upstairs comprised his rooms, the library, and a few other chambers he never disturbed. Downstairs was the study and the front door. The dining room. This in-between space he currently occupied was always temporary, liminal; his mind was invariably somewhere else when he was between floors. It didn’t really exist apart from when he was making use of it.

Perhaps that was true of the study, too—he tilted his head again and looked more closely, and he could almost convince himself, the possibility felt so real, so tangible, that the study had someone inside waiting for him, and whoever it was would come over to the doorway, first the edges of their clothing appearing and then a hand, a shoulder, a head, a face looking about in confusion before seeing him up there, a smile coming across those features, and the whole body tilting playfully to mimic him.

At last the professor rose and gingerly made his way down, observing as the flowers on the table tilted, becoming more familiar as he went up to them and leaned in very close. The petals were nice enough, but the lip and throat of each blossom was quite obviously rendered in some substance less than real life. He turned and entered the study, which was empty, as he knew in his rational mind. Everything was right where it was supposed to be, but some innate essence, perhaps through the addition of awareness or knowledge, had changed. The most important, the most essential room in the house, felt now like a museum, with all its displayed collections devoted to demonstrating what his life had once been like.

Higgins went over to the shelf of plaster busts of the great learned men of history, the ones he’d overhead Isobel complaining to Hannah of having to dust, and picked up Demosthenes to look into the face of the great orator. He’d never noticed how the eyes were blank. The craftsman had bothered to paint in a little grayish-sepia wash along the wrinkles of each man’s clothing, and the folds of facial features to add depth and dimension, but—each bust gazed back through pure white eyes as though long blind.

What were they for?

To demonstrate that this was a place of study, of learning. A temple of science, of practicum.

But what were they for? What purpose did they serve to his existence?

Going over to the anatomical structure, he posed the same question. To demonstrate to students how sound waves vibrated through the air and into the ear’s canal before hitting its drum and being interpreted as words or music.

Again, though: what for?

And this same query as he regarded the phonograph, before Higgins turned and saw the breathing bellows on the shelf behind his desk; he spun the little square mirror with the candlesticks that flickered with just the right breath work, considered the mouthpiece at the end of the hose.

He could live without this, he thought, and it was a moment before he was startled to realize that the idea didn’t particularly concern him. It was simply a stated fact.

Higgins turned toward the pocket doors, but stopped himself. What color were the wax flowers on the table? What were the subjects depicted in each of the reproductions on the staircase walls?

Even having just passed both groups of objects, he had to force himself to try to recall what they looked like. Colorless, the flowers were, and… he was certain the prints were sketches of buildings, brown ink on beige paper.

But in the foyer he discovered that the flowers had a vibrant pink and yellow hue, and that the engravings were of old street scenes from the time of the Great Fire.

The point was not whether his memory was poor, for it certainly wasn’t, Higgins reflected upon returning to the study, but the fact that these objects in his own home, his possessions, things he purportedly owned, simply vanished if he wasn’t looking directly at them—and perhaps, in a way, they’d never existed at all.

He’d never directed anybody to make any sort of decorative scheme about the place, and yet here he could look up, a decade after moving in, and suddenly discover that there were all sorts of things here, things he knew belonged to him but which didn’t register as his, as Henry Higgins’; things that were utterly foreign. Unidentifiable.

Nothing here felt as though it belonged to him, he realized.

These were objects, which existed, and which simply happened to orbit him.

None of it felt particularly necessary, or as though he would languish in doing without.

He could have had a house filled to the brim with things that didn’t belong, that he could live without, and he wouldn’t have known it before this morning.

With that stray thought, he turned in the direction of the foyer staircase, beyond the study wall, and looked up, as though through the ceiling, up another floor, to one of those rooms he stayed out of.

When he got there, when he pressed the door cautiously open with a faint, high-pitched squeak, he half expected to see the bed still made, covers smoothed and pillows plumped. But it was stripped down to the mattress, all the linens packed away, the fine lace curtains drawn to keep any sunlight from damaging the floorboards or the bed frame (Higgins rolled his eyes at the notion; London had perhaps two days of reliable sunlight a year). The wardrobe was shut up; he swung the doors open, pulled the garment bag from within, hooked its hanger at the top of one of the cupboard doors before undoing the fasteners, and then sat on the edge of the bare piece of furniture, looking into champagne and cream silk backed by deep red velvet.

Why were her gown and cape from the Embassy Ball still here, even packed away? Still kept inside his house, wrapped and stored as though she’d be back any moment to retrieve them? This little bit of preservation work had no doubt been taken on by Mrs. Pearce and the maids, but… what was the point? For them, it was their job to look after the things inside the house. But what was the universal reason for keeping these things here in the first place?

What was the purpose behind storing a dress that she’d worn for one night, seven—no, eight, now— months ago? It had been in an abandoned bedroom this entire time, utterly useless to him and to anyone who wasn’t the exact height and proportions of its original wearer. Why? Yet another object that simply existed in proximity to him, one which held a little more substance, a little more meaning, in a way that the wax flowers or the plaster busts or the telephone didn’t, and yet they were all part of the same category of miscellany, of ephemera, in the midst of which he wandered to and fro as he read, not giving any of it a second’s thought.

No, not ephemera, Higgins thought, folding his hands together in his lap and frowning at the open garment bag. That word sounded so light, like a length of fabric, the train of a dress, soft and airy, meant to evoke the image of a woman who could simply float away any moment. Not ephemera.

It was all lodestones on a yoke, pressing him down with immeasurable weight, pinning him.

He sat there for quite a while afterward, gazing at the thing, and very aware of his one hand cupped inside the other, until he heard distantly the sounds of a servant sent to summon him for lunch.

One evening—and it perhaps it was a year to the day, but there was no rain, and plenty of cabs to be hailed this time—he went to Covent Garden, bravely with empty pockets and nothing to occupy his hands, his only purpose being to stand near one of the columns and listen. To stretch that muscle after so long an absence, just to see. Just to test it.

At first, the task was slow going, but with few market sellers wandering about, this let him focus on a conversation about the price of food going up while charity from the middle classes was failing to follow suit. Shady-looking coves murmured in wavering and complex vowel sounds about a fellow accomplice who’d been picked up by the police, which was at least entertaining, but after a moment Higgins realized he’d been standing in the same spot for just a bit too long, and had to pretend to check his wristwatch and cross the square, looking about as though waiting to meet someone who was late.

The middle classes themselves began to arrive for the evening opera performance, entering the courtyard as though they’d every right to it, the space suddenly no longer the domain of fishmongers or the old women topping and bundling carrots, but of these sleek, fey-like creatures in velvet and diamonds. They glided past with an ineffable air of being totally ignorant of the poverty around them, as though the repulsion he knew they felt but never acknowledged gave them a selective blindness to the squalor and wretchedness currently sizing them up, calculating without numbers what sort of a night it would be.

He reflected: like looking through the wrong end of a telescope, it was all far away, all distant and detached from him. Higgins was doubtful that he could ascribe the change to not having his notebook and pencil. Normally he’d be content to bend his ear, to sort through through the stratum of vowels, consonants, of slang usage, drill down through cardinal directions, then areas, picking up the boundary streets, then the streets themselves, but tonight there was no joy in it. There hadn’t been for a long time, and that thought wasn’t even accompanied by a heavy heart. He couldn’t force what wouldn’t come, and wasn’t that an irony all of its own?

And that was what did it. It was the operator at the end of the complex equation that had been playing all this time; he made up his mind there in Covent Garden about the idea that had been swirling distantly in his mind for months now, the notion that would sometimes appear, then vanish before he could ever really get hold of and examine it.

Briefly, the thought of walking occurred to him, but was dismissed immediately, for Belgravia was as far away from Covent Garden as the Moon was from the Earth. When he got to the Goring and went up, the notion had coalesced, had set firmly, concretely, in his mind, and when he knocked and Cecily answered the door, before she’d even got the hullo out of her mouth, Higgins told her what he meant to do.

He visited his solicitor the next morning.

Higgins went to see his mother on a Friday, when he knew she’d be home, and when Vicky wasn’t likely to be hovering about.

She received him with a few little clever remarks about how she’d only just seen him the day before yesterday, and would again on Sunday, and whatever this was about could undoubtedly wait. Someone might drop in, after all. What she didn’t say was that she didn’t want him there ruining her pleasant small talk—but she didn’t have to. He sat on the chair next to the overstuffed ottoman and tried to think how he wanted to commit his opening salvo.

Despite all her veiled objections to his presence, though, Mrs. Higgins directed that the butler should bring sandwiches and tea, and looking at what she offered up, at the way her generosity and manners manifested, her son shored himself up for what he was about to say. Even in the moment, he felt an impulse to go back, but it passed, leaving him with a slight flavor of revulsion in his mouth for wanting to cling so childishly to his mother’s skirts.

When he’d been thirteen, she’d gone down with him on the train to Eton, all his things packed into a brand-new steamer trunk in the luggage car, and him dressed in the black tailcoat (terribly proud, but mostly grateful, that he’d managed to grow a bit taller over the summer and wouldn’t be forced to wear the bum-freezer jacket that the smaller boys would all have on), the freshly and shining black top hat on the seat next to him. James had gone to Reading, but Charles had been an Etonian, and so Henry knew all about things like fagging (he wasn’t too certain he’d find it agreeable to fetch, carry, cook and clean for the older boys, but that was all in the foggy still-to-come, for now, anyway), and how pupils who were deemed to require discipline would take a few strokes with a length of birch from the Master—and if you were elected to the Eton Society, which was the crowning glory, the boys themselves could summon you up for a vicious caning as punishment for a transgression: one brutal enough to shred your trousers. But that was unlikely, as he was a very good student, and not prone to finding himself in trouble very often.

He’d been given a prize: a scholarship, for being so clever, so utterly and devastatingly clever, that they felt certain he would do very well indeed. Even though he’d had tutors here and there—being far too advanced for the common grammar schools—he’d taught himself everything he knew, which was why he spoke ten languages flawlessly and was working on the minute differences of Portuguese as spoken in its native country versus the Brazilian dialect. Charles had mentioned that boys who produced exceptionally good work could have it ‘sent up for good’ to the college archive, and Henry had no doubt that he would land a few papers there himself. In fact, he was perfectly assured of it; counting on it, even.

Father would have joined them otherwise, but he was abroad still, and so Mother had taken it upon herself to see him down, looking out the window with a queenly expression.

Mother was very beautiful, more beautiful than any woman he’d ever seen (Vicky, three years on from her first Season and still searching for a husband, often looked at their mama with thin-lipped envy when the older woman, who still looked like a deb herself, greeted guests at the house parties she gave every week), with glossy dark brown hair, very high and prominent cheekbones, and eyes that weren’t round like his but which sort of tapered off at the sides. She’d told him when he was little, when he’d ducked Nanny again, that they were almond-shaped, which must have been a very desirable thing to have, for when she said that, she’d looked at herself in her dressing table mirror admiringly—but never too much so.

“It isn’t proper for a lady to be too proud of her own looks,” she’d told him then. “Far better to have a mind that knows how beauty fades, for the moment it does, she’ll have her own wits to fall back upon, and those may be far more readily maintained.” And of course—of course—Mother was very charming and witty, and knew quite all about art. She’d been the daughter of a very wealthy gentleman, but loved the way Father painted so much that she’d given up her chance at being a Countess to marry him instead, and would joke to Henry that if she’d stayed the course, he would’ve had a title too.

“The Honourable Henry Higgins, can you imagine?” Mother had said, touching the end of his little child’s nose with one of the brushes she used to apply a bit of rouge powder, and smiling down at him. “We’d call you Hon for short.” And that was her name for him when they were at home alone together.

“It’ll be awfully strange to be away from home until Christmas,” Henry said, injecting his voice with something new, a terribly grown-up sort of importance; he found to his satisfaction that it sounded very well coming from him. The train began to slow on approach to the station, and the feeling dissipated, replaced by his stomach giving a flip. It was the first moment when it all felt real, that he was going away, that he wouldn’t see Mother, or the paintings in the drawing room, or get to arrange the library books by his own methods, that everything would be different now. His bed at home seemed more than twenty miles away, and yet—

“This is your home now, Henry,” she replied evenly, without looking at him, but not in a way which suggested discomfort with the meaning of her words. Had she heard herself, with so ordinary, so matter-of-fact a tone she’d used? Sitting there, thirteen years old, he was too startled by her sudden frankness to reply. And shocked again by the pause which followed, as though with one sentence she’d brought down an axe between them, severing some essential link of mother and child, and in that ensuing silence the effect, the loss, was doubled and secured entirely. No reassurance, no softening. Perhaps it was itself the readying for the blow to come.

(Later, only three or four days later, before he’d even had the chance to know the layout of the Lower School, before any canings could be exacted or papers written, not to say archived, but just as all the boys were dividing off and choosing sides, she’d had the audacity to claw him back, to her, to London, to her maternal breast, and kept him there, confused and anguished, wondering if he’d ever know what it was to be at school.)

He thought about all of this as Mrs. Higgins finished her story about Rupert’s most recent letter from India, before his mother gestured at his cup of tea and asked him if it wasn’t to his taste.

“No, it’s fine,” Higgins said. He took a sip to prove this, but she still frowned, just a little.

“What brings you here? I don’t suppose you’ve finally accepted James’ invitation to dinner,” she remarked.

He wasn’t aware that James issued invitations. Or that he had enough food at the vicarage to even serve guests in the first place, let alone feed himself and his (Higgins shifted in his chair) something-odd children and wife—it certainly wasn’t as though any of them were hurting for money; was it really necessary for his brother to be quite so precious about his displays of piety?

The professor breathed in; breathed out.

“No, I’m—”

But he couldn’t go on, suddenly. Words failing him: the ultimate irony. How had he phrased it to himself in the ride over?

“I’m leaving London.”

She paused from fussing with the tea set.

“Oh?” Mrs. Higgins looked almost… pleased, in a way. “Are you going back to teaching?”

Higgins was momentarily confused, for he’d been teaching all along, then remembered that everybody still thought he’d been back to Oxford of late, and apparently that it had been a fine reunion. But that was all gone and done, and how could she even think of it as a possibility now, here, years later?

“I’m—” No. He couldn’t say of a mind to, she’d have reason to pick away at that until his point collapsed, dissolved into nothingness, into weakness. “I’m going abroad.”

His mother scrutinized her tea cup in its saucer.

“And where is abroad, exactly?”

“The continent, to begin.”

That word, begin, snagged her attention, and Mrs. Higgins looked up, sharp. Softened it after a pause.

“Far be it from me to question your finances or expenditures, but I would hazard a guess that it may not be cost-worthy to retain a cadre of servants dusting an empty house, all awaiting your return from… abroad,” she said.

She had cut to the crux of the thing a bit quicker than he’d anticipated, and his chin jerked a bit to the side before he put it back.

Higgins looked at his mother, who was sitting expectantly, as though she were ready to debate the dubious merits of retaining seven servants while he swanned off to Cádiz or something; compassion washed over him, and he loved her just as much as he had when she’d been at her dressing table, running the soft tip of a brush over his nose and cheeks.

He broke it to her gently, the way a doctor might when the diagnosis was very bad.

“I don’t know when I’ll be back. I’m selling the house.”

She stared at him, amazed, then started, as though she meant to bolt to her feet, before at last she forced herself to remain as she was.

“You aren’t serious.”

Her voice was in an in-between place: too distracted by sudden emotion to command any natural authority over him as her child, and too stunned to appeal to him with her usual little manipulations. It was as though the conversation were already at an end, but Mrs. Higgins pulled herself back, blinked, shook her head, began calculating exactly the right argument that would stop him. Even watching her do this, he felt more a sense of compassion toward her than any urge to out-think her, get a few moves ahead and prepare his defenses.

“Oh, Henry, don’t be absurd, of course you won’t—!”

“I’ve already spoken to the solicitor; it’s been arranged.” He found that if he kept his voice even and low, nearly emotionless, it was easier.

“What of your—your practice? Your students?”

“It’s all done; the last one is finished needing lessons, at any rate.”

“Well, what of the servants?”

Of course she would think that was some insurmountable hurdle.

It had been more painful than he’d anticipated, first summoning Mrs. Pearce before him in the study and trying to find the right words to say after running through the appropriate lines, pacing back and forth. The woman’s expression had not wavered; her place was to not react to the decisions of her employer but to accept them with equanimity and obedience, and she’d tolerated plenty of his little eccentricities and teasings over the years anyway.

But the hollowness that had still made its way into her features. The way her shoulders had gently sagged, just a little, before she remembered herself and inquired whether he would make the announcement to the rest of the staff himself, or if she ought to advise them to make other arrangements.

He hadn’t been able to make up his mind about that prior to telling her, and it did seem easiest to have her do it, being in charge of them and all that.

“They’ve been informed.”

His mother’s mouth opened, and he knew what would come out next.

What about me?

But she swallowed it, tacked in another direction.

“And when is this all supposed to take place?”

“My ship sails at the end of the month.” That was just over a fortnight away.

Now Mrs. Higgins really did lean back against the cushions behind her, and several minutes ticked by, during which neither of them moved.

“I’m the last person to find out,” she murmured. “You’ve been making your plans for weeks, and waited this long to tell me—with just enough time before you left to try to make me feel that I was kept abreast of it.”

Higgins did not reply.

“If this is your idea of a joke, you are developing a very common nasty streak, you know.”

But it wasn’t, they both knew, and her lips pursed together.

“Well, and so I’m simply to take this as you’ve laid it out?” At last, the real question from her as she shifted in her seat, gestured indignantly. “What do you expect me to say to people?”

He let a careful pause go by, to add weight to what he said next, what he’d rehearsed in his head a hundred times (And why had he been forced to do so? Higgins had asked himself that, too—why would a grown man practice arguing with his own mother over a decision he’d every right to make, that was not her place to question or challenge? He was trying to find something, trying to untangle something, and there was no way to tell her that—this, even this stinging little set of lightly barbed call and response, was a far easier prospect).

“Tell the truth, if you wish. You’ll have your children and grandchildren, just as usual. Plenty of friends to fill the social calendar. The Season and all its delights.” At last he looked up at his mother. “You don’t need me,” Higgins told her in what he felt was a very generous, bolstering kind of way. “Once you’ve been to a few parties and the theatre, I daresay you’ll hardly notice I’m even gone—or even be glad of it.” He fidgeted again, and added lamely, “I’ll write, anyway.”

And it was here, in his bit of misguided prevaricating, that Mrs. Higgins took hold the conversation, finding her dry wit and regal affect once more.

“Oh, yes, I’m certain that your usual style of letters will tide me over as I lie awake at night wondering if you’re still alive.”

“Well, what would you like me to do?”

“Tell me why you want to leave London.” She tilted her head at him, baleful. “I think you owe me that much, at least—”

“Why—”

“—you certainly have my work cut out for me if you expect me to make your excuses, needless to say.”

“I’m tired of it!” Higgins cried, throwing his hands up. “I want something different—even if it’s for just a little while.” He ground his teeth together for a moment. “So tired of it, so tired of the people, of the way nothing changes, of everything—”

Again, that startled look in her eye.

“You, living the grand life you’ve chosen, are so miserable with the land of your own birth that you’d prefer some hovel in a foreign land,” she said at last. “And how dare you tell me I’d so readily forget about you, or that I’d simply be placated by the whirl of my social calendar—my own child is leaving, and we may never see one another again; what other response could there possibly be?”

He was growing tired of running in circles, and his tone was veering into a dangerous territory.

“Well, pulling me back home certainly isn’t an option this time,” he shot back, half intending it as a joke.

“Oh, this again,” Mrs. Higgins cried, exasperated, “As though the great tragedy of your life was to be home for a little longer, in plenty of comfort, doing exactly as you pleased! You’ve never forgiven me that—”

“It was school, it was—”

“I was devastated!” His mother was nearly shouting now, nearly forgetting herself now, and it was the first time they’d spoken of this in years, in decades, even. “I was devastated, and I wanted something for myself, and you were clever enough on your own, you did perfectly well, I daresay.” She sank back against the couch once more. “You’d have hated it there, you know; you’re too much of your own mind for a place like that—for people like that.”

He thought of all the times he’d called her darling, the way he’d made certain to dote on her through the years, to treat her with the utmost manners even when it didn’t suit him, even when he didn’t need to. Accompanying her to the theatre at her every request, taking her arm when he was supposed to, putting up with all her little asides about his work, her pointed remarks on his prospects for marriage, the eternal and implicit question of whether he’d ever finally straighten himself out and be normal. So many expectations, after a childhood spent forgotten and free, and his adolescence tiptoeing about, pretending it was all all right, pretending the house wasn’t shut up, the parties canceled forever, his mother inconsolable and yet refusing to grieve. How could anyone be normal in a life like that? What did she think him capable of?

And of all the hypocrisy: she didn’t think he would have succeeded at Eton anyway. That he would’ve been too strange, too much of a damned nuisance to get on with anybody there. As though he’d ever needed anyone in his life, let alone the good opinion of a bunch of pubescent savages who fancied themselves the future commanders of the Empire, men who would shape policy and culture. That bunch of slobbering idiots. He’d seen the future in the three days he’d been there, and it had not looked promising.

“I suppose you’ll have to learn to get on without me,” he said, and it wasn’t until he saw the sparkle of anger flicker over his mother’s features that he realized that he’d been waiting for the delicious opportunity to say that to her. To throw that arch, smug little line back at her, to enjoy the shock and recognition that came with it. Her nose crinkled, and she was thinking about slapping him in the face, quite hard, he reckoned, and wasn’t that the way it was? Every volley met with another, and they’d only been holding themselves at bay for years, never allowing any of it to grow too far beyond any real escalation. Mother, mother, mother. He dug his nails into his palm, waiting for the caustic sensation, but it didn’t come from her hand.

“All this,” said his mother, containing her fury only out of propriety, “Because of that poor girl.” As though she couldn’t remember her name when they’d probably been having tea every Tuesday afternoon and laughing to themselves over what a fool he was, Higgins thought bitterly. “Because you didn’t get what you wanted—you broke your toy, stomped on the pieces for good measure, and decided to spend all this time sulking about, feeling sorry for yourself, and that didn’t soothe you, so your solution is to run away from your problems.” Her throat was working, bobbing and ducking. “Like always.”

This little speech completely astonished him, to the point of breaking his calm, and Higgins did the only thing his mind, focused like a pinhole beam of light, would allow.

“Perhaps it runs in the family,” he said in nearly a whisper.

There was a long, heavy pause.

“You are completely heartless,” Mrs. Higgins told him in a tight voice, and rose elegantly, in the way that people did when they meant for a guest to vacate the premises immediately.

He left his mother’s house without another word.

He was sitting at his desk sifting through his things—some to go into storage, most of it for the rubbish pile—when Mrs. Pearce entered to inform him that he had a visitor. She’d been muted the past few days: most of the servants had expressed some dismay at losing their employer (and job), but Higgins had put good effort into writing each a perfectly respectable letter of reference, and this act had restored their spirits—all but the housekeeper, who was developing a permanent face of concern or dismay, he couldn’t quite tell which. She’d no real reason to worry for herself, as he’d settled on her a modest pension, with a legacy on top of that, and he knew she planned to return to Scotland and live with her sister.

Higgins did not inquire upon this point, however, because at that moment his own sister strode into the room with great purpose and energy, causing him to bolt to his feet in a kind of animal instinct as Mrs. Pearce discreetly and quickly made her exit. He’d expected a telephone call with quite a lot of shouting, at the very least, but this surprising visit, and Vicky actually setting foot beyond the foyer, was a cold ewer of water.

“Mother is absolutely raving,” said Vicky, out of breath. She hadn’t removed her coat and hat in the hall. “What in God’s name did you say to her?!”

“Well, what did she say?” Best to know what he was up against before he could correct or refute any of it.

“She telephoned in the middle of a tennis match, insisted that I come to London at once while I had house guests, I thought something awful had happened to her, and then you, that you were in hospital or dead or something, I get all the way here, and she tells me some fantastic story about how you’re selling up and leaving England forever!”

Vicky stopped and looked about herself, finding evidence in support of that conclusion: the open boxes and crates filled with items from his professional life. Empty library shelves above. The rug rolled up and placed along the baseboard at the far wall.

“You really are leaving, aren’t you,” she said in a much lower and solemn register of voice than he was used to hearing from her.

He looked at the books in his hands and leaned against the edge of the desk. Vicky came over, calmer than when she’d come in, and folded her arms about herself.

“She says you’re making a rash decision,” his sister told him. “That you’re only doing it to needle her, to hurt her.”

Higgins scoffed.

“It has nothing to do with her.”

“Then what is this about, Henry?” Vicky’s eyes were very wide, and she hadn’t inherited Mother’s almond shape. “Uprooting your entire existence, selling everything off?” She looked over her shoulder at the rug once more, then turned back to him, and said gently, “Are you sure you’ve thought this through? It is awfully sudden, surely you can see that.”

If he’d been tasked with predicting what his sister might say to him were she sent to broker peace between their mother and himself, Higgins definitely would have guessed that she would behave as a true proxy, parroting every admonishment and dire warning that Mrs. Higgins had assuredly assembled in the time since he’d left the house in Mayfair.

But it was interesting, the way Vicky didn’t immediately object.

The main thing was to think of a way to put this, to frame it just so, that she could report back to Mother every word he said as he knew she would, but not so much—too much would become fodder, not merely to talk him out of this decision, but for every argument and discussion for years to come. One didn’t speak of unhappiness to family, of trying to figure something out. It was… boredom. Restlessness. Or a fascinating new prospect for studying language.

“I suppose I’m the only one to whom this comes as no surprise,” Higgins said, folding and unfolding his thumb reflexively. “I haven’t been thinking about it precisely, but—“ He looked up at her worried, frowning little face, and decided, then and there. He dropped his voice, made an unspoken appeal: he’d tell her, but she’d better make sure she filtered it a little before carrying it along to Mother. “I was never meant to come back to London. It was supposed to be Eton, and Oxford, and—”

She breathed out, knowing precisely what he meant, the litany that none of them ever spoke aloud.

“And then whatever I wanted. But I’m dragged back here, every time, and I can’t help but wonder why, for what purpose?”

“Your practice; your students,” Vicky reminded him in a gentle voice.

“I don’t know if…” He hesitated, for saying it aloud suddenly seemed a much worse crime than letting it go unacknowledged or examined. “If that’s what I want, anymore.”

“Well, then, you’ll—you’ll figure something else out,” said Vicky, gesturing and then dropping her arms to her sides with a world-weary heaviness. “But don’t go leaping into such a sudden change believing that everybody’ll just go along because you’re such a genius and every decision you make is unimpeachable.” She perched on the tea table nearby. “You’ve always had a tendency to behave impulsively—and don’t go off thinking I came here to criticize and nag you,” his sister said a bit sharply, “I know what that look on your face means, and I shan’t tolerate you railing against me inside your head where I can’t hear you. But you do things so rashly at times: taking that poor filthy urchin off the streets with no forethought, feeding and clothing her at your expense, giving up every other student just so she could have six months of lessons for nothing!” Vicky looked aghast at the idea. “You didn’t know where she’d been, and then to keep her in your own private home, full of your nice things, and unmarried like that!”

“Oh, it was all right,” Higgins said, a little irritated that she was attempting to revisit something long since past. “Pickering was about, anyway, and we were too busy to be carrying on with anything untoward.” He put his hands in his pockets. “I don’t know that it ever occurred to her to steal my things, at any rate.”

“Well, you might have been having fun, but your little arrangement did not go unnoticed. Or unremarked upon.” Vicky’s tone was significant, and he glanced up to find her lips pursed and one eyebrow ever so slightly tilted. “I won’t re-litigate any of it, but Mother had some rather pointed questions from her friends after that scene at the Ascot. And it got round to Charles, who was just champing to march down here for a little dust up, you know. Lucky you, she managed to smooth everything over and keep our family name out of any dubious associations.”

He gave a mirthless snort, and Vicky responded with the sort of raw sigh that women sometimes gave; the one he didn’t want to unpack.

They sat in silence for several minutes.

“Mother’s right; I might have done something rash,” he admitted. “She accused me of running away from everything, and I told her—I told her maybe it ran in the family.” Higgins flicked his gaze up at her, abashed, prepared to be significant if necessary, but Vicky already had the threads of the thing, and reeled backward, mouth agape.

“Henry!” she cried, outraged, “God!”

He twisted his fingers around against each other guiltily and huffed.

“I couldn’t help it, it just came out of me—” he began. “I don’t know. Perhaps it’s best I go away for a while, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, why I keep doing this. I might’ve—” Higgins ran a hand through his hair. He might’ve just ruined everything with her. Despair was beginning to creep in—what a horrible, horrible thing to say, and to his poor mother, of all people—“I might need some distance, for a while, anyway.”

The scandalized look had drained from her eyes, leaving Vicky with slumped shoulders and an air of shabbiness, as though she were very tired.

“I’m sure she could forgive you, even for that,” she said quietly. “She’s always loved you best.”

“Yes, well, not anymore,” the professor replied, succumbing to the suspicion that had been hovering at the edge of his consciousness for the past few days, and putting his face in his hands.

“Here I was of a mind to talk her into a visit before your sailing, but I don’t think she could bear to see you with the house like this,” his sister said, looking about once more, one last time. “And you’d have quite an uphill battle after an outburst like that.”

“I’ll think of something,” Higgins replied. He’d have to, if he expected to take leave of this place with his conscience in any fit state.

With her promise to at least calm their mother, he saw her out, and at the front door Vicky turned, tugging needlessly at her gloves.

“In a way, you’re lucky,” she told him. “You haven’t as many attachments as most people, which ought to make it easier.” Vicky looked at him keenly, and for the first time, he realized she was possessed of as sharp a mind as any of them. “Nothing to keep you anchored, so…” She shrugged, and her expression was strangely encouraging to his eyes. “Why stay?” Vicky half-smiled, placed a hand on his arm, and took her leave.

At last it was time to call upon the Macreadys; Sir George at last said that the Thursday before he left would be amenable, and Higgins found himself glad, after all, for an afternoon’s reprieve from trying to decide what among his possessions could yet fit into his trunk and the scuffed hand luggage, what would remain in the surprisingly-small storage he was able to procure, and what he would need to let go of or dispose forever (the sketch of the pheasant had gone to Hannah, and a few lines of poetry to Isobel).

“Well, spring at last,” Lady Macready said, pouring the tea. She was a very pleasant young woman with straw-colored hair, and just as he’d suspected she would, looked every bit the part of a rural farmer’s hale and healthy daughter who’d accidentally stumbled into a fantastic stroke of luck. “It isn’t quite the gathering I’d promised Sir George, but I’m very glad to meet you at last, even if we are a bit lopsided in number,” she told Higgins.

Alice, as she was, had a curious way of speaking—she too had come to London by way of Bristol, and hadn’t entirely managed to soften her consonants quite as much as she ought, but her voice was melodic, soothing. Not at all the standard of ambitious young upstarts. She was possessed of a natural sweetness that other girls often imitated in their determined efforts to ‘conquer or die’ on the marriage market.

“Do you sing at all?” he inquired. “In the church choir, or to entertain your husband?”

Sir George was beaming at his wife.

“She loves singing, and does it so well, even if just she’s at home darning socks or some other dainty work,” he said, and Lady Macready gave him a lightly chiding smile.

“Perhaps I ought to join up, only I don’t know that I project quite so far as they’d like.”

Higgins was just thinking of how to change the subject from this cliffside of a conversational topic when Sir George once more elbowed his way in for a bit of salvation.

“Doesn’t she speak ever so nicely, too?”

“George,” said his wife gently. “You mustn’t embarrass the professor; I’m sure he’s asked to rate people on their voices and accents all the time, and he isn’t here for work.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that, I assure you,” Macready said, eyes wide, and Higgins thought that the man with his bright red beard would never quite lose that provincial innocence.

And this was the crucial moment, the time to issue his final verdict on his pupil’s evolution over the last few months. Something that would satisfy the man’s wife without sounding artificial, while remaining true to Higgins’ sense of academic rigor and honesty.

Higgins sipped his tea while they both waited.

“It is an extraordinary challenge, to permanently alter the way one speaks,” he said after a moment. “Speech is one of the first things human beings develop as we go from rudimentary infancy into the full potential of becoming a person: the essence which marks us as thinking creatures and sets us apart from the animals. To change the way we speak changes the way we think and act, the way we view ourselves, our place in the world. Taking on such a monumental task requires bravery, dedication, and strength of will.” He turned his tea cup in its saucer, a bit awkward suddenly at how this had become more effusive than he’d anticipated. “You are both to be commended for even attempting it, but to achieve the thing itself is nothing short of miraculous.”

There was a warmly stunned silence, broken only by Macready discreetly smudging at the corner of his eye with one hand.

“He’s spoken often of how well you talk,” Lady Macready told Higgins.

“I suppose it comes with the territory.”

“I’m only sorry that you have to go away,” said Sir George, looking a bit crestfallen. “It’s been rather enjoyable, all told.”

“Oh,” said Higgins in some surprise, “It’s only travel.”

“You must write from wherever you are,” Lady Macready kindly said, Sir George agreeing with immediate enthusiasm, and the only choice the professor could possibly make was to promise them a letter now and then.

In total, he wrote seventeen drafts of the letter to his mother, and in the time it took to compose each, a little more of the study disappeared, until at last he wrote the final version on a book laid out upon his knee, sitting in the wing chair, utterly wrung out by the act of it.

The time had passed, the house at 27A was packed, and all that remained was for him to spend one last night beneath its roof. Higgins sat on the sofa nursing a glass of port as Mrs. Pearce entered the cavernous study, footsteps echoing. Footsteps had never echoed in here before—what a discovery at such a late hour. He’d always known it to be just a bit too big for his purposes (albeit impressive to his students, a fact which had given him great satisfaction over the years), but with the piano and desk now moved out, the near-bareness was almost eerie.

