Chapter Text
Sid opened the door of the presbytery to see who had knocked, then immediately glanced back over his shoulder. “I’d come back later,” he warned the man outside in a half-whisper, “‘less you want to get roped in with me.”
“We’ve hardly seen each other in three weeks,” Sullivan breathed back, “and I was finally able to take an afternoon off. Unless you’re being held hostage, being ‘roped in’ with you sounds like exactly what I do want.”
It was a hard call for Sid to make. On the one hand, they’d both been working so much that they’d rarely even passed on the street of late. Just seeing Sullivan this close – watching his lips form words, catching a faint whiff of his aftershave, feeling the temperature difference where his shadow blocked out the sun – was a treat. On the other, he knew his boyfriend would hate everything that was going on in the kitchen right now. It was all legal, of course, but it was sweaty, smelly, labor-intensive work, and the boss was a bit of a harridan. A lovable one, yeah, but still.
“Thing is,” he said, “I am sort of being held hostage.”
Sullivan’s brow furrowed. His hand started forward as if he intended to grab Sid’s wrist, yank him out of the house, and run away with him. Then a voice emanated from the kitchen, and he paused.
“Sidney! This batch is ready to be pulled out! What is taking you so long?”
Sid winced. “Be right there, Mrs. M.,” he called back. “...See?” he then hissed to a frowning Sullivan. “Best run while you still can.”
“What...?” Sullivan’s hand fell back to his side. “What are you doing in there? Can’t you get away?”
“Not a chance. If I tried to skip out on a canning day, I really would be held hostage.”
“Canning?” Wide eyes. It was a pretty sight, but Sid didn’t dare indulge in it for too long. Not if he wanted to give the other man one last chance to escape.
“Just go,” he urged. “You don’t want anything to do with this. I’ll come ‘round yours when we’re done. It’ll be late, but-”
“Sidney!” Sid jumped as his name was spoken directly behind him. “Who is distracting you from...oh, Inspector. Naturally. Well, you have excellent timing.” Mrs. M. waved Sid back from the door and ushered the uncertain-looking Sullivan inside. “We are in desperate need of another set of hands. The Father was called away to the other side of the parish, and our entire process has slowed down as a result. You can take his place and help us get caught up.”
“Ah...Mrs. McCarthy, I really can’t stay...”
Sid bit the inside of his cheek. He’d never been able to beg off of a canning day, despite his best efforts. There was still a distance between Sullivan and Mrs. M. that had never existed in his own relationship with the woman, though. She’d read Sid’s personality within five minutes of meeting him and gave him a piece of her mind on the regular, but she occasionally backed off with Sullivan when she wouldn’t have done so with anyone else in their little circle. Maybe she would take his excuse and let him bow out, albeit with annoyance.
...Or not, Sid allowed as she closed the door firmly and then crossed her arms and squared up to the Inspector. “Oh? So you have time to stop in for a bit of idle chit-chat, but not time to assist with our charity work before you leave?”
Sid shook his head slightly as Sullivan glanced at him. Too late. Don’t argue. Struggling would only make things worse.
Fortunately, Sullivan took his unspoken advice. “Well,” he allowed with a faint sigh, “I suppose I can spare a little while, since charity work is for the common good...”
Mrs. M. nodded, a glimmer of triumph shining in her gaze. “It most certainly is for the common good. I am glad you agree.”
“D’you want me to show him what to do?” Sid offered. Before he’d been called away, Father Brown had been at the table filling the jars they’d sterilized this morning. Sid was assigned to the cooktop, responsible for keeping three large stockpots at a constant boil and cycling the filled jars in and out of the water to make them seal. Once they got to work, there weren’t going to be many opportunities for them to be close to one another for more than a second at a time.
Mrs. M. sent him a dumbfounded look. “What are you still doing out here?! You likely have two batches to pull now, and we were already behind!”
Oh. Right. Throwing a shrug and a helpless grin in Sullivan’s direction, Sid ducked past the parish secretary’s glare and headed back to his station.
“Why on earth are there so many of them?” Sullivan asked plaintively a little while later.
Mrs. M. had gone to assess their shelf space in the pantry, which was likely why Sullivan was letting his dismay show. “It’s that time of year, innit? Harvest.” Sid lowered a fresh rack of jars into one of the stockpots, turned up the heat, then swiped at his damp forehead as he turned to face his boyfriend. Sullivan had removed his suit jacket and loosened his tie in recognition of the kitchen’s steamy atmosphere, but he still looked out of place sitting in front of a massive bowl of sliced raw carrots. “I tried to warn you.”
“I know.” Sullivan cast a glance over the ranks of jars that were still waiting to be filled. “As glad as I am to see you, this isn’t the afternoon together that I had in mind.”
