Chapter Text
The house was tall and narrow, with a knocker in the shape of a heraldic panther (complete with fire coming out its ears). Someone inside played the harpsichord tolerably well, and the whole place glowed faintly with Aziraphale’s blessing. Crowley wasn’t certain what he’d expected, but this didn’t seem to be it. Oh, well, existence would be boring if you only got what you expected. He climbed the tall stairs leading to the first-floor front door, knocked, waited, and knocked again.
In this neighborhood, doors were more likely to be answered by maids than by footmen, but the person who opened this door seemed to be an amalgam of the two. Crowley smiled the smile that made servants think of tips and said: “Good evening. I’m meeting Felicity?”
She stood aside. “Oh, yes, sir. She’s occupied, but I’ll put you in the sitting room and let her know you’re here.” She led him to the right after taking his hat; but the door to the left stood open. As the crowd around the harpsichord started belting out bawdy alternate lyrics for “To Anacreon in Heaven,” he began to understand where he was. The maid told the sitting room: “Here’s Miss Felicity’s young man. I’m off to fetch her,” and left him without further introduction, facing a man in face powder, lace, and knee breeches and another in a lovely sprigged muslin gown and Hessian boots. Muslin and boots observed him from above her fan, while knee breeches hopped off the divan to greet him.
“Good evening! Felicity was waiting for you, but Margery’s gone and gotten her heart broken and won’t let anybody else near her. She won’t be long, I’m sure. I’m Phillida, and this is Julia.”
Crowley made sure his roll of plans was secure beneath his elbow and said, not quite at random, “Eve,” shaking hands with Phillida and bowing to Julia.
“It’s so charming to finally meet you,” said Phillida.
“You’re not what we expected,” said Julia, “but then she’s always so coy about you it’s impossible to say what we expected!”
Ah, yes, the universal “prepared by Aziraphale” experience. “She does talk about me, though? You surprise me.”
“I don’t believe she ever meant to,” said Julia, rolling her eyes. “You know what she’s like! But a couple of the girls started vying for her attentions and suddenly she was mentioning her particular friend at least once an hour.”
“I told her months ago she was welcome to invite you any time,” said Phillida, which presumably meant the house was hers. “And she’s been dodging the issue, so I was ever so pleased when she told me you’d be here tonight. We’re all so fond of her!” Crowley knew that tone, and the look Julia leveled at him, too. He warmed to them, for being in the “protect the angel from his own good nature” camp. “But I’m afraid you must take us as you find us.”
That sounded defensive. Crowley wished he hadn’t dressed up so much. Unless he missed his guess, this was the house - a little cramped, everything in style but nothing expensive - of someone in a trade rather than a profession, and sensitive about it. Envy and Vanity, he noted, from habit. “It seems to me I find you well enough,” he said. “Felicity’s recommendation is all I need. And I’m desperately curious what she’s told you.”
He directed that at Julia, who did not disappoint him, but leaned forward with sparkling eyes, ready to dish. “Hardly anything! Gathering her hints is like following breadcrumbs! We know about your eyes because she got your optician’s address for poor Eliza, and we know you’ve spent far too much of the past ten years on the Continent, and you won’t read novels but don’t mind being read to -“
“Oi, I like that! I love being read to, if she’s the one doing it. It’s not my fault print’s so hard to read in these specs!”
“...and you barely eat but are a fiend for coffee, and taught her to smoke but never have a pipe on you, and got her out of jail once, and are elegant and satirical and clever, and you’ve always known each other but can’t be seen together because families are terrible.”
“I see. So she didn’t lead with the Jewish bit, then?” Crowley raised his voice enough to be sure that Aziraphale - who he could feel outside the door now - heard him. Julia managed not to recoil; Phillida looked wrongfooted. “If I’ve told her once, I’ve told her a dozen times, it saves bother later on.”
“It’s nobody’s business, my dear.” Aziraphale bustled in, dressed exactly as he always was, rather to Crowley’s disappointment; but suffused with happy-angel radiance, which made up for it. “We don’t ask personal questions here, and certainly don’t go around volunteering personal information about other people.” He kissed Crowley on the cheek, briskly, as if this were normal. All right, then! This was normal!
