Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Once again... welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the happiness you bring.

- Dracula, Bram Stoker

Mary’d always said Maiden Lane was too overrun for it, but Jaime did well most nights, and even if the fancy lads could be such devils at times, even if the girls moaned about the way they treated them, the pay was enough to make up for the troubles he had now and then.

But it had been a hellish night, drizzle spitting from low clouds that sank heavy over the streets and clogged up the alleyways, sending all of London to sit by the fire. Jamie wished he was inside on some fancy chair, a woolen blanket over his lap and a mug of something hot and strong warming his fingers. The girls had been stroppy, and Jamie was still light in the pockets and feeling an angry sort of sorry for himself when he saw a flash overcoat, the kind the toffs wore to the opera, turn and head down Bull Inn Court. When he got there, it wasn’t a shiny black ensemble after all, just a plain brown thing, but it was all the same in the end, getting on late and him without so much as half-a-crown for the night.

“Cold one, ain’t she, guv?” Jamie said to the man. He was facing away as though the buildings around them were very interesting. If he was drunk, all the better; maybe Diana would stop her whinging about working in the cold, the little bint. Airs like she was bloody Madam Dewberry—she ought to know better, know her place. “Kind that gets inside your bones and sticks there, eh?”

The man replied by giving a disgusted scoff and turned to look at the other building, as if it would sympathize with his plight. 

Jamie set his teeth and clenched a fist in one pocket. The old trade hadn’t changed, despite all of the last few years. Some blokes were still precious about it: too much religion, or they wanted something else. If it had been a better night’s take, or his blood wasn’t already up after that row with Clara, maybe Jamie would have been generous, would have turned a blind eye, sent this fella along to Teddy and his boys near Cleveland Street, and taken a cut for stooping so low. Nasty, immoral stuff, but he wasn’t so high and mighty—nor his purse so fat. Jamie tried again.

“Don’t I know it. Nights like this, it’s good to have summat to keep yer warm for a bit, maybe little company ‘sides.” The man didn’t respond. “I know a nice girl’ld do for you, poor thing, down on her luck and more’n willing.”

“Dorset Street, Spitalfields,” the man replied after a moment’s pause. He’d a very fine way of talking indeed, the kind that made Jamie’s arms get all gooseflesh and red-like when he heard blokes talk that way. Gentlemen. They got in and out of cars wearing shoes shined so high you could see yourself in them, but that wasn’t even the most impressive thing about men like him.

They could do a magic trick.

They could turn you invisible. Their eyes went past you, even if you were right there, and they glided on by in their high-footed and arrogant way, never stopping even if you dared reach out and touch their sleeve. 

“What’d you say?” The man’s voice, and his uncanny mention of the old neighborhood, had Jamie wanting suddenly to spit on the man’s shoes, grime them so they looked nearly as scuffed and coated in shit and mud as his own, and the thought warred with the prospect of the night’s efforts finally being worth his while. A victor emerged, and both fists clenched now.

“Nevermind,” said the man, sounding nearly mournful. “It was nothing.”

He still hadn’t turned around. Still stood there, gazing up at the muck-coated bricks, oozing with thick black where they didn’t shine with the wet, oily glaze of fog and rain. 

The man was right. Jamie’s stomach hardened—against the cold, against the wind, the rain. Against a whole night with nothing to show for it.

“You a fan of arkey-tecture, are you, then? Interested in buildings? Maybe go stand and stare with yer gob open outside St. Paul’s, there’s nothing ‘ere for you, m’lord,” Jamie said, bitterness leaching into his voice. He took a step forward, calculating which pocket inside that ridiculous coat would hold the wallet—a lovely thing, thick with bank notes, probably. Maybe have himself an overcoat without holes for the winter, besides. Great ruddy idiot, coming out at this hour and wandering down dead-end alleyways. 

“No, not particularly,” was the answer. “I don’t want your doxy, either, although—” And here the man’s voice drifted into contemplativeness, as though he’d all the time in the world to stand and muse while Jamie crept up over his shoulder. “Considering the likely and obvious differences between you, the lives you’ve led, health and all that, I mean, is there much comparison? What was the last thing you had to eat?”

This strange monologue, capped with the abrupt question, stayed Jamie’s hand from leaving his other pocket with the blade.

“What?”

The man did turn now, and he was only a man after all, all there, all normal, face clean and uncreased by way of the ease and care that the middle class afforded.

“What was the last meal you ate?”

“Pasty,” said Jamie after his mind caught up, “And a pint.” He ran the meat of his thumb over the sharp knife, the solid metal warm from being in his coat pocket. 

“Not a bottle or two of whiskey?” said the man. “Or whatever rotgut they’re brewing in the tenements these days? Could melt a warship with it, I warrant. Nobody ever drinks port anymore; such a shame.” He tilted his head to one side and jingled the coins in his pockets, expressionless. “Well, that’s good of you, anyway—I never did like whiskey, or anything of that ilk. Tastes of petrol; ruins the flavor.”

“Flavor? Wha’ are you on abou’?”

The man didn’t answer him, but gave a fresh sigh instead.

“Your manner of speech is an abomination. It’s an affront to—well, everything. Members of your class always do howl and shriek about it, and listening to that caterwauling is quite frankly the worst part of it for me, but it’s been a long and irritatingly slow night already, I’ve got a very good book waiting for me, and you aren’t fuming with ethanol, therefore—,” he said. The man drew up half of his face in resignation, and shrugged.

“Wha—” said Jamie, but the man shoved him up against the shadowed wall so roughly that the wind knocked out of him before he could finish the syllable. The knife clattered to the pavement; his feet dangled half an inch above. There was a wet, glistening crunch, and even through the sharp electrical currents of pain arcing down his limbs through his fingertips, and the incoherent, half-formed words pouring from his lips, Jamie found he couldn’t move in his own defense.

Oh God, oh God, save m— the breathless words went up.

“Oh, hell,” the man muttered after several moments of this, his face contorted in a pained wince. He pulled away to look Jamie in the eye, and held up one finger like a schoolmaster, but his voice was an appeal. “I don’t like this any more than you do, but calling on… the powers that be, won’t get either of us anywhere. A whoremonger and a murderer, and suddenly you’ve found religion, like some hackneyed drawing room pantomime. Do whatever it is you must, but stop talking. Such melodrama; it’ll be far quicker and easier if you’d shut up, for—” but the man didn’t finish the epithet. Instead, he pushed them both back into the shadows and continued. Drowning and floating at the same time, Jamie fancied a great dull weight come over him, then slowly dissolve.

At last the man took a step away from the scene, the back of one hand over his mouth and a gore-soaked handkerchief already clutched in the other. 

He made another sound of disgust.

“Sloppy,” he murmured to himself critically. “And whatever pub bleeding your pockets dry—forgive me—deserves the loss of your patronage,” he told Jamie’s body, now slumped in a heap. “That beer was off.”

The man went out Maiden Lane and up toward Bow Street, swiping the handkerchief over his mouth firmly one more time before turning up his collar and hurrying past the opera house, which was emptying for the evening after a rather pedestrian performance of Don Giovanni.

He did not notice the group of glittering women and men gathered on the steps near the entryway, swaddled in velvets and silks, dripping with glass diamonds and crowned by feathers and beaded hairbands, chatting comfortably as they waited for drivers and cabs. Nor, among their number, the lone young woman who turned to watch his long strides through shining puddles, the familiar gait, the singularly recognizable overcoat and hat that marked him unmistakably as himself.

Respectability was a curious thing.

She’d once thought of it as a neatly-manicured garden path toward a better life for the best possible version of herself, the one who would be granted access to a kingdom of deserved riches and rewards she’d for so long only been allowed to view from an envious distance through the iron bars of a locked gate.

Passing through that gate after so much tribulation, she’d taken a handful of triumphant steps down such a beautiful and artful walkway, only to have a mortar shell suddenly rip through the earth at her feet, leaving smoking craters and trenches to be picked past and navigated.

Gingerly and dutifully she did so, along with everybody else, and nowadays found herself returned to the curated walk with the bombed ruins solidly behind her, where she didn’t have to look at them if she didn’t want to.

The war was over; normalcy and peace graced England once again.

Youth clumped together where it could, its lopsided numbers favoring the ladies, upon which none of them commented. 

