Work Text:
Daisy tells Sylvester the truth about her past.
It’s not a decision she leads with , of course. Daisy D’umpstaire doesn’t maintain a reputation by going around telling every handsome fox she meets about Daisy Dumpster of the South Carolina Dumpsters. It’s not even a really conscious decision. It’s just that, five months into their relationship, she has fallen into the habit of matching Sylvester step for step. It’s the only way to keep up in a tango like the one they’re doing.
So Daisy really should have known better than to press Sylvester on his own history—it will only open the door for him to ask about hers. Some of his is public knowledge. Since exposing the Cottonbottoms—the saga of which has been meticulously documented in the Times — his storied career has been well-covered by the press. She could have been satisfied with that. It’s only the early years that remain hidden to her, things she doesn’t need to know. They live in the present, they don’t talk about the past.
He lets her lead the dance, often, and as long as she doesn’t broach the subject her own history is safe.
She asks, anyway. She isn’t entirely sure why, although she has a few good guesses. Insatiable, creeping curiosity, for one thing. Also, a growing desire to possess him; to have every part of this remarkable man for herself. The desire bubbles up and over one evening, overflowing like too much champagne.
“And who are the Crosses?” she asks, coyly across the table. They’ve finished dinner and stacked the plates up on the sideboard; the candles are burning down. Sylvester’s eyes are very gold in the flickering light.
“You’ve met the only one,” Sylvester says. He swirls the whiskey in his glass, his second to Daisy’s third. She can hold her liquor better than he can, something he sees as charming rather than a threat. Sylvester Cross has an ego, there’s no denying it, but it’s not easily wounded; when she does manage to show him up, he’s always delighted rather than put out.
“What do you mean?” Daisy hesitates, and then starts to edge her hand across the table, ready to offer comfort. “Are they gone?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Sylvester says flippantly. “I never knew them. I was abandoned on the steps of a church as a baby. The Holy Cross Church, in fact. So, Cross.” Daisy isn’t sure what her expression is doing, but it makes Sylvester give her a reassuring smile. “Sounds like something out of a penny dreadful, doesn’t it?”
“So where did Sylvester come from?” Torn between the impulse towards sympathy and the practiced back-and-forth of their conversation, her tone ends up a little strained without meaning to.
“You know, I don’t know,” he answers. “They never told me.”
Daisy almost changes the subject right then, lets it go, lets Sylvester keep that smile on his face and keeps her own heart locked up. Yet again, the only excuse she can give for why she didn’t is swimming in those candlelight-gold eyes.
“How long were you there?”
“Until I was fifteen,” he says. “Then I joined the Navy. Enlisted. I ended up in the medical corp by chance, and a superior officer thought I showed promise, so the Navy funded my education as a doctor. I was a ship’s doctor for a time, and when the war ended, one of the officers recommended me as a physician to an old friend of his.”
“Ignatius Cottonbottom,” she guesses.
“Excellent work. You’ll be stealing my title yet,” Sylvester replies, with a flash of teeth. “The Cottonbottoms were very good to me. Fletcher befriended me—I was very flattered, at the time, that he cared so little for my social standing. I know his motives now, of course.”
Sylvester speaks with a terrible ease about all of it, as though it is all water under the bridge. As though none of it hurts anymore, with his success, or as though it never hurt at all—as though it had meant nothing to discover how the Cottonbottoms planned to use him.
“The officer who recommended you,” she begins.
“I’ll never be sure if he knew, of course,” Sylvester says flippantly. “Certainly he did not confess, and he was tangentially involved enough that it would be difficult to arrest him for anything even if we could ascertain his knowledge.”
Daisy had meant to ask if he’d checked up on Sylvester, but Sylvester’s reply took the words out of her mouth. Betrayal after betrayal.
“Have you ever gone back to the church?”
“The Holy Cross Church,” he says. “No, I haven’t. It’s been a long time, I’m sure not many of the nuns are still there. Anyway, they were not…” he trails off for a moment. “I don’t think I was expected to visit.”
