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It was snowing outside - the kind that stuck, heaped up on everything, and made for fantastic snowballs in the morning. The savory smells of their small dinner still inhabited the kitchen; spectres of a warmed over Christmas feast.
"I haven't played this in years," Thomas was holding onto his reservations for comfort. What was so wrong with sitting in front of the fire, apart from the fact it was what they did every other winter night? He was fast-approaching what he remembered as his favorite part of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea . Desire to return to the book tugged at his mind and heart. Almost a physical sensation.
"You're due for a match then. I wager."
"Any wager is tipped in your favor - you know it."
"Perhaps," Dick gave a slight tilt of his head, "but you're so good at games." Knowing glinted in his eyes, a relaxed-sort of rivalry. The kind that made him weed the garden faster and made Thomas feel the better sock mender.
The soft, distant strains of a Christmas song punctuated the pauses in their conversation. The holiday was already a few days dead but the modest radio in the sitting room seemed to be operating on it's own calendar. Thomas wasn’t going to complain.
"This doesn't count," but he could already feel himself growing softer on the idea. Sitting by the kitchen table brought the kind of reality to the situation which only a cold, hard chair seat could manage. He needed to make peace with the wants pulling him in the opposite direction and play nice. Play along.
"Snapdragon!" Dick put on a silly voice and gave a dramatic flourish to the bowl between them. "Has it been so long you need a primer?"
Thomas gave the top of Dick's foot a soft tap with his own stocking-clad toes, a playful admonishment. "I remember."
"Just put your hand in the bowl..." Dick placed his still flourishing hand - palm up - over Thomas's own, and ghosted the backs of his nails across the top of Thomas's hand. Wrist to fingertip.
"...and take care with yourself," was the finish.
"And will the winner find his true love before Year's End?"
This wasn't the exact prize, but Thomas knew his partner would oblige. Dick made a show of scanning their kitchen from floor to ceiling, wall to wall, looking for this imaginary competitor.
"He'd best get a move on - it's already after Boxing Day."
Thomas felt a smile cracking through his disinterest. "You haven't used the good brandy?"
He was going to give up his initial reluctance completely. Every word between them now held only love and play.
Richard smiled back. "No, but I used your favorite dish to make-up for it."
The dish in question was a repurposed piece of ovenware - it had long ago lost it's lid to the kitchen floor. It was the largest flat-bottomed food container they owned. It was, in fact, Thomas’s least favorite thing in the kitchen.
"I'll do the honors," Thomas demonstrated his investment by sprinkling a large handful of raisins into the bowl, and Dick followed suit. They floated idly in the shallow film of heated brandy. Thomas wiped his sticky palm on the leg of his trousers without thinking, too engrossed in silent strategy to care.
"Mind the light - I'll add the salt and such."
Thomas obliged, resenting the need to get out of his chair. But he did, and almost as soon as the light blinked out there was a strange flicker of blue flame on the walls. Dick looked positively demonic in their cast. A handsome blue devil.
Thomas never failed to realize his love for him like this, in spaces between moments. He could still feel Dick's hand on his if he thought about it hard enough.
"I'll go first," Dick stood and steadied himself over the flaming dish, greedy blue tendrils of heat licking the air.
Forty-some minutes, three rounds of snapdragon, and six singed fingers later, there was no definitive winner.
“You lost count,” Dick ribbed him.
“I wanted to give you a fair chance,” Thomas smiled, the alcoholic bite of the brandy-raisins softening his senses.
Dick leaned back in his chair. The lights were still low in this quiet, mildly ethereal moment.
“I love you.”
It was a return to holiday form in ways that went beyond games. After cleaning up, changing into nightclothes, and tucking into bed, it was still not-quite midnight. The clock on the mantle of their bedroom fireplace had yet to chime.
“What time was it again?” Dick asked after fifteen minutes of fretful stillness. They were nestled into each other, and as such they could tell from breathing and movements that they weren’t alone in their awakeness.
Thomas squinted in the dark - “Five minutes til midnight.”
“Our true loves await,” Dick’s words tickled the hair by Thomas’s ear. Thomas smiled at the notion. The air was heavy and still. Warm, but foreboding in the right mindset. It put him in the mood for another long-neglected tradition.
“Did you have Christmas ghost stories at Buckingham?” he asked, thinking of eve’s past and one contraband ouija board in particular.
“Mmm. None that were very good. Except mine.”
Thomas shifted so they were facing each other. “Let’s hear one then.”
“Alright. Ready yourself, dear. For it involves this very cottage, three-hundred years ago -”
“This cottage didn’t exist three-hundred years ago.”
“- the land this cottage was built on, three-hundred years ago. Better?”
“A true story, is this?”