“Of, of course not,” said Phillida, who plainly had never considered the possibility of entertaining a Jew, but was not about to offend Aziraphale about it. “We’re all family here, you know. Have you got Margery calmed down? Should I go to her?”
“She’s reached the point of being wretched about being wretched, and will be taking a little nap before supper.”
“Thank you for dealing with her! I’m afraid she wears me out and I only make her worse if I try to talk to her before she’s done crying.”
“I have no patience with her,” said Julia. “I know she’s young, but it’s time for her to grow some skin. It’s not as if we didn’t all warn her when the business started.”
“And you think that makes it easier for her?” Crowley asked. “Knowing everyone else was right and I was a fool never made anything I ever did feel better.” The roll of plans tried to escape from under his elbow, and Aziraphale plucked it away, leaving him holding only the portfolio of notes.
“Regardless, she’s delayed your business long enough,” said Phillida. “The gong’ll sound for supper, but you and Eve can have the library as long as you need it, Felicity dear. Make yourselves free of the brandy. After all, we wouldn’t have it if it weren’t for you.”
“Oh, this is who you wanted the brandy for? You might have said.”
“You might have asked.”
“I did. You said ‘a friend.’”
“And I told the truth.” Aziraphale ushered Crowley through a door into a small library with a large desk, closed the door behind him, and raised one eyebrow. “When did you turn Jewish?”
Crowley shrugged. “Sometimes I’m Catholic. Or atheist. Or Irish. Anything that’ll set the cat among the pigeons.”
“Well, I think it’s in horrible taste!”
“I’m not the one who invented demonizing people, but once the humans did, you can’t blame me for keeping the pot stirring. I’m always on my best behavior when I do it - the temptation pays off better if all the energy feeding the bigotry comes from the bigot.”
“And what do you tell Jews you are, when you’re tempting them?”
“I don’t tempt Jews. They have gentiles for that! You know me, angel - start at the top of the privilege heap and let the ball roll downward.”
“We’re hardly at the top of the privilege heap here.”
“All right, sorry; only it occurs to me that ‘Oh, Felicity’s fellow is Jewish’ beats any number of stories we could invent as an explanation for why we have to be so careful.” His mouth twitched. “You might have mentioned you were inviting me to a mollyhouse, angel.”
“Where did you think I was inviting you, with a password like I’m meeting Felicity?” Aziraphale rolled the plans out on the desk, weighting the corners with an inkwell, an address book, a paperweight shaped like a cockleshell, and a letteropener shaped like no sword that had ever been wielded upon the earth.
“I had no idea. Head completely empty.” Crowley found the brandy decanter and took Phillida at her word.“I remember a time when you wouldn’t eat in a brothel with me, and now apparently we’re having supper here.”
“It’s not a brothel! It’s Phillida and Julia’s home. They keep open house for their friends on most days and yes, the chambers are available to guests who need a little privacy, but mostly it’s a place to stop in and take down the facades for an evening. People who want to dress comfortably leave clothes here, and dining’s informal, and both the cook and the maid were rescued from a freak show, poor things, that displayed them as hermaphrodites, so there’s not a judgmental eye in sight. Phillida keeps a box on the mantel in the drawing room where we all drop in a pound or two when we can, to cover the suppers and candles and drinks and whatnot. It would be easy for both of us to justify being here at the same time by accident - you trying to corrupt them and me trying to protect them.”
“That’s why you come here, is it? To protect them?”
“They belong to a highly vulnerable population.” Aziraphale went to the mantelpiece and took down a pristine new pipe from a rack.
“So do prostitutes.”
“We couldn’t conduct this business properly in a brothel.” Aziraphale took out his tobacco pouch and began packing the bowl. “If I’d known you were going to be all pompotical about it -“
“I’m not! Angel! Honestly, I’m not. Only I wasn’t expecting it and now I wonder things.”
“What kind of things?”
“Like - how long have you been coming to places like this?”
“As long as they’ve been around. Haven’t you?”
“No! I mean - I’ve been in them before, of course I have, but not one like this, where apparently everybody knows each other and nobody’s paid to roll over. If there’s any actual Lust going on here, as opposed to normal healthy appetites, it’s so neglected I can’t sense it.” He tasted the brandy. It wasn’t the pinnacle of brandies, since he’d acquired it from the smugglers on behalf of Aziraphale’s friend rather than on behalf of Aziraphale, but it was better than the average honest tradesman in London was likely to have in his library, so well done Crowley. “Normally I’d go by Lilith, but that felt all wrong here.”