The men who did come home, who did rejoin the parties, who dressed for dinner and balls and the opera, were perfectly nice in their way. Mostly whole, ones and twos of their proper features, and if their hands shook beneath their programmes in the theatre stalls as the house lights dimmed, it was only mannerly to look away, even if one would have liked to clasp them in one’s own and give a reassuring squeeze. Everybody did their bit, and it was awfully nice to have a turn about the dance floor with a handsome young man of broad shoulders and sharply parted hair who talked of how jolly things had been at the officers’ camp, how the Germans had let them put on little plays of their own, how they wrote and printed a camp newspaper to keep themselves occupied. 

Another ballroom, and the armory of gowns and paste jewelry. Orchestras playing on and on, and sometimes she nearly thought it was the same men, playing the same instruments, with only the wallpaper to mark the difference, but it hardly mattered, really. 

Some veil had been blown aside by a sour yellow wind, and now gatherings, dances, teas, all of them, revealed themselves for what they were, with hardly a sense of decor or grandeur to obscure the machinations, the maneuverings, the desperation for money and titles and power, more frantic and haphazard now. Nobody kept dance cards anymore, for the men would surely exhaust themselves by the end of the night merely trying to fill their basic duty, and anyway, it was a strange business, as though they were all bony lionesses eyeing one another and creeping jealously toward their scant prey from bushes beside the watering hole. 

The newspapers weren’t there, in the drawing rooms where Mamma made battle plans to secure a ridge’s worth of ground; they wrote of surplus women who would never pair up, never marry, as though they were over-requisitioned woolen stockings and would have to be repurposed eventually, women like canvas military packs languishing in a warehouse basement, wasted and useless to the nation’s cause.

Rumors went round that some of the men who didn’t return had simply gone abroad, unable to fit themselves back into the arbitrary boundaries of society, that they’d lived through Hell, watched whole neighborhoods of their fellow soldiers vanish, and were left wondering why they’d been spared. Whispers were that they sought now the heights of pleasure and some means of escape after so much suffering. They disappeared into far jungles, distant deserts, to smoke-filled rooms and bottles, into dangerous and lamentable configurations, anywhere but the dazed and scarred continent—and whatever path they walked after that was theirs alone.

Eliza wondered what it was like.

War had not induced within her breast a thrilling sense of real and honest purpose, despite what the others at Endell Street said whilst they waited in the courtyard near the vans. It lent her a vague sense of guilt that came and went. She couldn’t entirely discount the experience; it had been a great and noble thing to join the staff of a woman-run hospital. A girl she knew from the WSPU had convinced her. With no medical experience or training, she’d been assigned to drive one of the ambulances, making trips to the train station in the middle of the night to gather up wounded passengers sent home by boat—all because the summer before the war broke out, she’d learnt to operate her father’s new open-top sporting car, despite his directions.

It had been an efficient and useful number of years. But Eliza had always known that she could work and learn and do difficult things, that she was independent and beholden only to herself—that had not been a shock to her soul. That death continued after the Armistice was signed, and so relentlessly, did, but of course—but of course she’d survived that, too, so far. With the war, the suffragists had fractured and in the end only the older women got the vote anyway, Endell Street was broken up, for women were not required beyond the present emergency, and it almost seemed to reveal itself as the theme of her life.

Eliza, a brilliant phoenix all aflame, rising from the ashes. Always fated to step forward into change, to adapt, but forever in this unsettled state of impermanence, left wondering who she was, honestly, at the very bottom of her own soul. Flower girl, duchess, lady, ambulance driver, shopgirl. Up and down, the Wheel of Fortune goes round, as Marguerite always said. She’d worked hard to live a good life, would not release her grip on the idea, and so Eliza had set it in her mind to have that world of niceties and leisure, of pretty curios and sweet affectations, after all. Pastels and light hats crowned with ribbons. Paste jewelry bought secondhand, nothing hired. Dove-grey suede gloves. The same gown, worn more times than was really fashionable or socially acceptable. 

But whatever had wormed its way into the minds of the men who’d taken in the horrors before them and run away, rather than toward, their homes, was not a symptom of battle fatigue, but something larger, more cosmic and invisible, that infected only a select few, for Eliza found herself, of all things… well, she didn’t really have a word for it.

Not bored. That was a factual impossibility, for there was nothing boring about being comfortable for the first time in one’s life. Not having to grapple with the other girls for the best violet stock, not sit in the early-morning damp chill and wind them into posies, not scheme and wheedle and dodge to ensure she’d have a place to lay her head without being molested.

But it grew so wooden, and not after too long. Tea and polite conversation and the weather and chiffon floating in a light breeze and the weather and who was dancing with whom and who’d a new motor-car and who would sit in the family hall that had been so… abruptly vacated, and how sad for the wife, for she’d married but he came back a cripple, and wasn’t it such a shame they couldn’t throw parties or do anything at all, really?

To work so hard toward something shining in the distance, be ripped from it and left wanting, and then to have it in the palm of her hand and find it rather dull after all—it was nearly funny. 

The worst of it was, nobody could admit to wanting something more. Adventure had been had, and in far too great quantities. That wasn’t any sort of problem. Everybody wanted calm and serenity; nobody wanted a farrago of fitful days and hours and years spent wondering and worrying. This was enough, being alive and safe and having both arms and both legs was enough, and ought to be enough, and she should be perfectly content with rounds of parties and balls, for they were far more than others could expect. Eliza was an independent woman, made her own decisions, lived for nobody but herself. She occupied the middle ground: neither the poor distant relation brought along out of pity, nor some savagely sleek creature with money, a titled husband, and a string of lovers equal in length to his own. Eliza was there, danced with everybody, made sympathetic noises at her friends’ woes and kept their secrets, and that, for them, was enough. 

Standing outside number 27A Wimpole Street one blustery grey morning, though, she couldn’t answer enough.

Why was she there? 

She couldn’t very well barge in and demand that he train her to give diction lessons; the time had long since passed when that was even a possibility. They’d never spoken again after she’d left, never written, never come face to face, but then—perhaps enough years had gone by that any lingering unpleasantries had turned ripe for reflection and reminiscence. That did happen, after all; Eliza now looked back on her own early years of education from a greater distance and found that the intervening time had done much to dull her sense of injustice and outrage.

Perhaps all anguish faded eventually. Perhaps bitter things could at least become bittersweet. 

Eliza went up the steps and rang the bell. 

After a moment or two, she realized there was no movement beyond the door, no sign of life within. She rang again, and leaned over the iron banister to peer into the front windows, but the curtains hung heavy, not even a sliver of the rooms visible near the edges. With no other choice, she came back down the steps, then crossed the street to assess the house anew. 

All the drapes were pulled just as close. 

This was curious not for the fact that it was daytime and they should have been drawn, but that she knew with skin-prickling certainty that she’d seen the Professor only the night before, hurrying through Covent Garden with his collar put up against the wind and rain. He still wore the same coat, the same hat—even setting aside the difficulties of having new things in a world only just awakening to the fact that it had survived and lived on, the styles had shifted. The man had never cared for propriety or the done thing, of course, but he’d always had his own sense of elegance—perhaps aging had frozen him in place, forever destined to remain out of step but entirely within his own singular realm. 

Eliza sighed and walked toward the nearest Underground entrance to return home.

But it wasn’t enough. 

She knew she’d seen him, and spent the afternoon in empty gestures of little houseworks until just before dark, turning over and over the idea that if he were in Town and in the habit of going out in the evenings, she could catch him as he went. All the way to the Bond Street station, Eliza struggled distractedly against possibilities, for though she’d not actually seen his face, the idea of Professor Higgins as one of those unfortunates ruined by some instrument of war and forced to wear a painted mask with false glasses to hold it up was nearly enough to make her burst out in frantic giggling at the absurdity, the impossibility of his ever changing for anyone or anything, nations and sovereigns, battles and cataclysms—

Out of everything else that had changed in the world, the sudden anchoring onto this figure from Before, and the need to know after so long: her ruminations in this manner went without closer examination. Any urge to do so was only a fleeting bit of mirrored light over her face, a flash that winked and disappeared.