“I came to bid you goodnight, sir,” she said, and now there was this, too, to be faced with dignity.

“Care for a glass?”

“No, thank you, sir,” said Mrs. Pearce, ever feudal, and he hmmed fondly at that.

“You’ve been a most loyal housekeeper through the years, Mrs. Pearce,” Higgins said, looking down into his glass and wondering if he’d lost his tolerance, for there was a strange pressure inside his chest now.

“Thank you, Mr. Higgins,” she replied. “I’ve always done my best to serve you.”

A pause, and he nearly thought she’d find space to take her leave, but he said,

“Well, go on, then, woman. Say I’m being ridiculous, that it’s a foolish endeavor. Tell me I ought to cancel the tickets and stay here, or give me some halfhearted farewell.” He could do that—he house itself wasn’t actually sold as of yet, simply awaiting a buyer so that the solicitor could complete everything for the professor in absentia. “Everybody else has, I think.”

His letter to the Royal Society announcing the suspension of his membership while he went abroad for a time was answered with a curt note informing him that upon his repatriation, he would owe back dues for the length of time spent away before being allowed to rejoin their ranks. A very encouraging way to end his tenure in this country, to be sure.

She shifted; he heard her skirts rustle in the semi-darkness, for there was only the light above the doorway, very dim.

“I think,” said Mrs. Pearce slowly, “It is a good thing to see the world for a while. Go on, while you may, and do everything you can. Sir.”

Higgins had expected, with the way she’d been going about the house over the past few weeks, that his housekeeper would be a bit weepy in the end, but this was a refreshing change of response from what he’d gotten thus far. The professor sat up from where he’d been slouching against the sofa cushions.

“Really,” he said.

“They say travel is good for the body and spirit, and serves the mind very well.”

He nearly laughed, for the Colonel had said practically the same thing all those months ago, while standing in nearly the same spot.

“Of everybody who’s granted me their opinion, I think you’re the first person to not express a single reservation,” he said, thoroughly and yet quietly cheered by her. Good old Pearce; he was glad he’d made sure she was taken care of.

The housekeeper was silent for a moment, and when she spoke again, he could tell why.

“It has been a pleasure to serve you, sir, and I wish you all the best,” and with that slight thickness to her voice she nearly made it to the doorway when he turned, and said to her,

“I shall miss you indeed, Mrs. Pearce.”

Whether she bobbed a curtsey or not, he couldn’t tell in the darkness, but he heard her sharp intake of breath only when she reached the hallway, and had to blink a few times himself.

Standing at the ship’s aft, on the viewing level lined with cushioned deck chairs, Higgins thought wryly to himself that it could scarcely be called a luxury liner when it looked like this. No grand band saw them off at Southampton Docks; no confetti streamers and long tearful handkerchiefs waving farewell from the people on board. It was all paperwork inspections, metal chains, bodies crowding onto the gangplanks, carts of luggage trunks, a general sense of jostling and nervous anticipation before the final horn sounded and the great thing shuddered into a rush of movement, followed by the perception that they were only barely drifting, apart from the scent of coal and the sound of the engines.

Certainly not the ferry train to the French coast, that was true.

Professor Higgins turned and looked back toward the place they’d launched from, hands in pockets.

His final goodbye to London, to England—his last look at his own homeland for who knew how long, in some of the worst fog he’d seen in a while.

And then he turned, and went to see if Cecily had found her stateroom.

Chapter Text

But there’s really nothing
nothing we can do
Love must be forgotten
Life can always start up anew

- “Time to Pretend,” MGMT

“I say, what’s today?”

Cecily looked up—whether she’d been watching the waves toss along the ocean or dozing, it was difficult to tell past her dark glasses. The question had caught her unawares, and for a moment the portion of expression visible on her face was nonplussed, as though he’d inquired whether there was cheese on the moon.

“Tuesday? Does that sound right?” She sounded as though she were unsure if Tuesday actually existed, if it were possible to be Tuesday at all.

Higgins gazed off in the direction of the castle ruins through his own smoked lenses and fanned himself with the letter the criada had brought to him sometime earlier—a few minutes, or perhaps half an hour. Difficult to say.

“Blast it all, I’ve no idea,” he murmured to himself. It didn’t particularly matter, being more a passing curiosity than anything else. Sort of like those people who wondered aloud which star or planet they were looking at in the night sky, yet refused to trouble themselves looking up in an encyclopedia. Higgins chuckled a little at the thought. He was stretched out on a long chair, the book he’d been reading limp and languid across his knee, forgotten for a brief time.

They lived in Sintra, at the westernmost tip of Portugal, in a curious house with an open-air balcony and a long cliffside drop to the beach below, which curved inward: a private cove. The house was painted shocking greenish-blue, and the front courtyard, facing away from the ocean, was filled with tropical plants he didn’t recognize bursting from their terra cotta pots, all overseen by an ancient drooping willow growing in the center of the stone square, so overgrown with vines that it was impossible to see the bark. Mountains and castles of old Europe, foreign greenery of steamy African jungles, and the unceasing ocean beating at the back door day and night. A strange part of the world, mixing together these incongruous ideas like that.

He sat up and stretched, long and slow and luxurious.

It was nearing sunset, if still hours off yet, and the filtered shade was becoming more opaque and solid by the minute. Soon the housegirl, who played chief cook and bottle washer, would summon them for dinner, and they would eat in the bright dining room with the windows that had wooden casings carved in great curves and flourishes.

Higgins looked again at the letter, now a little creased in the middle, and considered opening it, but did not.

A stream of especially piquant curses was making its way up the stone staircase along the edge of the balcony, and the two of them turned to find a young blonde woman bounding up the steps with an almost obscene energy, dressed in linen and swatting at her legs with an enormous straw hat.

“Bloody stinging things, I’ll be covered in welts before long, and then where will we be,” she was muttering darkly, and gave an especially sharp blow with an accompanying cry of either pain or victory over an unseen foe. “God damn these mosquitoes—!”

“Penelope,” Cecily said, and for a wild moment Higgins had the strange thought that she might chide the girl for her language. But such an impossibility dissipated as quickly as it had arisen. “Are you wearing trousers?” There was an utter lack of insinuation, of warning, in her tone which Higgins found strangely reassuring.

The girl in question looked down at herself before smoothing the fabric flat about her knees so that it could be viewed at its best advantage.

“It’s a split skirt,” she said brightly, adding a carefree shrug. “I begged them to make me some trousers, but they wouldn’t go for it, so I settled for this instead. No good for riding, of course, but better than subjugating myself in this heat to broadcloth, or… whatever the hell dresses are usually made of.”

“You know perfectly well what fabrics make up dresses.”

“Don’t know, don’t care,” said the blonde, skipping over to where Higgins sat and practically throwing herself on top of him but feinting at the last moment with a laugh.

“Lawn,” said Cecily, leaning back against the lounger and speaking in a slow and lazy voice. “Duck cloth. Percale. Serge.”

“Hullo, Henry. What’s that?” Penelope nodded at the thing in Higgins’ grasp as she nudged his hand from the lounger arm with her hip and took it as a seat.

“Oh, Penn, don’t get too close,” he groaned. “It’s warm enough as is.”

A burst of intense heat had overtaken them suddenly after a week or two of very fine weather—very fine indeed—and it was causing them to take to the beach in shifts, when they felt like it.

“Eugh, right, I nearly forgot,” said the blonde, abandoning the ironic way she’d draped her arm across the back of his chair and sitting bolt upright. “At least it’s dry here—some places get so damnably humid one wonders how humanity ever made it out of the fish state.”

“Silk. Organdy. Poplin,” Cecily went on, talking to herself.

“It’s a letter,” he told her, holding it up before resuming his back and forth, back and forth. It wasn’t doing much good as far as cooling went, but it did make for a nice meditative motion. Back and forth, and back and forth. Very simple, but something about it settled his brain.

“Pongee. Cambric. Panama.”

Penelope elbowed him gently.

“Don’t need to be a haruspex to see what it is, you silly ass, who’s it from?”

“My solicitor, if the outside is to be believed.”

“Velvet. Cashmere—”

Suddenly the mention of fabrics intended for colder climes was too much, for at this Penelope whipped her head round and exclaimed to the Baroness,

“All right, all right! You’ve made your point, for God’s sake.” But angry as the young woman sounded, she was smiling.

“Have I?” Cecily’s voice wound its sluggish way across the sun-drenched balcony with a hint of flinty determination. “Oooh, I don’t know. I don’t know at all, dear.”

The blonde rolled her eyes in an aggressive drawl, Higgins wondering that she didn’t pull a muscle doing it, and made some exasperated noises at the Baroness before turning back to him.

“What did you two do, drink a jeroboam each while I was out?” she asked.

“Oh, I meant to ask the girl,” he replied, looking about. “Where’d she go? Nevermind, she’ll probably bring some up before long.”

“Sun’s nearly ‘cross the yardarm,” she said in agreement. “Not that it’s much of a reason.”

“Taffeta,” came Cecily’s droning voice once more.

“Madre, would you go for a swim or something?!” shrieked Penelope suddenly in a fit of pique. Higgins burst out laughing, and after a moment, Cecily joined him, for that had been the point of the game all along.

They began in Le Touquet, for Cecily had some memory there of staying in a pretty little house done up like a chalet on the Rue St. Jean a few years back, a nice holiday she had taken with her husband. Higgins was of the (very strong) opinion that they ought not waste time in a bloody seaside resort—within shouting distance of Hastings, to top it all off—where the wealthy middle classes of his own country came over simply to sail and gamble and golf. She was so awfully excited to wander along the beach, though, that he let her do it whilst he stood at a distance, smoking his pipe and watching the regattas just off the coast.

Besides, the plan was this: there was no plan.

Higgins had plenty in mind, of course: museums to see and castle ruins to visit, libraries he’d like to be granted reader access to for an afternoon. Perhaps he’d listen to conversations here and there—hadn’t determined yet whether to make a go of that. And in a year or two, once he’d absorbed it all (and perhaps Cecily would grow weary and wander back), it would be time for an assessment and a continental shift. India did not exactly curry his good favor; from Pickering’s descriptions one was either stuck with the unwashed masses or trapped among the British who’d been brought up from infancy for the military or civil service. The thought of ensconcing himself within those ranks induced deep shudders, as did the notion of traveling farther east. More civil service, but the financial types. That was one thing Higgins knew to be grateful for, that he’d not been under heavy pressure to go straight from youth into a job as a bank clerk in the City, facing bewildering ledgers and daily quotas until some manager deemed him competent enough to get his orders and be shipped off to Honkers & Shankers HQ for more of the same.

He’d not heard from his mother before the sailing.

Australia, perhaps, or Tasmania. Arumpo. Launceston. The Empire did extend quite far, although he wasn’t wholly certain how much he wanted to follow it. There again, the notion of holidaying among the crisp and proper set who wanted to retain every single aspect of English life—which didn’t bother him particularly, it was the dogged insistence upon tedious social obligations—just in a better climate. Or he could go the opposite direction—America, North or South. Places that held a curious texture in the mouth: Saskatoon. Cumberland Gap. Sarasota. Codrington. So far as to be nearly impossible for him to picture.

He’d batted ideas about for a little while as Cecily meditated ambulatorily, and they left the resort without discussing further her reasons for stopping there.

But the real adventure seemed to begin when they went up to Amsterdam, which Cecily requested to his surprise, for she’d been in Brussels only a few weeks prior, and they traveled through the capital on their way up, though it was brief: his only aim in getting off the train had been to find a chocolatier.

Belgian chocolate boxes came in two colors: mint green, and pale pink. All the chocolates were the same between the two—Cecily had said so upon closer examination—but Higgins purchased both, just to be sure, and found them better than the ones Mrs. Pearce had always bought imported from a French confectioner, for there was something ineffable about these. Fresher, perhaps, and not a week or two out from being made. A discernible difference: he’d always had a palate for such things, wasted as it was on himself alone. Curious that there existed societies for the sole purpose of oenology, but nothing devoted to the tasting and appreciation of chocolates—surely it took just as much work and dedication to shape and craft a truffle that tasted of lavender as it did for some Frenchman to pick grapes and stomp on them a little. And certainly more sanitary, surely.

“Better to have those than lug around some souvenir,” Cecily remarked, nodding at the chocolate boxes. Her mouth scrunched as she tried to suppress a smile. “You’ll probably eat them all before the afternoon.”

Higgins feigned outrage.

“This is a fortnight’s worth, at least!” he cried, pressing one hand over his heart dramatically. “A true connoisseur doesn’t simply stuff his face with such top-notch wares.”

“All for you?” she inquired, nodding at the boxes. “You might consider bringing one of those tomorrow night.”

She’d finagled them an invitation to some dinner party at Lerne, a little village situated to the east known for its high concentration of artistic types. Higgins would much rather have eaten in a proper restaurant or at the hotel instead of sitting through some interminable discussions of form or technique, even if he could readily keep pace, but the museums closed long before sunset and he could not have come up with something else to do at night if pressed.

And so they went, and it was a frightful show, at first.

For a start, he and the Lady Sudcliffe were the oldest by a decade or so, and the only ones dressed anywhere near appropriately for dinner. She’d even put on one of her strange black and white gowns that hung so loosely from her frame, wound enough pearls about her throat to look like an African warrior, and hung the last bit along her front in one impressive loop reaching her knees.

It had been clear from the moment they’d walked in that everybody there was quite bohemian in their way, and therefore either terrified or put out by the possibility of their aged and wealthy disapproval. Upon their being led about the house by Carey, the tenant of the place and the host for the evening, in an embarrassed little tour, they’d passed a closed door and Higgins had asked what was in there. The fellow replied that it was where the ghost lived that haunted them now and again, and Mrs. Carey had laughed and said that they’d never managed to furnish the space with anything more than a rack to store her husband’s boots.

“Always go with the ghost story,” Higgins said to her in an approving and mild way, still good-humored from the acquisition of chocolates from earlier, “Any place ought to have a welcome air of mystery no matter the circumstance.”

“Bluebeard didn’t murder all those wives for nothing,” Cecily pointed out, to his amusement.

The house was ghastly—several of the windows with little colored sections like stained glass were broken, and he was fairly certain there was a hole in the roof in one of the dark corners of the largest room, a library or a study being put to use as a terribly untidy and overrun studio laid out with so many easels that one had to figure out how to move through the room about three steps in advance. There was a large crockery bowl on one of the end tables filled with carrot skins and a paring knife on top, which gave Higgins a pause he did not allow himself to consider for very long.

At the other end of the room, Higgins had a look over a low cabinet with drawers meant for maps or architectural drawings where a small unframed canvas had been laid out on top.

“Oh, a friend gave me that,” said Carey cheerfully. “He used to teach, but gave up a year ago and ran off to Paris.”

“Is that Peter’s piece?” said Mrs. Carey, approaching the table. “He used to do such nice things, windmills and trees and landscapes.” Her husband smiled and fondly shook his head at her.

The thing in front of them was meant to be a tree as well, for the style looked familiar—one of the new abstractions. His own art had been nailed into little crates bound for storage. This one was only half-finished, and smaller than the final version, likely. A lot of bold, thick paint strokes done in muted grays with a spindly oval tree in the middle looking like a shattered spot where a rock had punctured a window.

When they’d passed the laid table, Higgins was a little perplexed by the sudden splendor of the elaborate feast before them, for there was not only a fine saddle of mutton and a finnan haddie but several dishes of plainly cooked fare that later turned out to be magnificent indeed, as well as a pine-apple the size of a man’s head. Cecily copped to it immediately, for during an interlude of the little tour, she'd leaned in close and whispered that the couple in charge must have been very far behind indeed to their creditors and this was all a theatrical attempt at waving their hands to show that they were not only solvent but prepared to make good on several months’ worth of back allowances in the hopes of silencing those tuts and firm knocks at the door.

Uncanny, that people should even think to put on such a charade, for he’d never been called upon to think how the greengrocer or the fishmonger or the butcher was paid, and Higgins looked upon the shabby Careys with something of warm, paternal amusement after that, but it was all all right in the end, for the young couple were relieved with the two of them for being so understanding.

The rest of the party had been at the house since breakfast; they had spent the day eating bread and cheese and beer, and batting about a ball in the garden. There were five or six in addition to himself, Cecily, and their hosts; he was fairly certain from the conversation that there numbered among the assembly somebody’s sister, a portraitist, and an art model. Some of them seemed to live there, or spent enough time at the house that they’d fallen into the category of resident by sheer willpower. Quite an original group of characters, and not all of them Dutch, he perceived. The Careys were down from Derbyshire, having gone into what Mr. Carey described as “self-exile,” which seemed to stem from boredom more than the vaguely-defined political convictions the host claimed.

“So who are you? What line are you in?” the young woman at his left elbow asked at dinner. She had blonde hair and an interesting, if not classically beautiful, set of features. The top of her face seemed too large for her skull, giving her a constantly-stunned look, and her eyebrows were a different color altogether.

Higgins tried to remember the name: Nellie, or Anita, or something. The artist’s model, a girl who was twenty or thereabouts. She was slouching a little, one arm draped along the back of her dinner chair watching as the two young men across the table—the one with the peacock-blue tie was first violinist, and the other one, whose profession he could only recall as involving the design of wallpaper patterns, had on a brown suit with the coat buttoned up over his breast to try to obscure the fact that he’d forgotten to wear a waistcoat—were animatedly describing a boat trip in one of the canals gone preposterously awry. One kept switching between German and Dutch, and the other trying to translate it all into English, except he kept drifting off into French, causing the other to rant at the fellow in some rare dialect instead.

It would have been terribly annoying if it hadn’t been so bizarre; a theatrical performance right there at table.

“Nothing, at the moment,” he answered.

“Oh, that’s right—she said you were just traveling,” the girl said, leaning a little to glance at Cecily down at the other end of the table. “You have got the manor-born look about you with that forehead and those ears, but you aren’t bothered by our rough little gathering, though I did see you eyeing the dogs in the parlor with noted distaste. You know, they say anybody who doesn’t love dogs must be a bad sort.” She tilted her head and observed him with a neat little fox-like smile. The animals—parentage questionable—had loped about with rangy legs and shaggy hair, which he felt quite certain was distributed throughout the dinner fare. They’d breathed on him and followed him as he’d tried slowly to escape, nudging at him with wet noses and mouths, incomprehensible in their mysterious expectations.

“Sounds like a circuitous route to determine who’s a villain,” Higgins replied. “The only conclusion to be drawn from that is that I don’t care much for dogs, for I’ve done nothing to label myself any sort, let alone a bad one.”

“Mmm,” said the girl. “Neither do I, though these ones at least don’t bite, which does recommend them. But you’re the one who brought the chocolates, isn’t that so?” She looked about the table before them.

He had; the mint green box with scalloped edges had made its way all round the table and was currently held up, for someone had set it in the shadow of a chafing dish filled with beans. Higgins reached for the box, and the young woman bent over it with him, tapping at a couple of pralines here and there.

“What d’you suppose that one is? Suspicious character, eh?”

He lifted it out and held it up. This one was a molded confection, a thin chocolate shell with a creamy center—it was very light in the hand, and his theory was only strengthened by the crispness of the outer shape, which was very new among chocolate-making methods, and only used to house flavored nougats.

“Hazelnut,” he declared, squinting a little. They invariably had a domed top and a slight texture. He set the thing on his bread plate and looked about for a clean knife, which the woman stole from another dinner guest several seats down and presented to him with a little flourish. Cutting it with a snap, he popped one half into his mouth and was pleased to find himself correct.

“That’s almond,” said his companion thickly through her mouthful.

Higgins shook his head.

“Definitely hazelnut.”

“Almonds always taste like cherry,” she said. “And that’s cherry.”

“Hazelnut has a darker, slightly burnt flavor. Makes one think of acorns, and burning leaves after Hallows Eve.”

She turned away from watching the two men nearby pantomime the way their skiff had flipped over into the water and took a moment to gaze at Higgins contemplatively.

“How do you know so much about this? Are you on the run from Belgian creditors, or something?”

He began rifling through the set once more. Someone had already claimed the truffles with the dark chocolate ganache, a concoction which turned miraculously from a reliable-looking solid into a liquid the moment it hit the tongue (such a lovely sensation, and an utter marvel of craftsmanship), but there was a caramel left.

“No, indeed,” Higgins said after a moment, still looking. “My only qualifications as an expert come from having eaten thousands of these things over the years.”

There was a squeak as she leaned her chair back from the table and he glanced up to find her having a look at his midsection.

“It’s a wonder you aren’t twice your own size,” the girl muttered.

Carey rose, got everybody’s attention, and invited them all out of doors for a bit. Higgins found his way to Cecily’s side, but before he could speak, young Mrs. Carey touched his elbow.

“I’m afraid we’ve forgotten to ask—do you smoke at all?”

He replied that he did, but his pipe was back at the hotel.

“Oh, well, that’s all right, we’ve got an extra, and there’s some shag lying about too, I expect,” she said, pleased to at the opportunity to be so obliging.

They all trooped out into the back garden, sans chiens, where dusk was beginning to settle with a nice streaky orange-pink sunset in the distance; there was a little canal out farther beyond the tiny stretch of land, moving in a dark bluish shadow.

Carey and the others took out their cigarettes, borrowing matches from one another with the over-bright gratitude of young spendthrifts who’d just successfully touched an old school friend for a fiver; there was located for Higgins a plain white Meerschaum; they all took a turn about the little plot in the garden blowing smoke on the roses to kill the aphids while Mrs. Carey sat in the middle playing guitar.

“Well,” said Cecily’s voice in the semi-darkness, coming up behind him.

“Well,” replied Higgins.

“And what do you make of all this?”

Higgins watched the artists together for a moment.

“Odd. Chaotic. A bunch of children following their base impulses, playing at house.” He had another go at the pipe, and a thin curl of smoke drifted from between his lips before he spoke again. “But odd things can be awfully charming.”

Once it grew too dark to see, their housemaid went about lighting lamps and Carey unlocked the secret door to reveal a guest room where they waltzed for a bit, for dinner had been laid out in the drawing room. Having no real objections to it, and hazy by the novelty of the night, he danced twice with Cecily, once with Mrs. Carey, then with his dinner companion, and left the house astonished that he simply couldn’t remember her name, for it did seem to grow in importance the more they met.

Her name was Penelope Danvers, for she said as much a few mornings later when they went to a cramped garret loft in Amsterdam proper, another artist’s colony. This one was located on a top floor where the girl herself seemed incongruously in charge. Eating croissants from a tarnished silver platter and gulping milky tea out of a beaker resembling a flower vase more than a cup, the blonde waved them round to two young painters and a sculptor, all working on pieces simultaneously with her as the model, if the half-finished abstraction of a faceless nude female form on a canvas the size of a Cole landscape were any indication. Along with the fact that she was currently dressed—if it could be called as such—in a silk robe with the sash beginning to come undone. Higgins inspected some of the other (godawful) pieces about the place. Not the same level as what he’d seen at the dinner party.

“That one’s called Arnold, and I think that’s Monty, or something. Montesque? Montgomery.”

The fellow piped up to helpfully indicate that he was Montrechert.

“Well, you know your name, and that’s all that matters, anyway,” said Penelope, who paused and then gave a low, self-indulgent chuckle and shook her head at herself. She’d a clear RP style with a drawl as the only affectation, and slight at that. Educated abroad, likely, which when mixed together with her speech and utterly unrestrained mannerisms, gave a very insouciant effect. A girl who’d seen all the parties and found them devilishly boring. The sort prone to making entrances at country house drawing rooms through the French windows. A hoyden. He liked her immediately. She turned toward them again and spoke brightly.

“What are you two up to today? Off to the Rijksmuseum, a tour of the tulip fields, concluding with the symphony?”

Well, they’d thought of all of those things, actually.

With a breeziness that was either blithe or terribly rude, she invited herself to go along with them, for, as she put it, “it would make it so much less obvious,” whatever that meant.

“Oughtn’t you stay here for this?” Cecily said, gesturing vaguely about to the assemblage who’d gathered to pay homage to the girl.

Penelope shrugged carelessly. “They’ve got what they need. You wouldn’t believe how dull it is to sit about holding the same position for hours on end.” Higgins felt a half-smile beginning at the corner of his mouth, and Penelope pushed the beaker of tea aside and went off into another room, presumably to dress.

The young men at their artwork didn’t look up as the three of them left together.

“So are you her latest?”

A bold, bald-faced question: a curious thing to ask.

They were walking ahead of Cecily by a few paces on a pathway beside the canals. It was an hour or two before sunset, and the amber glow of lights from the windows overhead reflected against the waters below, boats chugging past with the little sounds of waves slapping the hulls as they went. They’d gone to the art museum after all, but upon emerging, Higgins found himself waylaid, his plans to locate some historic house diverted utterly when the young woman had insisted they go for a stroll about the city.

Higgins looked out the corner of his eye at Penelope in profile. Took in the shape of her nose, her chin. It was clearer when they passed within the shadow of some great building or even simply a thick canopy of tree leaves and her blonde hair fell darker. He’d noticed it at the Laren party. The eyes. That was what he’d recognized, for just a moment. Or perhaps it had been the strange conversation. She turned to look at him, cynical and darkly expectant.

“No,” he said quietly to her. Then, carefully: “I think she’s still in love with your father.”

Penelope came to a full stop in the middle of the walkway so suddenly that Higgins had to backtrack two or three steps to join her once more. Her face had gone blank, giving her a look of great concentration and intensity, before she gave a low chuckle and said,

“Oh. I see you what you mean. No, Lewis wasn’t my father—I was born on the other side of the whatchamacallit, as it were.”

If her intention had been to shock him, he only indulged her with a mild ah as he continued to stroll, hands folded at the small of his back. Still in the middle of the path, she turned and spoke to their dawdling companion.

“You coming, Cecily darling?”

And somehow that summed up their relationship to one another more than anything else could have done.

The older woman in black looked up from where she’d paused to observe some flowers and stepped lively to join them.

“I can’t imagine any other city trussed up quite like this,” she said when she got there. Lady Sudcliffe looked them over. “Having a nice chat amongst yourselves?”

“We’re getting on splendidly,” declared Penelope, and looped her arm through her mother’s, walking on and leaving Higgins to follow in their wake.

All these women, he thought. All these women kept popping up unexpectedly, and always turned out somehow to be of enormous import—or at least some higher power thought so. It wasn’t so much irritating as seemed to be a cosmic coincidence. One of his students had once told him of something strange that happened to her regularly—she came across abandoned playing cards when out and about. Wherever she went, whether to the dressmaker, the theatre, or for a stroll in the park, there’d be a ten of diamonds in the gutter, or a knave of clubs poking out beneath a stand of daffodils. She’d felt obliged to fish them out and keep them and had acquired several complete, if mismatched, decks in the process, but had never known quite what to do with them.

Perhaps collecting unusual women was the albatross the universe had assigned to him.

In the end, they didn’t go to the symphony but a cruise on the canal, huddled comfortably together in the stern of the boat out from under the cabin walls and roof, just the clear sky overhead and the buildings and trees leaning in on them like mountains.

Higgins turned to rest his elbow against the very back of the boat and watched the world fall away behind him.

Buildings, homes, right there, the waters lapping against their window casings, the residents within could open them and hear the waters rushing past all night, lulling the occupants to sleep.

A great domed camera jutting above the houses, a cathedral or government building—no courtyard, no pretention or artifice, and it was all right here, all right here at the edge, and your eyes never wanted to stop taking it all in, for it was pleasure simply to look, to see, to gather it all in against yourself, this new old thing that had been here for centuries that you were the first person to discover, and that gripped at his heart, just a little, and the lights in the windows grew warmer as the pale blue melted out of the sky, and Higgins knew with a certitude that this, this, had been the right decision.

She’d join them for a little while, she said airily. Anything would be more interesting than the Easter parade of bored younger sons, fallen royals, bounders on the run from their gambling debts, opera singers, chorus girls, knuts who wore too much hair pomade—cutting it like this would be a nice change, and if it all grew unbearable she’d shove off somewhere else, for she knew plenty people.

If that would be all right, Cecily murmured to him later, and Higgins could only shrug, for it wasn’t really as though he’d anywhere to be, but since he was the one settling their bills, it did matter, Cecily said.

Lady Sudcliffe must have spoken with her daughter after that, for Penelope never missed an opportunity to thump his upper arm and call him a good old thing, a fine old chap.

Barcelona had not impressed him terribly—too crowded, too cramped—but Málaga, the tall orange trees, the pomegranates, the ancient architecture, the art, was bearable and pleasant to the soul.

The freedom, the freedom, the utter freedom of being somewhere else. They spent a fortnight drunk on it, drunk on Burgundy wine (“Our Nebuchadnezzar phase,” Penelope cried, lounging sideways in a chair on the lawn and laughing deliriously, holding aloft her glass like the sword of victory), living in a little guest house in the valley, where he could sit on the banks of the Yonne, where he strolled through the vineyard at first light and weighed in his hand a cluster of grapes on the vine. They were bizarre; he’d seen photographs in the newspaper, but there was nothing like being next to them, strange little bare-trunked things that weren’t quite trees and weren’t quite bushes, and the particular color and fragrance of the turned earth below—

God, it was easy to be that… sanguine.

The people were strange in their ways, strange in needing the three of them and yet lacking in even a single ounce of welcoming cheer or hospitality, but they had themselves and did not mind it quite so much, found it easy to let that slip over them as though it hadn’t a chance in hell of touching them, let alone doing any harm.

He took to walking for hours in the countryside, dragging along a satisfyingly whippy branch found in a ditch. No buildings, no people to listen to, not even his own thoughts inside his head. He could stand at the top of a country lane and look all about, and there the Earth rolled in on itself, showing him a dozen other hills layered together, winding down and then back up once more.

It was astonishing how one could simply choose to not long for anything, but surround oneself with other things to do and be, and it was as though a great pressure lifted, an enormous thing came away from his shoulders, and he was lighter, taller.

“Give me those,” he said to Penelope one afternoon, upon returning from another hike. Higgins plucked the pair of dark glasses from her nose and she blinked up at him, pretending to be sleepy and innocent of her crimes. “You little thief; I’ve been looking for these for a week.”

“Well, what of it?”

“I’d certainly enjoy having them on a walk, you know. It’s so bloody sunny in this country.”

“Oh, tosh,” said Penelope, moving her chair back into the shade, leaning back, and closing her eyes, “You haven’t gone blind so far. Just don’t stare directly into the sun; you’ll be all right.”

He tried wearing them on another outing, but everything was different, and he felt interminably silly when some of the locals stood from where they’d been bent over at their work, staring at him, inspecting him like birds on a telegraph wire. The glasses drew attention where before he’d perhaps simply looked like a man walking along a pathway; Higgins tucked them into his coat pocket, and they disappeared again only a few days later.

And the thing of it was this: after a while, even the most foreign landscapes begin to seem, if not familiar and cozy, then not quite so surprising. They melted into the eye quicker each time he looked at them.

They skipped Nice and Monaco but steered downward into Toulouse, then Marseille, and ate in restaurants with facades painted the color of butter. Penelope disappeared for a few days and nobody commented on it before she strolled back in, flung herself onto a chair with a fresh sigh, and took up a book he’d been reading. He had his fill of architecture and watched the fishing trawlers come in and out, the men hauling nets swollen with fish.

A sudden intake of breath and Higgins awoke—Cecily was shaking him gently, and he sat up to rub his neck from where he’d been asleep against her shoulder.

“Wake up, we’ve stopped.”

“Where are we?”

She peered down at the guidebook in her lap, puzzled.

“Nearly there, according to this, but someone outside keeps shouting.” Cecily closed the book with a sigh and shrugged. “I don’t know, perhaps they’re having a revolution, and we’re all under arrest.”

Penelope opened the compartment doors and stuck her head out.

“Where the hell are we?!” she screamed in Spanish. Someone hollered back at her. “Well, why isn’t the damn thing moving?!” More shouting, protracted this time, and at last she stood upright within the compartment and shut the doors.

“They’ll get on in a few moments,” she said cheerfully, “Something about a herd of cattle in the way.”

Alicante was one of those cities that refused to appreciate the value of a straight line, everything twisting and turning, nothing but back alleys and iron balconies overhead leaning so close to each other that they nearly touched, and palm trees, real ones, huge, planted in the ground! and everything bleached to a light tan by the endless, endless sun, which you could really only get a glimpse of if you climbed to the top of the castle and looked out over the battlements, up where it was open. Still bloody hot, but open.

Where it was calm. Where you could breathe in, and breathe out. The port lay below, and all its ships.

Everything visible at once, not squeezed in here and there as you tripped over pots of strange plants, dashing up and down streets that were nothing but staircases, all strange and impossible. Even if you could be down in there, suddenly turn, and see through the maze of buildings the shocking cornflower blue dome of the cathedral, the question became: where it had been this whole time, and which way were you turned?

Cecily loved it.

Like children in a German fairy tale, they went deeper into strange forests, except that they were adults, except that they were doing it backwards, leaving the familiar for the alien, going further in and further down, striding with great purpose. Higgins dreamed himself pausing at the tree line where the world went from open grass to the density of woods and mist, looking over his shoulder, squinting and trying to find a glimpse of whatever was back there. But after a moment, his companions’ light voices called to him from within, and he went to join them.

“Like a recalcitrant uncle,” Penelope told him.

“Come up with that on your own?”

She’d joined him in the gardens just below the old palace and was tiptoeing her way along the top of a low stone barrier, arms outstretched like an unsteady child. He reached out to grasp her wrist, reasoning that if she came down, it would be on top of him, and that would surely spoil the walk, for they were barely halfway out.

“Took me a while to come up with just the right combination,” she said, still concentrating on the narrow edge before her.

“How amusing,” replied Higgins, “For I think of you as a kind of wayward niece or younger cousin, only without all the entreaties and pleas from your parents to instill reason or dignity into you. Although if you crack your head open, Cecily’ll bludgeon me.”

“Oh, she won’t mind,” was her drawling reply.