“I think Eve is a sweet choice.” Aziraphale passed him the full pipe and an encouraging smile. “Phillida picked this up for you, since I’ve told her how you can never keep track of the things. You can leave it on the rack and it’ll be here any time you care to come. All she knows about you is that you’re my friend and we need a place to meet away from prying eyes, so she’s prepared to make you welcome over and over again.”
Which was as much to say, that he was trusting Crowley with a great deal here; and Crowley accepted the pipe and lit it with a finger snap, as token that he understood and would honor that. “So I’m your friend, now, am I? You’ve said that out loud, in so many words? Your particular friend, even, according to Julia.”
Aziraphale took out his own pipe, a comically small one, by present standards, that he’d had about a hundred and fifty years now. “In this house, yes. We’re no different from anyone else here, in that regard. They’d all stand by each other, in certain circumstances, and all deny each other, in others, and no one would blame anyone.”
Crowley drew in a lungful of smoke, taking plenty of time to consider his next words before he let it out again. “That’s not the only regard we’re not so different in, is it? I hadn’t wondered before. It seemed natural enough, as skin hungry as you get, and as fond as you are of your earthly pleasures. But now, well - is this where you got the idea? For Paris?”
Aziraphale busied himself with his pipe, packing it, lighting it with an ember from the grate, sucking on it to get the air flowing.
Shut your mouth, Crowley. You’ll ruin things again. “If it is, I owe them one, is all I mean.”
The pipe started drawing. Aziraphale’s radiance did not falter, but he did not look up as he asked: “It doesn’t bother you, that I don’t want to do it again?” (I can’t see what you want, my dear, he’d whispered, once, in a refuge made of wings and wards and water. You have to find ways to let me know.)
“How can anything bother me, when you’re still visibly afterglowing?” He hadn’t seen Aziraphale this relaxed, this long, in...ever? Maybe Rome? His Vanity did not mind competing with the Resurrection for honors in the “making Aziraphale happy longest” sweepstakes. “You wanted something and you came to me for it, that’s all I care about.”
“Well, I couldn’t have wanted it from anybody else!” Aziraphale did not quite mumble around the pipestem.
Crowley tried not to grin like an idiot. “I’m glad it happened once, all right? And if these people piqued your curiosity, they’re some of my favorite people.”
Aziraphale took the pipe out of his mouth, and Smiled. “Mine too! You’ll see at supper - they’re all so lovely!”
“Of course they are.” If Aziraphale didn’t think people were lovely in some way, he didn’t hang about with them. “We should get on those diagrams if we want to decide where your bookshop will be before the gong, though.”
This change of subject was rewarded with another Smile and a happy wiggle. Aziraphale pulled a stool over to the desk, leaving the chair for Crowley to sprawl in, and arranged the candles to cast light upon the plans. “Thank you so much for going over my calculations for me - oh! You don’t like the Soho location? What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s too unstable financially! Look -“ Crowley opened up the portfolio, pulled out his charts, and they were off and arguing, heads close together as intricate models of unmodelable factors in the dynamic system that was London formed in the four-dimensional space created by the combination of plans, notes, and their own gesturing hands, pipes, and brandy snifters. Aziraphale’s impassioned accounting of his reasons for preferring a financially unstable district, especially one in which the chthonic and ethereal leys converged so precisely at a crossroads, did not so much win Crowley over to the Soho plat as flatten his objections to it, and he only withheld surrender on the subject in order to enjoy the spectacle of the siege his angel laid to his understanding. In the end they agreed on the size, shape, and best astral conditions for creating a Soho bookshop, and Crowley made note of his own first choice, in Mayfair, contemplating a purchase of his own.
That settled, they returned to altering the geas around Aziraphale’s neck. It had to be done delicately, so as not to alert Sandalphon (if Crowley ever got a chance at Sandalphon, he was taking it), and they’d been patiently picking away at it for months now. Finally, tonight, they loosened it enough that Aziraphale could be confident that, should a miracle be necessary to save someone else, the fact that he was also in the area of effect would not shut it down. This did not seem adequate to Crowley, but Aziraphale declared himself satisfied, and the gong sounded, so they tapped out their pipes, bundled up their papers, and went down to supper together.