This time, she rang the bell determined not to leave until she’d an answer, half-musing of how readily she could make her way round to Harley Place, climb the iron gate and enter through the courtyard and the back garden, perhaps one of the servants had left the kitchen door unlocked—

An orange light was emerging from the darkness beyond the frosted glass of the door, round and wobbling. It hovered some three or four feet from where she stood on the other side. 

Eliza stooped slightly, and squinted to peer within.

“Mrs. Pearce?” she called. “It’s Eliza Doolittle, can you hear me?”

A momentary pause, and she strained to see, but couldn’t quite tell who was there.

Haltingly, the locks were undone, and with a crack as though it had been sealed shut, the door pulled open.

He stood at an odd angle, only his face and the one shoulder visible, his forearm held parallel to the edge of the door, as though by these means he could prevent whoever was on the front steps from rushing at him and forcing entry. 

But there he was. 

“Professor,” she said, surprised, for inside only a moment she’d not recognized him, or—she couldn’t quite define it. The shock of seeing a face she’d imagined she’d known but had not remembered perfectly after so many hours, and her mind embarrassed at the wrongness, perhaps, or the strange tension between seeing something intimately familiar and its bizarre newness, as though seeing it again for the very first time. The purity of paradox. There was no way to describe the sensation.

“Eliza,” he replied after a moment, and he even sounded the same. That resonant voice, with its texture and flawless form. His arm against the doorframe showed he still wore the damask dressing gown. Still tall, still that arch and regal superiority, still the same mostly-brown hair with a few strands of silver hinting at middle age, and—God help her—he’d not grown a beard nor been so vain and pretentious as to dabble in waxed mustaches. No, and now she felt silly to have started so at the sight of him, for he was himself, of course he was.

Whole, complete, unblemished. 

Professor Higgins, still the same. Eliza felt cheer bubble up, and to her amazement it hadn’t lost its ability to fizz inside her despite being held in check so often, and for so long.

It was in this moment that she made her decision.

“I came to see how you were,” she said, plain and unruffled, “Let me in.” 

It was a candle in his hand which had produced the orange light, and when they reached the cavernous study, with only a fire glowing in the hearth, he set it on the tea table and walked three or four steps away before stopping and turning to her.

They had the measure of one another over the waxen light. The dressing gown remained a leisurely affectation over his dark grey waistcoat and crisp collar, and after a few moments of her steadily searching his face he made an odd, agitated little gesture and remarked,

“You’d care for something to drink, I expect,” 

—sounding none the happier for having to say it. Eliza was all the more reassured that he did not offer it politely or even generously, and expected him to ring for tea, but the Professor went to the sideboard and opened it to pull a bottle of wine from within. 

“Sit down, if you like,” he told the cabinet, and it was only then that Eliza moved to the sofa. 

It had taken her a long time to develop any taste for liquor—she’d too much experience with it by way of others determined to drink life dry, and they’d all wound up trapped at the bottom of the bottle. But he poured into a tiny port glass, only meant to be sipped anyway, and handed it to her.

“Aren’t you joining me?” she asked, for he’d not poured a second, nor even taken another glass from the cabinet.

The Professor gazed down at the bottle, cradled gently in his hands, with an expression that was nearly one of longing.

“I’m afraid I’ve lost the stomach for it,” he said at last, placing it atop the sideboard before settling far at the opposite end of the sofa. 

They sat together in silence, Eliza sipping at the wine as they alternated between giving each other slight glances out the sides of their eyes and looking into the fire. At last the Professor pulled from his silk pocket a pipe.

“Is it all right?”

“Mmm? Oh, it’s fine,” she said quickly, feeling a little scrutinized. Usually she took care only to wet her lips in deference to the host, and to avoid drawing attention to herself. “A very nice vintage.” That was what people usually said when they had wine, anyway.

“I suppose I ought to ask how you’ve been,” Eliza continued at length, “But somehow everybody talks of that, even when they don’t say those words exactly. Have you heard from Colonel Pickering?”

“It’s been some time,” he answered after thinking, “But his last letter came from Hyderabad. He was having a fine time of it, he said. Spent his pages going on about shooting parties, all that sort of thing.” The Professor rolled his eyes fondly.

“Shooting parties?”

Professor Higgins had absently brought the stem of the pipe to his mouth, then looked at it in a startled kind of way, and lowered the thing again. 

“Yes, he bagged a… something or other.” His brow crinkled. “A large cat? I can’t remember.”

“I can hardly picture him deep in the jungle like that,” she answered. Was that a silly thing to say? The Colonel was a military man, of course he was well-versed in the mechanics of shooting. But he was such a gentle soul, and to imagine him hauling about a rifle—oh, such tosh, to go on about it to herself so. Colonel Pickering was a dear thing, of course he was.

“Mmm—he wanted my opinion on whether he should have it mounted or turned into a rug.”

“What did you tell him?”

Professor Higgins’ answer was wry.

“I asked how his book on Hindu dialects was coming along.”

Eliza looked about at the shadowed walls, the library bookshelves overhead.

“If you were a game hunter, I’d have lasted two days here,” she remarked. “Dad’s dragged me to a few country houses where that’s all they seem to know in the way of decoration scheme—animal carcasses rearing up with claws out, heads lining the walls, those eerie glass eyes staring all the time.” Eliza shook her head, and as she sipped the wine again, the Professor gave a bland smile that was more a reflexive movement of facial muscles.

“How does it taste?”

He wasn’t asking for the sake of hospitality, she gathered; he wanted to know if she could detect each flavor. Eliza glanced down into the miniature beaker. In truth, it tasted like wine, but she didn’t quite know how to say that without sounding ignorant, and he would do this to her, he would ask until her answer satisfied him. Some people said such flowery, poetic things about it, when in reality—well, it was all just old grapes, wasn’t it? She couldn’t find words suddenly, all her lessons and dictionaries slipping out the back of her mind; the stuff was too strong, perhaps. 

“Port has a profile like berries,” the Professor went on softly. “Blackberries, raspberries… chocolate and jam.”

“I suppose it is rather sweet,” Eliza remarked thoughtfully, and held the glass upon her knee. Exactly what she would expect him to prefer. She glanced about, but all the usual crystal dishes filled with truffles had been taken to the kitchen already. Presently it came to her to enquire after Mrs. Pearce, but from the firelight before them as they sat alongside one another on the sofa, the strange shadows thrown onto his features almost gave him an expression of terrible, aching sadness, wistful for something he couldn’t possibly have, and too late, she realized she talked of nothing but death, couldn’t get away from it, there seemed no escape from guns and decay, the permanence of ruination—

“And where have you been keeping yourself?” 

Had he really looked so unhappy? Surely not, with a question that sensible. 

She told him the name of the shop where she’d been employed of late, and he nodded. 

“Before that? Did you… roll bandages, I mean? Or—knit stockings, I’ve no idea what women did.”

“I drove for a hospital.”

To her surprise, he faced her with genuine interest.

“Did you! Huh!”

Eliza sat in the wake of this, until curiosity took over.

“What d’you mean, huh?”

“Only—only I suppose that you would learn how to drive,” said Professor Higgins slowly. 

“I would learn to drive,” Eliza said back at him.

“You’ve always been rather independent-minded, haven’t you? Doing whatever pleases you, the moment you think of it.” He arranged the edges of the dressing gown about himself and asked, without looking at her, “Ever crash into anything, lose the wheel and upset any apple-carts? Run over some poor fellow and agree to meet him for tea and cake while cooing over his sprained wrist?”

“Of course not!” she cried, stung to outrage at the rudeness, the audacity. “I was very good at it, everybody said I was the quickest and safest one in the motor pool. I drove loads, never even startled a cat in an alley.”

“All right, all right,” replied Higgins gruffly, waving her off. “I only say because Pickering bought a motor-car, and we used to tool about in it. Well, he did.” He made rings with his hands and held them up to his eyes. “Goggles and everything. I never saw the point, really, but he did insist—mostly to get out of the house on week-ends.” The fireplace, which had worked itself to a high roar, popped and sent up sparks as the Professor shook his head. “Never could wrap his head around making it out of first for a steep hill. Come to think of it, he put it away for good when he got distracted on a country lane.” He looked at her sidelong, conspiratorial. “Bent the fender on a stile, if you can believe it.”