“Most certainly. May I continue?”
“Please.”
“Three-hundred years ago, on this land - not quite in our garden, of course, but close - a young girl named Mary had a lovely string of pearls. These pearls were her most prized possession, so of course she wore them everywhere. A beautiful young lady she was, tens of dancing partners in thrall at all the parties -”
“This wouldn’t be Mary Ingham, would it?”
“Certainly not.”
“Temple Newsam...?”
“Them? They’d have copied it off my version.”
“Temple Newsam isn’t anywhere near our garden.”
“Stories might as well have legs. And I did say, ‘not quite’.”
“My apologies. Please, continue.”
“Thank you. So, our Mary, she was riding home from a party, when who comes out of the bushes and stops her carriage? None but the dread highwayman, who takes the thing she loves the most in the whole world. Her pearls.”
“He never.”
“He did. Mary, traumatized, fell into a deep sleep. She woke at home, with not a single memory of the event. In fact, the only evidence that anything happened at all was the missing string of pearls. She searched high and low, looking and looking, with no such luck. She wasted away for love of that necklace. And they say you can still see her sometimes, searching for what’s been lost. A lady in blue. Wandering up and down the lane. Standing in people’s gardens. Looking in windows.”
“If I see her I’ll give her my regards,” Thomas said. “Not a bad story. Familiar, though.”
“They’d not know the difference down south.”
“Am I to take it you were the only servant from Yorkshire then?”
“Well, apart from that lot.”
Thomas’s laughter came in a short bark.
“They asked for Mary Ingham every Christmas,” Dick’s words hitched with his own laughter.
“Brilliant, sweetheart.”
Dick shifted in bed, mocking being offended. “Of course it was brilliant! Your turn, now. Show me up - if you can.”
Thomas waited a few breaths to calm himself, trying and failing to banish the smile from his words. He needed the right atmosphere.
He began with, “Listen closely. This story is true.”
“Right.”
“It is - it happened to me.”
“A trustworthy source if I’ve met one.”
Thomas inched himself even closer to Dick. They were hardly a finger’s-length apart. Their voices were whispers. He took Dick’s hand in his own.
“It was the October of my first year at Downton. Second footman was my position, and the family hosted a shooting party. They invited all their neighbors and associates. I was asked to valet for the Earl of Barquith. After our dinner downstairs, I was leaving his room-”
“What were you doing up so late?”
“I swore I’d never tell.”
“Cheeky.”
“I walked up the servant stairs. They were cold - colder than usual. It was quiet, apart from my footsteps. That was the only reason I could hear them,” he paused.
“What did you hear?” Dick assumed his part in the storytelling with good humor.
“A second set of footsteps,” Thomas paused once more. For effect.
“Go on!”
“The only light I had was my candle - the stairs wouldn’t be wired for electricity until the war. So it was nothing but a flame and the new moon. Someone else was coming up the stairs. In the dark.”
“An echo?”
“When I stopped, the footsteps kept going on. Kept growing louder. Closer.”
“Were you afraid?”
“I told myself I wasn’t. But my hand carrying the candle started to shake. I started climbing faster, and the footsteps kept pace. I got to the next landing and I decided to wait. I ducked out the door, but I kept it open just a crack. The footsteps kept coming. Closer. Closer. But I was safe behind my door. And just when I was about to give up and resume the climb....I saw it.”
“What?”
The clock began chiming midnight.
“It looked like a hallboy. Dirty, pale. It’s clothes like something out of a book. Identical to you and I in almost every way but one.”
“ What ?”
“The moonlight shone right through him.”
Dick was enraptured.
“I watched him stop at the top of the next landing, take a look out the window. Then...he turned his eyes right on me. Like he knew I’d been watching the whole time. And then he was gone.”
The clock was silent.
“Did you see him again?”
“Never.”
“And that was true?”
“Every word.”
Dick gave a little laugh, “What would you say if I were frightened?”
Thomas smiled. “I’d say it’s only a story. Come closer.”
Dick obliged, settling into Thomas’s familiar and welcoming hold.
“Fixed?” Thomas, from behind, secured him with a light squeeze.
“Tidily,” Dick sealed the physical charm with a kiss on Thomas’s wrist.
“Happy New Year.”
“I’ll collect your kiss in the morning, Thomas. I’ve given you mine.”
“I’m in your debt.”
Neither one of them remembered growing tired or falling asleep. Such was their contentment.
The snow falling outside the window was illuminated by the light of the moon. The new year lay before them, as fresh and untrodden as the layer of white stuff covering their garden.
No ghosts, goblins, or ghouls would haunt them. They were safe. They had one another. In this way, resolutely armed with the other’s presence, they slept through the potential terrors of night until well past daybreak.