“‘Least with you here we might finish at a decent hour. She wasn’t exaggerating; we started falling behind as soon as the Father had to go.” Cutting the carrots into fingers and rounds and loading the pieces into jars didn’t seem like something that would take long, but it was hard to fall into any sort of rhythm if you were also trying to tend to the water baths or peel more carrots to pass down for slicing.
“Or early, if he comes back soon? Four people working should make things go faster.”
“Nah. Not really.” Sid jerked his thumb towards his roiling pots. “Can’t rush this step. It’s what keeps the stuff inside from going bad.”
“...Oh.” Sullivan got up from his seat and came over to where Sid was leaning beside the stove. The presbytery’s stockpot and Mrs. M.’s both had opaque lids, but the fancy new one that Lady F.'s cook had let them borrow had a cover made from tempered glass. Sullivan peeked down through it and into the water. “So I fill the jars with carrots, and then...?”
“Then I pour boiling water into them,” Sid said, indicating the gently hissing kettle on the fourth hob, “pop the lids on, and get them in the pots. Take them out a bit later, empty the racks, and let them cool. Mrs. M. checks the seal, then they go into the pantry.”
“She’s been gone longer than I expected.”
“Good harvests this year. There was more to can than usual, so it’s getting pretty full in there. She’ll probably be a few more minutes, if she’s having to reorganize again.” Sid watched Sullivan’s gaze travel down his body. “I know what you’re thinking, but I’m soaked. You wouldn't like me right now.”
“I can tell you’re damp just looking at you. Your clothes are clinging.” Sullivan reached out and plucked at Sid’s shirtfront. “...But you’re right,” he agreed as he pulled away. “You’re a furnace. Anyway, it probably wouldn’t be wise for us to even kiss at this juncture.”
“Yeah. Not after three weeks of nothing. Hard enough just standing this close to you without touching.” Maybe it was good that their workstations were separated, after all...
“Later, then.”
“For sure. S’posed to be cool tonight. It’ll be nice to walk over in that.”
“After you shower, of course.”
“Would I try to seduce you reeking of hot carrot?”
“I wouldn’t put it past you to try.”
Sid smirked. “And I wouldn’t put it past you to be won over.”
A twitch of amusement elevated the corners of Sullivan’s mouth. “Let’s not try that experiment tonight. I just put on new sheets.”
“Picky, picky...”
“Ahem.”
Mrs. M. was back from the pantry and regarding them with unimpressed eyes. “Inspector, these carrots are not going to slice themselves.”
Sullivan colored slightly. “Of course not, Mrs. McCarthy.”
“It would be shameful to let any of this bounty go to waste,” she continued as he slunk back to his seat. “There will be plenty who need it come winter.”
“You grew all of these to give away?” Sullivan inquired in astonishment.
“Me?” Mrs. M. appeared to be equally surprised by that idea. “Good heavens, no. These came from the Gregsons and the Fletchers.”
Taking her own chair, she began to peel more roots for Sullivan to chop up. As she worked, she explained. “Many of the parishioners who farm or have success with their kitchen gardens bring their produce as part of their tithing, or simply as a donation. It trickles in all year long, but this is always the busiest season for it. Since there is no sensible way to use up so many fresh goods before they go bad, we can as much as possible and store it away. Some of it will go into the Father’s dinners, of course, but most will end up in meals for the ill or the bereaved, or in baskets for new arrivals and those who could use a little extra goodwill.”
“You should have a look in the pantry before you leave,” Sid suggested. “You’ll like it in there. Mrs. M. keeps it so neat that you’ll think you’ve died and gone to organization heaven. There’s even an inventory you have to mark off if you take something.”
“I take it you’re not allowed within three feet of the door, then?”
“He knows the pantry rules,” the parish secretary answered. “And he knows what he has to do if he breaks them, too.”
“Oh?” Sullivan looked up from his cutting board, intrigued. “It sounds as if there’s a story behind that.”
Sid grimaced. “First year I was here, I didn’t know how Mrs. M. liked to handle extra jars. You know, when there’re a couple left, but not enough to fill a whole row. Those get stacked in crates on the floor and used up first, but I just put them up on the shelf and filled in the rest of the row with the next thing we canned.”
Mrs. M. picked up the tale. “I only discovered what he had done in December, and of course I knew immediately that my inventory must be off. The shelves are exactly five jars deep, which makes counting our stock a fast process if everything is put away according to my system. Since it had not been, we had to pull everything down and reorganize it.”
“... I had to pull everything down and reorganize it,” Sid clarified.
“You were the one who made the error."
“You’re the one who didn’t tell me not to mix rows!”
“I am certain I told you what to do with the spare jars, Sidney. You simply were not listening.”