“Then I suppose you won’t mind falling,” Higgins said, letting go merely to tease her.

“Ah, you see,” Penelope said, hopping lightly from the wall onto the walkway below at last, “We’re equally matched. Perhaps it is I who shall take you under my wing, and put a little sense into you.”

Higgins doubted that, and said as much.

“You don’t think I’ve anything to tell you?”

He laughed.

“What a strange, cold world you must live in,” she said after a few moments.

Higgins stopped, and then she did, a few paces ahead. He scoffed out a laugh.

“What do you mean?”

“I think all men must,” she said, still where she was, squinting and still stubbornly not coming back to meet him. “You… learn everything in the world too much, too soon, maybe, and think yourselves far above it, or…” Penelope looked away for a moment, then returned, doubled, with renewed vigor, “This notion that we all must occupy certain places in the world chafes me,” she declared. “I should like to live life as both a man and a woman.”

At this, he was flummoxed.

“You want to become a man?” They walked on. “Somehow I don’t think science has quite caught up with you.”

“Not become one; live like one,” she said, “I can still face life as a woman, I can reckon with who I am, but I want… I want everything. I want it all. I want to live exactly as I please, and the only people who come close to that are men, but even the freest man is a slave to the act of being one.”

He parsed this collection of thoughts for a moment or two.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s all a cage,” Penelope said. “A man who has everything—money, property, connections, his god, fulfillment through his work—whatever you like, whatever you imagine sets him free from the constraints of a hard life is worthless, because there are still boundaries he cannot cross, must not cross in order to retain his dominion. That narrow pathway that men all seem to think so glorious, so superior to anything else, is just that—a path you must squeeze your way along, ignoring whatever’s on either side, no matter how beautiful.”

“Well, of course there are boundaries—a civilized humanity depends upon them. And our place within creation is by virtue of our ability to think, to speak. Our ability to reason. Man must naturally, rightfully, be in charge of himself, of the Earth. God has granted us that much, at least.”

“I thought God was dead,” said Penelope. “That he remains dead. And we are the ones who have murdered him.” And then the young woman did something very peculiar, which was that she swung herself back atop the stone wall, bent toward him, and spread her thumb and forefinger about his jaw, framing it.

“ How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?" she intoned, looking into his eyes. “What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?" She let go of him, rose to her height once more, and with a little flick of her heel dropped to the walkway again.

He stood watching her, hands at his sides, for there seemed to be no other response to make.

And after a moment he could tell that Penelope was greatly affected by her own speech, for she looked away and swallowed hard.

“I wonder that it isn’t difficult for you to do, to carry the burden of two opposing ideas in your mind like that; to be a man of science and reason who understands so much of the world, its intricacies, pathways and functions; and yet, to simultaneously believe that God created the Earth and mankind, that he moves in mysterious ways his wonders to behold.”

“I mean it,” she went on. “How can you know the anatomical structures which make up the human mouth and larynx, and yet sit in church singing along with the hymns and blissfully believe the minister when he talks of God’s will, and other reassuringly vague stuff?”

“They aren’t necessarily at odds,” Higgins said at last. “The very concept of a higher power ought to inspire us, drive us to understand the world even more, we are, after all, gifted with natural curiosity—”

“But if we understand everything, what place does a god have in our lives? I don’t disagree with you; surely we’d be better off the more knowledge we have available to us,” said Penelope. “Ships can send invisible messages to each other through the air itself by wireless telegraphy now—where is God in that?”

“In the wonder of it, the extraordinary nature of—of how it’s even possible!”

“But even if you try to argue that God is inherent in electricity, existing down to… to the minuscule level of how it works, doesn’t that inherently reduce the almightiness of the Almighty? Gas lights, electrical conductivity—and then what? Each of them created by man, not gifted to us out of the primordial garden, and each of them taking away a little more of the mystery, of our fear of God’s wrath. We control the light.” Penelope fidgeted for a moment, and sighed. “And if there’s no mystery on high keeping us us all in line, then… religion doesn’t make much sense, either. The rules don’t make sense, because—because there’s no reason for them to exist. There’s no reward, which means there’s no punishment, either.”

Penelope worried her bottom lip back and forth for a moment.

“Mostly I wonder: if all we’ve been doing this whole time is behaving ourselves to get in to Heaven, if following the rules here and now is simply preparation for an afterlife, doesn’t that belittle this life, the one that’s supposed to be so precious and fragile? Why waste our little time here chaining ourselves to moral strictures, or other people’s opinions?” She kicked at a clod of upturned grass with the toe of her walking shoe.

For all his years of schooling and church, Higgins had not the slightest thing to say. She’d come to it, to her eerie and lopsided conclusion so quickly, so readily. Perhaps James had been here, listening to this, he’d know what to say to her, what she ought to hear. How she ought to be put back into place. But it all carried the distinct sensation that she was telling him something else, something about herself, that he couldn’t fully puzzle together just yet.

“I don’t mean we ought to start murdering each other in the streets, but there’s no real reason, no impetus, to fit ourselves into our ‘places’ within the world, is there? It won’t get us to Heaven, so… why not simply fulfill our desires in the life we do have, the one we know we’re guaranteed, and do it in a way that doesn’t hurt anybody else?”

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” he murmured.

Penelope looked off to the other side of the gardens, and Higgins frowned a little.

“Who are you?” He meant it to sound more curious, but perhaps it came out accusatory; he couldn’t be sure.

She scoffed, and gave a self-deprecating little smile.

“Perhaps I’m the daughter of the Antichrist,” she said, and rose to dust herself off so they could go find the entrance to the tunnels.

Sometimes in his bedroom late at night, a borrowed book beginning to swim before his eyes, he could hear in the distance the sound of muffled voices rising in pitch and volume before suddenly dropping off into nothing as though scolded into silence. Perhaps it was too much time spent together, just the three of them, even if they did visit Cecily’s friends in the country and the people Penelope knew in the city (and they were all the same, interchangeable actors playing parts and saying lines, and sometimes he wanted to applaud them at the end of the night, a thought which amused him one night and the next brought a strange melancholy). But he could never catch what was being said, and it had nothing to do with him—or at least it ought not—and let the book lull him to sleep again.

He found Cecily on the verandah, smoking and watching a yellow moon come up over the mountains.

They stood together in silence for a while, and then he nudged her gently, shoulder to shoulder. The briefest touch.

“You’ve seemed a bit down in the mouth lately.”

She let loose a stream of smoke, which instantly dissipated, carried away by the lightest of breezes.

“I suppose it’s been a bit tougher than I expected,” she murmured.

“Being away from England, and all that?”

Cecily turned to look at him, and after a moment reached up with one hand to brush something from his face before looking out at the low horizon.

“I mean giving up a whole cross-section of my life—designing, sewing—for laying about, swimming. I’ve no sense for how time passes anymore. It’s strange to be so… unproductive. This has been refreshing, and I’ve enjoyed it, but…”

The prospect of it was forceful in its sudden clarity.

“You want to return to London?” In the background of his brain Higgins could already hear himself constructing and testing arguments against it, reasons she ought to stay, for if she left, Penelope would go with her, and if Penelope went with her—

“No,” Cecily said firmly, “No, I don’t think so.”

She ruminated on the cigarette in its long holder for a moment.

“I’m struggling to find a purpose in all this. I want it to have meant something by the end. I just can’t quite see it.” The Baroness turned, and her face was a ghostly dim white in the darkness. She was smiling the way she did sometimes when something wasn’t funny at all.

“Perhaps I’m simply not where I thought I’d be by now,” she continued, nearly in a whisper.

Higgins looked at Cecily until her face blurred, until it was impossible to tell whether she was really there.

“Do you want to go somewhere else?”

“We said Spain,” she reminded him gently. “We’ll do Spain.”

“Yes, but if you don’t want to go—”

She let a pause slip past.

“I don’t know where I want to go.” He heard her sigh, and looked out to find the moon had turned a cold silver, had loosed itself from the horizon and was drifting far away. “I’ve had a letter from Vivienne,” she said suddenly.

“Oh?” There’d been a moment where he expected relief, but it revealed itself as a mild confusion instead.

“She’s got a place outside Vienna and wants us to visit.”

That was an easy enough solution.

“Well, let’s go there, then.”

“She’s in Greece for a while first, we’ll have to wait her out.” She let loose another bit of spent smoke. “Do you ever miss it?” Cecily asked him. “Any of it?”

“I find myself at times nostalgic for fish paste sandwiches,” said Higgins, bending over against the balcony and resting on his elbows, “Which is unusual, because I hate fish paste.” They were silent for a moment, and he sighed a little, ever so slightly disappointed.

Cecily indulged him at last with a small chuckle.

“It may amaze you to hear that I don’t think about any of it,” Higgins said slowly. “You get used to a thing enough and it becomes a sort of backdrop; one doesn’t really consider it when it’s been predictable, reliable. And then when it isn’t there, it’s impossible not to think about, and I thought it would be like that. But it amazes me, that this was the solution to it all along.” He heard her shoe scrape against the pavement as she turned to look at him.

“Everybody runs away from home eventually. Or they ought to.” She gave a lung-clearing sigh. “That’s what I’ve been doing the entire time I’ve lived abroad.”

“Perhaps that’s why you find yourself struggling.”

“Perhaps,” she said, very quietly. “But I’ve always been a foreigner, even at home.”

Intriguing, he thought, England, a foreign country. At what point did those other countries, those other places, become as familiar as one’s homeland?

They took the ferry out of Marseilles to L’Île Russe on Corsica, along the French side, and Higgins rolled his trousers up to his knees and waded out into the waters that were so blue, so clear, that he could still see his toes, the hairs on his shins. He looked out farther into the bay, and thought it would take a long swim before he would turn dark blue with it, would disappear altogether.

Higgins opened the solicitor’s letter after the preprandial sangria, a little ritual for which he’d developed a bit of a taste. No respectable vintage, and certainly not a port, but a concoction with plenty of fruit, sugar, red wine that had been bottled yesterday: it all surged to a dizzying head if you weren’t careful. The housegirl made it up with a splash of brandy, and he’d seen her chopping pine-apple and lime out in the courtyard. Likely the recipe was something she did by feel or instinct more than measurement; some concoction he’d never taste again once they passed Portugal’s threshold, which he knew they must do soon. There was no reason or logic behind this knowledge, merely a kind of sensation about it, that this had been enough, and they were approaching a threshold that they would only know when they got to it.

The thought charmed him utterly, but there was a dash of melancholy in there too, and he sat with it for a moment, looking at the red glazed jug his afternoon drink had come from. It had to be made by the girl herself, in this house, in this land, with these tools, with that jug, and the ocean working its spray against the cliffside drop. One element off and the whole conceit collapsed. A thing he could only have momentarily, and would never find again. Here it was, or rather, here it had been and would come again tomorrow, and when he left it for the last time, the careful balance of ingredients would be lost to him forever, even if he had a precise recipe and followed it with scientific rigor.

Was that what the Portugese meant by saudade? A longing for something which you could no longer have and yet wished for very much regardless.

Keenly aware of the interesting contours of that definition, Higgins opened the letter to find that as the property listed at the address of 27A Wimpole Street had sold at the beginning of August, the funds from that transaction had been remitted into the client’s bank accounts and the appropriate taxes and fees owed to His Majesty’s government calculated. This document would serve to notify the client that all taxes for the annum had been paid, but as the sale of the house had occurred within this calendar year, the—

Higgins stopped there, and stared at the letterhead at the top of the sheet. He went inside, sandals clapping against the flagstone in the foyer. He passed the housegirl as she brought out a tureen of something destined for the dining room; nipping into the east side of the house, he located Cecily and Penelope in the cooler sitting room lined with blue and white tile, and thrust the first page into Lady Sudcliffe’s line of sight.

“Are you aware of this?”

Penelope ducked her head and squinted at the wording.

“Oh, brilliant!” she said after a moment. “My God, I was going to suggest Morocco, but with that wad of cash we could round the Cape of Good Hope in a fully-provisioned private yacht and head for the Seychelles. Good show, Henry.”

Cecily swatted at the girl’s shoulder in light rebuke without even looking.

“What!” Penelope cried, crossing and rubbing at her arms, “I don’t hear either of you contributing to the planning of this venture, and I haven’t gotten to pick any of our destinations.”

Higgins turned over the page to gaze at it once more.

“Good gracious,” said Cecily, an astonished look about her now. “Are you sure that’s right?”

Higgins turned and called to the housegirl, who appeared in the doorway after a few moments.

“What’s today?" he asked, and she answered.

He turned back to the two women.

“I still don’t understand.” Penelope made to stand and go in to dinner.

“It’s November,” cried Higgins, a bit staggered by this revelation.

The information percolated among them for a moment.

“Well, I suppose time was always going to pass somehow,” said Penelope momentarily, and pinched his arm with a gentle affection as she tripped along to go locate some food.

“I knew I’d lost track of time somewhere,” Cecily said, and laughed in more bewilderment than anything else.

Higgins went to put the letter among his other things and looked one last time at the date at the top. It was strange, the act of knowing, but equally strange that when he folded it inside its envelope and tucked it into his luggage, it simply ceased to exist.

He went to join them.

Chapter Text

Though the road leads together
Still we make our way alone
And I got something I don't wanna lose
But I'm learning to let go of you

“What We Gained in the Fire,” The Mynabirds

Perhaps it might have continued in that way, gone on as they did—in a dreamy and distant wandering—if they hadn’t gone to Morocco, if Penelope hadn’t materialized in his doorway one evening while he sat in bed writing a letter with a book on his knees to ask if he had any tobacco. She was holding a long object in her hands, turning it over as though she didn’t quite recognize it.

“It’s in the top drawer,” Higgins murmured, finishing one last remark before looking up. “Why do you need it? Girls don’t smoke pipes—and if you bought that ugly thing in the market, I would guarantee the shopkeeper bargained you up past what it’s actually worth.”

He signed the bottom of the page the way he usually did—Higgins had written to Sir George once or twice so far and gotten replies bursting with questions, demands for satisfaction of the gentleman’s curiosity, and though constructing a response to these was a tedious exercise, he did find it aided his recollection of travel. Sort of a mildly-censored diary or accounting of events. Helped to remember how the days were different, for sometimes they all blended together in one smooth motion broken only by whether there were clouds in the sky.

Penelope had apparently found what she wanted and left the room whilst he mused in this way, for she reappeared through the ornate doorway, this time with Cecily in tow, who had a look on her face he could not divine. Penelope came over and sat on the edge of his bed as casually as if she were joining him on a sofa, motioning that the Baroness should come round the other side and be seated as well.

“Don’t mind me,” said Higgins with no little amount of sarcasm, “Just about to sleep, but you two have your little gossip, or whatever it is you’re doing.”

Cecily murmured in a squeaky little tone whether they ought to, to which Penelope answered,

“Oh, hush, it’s fine,”

And took from her pocket the entire packet of tobacco she’d pilfered from him (at which he gave her a rather severe look), followed by a round tin of fruit drop sweets, which she opened to reveal not fruit drop sweets but something that looked like… he peered closer. It looked like molasses sugar. A teaspoon or so of dark brown sand, stuck together in moist clumps.

“Penelope,” he said flatly, which she ignored as she busily added a pinch of tobacco and a pinch of sugar to the clay cup at the end of the ornately decorated wooden pipe. Cecily leaned forward to watch this from over the girl’s shoulder. “That won’t make it—what are you doing?”

“It’s a local thing,” Penelope said, holding the pipe up and having a look at it, testing its weight. “Mix it with a bit of shag—”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Cecily, moving about as though she were seriously contemplating going back to whatever she’d been doing before. But curiously, she stayed on Higgins’ opposite side. “This’d better not take too long, I don’t want to be up all night.”

He looked from one of them to the other, for there seemed to be no stopping this, and Penelope slid open a little box of matches.

“It’s like a stronger tobacco, makes your head fuzzy for a bit,” she told him, and fiddled with the match to light it.

“Did you happen to see whether the camera shop had any more film?” This question he directed to Cecily, who was watching her daughter with a slight frown. He’d bought a little camera before leaving London and had been trying to better document the trip—of course that did leave him with the choice of either retaining all the spent film, or attempting to have it developed as they went. Either way, each new photographic image was an addition to the weight of his luggage, an idea he didn’t particularly fancy given that the point was to travel light and go far. Of course, he could look into packing the negatives all together in a reputable European city and having them all sent back to London, but then the question became where he’d have them sent, for surely his mother wouldn’t—

“Penelope!” she cried, sounding shocked to the point of disapproval. He looked over just to see said miscreant purse her lips, the slightest wisp of smoke escaping from between them before she turned her head and exhaled a massive cloud toward the window.

There was a long silence.

“Good God, that smells awful,” Higgins remarked.

“That’s why you keep the window open, silly,” replied Penelope. “Phew! I say,” and she handed the pipe to her mother before rising from the bed to open the wooden shutter at the other window. Cecily shook her head minutely and took a sip before blowing a soft ring of smoke, then turned the pipe toward him, tip first.

His assessment was brief and apt.

“That is a vile waste of perfectly good tobacco.”

Penelope sauntered over to have another draw, and began to move toward the window once more.

“Hang on!” cried Cecily to his right. “If you’re going to make off with it, at least give us another go.”

“Here I thought I was helping you—biggest pair of complainers, I never saw so much,” Penny was muttering as Cecily handed it to him once more, a cloud passing over the bed before him like steam shooting out, obscuring the doorway at the foot of his bed momentarily. He inhaled again, and the young blonde went over to the window.

He looked down at the letter and the book and his pen, still before him, and drifted them all to the nightstand.

“Did you buy this somewhere, or did it come with the house?”

Cecily was playing with the gold silk tassel on the end of one of the decorative pillows on the bed.

“No,” said Higgins, teasing her a little boisterously, “I don’t even know what it’s for—why on earth does anybody need more than one pillow to put their head on, anyway?”

“It’s to look nice,” she said, and leaned over to rest on her elbow, flipping the tassel back and forth.

He lay back amongst the plethora of cushions that the housegirl made up every morning. At just this angle, the night air from over the desert came in through the window and it was a bit cooler, certainly helped by the fact that Penelope had opened them all. She was still leaning on the frame in the corner where he couldn’t see her, apart from a slow and languid cloud appearing outside every now and then.

Cecily had read his palm when they’d arrived in Casablanca.

Setting foot onto the African continent was nothing, of course, in the real sense of the thing, or perhaps it wasn’t—one didn’t simply come down on a lark, after all, and really it was just a place in a world filled with places, but at the same time, Africa—but the moment Higgins had stepped off the boat out of Portugal he’d stood on the dock just looking down at the dust wafting over his shoes as he pretended to wait for the two of them to come off the gangway.

And when Cecily had touched his elbow and looked into his face inquiringly, he’d simply said,

“It’s just odd to be here,”

And turned away to let it be at that.

The three of them sat by candlelight as she cupped his upturned hand in hers, moving a finger over the lines life had carved into him—for that was the way, palm up, wrist up, exposing the blue in his wrist to the room as though he came before her to have his veins opened with a freshly-stropped blade.

But he was in no danger, for the warm amber light flickered across Penelope, Penelope with her head resting upon her mother’s shoulder, listening with an intense quietude as Cecily looked, look, she said, see how it breaks, is interrupted just there, and then reforms, the thready little u-line extending from beneath his forefinger to his fourth. The Girdle of Venus.

It meant nothing to him, and he wasn’t convinced that she held much stock with any of it either, but it was a calm way to spend the evening, with few regrets, and Cecily was happy, and Penelope amused, and that was all right.

“And what’s that one?” The blonde tapped at a faint mark beginning at the heel of his hand, just below the last finger, and which curved ever so slightly as it wound nearly round the back of his hand. Higgins turned his palm—he’d no idea there was even a line there.

“Marriage line,” Cecily began, “When it’s long, the marriage will last and be happy, and when it is broken or short—”

“The marriage is broken and short,” he finished for her. “Perhaps I’m a natural at palm-reading,” and at this Penelope pointed at him and gave a soft, ironic exclamation.

“There’s hardly anything esoteric in palmistry,” Cecily said, “You just look, and follow what’s in front of you. The really good readers can tell you what time in your life these things all happened, though.”

“Ah, Henry, I don’t think you’ll ever get married, with all these dark omens before you,” Penelope chimed in.

“That’s all right,” he said easily, “I’ve never been the marrying sort, anyway.”

“What do people mean when they say that?” The young blonde had furrowed her brow a little. “Or men, usually, I suppose—you hardly ever hear women say they aren’t the marrying type, for all women are the marrying type, aren’t they? Even if they aren’t.”

“I suppose what I mean is that I’d rather be alone,” said Higgins. “That I’m very particular in my ways, and that’s not usually conducive to an as-one-flesh situation.” He grimaced.

Penelope scraped her fingers through her hair, against her scalp, for a moment.

“I don’t think I’d want to marry, either,” she said. “But not to be alone. I think one can be married and still be alone.”

“Marry well,” Cecily advised her, still peering over the lines in the folds of his hand and lapsing into an eerie and theatrical whisper, “And have yourself a great big house in the countryside, with so much room that you’ll wander about for miles and never come across another soul.”

And loads and loads of moldering portraits of all the dead relatives, peering down across the centuries to frown at you, to judge and deride you.

You selfish liar.

“Is that what you did?”

“You know perfectly well we had only the house in London.”

“I’d rather not marry,” announced Penelope in a grand sort of way, “I could lie in for as long as I wanted, and be beholden to nobody.”

“You do that anyway,” her mother said teasingly, giving a gentle pinch to the girl’s cheek. “I think you must be half-fae, wild as you are.”

“Well, then I shall never see a risk of it, for the fair folk could hardly tempt one of their own into darkness.” She paused, and recited a little, sarcastic and wide-eyed.

"Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie,
Down the glen tramp little men.
One hauls a basket,
One bears a plate,
One lugs a golden dish
Of many pounds’ weight.
How fair the vine must grow
Whose grapes are so luscious;
How warm the wind must blow
Through those fruit bushes.”

“No,” said Lizzie, “no, no, no;
Their offers should not charm us,
Their evil gifts would harm us.”

Blinking, Higgins realized he was still staring up into the strangely-patterned tile above the bedroom doorway, though conscious that Cecily had moved and was now amidst the pillows next to him. The lights from the candleabra overhead looked like triangles, slowly rotating, and he watched them for a while. Not detecting Penelope nearby, he tried lifting his head to see her, but found that he had gained several stone in the interim, and relaxed again, back to where it was very comfortable. His blood settled, and he was overtaken lightly by a kind of relief.

A shot of good cheer, as though that were a real thing one could have, an actual drink, fizzing and sparkling and flashing golden in the cup—by God, by God, here he was in Morocco, and Cecily was here, and Penelope was somewhere, and there were people in the world who knew his name, knew his face, and who cared whether he got on the boat with them, whether he ate with them, whether he was alive or not. Nothing was so terrible in this life that could not be forgiven.

He breathed in this elation, breathed out again.

And it was a good thing—a good thing—that he had left London. Left it, and everything else behind. He’d speculated on it, then repeated it to himself a few times to test it out, but here and now was the first time he felt it as a conviction and not merely a string of words. It was good to be away from London, good to be away from smugness, from arrogance, from the constant sense of superiority over others, from picking and scolding and tormenting and nagging.

It was all past. He could turn away from it, shut the door. And in so doing, perhaps what he’d left behind on the other side would wonder at times where he was, where he’d gone, and perhaps a little shot of imaginative indulgence on that notion would satisfy him and harm nobody, for it was all past and the door was shut. It was long since over, and he’d taken his time, but the world was a funnel shaping outward before him, and he and everything would go on and that would be all right, in the end.

“Did we lose Penelope?”

He’d directed this question at the ceiling.

“What?” Cecily sounded very far away, or as though she’d planted herself face-first into the cushions.

“Did we lose her? Is she still in here?”

At last he managed to turn toward the Lady Sudcliffe, who’d groaned and was—it took him a moment to figure out—attempting to right herself from where she’d capsized.

“Push, Cec, push up,” he shouted, laughing.

She drawled in a long moan for him to shut the hell up and her very pointed nose appeared at last in his peripheral vision.

“Penelope,” Higgins called out again. “Can you see her?” he asked the woman to his right in a quiet aside.

“What?”

“Can you see her,” very clearly this time.

“She’s in the window.”

“Still?”

“I think so,” Cecily said, sounding like she was either very sure or totally uncertain, he couldn’t tell which. And this thought, that she was both possessed of surety and entirely the opposite in the same moment, caused him to descend into a little bit of (another little bit of?) hysterical laughter for a moment before Higgins managed to turn and see for himself.

“Penn,” he called, and he was about to ask whether she planned to stay there at the window all night, if she meant to sleep standing upright like a statue, when it suddenly occurred to Higgins that he could have another long brooding set of dark thoughts about the way he was, but it was all for naught if he didn’t do anything with it. If he merely continued to drift, to perambulate through city streets and country lanes alone (he’d always loved long walks alone, if he could extract himself from this bed right now he’d go for a walk, but—), if he went on bending his hands and creasing his palms in ways that meant that he was destined to be exactly as he was, and forever would be.

And then Higgins thought: Even a year after knowing each other, he still didn’t really know who Cecily was.

He knew her, of course, he knew things about her. But the greatest sense he had of her was that he knew around her more than he knew her. In thinking of Mrs. Anstruther, of Lady Sudcliffe, of the Baroness, it was always about titles, or her occult affectations, or her hobbies, or her husband. Who she was as an individual person was a bit of a mystery. What did she value, what were her expectations in life? What was important to her?

He concentrated on the ceiling beams, contracting and expanding with each breath. They sort of worked in concert with a bit of music running spontaneously through his head, yet another tune he could never grab hold of before it disappeared. What was the name of that song he’d played on the piano last summer? No, he hadn’t played it, she had, off the top of her head—

The tiles rotated a sickening forty-five degrees, and Higgins remembered he had lungs.

Cecily. Right.

She was open-minded. Seemed to sympathize with other people’s emotions. Enjoyed a sense of adventure, but felt deeply out of place even years after joining the ranks of the gentry. Sarcastic sense of humor.

Was it him? Was he simply unable to detect the aspects of her character that he ought to?

He didn’t exactly try very hard. Or at all, sometimes. He could never seem to make himself do a thing he didn’t want to, even if he knew it had to be done—and it wasn’t even a matter of manners or politeness, which fell more into the category of being useless for other reasons. Sometimes it felt impossible to… just allow someone else to have what they wanted. To be victorious without him rushing in, pushing at it, pressing on it, testing how real it was. Jealously perverting the course of triumph because… he couldn’t remember why because.

And it was all a cycle, wasn’t it?

Meeting someone, knowing them, figuring out the little ways to disappoint them. Watching them grow more and more shocked, more dismayed, at how preposterous a human being he was. Letting them question their reasons for ever having taken a leap of faith in his direction. And the eventual break, the rift, only for the whole thing to start itself over once more. Sometimes he wished he could simply stop being the person he didn’t want to be. Just… full stop, then bound off the walls and go in another direction entirely. An ending—

“Does this ever end?” Higgins found that what his eyes could see around him was sort of concave, a wide arc from the baseboards below the window to the opposite wall across the room, just above Cecily’s shoulder.

“Everything ends,” she murmured in a way that had him dead certain that her eyes were closed, that she was concentrating on keeping her insides inside herself. “You know that. It’s why you have to make the most of things now, while you can.”

Higgins groaned; his hand was on his forehead suddenly, a million tons of himself, and he reeled slightly.

An ending leading into a beginning; a change.

That was what he wanted, but it was the movement, the transfer, of one grain of sand at a time. One could see it now and it was nothing, but it added and built, and this was the only way. Cecily had told him that once, and he didn’t need her to tell him those kinds of things, or listen to him, but it was nice to have someone to complain to about himself, as though he weren’t there. And that was her role, the job he’d employed her in, to forever listen to him in patience and offer up advice and sympathy, the physical manifestation of his conscience writ large.

Perhaps that was why he didn’t really know her.

All this wallowing and grieving over… over something that hadn't even lasted quite as long as it had felt.

Eliza came over and sat on the edge of the bed, looking down at him. Her face was blurred, moving through a complex sequence of expressions so quickly that it was hard to grab hold of one and pin it down, and—what color was her hair? Red, or brown? He knew the answer, but the way it shifted back and forth, never entirely settling on one or the other, was interesting to watch. She folded her hands in her lap.

“You should go,” he told her. “I want you gone. It was six months, and this—” He gestured about them without his hand, “Has gone on for twice as long, and then some.”

That’s not how it works. You don’t just get to wave your hands about and erase the things you don’t like.

He tented his fingers over his eyes.

“Get out. Just get out.”

I’m not inside you. People’s personalities are just a collection of the ways they’ve learned to behave in strong situations, she said.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Higgins muttered to himself. “Not you too, with this pseudo-intellectual tosh.” Penelope was always going on about this and that, usually things she read in books and didn’t take the time to analyze or think about for herself. Just parroting up whatever somebody else had written. He wondered if she had any ideas of her own or if they all came from revolutionary papers. “This is disgusting. It’s all just been toppling on and on…”

How convenient that you think that now . What was it your mother said, that you sulked over it? And now you’re claiming you’ve been wallowing in it? Perhaps we ought to employ precision in our language—basking. Basking in the glorious light of your hurt feelings, reveling in it. Gorging on your own self-pity. How is that supposed to accomplish anything?

There was a long sigh of raw exhaustion coming from somewhere. Himself. The room at large. It didn’t matter.

“Oh, listening in and then throwing all that in my face, that’s poor form, and you would, you little—”

Do you think I’m happy?

He paused, gathered together what was left.

“I suspect you aren’t.”

She didn’t say anything to that. He dropped his hand. She was still there, spinning.

“It’s all well and fine to make your dramatic exit, head held high, but it’s another thing entirely to face the world possessed only of the hope that it’ll be kind to you.”

I’ve had good luck before.

He ignored her. “It’s a cruel and unrelenting sort of place, even for a willful personality—and being possessed of such might not benefit you as much as you assume if you hitch yourself voluntarily to polite society.”

Cruel? Couldn’t be any worse than you were. I’ve been through the fires; I’ll be fine.

Higgins sat straight up and stared into the vortex of her face. She was nauseating to look at.

“You have two options,” he said, a thick vein of viciousness coming deliciously into him, “Throw yourself onto the mercy of the world with no education, no formal training, hands that can’t even sign your own name, and an accent that falls apart at the slightest pressure; or chain yourself to people who’ll watch you day and night, licking their chops and salivating for the tiniest mistake. Proof that you aren’t worthy. That you don’t belong.”

I would be wonderful among them. Charming, perspicacious—I would be a breath of fresh air to their stupor.

“You’d be a sideshow,” Higgins hissed to her. “You know that? A novelty. A hired pony to be trotted about for everyone’s amusement, a firebreather, a juggler. You wouldn’t even have to drop your clubs—just stumble a little, falter, and see if they don’t toss you right back into the gutter for the criminal sin of not fitting in. You, Eliza? You, with your cheek, and your impulsive mouth? Just skating by on the new small talk, praying every morning and night that you can keep their fancy a little longer, that you can squeeze yourself smaller and smaller to fit every rule, every new box they can come up with. And for what?”

She was quiet a moment, and then said,

You think we’re the same, don’t you?

Higgins sank back among the pillows, breathless suddenly.

That if you were different, if you were so grand in your affectations and your eccentricities and couldn’t get along with those people, then surely I couldn’t survive, but you know what the difference is between us? Do you know? You know, don’t you?

His hands were shaking, and there was poison in his throat, choking him.

I don’t need to grind someone beneath my shoe to like myself. I don’t attack people, lay my hands on them—

“You can’t be in here. You… stop being inside of everything.” That didn’t make sense. “You know what I mean.” Eliza moved; he heard the rustle of her shocking blue coat. “All I want is to wipe the slate clean and be done with it all.”

Absolve yourself, then.

He put the back of his hand to his eyes and smiled wanly.

“You don’t know that word.”

How do you know? You don’t know. I might know it by now.

That was true. She could have grown her vocabulary; taught her hands to write (forwards and backwards in Latin and Greek at the same time or some other extraordinary thing)—anything, anything.

I wish I could understand why you hate me so much.

“I don’t hate you,” he said. “I don’t.”

Don’t you? She sounded so sad.

“Do you want to know a secret?”

“What?”

He heard both their voices answer, but rolled slightly—twirled, the bed was sinking—toward Cecily along the other horizon. Gave his shoulder, his back, to the empty space at the edge of the bed. She was fixed among the pillows as though meaning to sleep, but her eyes were open.

He could tell Cecily. It was still early enough. She would keep it for him—although that wasn’t the point, not really. The point was to tell her, to turn up the palm of his hand, to expose just a sliver of the soft flesh of his wrist, holding it there as though she could take a blade to it if she wanted to. Perhaps she would, and perhaps she wouldn’t, but maybe—maybe it would all come out better.

Higgins tried to think about whether he wanted to do this. Tried to calculate what he’d think of it after sleeping, but the concept of morning was hazy and foreign, and kept slipping through his fingers. He weighed, tried balancing it on a little set of scales inside his head, and decided that he wanted to do it more than he didn’t.

“I know how my father died,” he said to Cecily.

“Are you not supposed to know?” Her voice lacked something—an innate quality of sophistication, or quite grown-up detachment that it usually held.

“When I was… thirteen, I went off to school,” said Higgins, “And I was only there for a few days before my mother summoned me home—all my bags, everything. Took me out entirely. And I got home, and she informed me that he’d passed.”

“You said he was an artist,” Cecily said.

“I did,” he replied, “I mean—he was. For a time. But he’d married Mother, and she was accustomed to a much grander lifestyle than artistic poverty, and she had money of her own, and… well. So he’d gone to the southern tip of Africa, on a hot tip from a friend of his. They went down together. That was when they opened up the gold mining to Britain, and quite a lot of men went down there.