Her anger cooled at the image he drew, the two of them in a car, Higgins with one hand on his usual hat to prevent it taking flight, hollering at his friend to shovel down into third, man! as the Colonel tried to remember which pedal was the clutch, the engine roaring as they finally crested a swell in the road before unexpectedly gaining speed on the downward slope, the two of them racing toward a man in a flat cap as he drove his flock of geese along the lane, bachelors open-mouthed and yelling, the man diving into a bush, birds in hysterics, feathers going everywhere—

Eliza laughed.

“I should have liked to see that.”

A version of herself joined them in the back seat, and whether she was scolding them for such foolishness or laughing uproariously at the mayhem, it didn’t particularly matter. Maybe she would have done both.

They’d been such great friends when they’d gotten on, the three of them.

“Ah, well,” the Professor said.

“I could teach you to drive,” Eliza declared, lest another silence descend. “I’d have you all the way to Richmond Park after only a half-day’s lesson, like that.” And she snapped her fingers.

“You sound awfully confident.”

“Oh, I am,” she went on, and prinked herself up herself in an arch, joking sort of way. “In myself, to be sure.”

“Uh-huh,” he noted drily.

“I used to fancy teaching you something,” said Eliza, leaning forward and pressing the heels of her palms against the wooden frame beneath the cushions. “Make you write out lines, put a ruler over your knuckles, that sort of thing. I used to think perhaps—perhaps how to behave, but you already know etiquette, and there’s plenty of books about it, and… anyway.” She scraped her thumbnails over the leather. “And then I thought how to be a person, but that isn’t something one can learn, is it? You can’t know without living it.” She felt a nervous excitement come over her, along with the brief, absurd thought that she should have gone for a long walk instead of this. “I don’t know what I know to teach you.” Abruptly, she sat up and pressed her back against the sofa once more, electric and nearly violent. “Except driving. That I do know. Out to a park on a beautiful afternoon, and no fish paste sandwich from the picnic hamper until you’ve learnt not to flood the engine on a flat start.”

She’d meant it to be funny, but when Eliza glanced at him, his face really had taken on something complicated, a haunted astonishment, perhaps, or sad amazement. Those emotions didn’t blend together, and were too numerous to be possible; she curled her fingers into the fabric of her skirt until the knuckles turned white, and released them.

“I say, do you remember that old bit of verse you used to make me repeat?” It sprang into her mind, and how funny, the way one could remember the smallest things from the past.

“Which one?”

Eliza sat up very straight and proper, shook her head a little, and enunciated very well indeed.

“She stood upon the balustraded balcony, inexplicably mimicking him hiccuping, whilst amicably welcoming him in.”

Her efforts were rewarded: momentarily the Professor went as wide-eyed as a small boy discovering a fantastical thing for the first time, then a slow but unmistakable warmth came over his features, and blinking, he actually half-smiled. 

“I can’t believe you remember that,” he said. “You hated it so much.”

“I did,” replied Eliza, bold as anything, “I came out brilliantly in the end, though.”

“Hmm—that is a wondrous feat,” he replied, all sly wit now, and Eliza rose to it, veered into a bit of cheek, the better to tease him back. 

“Well, it is all that mattered, after all. I am forever enrobed by glory and triumph, and the King has seen no other option than to leave the administration of the nation to me alone.”

The Professor affected dramatic noises of great interest at this.

“I am Queen forever and ever, and just to demonstrate with good faith that I’ve every intention of ruling as a benign and loving embodiment of power, I shan’t go executing anyone. All other members of the royal family are hereby divested of their titles and lands and shall work in a department store selling typewriter ribbons, for the good of Britain and her economy. By… Order of Parliament,” Eliza finished, laughing a little.

“Ah! And so one must inquire of Your Majesty: do you sleep in the crown jewels? Follow-up question: when your subjects are all a-rage and torches on the grounds that you’ve single-handedly created a constitutional crisis through the Great Ink-Ribbon Strike of 1920, do you think they’ll come knocking with a guillotine and politely ask you to put your neck inside, or have you got an island fortress near Malta to flee to?”

Eliza gave a low, chiding ohhh!, reached out with her leg, and gave a good push to his knee with the toe of her boot, to which the Professor only chuckled.

The mood between them, so stiff and awkward, relaxed into a more effortless ease, perhaps spurred a little further on by their mutual relief than it would have done otherwise, and Eliza let herself lean against the couch. 

Remembered that bit of verse well—remembered standing on the balustraded balcony of the library above them and sulking as she pretended to go through her lessons, thinking how stupid a phrase it was, how it was utter nonsense, for she’d never make use of such a thing. The Professor had always been able to speak it very rapidly and with the immense precision afforded only to one possessed of such peerless expertise. Driving to the station for patients, sitting in the cold dark van with her hand on the gear knob, she’d chanted it to calm her nerves so many times that it flowed from her lips smoothly, without the slightest hesitation. 

Eliza looked down and twisted the stem of the wine glass: even a handful of years later, even after everything, his approval and goodwill meant… something, however small. She didn’t know quite what to do with that thought. The great split: she’d never considered it directly, let alone named it. Had walked away determined never to glance over her shoulder, and yet—and yet she’d carried it all with her, pretending that she could mould it into something neutral, that none of what she’d taken had any history, any inherent significance beyond serving her purposes in behaving as a lady. There was another word she wanted: anodyne. Featureless. No, those weren’t quite right—

“Did you ever go to Biarritz? You were always saying to Pickering how lovely it sounded,” he was saying.

“No, I never did,” Eliza laughed, “I should have done.” She turned toward him. “What about—?” And pieced together too late that if he’d been to France in the past few years, it wouldn’t have been on some carefree holiday. “Or, no,” she said, “I don’t mean like that.”

“Don’t mean like what?”

“Asking you where you were, what you did,” she murmured. 

“Is that what people do?” The Professor paused. “Do they really talk about it?” He sounded curious.

“When they can’t think of anything else,” replied Eliza. “They run out of things to say, or someone foolishly blurts it out, the query goes up, and everybody pretends as though the answer couldn’t possibly be something horrid. Nobody tells the unvarnished truth, and we all get to feel very proud of ourselves indeed.”

He said nothing, and for a moment the only sound was of coal collapsing and sparking inside the hearth, and the near-silent but somehow deafening hiss that had been the backdrop for their conversation.

Eliza looked at him sidelong for a minute, maybe more.

“Did you go?” she asked quietly, for her voice couldn’t go any louder suddenly. “They sent all the young men, and then they sent everyone else—but did you…?”

Professor Higgins had taken up the curved wooden pipe once more. He looked down at its stem, and instead of lighting and drawing from it, he bit down gently on his lips, and was silent for a moment before glancing back up at her.

“The world outside doesn’t belong in here,” he said, not unkindly. Meditatively, perhaps. “It never did.”

Some emotion she couldn’t identify moved through her so quickly it nearly felt like a painful, searing affection for him, and her eyes pricked. He was himself, and could remain himself, separate from the world and the passage of time, as though he’d been plucked wholecloth from the past and simply dropped into the present, absent all weight, and simultaneously absent nothing.

She looked at the wine glass anew. Wasn’t there such thing as the wine-dark sea? Hadn’t someone said that, once? Eliza tried to call back the taste across her tongue, but it was gone, and left only a dry sensation.

“Would you like any more? As I say, I’ve—” he gestured at the bottle still atop the sideboard.

“Are you trying to ply me with an excess of alcohol, sir?” Eliza gave him a deep, keenly assessing frown. “You bring it up so much, I really wonder whether your intentions are entirely honorable.”

For the first time, he looked genuinely alarmed.

“No!” he cried, “Of course not!”

“No, you aren’t trying to get me soused, or no, your object in being alone at night with a young woman lacks a shred of decency?”

The Professor opened his mouth, closed it, and seemed unable to decide how to go on. 

Eliza chuckled and waved lightly, the frown gone, for she’d only been joshing him a little after all. Relishing the moment, she tipped back the drink in an unladylike motion to finish it off. She’d dressed for the weather; and in the act of arching her neck, the soft flesh of her throat was exposed then to the two contrasts of the chill of the room and fireplace while he watched. As she contemplated the glass once more, she said,

“It is a shame, I suppose, to have something you can’t drink when you’d very much like to.”