“Well, I’d been being slow-cooked in this kitchen all day long, hadn’t I? I didn’t have much energy left to give to listening.” He felt about the same now as he had at the end of that very first canning day, as a matter of fact, though Sullivan’s arrival had perked him up a little. “Just lucky I didn’t drop anything while I was putting it away.”
“You did drop one. It was a jar of radishes,” she added for Sullivan’s benefit.
“No, that was the next time, remember? We got up all the glass, or thought we did, then while I was cleaning the pantry floor I reached under the shelves and cut my finger on a big shard we’d missed. Bled like a...” He swallowed a word that he knew would have earned him a scandalized Sidney! from both of the people at the table. “...Like a stuck pig.”
“Oh, yes, it was the second time you helped.” Being reminded of the fact that Sid had literally bled for her canned goods seemed to mollify her a bit. “I am sure that there was a good reason why that particular jar slipped from your grasp. Perhaps the seal was less complete than I thought. It might have made someone terribly ill if it had ended up on the shelf as intended. Thank Heaven that did not occur.”
Sid wasn’t going to argue if the parish secretary wanted to chalk a moment of clumsiness on his part up to divine intervention. Shooting his skeptic boyfriend a wry smile, he dove into preparing the next round of jars for their bath.
Behind him, Sullivan did a decent job of maintaining the flow of light chatter. Sid kept half an ear on the talk, monitoring it. The other man was not a natural conversationalist, at least not unless you got him onto a topic he had real interest in. The Father and Lady F., both adept at reading people and making them comfortable, could almost always avoid long silences when they spoke with him in a relaxed setting. But Mrs. M. lacked their respective knowledge of human nature and social fluidity. Her interactions with the Inspector were often stilted, particularly when there was no third party to cushion the blunt assertions they were both prone to.
Today, though, they were both trying hard. Sullivan seemed to be making a conscious effort to aim their talk towards things that Mrs. M. could then go on about for a few minutes with minimal additional prompting. A recent local flower show, the upcoming Church fair, what sort of a winter they were likely to have...he’d been studying, Sid thought with a faint smile. That was sweet of him.
“Stop!”
Sullivan had been mid-sentence, but he broke off at Mrs. M.’s cry. Sid froze, then moved his arm and hand out of the plume of steam rising from one of the stockpots. He’d been about to lower a freshly filled rack into the water below, but the parish secretary’s voice was imperative enough to make him set it aside.
Before he could turn to see what was wrong, she was beside him. “Cover that pot, or you will lose all of your heat,” she directed without looking at him. He did as he’d been told, then turned back to find her gaze riveted to the jars he’d just put lids on. She let out a little hmpf and reached out to lift one with her bare hand.
“Careful!” Sid said, taking hold of her wrist before she could burn herself. “It’s hot, y’know.”
She’d caught her breath when he caught her arm. Now she pulled gently free, picked up the jar – Sid winced, expecting her to react with pain – and, holding it easily, met his stare. “It is not hot, because you have not filled it.”
“...Oh. Uh...” He hadn’t, he realized with a glance, added water to any of the jars on the rack he’d been about to put into the pot. Had listening in on the others’ conversation distracted him so much that he’d forgotten that crucial step on the other two racks? They’d both been in their baths for several minutes already; without water in the jars, they might be ruined.
No, he was certain he’d done those proper, because they’d been the right weight when he’d lifted them. This last one hadn’t been, and now that he thought about it he’d had a tickle in the back of his mind that something didn’t feel on. How had he missed putting the water in...? “Sorry. I’ll fix it.”
Mrs. M. shook her head. “No. You will go outside and cool down. You are entirely too warm.” She studied his face for a moment, then frowned. “Inspector, will you go with him, please?” Sullivan was already behind her, his eyes dark with worry. “Here...” In a moment she’d fetched a glass and filled it at the sink. “Make certain he drinks this,” she instructed, pressing the water into Sullivan’s hand. “Not too quickly, or it might make him sick.”
“But...” They both looked at Sid as he tried to argue. “The carrots?”
“We have caught up once today already,” Mrs. M. soothed. “We can do so again when you are not about thirty seconds from passing out. The bench at the side of the house should be in shadow by now, Inspector. Take him there.”
“Right. Come on, Sid." Sullivan took his elbow, gripping it tightly despite the clammy dampness of his sleeve and skin. "This already isn’t the afternoon I had planned,” he murmured as he led him out of the kitchen. “We’re not adding you getting heatstroke to the list of things that have gone awry. Do you understand?”
“...Yeah.” He hadn’t realized it while he’d been standing still in front of the stove, but the floor was awfully wavy. “Sorry...”
“Don’t apologize. You haven’t done anything wrong. But don't pass out, either.” The world filled with blazing light as the door was pushed open. “Outside. We’ll be in the shade soon.”
Mm...shade...sitting in the shade with Sullivan at his side...that did sound nice...