She never said how. And I thought—he must have fallen, or taken ill, or something. We waited round for the ship with his body to come back; it took a month or two before any funeral could be held.” Higgins sighed a little. “And all that time, I could’ve been… But so, and my siblings—”

“You have siblings? Oh, no, I knew that,” said Cecily, curling up close to his side and fitting her head into the crook of his shoulder. “Brothers and a sister.”

“Brothers and a sister. They’re all older than me—Vicky’s the closest, only seven years between us, but they were all first together in a clump, so I was always off on my own anyway.”

“Oh, your mother doted on you, didn’t she?” Cecily laughed, a slow sound. “The unexpected starting over.”

“Mother used to call me her second first-born son.”

“That’s clever!”

“We had the funeral, and went back to the house, and—I can’t even remember how I came upon them, but I was going down a hallway and heard them talking, and listened at the keyhole, and my eldest brother said, he said—”

He paused, trying to remember the exact words, but they were lost, either to the haze of this or the vagaries of time.

“They were talking about how Father had gone down to Pretoria, found something, and changed his mind. Swapped claims with his friend, and then it turned out to have been the worse outcome. The claim he’d originally staked was the one with a thicker vein of gold, and he was left with nothing. They got into a fight, and…”

Cecily’s eyes were huge.

“Did he murder him?”

Higgins considered this.

“Perhaps it would’ve been better.” He felt a bit less substantial against the mattress, and the room did not seem quite so oppressively heavy against him. “No—Father took a shotgun, put it into his mouth, and pulled the trigger.”

If he was so miserable and cowardly as all that, then perhaps it was better done, Charles had said. And then the floorboard had creaked beneath him, the door had slammed back on its hinges and Vicky had bolted into the hallway and grabbed Henry by the collar.

Look at you, spying on us, you little sneak! Ought to box your ears for that— With her hideous rat-face, crossing her arms over herself, that overly-trimmed dress that did nothing but show off how plain she was and how she’d never compare to Mother. Charles a cipher, always ready to pummel you with all the technicalities of law, of reason, of debate. And James over in the corner looking out the window, his back to the room, ignoring the three of them.

What’s going on? Mother had heard the door and come upstairs. She looked at Henry and then at his sister as Vicky released him and backed into the room once more. What were you talking about?

A long and guilty silence—he’d never known what was happening behind his back, but he’d always guessed that a series of glances were exchanged amongst his siblings in order to come up with a compelling reason why he was with them at a time like this. What he’d heard.

They were talking about the horses, Henry whispered to her.

The horses?

On the carriage, with the coffin.

As his mother had guided him from the room to go and sit with her, he’d turned his head to see if they had all heard his lie, but only Vicky would look at him, and he couldn’t tell if she was more angry or worried.

Higgins took a breath.

“I don’t think any of them know that I know,” he said. But Vicky knew. Vicky always knew. 

“God,” Cecily answered in a whisper, and stretched out her arm to lay it across him.

“And of course we don’t talk about it—how on earth do you talk about a thing like that, even years later, especially years later—and what I’ve begun to wonder lately is: does my mother still think I believe her version of what happened, that he just suddenly and mysteriously went,” he lifted one flat hand, palm-up, “Or does she assume that I’ve simply found out as I’ve gotten older?” He lifted the other hand a little from beneath Cecily’s arm. “If I put it together somehow, or asked my brothers, or… I don’t know. It becomes a play within a play—pretending that I’m a grown man still somehow innocent and unaware, playing the part of a child kept in the dark.”

The telling of it having exhausted him, he turned to press his temple against the top of her head.

“I don’t know what to say to you,” said Cecily, “But that it’s an awful way to have found out, and then to have it hanging over your head for so long.”

It was nice to lie there, to have it out in the telling.

“I’ve got a secret,” Cecily murmured into his breast.

“Oh? Is that what we’re doing tonight?”

Her quiet was very serious, and the humor drained out of him.

“I’ve only recently been able to understand it a little better,” she said, and sort of wriggled about so they were looking at each other. “Penelope has, I imagine, told you that she isn’t Lewis’ daughter.”

“She mentioned it only a day after I met her.”

For a few moments, Cecily lay breathing against him, and he was reminded of what it felt like, the sensation of being this close to another human being. A quick dry kiss on the cheek was rote and meaningless. Living beneath the same roof on opposite sides of an invisible wall was a long study in separation. Dancing did not quite match up to it. And yet here, with each other in each other’s arms, Higgins and Cecily, he was struck by how utterly relaxed, how wholly without tension, such an arrangement was.

She whispered to him.

“Penelope wasn’t born out of an act of love.”

He did not know what to think about that, and then he did, and didn’t want to. Higgins kept his arms very still.

“Oh, I—”

He didn’t know what to say to that. There was nothing to be said to that. He tried anyway.

“That’s awful,” he said, because it was. “I’m sorry,” he said, because he was.

She took in a long breath, and perhaps this thing had loosed its grip on them, then released it, for the room had returned to its normal dimensions, its usual definitions.

“Some things are best left in the past,” said Cecily, “But in the end, I thought it was better that she know—but I don’t know now if it was better after all.”

She did not say anything after that.

He awoke the next morning utterly dried out, and coughing obnoxiously enough to make Cecily sit up from where she’d fallen asleep curled up against him.

“Have you got a headache?”

“No, you?”

“No, I’m starving,” said Cecily, looking blearily about, her squint landing at last on the window. She clambered over his legs to go and see, and began laughing.

“What is it?”

“Penelope,” she managed, and he joined her. Together they hauled the still-sleeping young thing over and deposited her onto his bed before going off to have double helpings of whatever had been prepared for breakfast.

Higgins had it in mind to go on to Tunis and perhaps Cairo, but Cecily had another letter from Vivienne Norton inviting them most particularly to see her in Vienna, and so they took a boat up through Gibraltar the week before Christmas. It was Penelope’s birthday, and they celebrated: a pudding cake with a bird’s nest of golden spun marzipan at the center of a wreath of figs on top elicited a shriek of delight from the girl when the waiter brought it out from the kitchen. Cecily gave her daughter a fanciful little magnifying glass on a silver chain, and Higgins presented to her a magic box carved from a deep and shining burled wood inlaid with pearl along the edges.

“The man said it can’t be opened unless you know what you’re doing,” he told her mysteriously. “Supposedly there’s a key somewhere, but you have to find it first.”

Penelope embraced and kissed them both before settling in to press on and poke at the box, cursing delightedly beneath her breath.

He nearly stood to go and have a solitary pipe near the railing outside, but Higgins looked them both over, Penelope playing with her gifts and Cecily fanning herself gently with a magazine, looking peaceful and content, and stayed where he was.

Chapter Text

“And so the dissemination of external influences and experiences has a greater impact on the interior child-as-self than we as a culture have ever examined until this point,” said Trauttmansdorff. He was a prematurely white-haired academic from one of the universities in Graz and had the most extraordinary thoughts on the idea of being a person.

Cecily appeared at Higgins’ elbow.

“Come tell Marina about Málaga,” she murmured, and he responded with amused surprise.

“You were there too—you know it as well as anybody.”

“It’s all in the telling, and you do it better than I ever could.”

He glanced about the circle before taking his leave, following in the wake of the Baroness.

Vienna; a pause.

They’d entertained their feet for a while, paddled about in the bay, dozed in a tiled parlor to avoid the midday sun, ducked and dodged heat so fierce that one woke in the mornings with a premonition of wanting a lie-down between lunch and dinner—and only that guaranteed return ticket provided enough mental fortitude to enable one to bravely pull body from bed in the first place.

How lovely, how strange, to be in residence at this villa with its mansard roof, the marble statues posing in the summer gardens and the great glass conservatory in the winter garden. Delightful, to meet with Vivienne Norton once more and to be counted among her circle of acquaintances. He’d been awfully glad to see her again.

She’d given them a party this evening. She gave everyone a party, for of course she knew everyone and she knew parties, and she was never alone in this house, filled as it ever was with her friends, all of them expatriated, all of them in some sort of self-bound exile, forming a new world beneath their feet. Swiss academics, Russian nobles turned Socialists, chorus girls, the usual sort of occultists, right down to a man who turned fountain pens for a living, which had given Higgins no end of delight for the hours-long discussion of pistons and whether the patented crescent-filler was simply a contrivance. Serbian philosophers, Americans in search of the Buddha—the most absurd cast of characters filled the nooks and crannies of this place, and all of them viewing from a distance a world that thought them too strange, too much, too outré.

In here it was an artist’s colony, comprising not bohemian youths play-acting at the sufferances of poverty, but people who’d seen the world, studied its nuances, and knew it didn’t particularly matter in the end whether you led a lady from the dance floor by your left or your right hand. They had ideas, opinions, weren’t obsessed with who was marrying whom and how ornate the wedding would be, but the workings of what was, what would be.

As he gathered from these soirées, the world was not long for the world. People did not merely question the here and now, but the future of things, and the nature of things. They thought not of stocks and bonds, or whether their employer would give them a pay rise, but of the universal workings. Higgins wandered from one room to another to find Penelope at the center of a ring of lookers-on, and by the animated nature of her gesticulations, she was giving at least one of them absolute merry hell.

“—Finland sees fit to grant it, and this year Norway too, so why not other nations, if they’re so civilized? And it’s an absurd stroke of irony that Australia, where our ancestors sent the worst convicts and prisoners as a kind of dumping ground, is so enlightened as to treat women as though we’ve a brain and opinions of our own. It’s a foregone conclusion of women gaining the vote—the only question is when.”

“But are they suited for it by constitution, by temperament?”

Everyone turned to face Higgins.

If Penelope was the slightest bit disappointed to see him wade into this argument in anything less than total agreement with her, she certainly hid it well. Indeed, she looked positively gleeful at his having stepped up.

“What is it that suits men so specially for it?—oh, I know. The all-powerful anointment by God, merely to tick a ballot box.” She rolled her eyes and gave an elegant and dismissive little shrug.

“Do you deny that there are natural distinctions—”

“Oh, no! Don’t you try that on me. I know you’ve been to Oxford and are versed-up in the rules of debate and all that, but this isn’t the Union and we aren’t competing for some silver cup or our names on a plaque. This is reality. You take a simple man—one who isn’t educated beyond being able to add his wages once a week, doesn’t read the papers but for the sporting section, holds a job of some dubious stripe and isn’t certified as an idiot—”

The ludicrous specter of unmoneyed Alfred P. Doolittle rose out of the floor before him, and he had to check a sudden fit of laughter that wanted to bubble up.

“—and you’re going to tell me, with a straight face, that such a man as that is a better choice to send to the polls than any woman who reads politics, follows the workings of government, of the goings-on of the world outside of the society column, and has something true and real to throw into the ring?”

“I wonder what sort of woman is as well-versed as you describe,” he remarked, folding his hands at his back. “A rare bird, with neither family nor friends for all the time she must spend brushing up on her law books.” A fellow with a thick handlebar mustache at his left elbow chuckled a little. Higgins thought of the girls he’d known as a younger man, and doubted very much that any of them had any idea how Parliament even worked, let alone held any interest in its doings and outcomes.

“Ah, you see how high the bar must be for a mere woman, but a man with the solitary qualification of being just literate enough to read the candidate’s name is eminently acceptable,” Penelope declared, lifting her chin a little. “If education is your concern, why not remove the burden of voting from any man who isn’t educated enough?”

“Goodness, what an idea,” said a man with a French accent on Penelope’s other side.

“You’d have to consider carefully what constitutes a sufficient education,” said someone else.

“Not to mention the legal hurdles associated with stripping away a man’s rights,” said Higgins. “Once people have got a thing, they aren’t likely to give it up as easily as that.” He snapped his fingers.

“The real purpose, then, is not to ensure that only those who are informed and capable have the right to vote—in fact, it has nothing to do with one’s intelligence or ability to lift a pen to vote—which I assume is what is meant by a lady’s constitution. All this resistance is merely meant to jealously guard the practice from an entire section of the population who willingly desire it and would gladly use it.”

“There have been arguments made,” said a middle-aged woman with a lorgnette at her eyes, “That women would naturally bring a sense of kindness, of charity, into the coldness of politics. The sphere of the home ought not go without some attention, at least.”

The man with the handlebar mustache leaned in at this.

“One might counter-argue, madam, that kindness would only slow the machine of governance to a crawl—what part of the domestic sphere could possibly require attention at the political level? Perhaps we might answer the question, once and for all, of how best to wash windows or make gelatin—”

Penelope slipped out of the ring of spectators now watching the new debate, and he joined her.

“Do you really think that women mustn’t vote, Henry?” she asked him, linking her arm through his, a reminder that they were still friends. He looked down with—if not a smile, then certainly a suggestion of one.

Higgins didn’t say anything as they walked together through the room, past the piano where someone was playing and singing a melody from some show that had cropped up of late, and into the hall which led to another drawing room, the one with all the mirrors.

“I don’t know,” he said at last, and as they stopped, he realized he meant it. “It is a responsibility, and not a light one. Perhaps there are fools who lurch into the polls as you describe, but not so many as all that.” Fools, or bounders, or the young men-about-town who seemed to spend all their time choosing the perfect shade of boutonnière, or gambling away their family’s fortune simply because they were the first son.

“It is accepted in some circles that women have consciences and the ability to reason,” Penelope answered with a little smirk of a smile. “Or do you think us all pretty mannikins and empty vessels?”

He put his hands into his pockets and leaned against the wall.

“Perhaps it’s a matter of… maturity,” he said. “Of being able to accept one’s place in the world. A woman at twenty-one or -two is far different than a man. Less of a sense of the world.”

She gave him a dark look.

“An entirely separate issue, I assure you.”

“From what I know of young women—aged twenty or thereabouts,” said Higgins, “—they are primarily consumed by thoughts of their dressmaker, their milliner, and whether all the men around them are falling at their feet in worshipful adoration.”

Penelope tilted her head at him sardonically.

“How many women under the age of twenty-five do you know?”

“Hmm,” said Higgins, “Not many, by design.”

“Goodness, men say women ought not be out in the world because it is corrupt and noxious and we must be kept pure and good and innocent, but then complain endlessly when the only thing women want to talk about are the little things we are allowed to have.”

“Ah, well,” said Higgins blandly.

“You don’t think I’m too stupid to decide how to vote, do you? I haven’t lived by parental rule in years, and look at me.” She gestured about herself, twirling, growing more grand and ironic as she did until she bumped into a painting on the wall and began laughing.

“It isn’t a matter of stupidity,” he told her, and tweaked her elbow affectionately. “Or clumsiness. I don’t know, it’s—perhaps it would make sense if the age limit were higher. A woman of thirty, say—someone older, more versed in the ways of the world. Less prone to making snap decisions, being impulsive.” He tilted his head to the side. “Or basing their choices and judgments on emotion.”

“Well, as long as you say yes, darling,” said Penelope, patting him on the back and steering them down the hallway once more.

How pleasant it was to go from one place to another and have all these ideas together; such a grand mixture of people and opinions freely expressed. No scolding for what was proper or healthy, no judgmental tutting or private lectures about shaming one’s friends and relations for talking of anything real, of anything substantive. Anybody from polite society in London wouldn’t have been able to face such a strange crowd without lapsing into embarrassed silence. How would his brothers and sister feel, burdened with the task of trading anecdotes with dancers from Montmartre, of being seated next to revolutionaries at dinner? His mother could pretend all she liked that she was possessed of modern and progressive thought, but in the end, she wouldn’t have been able to skirt by with her usual script. Wouldn’t have been able to make it through the night.

Well. None of that in this crowd. He went to find Cecily and located her near two women in deep conversation, one of them a lady of middle age named Madame Rohan who specialized in economics and was saying:

“Europe is divided and will only turn on itself. Infighting over territories and grievances from wars long past, competition over land and resources and borders, and the fear that Germany grows too large and will begin to invade to increase its power even more—it’s all getting to be too much,” she declared. “Then there are all the smaller revolutions fomenting just beneath the skin of society—”

“What was all that about?” he asked Cecily when they’d moved aside.

“Just talk,” was her answer.

Higgins padded softly along the marble-tiled hallway lined with rugs so thick he nearly sank up to his ankles, gripping a silver teapot. There were two glass beakers in the pockets of his dressing gown, and between the knuckles of his left hand jutted the handles of a pair of metal holders, spaced such that they would not make noise as he went. Two fluffy white dogs the size of cats not quite out of their kitten-hood had joined him as honor guard; he paid them no particular mind, and after several paces they paused, unwilling to stray too far from where they knew their mistress to be.

He pushed open a bedroom door with gold filigree and thick moulding across its face; the drapes in the tall windows were drawn shut and he paused to set both the pot and the metal holders on a dressing table before pulling back the velvet to reveal a white reflection from where the early rays of sunlight were beginning to reach across the snow on the grounds below.

The occupant of the lit à la duchesse bed, which was turned out in gold and cream and had a massive baldachin above, stirred, groaned, and pulled several pillows over her head.

Higgins took up the pot once more, fished out one of the glasses, and poured before perching on the edge of the bed opposite the large lump. He gazed out the window and sighed, meditative and pleasant.

It would be a fine day for a walk if the clear skies held. Perhaps he’d go to the lower gardens and have another go at solving the hedge maze, or take his pipe for a tour of the conservatory—such a great, grand inconvenience in Austria, of all places. Sit in the east drawing room while Penelope plinked around on what she insisted was called an mbira, a little handheld piano made of wood and metal she’d bought in Morocco. She could go at it for hours, never sounding quite in tune, and was driving them all mad with it, to her endless amusement.

After a moment the pillows shifted, a hand raised their edges, and a face peered out of the dark cave within.

“What time is it?”

“Dunno,” he answered, having another sip, “The fireplace is lit, so the servants must be up.” Higgins looked out the window again. The snow-covered lawns visible from this angle were very fresh and smooth, a huge bed of minuscule crystals pulled taut and soft like a coverlet.

Cecily twisted round in bed and sat up, very disheveled. She looked at the podstakannik in his hand, the only sort of tea cup that existed in a place owned by an absent Slav. Vivienne drank coffee and so had no opinion on the matter, leaving the three of them to figure things out on their own, and these things shaped like clear beer steins were odd—but novel, in their own attractive little way.

“Oh, God,” she said, and he produced from his pocket with a little flourish the other cup, filled it, and passed it to her. Any black tea had to be imported, for Austria in all its pretentions had never developed a taste for the stuff, and somehow the scarcity made it that much more tart and heavy in the mouth, like a fine wine. Except that it wasn’t what they were currently drinking, for Cecily’d been laid rather low these past few weeks and wouldn’t do anything about it.

“It’s not enough to call the doctor,” she’d told him when it first began. “And only first thing in the morning. Not as though I’ve come down with consumption.” This had been followed by a pause. “Right?”

“Not with the amount of apricot knödel I’ve seen you put away—ow! I say!”

The Baroness had recoiled back among her pillows peevishly, hand still in in a fist from where she’d socked him in the arm, and he’d had a good mind to leave her there if she wanted to behave like that.

Still, though. Higgins had looked down her throat with a small lamp and felt around a bit on her lymphatic nodes, pressing his fingers into the sides of her throat to determine how swollen they’d become.

“That’s an unusual talent,” she remarked, “You must tell me how you know these techniques.”

“Not as interesting as you assume.” Higgins pulled his hand away.

“Is that sort of thing in the normal course of a phoneticist’s work?” she asked him, rubbing pointedly at her throat.

“Anatomy classes,” he’d told her. “Probably just a mild but persistent reaction to the change in weather—drink something hot first thing and you’ll feel better.”

But when he instructed the cook to make up some remedy, Cecily wouldn’t drink the stuff, claiming it a vile concoction, and so the only thing to be done was for him to personally cart it to her room each morning and sit drinking it with her until she choked it all down. A little dramatic of her, certainly, but not the worst way to begin each day.

“Saint Cecilia was known for her troubles of the throat,” he’d commented one morning in the midst of this routine.

“Oh?” Cecily frowned. “I thought it was Saint Blaise who looked after problems of the throat. Or is it Barton? I’m not familiar with the saints.”

“Well, actually…” Something vague stirred within Higgins, and it occurred to him that perhaps the piece of related information which had burst unbidden onto the scene of his mind had a strange cast to it, as though it did not quite fit. But she was looking at him expectantly, and his only option seemed to be to go on. “She was struck with a sword on the neck three times at her execution, and managed to live for three days afterward.”

Cecily had stared at him for what he felt was really an unecessarily long period of silence.

“Why on earth would you think I’d want to hear about that?!”

“I thought you’d find it amusing,” he told her honestly, “Or at least interesting.”

“Neither! It’s neither of those things!”

“Objectively?” He couldn’t stop the word from coming out of his mouth. It demanded to exist in the world.

“Subjectively!” cried Cecily. “I could be very well plagued of cancer in the throat—”

“Oh, I doubt that—”

“—I am, at any rate, not feeling terribly well, and just woken up—damnit, Henry, you already know all this! You don’t need an explanation in the least, you just think you’re being funny.” She chucked a pillow at him, and the woman had a good arm, he could say that about her.

Cecily was frowning at him very much, thoroughly put out and not in the least impressed with this tidbit of information, and he’d seen that coming and done it anyway, and here was the outcome.

You can’t possibly be so offended by death—the Titanic barely moved you at all, why on earth are you going on about it here?

It isn’t my fault if your spiritual education is so lacking. All the saints died horrible deaths, don’t you know how they become saints in the first place?

Oh, you’re fine. Hardly dying, at any rate. If you’re going to be so childish and naive, you can convalesce alone.

Your husband’s been dead for nearly two years, you know, you ought to put it behind you.

Thinking I’m funny? Certainly not! How dare you level accusations at me , you beldam, I’m paying for everything on this trip—

And on and on. All of them somehow the worst option, but they still drifted through his mind, distant and watery background music, playing in another room, that couldn’t be tuned out.

He made a sort of wooly noise in the back of his throat at this, curling his toes up inside his slippers and squashing his face into a mess, before Higgins reached out to take the bottom of her tea glass and tilt it up to her face.

“Drink up,” he’d said miserably, “Perhaps you’re just having a nightmare.”

The tea really wasn’t as bad as she always said—not good strong black tea to really wake one up first thing, but nothing injurious, even if it was a bit… strong. Herbal. Botanical. He looked down into the cup now, and picked out a little shard of something plant-based suspended in the liquid. Cecily, having smoothed her hair a bit, sighed and dutifully took another sip.

“What do you think is in this?”

“Dittany of Crete, probably,” said Cecily, still in the raw voice of first light.

Higgins ignored her.

“Lemon balm. Ginger, I think?” He tasted it again. “It almost gives the impression of being spiced.”

“Opens the body and mind to ease the way for demonic possession.”

Higgins looked into his glass again.

“Ginger?”

Cecily rolled her eyes.

“Dittany of Crete.”

“Oh, I’m sure the cook doesn’t have it out for you that badly.”

The Baroness gave him a flat look.

“Ha, ha, ha,” she said.

“It was rather funny, wasn’t it? Thanks awfully,” he replied, affecting supreme serenity and having another taste. In a slightly better mood now, she shook her head at him. They sat in comfortable silence for a time, for that was how things had worked themselves out, they two resting on her bed in a friendly way.

“What do you think of this business of women voting?”

“What do you mean?”

“Penelope is certainly a firebrand about it—like watching a rabid preacher at one of those tent revivals one hears about.”

She laughed.

“Never been one for subtlety, that girl.” She sipped a few times in rapid succession and winced. “Eugh. Well, I’m for it, I suppose. Women could bring some humanity into politics, they say—I’ve often wondered how much MPs really talk of things like children and the home. When you’re so concerned with the grandeur of an Empire, I imagine it’s far too easy to forget the foundation far below. Education reform, hospitals, things like that.”

“Temperance,” he said, still looking out the window.

“Oh, well, now, we needn’t go too far,” and he turned to find Cecily looking darkly amused over the rim of her glass.

“Naughty!” he cried, mutedly, and they both basked in it a little. After another few moments, she yawned and stretched, which was his cue to leave her for the breakfast room, where Penelope and Vivienne and several guests of other stripe had already begun.

Higgins wandered in, hands in pockets, to which Penelope glanced up from slathering her roll in jam and began laughing, which in turn caused Vivienne to look up and smile. He smiled back.

“Good Lord, look at the sight of you!” Penelope cried. “I thought not dressing for breakfast would be great fun, give us all a bit more time abed, but it’s better than I expected if I get to see your hair stuck on end.” She held up a fork. “Shall I have a go at playing barber for you?”

“A really good hostess knows her guests fully and completely,” Vivienne told her mock-confidentially, and sipped her own coffee. “Even if that means they haven’t hit the combs yet.”

He basked in the pleasant haze of familiarity for a moment before helping himself to a boiled egg, ham, and the greasy sausages to which he’d taken an odd liking. When Penelope got up and disappeared with a wag of her finger and a promise to suss out wherever they’d hidden her bloody mbira this time, he turned to his hostess and posed the same question to her as Cecily.

“Hum!” said the Countess, pressing a napkin to her little cherry mouth, “We should have had it all along. We’re human beings, possessed of mind, body, and willpower—I see no reason not to, especially given that so many women are off to work. You know, they used to complain about the bicycle giving us too much independence, and I think they were right.”

“You’d use it for social reform?”

She didn’t even have to think about it.

“Money and taxes, My Lord Higgins, money and taxes. I’m the richest woman in the world for no good reason, and I aim to stay that way.”

It was curious how they all three had such different opinions, that their thoughts diverged over the justifications for it, and yet—somehow he wondered that any of it would ever happen if women would be so fractured in their cause.

On his walk back from the stationer’s shop in town, where he had simply browsed about, admiring the neat bottles of ink and sheafs of very fine paper—for though Villa Zubov provided every good thing that her guests could want, including plenty of means for letter-writing, it was still a wonder to go into a place and simply look, and imagine running one’s hands over lovely glass carafes all in a row in one’s own study, and the sensation of opening a brand new box of writing paper—Higgins was striding with nearly cheerful purpose up the main drive, heading toward the conservatory, when his shoe was met with a thick patch of ice, and he went flying.

Higgins lay flat on his back, staring up at endless white that shifted and flickered with slight gray patches, the only proof that he was facing a cloudy sky threatening to snow again rather than a Heavenly void. He’d landed on a fairly decent layer of snow, which was atop ice-crusted grass that crunched and cracked as he breathed.

It was sort of nice down here. Well… not nice, exactly, but not awful, either.

He didn’t get up.

Just remained as he was for a bit.

The clock on the church steeple closest to the house began to chime, and he realized that on the landing, a bit of snow had wormed its way between his coat collar and his neck.

How strange to have come to such a winter-bound place after the heat of Iberia and Africa. He wondered briefly if that sort of sudden change of climate had any detrimental effect on the human body—if, in reality, people were actually meant to shift between temperatures in a slower way, following the progress and change of the seasons. That would make an interesting thing to study; perhaps someone had written a book about it.

A set of muffled footsteps, which broke into a run, and La Norton herself appeared, looking down at him.

“Henry, are you all right?”

He looked up at her from the ground.

“I think so.”

“Is anything broken? Can you move?” Her face was strained, anxious. Higgins moved his hands and feet.

“No, I’m fine.”

She unbent, and stood fully.

“Aren’t you going to stand up?”

“I suppose not.”

“You’ve been down there for a while, aren’t you cold?”

He shrugged.

Vivienne gave him a long, odd look, and then did something strange, which was that she lowered herself to the ground next to him, in willing and generous solidarity.

“Well, if you’re going to lay down here, then I suppose I’ll join you.”

“Lie.”

She turned to look at him.

“You’ll lie down here.”

The Countess clucked her tongue.

“Such an odd duck,” she murmured, hugging her arms about herself.

“I’m not odd,” Higgins said evenly, “It’s everyone else who can’t follow a simple rule.”

“Hey,” said Vivienne after a moment, and he turned to her in some small alarm at the use of this interjection to address him, particularly as it had come from the mouth of a woman. “This might be unusual, but I have a proposition for you.”

“Oh?”

“I have a friend who works at the opera house, and they’re suddenly shorthanded for the productions leading up to the season.”

“You may find this difficult to believe,” replied Higgins, “But I’m rather infamously a non-singer.”

“Perish the thought,” the Countess said with a little gesture, “They need a dialect coach. It’s a small theatre, still fairly new, and some of the performers are on loan and keep gargling the German.”

He squinted at her.

“How is that a problem?”

She swatted his shoulder and they both let out a wicked, indulgent chuckle.

“It’ll be interesting at the very least,” Vivienne said. “His name is Rainer. You’ll get along splendidly.”

“That’s usually a portent for disaster,” he said. “Women telling me I’ll get on splendidly.”

She swatted him again.

“Maybe you will, and maybe you won’t.” She paused, thinking. “But either way, better than sitting around listening to what comes out of the music room.”

He had to admit, she was right in that respect.

They were still for a moment, stretched out side by side gazing up at the sky, and after a while of this, Higgins righted himself into a sitting position.

“All right, I suppose that’s enough of that.”

“Getting bored?”

“No,” he said, dusting himself off and looking about for his hat, “I’m cold and damp, and it’s finally beginning to outweigh the inconvenience that getting up would have done in the first place.”

“Oh, Your Grace would have stayed there forever if you hadn’t been cold,” she surmised as he reached down to hand her up.

“Perhaps,” declared Higgins as they walked back to the house.

Dutifully (and not incuriously), Higgins put on his boots and goloshes the next day and let himself be hauled off to the Volksoper. Vivienne was right: it was not particularly grand; he was received with at first a bit of suspicion, which turned into relief, for, as the kappelmeister told him,

“English opera singers who’ve never sung German—what sort of a career is that?”

Higgins let a discreet pause go by.

“An English one,” he replied, and the little fellow paused a moment before giving a chortling laugh.

After that, they did get on, though Higgins was disinclined to say that it was splendid, for the soprano set up to play Adele simply couldn’t wrap her tongue about the line Wenn nicht dies Gesicht / schon genügend spricht with anything approaching lively flirtatiousness, and that was rather the point of the whole thing: her big solo and all that. The chambermaid pretending to be a diva demanded center stage. He had her do twenty rounds of articulation exercises before he would allow any of this to continue. The lips the teeth the tip of the tongue, over and over, very nearly threatening to become a boiled mush in her mouth.

“Emphasize the third and fifth syllable in each phrase, if you please,” he instructed the woman, and let the pianist start up for the fourteenth or fifteenth time.

Enjoying the zealful charm and chaotic sparkle of Strauss once a year was one thing. Sitting through hours of repetitions and the same lines of accompaniment played again and again was outright Hell. Orlofsky was an ass. Eisenstein could go to blazes. It was all on the verge of ruining the piece for him forever, and rather than being conflicted, Higgins was half-mad with the urge to simply let it happen. He sought refuge in a dressing room one afternoon, rubbing his temples and repeating to himself that he was very generously doing this as a favor to the Countess, he didn’t need to shout at Doctor Falke for being so plodding, so damnably dull, the way his frayed nerves so very badly wanted him to—

In a moment of clarity, Higgins conceded that it wasn’t really his moral responsibility to either these people or to Vivienne Norton to continue, if the situation insisted on being as trying as it was. He could do as he liked, including giving up on this irritating set of circumstances. It wasn’t as though any money had changed hands, any promises. He hadn’t gone abroad to be press ganged into a job, of all things. This was all out of a sense of charity and nothing more.

The dressing room door opened, someone entered, and leaned against it, back facing the room.

He sat up straight and eyed this person cautiously.

The soprano playing Rosalinde turned, registered his presence, and jumped.

“I didn’t know anyone was in here,” she said. What was her name? Gerda Maxwell (Gerda, what an awful burden for a name). She was from—Higgins pressed his thumb into his skull again. It didn’t matter where she was from, who her people were, what street she’d grown up.

“I see I’m not alone in needing to get away from that for a bit,” he said. She was the only one of the English singers worth anything, who didn’t require much in the way of instruction or reproach. Still—someone who had a hand in the very problems he was attempting to escape wasn’t his ideal of a companion at a time like this. For that matter, nobody would be perfect. She went over to the dressing table and dug through one of the drawers, found what she was looking for, but hesitated. Ah. She wanted to be alone. Higgins moved to let her have whatever privacy she apparently required, but Gerda faced him to reveal a silver flask in one hand.

“Want some?” She was keeping her voice low and quiet.

“In the middle of the day?” he inquired.

She came over and sat next to him.

“A performer’s life is off the normal working day by six hours,” Gerda Maxwell remarked. “So it’s actually about…” She leaned over to look at his wristwatch, and Higgins pulled his cuff aside. “Nine in the morning.” The singer opened the flask and had a tipple of whatever was inside, then looked rather thoughtfully at it in her hand. “Have you ever had this?”

He took it from her proffered hand—it smelt of something dark and very sweet.

“What is it?”

“I think it’s supposed to be a schnapps.”

Giving it an experimental taste after wiping the rim, Higgins frowned. The flavor was as sweet as the scent promised, but he struggled to put his finger on what exactly it was supposed to be.

Ms. Maxwell sighed.

“I never thought of gin as having much of a flavor beyond that… herbal medicinal taste, but it’s funny how one can be homesick for the oddest things.” She peered down into the neck of the flask before twisting the cap back on and setting it aside. “Do you ever miss it?”

Higgins gave a short dry scoff.

“Oh—,” he said at her look of offended surprise, “Any time someone asks me that, it’s as though I’m supposed to miss England more, and am not doing my proper bit, somehow.”

“I miss everything being so predictable and orderly—you always know what you’re in for, no surprises,” she said. He sensed a soliloquy coming on, but it did not emerge, and at last he replied,

“I suppose that can be a comfort. The tea always tastes the same, the menu makes sense, you don’t have to think about what to tell the cab driver.”

Gerda Maxwell laughed, warming to the exercise instantly.

“No sense in not taking along an umbrella because you’ll definitely need one eventually.”