He saw her out at the door, and she turned in the vestibule, a thought directing her movements before she could remember herself proper. But he was unusual in his ways, Eliza reckoned, and the likelihood of his minding was equal to the chance he might not.

“Will you be in Wednesday next?”

The Professor slipped both hands into the pockets of his dressing gown and fidgeted a little.

“I don’t expect otherwise,” he answered, as though it didn’t matter to him one way or another.

“I’ll call on you then,” she declared, tugging her gloves into place as she went out onto the front step, and then said, “I do like this house.”

When she got to the top of the street, Eliza turned to the mansion once more, still drawn close and dark, but with the smallest slit of light winking through the parted drapes at one of the lower windows.

She watched him watching her for a moment, then turned the corner bound for the Underground.

Of course he was himself. Of course, of course—wasn’t he?

It wasn’t until she reached her own rooms that she realized she’d not seen a single servant the entire time.

Chapter Text

The fact is that five years ago I was, as near as possible, a different person to what I am tonight. I, as I am now, didn't exist at all. Will the same thing happen in the next five years? I hope so.

- Siegfried Sassoon

Eliza washed and dressed her hair and put on her second-best frock, gauging herself in the vanity mirror carefully. Neither too much, nor too little—unlikely though it was that her efforts would be acknowledged, let alone recognized. This thought prompted a wry twist to come to the mouth of her reflection.

Still, today was the day Cook usually made poached salmon; barring that, Eliza might subtly suggest a nice little restaurant, if his mood were amenable. Nothing too tremendous or full of expectations: merely somewhere with a soup, a meat dish, and some fruit at the end. Of course, the really nice thing would be candlelight, strings in the background, and a dish truly remarkable, with a wonderful name—finnan haddie, or coq au vin—but there was little sense in getting too far ahead of herself. 

Either way, she felt certain that she could talk him up to it with a deft hand, for he was in need of an airing-out, so to speak, and even if she were… charming her way into dinner by his wallet, he’d surely benefit from a little time spent among other humans.

When she reached Wimpole Street and rang the bell, there was even longer pause before the door opened, no glow presaging the Professor’s coming to the door.

He looked positively groggy, as though her pressing the bell had roused him from an over-long lie-down, and he squinted down at his wristwatch, then at her, then down at the stoop.

“I did say Wednesday. Did you forget?” she asked, to relieve the awkwardness of the little scene.

Professor Higgins responded with a strange sound in the back of his throat, and led them inside.

Reaching the grand study, she was surprised to find the room in utter darkness, without even a fire in the hearth.

Eliza said, in an amusing sort of way,

“Have your servants forgotten you live here? Mrs. Pearce will certainly give them a tongue-lashing. Shall I turn on the electrics, and you summon them? I should like to say hello to her again.”

“Er—don’t,” he answered after a moment, “They’ve—they’re damaged, they don’t work properly—”

But she’d already touched the switch, and the pair of sconces near the doors lit up orange and gold.

“There, that’s better,” she said. “At least we might see—” Eliza found him turned a little away from her, arms crossed about himself, wincing.

“Turn them off!” the Professor burst out. “For—oh, turn those damned things off!”

Irritable old thing, just like always. She browbeat him cheerfully in reply.

“Oh, hush, they’re hardly brighter than what’s on the walls at the Feathers; we’ll have someone start up a nice fire, fetch you some tea and a little sandwich, and then once you’ve fully woken and calmed yourself, we might decide what to do about dinner.”

“Turn them off,” he said again, not facing her.

“I will not; there’s no other light and I don’t want to stand here in pitch black, fumbling about like an idiot.” She went to his desk and began putting it in order, trying to find the electric bell that had always been there. It was terribly messy, globs of dried candle wax splattered about. Eliza frowned. “It’s been so cold lately, I could drink a cauldron of soup. The only real question is whether I want oxtail or leek and potato. Oxtail is rather tricky to get these days, but leek and potato can feel so insubstantial, and then of course there’s onion—”

“I don’t want dinner.”

“Oh, no?” she answered with calculated lightness, setting aside a stack of papers with a very dusty top sheet, “You may not think so, but I suspect you’ll change your mind once you’ve had a bite or two.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Of course you are; your mood tells me everything.”

“If it is, you certainly aren’t paying attention.”

It was here, with this outright waspishness from him, that Eliza straightened to find the man sitting on the sofa, hunched over, elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. 

She waited.

“This isn’t a good idea,” said Higgins. “You shouldn’t be here, you never should have come here, why did I open that bloody door—”

It wasn’t shouting; he sounded neither angry nor upset.

Her stomach went sour, somehow. This strange, paltry reception after so mild and encouraging their earlier reconnection; his curious mood beyond his usual rudeness that was veering into inhospitality, perhaps even displaying a touch of depression; and top it all off, her best efforts at being cheerful were going nowhere. The bell had disappeared, and his papers were in an uproar; the man required a private secretary or someone willing to manage his impulses. But it was not her lot in life to coddle and smooth over Professor Higgins, as well she had established, and so Eliza quite pointedly did not. 

“A gentleman would offer a lady a sip of tea before sending her out unchaperoned into a night like this,” she warned him, being particularly generous in allowing it to sound like an idle remark. “Otherwise she might find no reason to continue associating with him.”

“You want tea, you’ll have to boil the water yourself; I’m certainly not doing it,” was his answer, directed at the floor.

She placed one palm against the desktop and pressed her weight there, hard. He was not looking at her.

“I want to be left alone,” he said.

“You might get it, if you keep wishing for it,” she said, curt now.

“I want to be alone, Eliza. Go away and leave me be.”

But now disappointed, frustrated, and growing hungry, Eliza was easily piqued.

“Very well,” she said loudly, and dropped the heavy book in her hand with a tremendous crash onto the desk. “Perhaps I was mistaken in believing I could revive an old association.” At least she hadn’t yet removed her hat and gloves, for there’d been no one in the hall to take her things. “I suppose I might go and say hello downstairs, where they might remember their manners,” Eliza concluded, and swept from the study.

Directly she went out into the foyer, she truly realized just how still and dark the house was. Usually the sconces along the staircase landing remained lit until the household were all to bed, and there were distant sounds of industry and bustle well past the dinner hour. Sometimes Travers and Mason would peek their heads out from behind the dining room doors, abandoning their work of laying out cutlery for only a moment to see who was there, to say hello and whisper that they’d be sure to give her the biggest portion of pudding.

So many in service had gone into shops, or to mills—had they all made it safely home to Marylebone? Were Isobel and Hannah downstairs at the great wooden table, one of them sneaking a copy of Peg’s Paper behind the Times while the other darned a pair of stockings? Perhaps Mrs. Pearce would be in the Housekeeper’s Room reviewing the account books, ready to share a pot of tea and dignified conversation; Cook would be at the stove at this hour, stirring something particularly fragrant.

But when Eliza pushed open the baize door leading downstairs, she was confronted with absolute darkness.

Flicking on the light switch, she went down.

How cold—not even the fire stoked up. The glass on the street entrance door was grimed over and coated with coal dust from outside. There was no evidence of anybody, and judging by the greyish cast of dust over the table, there’d not been anybody for a long time. Bunches of herbs hung to dry beside the sink had shriveled and looked ready to crumble at the slightest breeze; something small and wrinkled up tight and hard on a shelf caught her eye, and she went toward it—perhaps it had once been a tomato or an apple, but something had hollowed out its flesh and left a brittle, mummified shell behind. 

The icebox was empty. She didn’t dare touch the pantry for the cobwebs over its door.

It was as though the kitchen itself had died, slowly descending into a sinkhole, and this was what remained, poking out.

Eliza looked toward the staircase. 

This, and the dreariness upstairs: his desk absolutely run riot with crumpled sheets of writing paper, newspapers scattered here and there, disheveled stacks of them dipping toward the floor. It wasn’t proper. But not a single tray to be found in the study. No china cups thoughtlessly left behind upon whatever surface was empty and within reach. The servants of this house wouldn’t tolerate such disarray whilst carefully clearing away the tea things—but there was no tea served to begin with.

Whatever was happening here wasn’t healthy or good. Eliza was growing agitated merely standing in the neglected kitchen, unsure whether she ought to leave him be as he’d insisted, or stay and take on the burden of righting whatever had gone wrong. It wasn’t her duty to coddle and smooth him over, to fix what refused to believe itself broken and that demanded that she go away; she needn’t waste any more time on him.

