Work Text:
Nov, 1922
Faith woke with the strange foot-in-water sensation, as if she were not quite on solid ground, and knew at once what it meant. Her previous pregnancy was far too recent to forget. Recent being, obviously, the operative word.
At half a foot away, a young Christopher Blythed wailed full-throttle from his basket. Faith thought muzzily that she ought to go to him –only first she wanted a moment to sit and miss her mother terribly. She should have been here, because had she been, Faith could have clutched at her skirts one last time and demanded to know How did you do it? No one ever said Jerry was an easy baby, and I refuse to believe I was –so how in the name of God did you do it? But Cecilia Meredith was long dead. Of course she wasn't there. So, the half-formed thought was left to win itself restlessly heavenwards. Jem plucked the frazzled baby out of the cot and handed him to Faith, kissing her temple in passing.
Teddy Lovall popped his head around the door just as the baby settled, and asked, 'Everything all right?'
It occurred to Faith, now feeding the baby half-awake, that Sergeant Teddy Lovall had had the late-night stint at the station house, and needed sleep. Less restlessly went heavenward Bless Teddy.
'Nothing we can't manage,' said Faith. She made to switch Christopher to the other breast and he wailed red-faced fury at her temerity. She settled him, and Teddy withdrew.
But his voice came drifting back down the hall, wry with amusement. 'The Inspector's Gremlins were just the same. Ask him, sometime.'
Notwithstanding Christopher noisily feeding and kneading his fists against her breast, the thought of the Inspector, of Geordie, conjured Judith, and Faith's nerves steadied. Judith, mother of seven, with her terrifying efficiency and ready advice at the corner of her mouth. If Faith couldn't have her mother, Judith would more than do. She smoothed the fuzz of her son's head with her unencumbered hand.
'Definitely nothing we can't manage,' she murmured in an undertone.
In the event though, Faith told Mara before anyone else. The other woman was newly returned from Scotland, to Faith's unutterable relief. Once Nan had written of the girls who pinned hopes, We were not made for separation, and only now, the baby between them, did Faith look to her friend and fully grasp what Nan had meant. If Mara had not been here, the late November sun waxing grey, and the day short, how much more terrifying would be the prospect…but Mara was there, enticing little Christopher with a bauble that was one of his inheritances from the Carlisle gremlins. Something appropriately bright and noisy, designed to madden parents and delight children everywhere.
Faith observed his flash of disinterest as he batted it away, and said to Mara, 'He wants to give it to you.'
'Do you then?' said Mara, as a burbling Christopher boxed with the air. She nodded, apparently satisfied and said, 'It will mean home to you of course.'
'And you?' said Faith. 'What would you give him then?'
'From home?' Mara hummed faintly, taking the question under consideration, and offering her ring finger to the baby in temporary token, risking her wedding band in the process. 'Our heather,' she said, 'white with blossoms and smelling of spring. The gorse too, even with the bristle and prickle of it, and the smell. It's sweet, almost coconut. You'd like it.' This as Christopher seized clumsily at her rings.
'I thought home was Halifax?' said Kitty, reporter in residence, from the spindly-legged table, where she sat attempting a shorthand exercise
Startled, Mara said, 'It is. It was. But Scotland was home first.'
'I didn't realise you remembered it,' said Faith. 'I always think of you here.'
'Yes, well, I mostly have been. There was only a handful of us as could remember – Alec would have been the last of them.'
Faith opened her mouth to say something, perhaps to risk the asking what it was that had brought Mara and Shirley back, but stopped at the mention of Mara's dead brother. There were lots of dead McNeillys, but Faith remembered this one because Mara loved him best, and because, in a turn Gertrude Oliver would have appreciated, she predicted his death. Anyway, Kitty with her reporter's instinct, got there first.
She said, 'You and Teddy talk to him the same way – as if Christopher's a small person.'
'He is,' said Mara, gently extracting her finger from Christopher's clutches. 'All children are.'
'Yes,' said Faith, who had not meant to say it, 'and it's just as well he's a small person on the verge of being usurped or he'd be in a fair way to be spoiled, between Teddy, Judith, and I don't know who else. I thought you didn't have much taste for gremlins, Ariel?'
'I don't mind when I can give them back,' said Mara, not without affection. 'Go back, a minute, Parrot. I thought you meant to wait your gremlins a bit?'
'Oh, I did,' said Faith. 'There were grand plans. Apparently my God is a jealous god who resents my audacity in making plans. He's gleefully overturning them with malice aforethought. I've decided on the whole that as it's just this once, I can be tolerant.'
'I'll remind you of that next time, shall I?' said Mara with a smile.
Faith shook her head. 'No,' she said. 'No, there won't be a next time, Ariel, because you're going to let me in on whatever charm of yours it is that works so well. I should have asked before.'