“And above it all, our innate sense that it’s all better, that it’s superior to anything else that ever was or could be,” Higgins murmured. She was looking at him curiously, and Higgins took in a breath. “Well, I suppose,” he said, and rose to head back out to the fray.

Home again in the evening, he knocked about at loose ends. Nobody was anywhere they usually belonged: no Penelope banging resolutely away at the keyboard, no Cecily and Vivienne in the unused sitting room they’d repurposed for Lady Sudcliffe to lay out huge lengths of fabric—upon his initial investigation into this venture, they’d beckoned him within and then tried to shanghai him into some sort of robe like Moses would have worn (all he’d needed was a staff with a crook at the top) and he’d steered well clear of them in that room ever since, giggling hysterically and gossiping like schoolgirls and having a grand old time of it—and the book he’d been reading lately was proving less than adequate.

Higgins stood alone, his fingers twitching a little.

He could try writing to London.

None of the ones he’d sent to Mayfair last year had been answered, so he’d given up a while ago and just done the best he could. The thought didn’t thrill to his heart, though, and he flopped over onto a very ornate sofa with quite a lot of gold scrolling.

He flipped through the rest of the usual list—the conservatory, the library. Hedge maze was a bad idea after dark (he’d found that out the hard way), and going for a walk into the city didn’t spark anything new. It was all done, all rote at this point—and how could one tire of a place like this, like Vienna? Sometimes it felt a little too familiar, a little too similar, as though—

But he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

At last he got away from the business at the Volksoper only to discover that the whole thing was a trap, that Vivienne had been rather deliberately circumspect in her entreaties for him to go and help her friend, for the next thing that happened was that he was summoned by request to the Hofsoper, the Court Opera itself, purveyors of fine musical entertainment to the pleasure of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and there dealt with far greater things.

“No, no, no—” Higgins was saying.

“Yes, yes, yes,” the Italian woman was fully shrieking at him. “You do not understand, Signor, this is the way it is done, and this is the way it shall be done!”

They’d been arguing for at least twenty minutes about whether she ought to pause at the end of a phrase before committing to the stage choreography, which was entirely beside the point, by his estimation, and well outside his purview. They were only concerned now with lyrics, with words, and she wanted to walk about the place, turn her back to the audience so that he couldn’t hear anything out of her mouth. There was no way for him to assess the crispness of her delivery if she insisted on behaving like a stubborn donkey. Besides, weren’t divas supposed to be concerned with being the best, and brightest, and projecting the farthest? And perhaps this all was the way things were done in some Italian companies (getting a feel for the space, whatever the hell that meant), but now it was a matter of principle. There was no way this woman would be allowed to have the winning say, particularly when she held up rehearsals for nearly two hours while perfecting her hair and makeup backstage—for something as simple as a bloody rehearsal that he was attending as a favor.

“Just because you’ve always done it this way doesn’t mean it can’t be done another way,” he told her, and at this she threw up her hands dismissively and began to head for stage right. “Don’t you walk away from me, madam, this is not up for debate!”

She turned and began speaking to the director in such rapid Italian that he couldn’t keep up.

“Don’t talk to him! Do not talk to him! He has nothing to do with any of this!” But the man crossed his arms over his chest and seemed determined only to weather this storm and come out of it as undamaged as possible. “Oh, for God’s sake, are you seriously going to pay this woman any heed?!”

With a complex series of gestures and a long shake of her head, the diva flounced offstage through the wings.

Higgins let his shoulders collapse and his arms dangle at his sides. The director came over as he was letting out a frustrated groan actually meant to be a strangled scream, but he couldn’t quite get up the momentum to really have a go at it.

“Simons said you were quite a firm horse-wrangler, and by Jove, I think he was right,” said the man, laughing.

“My soul for a good whip,” Higgins replied, face still in his hands. He stood upright and looked in the direction of the darkened wings. “I suppose she’ll order you to sack me, or you risk losing her from the production entirely.”

The director—Felix something, that was his name—shrugged.

“Well, it’s the way of things: when it comes down to a production like this, we do prefer having singers on the stage, not language experts.”

Predictably, his tenure at the Hofsoper did not last beyond that, for which Higgins was very relieved indeed, and went back to his circuit of walks and and reading and watching the hot-house plants throw out new growth for a time. And it was all right, if a bit dull at times—at least there were no opera singers to be dealt with.

But the real trap came weeks later, for Vivienne (and he was beginning to suspect conspiracy among the ranks of the triumvirate, for she did seem to have her hand in quite a good many schemes that wound up trying his patience) received at the villa an invitation to the annual Vienna Redoute, to be held at the Hofsoper with its chandelier and all the glittering lights and that sort of thing. The theatre stalls were cleared of seats to create a dance floor for a lavish party which lasted until six in the morning, she told him, with food on every level, the ladies all masked until midnight, and every second of it meant to demonstrate the full force of luxury that the Viennese had in their blood.

“That sounds exhausting,” he said, ramping up to a je regrette que non, but she charged on ahead.

“Oh, it is,” Vivienne cried brightly, “That’s why everybody sleeps all day before, and the whole day after, too. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to rest Your Serene Head; I’ll have Basil’s tailor sent over in the morning.” She breezed from the drawing room, leaving him outstretched beneath his newspaper on the gilded furniture ruminating on how she’d maneuvered around him like that.

And so, to the Redoute they went, every bit the spectacle Vivienne had threatened.

It had been so long since he’d been to a party like this one, and Higgins couldn’t remember ever having been to a party without his notebook.

They sat in the balconies at little tables and watched the performances below—it was nearly eleven before the debutantes were presented and began their waltzes. Finally, finally, the floor was opened to everyone, and there was a mad, if dignified, dash to go downstairs.

“Did Penelope just punch someone?” Higgins looked with disbelief at a brief hole in the crowd.

“Come on, Your Imperial Highness, I don’t want to miss the cotillion,” said Vivienne, tugging at his elbow.

“Playing fast and loose with these royal promotions,” he remarked to Cecily as they jostled through the crowd. “You’ve upped me from a minor French prince to the head of the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire,” he called up to Vivienne, “That’s not how any of this works, I’d be morganatic!”

“I can’t hear anything you’re saying!” she called back to him a sing-song voice, which was of course impossible being that she was only four feet ahead of him and throwing sly looks over her shoulder at Cecily.

The orchestra had already begun to play Wein, Weib und Gesang by the time they reached the ballroom floor, and Cecily waved cheerfully goodbye as he was dragged farther into the whirl by the Countess. They danced that, and then he found himself thrust into the hands of the Baroness for the Künstlerleben, came across Penelope for a mazurka he didn’t recognize, and at the very end of Eljen a Magyar he finally told Vivienne that was quite enough for him.

“All right,” she said easily, and Higgins went to find something with which to fortify himself. There was nothing but champagne and cream puffs and endless, endless, endless flower arrangements. How did people live like this?

He’d been sitting quietly by himself at one of the tables upstairs trying to see if he could pick out the hair and dress of any of his companions when a gentleman with a dignified bearing and a deep red sash across his whites and tails approached and inquired if he had located the person of Henry Higgins.

“I am he,” he answered.

“Would you please to come with me, sir.”

“What’s this about?” He glanced down at the dancers below, but still didn’t recognize anyone he could flag down.

The man repeated his request, and blinking, Higgins followed, soon finding himself at the opposite end of the ballroom floor in a secluded area. The majordomo bowed deeply, and the professor turned to find a very beautiful young woman there, clad in a silver-white gown trimmed in pale blue, with bands of diamonds in her hair, and a domino mask to match. He had no idea who this person could be, or why he would have been summoned to her side.

“May I present Herr Henry Higgins of England,” and didn’t that sound a little absurd coming out of the man’s mouth, all that alliteration from an Austrian. But as for the lady’s name, he did not continue in any substantive fashion. They had all the gentlemen at a disadvantage until midnight, when the female ranks of the party would at last remove their masks—but until then, the mystery remained.

He only remembered to bow at the last possible moment before it would become a shameful embarrassment not to, and the young woman gave him a swanlike tilt of her neck in reply, the majordomo having receded discreetly into the shadows.

“I am told you had a role in securing the good performances of our visiting singers for this year’s season,” she said.

Ah—he had the gist of the thing, now, and was a bit more in his element.

“One helps to the best of one’s abilities,” he said, “Madam.”

She neither affirmed nor corrected his assumption.

“Did you find it enjoyable?”

“It certainly had its interesting moments.”

“I am a great admirer of the opera, and never miss a performance. It is my great passion, and particular cause, if I may flatter myself a little. Perhaps in a different life, I might have enjoyed singing on the stage.”

Probably he was meant to say something effusive about how her gracious patronage brought bliss and delight to all of Vienna, but the most Higgins could muster was something vague about how she probably sang perfectly well.

They looked at one another for a few moments, and he realized that the small talk portion of the conversation had concluded, and now was the moment he ought to beg her leave for a turn about the dance floor.

Only—how did they do it in Austria? And at a ball like this one? He could remember someone saying something about how it was the ladies who invited the men to dance until the stroke of midnight. Or had he insulted her, damned the girl with faint praise, and now she was rethinking the entire exchange? He should have told Vivienne he wouldn’t come, been firmer about it, or taken leave of the whole affair the moment he was tired with the dancing. What was he supposed to do? Quite a lot of time was passing, him standing there with his hands at his sides, at a bit of a loss for how to move forward.

The lady before him gave the subtlest of smiles.

“A redoute is one of those thrilling French customs—we ladies are granted the privilege to ask gentlemen to dance. Would you do us the honor?”

An immense, internal relief hit his bloodstream so quickly he nearly hit the floor.

“You are very kind,” he said, and he led her out beneath the lights.

It was the Fledermaus Quadrille this time, and though he had not danced like this in a couple of decades at least, his partner was quite at her ease, and really a quadrille was simply a good deal of walking back and forth and bowing to strangers rather than the close intimacy of a waltz, which was perfectly all right with him.

“Goodness, I think I’ve heard every bit of these at least forty or fifty times,” he remarked to her as they walked around one another, before remembering that they’d not been speaking in English.

“Fledermaus never fails to excite me,” she replied, flawless in her execution. “I always seem to find something new and brilliant within each time I see it.”

At the conclusion of the dance, there was a deal of noise and buildup from the orchestra before the clock struck the twelfth hour, and all the ladies removed their masks to cheers and applause from the whole hall. Higgins turned to find his partner quite lovely indeed: as pretty as Lily Elsie, but more regal, with large and dark eyes giving her no small resemblance to a doe pausing at a sylvan pond in spring.

But still—no idea who she was.

“Shall we dance the next one?”

It was a waltz he didn’t recognize, and with this strange girl in his arms, it occurred to Higgins that it was was quite odd, being so close to another person—the mask had fallen, but simultaneously it had not.

The lady was staring at him keenly. She was a little older than he’d first thought.

“You seem a melancholy sort of man,” she said in a low voice. “I wonder if that helps or hinders your work.”

“Dialect work with singers isn’t my usual line,” Higgins said.

They slowly came to a halt even as the other dancers moved about them.

“It is a very difficult thing, to suffer from unhappiness in the heart of so much frivolty and celebration.”

“Are you very often sad yourself?”

She looked at him for a long moment.

“Strange how difficult it is to find fellowship or a kindred spirit in a state of melancholy,” she murmured. “And yet I think each day we must walk among those who would sympathize with us, if only we dared look.”

The song ended, and couples began heading for the edge of the dance floor.

“I must confess to remaining at a disadvantage as to your identity,” he said.

“That is easily resolved,” the lady replied, and gave a discreet glance to his hand. He led her back toward the secluded portion of the floor, where the majordomo waited.

“You have the pleasure of standing in the presence of Her Serene Highness Princess Anna von Auersperg.”

He bowed again, and this time she said, her face smooth and blank,

“Your work has not gone unappreciated, Herr Higgins. Thank you for the dances. Enjoy the rest of the evening’s pleasures.”

When at last Higgins relocated his companions for the evening, he told them what had transpired.

“A princess!” cried Cecily, looking all about. “I kept looking for royalty, but could never find any.”

“Was this your doing?” he asked of Vivienne.

“Difficult to say,” replied the Countess airily, preening at her dress a little, “Famous though I may be, I doubt I have clout enough to twitch my finger and send a princess running into your arms.”

She smiled mysteriously and went back out to the dance floor, catching a gentleman by the elbow and leading him deeper into the crowd as the Champagne Polka picked up.

Chapter Text

Penelope, inspired by the Redoute and a series of other soirees to which only she was privy, and motivated by her own exquisite sensitivity to the artistic life (“She means she’s bored,” Cecily remarked placidly) began to give parties, guided by the expert hand of Vivienne herself, and it was at one of these that Higgins met a group of fellow academics in the field of linguistics and phonetics from the university.

What a refreshing surprise to be among his own kind once more. Or for the first time ever, for they, too, had dedicated their lives to teaching and improvement of the self, a basic but essential element lacking from the membership of the Royal Society. It had been so long since he’d known what it was to be able to speak freely of a topic he knew so well, among people who both fully understood and were eager to listen to what he had to say as a fully qualified and respected expert.

The long hiatus from his profession had, thankfully, not lessened his enthusiasm, nor left him unpracticed or unable to recall the finest points of his own research. Its absence from his life had, almost paradoxically, created a vacuum: taking up once more the mantle of instruction was refreshing, as though he’d set aside a large painting in frustration only to come back to it later and realize exactly what had been missing, where to apply color with a fresh and wise eye. He could give it up, come back, and it would still be there, waiting.

And upon this serendipitous and sympathetic introduction, he was invited to deliver a series of lectures to the linguistics department. He spoke firstly on the subject of English phonetic inconsistencies as a barrier for foreign speakers, a fascinating topic that had never really applied to or interested his private students. With this appointment came access to the academic library, where he spent the afternoons that he was not engaged in boisterous and friendly debates with these new colleagues over methods of treatment and sources of speech defects in the Teutonic languages. He discovered that this arrangement was all to his preference: occupied with the knowledge and business he knew so well, yet without the responsibility of ensuring the progress of the unmolded, often unmotivated, and ungrateful individual, for this was educating the educated: there was no exhausting need to constantly explain the essentiality of why, for it was an audience who spoke the same academe language as he.

Perhaps this was how any seduction began.

“Look at you, moving your chess pieces about,” he teased her as they sat in the conservatory. Higgins was of late experimenting with growing a few plants of his own in an unused corner. When he’d inquired about the possibility, Vivienne had told him he could do as he liked, for she was not precious about what was growing in the greenhouse in the first place. To her it was simply another wing in another villa. He was busily trying to get an Epipremnum aureum to propagate so that he could observe and record its growth habit, and had designs upon the idea of eventually cross-breeding a leaf with two separate color variants, split down the middle, for his own scientific interest and amusement. Just to see if he could.

Higgins continued, looking through his glasses owlishly at the bright green leaf curled around itself, a little more loosely than it had been yesterday. Young growth was a much lighter shade of green than the mature portions of the plant, more elasticated, shinier and brighter. Perhaps by week’s end it would unfurl entirely and begin the process of darkening to the same degree as the rest of the specimen.

“So high-handed, calling in your favors to connections I might like to know, tasking me with jobs so that my brain doesn’t become too dusty. You’ve practically become my own personal agent of contentment.”

He was not at all annoyed about it, nor concerned—in fact, it was rather interesting that she’d done anything at all.

“High-handed!” cried Vivienne Norton, playing at being outraged, “I might resent a little the implication that I would use my power to make decisions without thinking of your feelings.”

He looked up at this dictionary-accurate definition from where he was carefully trimming away a bit of dried plant matter from the vine as a smile quirked at the edge of his mouth.

“Oh?”

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” she said, all nonchalance and shrugs.

“But you’ve no compunctions about wielding your influence in the first place,” he said.

She gestured with both hands and a smile as though that were perfectly obvious and understandable. Which it was, when one had the amount of money she did.

“Power is meant to be wielded,” said Vivienne. “Otherwise what’s the point? If I don’t use it to uplift someone I like, the alternative is a disservice to them.”

Higgins paused, arranging minutely the tools laid out on the potting bench before him as he thought.

“You choose to do this with the time you have on this earth,” he murmured, meditatively adjusting and straightening a small pair of Japanese bonsai shears, “Even though you are the richest woman in the world. Even though you can have anything you want in this life.”

Her answer was quiet, and when he looked up, her smile was both mysterious and wistful.

“Almost,” replied Vivienne. He thought of her lost child, and all the husbands, all the attempts at finding love, and considered of which she was speaking.

“I am absolutely furious,” Penelope gritted out. She had her arms crossed over her middle and was slouched back in her chair, absolutely furious, per previous disclosure. They’d had the servants erect a table out-of-doors, sort of a lunch and sort of a tea as well, in the mild sunshine and clear skies of a fine day.

Cecily buttered and jammed a roll and handed it down the table. “Eat this; you’ll feel better.”

“I don’t want to eat, I want to be angry.” Penelope turned toward the professor as though there were a legitimate issue at hand. “How dare you neglect to tell me your fortieth birthday was in February. You could have said something about it; I’d have had a real corker for you!”

“Mmm, I seem to recall your concerns veered in other directions at the time,” he replied in a low voice. “If you want to orchestrate your social wars and lay out your ballroom battle plans, you may leave me out of it, and I shall be all the more content and grateful for it.”

“You see!” Penelope threw up a hand. “I’ve no support anywhere.”

“You just can’t be too careful picking your friends in this day and age,” said Vivienne smoothly, and Higgins snorted from behind his newspaper.

“I should say so,” replied the young woman, “I’m half inclined to think he doesn’t want anyone to give him presents, or at least have a pudding.”

Cecily looked up from the wool needlepoint image she’d been working on of a large bird of paradise.

“Considering that he prefers that tasteless white gelatin to whatever you’ve imagined in your head—”

“There’s nothing wrong with a blancmange,” murmured Higgins pointedly, for it was a well-worn subject.

“Chinese sparklers coming out of a four-tiered cake,” Penelope said a quiet but firm voice.

“—perhaps Henry is not the ideal candidate for such an extravagant vision, darling.”

“What ideal birthday party would we throw for our man Henry here?” He looked up to find Vivienne gazing at him with a contemplative little smile.

“I want to host bacchanalias so good they will be spoken of in hushed, reverent tones, and no pretender to the throne will ever try their hand at it again,” said Penelope, her voice insistent like a knife stab.

“The people?”

“Fashionable.”

La Norton hmmed.

“The music?”

“Only what’s good to dance to.”

“The food?”

“A sumputous feast.”

“The entertainment?”

“Questionable,” Higgins interjected slyly, earning a chuckle from Cecily.

“The key is to narrow,” Vivienne said instructively. “It’s not enough to simply be over-the-top or ridiculous: you must do it with great specificity—it’s the only way to achieve true notoriety.”

Penelope made a rough noise in the back of her throat and steepled her fingers together.

“It really calls for spectacularity,” said Cecily through a mouthful of wool yarn. “Outré, even. One of the most memorable parties I ever went to began with the sacrifice of a goat.”

There was a deep, dramatic gasp from Penelope’s side of the table. Higgins touched his fingers to the bridge of his nose.

“—it was all a bit downhill from there, though, three days of the usual orgiastic quelque chose, and then I later discovered someone had cut off a chunk of my hair. Never did find out if it was because I got it stuck, or something got stuck in it, or if it was for a potion or spell. Anyway, I wouldn’t do it again without a bathtub or trough.” She paused. “And only on the ground floor.”

“What did you do with the goat?”

“Oh, we roasted and ate it,” said Cecily. There was another, subtler, pause. “And ground its bones into a fine powder which we left in little pentagram-shaped piles on the doorstep of a nearby church.”

Vivienne spoke up. “I think there are newborn lambs on the farms this time of year; two or three might be suitable.”

“There’s an idea!”

Sensing he was meant to purposely be provoked by these airily blasphemous musings, Higgins lowered his copy of Weiner Zeitung with a flat look; his companions broke into hysterical laughter at having gotten a rise out of him at last. He’d quickly surmised that the best response to their collective silliness was a perfectly straight face and droll remark, just as they’d apparently decided amongst themselves that any meditations from his direction that did not suit them were to be met with a swat on his arm. Or in Penelope’s case, throwing dinner rolls at his head, for she was as bad as any young man-about-town in a checked suit and straw boater. And luckily, not an especially good arm.

“Shadrach, Mesach, and Abednego didn’t play with as much fire as you three,” he said drily, removing his glasses to rub at his eye. There’d been something in it, bothering him for days now. He awoke each morning with the lid glued shut, the muscle struggling to open for at least a quarter of an hour.

Penelope turned to her mother, brow furrowed.

“What is that, a law office?”

Vivienne erupted in another whoop of laughter.

His lectures complete, they exchanged one capital for another, and took up residence on the top floor of the Corinthia Hotel. Vivienne insisted that they go to a cinema, which he’d never done before, and spent two hours watching a new Italian superspectacle about the burning of Rome. It was certainly no opera, and not entirely comparable to the theatre, but neither was it a music hall offering or even —God forbid—a vaudeville, he told Vivienne as they wandered home, Cecily and Penelope in tow.

“Spent much time in music halls, have you?” she replied, slipping her arm into the crook of his elbow.

“Enough to know my own opinion of them.” Higgins steered her toward the crossing at the head of the street.

“Where are you going?”

“Home—unless you wanted to go to a cafe.” Cecily and Penelope were still catching up, several paces back.

Vivienne looked at him, an odd smile playing about her mouth.

“This is Budapest, not Vienna,” she said. “We live on the other side of the river.”

They walked on, and he thought how strange, yet how familiar, how similar it all was, and felt a door open in the back of his mind.

One late warm afternoon, the blue skies filled with puffy white clouds bigger than cruise liners, Vivienne entered the sitting room, sat on the chaise lounge across from him, knitted her fingers together meditatively, and said,

“I’ve been giving serious consideration of how best to persuade you, and so far have been able to strike from my list flattery, flirtations, and hint-dropping. These are not your ways. I understand that. But I’m surprised at you, Henry—even shameless bribery gets me nowhere.”

Higgins glanced up, then briefly resumed his pencilled marginalia.

“Oh?”

“I see it behooves me to take the direct route, which for most women is in contrast to a lifetime of social training, but which for me remains a faultless bedrock merely veiled by money and frippery. Blunt honesty is in my nature.”

He waited.

“We should have an affair.”

Higgins stopped in the midst of turning the next page.

He looked about the room.

“Did Penelope put you up to this? That girl needs a better occupation, I’ve never known anyone who gets up to such mischief—”

“She did not,” declared Countess Zubov, and without taking a breath, went briskly on. “You may begin your objections, which I shall crush with devastating and logical counterarguments.” She sounded very sure of herself, to the extent that she gave one of her elegant shrugs, a very amused smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

He laughed.

“You see?” she said, “Just like a puzzle. I have plenty experience in managing difficult men and foresee no problems there. Why aren’t we involved?”

“You can’t be serious.”

“What makes you think I’m not? Go on, satisfy my curiosity.”

“Well, for one thing…” He thought about it. “For one, this is completely out of the blue.”

“To you. I’ve been working on you for months now.” A pause, during which she gestured a little impatiently. “Go on.”

“I don’t find myself requiring romantic companionship,” he said after a moment.

Vivienne narrowed her eyes thoughtfully, but only gestured once more for him to continue.

“We’re entirely unsuited for one another.”

“Why?”

He was about to say I’m devoted to my work—but he didn’t have any. Work wasn’t in the way; he didn’t work. What did he do with himself all day? Read, visited the art museums, took long walks, listened to other people’s conversations at unusual, neurotic parties, and rose the next day to do it all over again. The only thing which had interrupted the flow of time had been his brief tenures in the opera houses, his lectures and debates at the university, and only at the hands of the woman in front of him. There was so little to be done now. There always had been.

The stupor was back.

Higgins chose his words carefully.

“As you say, you find me difficult—perhaps a better word might be impossible.” Looking down at the book in his lap, he went on. “One doesn’t become an academic by tripping along down garden paths and making love to a woman inside a Grecian folly.”

She tipped her head and gazed pleasantly out the window for several moments, prompting him to ask,

“Vivienne?”

“Hmm?”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Higgins said reproachfully at her obvious daydreaming. “If it’s love you’re after, I’m afraid I’m the last person for it, as I’ve none to give. Ask anyone—I’m cold, selfish, and unfeeling.” This warning thus delivered, he waved a hand and moved to return to his book.

“Love!” Her long upward yelp of laughter was a shock to the senses. “I’m not looking for love; I just want to have fun with an interesting person, someone I enjoy being around.”

He was utterly bewildered at her unflinching persistence.

“We’re so good at keeping one another company,” she declared. “The two of us get along splendidly.”

Higgins smirked at this, ironic and broad.

“All right—magnificently. I can buy a thesaurus and find the right adjective.”

“Adverb.”

“That too. Hell, I could buy the company that makes thesauruses and have them swap the definitions.”

She bit her lip to keep from smiling at her own joke and failed outright.

Higgins closed the book and set it aside.

“You’re determined to make this happen,” he said in amazement. It was impressive, a woman who refused to be put off, who wouldn’t back down. And yet she was so kind, still smiling at him.

“I don’t understand how such a dynamic and outgoing man can live like you do—you must be so lonely.”

Was he those things? No one had ever called him that before, but he was already past it, thinking: There it is.

“That’s just it,” said Higgins, livening immediately to this line of argument, “Everybody—women especially—always assumes that humanity as a whole must have some baseline intolerance to being alone, that every living man, woman, and child must reach a point, the exact point, where being alone turns into being lonely, without fail or variation.” He looked at her. “It’s an assumption I’ve never quite understood. I don’t require someone be there when I wake in the morning, I don’t yearn to go searching for someone in the drawing room or the dining room to tell her something interesting I’ve just recalled, I don’t… I don’t need someone hovering over my shoulder, hoping I’ll pay attention to her.”

She did not answer, and he went on.

“You know me, what I’m like. You ought to realize what a risk you’re taking, to bank on gaining any sort of happiness out of the deal. I’d have thought you long weary of the sort of man who wouldn’t bring you flowers, or call you darling, or recite poetry beneath your window.”

“I’ve had all that, and it’s never been as impressive as everybody wants it to be,” said Vivienne with a fullness of honesty that made something twist painfully in his chest. “And I wouldn’t want to spend all day draped over the furniture, working fancy needlepoint and waiting for you to talk to me—I have a life of my own, money of my own, my own secrets and thoughts and opinions. I have other things to do, you know.”

La Norton said this with such warm haughtiness that he felt his brain pulse inside its casing.

“Lead separate lives with a transactional arrangement, then? How positively cosmopolitan.”

The Countess was silent for a long time, so long that he began to think he’d really offended her and the conversation would be over as soon as she pierced him with some blistering rejoinder and he could consider his hands washed of her, when she said,

“And yet I suspect it’s what would truly suit you.”

He wasn’t stupid—he’d heard her granting him increasingly elaborate and fulsome nicknames, going out of her way to ensure that he would be happily occupied here, living in her house. Dropping in on him as he read in the drawing room, watching over his shoulder in the conservatory. Asking what he’d done at the opera house, how his lectures proceeded. He’d known. But it had all been shrouded in a kind of foggy distance up until now, as though they’d both silently agreed never to mention it, agreed to simply let it exist, that that alone would be sufficient.

“Why are you so set on this? On me? What have I done?”

“I like you,” said Vivienne, bald-faced and plain as day.

There was only one way to answer that.

“Why?” It came out of him in a kind of exhale of desperation.

She cocked her head to the side and gave him a long, assessing look.

“It’s hard to pin down,” she murmured, “But I think it’s all that prissiness.”

The scoff which came out of him was inadequate to convey the level of indignation that overtook him.

“Sorry—you all say priggish, don’t you.”

“Those are the same thing!”

“You’re so tightly wound that it’s any wonder you aren’t a basket case,” she remarked, and it was stunning how she could say those words, slip her hand and then her entire arm between his ribs, thrashing and fishing about, probing the dark corners. But with that delicate tone in her voice, crafted for his ears alone, all he could do was watch. “Bossy, anxious—you’re right that I’m right. You are difficult. But ultimately speaking, I don’t think it’s that you don’t want to, or that you are cold person incapable of feeling—you have enough emotions for two or three people. You’re funny, witty, charming, intelligent, but I don’t think you’re impossible, Henry. You haven’t gone to those lengths in the time that I’ve known you.”

Vivienne was thinking of Harwell then, the man who’d stolen her son with the blessings and good cheer of the United States judiciary system, and if she could handle him and all the vivid humiliation of fighting to be a mother to her child with such grace and aplomb, she could handle Henry Higgins bellowing over the nuances of grammar. His awful, unkind ways. (Not his hands around her throat.) Here was an intelligent, attractive, generous, and fascinating woman, one near to his own age, the richest woman in the world, a living and breathing fancy, and he was arguing that they made a bad match. Men did not do things like that. Reject a woman who stated clearly, unequivocally, without reservation or silly insipid games or incomprehensible hieroglyphic signs, that she wanted to know him better, to be near him by choice.

He was down to his final argument then. Higgins thought about how to play this card, how much of it was truly necessary to reveal.

“I’m not the sort of person who can jump into these things with easy abandon,” he said quietly. Carefully. He flicked his eyes up toward her. “I lack a romantic nature—it doesn’t come easily to me. I’ve not had the best experience with that sort of thing.”

“Everybody has a bad story or two in their history—” she began, but Higgins lifted his chin and dropped his shoulders slightly, and Vivienne went quiet.

He thought of Eleanor, and Eliza, and what had become of Caroline between their bookends.

Vivienne was none of those. Not some silly girl with a head full of delusions. She was older, wiser. Sadder and yet—more cheerful and at her ease. Perhaps she’d make something of it.

Perhaps if he had early and advance warning that this was what was to come, it wouldn’t sneak up on him, startle him from behind, make him jump and shout crossly.

Higgins worried his bottom lip between his teeth.

“Shall I think about it?”

“No!”

He frowned at her, for he had not been expecting such strictures. Vivienne tilted her head at him, softening.

“Kicking it down the road won’t help you make up your mind. Life is for living, now. Here and now.”

Do what thou wilt etc., he thought. He couldn’t escape it, the universe was determined to make him hear that.

“Usually when people speak to me of impulsivity or eccentricity, they are as singular character flaws I ought to mend,” Higgins said crisply. “This is a first: encouragement to outright relinquish propriety and decency.”

“Oh, Henry,” Vivienne said with a smile like she’d got both the canary and the cream, “The time will pass anyway—why not make good use of it?”

He looked across the room and out the window for a moment.

“What’s holding you back so much?” she said after a while.

“How do I know that our expectations are in alignment?”

“Goodness,” said Vivienne with a sharp breath out, “We’re not getting married, this isn’t permanent. It’s only meant to be a bit of fun. You like fun—everybody likes fun.”

“I don’t. I don’t know that I like fun,” he said, looking at her at last.

She rose from the chaise lounge and came over to sit on the arm of the couch where he’d been the whole time, placed her arm across his shoulders, and looked into him.

“You don’t need to be so sad,” Vivienne said in nearly a whisper. “You don’t have to be that.”

And she leaned over and kissed him, starting as she meant to go on. If there was nothing in life that was so unforgivable, if second chances and other beginnings were possible, perhaps this was it.

They spent fine days on the river, waving to Penelope from the little wooden yacht rented from the docks nearby. Vivienne and Cecily had grown up sailing in the San Francisco Bay, while Higgins could not remember once ever having set foot on anything floating in the Thames, and so either of them worked the lines and tiller while he let the breeze filter through him, plucking at his his hair and clothes. They climbed Gellért Hill, hiking all the way to the empty citadel and looking out over the cresting swells down to the city and the old churches far below. Penelope insisted that they all go to the newly-opened Szécheny Baths as the weather cooled, and he was surprised to discover that he had a taste for thermal steam-baths, and happily so, as he’d always enjoyed a good soak (“So does my uncle,” Cecily told him when he remarked upon this, “He runs a hotel in Switzerland with thermal pools, where you can sit and watch the snow pile up whilst you’re nice and warm. Perhaps we might go and see him soon.”). He went back on his own a few times, and was quite content. They picnicked in the City Park, and went to the opera, and every good thing that he could stand, and it was all all right.

And when they returned to Vienna in the fall and Higgins was reunited with his colleagues at the university, the junior department head, a fellow in his fifties named Rottmayr, summoned him to the offices.

“Perhaps they mean to install you as a permanent member of the faculty,” said Cecily, there to see him off at the front door one blustery morning.

He doubted that, but appreciated her optimism.

But it was not an offer of employment with the University of Vienna at all, but rather a request that he might bring aid in the spirit of collegiality, for there was a fellow who’d been teaching at the Berlitz School in Trieste, but he was ready to give up the position in favor of joining the department, and it was put to Higgins whether he might like to go down and teach for a little while. Just a few months. Otherwise an agent could find someone else without difficulty.

Higgins thought about it. He’d never taught foreigners to speak English before, but supposed it was not so far removed from what he’d done with private students. It was not likely to pay well at all, but that was never quite so important; mostly he was curious to see the famous Method first-hand, to know how it differed from his own techniques.

That, and the Mediterranean and Cairo were, if not really very close, then at least in geographic alignment with the city. He’d had something in the back of his mind for a time now, ever since Morocco, and he’d been thinking of how to make it happen, and more importantly how to break this news to his companions.

He wanted to go to South Africa. To Pretoria.

He wanted to see the gold mine.

This would not be the usual undertaking with which he had approached his travels so far—there was research to be done into what sort of boat would be willing to take him halfway down the edge of the globe. Where he would stay, what sort of guide he might expect. These were serious aspects to be considered, but were not so insurmountable, Higgins thought, as to put him off the notion of doing it at all.

First, though, he went to talk with Vivienne, for if she had never said anything, well—he would simply do it, and would not ask for a single opinion at all.

“Trieste sounds lovely,” she said. “And the Dark Continent—what an adventure you’ll have.”