Crowley could have skipped supper and not minded, apart from the pleasure of watching Aziraphale eat. The dining room was slightly too small for all the people in it; and as for keeping track of those people, remembering for more than a moment which male body was Kitty and which Georgina or whoever, no one should expect it of him. Eliza was simple enough, with her spectacles not quite as dark as his own, and the two pairs of bodily women (one of whom should have had a male body, and two of whom wore tailcoats and breeches) stood out; and then there was Margery, distinguishable by her tear-reddened eyes, her extreme youth (seventeen at most), the general air of recent angel-blessed sleep, and her lack of boundaries. She gave her hand to Crowley with a theatrical air and said reproachfully to Aziraphale: “Darling, you never said he was a toff!” as if the subject of the remark were deaf.
“I’m not a toff,” said Crowley. “I have access to money. Not the same thing.”
They were seated in the closest approximation Phillida and Julia could manage to the current style in semi-formal dining, with certain pairings - including Crowley and Aziraphale - assumed to be “married” and set across from each other, and the singles distributed in the gaps, possibly according to some idiosyncratic gender or status calculation that Crowley had no interest in puzzling out. He ate enough to be minimally polite, splitting his attention between Aziraphale, finding a comfortable way to arrange his limbs, and being the right amount of charming and diverting. Margery in particular wanted to be charmed and diverted and he didn’t mind indulging her.
“So what is this mysterious business you and Felicity are conducting?”
“Felicity wants a bookshop, and I want her to have what she wants. What’s mysterious about that?”
“Only that she wouldn’t talk about it! Couldn’t you have conducted that business at your offices?”
“She’s not even supposed to know where my offices are.” Offices! He needed some!
“Are your families really as formidable as that? When I’m as old as you are, my family won’t have a word to say about where I go, I assure you!”
“You have all my best wishes for that. Our families are each worse than the other, and if you ever have the chance to be introduced to either, you should run as fast as you can in the opposite direction. Romeo and Juliet aren’t in it!”
“That is not how you quash her curiosity, my dear,” said Aziraphale, his foot checking one of Crowley’s on its restless journey through the cramped space under the table.
“Since when do I quash curiosity, angel?” Crowley, intrigued, let him guide the intercepted foot into position, and deployed the second one experimentally in the same direction.
“Margery, dear, you must learn the difference between interest and impertinence. Especially when talking to Eve! Because she will always answer questions, whether she should or not.” Aziraphale spoke as primly as if Crowley’s feet hadn’t settled on top of his own under the table, the leather smooth and supple under his soles.
“I don’t mean to be impertinent,” said Margery. “Only how am I supposed to make wise decisions, if I don’t have examples to follow? If I don’t ask questions I never get the whole story.”
“You’ve got that right. But if you’re looking for the rules to happiness, there’s no such thing. You do the best you can with what you’ve got, and what you can’t make the best of, you escape. That’s it. That’s all you need to know.” Crowley separated out the toes on one foot enough to maximize the sensation as he went exploring for the boundary Aziraphale was setting, here, and found some stocking. Silk, because of course it was.
“I’m afraid Eve’s a fatalist,” said Aziraphale, twisting both of his feet so as to trap both of Crowley’s between them, eyes sparking and mouth that butter wouldn’t melt in. “You’re too young for that nonsense. Happiness is having something to look forward to, and working toward it.”
“Not if you can never get there! Real life doesn’t have happy endings, only sad ones. You’re the one always saying we can’t do what we want.” Crowley shamelessly utilized his flexibility of form to worm his feet around Aziraphale’s, trapping the trapper.
“Yet, my dear.” Aziraphale beamed at him, pulling his feet directly up, freeing them neither quickly nor decisively. “Have faith, and we’ll have a happy beginning in due course.”
“At this point, I’ll settle for you having your bookshop,” said Crowley, trying to tickle Aziraphale’s soles, but of course Aziraphale spent real money for real shoes and couldn’t be tickled. All the same, he lowered his feet in apparent surrender. Crowley wondered if he could spin this into “routed an angel,” but when they wound up with their toes pressed together companionably for the rest of the meal, he had to concede that it was, at most, a draw.
Oh, well. He could live with that.