'Your mhaither,' said Mara mildly to the baby, 'talks an awful lot of nonsense, doesn't she? I suppose you're used to it?'
At the spindly-legged table Kitty's pen skittered and Faith said, apropos of nothing, 'Fox Corner has spiders, has it?'
'Not that I'd noticed, no,' said Mara.
'Well something's bitten you,' said Faith, leaning forward and touching a hand to Mara's neck, 'just there.'
Mara, who had since shifted Christopher from the floor to her arms, now shunted him deftly into the crook of an elbow and touched her unencumbered hand lightly to the place Faith had indicated.
Faith said with unapologetic amusement, 'Evensong would have had them to. It surprised me, because I remembered your housekeeping, and it never ran to spiders when I was at Swallowgate. All the money in the world says Nan and Poppy disagree, though. But, as I say, something has bit you, so I naturally assumed - '
'You're scandalizing poor Kitty,' said Mara, with a smile.
'Enlightening more nearly,' said Faith.
'What, with talk of spiders?'
'Definitely.'
'Well, and so. It's an awful lot less oblique than special cuddles, I'll grant you that,' said Mara.
Here Kitty's pen nib was heard to stumble, scratching badly against the paper. Her elbow shot out in compensation and overturned a bottle of ink, and flooded the room with the potent smell of ammonia and petroleum.
Kitty said, 'You're wreaking havoc on my shorthand, is all. I could do 100 words a minute yesterday.'
Mara shook her head. To Faith she said, 'Remind me before I go. I'll make you an offering the next time I look in, shall I?'
'I told you so,' said Faith, triumphant, laughing, reaching forward and extricating Christopher from Mara's arms.
'Not quite what you mean,' said Mara. ' Though I'm surprised at you not knowing, and you a doctor.'
'Is that what we're calling it?' said Faith, while Kitty daubed ineffectually at the ink with blotting paper. 'Not...' she considered. 'Cuddle-us Interruptus?'
Mara choked on a spasm of laughter. 'Your Latin,' she said, 'was always abysmal. Nan called it doctoring, last time she was here with the little girls.'
'You know,' said Faith, settling Christopher back in his basket, 'I did wonder about that. Sensible, because I wouldn't want another baby sooner than I could help with twins on my hands. Poppy too, I suppose?'
'No,' said Mara, startled. 'Not if you mean did I give her handfuls of Queen Anne's Lace for a wedding present. I took it for granted Mouse knew. I did, you know, and she had more sisters to choose from than I ever had.'
'Right,' said Faith. 'Of course. And you were brought round to the revelation – when exactly?'
Mara shrugged, fetched a dish-rag from the Larkrise kitchen and, passed it to Kitty, who accepted it gratefully and began blotting the ink.
'It would have been the Christmas you nearly spent at ours,' said Mara from the kitchen, over the filling of the kettle with water. 'Senga seemed to think I'd have need of the knowing.'
From her place at the table Kitty made a ball of the soiled rag and squeaked as she ducked her head.
'Now who's scandalising our resident journalist?'
'She's not,' said Kitty, managing to sound indignant in spite of the crease forming on her forehead. She said, perplexed, 'I just didn't think people could –I mean I thought –' but whatever she thought, the enormity of it defied communication.
'That terrible things befell young girls who disregarded the rules?' said Mara, not ungently over the rising boil of the kettle.
Kitty turned a colour that would have done a tomato credit and squeaked her agreement on this point. Faith bit back a smile. 'Strictly speaking,' she said, 'you're not wrong. Hence all the questions from this quarter about charms.'
'I thought,' said Kitty, 'we were calling it doctoring?'
This time Faith made no effort to check her grin. She joined Kitty at the table, shook her head and said 'Only inasmuch as it isn't really a spell out of a faerie story.' Then she reached out a hand and caught the tea towel Mara threw at her.
'Seriously though,' said Faith, relaxing into her chair, 'There must be a list as long as Teddy is tall of all the rules that existed before the war and have generally been broken since.
'And things don't…I don't know…end in catastrophe? Only Uncle Albion always said they would.' This from Kitty with so much earnestness that it was impossible not to smile. Faith tried valiantly not to, anyway. She tucked an inky hand into hers and nodding in the direction of the kitchen, and thus Mara, said 'Obviously not.'
All too often, Faith thought, with squeeze of Kitty's hand, she forgot this gangly tangle of intrepid reporter was still more girl than woman. It hadn't been all that long ago she'd appeared in Faith's room, blood instead of ink on her fingers, and said, I can't make it stop – I've tried everything I can think of in tones of apology as much as unease. This wasn't so different. Granted, Faith thought with an inward smile, she hadn't anticipated having to get into the weeds of this conversation for years, at least. It featured a daughter or two, and an afternoon when Jem was out of the house. All told, then, an afternoon not unlike this one. She gave the ink-spattered hand still enfolded in hers another squeeze for good measure and supposed that really this shouldn't have surprised her.