He was taken aback by this, and must have looked so, for she went on in amusement:

“What, did you think I’d cry and scream and throw up a big fuss?” She smiled. “I told you we were only having fun—you do whatever pleases you.”

“It doesn’t bother you at all, that I’d simply pick up and leave?”

“You’ll come back,” she said with ease. “Or you won’t, in which case my only regret will be that we didn’t have enough real fun.” And there was that tilt of her head to go along with those words.

Higgins stared at her.

“What!” cried Vivienne with a sparkling laugh, “It’s your decision, and I accept it gracefully.”

“How do you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Just—take it, accept it, like that.”

She moved to sit in the windowsill and beckoned him to join her.

“There’s plenty I can’t control in life,” she remarked, “But at least my reaction will always be my own, for good or for bad. I am disappointed that we won’t be able to spend time together while you’re away, but one disappointment, no matter how big, isn’t the end of the world.”

“But how do you do it?”

She looked out over the gardens. A strong wind had come up and was blowing leaves along the paving stones outside.

“I think of the worst reaction I could possibly have, and then I picture forward in time from there, after whatever crisis provoked it has come and gone. And if someone whose opinion I respect would be ashamed of me for responding that way, then I temper myself to something I could live with on my mental ledger.”

“And you do all that, in a split second? You aren’t ever surprised, caught off-guard?”

“Oh, everyone has their bad days, even if they try hard not to. But it’s easier the more you do it. I mean, I’ve bet badly so many times, I should be an expert at it by now—husbands, the stock market.” She wrapped her warm little fingers about his wrist. “But when you step up to the table in life, you need to be ready for any outcome—to expect nothing, and everything, simultaneously.”

He decided he liked her even better than he already did after this speech, and kissed her cheek. What a thing, to be able to part for a time as calm and cheerful friends.

“Besides, I’m a very engaging letter-writer,” she said, still in all that cordiality, “And Cecily and Penelope will be over the moon to come visit. It’s only a few hours from Venice.”

The door slammed back on its hinges, and he jumped.

A dark storm cloud, scientific name Nimbopennystratus, passed the threshold and glared at him, hands on hips, mouth and eyebrows squiggled into parallel lines of theatrical irritation.

“Oh, now,” he said, trying to get ahead of her, but she came right up and jabbed her finger in his sternum.

“You are playing a very cold game with me, Higgins, and I’m rather hard done by it, I should say.”

He sank onto the edge of the bed, looking at her as one does a child who ought to know better than to have a tantrum, and she knotted her fists into his lapels to shake him back and forth a little, an act of mild violence which he tolerated with good humor.

“I shall never throw you a birthday party at this rate,” Penelope lamented in a wail. “And I’d such genius plans for you! Wonderful plans! Amazing plans! Plans of which you would not have approved of!”

“Extraneous preposition.”

“Ugh! You beautiful, horrible, pedantic monster!” and she kissed the air about his forehead five or six times, for she was feeling particularly histrionic at this turn of events, as she was sometimes wont to behave. He’d mostly learned to ignore these antics, or if he felt expansive, to one-up her in absurdity, which made her laugh.

“Goodness, you are ridiculous today.”

“Being intelligent and incisive is exhausting,” she said in a very different voice, winking at him. His smile in response was wry.

“Uh-huh.”

She fussed with his necktie, loosening and doing the knot more neatly.

“You can’t stay until February? The last week of January, at least?”

“The terms don’t run like that. You can throw it after I return,” he told her reasonably, for he had a good deal on his mind. “There’ll be plenty of time for a ball later.”

“Well, you’d better hope so; Cecily’s not pleased.”

“Seemed fine when I spoke with her,” he said, not a little surprised at this information.

“Mmm, not that she’d say anything, but I think she’d much rather we go on this voyage as accomplices. Or handlers. Or wranglers. Or—”

He thought back to that night in Casablanca, and looked down at his hands, folded in his lap. Cecily would be the one who wouldn’t want him to go face it alone, for she was the only one of them with an inkling of his reasons.

“You don’t want to go all the way to Pretoria,” Higgins said gently, interrupting her list. “Much better to stay on, enjoy yourselves, and all the luxury and comfort.”

She ignored him, for she’d launched into a description of his lost birthday party, never to be.

“I’d make it a costume ball set in the years of your dashing youth—”

“Oh, good gracious,” he muttered.

“With opera singers—”

Higgins crumpled up his face at her.

“And everybody resplendent in bustled-up gowns and tails and masks—”

“Is this party for me, or for you?”

“And with plenty of food, the sweetest wines, whores and cocaine, and fireworks at the end of the night, over a lake or a pond, if we could manage to find one in time.”

“Well, that’s very—what?”

Penelope squished his face between the palms of her hands and gazed down at him in such a perfect imitation of seriousness that he was nearly inclined to believe her.

“Oh, Henry, that is the sort of regard I hold you in esteem of.” She paused, then scrunched up her face as she tried to figure out whether that phrasing made any sense. The blonde looked back at him. “I think you’re a good old egg and I’d fetch you so many whores, if it made you happy.”

“Don’t bring me a whore, I don’t want a whore,” he managed with his face contorted in this fashion.

“You’re right, you’d probably train her to speak properly and ruin her crude appeal,” replied the girl with convincing authenticity, before she muttered to herself. “Actually, I wonder if anyone’s ever thought of that—getting the common girls to talk and act like courtesans, setting them loose among the middle class, and then collecting a nice fee for the trouble…” Her hands dropped away from his face as her eyes darted back and forth, gears winding inside her head.

“Penelope,” Higgins said in a monotone.

She sat on the bed next to him and sighed, all joking aside at last. “I finally had a line on teaching you a thing or two, and here you go swanning off to the darkest reaches of Africa without any of us.” Penelope fell backward onto the coverlet. “Another continent, another country—another hemisphere! I am vexed, Henry. What shall I do without my avunculus?”

“It’s Trieste,” he predicted placatingly. “I’m not booked for Africa yet. You’ll all be fine without me.”

She did not reply for a moment, and he turned to find her regarding him gravely.

“We are your friends,” she pointed out. “Whether you think you are worthy of it or not.”

How easy it was for her. How easy for women, at times, to cut straight to the quick of a thing, to come up with the combination of words and tonal inflections that hurt the most, and not always out of anger or exasperation with him, but a quiet kind of knowing. As though all that time they spent at the fringes of a room, watching, observing, telling each other secrets and gossiping in low voices, gave them a sight beyond sight—the ability to see inside a person, to see the wounds he thought his flesh and blood had filled in but had really only papered over.

Higgins rubbed the pad of his thumb across his chin.

“Trieste is not so far, and I daresay you’ll come visit me, and Venice too, I expect. And we’ll write.”

“You swear it?” she asked the ceiling. “You’ll write to me often?”

“Every week,” he offered.

“I shall hold you to it,” she warned. “And come down there if you don’t.”

“Perhaps not every week,” replied Higgins, for Vivienne had extracted a promise from him to match her page count (and he had not yet seen firsthand whether her boastings of being a prolific writer were true), and Cecily had requested with a graveness that he give plenty of updates so that she would know that he was all right. “Perhaps I could trade off between the three of you, and you all could share it amongst yourselves.”

“I still don’t like it,” Penelope said, pulling herself to her feet and planting a loud smooch atop his head, “But I shall pester Madre and Marraine on the hour to book us train tickets south.” She disappeared through the doorway.

He sat for a moment alone, then gathered himself and went down the hall to sit with Cecily for a little while in quiet fellowship.

Chapter Text

Dear Henry,

Goodness, isn’t your handwriting exquisite! I always took you for too much of the stodgy academic to be much of an effete (or am I thinking of the word aesthete? You’ll know which I mean), but there is something creative in your soul after all, and to that, I say good show. Man cannot live on bread alone, etc. Try to eat something a little more adventurous, and which is not constructed of milk and gelatin. Do they even know what blancmange is down there? One prays not.

Well! We are all here and doing well, and immensely relieved to hear that you have settled in and found rooms suited to your taste and general requirements. I urge you not to take the situation with the shutters too strenuously, for well I know how little things begin to grate on you after a time, and it might spoil your entire trip if you let it. I think if you accept things as they come (and yes, that is a difficult thing indeed when something chafes at you like a pebble in your boot), it will be far easier on your nerves.

Your student Signor Foscarelli sounds like a real blighter—Penelope has ordered me to put down that word, for she insists on hovering over me as I write this, and when I inquire as to what she means, she says it’s worse than a masher, but not quite the same as a bounder. I have no understanding of this scale of wickedness and can only leave you to attempt a translation. As to whether he attempts to undermine you—difficult to say without more knowledge of him as your student. (Cecily and I argued for twenty minutes over whether to call him your “adversary,” which I think works much better. Just letting you know who’s on your side in all this. - P)

I am designing a new collection, and before you roll your eyes and begin skimming through this part, know that it is a perfectly ordinary and respectable one, not “two hundred yards of god-knows-what sewn into a sleep sack with arm holes,” as you always say. It is a series of drop-waist day gowns in competing shades of tangerine and sky blue, and I am very pleased with how well it’s all coming together. An acquaintance of mine in Berlin says that I ought to go there and put it up, but of course the Germans are so awfully hard to please, and harder still to decipher.

We might go to Salzburg for a fortnight, I think. It’s supposed to be rather pretty this time of year, with all the schlosses and things like that. I don’t know Mozart as well as I ought to, and you know I’ve no desire to see cathedrals, being that I shall catch on fire and really put a damper on the whole holiday, but I should like to see the mountain fortress, at least. And the sculpted gardens at the palace, perhaps, but it does remind one awfully of Versailles, and I hate when everything is pastel.

Oh, speaking of the mountains—I’ve heard from my Uncle Joseph, the one in St. Moritz. I haven’t seen him in ages, but we’ve had ourselves quite a little correspondence. He had all sorts of reminiscences about San Francisco that I’d nearly forgotten about. He made a fortune in the gold rush selling (of all things) denim trousers to the miners. No gold in our family, but quite a lot of indigo dye, it seems. It did make me a little homesick, in a strange way. Perhaps next year we should head to California—or if not, perhaps I should get my hands on a bolt of dungaree and see what I can make from that. See me in trousers next time we meet.

I suppose I should end this here. We think of you often and hope that you do the same, and that you are doing well and staying busy.

All the best,

Cecily

—

Saluton, onklo!

I suppose it’s my turn to pet you and praise you for the excessive nature of your script, but I expect you’re already preening and smug in anticipation of it, so instead I’ll say it’s a horrorshow of swirls and loops, and that you probably waste a good chunk of your income on fancy paper alone. Did you buy a bottle of violet ink?! Or are my eyes going bad and it’s just reflecting funny in the sunlight?

What in the name of Christ is that word in your second paragraph supposed to be? I have asked Cecily, who after squinting and fetching a magnifying glass has hedged it to be Parsifal, and Vivienne agrees, so I shall go with that. No, I don’t think they’re putting on whatever that’s supposed to be in Salzburg. Oh, I’m told it’s a Wagner spectacle—now I really don’t want to go see it. Good to know, thanks!

Went to an absolutely raging party Friday last with a few artists I met at another little get together. One fellow says he wants to capture the light within my flesh and render it ageless and timeless, and we all know what that means, so he and I spent a funny little evening getting better acquainted, and with one thing and another, I found myself splashing about in the bathtub he had in this godawful set of bleak apartments (Austro-Hungarians are only good at being surrounded by gilded furniture, anything less and they collapse as a rule), and what do you know but his fiancée walked in and they began having quite a row. From what I could pick up of their German through the wall, it concerned money. It’s always about money, isn’t it? Even when it’s about something else. And just as I’d got my left slipper back on and was about to exit through the window, it occurred to me that in times like these, it’s important for we girls to stick together and present a united front against the men of the world. That, and the window was cemented shut. So I went out there and began explaining as best I could in what little German I do know, and upon my grand and dignified auf wiedersen was delighted to discover that she’d followed me out into the street. And before you say “Penelope she was only following to thump you soundly about the ears with her handbag,” I should mention that there was a cafe across the way, and as she came at me, arm raised and handbag loaded, I took that arm and both of us inside to have a coffee, and from there we became better acquainted ourselves. Perhaps I’ll paint her.

Your lessons with these Triestines are sounding more and more like a job every day. I know that’s your one true love and all, but don’t overdo it, eh? Work isn’t everything—in fact, more than not, it’s nothing. Certainly not a personality. And one that I thought you gave up. Tell us more about this Irish writer who so mysteriously hates you! I should be overjoyed to know if someone in the world considered me his personal nemesis—is it because you’re an Englishman? I would think that would give you two something in common besides both giving lessons, although you would be the more conscientious one about actually teaching. He sounds ghastly, I demand more. Not nearly enough drama around here.

All right, I can hear the gong for dinner. Go find some pretty Italian to dance with—

Penelope

—

Caro Henry,

Don’t let Penelope take you for a ride, she delights in putting people’s backs up. Your choice to write in all capital block lettering was hysterical, but I assure you, your script is perfectly legible. What an expert Italian hand you have! And what a choice of paper—laid, but with a fine glaze. Did you get it in France? I’ve got several boxes of good paper around here somewhere, I’ll have to see about getting it out.

Pleasantly, it falls to me to tell you about Salzburg, and the wonderful time we had there. The food isn’t nearly as bad as you’d expect in the more provincial parts of the country—a sweets lover’s paradise. Really superb chocolate-and-cream pastries called schlotfeger, and all the strudels you can withstand, until you can do nothing but sigh in delight for the cherry purée dripping down your chin and coating sticky fingers. Cecily told me you have quite a connoisseur’s taste for chocolate, and so I have sent along in this package a box of Mozartkugel. Hopefully the weather hasn’t melted them. Can you guess the flavor of the marzipan inside? I suspect you’ll be able to tell by the pale green color alone.

Is Trieste treating you well? Funny place: full of Italians, but ruled by Austro-Hungarians. Go figure. Have you had a shave at one of the barbershops? They’re famous for a good shaves and haircuts. There’s a little place in Milan that sells the best-smelling bowl of shaving cream. Cella, I think it’s called, redolent of cherries and almonds. It’s divine, I absolutely love it. If you get a chance, buy some, and I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. I once bought a bowl of it just to sniff—it’s somehow both tart and comforting. If they made it into a perfume, I think I’d bathe in it.

And while you’re there, have a pair of bespoke shoes made. Italian shoes, Henry! Nothing as lovely as slipping your feet into something that was made precisely for your exact personage. Something in a supple, buttery leather, maybe a monk-strap shoe. You would look so stylish, and it’s the sort of shoe that easily straddles the line between formal and informal. Perfect for looking smart without blending in too much.

Oh, I just reread that last paragraph and feel so absurd. Here I go on and on, telling you what you ought to be doing. You don’t have to do all that—just think about it. Really what I’m trying to say is that I hope you’re taking in as much of the experience as you can, and not leaving anything on the table. That’s all we can ask for in life.

Did you finish that book you were reading, the one about the Second Punic War? I remember you said something that stuck with me: that your interest wasn’t so much in how the battles were fought, but why. I was never much of a history buff, but I looked it up, and that was a big one, wasn’t it? I’ve sat here for the past ten minutes trying to think of something remotely intelligent to add, but have come up with nothing. I guess not all of our interests can be so perfectly aligned.

How are your plans proceeding for Africa? I nearly wrote plant there instead, which reminds me that your vine-y ivy is doing very well in the conservatory, according to the gardener. I check in every now and then—no color variations yet, but it’s thriving. I found some tropical plants that I didn’t even know were in there, and I can’t think where they came from. Certainly not Basil; I don’t think he even knows what plants are.

But back to Africa. You mentioned visiting in order to see the history of the place? I wonder what particular reason you have for going there, or what historical events you’re interested in. I have an agent who manages all my travel, and I’d be more than happy to ask him to look into ships and guides for you. Really, it’s the least I could do. I’m sure you’re looking forward to it, and will be the more content if your plans are securely arranged.

I genuinely hope you’re finding enjoyment in your travels.

V

—

Hello, Henry!

I am writing very quickly from the sewing room—or what I’ve managed to designate as the sewing room, because there’s still a bed in here—to say hello, and that I’m glad to hear your lessons are going much more smoothly, although I don’t think I’m wrong in reading between the lines that you’ve managed to abandon any pretense of following the exact method they’ve asked you to, and are exacting your own policies. Precisely as I knew you would, you anarchist you. Burn this letter if that’s the case, you wouldn’t want the authorities catching wind of any nefarious goings-on in your rooms.

That glob of ink was supposed to be a sketch of a smiling face, but I’m trying to write this on the cutting table and my pen keeps blotting up.

The photograph you took from your window is so bizarre!! Thank you for including it. I haven’t seen any of your camera work so far, but speaking as someone who’s been an artist’s model and does know a bit about these things, you do have an eye for composition. Penelope mentioned that you can buy backing slips to paste onto the blank side of the picture, and you can send them as postcards. If that’s true, you should be sending us a lot more post, even with just your initials. Efficient, if not a very deep message. Don’t you dare get any ideas about substituting anything real for a picture and hastily-scrawled set of letters. But I’m still stunned by that view! Amazing that you can see so much of the city in just one glance.

How was your new year? Did you have a nice dinner with the other instructors? Or perhaps it was given by one of your students. I’m nearly jealous, thinking of you having other friends that we don’t know about. Kind of strange to think about, actually—a whole side of your life that doesn’t involve us. I imagine you found some way of your own to celebrate.

You mentioned in a previous letter, I think a couple of months ago, that you were teaching a pair of nobles. What are they like? What is that like? Do they expect you to go easier on them? Or to bow to them and call them by their titles? You’ve had past experience in dealing with men and women aristocrats, so perhaps it is no degree of difficulty. I think that would be quite the incentive, though, getting to correct your social better on his pronunciation…

Did Signor Foscarelli ever get over that lisp? You said you was certain it was an affectation. Did you catch him in the act?

I ask too many questions, but do so with the knowledge that Penelope is sure to get the answers out of you even if you pretend I haven’t asked them, and so my conscience is clear.

Last week I did a tarot spread for the year ahead. Lots of court cards. Portentous people!

Best,

Cici

—

HENRY HIGGINS—

Many happy returns and the happiest of birthdays, you oaf, you churl! I’m fully aware of writing out of turn and that it’s actually Aunt Viv’s go this week (and you may expect a parcel from her, I saw it as she gave it to the footman to haul into town), and Mother Cec has been looking rather shifty and asking if Viv is absolutely certain she sent you your ration of correspondence (I nearly wrote rasher), which means you’ll get something from her as well, but I have snuck this off to the post by mine very own hand to ensure that you get the confetti I’ve tucked inside. Hopefully it’s all over your rug, and stuck in your hair and clothes, and serves as a good reminder of why you do not duck me by running off to another country. I’m imagining the look on your face—you know the one I mean, go look in the mirror—and luxuriating in it. Serves you right for going to Pula without me.

I love you and I hope you step in a puddle.

Pennsylvania

—

Henry,

Thank you for the well-handed poem; Mrs. Browning is one of my favorites. I didn’t know you drew birds, but you certainly do justice to the noble peacock. You are full of surprising talents and mysteries. I’ve tucked it away someplace safe. Your signature took me a minute, but made me laugh—how ironic.

The exciting news is that Cecily has at last grown sick of Penelope asking her when we are leaving to visit you, and also of Penelope taking off to visit these little towns and villages to the east of Vienna (she nearly went to Prague two weeks ago, which is almost as far from here as it is to you, and Cecily was naturally upset, they had a bit of an argument), and has given the go ahead for us all to visit Trieste and then Venice, just in time for your holidays.

You’ll come with us (won’t you? Of course you will) and we’ll see the piazzas, and have a nice quiet gondola ride. Perhaps it’ll be chilly and we can tuck ourselves under a big fur and stay blissfully warm. I got distracted here just thinking about it, and wandered off to have a bit of lunch! The house I usually stay in is tucked away down one of the quieter canals. In the mornings, the light comes through and it is truly Heaven—you’ll see it and agree. I quote her back to you:

Let the world’s sharpness like a clasping knife
Shut in upon itself and do no harm
In this close hand of Love, now soft and warm,
And let us hear no sound of human strife
After the click of the shutting.

We’re all so excited for a trip, and even though it’s two weeks away, I think each of us has already begun packing in earnest. Cecily has designed herself a new gown, and I am forbidden from mentioning any more than that. She really is fuller in spirit among her friends and work after losing Lewis—you have my gratitude for gently pushing her back out into the world. I was worried about her.

I’ve had my secretary enclose the full train details and when you can expect to see us. So, so soon.

With affection,

V

—

H—

Writing just as we’ve gotten back to fulfill the promise that we’ve made it safely. Cecily is sleeping it off, so I’m being responsible for once. The luggage and photograph negatives you asked us to store for you are here, and they’re just fine, so stop your obsessing over whether they made it. What a marvelous, marvelous time we all had. Perhaps someday I’ll manage to remember more of it.

Penny-Ante

—

Dear Henry,

The atlas in the library tells me there are nearly three hundred miles separating Vienna from Venice, but I think even after coming back, part of me was left behind among the canals and piazzas. What a marvel, to wander down alleyways hand in hand, to go running from a sudden storm to shelter beneath one of the archways, sodden and disheveled, and to be wrapped up in your arms, and to kiss you.

You see that fun isn’t so horrible after all—I hope not, at least. Certainly not after that.

Cecily thought your new shoes were so fine that she began to speak of designing menswear on the train home. I refuse to sink as low as saying that “I told you so,” but you don’t need to be so hard on yourself for them—they make you look outright dashing. And for someone who claims he trips over his own boots constantly but who can run across a rain-slicked set of porcelain tiles with those massive feet and never miss one graceful stride, I will point out: no shoelaces. Consider my elegant logic carefully, if you please, sir.

I placed the Murano vase you favored in the East drawing room, in a little alcove shelf where it catches the light first thing in the morning. (And didn’t I tell you? Heaven is here on Earth, and it is in all of Venice’s little places—carved windowsills, rumpled bedsheets when you first get up to stretch, and the way a gondola tilts.)

Are you settled, back in Trieste? Do you walk across to the Stella Polare after giving lessons, or do you levitate just above the pavement and float along, quite unconscious of how you got to a place when you get there?

Ho saziato la mia sete alla fontana dei tuoi baci.

Vivienne

—

Higgins,

Trieste! By Jove! I was only just called upon recently to ruminate as to your whereabouts, and there you are! How is everything down in the Adriatic—plenty of naval exercises to be seen on the part of the Huns, I expect? Dreadnoughts and U-Boats and all that sort of thing, though Britain has got her beat rather soundly in that department, I’ve no doubt!

Things are quite congenial here. Last week the troops paraded for Major-General Grenville, and it was truly a sight to behold. Good lads, all of them. Jawing with old Chuffy Bodkin afterward, I discovered that the officers were planning to take the Maj Gen on a bit of a safari, and snagged myself an invite, being that I’m still remembered as one of the best shots in my old regiment, and I still have that beast of a tiger decorating the floor of my quarters.

We had a dashed good time deep in the jungle for several days, tracking a black panther. A real sly fellow, and one who evaded our movements with an almost uncanny intelligence. Cleverer than any foe, that species, and often deadlier. At last we came upon a slow rise, spotted him up a tree, and let loose a single volley that had him out in one. The Maj Gen returned with one hell of a trophy. Ah, but the real story is that we ran across a herd of elephants at a watering hole on our return hike. Bless me, those things took off trumpeting like the Fourth Seal had been unbroken! Didn’t catch any ivory that day, but it was certainly memorable. I haven’t seen that many up close since I was stationed in Chandigarh with Eggie Parsloe-Parsloe—now there was a fellow who liked a good safari. In fact, I think—

[Continued, four pages later]

—and Lady Winnifred said, Well of course you must come, for we’ve no other use for the zanana anyway! Jolly good joke, really amused the ladies that evening. Oh, and the soup was excellent, too. No wonder Lord Bosham is always attempting a coup with regard to her chef, the fellow braises a side of beef as though it were the most critical act on God’s green Earth. Hardly blame him if he perpetrated a kidnapping for the sake of decent cuisine. I do enjoy the local fare, anything from the tandoor has got my nose, but sometimes one does pine for a good old fry up. I’m sure you agree.

Well, Higgins, I must say it is good to hear from you! Do enjoy the rest of your holiday, and when you’re back in London, drop me a cable. Give my regards to your mother.

Col. Pickering

—

Dear Henry,

Golly, here’s a surprise and a conundrum! Uncle Joseph has written to invite Penelope and myself down for the summer. He is thinking of returning to California in his dotage and wants to know if I would like ownership of his little inn, so we are going, mostly to amuse ourselves and see what he’s gotten himself up to. A wicked and corrupt Dowager Baroness bowing and scraping to guests and ensuring that their skiing and ice skating and looking at alpine cows or whatever it is the Swiss do is all to satisfaction—how’s that for a travel brochure?

Collaterally, it falls to me—although hopefully you’ve already heard it from her—to tell you that as we leave for Switzerland, Vivienne departs for Paris, as Count Zubov has initiated court proceedings against her. I tell you this because she is certain that she will not be able to keep the villa in Vienna, and so we will have your things, wherever we are, when you return from Pretoria. Do not worry yourself otherwise. Your lessons, and plans for Africa after the teaching term is over, will, I think, continue precisely as planned, with no call for detours. Please do say kind things to Vivienne, she’s prone to reticence at times but I think this is taking a toll on her, and you are an awfully dab hand at being soothing when you put yourself to it.

Africa sounds all wrapped up, from your description—perhaps soon I’ll be collecting the post with stamps from Cairo and Dar es Salaam. Bring me back a handful of sand, or whatever they have for dirt down there.

Penelope has embarked on a new campaign of terror. She has taken up the piano and is working her way through several pieces of ragtime. I have no further comment on this situation.

We miss you (some more than others, where were your hiding places for that queer little instrument she was always banging on?? It’s either that or burn her sheet music, and my ears can only take so much)—

Cici

—

Henry,

It’s all come undone. It always does, and maybe this time it was for the better—we’d grown apart, grown into loathing each other in our loving way, I suppose. The main thing is that I hate myself, and the worst part is that the papers will either make a field day of it or ignore it entirely, and either way it’ll only feel worse.

I’ve restarted this letter at least four times. I keep asking what’s wrong with me, why this keeps happening, but I can’t expect you to know that. Six marriages, not counting the others. What a joke, to fail that many times at something so simple. I’d blame the men for being all alike, but I can’t even muster that much.

God, Venice seems so far away. When this is over, when you’ve returned, let’s go someplace fascinating and utterly alien. Living among Westerners is Hell. I want to be away from polite society, and dinner forks, and insipid conversation. Alone, on a desert island, away from all ties and with nobody else in the world to consider. East Indies, or Mauritius. We could sail to the Cook Islands and live on coconuts and each other. Wherever it is, let’s go, and never come back. Some small but still selfish part of me wishes you weren’t leaving for so long, or leaving at all.

Send me something real. I wish I had your warm hands to hold.

Vivian

—

Hullo Henry,

I’m in bed recovering from a bloody awful night, and after several bowls of broth and quite a bit of questioning my own existence, I am now able to make my fingers grasp a pencil and generally gauge where the writing paper begins and ends.

The only good thing I can see about Switzerland in the time we’ve been here is that Milan is not quite so far, and Zurich only a few hours, although who wants to go to Zurich?? This place is so… staid. Cuckoo clocks and fresh air and sunshine and whatnot. There are cows in the meadows, a great lake, and I’m fairly certain I can hear yodeling echoing off the mountains first thing, but Cecily swears I’m making it up. You’d probably love it here.

I wish we’d taken in more of Italy, or especially that we’d gone back, but with yet another of Vivienne’s divorces, it meant dropping everything and pulling up stakes completely. I will probably regret writing that when I’m utterly sober. Do you like her? Do you love her?  I must confess I’d thought you more unconventional, somehow, although Aunt Viv is about as unconventional as they come, apart from matters of the heart. Sometimes I think her greatest and truest love is the act of searching for love. There’s a bit of philosophy for you.

Cecily told you about the hotel, did she not? There’s just a few guests here in the summer, mostly for the lake, and it’s not an inn or anything small and rural but a great big thing, and it wouldn’t look out of place set impressively atop one of these mountains with only a funicular between us and civilization. There are staff and porters, maids and cooks and people like that, and lord but don’t they have fun on their evenings off. Half the hotel Uncle Joseph reserved for his own private quarters, and it’s like living in a queer mansion with a lot of strangers sleeping on the other side of the wall.

I just recovered a memory of having located a piano in one of the drawing rooms. I am already out of bed and writing this against the back of my hand. Joplin, I shall conquer you.

P

—

Dear Mr. Higgins,

I write to inform you that my employer, Countess Zubov, has arranged for the purchase of clothing and equipment suitable for your upcoming journey through Cairo to South Africa. Attached you will find an itemized summary of the articles deemed appropriate. You may write to me at the listed address with any additions or substitutions, and the items shall be delivered to your various destinations per carrier service as scheduled. Please be apprised that any alterations are best made in advance of your sailing date of July 5.

If you require further assistance, I am at your service.

Yours, etc.,

Egon Holzer
Personal Secretary to Countess Zubov

—

Dear Henry,

Just a quick note that I hope reaches you quickly, and if not, Penelope's gone to the telegraph office—I’m sure you’ve heard about everything going on. The newspapers here are all in Swiss German, and we can’t understand any of it and keep having to ask one of the English guests what it translates to, as Uncle Joseph has already sailed to America. I've been checking the newsstands to see if they’ve brought any of the London papers down from Zurich, but nothing in two days. What is going on there?? Are you all right? Has your sailing been canceled?

Cecily

—

Dear Henry,

No, I'm afraid I agree with Cecily—you ought to cancel. No one knows what’s happening, it’s all a confusing mess, and every copy of the London papers I could find in the capital are predicting war, but nothing’s doing, no invasions or movements or anything like that. Perhaps it’ll all come to naught, but the last thing you need is to be trapped in Cairo, or worse, the bloody tip of Africa, whilst everything falls apart up here. It would be much easier on us all if we knew you were someplace certain—at least a nation where your travel papers carried water. I know that goes against your months of planning and preparation, but honestly, Henry, truly. You mentioned a lot of people in the streets at night, and protests during the day—the Hungarians aren’t going to let this go.

If you can’t leave altogether, at least be careful.

Do not hesitate to write to us.

Penelope

—

Dear Henry,

I never thanked you for your last letter. Cecily told me you were very good with speeches that lifted the spirits, and by God, she was right. You have a kind soul underneath an obscuring layer or two of gruffness, much to my everlasting surprise and consolation. I won’t say I’ve slept with it beneath my pillow, but it’s become more and more wrinkled and tearstained as I go on. I may have to transcribe it onto another few sheets of paper to preserve the sentiment.

Let me do something for you in turn, now. Cecily and Penelope are safely ensconced, at least for the time being, in the Alps. Paris isn’t likely to fall now or for many years to come, and I don’t consider myself in grave danger (nerves are another thing, though, but I don’t expect this to be a repeat of New York). But you, in a foreign port belonging to an empire that isn’t your natural home, or even a sympathetic colony or outpost—well, I’m sure I’m not the first person to say that headlines grow more worrisome by the day. It’s all this waiting and uncertainty, as though there’s a window closing and nobody is really certain where it is or what it could portend.

Whatever you need, I shall do my very best. Money I have, contacts I can arrange, communiqués with the consul are easily and readily done. Just say the word. Please do not delay making a request on account of the reasons I happened to be in Paris to begin with. I am prepared to devote resources to your safety if I can.

I don’t know what France’s position will be a month from now. I urge you to cable our friends in Switzerland first so that they may pass along any pertinent messages—I don’t think you’ll have trouble with the wires between those borders.

The hope now is that if it comes to war, it will be done quickly and decisively. I hope that’s so.

Yours,

Vivienne

—

THE EASTERN TELEGRAPH COMPANY, LIMITED.
TRIESTE.

Via Eastern -  1914 15 JULY PM 9 17

T2798=TRIESTE 193 16/7/1914 525AM
VIA MARCONI TELEGRAPH COMPANY
OVRNT LTR
MR HENRY HIGGINS
VIA DELLA SANITÀ 2 TRIESTE

BEG YOU RETURN LONDON IMMEDIATELY.

MOTHER.

Chapter Text

Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping lead into the boxing-glove.
- Very Good, Jeeves!, P.G. Wodehouse

The knock came as he finished reading his mother’s telegram.

Two members of the Trieste Polizia and a man whose uniform he did not recognize stood on the other side of his door.

The inquiry was put to him whether he was Signor Henry Higgins, a subject of the British Empire.

Yes, that was he.

“Would you please come with us, sir?”

“What for?”

“Come with us, sir.”

He was taken… somewhere. It was not the police headquarters, and it was not a government building he recognized. There they put him into a room alone and made him wait. A quarter of an hour, half an hour. Two hours. The man who was not a member of the police returned, and began to ask him questions.

Where did he work?

At the Berlitz School, teaching English.

Where in Britain did he originate?

London.

How had he come to Trieste?

By train from Vienna.

What had prompted him to come to Trieste?

Someone at the University of Vienna offered him to come down for a little while.

The man frowned at this, took a long and slow drag on his cigarette, and wrote with a pencil in a small notebook for several moments.

How long had he been a foreign resident?

Higgins blinked several times. The sudden application of this strange new label threw him off-guard, and he had to think, count how long it had been.

Seven, eight months.

Were his travel documents currently on his person?

At this, Higgins hesitated, but answered that they were.

Were his papers good? Up-to-date? They would not find irregularities?

Of course.

A request for them to be produced, and directly as Higgins laid them on the table, the man pulled them all toward himself and placed them atop the folder he’d brought into the room.

Just like that.

Higgins dug his fingernails into the palms of his hands beneath the table.

Who was this contact at the University of Vienna?

A man called Rottmayr, he replied.