“When we marry,” she says, quietly, knowing the answer and hating that she’s asking anyway. “Is there anyone you would—like to stand up with you?”
“You are all I have in the world,” Sylvester tells her, and his tone is light but the candlelight in his eyes is burning, burning bright. “Are you disappointed?”
“Disappointed?”
“Well, it’s not quite what you expected, I’m sure. Will Miss Daisy D’umpstaire’s family be disappointed when she marries an orphan who doesn’t know his own lineage? Will they be at the wedding?” His eyes dart to the ring on her finger; she knows the temperature hasn’t changed, but her skin suddenly feels hot under it, as though his very gaze is heating it with the reflected fire.
“All my family is back in America,” she says, heart thumping a little too hard. “It’s quite a trip. I think they’d—if we go over there, we’ll have another party, how about that.”
She’s sure he hears it as if we go over there in the sense of if they take the time for a trip, if a case takes them to South Carolina or across the ocean at all. She needn’t be so careful with her language, really; she’s told him so many lies that one more would do no harm at all. But she still says it, anyway, in that way that could land as depending on what we decide and not if I were really going to marry and build a life with you.
“That sounds splendid,” he says. “But you haven’t said whether it will be a terrible scandal.”
Daisy plays coy for a moment, still waffling. “Would it bother you? If it was?”
“I love scandal,” he says; she can’t tell if it’s a joke or true earnestness.
“No,” she says, after another agonized second of indecision. In the end, she can’t stomach another lie, not when he has been so achingly honest. “It won’t be. Would you like to know a secret, Sylvester Cross?” She’s said his name a hundred, thousand, ten thousand times, but it feels different on her tongue now that she knows where it’s from.
“Secrets are the only thing I like better than scandal,” he replies.
“My name isn’t really D’umpstaire,” she says.
“What is it?”
“Dumpster,” she says. “I was plain old Daisy Dumpster, of the South Carolina Dumpsters. My parents are Rusty and Tuna Dumpster, and they’ll be more than impressed with—with a Navy man and a doctor, even before we get to the world’s greatest detective piece of it.”
Up until she says it, she hasn’t been entirely sure if the conversation hurts him to have, but she sees the moment it stops hurting—the moment the tension she almost missed leaves his face, and his eyes light with something from within rather than the reflected glow.
“We’ll have to make a trip of it,” he says. “I can’t wait to meet them.”
He means it, too, and then Daisy makes the mistake of imagining it. Sylvester probably won’t be as disdainful of the old house as she used to think, orphan that he is; he won’t like the heat but he won’t mind the humidity, London’s just as bad that way. Her parents really will love him. They’d love just about anyone who loved their daughter honestly and truly, she thinks, even before they get to all the other ways Sylvester is charming and bright and lovable. They’ll ask if he’s looking after Daisy and he’ll correct them and say that she’s looking after him. They’ll want to hear everything about Daisy’s life now. They’ll want to hear every exciting detail of Sylvester’s cases.
They’ll love him, and they won’t want anything from him for it. They won’t expect him to hide their crimes. He won’t be a tool. He won’t be a source of information, secrets and clues sold out from under his nose, sent out behind his back. Daisy betrays him every day and he doesn’t know it.
He should know better. He should know Daisy is using him. He knows what that’s like; he said it himself. The world’s greatest detective ought to know that he’s being had.
Every once in a while, she thinks he does, thinks that he’s figured her out.
But then again, she knows why he hasn’t. She knows that she was offered two thousand pounds for details of his investigation, delivered by a nondescript rat courier when they were in a hotel in Vienna. Sylvester was just in the next room when she read the letter. He was asleep in the bed inches away when she burned it in the candle after writing back yes . And then he was wide awake when she told him she loved him the first time, in the slice of moonlight through the gap in the curtains.
It hurts, how easily it was to fool him. But of course, he’s always wanted to believe it.
No one has ever loved Sylvester Cross for free. The idea of it is almost enough to break Daisy’s heart—almost. She’s made of slightly sterner stuff than that.
What does break her heart is that she can’t be the first one to do it.