“You needn’t waste any more time on him,” the Captain muttered from the back.

Eliza stopped short.

Lieutenant Cheevers huffed. 

“That’s what he said,” the Captain went on. He was new; she didn’t remember his name. “Didn’t even look at the poor fellow, just told us there was nothing else to be done, to keep on the plank walkway only, and not be such bloody fools that we’d stumble and fall in ourselves.”

“Good God. What’d the man say?” Cheevers asked. 

Eliza heard a rustling sound, but did not turn her head. After a moment, the sound of a struck match was followed by the scent of burning tobacco. 

“Begged us. He’d been there just long enough to get an inkling he was done for, but not long enough that he’d lost hope. Crying, carrying on. Shameful. Every man what passed, the poor soul—he was a green thing, a boy, mind you—he’d beg us to help him, to toss him something he could use to pull himself out of the muck. He was only waist-high then, but those packs… and he was a thin lad, too. Doubled his weight, and he couldn’t even move to unstrap himself. Not that it would have done him any good. God had no hand in creating Ypres mud, I tell you.”

“Jesus.”

“That wasn’t the worst of it, either.” A dry sucking sound on the end of the cigarette, and the Captain exhaled. “Week later, we were sent back over the same stretch of forest—not that it had been anything like a forest for a while, but…”

“Yeah.”

“We marched back, and he was still there.”

There was a moment’s silence, during which both Eliza and the Lieutenant held their breaths.

“Mad,” the Captain said. “Completely mad. Up to his shoulders by then, and still alive. Raving and carrying on, just making sounds. Eyes rolling about like a horse going to slaughter. Face all cracked and bleeding, his lips looked like he’d tried to chew them off.”

Lieutenant Cheevers’ voice sank into a whisper.

“Still alive? After a week?”

“Nobody’d the kindness to put a bullet through his skull. Some fucker probably tried to give him water, or maybe fobbed off his tin of Maconochie—”

“Ay, there’s one way!”

“Give it to some bloke who’s dead and just doesn’t know it yet, he won’t know the difference and choke it down thinking it’s his mam’s boxty,” said the Captain, and both men began laughing.

Eliza whipped open the heavy canvas cloths separating the driver’s booth from the rear.

“Shut up,” she hissed at the officers. “Both of you—shut—your—mouths.”

The two men gazed back at her, surprised and guilty, but presently these expressions were replaced by dawning looks of disgust at being interrupted.

“This has nothing to do with you, love,” said the Captain. “Go sit up front and cover your delicate ears, it’s not for you, anyway.”

“It isn’t about you, either,” she spat. “I shall be more than happy to tell Drs. Murray and Anderson how cruel and heartless the officers are, talking about our patients that way, both of you shut up —”

“Yeah, yeah,” the Captain murmured, but Lieutenant Cheevers was roused to defend his character more thoroughly.

“You can’t tell us what to do!” he cried. “Not a single woman in this hospital holds rank over any of us, and besides, your job is to drive, not sit up there like a schoolmarm, eavesdropping so you can go cry and tattle about it.” He glanced sidelong at the Captain for approval, but the newcomer stared at the glowing end of his cigarette.

Eliza ran her lower lip between her teeth, pulling away chapped and dead skin. She leaned forward.

“I don’t hold any rank over you, but at least I’ve got a sense of compassion for the men who come through here. Lieutenant, if you’d even come within one hundred miles of actual battle, you wouldn’t be so eager to sit on your arse and gossip and laugh about what happens out there,” she said, her pulse pounding in her ears. “And perhaps you’d be an actual Lieutenant, not merely a Second after three years of loafing about.” Cheevers opened his mouth to protest at this humiliating revelation, but Eliza thrust the curtains shut and threw herself once more upon the driver’s bench.

There was silence in the back for a moment, and then the Captain poked his head through and leaned on the bench back.

“Ey,” he said to her. 

“What,” Eliza gritted out. Now she’d be stuck with both of them for another few nights, they’d probably gang up on her, the pair of them thick as blood merely for their shared sex, men were always loyal to men no matter what they’d done or said—

He considered the fag between his fingers again.

“Did I offend you?”

“I’m fine,” she shot back. “I’m not some fragile high-born lady fresh out of a country manor who fancies that listening to rough talk will get her a little worldly experience.”

“It’s easy to forget what it’s like when you aren’t in it,” the Captain said. “Coming back, being in polite society. It’s not the same for you, you weren’t there, but…” He paused. “Did you lose anyone?”

Eliza didn’t answer.

“It’s not funny,” he said at last. “But it’s the only way we can talk about it. Because I can tell you—no one’s ever going to talk about it.”

She was just trying to think of something to say to that when the porters came through, banging their fists on the van sides and giving the order for the whole convoy to head to Charing Cross.

Eliza entered the study to find Professor Higgins stooped over the full and bright hearth. He unbent, looking faintly bemused at her return. 

Eliza lifted her chin in spite of this, clenched one fist into the fabric of her coat, and released it.

“Are you all right?” she asked him, her voice strained against her will. 

He blinked in surprise.

“All right,” the Professor repeated distantly.

“I know that quite a lot of people are not—are…” Eliza swallowed and went on stiffly. “Most everyone, I think. It doesn’t really matter where one was, or what one did, or how close one was—” She floundered suddenly, gesturing. “I don’t know, perhaps I could telephone your mother, she adores you—” 

“Don’t do that,” he said, looking nearly panicked at the thought. “Eliza, please.”

Now she was well and truly unnerved: Professor Higgins never said please and thank you.

The dam broke.

“What is the matter with you?!” she cried desperately. “The kitchen empty and abandoned, the whole house shut up like the Paris catacombs, you’ve sacked your entire staff, with not even a daily to scrub the floors—you can’t boil water, let alone survive in an entire mansion on your own! How is anything being done around here?! I once watched you nearly go into a fit because the chocolates on a crystal platter weren’t shaped into an actual pyramid!”

“Eliza—”

“You ordered them all destroyed, even the ones still in the boxes, and sent Isobel to the confectioner’s with express instructions not to show her face in this house until every truffle was the same shape and size for, and I am quoting you, the spiritual mathematics of aesthetic geometries!”

“Eliza, I—”

“What does that even mean?! People starving in the streets, wishing and ‘oping they could see a glimpse of a shred of meat now and then, but Henry’s got to have his bloody sweets all the same so they stack properly!”

This last bit of her outburst rang in the silence of the study, and the Professor let both hands hang at his sides, eyeing her in a manner that was far too patrician for her liking.

He breathed in to speak—

“I am fully aware of having dropped that aitch,” Eliza intoned gravely, warning him with a glare that his input on the matter was not required.

The Professor turned his chin mulishly to the side, then back again. 

Her tone softened.

“What is going on?”

The look of imperious judgment was replaced with a carefully repressed but still-evident disquiet.

“Is it something you can’t explain?”

So many of the convalescents at Endell Street had been unable to express what had been in their minds, so great and ineffable was the horror. The nurses had taken much care to give the men sunlight, occupation, company: anything to ease their pain and help them sleep and forget, even if it was just a little. Some of them were in such poor shape that they groaned and spoke out of their own heads, talking nonsense to people who weren’t there. Some were silent; some had to be sedated merely to be pulled in and out of the vans. 

But nobody wanted to talk of what they’d seen. No one would ever talk about it; not there, the nurses said, and not now, not in the ballrooms and tearooms and salons. Tea and polite conversation and the weather. What of the men she danced with, sometimes? What, when their eyes glazed over and their conversation grew distant and detached, their minds in another world, another time, was she to do? What was anyone to do? Pretty faces and dressed hair and fine chiffon gowns would not coax them back from wherever they went, and even the gentlest of plain talk seemed the very worst imposition.

“Look, I—I’m no expert in shellshock, but perhaps you could find at least some comfort or relief. I’m sure your mother would welcome a visit, perhaps I could speak with her first—”

“No, don’t,” he said again, and now his face was consumed by worry.

Seizing on this, and determined not to be intimidated or bullied, the young woman moved through the pocket doors and toward the telephone in the foyer, but the most extraordinary thing happened as she reached it.

The Professor got there first.