Another few moments’ scribbling in the notebook, and Higgins wondered belatedly if the fellow would not appreciate having this name brought into this… whatever it was.

“What is the purpose of this inquiry?” he asked the man.

There was no response.

How frequent were his classes at Berlitz? How many pupils did he instruct? Did he give private lessons? To whom? What were his qualifications? His references? What manner of degrees did he hold from the University of Oxford? How long had he taught in England? When had he left England? Did he own property there? Was he here alone? Was he married? What were his plans now that he was no longer residing in Britain?

“What is your impression of the other instructors at the Berlitz School?”

Higgins thought for a moment. He knew the others as far as their mutual back-room conversation on the topics of students and their progress—there were dinners, and afternoons in the cafe after classes, but no intimacy, no deep friendships to blossom. Joyce, of course, was prone to pointed and sharp remarks lobbed in his direction, but then Higgins suspected the fellow was jealous of there suddenly being a fully qualified expert in their midst, a cat among the pigeons, and didn’t appreciate another toeing in on what he’d long considered his own special turf with the private students, the aristocrats. Not to mention the man’s constant harping on about cinemas. Dear Lord.

“They are all professional and excellent teachers, insofar as I know them,” he replied equanimously.

“Do you have reason to believe any of them subversives?”

They sat in silence at this, Higgins staring at the man.

“Subversives?”

“Foreigners acting to undermine the government by spying for the benefit of another nation or by taking actions that would incite or rouse sentiments contradicting the authority of the Empire.”

“I’m… not sure, what do you—”

“Clandestine meetings, giving only vague details about their private lives, activities and associations of a suspicious nature.”

Higgins tried to think—was that was this was about? Someone in the School suspected of spying?

The man took another drag on his cigarette.

“Revolutionary ideas. Strong connections to foreign governments or persons of… great position and prestige.”

A cloud of smoke rose between them, the man’s eyes never losing their sharp focus on his face.

The whole questioning had held, from its inception, an air of unease, but now Higgins felt a cold chill steal over him.  His brother’s position in Parliament; Charles’s overtures at becoming Prime Minister. Vivienne Norton and her world travels, her marriages to powerful and wealthy aristocrats. To a Russian. (Was he Serbian? A sympathizer?) Even—even the princess from the Redoute.

Was it him?

Did they suspect him of something?

Him, Henry Higgins, a spy?

He was a British subject abroad—a perfectly ordinary man. He’d done nothing wrong.

But if he was here, being… questioned, surely that meant they knew—thought, believed, were mistaken about—something.

That was impossible, though. He’d done nothing wrong. He eyed his travel papers atop the folder, the one thing that would guarantee him passage between borders (how stupid to give them up so readily, utter idiocy). And this whole crisis was just a… foolish act of revolutionary spirit from some young idiot, hundreds of miles away, that had not the slightest to do with him. The assassination of another kingdom’s leader was remote and insignificant. Higgins wasn’t in with the Serbian agitators, he was the furthest thing from a revolutionary that a human could be. He was old, staid, he’d just—he’d just—

“What did you say your name was?” he asked the man. Officer. Agent. Whoever he was.

“Do you recognize this man?” The questioner said instead, and produced a small snapshot of a man standing in a street, unaware that he was being photographed. Slowly, conscious of his question once more going unanswered, Higgins leaned forward and peered at the face, which was slightly blurry as the subject had been turning away from the camera.

It was Signor Foscarelli, the man with the irritating lisp whom he’d finally taught enough English as to be passable, and sent on his way when the affectations and constant queries of why it was pronounced this way, why it was spelled that way, why the English insisted on wholly arbitrary rules which made no sense to him, finally grew to be too much for Higgins’ patience. The man was utterly beyond decency, incapable of even a modicum of self-awareness.

“Yes,” he answered, anticipating the next question would be a full cross-examination as to who Foscarelli was, their association with one another, etc. To this point, he could rightfully respond very little.

But his interrogator pulled out another photograph, this one a portrait of a youngish man. He wore a light summer suit, held a cane and a straw hat at his knee, and was seated in an Oriental chair before a studio backdrop. The only thing notable about him was the fact that his hair was parted down the middle—otherwise he could have been anyone on the street in London.

He didn’t look remotely familiar.

“I’ve never seen this man before,” Higgins said, and slid the photograph back across the table.

“You are certain? You have never spoken with him, nor seen him in passing? You have never met with him?”

“I am certain,” he insisted.

“What manner of politics do you yourself have?”

“I beg your pardon—what?”

“Your politics, sir. You are Socialist, Anarchist…?”

“What! No! Conservative.” Socialist indeed, good Lord.

“Do you consort with Socialists?”

“Of course not,” Higgins insisted. “I don’t associate with them.” But of course he’d been to all those parties, spoken to interesting and strange people a handful of times, dismissed their ludicrous and unrealistic plans for what they were.

The officer spent another few moments writing in his notebook before he gathered the photographs, the folder, and Higgins’ travel papers, rose, and left the room.

Another quarter hour, another half hour, and at last Higgins stood, greatly exasperated by having his time so flippantly wasted, and tried the door.

It was locked.

Now the sense of unease had moved past the cold chill, and was overtaken by a sense of dread, of powerlessness, utterly intolerable to a man like Higgins, and therefore quickly replaced by the only other response which made sense to his mind at this singular moment: fury.

He pounded on the door for longer than was reasonable.

“Open this door immediately!” he bellowed through the narrow glass pane, heedless of what might happen to him after such an outburst. “Let me go at once! I want my papers! You have no right to detain me without explaining yourselves!” The hallway outside remained empty. “If I am to be arrested, I demand to know what charges I face!”

A member of the Polizia with a handgun holstered to his bandolier harness appeared in the window.

“What is going on?! Who are you?!”

“Be quiet,” said the constable, and reached out to smack the windowpane with his open palm, producing a sharp, rattling thump, causing Higgins to startle and take a step back from the door.

“Where is the man I was talking to before?” he said, sounding excitable and high-pitched even to his own ears. “I request to speak with him again, I have the right to speak with someone.”

But apparently the constable did not see eye-to-eye with him on this matter, for he left Higgins alone without another word.

No amount of pounding against the door brought any response.

He swept back into the chair as before, having gathered his summer overcoat about himself, and hammered his leg up and down with a nervous energy, thinking of what he would say to the man who’d been interrogating him if he returned. Practicing and rehearsing arguments in his head.

This went on for nearly an hour.

They could not do this to him. He was a British subject and Britain had declared nothing so far, least of all war; the Austro-Hungarians had no cause to detain him, suspect him, or do anything otherwise. He’d done nothing wrong, nothing apart from teaching a few odd foreigners to speak English.

Was it Foscarelli? Was it Count Amidei? One of those boisterous Italians with enough money to live entirely as he pleased; was his student involved in something funny? Was Higgins’ mere association with someone like that enough to draw the attention of the Trieste government? Had they passed a law in the most recent weeks regarding… foreigners? What if they required him to register in order to continue living and working here? What if he were made to give up his papers, his subjectship, to renounce Britain entirely? What if they arrested him in a few months regardless? What were prisons here like? He did not think them very pleasant places given the hysterics and chaos the Italians chose to live by, but then it occurred to him that more likely they would imprison him someplace cold and unyielding, transfer him up to a mountain fortress or detention camp in the Alps where he’d freeze to death, rather than store their subversives in the warm pleasantries of the Mediterranean.

He should have remained in London, Higgins thought with a painful shot. It might have been an unhappy place, a quietly desperate existence, but at least he would not now be held without justification by His Majesty’s government. At least they would recognize his rights as a subject, would not declare absolute power over him, would not force him to act against his will.

The professor turned his gaze briefly toward the locked door, then back to the table before him. There was a short but thick metal loop jutting up out of the center; that was where they handcuffed prisoners for interrogation. He supposed he ought to be grateful that he had not been chained like an animal. Did the police do things like that back home?

He should have stayed put.

At least he would be back on Wimpole Street in his beautiful house, all his own, with all his books and artwork and furniture, warm and comfortable, far away and blissfully removed from any useless squabbling between other countries. Where he was accustomed to the food. Where Isobel would bring in his afternoon tea precisely when he wanted it and not a moment before or after. Where Mrs. Pearce would read aloud the post, answer his correspondence, and ensure that his days ran smoothly and precisely. Everything to his preference.

But the house was sold, his collections broken, his possessions gone, the servants scattered to the four winds.

He’d wanted it this way; wanted to sell the shards of that life, retain what suited him, and wander the Earth.

Vicky’s voice whispered to him out of the corner of the dark room: you do things so rashly at times.

He was sick for home: suddenly, quickly, nauseatingly. It soured his stomach and gave no comfort. Perhaps he had been, the entire time, but had ignored it, or made himself be distracted from it. He’d not had to manage the details of his days in France, in Portugal, in Spain. Trieste was well enough, but it was the bare minimum—the landlady refused to take out his washing herself, and he’d spent far more than he cared going out to restaurants.

And canceling the trip down to Pretoria had been a blow to his heart. That had meant something to him, and now the significance was to be sacrificed on the altar of international affairs and petty quarrels.

Abroad was bloody, Higgins thought. Perhaps he was not meant for much more than study, than sitting about reading, than being looked after, propped up, indulged. No new life had sprung out of his uprooting; he’d just done the same things, in other places. God help him if he were taken prisoner in a foreign country, handed a sentence, and compelled to serve their military.

What a nightmare it would all be if it did come to war; Higgins could not picture himself handling a gun for a shooting weekend, let alone to murder another human being.

Thank God there was an army for that sort of thing.

At last—and not a moment too soon, for he was strongly considering lending his fist to the surface of the door again—another police officer whom he did not recognize entered, handed him his documents, and brusquely informed Higgins that he must leave.

He assessed carefully the papers, whether they’d been blacked out or altered in any fashion, but could not discern anything missing, and so tucked them within his inner pocket and left the way the man indicated.

It was well past lunch when he reached the street, and Higgins went to his rooms casting glances over his shoulder every few feet and avoiding some of the main thoroughfares where demonstrators had been gathering.

“Who were those men here this morning?” the landlady demanded when he reached his apartments, “I don’t like strangers coming into this building, they shouldn’t be here, you tell them not to come round anymore for scaring my residents—”

Quickly, Higgins shut the door against the tide of shrill scolding.

Of course nothing had happened to him. He was a British subject. He’d done nothing wrong. His Majesty’s government wouldn’t allow anything to happen to him, even as far away as he was. He would go and speak to someone in the morning about this brash and unnecessary treatment.

Higgins looked about the room, exhausted and starving.

Had they come here while he was locked inside that room? Gone through his things? Taken something from him? Was that why he’d been made to wait so long? Higgins ignored the hunger pangs and spent the afternoon and evening upending it all to account for every belonging he could remember.

The next day he woke late, bolted coffee and a roll, and went directly to the British Legation.

But if Professor Higgins was hoping for sanctuary, or at least a sympathetic ear, he found the place unfortunately in a bit of an uproar. Groups of holidaygoers huddled together in conference (from left to right: Portland Place, Lancaster Gate, and… Kensington Palace Gardens), frazzled secretaries trotting to and fro, a telephone ringing without surcease. He leaned over to adjust his trouser cuff and discovered the carpets had not been aired or beaten in some time, bits of fluff and effluvia from the streets having accumulated there alarmingly.

It was not entirely reassuring.

One would not have guessed so from the placid expression of the officer to whose desk he was directed, however.

“You may be assured that His Majesty’s government is closely observing this state of affairs,” said the man who’d introduced himself as Gilchrist, pouring them both a cup of tea from an institutional bone-white service. Higgins sipped; it was first tea he’d had in a long time. Rather good, sharp and slightly tart. Gilchrist winced and gave a hairy eye to his own cup. “I do apologize,” he said in an undertone as though discussing something scandalous, “We try, of course, but the excises on tea here are absurd, particularly for a consulate! They must think we’re smuggling gold through the port.” He set his saucer to one side and shrugged plainly. “The situation is not ideal, of course, but at this time, under the current circumstances, we do not have reason to anticipate a full escalation.”

“Difficult to believe, given the treatment the Austrians apparently see fit to exact,” Higgins said. “Being relieved of my papers without explanation or proper procedure certainly does not inculcate even threadbare trust, let alone collegiality.”

“Well, the Legation's position is to offer guidance and warnings if necessary as the, er, as conditions shift,” replied Gilchrist.

“Warnings?”

“If necessary,” Gilchrist repeated calmly. He waved a dismissive hand. “These little demonstrations in the streets are merely the usual Latin dramatics, a show of grief over their Emperor—one would expect the same in any other country. This is all a local fuss—it’s been nearly three weeks, and nothing has come of it. No declarations, no troops amassing, apart from France putting up defensive fortifications against Germany, and that’s not without reason even under ordinary conditions.” He laughed indulgently at his little joke. “It’s likely to blow over by autumn.”

Higgins paused. Perhaps that was true. The letters he’d received from Cecily and Penelope had been so highly-strung, so filled with feminine alarm, while the civil servant before him sipped tea and seemed mostly unconcerned.

“If I do decide to return to London,” he said slowly, “What manner of travel would be recommended?”

Gilchrist opened a desk drawer and applied a pair of wire-frame spectacles to himself.

“Well, I suppose if you must,” he said, with just a hint of snippiness at having to play travel agent, opening a folder and consulting its contents to reveal a map. “You might find a ship out of Trieste, and round Gibraltar and Portugal to head for Southampton. At this point, it would be a fairly reliable means of transit.”

“And if it weren’t? If… things become sticky otherwise?”

The consular officer was taken aback.

“Well, Britain has an old understanding with France, of course. You’d need to cross Italy; a fair choice since they don’t have much of a reason to get involved in this. And there’s Switzerland, which is entirely neutral, but the mountains might be difficult later in the year.” Gilchrist gestured down the center of the drawing. “It’s a shame Germany is proving to be so belligerent—really the quickest way home is straight through France.”

He thought of his mother, of her urgent and efficient plea.

He thought of Cecily and Penelope, and what Vivienne had written. Safely ensconced in the Alps; Nature’s ultimate defense. All their love, all their best, all their concern and worry for him.

Higgins thanked the man and returned to his apartments, where he spent the weekend alternating between reading, avoiding the newspapers, and sending the landlady’s grandson out for a tureen of goulash from the restaurant down the street.

Monday morning, however, did not bring with it calm or reason, for the newspapers were splashed with triumphant headlines about Germany mobilizing her Imperial Navy for Austria’s honor. The thought of leaving Trieste by sea was now a queasy prospect. By the end of the week, Higgins began to suspect he was developing an ulcer, and a telegram from Penelope with question marks after each sentence, demanding in the most urgent tones to know what his plans were, did not help matters. Any communication from Switzerland had been cut down to the barest essentials, priced by the word.

Not knowing what else to do, Higgins wired back to mention the possibility of crossing into Italy and joining them; the response was swift and in no uncertain terms: COME ASAP.

All that was left, then, was to give his notice to Berlitz, begin gathering his things, and make arrangements.

And this was where the trouble began.

He went to the station to book a ticket out and there was posed with the question as to whether his exit permit had been approved.

“Exit permit?”

“Exit permit,” replied the agent, stamping his book without giving the professor even so much as the courtesy of a glance. “You are a foreigner, you cannot come and go as you please.”

“How does one go about getting an exit permit?” said Higgins to the consular officer, this time an older fellow named Trenton who did not serve tea and was very distracted.

“If you know anyone influential in the city, get them to petition the border agents to let you pass,” said Trenton, and finally answered the telephone that had been ringing for the last ten minutes. “Yes?” He was silent a long moment, paled, and then set the receiver down before informing Higgins that the Emperor had just announced that Austria was declaring against Serbia, and Europe was at war.

Stumbling out of the Legation, Higgins pushed past the patchy groups of young men gathering along the sidewalks, animatedly chatting of the glorious days to come. There was cheering in the distance. He reached his apartments, dashed up the staircase, and slammed the door behind him before leaning against it, closing his eyes and trying to slow his breathing.

He had to get the hell out of here.

Did he even know anyone influential?

He should have gone to Africa when he’d the chance.

What about Count Amidei? Would he vouch for Higgins? And who the other fellow who’d taken private lessons—Schmetz? Wasn’t his cousin a baron?

He never should have left London. Never, no matter how bad it had been, it wasn’t worth any of this. Should have kept faith with his mother, who barely wrote to him now anyway, kept his mouth shut and bent over his work and—

Did he even have enough of an association with either of them to ask them for a character reference? Hadn’t he always kept himself to himself, and not gone in too far, not formed much of an association, let alone friendship?

Higgins thumped his head back against the door and ordered himself to stop panicking, but he could feel his heart beating wildly out of control, his palms going clammy, and no matter what he repeated to try to interrupt himself—Stop it. You’re fine. You are a British subject. You’ll be fine.—the overwhelming sense of foreboding, of forsaking, the terrifying and utter lack of control—which was silly, it wasn’t as though there were Barbarians at the gates in Trieste!—finally won out, and feeling nearly faint, Higgins went over to the bed, flopped down face-first among the pillows, and allowed himself four or five deep sobbing breaths.

Then he sat up straight, quite calm now, and went downstairs and to the telegraph office on the next street.

In the end, he had the petition to the border officials from both Amidei and Schmetz’s cousin, but in the time it had taken to pay them a mortifying little bribe, to procure the proper paperwork and have it all affirmed and approved, Russia had mobilized her army, the London Stock Exchange had shut down, Germany had declared war against Russia and invaded Luxembourg—

Switzerland. Switzerland and then… then whatever came next. London. Or not. But Switzerland, first.

It was all he could do to keep his hands from shaking as he entered the Trieste station and presented his exit permit to the military officers.

He was taken aside and made to write—

I, Prof. Henry Higgins, do swear not to take any action against the Emperor of Austria-Hungary during such time as his government and military be engaged in armed conflict with any other nation within the boundaries of the European Continent. By my hand this day 3 August 1914.

But at last, at blessed last, he was allowed to board. There was only this to be done, the long journey as the train picked its way through and up the mountain passes.

He leaned back in his seat, crossed the arm holding his overcoat over himself, and closed his eyes, trying to think of nothing at all. The Dolomites, after all this time, and he would pass them by entirely—that was rather funny. Whether the Alps would be as impressive as all the travelogues said. Whether Cecily would get his telegram in time. Whether his mother would even be able to receive his cable.

Higgins sat up, startled by a hand on his shoulder. Someone had been talking to him.

“What? Er, what?” He shook his head and tried to remember which language he was supposed to be speaking. “I meant, what did you say?”

The conductor looked down at him with a frown and asked again to see his ticket. Higgins dug about, trying to find his overcoat pockets, before finally remembering that he’d stored it inside, and dug it out for the man to punch.

He was left alone in the car, dozing for a few hours, until a man and a woman came in, seated themselves, and began arguing over something with the train map the woman insisted on holding.

“No, I’m sure it’s past there, because then it’s Verona and Brescia,” the man declared.

“It’s the far edge of the mountains, I’m telling you,” insisted his companion.

Something about their conversation nagged at him.

“Darling, I’m certain the next stop is Venice.”

Higgins bolted upright in his seat, causing the two of them to jump back slightly.

“What did you say?” he demanded. “What did you say—Venice?”

They didn’t answer him.

“Did you say the next stop is Venice?”

The woman eyed the man she was with, who spoke at last.

“Yes, it is.”

“This train doesn’t go through to Gorizia?!”

It was supposed to go through to Innsbruck—what were they talking about? Where was Udine, and what the hell were they saying—Venice?

“No, of course not,” said the man, and quickly escorted the lady from the compartment.

Higgins collapsed into the seat wondering if he’d gone mad, if he’d honestly managed to board the wrong train, or—or book the wrong one, why would he be on a train that continued through Italy if he were trying to get out—

No, that had been the first attempt.

He’d tried to book through, but he’d lacked the exit permit, and the train timetable had changed, and he’d opted for the alternate route, for even if it meant a transfer to a bus, at least it existed, at least it was there, at least there was a way out.

This was the right train.

He would reach Switzerland.

He sighed, tired and unable to think straight. Something to eat, perhaps, and then he’d feel better. Higgins gathered his hat and overcoat and wearily went to find the dining car.

Leaning back in the club seat, Higgins watched the flat countryside turn rocky and peaked, the mountains forever just out of reach. The waiter came by, and he ordered Jägerschnitzel; the texture of mushrooms he’d always found to be disgusting, but the dish was at least reliable no matter where one got it, and anyway it came with spätzle, which he enjoyed very much.

Soon. This little episode would be over soon, and he could sleep and rest and plan what to do next, where to go. Surely Switzerland couldn’t shelter every stranded holiday-goer who crossed her border. And as far as returning to Britain… well. But it all depended on what happened each day, going forward, and—and he was already so tired of thinking about war at all, let alone on the granular level.

He watched as a dark fellow across the car was waited on with a steaming plate of breaded fried veal, and felt his stomach ache with hunger. A coffee and roll before he’d taken his leave of the apartments early, what seemed like years ago but had only been that morning, sliding the key beneath the landlady’s door and hauling his luggage to the waiting taxi below in the burgeoning dawn.

Trieste had been… nothing if not instructive. Certainly a beautiful city, not one exactly known for its rich, unique food the way some places were. A decent seaside, docks to walk along and take in the view. Certainly, he could say that experiencing Berlitz firsthand had been valuable. There were lessons to be taken from the immersion method, potential applications for speaking proper English. Exposure to correct pronunciation rather than a rigorous focus on theory had surprised him, but how successful the students had been. It was worth examination and deconstruction.

Higgins enjoyed the Mediterranean. Odd, really, but the waters were blue and warm, not grey or brown and murky. There was something charming about clear waters, like a tropical island somewhere in the farthest reaches of the Pacific Ocean. The couple beside him received bowls of stew. Perhaps once things had calmed down, he and Vivienne could travel to Mauritius. Spend a little time—just a little, no need to go mad about it—among warm waters and soft breezes and the Moon dipping straight into the ocean at the horizon.

Where the hell was his food?

Surely it didn’t take this much time to fry up a pork cutlet. Everybody else had arrived after him, but were being served well before. Higgins huffed as the waiter handed round glasses of wine to a group of Italian officers at the far end of the car, their ridiculous mustaches all waxed to a gleam. If he wound up slumped over in a half-dead heap on his way back to his compartment, the railway company would certainly have a problem on their hands.

Higgins flagged down the fellow in the short coat.

“I ordered nearly half an hour ago,” he protested in response to the man’s attempt to assure him that the dish was on its way. “You’ve been serving everyone in this car, and they’ve all arrived after me. Even those—” The professor gestured at the officers.

“I’m so sorry, sir, I do apologize. Your meal will be out shortly,” said the waiter, and moved to go back down the aisle, but Higgins caught his cuff.

“Look, if you’re going to serve wine to the army, perhaps you ought to do it once all the dishes are already out so the rest of us don’t have to sit here watching them take their first course. I’ve never seen such lopsided, haphazard management of a dining car, even if it is out of patriotic fervor or whatever emotion is compelling you.”

The waiter colored, gave a short bow, and retreated to the kitchen.

It was badly done. Everyone, including the Italian officers, were turned round to look at him, craning their necks and murmuring amongst themselves.

But he was tired, and hungry, and—nothing good ever came of that. Either of those conditions put him in an exceptionally foul mood.

When the waiter returned with the dish, Higgins was subdued, and far moreso when he’d finished. With a sigh, he laid the napkin on the small table and rose to return to his seat, feeling—if not more cheerful, at least not quite so dispirited and low.

They switched in Milan, and after a long delay spent pacing the platform, began the journey north.

It was just outside of Colico that he went to locate the water closets on the far end of the car, and was returning to his carriage when Higgins glanced up to see, at the opposite end of the narrow hallway, the conductor talking to one of the officers from the dining car. He paused and held onto the edge of the window casement, the car rocking from side to side along the curving tracks, before continuing to move forward along the hall.

He was nearly there, was just about to reach for the brass handle, when a call rose up, and Higgins looked up again to find the officer advancing toward him, shouting rudely.

“You there! Where do you think you’re going?”

The professor found himself exasperated at the fellow’s utter dimwittedness.

“I’m just trying to get back in,” he replied loudly. “I’m just returning to my seat. I’ve booked this compartment, I have a ticket, I can prove it.”

The officer hollered something at him, but there were other voices down the hall, echoing toward them and muddling whatever the man was trying to say, and the conductor pressed back against the windows to let pass the rest of the officer’s companions, lobbing curt phrases in some other rural dialect back and forth. The tracks turned, the train shifted, nearly throwing Higgins against the compartment door.

“It’s all right,” he told them. “I’ve got it all right here,” and he patted at his overcoat with both hands, searching. Had he moved the ticket from when he hadn’t been able to locate it before? Or was it still in the large inner pocket with his other travel documents?

They were all shouting, the conductor had joined in, a high-pitched keen of either the train’s whistle or someone’s voice, and then he realized what the officer was now screaming at him.

“Put your hands up, or I’ll shoot!”

That was a gun. The Italian officer had pulled the pistol from his holster and was holding it up, aiming it directly at Higgins.

Slowly, like pushing them through a dream, he lifted his hands, palms out.

“I was only trying to show you my papers,” he said in a small voice.

He watched as the Italian moved his finger from the trigger to relax, and the train bumped again, jolting them all against the walls, but Professor Higgins kept his hands up, cringing against the compartment door. The man came forward, spun him round, shoved him against the window, and stuffed his hand roughly into each pocket of the overcoat until he came up with the travel papers.

Higgins stood there yielding, cheekbone smashed up to the cool glass so hard that the vision in his left eye blurred, the man’s palm cupping the curve of his skull and a knee digging painfully into the back of his legs, staring at the conductor, who looked away. There were the muffled sounds of the other officers filing into the compartment, soft sounds, talking he could not discern, the sound of the man holding him rifling through the travel documents, and just as suddenly he was yanked from where he stood and thrust into the carriage, thrown against the bench seat.

Another round of questioning.

Who are you? Where are you coming from? What was your business in Trieste? Where are you going? What is your purpose in crossing the border? Why do you speak so many languages?

And most importantly, of course: What government do you work for?

Higgins wanted to laugh. Of course he couldn’t leave, he could never be free, never have his way, never have any peace. He nearly burst out with it, but managed to check himself at the last moment, swallowing it down with the taste of acid.

“I’m a languages teacher,” he replied as evenly as he could given the circumstances. “I am traveling to Switzerland because… because…”

“You run from Germany,” said one of the others, and a low, smug chuckle went up amongst them, some joke at his expense he didn’t understand. They all had holsters, they all had guns. All had gleaming black mustaches and shared not one grey hair between them.

“Why did you refuse to answer me?” grunted the man who’d aimed at him, cold and unsmiling. Not joining the others in their humiliating laughter.

“I didn’t,” said Higgins, and with all of them standing up flanked together in their matching uniforms and hats, he felt like a small boy called to account for some crime he hadn’t committed. The sense of injustice, of grown-ups exacting their strange, incomprehensible punishments, meant to correct him by signs and sigils he did not know and could not understand. “I wasn’t. I was only trying to prove that I had a seat here.” He was shrinking, smaller and smaller by the moment.

The officer stared at him keenly, and Higgins did not meet his gaze.

“Haul him off to prison if he was making such a fuss, they’ll interrogate him and sort it out,” said one of the other men.

“Sure, if you want to be the one to start another shitstorm,” another shot back.

It was all so casual, as though they were choosing a restaurant for their dinner, or discussing what the weather would be like. This was how his fate was to be decided, not by legal authority or with any diplomacy, but by youths, mostly concerned with how their medals looked on their uniforms.

Finally, the officer gave a nearly imperceptible grunt, threw the travel papers at the professor with a thump that landed painfully across his face and lap, and they all filed out of the carriage, leaving the sliding door to slam shut on him, alone.

He sat there for a long time, the train still snaking back and forth across the rails.

When it was quiet, Professor Higgins came tentatively back into himself, noting with detachment that the soldiers had gone through his hand luggage, the contents dashed across the seat opposite. His dressing gown, a necktie. A box of shirt collars scattered along and beneath the bench.

Instead of rising to gather it all up and pack it back into the luggage, he sat stock still.

He could see the officer’s finger on the trigger of the gun.

The way it had moved aside just as the train had bumped, startling the lot of them.

Just another second, and—

Would it have sliced hot and unrelenting into his chest, killing him instantly?

Or lodged deep in his stomach, leaving him in agony on the floor, a long and slow death before him, mere miles from freedom?

How hard was it to pull a trigger, anyway? Did it take force, forethought? Was it a light squeeze, or a deep and hard pull? How many times did you have to fire a gun to learn where the final threshold was located? The last point before inexorability?

Higgins took a deep, shaking breath, considered how he might convince his fingers and toes to unclench, but it felt better the harder he pressed, on and on, until he thought the carpal bones would crack. His stomach hardened, he leaned forward, containing something, compacting and compressing it until he had it under control.

Someone in the corridor was calling the end of the line, Chiavenna, Chiavenna where he would disembark.

He spent the night in Chiavenna, only an hour or two from the border, but the bus only ran a few times a week, and of course nothing in Italy was on time, or at a decent pace, or run properly. He barely noticed, only looking up when they stopped at the border crossing.

The usual questions.

The usual inspection of his papers, which were by now quite crumpled and dog-eared at the edges.

And they waved him through.

Nothing about that warranted a celebration; Higgins got on the next bus, expressionless. Something else would go wrong. Something else would haunt him. It didn’t much matter what, now.

He dozed only lightly, the arm with the overcoat wrapped tight over himself like a steel band, and woke, a bit sore, to find himself in late twilight, the bus pulling to a stop, the driver announcing that this was Bahnhof St. Moritz.

Higgins gathered himself, gathered his hand luggage, and drifted through the station until he was outside, where the lights reflected in the lake were just visible. A figure, warm and dark, came up at him, and he nearly dropped it all until he heard Cecily’s voice.

“Oh, Henry! Thank God!”

She was warm, and smaller than he, and wrapped about him, and utterly real, the first real thing that had happened since—he couldn’t think when. Venice.

“Thank God, thank God,” she was murmuring, and pressed his hands between hers. “I thought that bus would never come, I know you said yesterday or today but I’ve been terrified all day.” He expected Lady Sudcliffe to chatter the whole way up to the hotel, but she kept still and watched the road in silent outpost the entire way.

Higgins was ushered into some door, down some hall, his luggage and overcoat taken from him. There was a steaming bath waiting for him by the time he undressed, and his vision grew hazier, and soon he was in pyjamas in a soft bed, asleep.

He woke with sunlight in narrow lines between dark curtains, and whispering close by.

Higgins sat half up, and Penelope stopped.

She and Cecily were at the foot of a strange bed, shadowy and cast in darkness, momentarily silenced by his having achieved consciousness. The blonde dived for him, and he caught her, but still collapsed back among the pillows from the thrust of her too-demonstrative affection.

“I haven’t seen you in months!” she cried, squeezing tight enough to make him gasp before releasing her hold and sitting upright. “How’ve you been, old bean?”

Higgins looked up at her, all good cheer and contentment radiating from her person.

He selected the word “Tired,” and that was true.

“Hopefully not; you’ve slept the entire day away, you know.”

“Don’t tease him, Penny, you were the one who asked every hour whether we should check for signs of life,” said Cecily, rising to come round the bed and perch on the edge of the mattress near his shoulder.

“Did you tell him? Does he know?”

“Penelope,” said her mother softly.

“Know what?” he mumbled, thinking of how very comfortable this bed was, and how nice it might be to simply remain here another handful of hours, and Cecily sighed.

“Germany’s invaded Belgium. Britain has gone to war.”

Higgins took a moment, and then finally huffed out a mirthless laugh.

“Oh.”

The Baroness reached forward to tuck a bit of hair behind his ear. Motherly. How would he have been greeted in Mayfair?

“We don’t have to think about it right now,” she said quietly. “There’s nothing we can do about it, and there are plenty people here; we aren’t the only ones in a sort of… liminal state, as it were.”

He noticed then for the first time how they were dressed, how finely done up their hair was, and sat upright again.

“What’s going on?”

“Get dressed and come downstairs with us,” said Penelope. “Light fare and conversation with our fellow refugees.”

“I’m in no state for a party,” Higgins replied. “I’d be terrible company, I’ve no good conversation in me at all.”

“You don’t have to. No one wants to think or talk about it,” Penelope said. “It’s… not exactly a party, that would be dreadfully uncouth,” she said that part as though she didn’t believe any such thing could be possible, “but it’s far better than sitting about in silence, worrying and thinking about everything that could go wrong.”

(Or everything that had already gone wrong.)

Cecily went to find the tuxedo that he’d left in the luggage they’d brought back from Venice, already pressed. He watched Penelope open the curtains to reveal a lovely and golden early dusk before giving him a fond half-smile and disappearing from the room.

A not-party. People. Polite conversation, stepping carefully around the large black hole in the floor.

He felt like writhing, just a little. Cecily came back over and resumed her perch on the edge of the bed.

“It’s all going to be all right,” she murmured.

“What are we going to do?” Higgins shook his head, thinking of home. Britain. At war. The Baroness took his chin gently in her hand.

“As of this moment my solemn duty is to ensure there’s enough food and champagne. And you—I’d start with a shave and a comb. One step at a time; it’s the only way I’m holding onto my sanity.”

She left him to it.

He considered remaining where he was, but… Penelope was right. Sitting alone in a darkening room with darkening thoughts would not help him sleep.

Higgins took his time, wincing at the state of his beard in the bathroom mirror and trundling to and fro across the unfamiliar suite in various attempts to locate his shaving kit, then his comb, then his hair pomade, then his toothbrush, and any other little things he required. It was long after dark by the time he was presentable, and this was to his preference, for he felt a great reluctance to go and join whatever was going on, to attempt to be charming and interesting—or at least not unwelcome or intrusive. The longer he could avoid it, the better.

Don’t be yourself, he thought at his reflection, taking one last look. Just follow what anyone else does. In fact, don’t make the mistake of opening your mouth at all. Restrict your remarks to health and the weather, and lie about both.

Higgins passed through the darkened corridors of what was apparently the private quarters of the hotel until he reached a wide carpeted staircase, and took that several floors down until he began to hear the murmur of many voices. This emptied him out into a main lobby of sorts.

Cecily had not exaggerated—plenty of people was a mild understatement. The hotel was thick with guests.

And no middle-class climbers from Portland Place that had been at the Trieste consulate, either. Women dripping with enough strands of pearls to drown an infant—don’t voice that thought aloud—and men with expertly curled mustaches, their tuxedo jackets glinting and heavy with military honors—brilliant, they could be the vanguard when the hotel was invaded and could fight off the Huns with… fireplace pokers and silver hors d'oeuvres trays taken from the waitstaff. Don’t say that either. Waitstaff, and plenty of them, all bearing trays of food and drink.

This, their great battle plan.

He took a glass of champagne simply to have something to with his hands, and filtered in and out of groups, feeling tremendously awkward as he did.

Someone was calling to him. Higgins turned to find himself beckoned by a familiar face. It was Laurenz Waismann, one of Vivienne Norton’s set from Vienna, greeting him like a dear old friend. They’d had some healthy debates over etymologies, and played a few games of chess.

“Wonderful to see you,” said Waismann warmly, and introduced the professor round to some mixed company, a group of intellectuals and bluestockings. “Glad you could make it,” and this prompted some ironic laughter from the others around him. “And where have you been keeping yourself?”

“Trieste,” said Higgins, and there was a slight pause which necessitated that he offer more than that. “I only just… got in, and, er, it was certainly a journey.”

“I don’t doubt it!” Waismann gripped his shoulder and squeezed, a strange reassurance.

“How was Trieste in the summer?” one of the ladies inquired.

“Quite beautiful, actually,” Higgins replied, and in the midst of recounting how the fishermen brought in their trawling lines, he reflected that it was easy, pretending that he’d simply been abroad and come here for the rest of his holiday.

“Herr Waismann, would you mind terribly if I pulled him away for a moment,” said Cecily from over Higgins’ shoulder agreeably. She led him off past another school of bodies to where a young lady was waiting, glass of undrunk champagne in hand. “Professor Henry Higgins, this is my niece, The Honorable Miss Mariah Westholme.”

“Oh! How do you do,” he said, vaguely remembering that she’d a niece at all. Mariah had dark brown hair framing her very round face, which contained a pair of brown eyes that never stopped surveying the crowd behind him, as though she found it all absorbing to the point of distraction. A middle-aged professor was clearly not of much interest or use to a debutante, though she politely tolerated a snatch of conversation before Cecily beckoned Penelope over to take charge of the girl, and steered him toward another drawing room.

“Is this your second career?” he asked her over cucumber sandwich ends. “A luxury hotelier?”

“I dunno, it’s been a few months now and I seem a dab hand at it so far,” Cecily answered brightly, wriggling her shoulders and preening a little. “Hang on, is that Tessa Burton-Cox? Oh my God,” and with this ominous and mysterious pronouncement, bolted from the settee and rammed her way through at least three groups before disappearing entirely. Feeling once more uncomfortable at the prospect of being conspicuously alone, Higgins began to wander through the rooms and see what it was she’d gotten herself into.

There was the upper sitting room, open to the the lower sitting room. There was the drawing room with ornately carved wooden ceilings, plenty of cozy and intimate little seating areas lit by amber electrics, and very good vantages of the lake. He spent quite a while lingering in one of the red velvet wing chairs, gazing out at the lights across the water, and the grand forest of pine trees beyond. Another drawing room faced the mountains, which were hardly visible this time of night, but he could just make out the white snowy caps.

Higgins wondered, for a moment, what it would be like, to live in a snow-bound place such as this. What people did here, how they occupied their time when it was so cold and there was nowhere else to go. Drape oneself in a great woolen blanket, put on an extra pair of stockings, and sit beside the fire sipping tea, perhaps. He would certainly find that amenable.

Conversations drifted past him.

“Of course, Switzerland is surrounded by mountains, that’s the main difference,” a man was saying to a loose gathering of confederates. “When it’s flat, marshy, and your military is disorganized, well—”

“Caviar is really best with cold vodka, and both from Russia,” said a woman in a tiara to her lady’s companion.

A young woman stopped him apologetically.

“I beg your pardon, do you know where the ballroom is?”

He regretted that he did not, and they parted ways.

The drawing room led out onto a balcony, and he went outside to be alone for a bit. The early August air held a slight chill—or was it that he was overly used to Mediterranean weather by now? What was it like in London this time of year, this late at night?

“There you are,” Penelope said as she found him. “You looked down in the mouth, and I’ve got something fun that’ll cheer you up.” She looked about as she pulled a tobacco tin from some pocket and popped it open to reveal a small quantity, perhaps only a teaspoon or so, of something white.

“What is that?”

Her response was to purse her mouth in amusement and waggle her eyebrows at him. Higgins grabbed her shoulder to draw her farther onto the balcony, shouldering them both so their backs shielded her hands from sight.

“Penelope!”

“What! They won’t imprison me, it isn’t illegal.” She looked unsure suddenly. “Wait; this is a Catholic country, does that change the answer?”

“You shouldn’t have that anyway,” he told her, “You’ve no idea what it’ll do to you.”

“Mmm, trust me, you come to enough of these marathon eight-hour soirees and it becomes a necessity.” She set the tin on the wide balcony railing, bent over it, and performed an act rather unpleasant to the ear.

“No, I am not doing that,” he said in an affronted tone when she offered it to him.

Penelope shrugged.

“Suit yourself,” and she swanned brightly away.

Higgins found some more food, and a bar, at last, with a port he could tolerate. Better than champagne and all this glittering, fizzing waste and excess. He turned the balloon-shaped glass about between the palms of his hands, contemplative.

Before, he’d allowed these upper-crust gatherings to occur on the edges of his existence, a sort of thing that he could endure as long as he knew there were other destinations in his future. And now he was uncertain as to whether there would be any further travel at all.

This… was likely to be his home now. It coalesced before him, materializing out of the realms of haze and solidifying into something tangible and definitive. He could see that, now.

It could be five weeks. It could be five months. It could be five years.

Higgins frowned at this, then deliberately turned on the bar stool to look around the room.

Into the arched doorway, and the hall beyond, and the drawing room, filled with people, beyond that.

Could he do this for that long? Live in a Swiss chalet, some trussed-up hunting lodge, for years and years? Filled with the same upper-class twits he’d avoided in London, only now with no escape?

There was no time to answer, for he’d already begun, had already granted his permission.

It was a trap, perhaps, or perhaps it was not. It was not by choice, but perhaps that wasn’t so important, in the end.

He suddenly missed Vivienne’s company. She would say something soothing, something amusing—just the right thing, to put his mind at ease.

A passel of gentlemen entered the bar and ordered several whiskys.

“Of course, with Germany, you always know what to expect,” their leader was saying in a Teutonic accent. “It’s these other countries, these pretenders to power who believe that their little colonies will lend them a natural authority, that ought to keep a watchful eye. It’ll be over like a shot, sovereignty will prevail, and the true European supremacy will out.”

Higgins rose and strode through the archway.

Down the black and white tiled hall until the crowds thinned, until he saw a pair of open double doors, went through, and shut them, leaning back against the handles with his eyes closed.

He needed to go back upstairs, pull the covers over his head, and sleep for several weeks. This was—this was madness, throwing a grand diamond-crusted ball as their countries all went to war, as though nothing were happening in the world outside, as though they could all remain cloistered, happy and dauntless and sagacious in a castellated abbey, and Christ but he wished he were home now. As soon as he was able, he’d take his leave, make his regrets to Cecily, or not, as she was more likely engaged in delightful conversation, and slip out to find his way back to where he’d come from.

And then what?

London. Or not London. As though a door had closed forever.

It would all be all right.

Higgins took a few slow, deep breaths.

It was fine. He would be fine. And if he weren’t, he could walk out into the lake until he couldn’t come back.

The professor opened his eyes, straightened, and made to turn to open the double doors once more, but froze where he stood, for in the deep plush quiet of the library, perhaps ten or fifteen feet away, seated on a red velvet sofa, staring back at him, was Eliza.

Chapter Text

Let her believe me to be free and far away
on a new path of redemption!
She will wait for me to come back
and the days will go by
and the days will go by,
and I—and I will not return.
And I will not return.

“Ch’ella mi creda” - La fanciulla del West, Puccini

May 1914

Eliza stood on the pavement across from number 27A Wimpole Street, gazing steadily at the windows of the grand and sedate townhouse.

That morning she’d risen, marshaled her wits and patience about her, adopted the air of unruffled serenity she’d practiced in the mirror, and had dressed in the smart green tunic-style walking suit with the oversize lapels and a matching felt toque that had a long plume jutting upward. The outfit had cost her more than was really sensible, but it was the look of a grown woman come into her own. Thusly armored for battle, and lightly armed with the item tucked within her handbag, she crossed the residential street, climbed the short length of steps leading up to the front door, and pressed the bell.

She breathed out; breathed in. Nerves bubbled in the bottom of her stomach, but she usually found them useful, even helpful, in the right circumstances. It would’ve been more worrying if she’d felt nothing. Or worse—nothing but arrogance, which she couldn’t afford. 

The front door cracked, creaked. Eliza let a brave and soft smile come to her lips in anticipation of seeing Mrs. Pearce, but it swung open to reveal a stranger: a housemaid she didn’t recognize. The redhead wrinkled her brow, caught on the hop. A new servant was certainly an unexpected twist she’d not accounted for while imagining and rehearsing how this would go.

“Yes?” said the girl.

“Is he in?” Eliza asked.

“Oh, Miss Doolittle, how lovely to see you again,” Mrs. Pearce replied, fond warmth beginning to shine through the Scotswoman’s usual dignified bearing. “And how well you look! Do come in. Yes, he’s here,” and she said this with an arch and knowing smile that Eliza shared, as though they both knew from experience that no matter how the master might storm and rage, throw his childish little tantrums, a woman would ever remain serene and stalwart, and win the day in the end. 

“Is he in?” Eliza asked. 

The response was a stupid, silent stare. Poor creature. She wouldn’t last long if she were slow, Eliza thought. There was certainly no place for a dimwit in this house, and if the girl hadn’t already been the tear-stained recipient of a thorough tongue-lashing, she must have been taken on only ten minutes before. 

“I’m sorry, miss?”

“The Professor,” Eliza said, a little impatient to usher things along. “Is he in?”

There was no possibility of a student at this time of day. She had chosen the hour deliberately. This was the mid-morning tea break, when he would allow the second post to be brought before him for inspection and recitation, right up to the moment his cup was empty, and then he would hear nothing else until after lunch. His mood would be tempered, he would be easier to handle.

The housemaid looked her over, a crass and obvious down-up of her head.

“I’ll—I’ll just ask, Madam,” she said, bobbing an amusingly unnecessary curtsey and admitting Eliza before she disappeared through the inner door.

She took the handbag into one hand, then the other, trying to decide which looked better. Tugged on her gloves to smooth them taut. Likely he wouldn’t notice, but she would know, and Eliza would not suffer any chinks in her armor. Three things, and then she would leave. No matter what. He could behave impeccably—greet her as an old friend, be generous with smiles and compliments, clear his appointments for the rest of the day to discuss how she’d been and praise her accomplishments. It was improbable that he would, but the point was that even the most scrupulously perfect manners from him would be futile. Eliza lifted her chin: she could not be coaxed or cajoled or even threatened into remaining past the time she had selected as the cut-off. 

He ought to know better by now, and if he didn’t—well, it was not her concern.

The servant did not return immediately. How long could it take? He only used one room. She hadn’t even asked Eliza’s name to present her, she realized belatedly. But the girl had already proved too gormless to give her the satisfaction of a proper introduction, really. Mrs. Pearce needed to check her staff more carefully before assigning them to the front door. It was hardly proper for a servant to treat a guest with such carelessness. It was sloppy, rude, and a mark of low standards in the household.

Eliza waited with growing impatience, and as she did, she noticed that the marble-topped table with the wax peonies was no longer visible from the entry. She took a few steps forward to glance around the foyer. 

And frowned.

It was gone. 

Instead, there was a tall Oriental chest topped with a vase of peacock feathers, set against the far wall next to the study doors. Peacock feathers. She nearly rolled her eyes—was he serious? This would not be a lengthy visit, she could tell already. 

Something was different. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. It wasn’t the absence of the table, or the presence of the chest. Something nagged at the back of her mind. 

Throwing an annoyed glance to the door leading below stairs, Eliza squared her shoulders and turned her gaze resolutely to the open doors of the study. She had imagined many times the look on his face, the spluttering of shock when her name was spoken aloud to announce her, pictured his reaction when she entered. She’d run through it at every angle, calculated for every possible response, luxuriated in the anticipation of having the upper hand, thought about whether he would betray himself with knee-jerk joy and then attempt to check it with a chilly and cruel remark. Whether he would scoff and call her horrid names, pretend not to care that she had returned, before warming to their reunion in spite of himself. 

(And as for her, she had counterattacks upon counterattacks at the ready. Her mind was resolute. Three things, and then she would be gone.)

She crossed the foyer and paused at the pocket doors. Leaned around the trim, peered in to see if he was at his desk. 

Eliza blinked and abandoned the pretense of tiptoeing about, for the room was unoccupied.

It was all gone.

The great leather sofa, Colonel Pickering’s favored wingback chair, the desk covered in bizarre speaking apparatuses and examination tools, the shelf of busts, the—

She turned, her skirts twisting about her ankles, took several steps backwards.

The library balcony. There was so much empty space up there, so many… she could just see them through the railing. Trinkets. On the bookshelves. A carved wooden box, a pair of Chinese urns, a stuffed bird beneath a glass bell cloche. Decorative plates. A handful of books, all with the same dark brown cover, huddled together like the last survivors surrounded by the enemy. Framed photographs, a silver prize cup with filigreed handles, porcelain figurines. 

Eliza lifted her gaze.

The pulley lift was missing. 

He would let her use it if she’d done well at her lessons, getting to draw on the long cord, hand over hand like a sailor, to send the texts up to their home at the end of a long day. She’d always thought how genius it was, how clever he was for thinking of it, that he didn’t have to carry them up the stairs himself. It had always been her favorite part of the day: he would nod, and then she would arrange them in a stack from big to little, the best to ensure that his property, his precious books, filled with all that knowledge, would never be damaged under her trustworthy care. 

She searched for the place where it had been attached to the ceiling, but the holes had been filled, the plaster painted over, the efficient little system erased.

The grand piano, the anatomy charts and models, the strange painting over the mantle that made her dizzy to look at, the huge phonograph speaker horn mounted beside the great arched window. 

All gone. 

As though none of it had ever existed. 

That window was covered now, diminished in size by drapes in some muddy shade of grey or green. There was a plain rug, and tufted seats gathered in little groups here and there for polite entertaining and conversation. Neat tea tables, their surfaces absent of forgotten teacups or platters of truffles stacked in pyramids. A settee. An ottoman. A chaise lounge. All with complementary patterns, matching colors, blended in normal, average respectability. Nothing unusual or interesting. Nothing to set it apart from any other London townhouse.

It was just an ordinary drawing room. 

Eliza swallowed, painful and dry suddenly, and hurried back through the pocket doors, back into the foyer, which she now saw was painted in the wrong color, past the chest and where the lithograph of the Apostles was supposed to hang, back to the entry. Her fingers were reaching for the front door when voices drifted toward her from around the corner, and she forced herself to straighten and resume her proper hold on the handbag. 

An older woman in a black and grey stuff dress, trailed by the mousy little housemaid, appeared in the doorway.

“I do apologize for keeping you, madam,” said the housekeeper with the subtlest of glances over Eliza’s person, sizing her up, assessing her status and calculating what measure of respect to afford her. Eliza was glad the hat was new. She wouldn’t—couldn’t—be tossed out on her ear wearing something so fine. “How may I assist?”

Eliza opened her mouth. Closed it. 

“This is… is this Professor Higgins’ home?”

The housekeeper folded her hands before her.

“No, ma’am,” she said placidly. “This is the Van Nyeburg residence.”

As though from very far away, Eliza felt a cold, piercing sensation between her ribs that pulsed eerily. 

“I beg your pardon,” she heard herself say, faint and nearly in a gasp, “But—how long have they lived here?”

The housekeeper swept her gaze over the redhead again, as though reevaluating her earlier conclusions, detecting new clues as to this intruder’s class and worth. The girl had been right to find her, the housekeeper thought, for this tart might have been trussed up in fine enough clothes, but her manners showed her for what she really was—

Eliza clamped down on the thought.

“Longer than I have been employed to them,” the woman said lightly. Vaguely.

“And this isn’t… this isn’t, by some chance, Upper Wimpole Street?” She was shaking her head with the thin chance that she’d been mistaken, that it was simply the wrong address. The wrong house (but it was). Eliza was aware that she was overstaying her welcome, raised the suspicion natural to housekeepers with all her questions. She had to be absolutely certain, though.

“This is 27A Wimpole Street, miss,” said the housekeeper with finality.

Outside, once more on the pavement across the street, Eliza looked up at the mansion looming over her. Far above, at the window she knew was her bedroom, the one with the little balcony, there was movement near the fine curtains, and a small boy of five or six appeared, playing with a toy car. Before he could notice her, someone called to him from behind, and he turned and disappeared. 

The house had lost its scent of familiarity. That was what had been nagging at the back of her mind. There were strangers living in the house, and her nose had known it before she did. 

There was nothing else for it. Unwilling to return home and waste the debut of such a fine new outfit, Eliza hailed a cab and gave the driver an address.

She’d thought—what had she thought? Perhaps three years might have improved his temperament, softened the edges, would cause him to demonstrate just a little kindness. That even if he were still the same stormy, petulant ass about everything, at least it would be accompanied with the hard-won knowledge, the precedent, that Eliza had and would get up and walk away from him at a moment’s notice. That she would not suffer his terrors, joyfully or at all. 

That she did not need him. 

(If she ever had at all.)

Eliza watched out the cab window as they turned onto Cavendish Street and began the journey southward. 

Puzzling, that the Professor wasn’t there. And stranger still, that he should leave such a lovely place to live in. It didn’t fit, somehow. 

If she ever had a house like that, Eliza decided, she’d never leave. Just stay there all day, admiring her beautiful furniture, the way the rich floors were polished to a gleaming shine. Sit in an enormous, overstuffed chair, read great piles of books and send them up and down with a pulley, and be looked after by loads of servants who’d bring her tea and chocolates whenever she liked. Gaze out the window and bask in the delight of her own warmth, prosperity, and happiness. What a wondrous fancy; like something out of a novel. Only it was real.

Or it had been. 

Why leave all that? 

It was possible that he’d simply moved house, of course. But that seemed odd, not to mention unlikely, for the house was and always had been, in her estimation, settled and run exactly to his preference, a place to burrow into and winter for the rest of his life. It seemed to her almost a kind of extension growing out of him, rather than merely existing as an address where he lived. The Professor and the house on Wimpole Street were bound together, in a way, one and the same. He couldn’t have lost it. Unless he’d suffered a bad investment—or fate had finally seen fit to punish him for his petty cruelties, he’d lost all his students and income, and had to suffer the indignities of a downgrade. Could be he now lived in a boarding house in Hackney, and if that were the case, she would be very interested in paying him a call now. 

Could he have retired to the country?

Eliza began to sketch in her mind the Professor in some little thatch-roofed Kentish cottage, pottering about in the garden and tending to his foxgloves and asters, dressed in a homespun, lumpy knitted cardigan whilst he pored over a book of pruning techniques. Or worse—he kept bees, wore a huge floppy hat with a net, and never shut up about them to the neighbors. She bit back a chuckle at the absurdity. Surely not; the man didn’t care a whit about flowers and couldn’t have told a snapdragon from a nasturtium. 

Perhaps he’d gone back to Oxford, taken a professorship at the university. He was far too pleased with having been up to Balliol College, which she knew by his way of often polishing at the edge of a framed degree with his silk dressing gown cuff. An obvious ploy, meant to invite conversation about it while he conveniently got to avoid being branded a swankpot. The Colonel had fallen into that trap again and again, while Eliza had seen through it in a tick. 

He could have married.

Eliza frowned. 

That wouldn’t necessitate him giving up Marylebone, for it would be the other way round. Unless it were some titled grand dame keeping him somewhere, and that thought compelled her to pull a horrid face—she couldn’t picture him married, actually. No reason why, except that it seemed utterly alien to the very concept of him. Like a… like a dog playing the piano.

Or perhaps—perhaps he’d gone abroad, and was merely letting the house to its new occupants. 

The cab brakes gave a slight whine, so high-pitched as to be nearly imperceptible, as it slowed to a stop outside the address she’d asked for. Eliza paid the driver—more money she couldn’t really afford, but apparently she was splashing out today—and went up to the door to press the bell. 

She was received by a equable butler, very proper indeed, who took her name, led her on silent footsteps down the hall to the drawing room, and announced her in a sonorous and eminently dignified voice.

“Why, Miss Doolittle,” said Mrs. Higgins serenely, “It is lovely to see you again, and I must say, how well you look. Do sit down, won’t you?”

A fastidiously-appointed room in shades of sylvan green, coral, and buttery yellow. Its gracious owner had not redecorated in the time since they had last met, which was more than well with her visitor, who found it all a feast for the eyes. Carved furniture in the deepest shades of cherry, the grain so smooth and flawless. Pretty artwork of nature scenes. The large green pleated and tufted velvet ottoman in the middle of the room had always intrigued her, but it would be rather unseemly to choose it in formal conversation, so it was with just the smallest taste of disappointment that the young woman seated herself on one of the chairs patterned with a Morris motif of oak leaves and carnations. 

Eliza thanked the lady, who rang for tea, and they sat politely chatting of this and that for a few moments.

“I always had a feeling that you would do very well for yourself,” said Mrs. Higgins, pouring them both a cup with a steady and still-fine hand, “I am glad to see that you have found the life that suits you best.”

Accepting the tea, she took the momentary silence to consider how best to introduce the topic on her mind, but the older woman clicked her cup and saucer together gently.

“And how have you been enjoying the Season?”

“Oh, very well,” said Eliza, “We visited the Horticultural Flower Show on Monday.”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Higgins softly, “I have not yet had the pleasure. It is said that England has the loveliest gardens and the most devoted gardeners; I should think a flower show would be quite an agreeable way to pass a splendid afternoon.”

There was a bit of silence, during which Eliza opened her mouth.

“Do you recommend it?”

This unexpected dialogue caused the young woman’s thoughts to scatter suddenly. 

“I beg your pardon?”

“The flower show; would you recommend it?”

“Yes, indeed.”

The older lady tilted her head a little to the side.

“Anything in particular?”

Eliza was beginning to wonder if her visit was proving to be in vain, whether they would ever make it past polite small talk and come to the reason she was here. She studiously avoided shifting about in her chair, took another sip of tea, and reminded herself that above all, a lady waited for the proper moment.

“There was a display of fine roses,” she said, “Queen of Denmark has such a distinctive shape, of course, and er—they had a new one. Oh, what was it called? Ferdinand Pichard—pink, with cerise stripes. Very unusual, striking colorway. Almost a splash of paint. A strong fragrance, too. I would go simply to see that one.” Slightly embarrassed by this little speech, Eliza took up her teacup once more, and gave a soft laugh. “But there are plenty of other things—irises, and lilies, a sculptured pond with a waterfall and Japanese goldfish. Loads of orchids; I’d never seen so many.”

Mrs. Higgins smiled. 

“I wonder whether it must be different for you,” she remarked. 

For a moment, Eliza was not sure what she meant, but—oh. Flowers. Of course.

“The show mostly comprises specimens from botanical and manor gardens,” she said, and that was good, comprises, not is comprised of, people often mistook that to mean the same as is composed of, and it was surprising how many people with a decent education mixed them up. “The markets don’t usually offer the finer varieties; those are primarily in private collections, I believe.” She took another sip in an effort to signal that there was nothing else to say on the matter. 

“I, er—” Eliza went on, picking at a fold in her skirts, “I had reason to be in Marylebone recently,” and a bright, nervous-sounding chuckle came out of her. She made her fingers stop picking, stop moving. A lady does not move without purpose.

Mrs. Higgins joined her cup and saucer together once more, then set them aside on the table before them. 

“I wondered if that wasn’t the real reason for your visit,” she replied in a low voice.

It occurred to Eliza suddenly that she had not considered every possibility, that whether—that whether in the time since they had seen one another, that whether—whether the Professor had died. 

Truly, actually died.

She had not seen anything in the papers—but she didn’t really read the papers, not really—had received no notice of a funeral—surely the woman before her now would have made sure to send her something, regardless of how their association had ended, she would have come, she would have been there—and why would he be, anyway? Die of what? He wasn’t quite old enough to drop dead—what, had he been run over by a car in the street or taken ill with the flu or had he caught pneumonia from walking about in the dead of night collecting accents or, or, or developed a tumor in his brain and slowly grown weaker and bound to the house and then to his bed as he lost the ability to speak, to move, what little was left of his mind fully aware that his body was betraying him until at last he managed to scrawl out a note and beg the nurse for a too-large dose of morphine—

Eliza breathed in sharply.

Wildly inappropriate—she was not going to sit here and tell herself stories.

“I must confess myself… surprised, I suppose,” Eliza said. “Rather confused, as well.” Another brief, bright laugh.

Mrs. Higgins sighed, then nodded slowly. 

“Yes,” she replied. “As am I.” She folded and unfolded her hands. “I’m… not quite sure where to begin, really.”

“Is he all right?”

In response, the older lady developed a thoughtful expression before rising, going to the Chippendale secretary, and returning with some correspondence. She sat once more, held it in her lap, and patted her fingers over the item on top.

“I have no reason to believe that he isn’t,” said Mrs. Higgins. “He is abroad.”

“Abroad?” Was that all? She felt strangely disappointed, as though he ought at least to be in hospital, or prison, or something—if the Professor were on holiday, or on the Continent for some gathering of likeminded dryasdusts, then why sell the house? “Where?”

“Difficult to say,” his mother said, just a hair or two too loudly, too exasperatedly. She held the letters in her hand, turned them over, looked at them. “This is all the correspondence I have received.” And Mrs. Higgins handed them to Eliza.

It was a thin stack, surprisingly so. She had always known the Professor to be a man very much attached to his mother, inseparable to the point of being a bit strange, in truth. Telephone calls if he thought of the slightest comment or opinion; sending post to her though she lived but a few miles away. Not to mention attending church with her on Sundays, followed by hours-long lunches. Something Eliza had looked forward to each week—with him out of the house, it was a whole glorious day without lessons, for Colonel Pickering would teach her a bit about table etiquette, or how to address someone of greater social standing than she, and then snooze with the paper draped over him. She could sleep in, read one of the library books, naff about, for the Professor never returned from Mayfair before dinner on Sundays. She’d wondered once whether Mrs. Higgins did it on purpose, a merciful gift to her, keeping him distracted so hat she could have a day of rest like normal people.

She sifted through them slowly, almost counting them one by one, feeling overly self-conscious of the woman’s eyes on her, as though Mrs. Higgins were watching to see if she tried sneaking a read of the longer letters (but then why turn them over to her? Was there something particular she was meant to see?). At the top of the group, most recent, were postcards. An illustration of Venice, a canal boat next to beautiful old buildings. The next one after had its back toward her, date smudged, postmarked from somewhere called Pula. Eliza couldn’t help herself. 

Not as impressive as Rome’s, I am told—it said. 

On the front of the postcard was a photograph of a colosseum. 

She flipped it again. His handwriting was… quite good; it always had been, but she’d not known enough to know that for a long time. Eliza followed each loop, each swirl, each stroke he’d inscribed. Not a single blot-mark, no squashed or misshapen letters. Even spacing, a perfect slant so that the line weights showed to their best advantage. She squinted at the word just beneath the single sentence.

“HAH,” Eliza read aloud. There was nothing especially funny about either the photograph or the message.

She looked up to see Mrs. Higgins actually rolling her eyes.

“Thinks he’s hilarious,” the older woman muttered, before answering Eliza’s questioning look. “Henry Arthur.”

Henry Arthur Higgins. HAH. As though he’d been born laughing in the face of the universe.

Eliza stared at the initials again. Shuffled the correspondence together neatly. Relinquished it to its owner. 

“When does he plan to return?” she asked. The mystery was not quite so interesting after all.

Mrs. Higgins paused from where she was setting the letters aside, and looked at Eliza with a queer expression indeed, one which the young woman could not discern. 

“He isn’t,” said the older lady slowly, sounding surprised. “It’s been two years next month. He has left England entirely; I do not think he means to return.” She unbent and busied herself with pouring another cup of tea. “This was all… early the summer after you were finished, and he just—” her voice went to a higher pitch, almost as though she meant to be casual, but came off so strained suddenly, “Sold the house and everything in it, or nearly. Dismissed the servants. Ended his practice. Cut us all off, and left.” Something odd, a spasm, or a tremor, came over her face. Raw emotion trembled there, she did something funny with her mouth, scrunched it up, and then flicked her eyes for just a heartbeat or two toward the ceiling. A familiar old trick, to stop a woman’s tears from falling at an inopportune moment. 

Eliza was so mortified she didn’t know where to look.

Two years. Dear Lord.

“Henry said he was tired of London,” said Mrs. Higgins with a tone almost vehement. She pursed her lips now. Released them. Her fingers must have been gripping each other hard, for they were bone white, but their shape, their position, gave no indication that she was exerting them in the least. “And he knew exactly what he was doing when he said that. Tired of London.”

What could that possibly mean? Eliza tucked the phrase away inside her mind. 

“I thought,” his mother continued, “With absolute certainty, that he would make it as far as Paris. At best. That he would spend perhaps two months on the Continent, and come home grumbling, saying that abroad was—well.”

Bloody, Eliza filled in for her mentally. Abroad was bloody awful. 

“But two years now! Every letter comes from farther and farther away, and lately he’s taken to writing a single line on a postcard,” Mrs. Higgins sighed. “One of these days I expect there to be something postmarked Adelaide.”

Two years. 

“Surely he would not go as far as Australia,” Eliza heard herself say. Something was roaring in her ears. Monstrous, to leave an old woman, one’s own mother, bitter and saddened, with a single impersonal sentence a month, for so long. And to go to the other side of the world, as far as humanly possible, and—what did people do when they went there?

But the older lady clucked her tongue.

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” she said, her voice low and quite self-possessed once more. She had resumed her elegant posture, and Eliza made a conscious effort now, straightening to join her. “Before he left, we had a… disagreement about the journey.” She gave a short, mirthless laugh, nearly silent, and shook her head. “I don’t understand—I don’t understand at all. Well. The less said about any of it, the better. If he wants to be a child, he may have it, and good luck to him.”

Eliza inquired whether she might powder her nose, and went down the hall, mostly to compose herself.

It was like waking one morning to discover that the Houses of Parliament had vanished in the night—or, no, surely he was not so important, perhaps the Aldgate Pump would serve just as well, though still not a fair comparison, for at least it had a use—and she was only just discovering this strange phenomenon, while everybody else had known, and gone about with it inside their heads, while she’d been—

Two whole years of strangers living in that house.

She gazed at herself in the filigreed mirror above the porcelain sink. 

Eliza’s jaw was throbbing from grinding her teeth so hard. She watched the muscle pulse in her face, ugly and unbecoming, and let it happen, for she was enraged in the old way, furious at him for being so callous, so careless, toward the one person who took the trouble to adore him more than anything else in the world. Idiot! He had family who actually concerned themselves with whether he was happy and content, whether he was alive or not, who loved him more than their fairweather friends and drink down the pub, and he treated it all as his due, for it would always be there, utterly wasted on him. He’d shrugged and walked away: from that beautiful house, from the library pulley and everything else, for none of it mattered. Nothing ever mattered to him, not really. Not people, just things—or no! Not even things now! Just his stupid bloody ideas and theorems and principles, his methods, his program of improving the stinking wastrels who could do better if they only saw fit to crawl out of the bottle, always talking, talking, talking, as though that would magically remedy the injustices of the world, would solve poverty and the lives people had been born into through no fault or choice of their own. Always rolling his eyes at any little thing, any little question or wrong remark. Or worse—laughing. Life was a great joke, and he just sat back, mocking everyone around him while people scrounged and broke themselves for even the smallest bit of—of respect, of dignity, of having something their very own— 

No. That man did not deserve to take up space inside her head. 

She splashed a bit of water on her cheeks and held a hand towel firmly to her face to muffle a brief screech of outrage.

And then tore the fabric away from her face. Stood straight. Breathed more slowly, until the emotion had passed, and she was in control of herself once more.

A lady had better tools than anger at her disposal.

Calmed in this way, she exited and was just thinking of how to conclude the social call with the grace and gratitude her hostess was due, when Eliza passed an open door emitting pale, watery sunlight into the darkened passageway where she stood. It was a long rectangular solarium along the side of the house, which served as a gallery. She remembered it quite well, as a matter of fact. Even knew where it hung on the wall, past all the other landscapes and portraits, paintings of Mrs. Higgins herself in glowing and elegant youth, for this was where she kept her husband’s artworks. 

Eliza stood gazing back into the eyes for a long time. 

“There you are, my dear,” said Mrs. Higgins as she came into the room.

“Oh,” said the girl, startled, “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to—” she hesitated, uncertain of what word she meant.

“Snoop?” said the older lady with a wry smile. “You needn’t trouble yourself, Miss Doolittle, there’s no one else here to enjoy these paintings, so you are certainly welcome to look all you like.”

She could stay as long as she pleased, the older lady had told her with a firm nod, and Mrs. Higgins would ensure that her ungrateful, churlish boor of a son would not bother Eliza anymore—she would summon the neighborhood constable and have him removed from the premises if he came back like that again.