It wasn’t as though he’d been directly behind her—or if he had, that made no sense, for surely she’d have heard the crashing sound of him dashing forward, his footsteps pounding against the floorboards, wouldn’t she? 

Because he wasn’t there—and then he was.

“Eliza, really,” he insisted, then startled in realizing where he stood, and brought one hand up to his mouth in raw shock. 

They stared at one another for a moment, Eliza trying to feel her hands, for they’d suddenly gone numb.

“How did you do that?”

“I didn’t mean to,” he answered, wide-eyed.

She turned, looked at the distance between the doors to the study and the telephone table.

“Really, how—”

He answered by pressing the heels of both hands against his eyes.

“No, no, no,” he muttered. “Why did you have to come? You’re the last person I want to know about any of this.”

Sucking a great breath in, he dropped his hands and swallowed, composing himself into resignation. She watched only; the tirade had taken something from her, and now, even in the strange wake of his apparent ability to bilocate, she was unable to produce another such outburst, let alone try. There seemed no particular reason for that, other than—other than a strange sensation of her blood being frozen, her muscles aching to stay put. Eliza instead found herself wondering if perhaps the shadows within the foyer could trick the eye, for how could a man like him move so quickly? He was no great athlete, after all, didn’t play golf or cricket, didn’t have any particular sporting pursuits that she knew of, wasn’t with some rowing—

“Stay here,” he said, and strode toward the hall past the dining room. Some decision had just been made, and he was profoundly unhappy about it. Eliza squeezed her hands tightly and ignored the inch of dust on the marble-topped table. 

When he returned, the Professor carried in one hand a lit candle and in the other a large square object, which he undraped and rested against the marble-topped table. 

Eliza looked at the thing, and seeing that her coat lapel was a bit squashed, she reached up to smooth it flat. She crossed her arms over herself, and waited, but nothing happened. After a moment, she decided that—all vanities aside—it had been worth the effort to dress her hair properly this afternoon, even if only for herself. Hard work, and nothing she’d ever enjoyed, for the luxury of a lady’s maid had long been missed, but after years of adhering to military requirements for simple hairstyles, and knowing that things would never really go back to the way they’d been, it was nice that some things could feel like before.

“Eliza,” said the Professor.

“Hmm?”

“Look,” he went on, and when her reflection threw back a face of aggravated confusion, he had the nerve to tut at her. He actually tutted. Her patience growing thin indeed, even despite her better angels, Eliza sighed and leaned forward to clear the surface with the cloth he’d pulled, but it had been well-covered, and the glass did not change.

“It’s a very nice mirror,” she said, to placate whatever mood he was in.

“Very nice,” he repeated, sounding almost annoyed.

Finally she said,

“Is this supposed to be a philosophy lesson? I’m not sure I’m getting it.” She muttered, “Not sure I want to, come to think of it.” 

“It really is funny, isn’t it, how you don’t appreciate the nuances which life puts right under your nose until they’re gone forever,” he remarked, and it was a moment or two before Eliza realized his voice, and the cast of light from his hand, had come from directly behind her. 

She jerked her chin to the side: he was still standing there, hadn’t moved. 

But he wasn’t in the glass with her.

She reached back to grasp a bit of his silk sleeve between her fingers. He was there: solid, real, fully himself.

And saw nothing but herself in the mirror’s surface. 

Professor Higgins came up: she felt the air move, saw his hand go up to press flat against the cool pane. It produced no hazy double as hers had.

“That’s—I don’t understand. It’s a trick mirror,” Eliza said.

She pulled it upright, but there was nothing behind it that could effectuate such strangeness. The room behind her was dark, but the wooden walls, the artwork: it was all there. 

The young woman tilted one way, and then the other. Her body didn’t shift into fantastical proportions the way they’d done when she and Freddy had visited Dreamland at Margate a few years back. No trick at all. In fact, she even recognized it as the one that usually hung in the narrow hall leading past the dining room and toward the long galley meant to be a conservatory.

Eliza let the mirror drop back against the table with a slight bang.

“Why don’t you show up?”

“Finally!” he cried, and she turned again to see him throw up his hands the way he’d done when at last she’d understood what he meant when he kept saying that she must stop eliding the velarized alveolar lateral approximate when all he had to say was to quit swallowing the middle part of little. 

“Why don’t you show up?” she asked again. To him, to the room at large, to anything.

The Professor leaned over her shoulder and traced his invisible fingertip over the glass.

“I’ve not shown this to anyone else,” he murmured to her. “I’m not practiced at explaining any of it, and I’ve no idea whether I’m making sense.”

She looked between it and him again; again—he wasn’t there. He simply wasn’t there, even as she turned and saw him, the height and breadth and depth of him. 

But she couldn’t meet his eye: the young woman took four or five steps away and found herself giving a series of breathless, heaving laughs so utterly without humor that it sounded like someone choking. She coughed, and came over to look into the mirror once more, where she stood alone, with no sign of the man standing behind.

She needed to sit down, and returned to the study where, momentarily, he joined her.

“I must say, you are taking this rather well,” the Professor remarked. At Eliza’s look of utter disbelief, he said, “All considered, I mean.”

“I’m far less prone to descending into female hysterics than you so cavalierly believe,” she managed to answer, and in reply, he merely raised his eyebrows and fussed with the ends of his dressing gown.

Eliza turned abruptly, a sudden impulse, and took his chin in both hands. 

For a few breaths, they regarded one another carefully, in sure and certain knowledge.

“Don’t touch them,” he warned her, quiet and grave, and opened his mouth.

Briefly, it occurred to her that she might have lost her mind—it wasn’t uncommon. She could be at home in bed, dreaming, or it could have been five years ago, and she’d finally gone, finally left him and all his petty cruelties, and this was what her innermost thoughts had decided of him. Either seemed as plausible as this. 

“Those can’t be real,” she said, her voice odd and distant, “Are those real?” 

“Unfortunately,” he answered in a low voice. His flesh moved beneath her palms as he spoke; his sonorous voice vibrated to her fingertips. 

She hadn’t lost her mind—or maybe he had, maybe they both had, maybe she’d caught it from him. There was a term for that—

“Folie à deux,” Eliza murmured. 

The Professor gave a humorless chuckle.

“I wish it were a psychosis,” he replied. “It’d be easier if I had gone mad—at least there’d be an answer for all this.”

“Oh,” said Eliza. “Oh—oh.”

After that, it seemed impossible to go on. 

Once, she’d visited the London Zoo and passed among the menagerie of creatures a tiger in a cage, lolling about on its back, wriggling comfortably and showing the soft white fur on its stomach. Nearly like a housecat, she’d thought—until the beast had yawned in one long luxurious stretch, reminding the little group of families and children why they were on one side and it on the other.

Naturally these were not so long, nor so thick. But there was an inhuman relentlessness to them; Eliza could not fathom how she’d not seen, for he’d talked, and laughed, even. How absurd.

She must have spoken this thought aloud, for the Professor shrugged, releasing himself from her grip, and gestured to the wall.

“Clever little trick, if I may say so, keeping the lights low and myself a distance from you. But then, women always notice the little things anyway.” He looked… a little bitter. “Along with everything else, I find myself unable to escape even your passing scrutiny.”

“No—no, I’d no idea,” she said, waking to attention.

“I mean the lisp,” he said, as though this were self-evident.

“Lisp,” she repeated stupidly.

“You heard it,” Professor Higgins went on with great conviction, “Kept giving me such significant glances. I damn near lost it last week, racking my brain for how to explain it away: that I was suing my dentist for negligent practices, or some shady cove punched me in the mouth over who-knows-what, or I’d fallen over my own feet and taken a bite out of the banister… I can’t rid myself of it, I’ve worked for ages to no avail. It’s utterly embarrassing, entirely shameful,” he concluded with a dramatic huff, and leaned back against the sofa to gaze at the ceiling. “I suppose even genius must be undercut by something for it to gain true meaning. You may delight, I suppose, in how low your teacher has fallen, but at least do me the courtesy of waiting until you’ve reached your own rooms before breaking out in laughter at how I am cursed.”

“Which is—that you—have a slight lisp,” she choked out after a moment, nodding nonsensically all the while, “Because—because you’ve developed very sharp fangs, but you aren’t even—” Her thoughts came to a skidding halt. “No, on second thought,” she declared, “That is entirely what I should expect; that is what you would do in this situation. You have somehow entangled yourself with the legions of Hell, Professor, and your primary concern is whether your sibilants produce an undetectable hiss.”

The gentleman gave a soft groan as though to appeal to some higher power, and spoke in such indulgent self-pity that it was nearly possible to believe his sincerity.

“There’s a very well-trained ear in your head, and I know you heard it the moment I said your name. You’ve been very civil about it, and I’m grateful to see that you haven’t forgotten the manners I taught you, but I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to be seen, and while I am glad that you are well, Miss Doolittle, I think your visit must come to its natural and inevitable close. Good day. Goodnight.”

He dropped the hand which he’d brought to his brow and tried to appear chilly and as though the interview were concluded, but could not help the look in his eye: one of intense longing to be paid attention, to receive her regard and company most particularly, and she could well guess that more than anything else, he missed his audience.

The Professor leaned over and muttered to her.

“I will say, though, that it is very genial of you to use undetectable, that is, unable to be detected, over indetectable, that is, merely not detected. You do my teachings—and indeed, myself—justice, Eliza.” And he nodded very seriously indeed, one hand upon his breast.

Eliza sighed, and summoned up whatever patience she could—for though the tiger’s maw was startling, the Professor was by his very nature more inclined toward receiving pets and strokes over putting on displays of terror when he could help it. She helmed them both in a less pompous direction, and toward issues of greater question.

“Do you… turn into a bat at high noon, or anything like that?”

He stared at her, somewhere between disgust and horror.

“What?” said Professor Higgins. “What? What?!”

“Or a cloud of dust, or a wolf, or whatever it is?”

He went on saying what until Eliza gestured frantically as though she might hit him.

“Well, that’s what Count Dracula does!”

Again, staring at her as though she’d produced a document certifying her birth unto a large breed of goose.

“Count Dracula,” he bellowed, as though he were before the footlights. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“It’s what everybody knows about… those people… although come to think of it, it is only a novel, and some of it must be written wholecloth,” she mused.

“Yes! Only a novel, Eliza! Nothing I would waste my time with! Something written to sell copies and make some filthy, greedy publisher loads of money! It’s a superstition! A fairy tale! Folklore made up to explain things when people don’t have a basic scientific understanding of anything! We should all be thankful the world is run by men of rational thought and not idiots who believe the brownies come and clean their kitchen at night! This is why there ought to be modern, updated laws about education reform in this country—”

Watching this go on, she considered meditatively how unusual it was—how he really had pulled off the clever trick—that she hadn’t noticed his teeth on two separate occasions, for, as it happened, when he was roused to this usual state of loud, impassioned ranting about one thing or another, it became incontrovertibly obvious that the man bore incisors which belonged in the British Museum.

He was gearing up for a grand finale, something about putting a bill before Parliament; she blinked and brought herself back to attention.

“—because vampires aren’t real, Eliza!”

Several moments of silence followed this closing argument.

“Not real,” she said. “In spite of—” She gestured, first at him, then at his teeth, then at him again.

“No—no,” answered the Professor, “This might be happening, but that doesn’t mean it’s real, you see.”

His companion leaned forward and squinted at him very thoroughly.

“Oh, shut up,” he muttered, deflated and grumpy again, crossing his arms over himself. But Eliza was—if not sanguine, at least cautiously serene, for here at last was the state of him she knew and could withstand and steer about. It was not quite so… impossible, or frightening, perhaps.

Or was it? A thought occurred to her.

“—and so do you…” she began, gesturing strangely, and the way she said it must have said what she really meant, for he immediately grew grandly sarcastic.

“Hmm? What’s that? What is your question, Miss Doolittle? What could you possibly have in mind to ask?”

Suddenly she felt as though she’d begun to talk of bodies, and what they looked like beneath clothing, and beneath that as well—their insides and their outsides, but not in any way she recognized. In the study, he’d lectured the two of them, her and Pickering alike, on words like epiglottis and oropharynx, arytenoid and hyoid. All foreign words, alien. A bit high-handed and impossible to connect to herself and her own parts. This, though… seemed an awfully great thing to talk about, and Eliza wasn’t quite certain whether she regretted this line of inquiry, for her curiosity was so strong. 

But she shook her head; something prevented her from saying the words aloud.

Professor Higgins screwed up his face, mock-thoughtfully.

“Have you ever eaten chalk dust?” he asked her, very abruptly and broadly indeed, and went on without her answer. “Ever tried going over to the hearth, scooping up a bit of ash, and trying a mouthful? Or tripping along outside into the street, fetching a cup of muck from the gutter, mixing all three together in a nice little dish of black paste: chalk, and ash, and whatever slime has accumulated on the cobblestones. Quite a pretty culinary picture, don’t you think so? Because that’s what everything tastes like, now,” he finished moodily. 

She hazarded a glance at him sidelong. Eliza had never considered the Professor much of a gourmand, certainly not a lover of food the way he’d dedicated his life to languages; then again, she’d a strong memory of being served beef fillet cooked in browned duck fat, asparagus and grilled shrimp swimming in butter, dinner rolls brushed with garlic reduction, sticky toffee pudding, food so good that the act of enjoying it was exhilarating and exhausting all at once—

Eliza swallowed painfully.

“I can’t do anything anymore,” he was saying, and her attention snapped back. Professor Higgins had sunk against the back of the couch listlessly, talking to himself. “Can’t have students—no one wants to take speaking lessons at three in the morning. I can’t see my mother for the same reasons.”

“You haven’t seen your mother?”

He turned to look at her, his gaze careful.

“Unlike some people, she doesn’t exactly come beating down the door in this part of London,” the Professor answered. “Wouldn’t dare show her face north of Grosvenor Square.”

“Surely she would ask, though,” Eliza insisted. “What have you told her?”

Professor Higgins lifted both hands as though to convey he’d done the best he could.

“Lied and wrote that I was on a speaking tour.” Eliza felt like pressing herself against the arm of the couch, the better to shrink herself down—something about the hollowness of his voice filled her with such dread. “It was such a routine, before,” he murmured now. “Every week, luncheon, and we’d always—” He stopped, and bit his lips together. 

Before she could state the obvious, for it was already on the tip of her tongue—she did remember the languid nature of Sundays when he was in church service followed by long afternoons with Mrs. Higgins—he chuckled.

“I can’t go to any of those places, of course,” said Professor Higgins slowly, “And I can’t speak of them, either.”

And after a moment or two, with deliberate and ironic motion, he pointed at the ceiling. Or what lay beyond, she supposed.

“You can’t even talk of religious things?” Eliza said. “Good Lord, that’s—” 

The effect on him was instant, for he grew agitated, and began to laugh strangely.

“There’s a list of prohibited words!” he cried, sounding nearly mad, “I haven’t found them all yet, but I’m really plumbing the depths of what’s out there! And they’re cumulative, if you can believe it! Let out an epithet or two too many times, and they hang in the air, they stack up, and something horrid happens—maybe I’ll start to bleed from my eyes, or my head’ll light on fire! You never know how your curse will reveal itself, by what heralds and signs it will come. But it’s always there, always ready to remind.”

At last he swallowed, calmed, and looked down at his folded hands.

“You know, Mother would find it funny—I can say all the things she always scolded me for, but none of the ones I ought to say, and I find I miss those much more.” 

Overcome by a sudden and wholly embarrassing sense of grief—for where had that come from?—Eliza turned away, and upon composing herself, found that he had done the same. 

“It doesn’t escape me, the paradox of being bound back from words, and from other people. Not that I ever liked other people much, but—well.” Professor Higgins turned back to her with a sharp, bitter glaze of false pride and regret. “I don’t understand this. I don’t understand how I could be… how something like this might happen, and what I’m meant to do with it, or why. Why a lifetime of faith,” he gritted it out between his teeth, looking irritated at the pain it brought him, “Has yielded… whatever this is. Whether it’s real or not. Whether I ought to be in hospital, or—well.”

They sat in the awful silence of this, and at last he motioned as though to stand, but stopped himself at the last moment, and leaned against the couch once more. 

She was moved, and so was her stomach, for it let out a growl at the least convenient possible moment.

“Bloody ‘ell,” whispered Eliza.