Over the misting steam of the kettle Mara sent her a look that was obviously intended to convey I told you you would shock her, but there was no heat in it. Rather, she looked decidedly playful – puckish was the word that sprang to mind – and Faith was hard-pressed not to laugh.
'But,' said Kitty, lacing her fingers through Faith's, 'I thought – well I thought that sort of thing did terrible things to your reputation.'
'Doesn't reporting?' said Mara, not without affection.
That won a laugh from Kitty, bright and genuine, a counterpoint to the boiling kettle. The scream of it woke Christopher and in the ensuing chaos Mara warmed the teapot and Kitty slipped behind her to wrestle the teacups down from the lofty heights of their shelving, sending them rattling in chorus around the table as she laid haphazard places.
'Doctoring too,' said Faith, rejoining them, Christopher in her arms.
'That's not the same at all,' said Kitty. 'That's because of the men coming back…' she scrabbled for an argument and over Kitty's dark head and the farmhouse teapot, Mara and Faith traded smiles.
'Darling girl,' said Faith, 'you never think we came up with all that nonsense about virtue? It being one part a woman's, one part her father's, and one part her husband's – does it sound as if a sane woman would write it?'
Mara laughed. She said, 'That's one of Catkin's, isn't it? I can't think how you remembered.'
'I can't think how you didn't,' said Faith. 'It was too weird to forget.'
'Well who did say it, then?' said Kitty, who had after all not lived for four years with Nan's literary quotations.
'Aristotle,' aid Faith, frowning. 'I think. People have been saying things like that forever – but not usually women.'
The room filled with the dark and rich smell of Assam tea as laughter rippled around the table. Even little Christopher caught it off them, his contribution a fragmented thing, just discernible over the china rale and the wind gusting through the windows. Faith made a mental note to campaign for double glazing, or at least better sealant at the sashes when they inevitably expanded on Larkrise.
'You do all right, a leannan,' said Mara, pressing Kitty's shoulder as she passed her with the tea tray, 'if you know what you're getting into.'
Kitty appeared to take this under consideration, accepted a teacup's worth of Assam, and said as she breathed it in, 'Tell me? Just – just so I know.'
'Of course,' said Mara, and Faith nodded, awkward because of the pillow little Christopher had made of her collarbone.
There followed an instructive three-quarter hour. The tea cooled, the Assam blending with the chemical smell of spilled ink and the woody one of dying fire. Even uncertain and stilted, Kitty couldn't altogether lose her reporter's instinct, as she fired question after question across the spindly-legged table, and unfailingly, even easily, Faith and Mara took it turn about to answer.It was only how they used to talk to one another during the war. How Faith and Nan had always said they wished they could talk to their adults.
Strange, now, to be on the receiving end of the inquisition. Stranger still wasn't Kitty's innumerable unknowns - that was a given when talking with an ambitious young reporter. It was the readiness of the advice that bubbled up in Faith's mouth when confronted with them. Kitty was only asking, after all, all the things a young Faith had never quite plucked up the nerve to put to Rosemary. Or Mother Anne. Well, one didn't, when courted by a woman's son, whatever her famously scandalous opinions and youthful scrapes had been.
Faith looked across the table to Mara, possessively cradling the teapot, and thought her friend felt the same. They teased and they laughed, and by inches Kitty relaxed, the chatter of her teacup growing less nervous as she became interested. It was – odd – Faith thought, stumbling a little over the word, to hear Kitty devoid of her usual inquisitorial style, for once only a girl whose mother had died years ago and not a reporter after a story. And yet, she must have begun somewhere, must once have been more stilted girl than ambitious reporter. It was a dizzying thought, and a dazzling transition to witness.
Presently Kitty said, 'And it doesn't – hurt?'
'Kitty,' said Faith, 'Have you ever know us, any of us to send you into harm's way?'
Kitty diverted her attention to her teacup, and Mara batted at Faith's elbow. To Kitty she said, 'Not always. And it shouldn't, if they know what they're about.'
Outside a fine snow began to fall, blotting out the last of that days rationed light squibs. Kitty lit the lamps, and the smell of gasoline tangled with new-blossomed light and essence of tea.
'Then,' she said, pink-cheeked in the lamplight, 'It's not only for – I thought the only reason – ' In the end she settled for nodding, pinker than ever, at little Christopher, still cuddled against Faith's chest.
Faith shook her head, inhaled the last of the acrid burnt match smell, and scrabbled for words, not for the first time that day reaching mentally for her mother.
'No,' said Mara for her. 'No, it's not. It needn't be.'
'Enter faerie rings and charms and all sorts?' said Kitty, with a tentative grin. Faith laughed and Mara swatted her across the table.
'Something like that,' said Faith. Then, on consideration, 'You know you're always safe here?'
She hadn't meant it to be a question. Kitty smiled, shrugged, and gestured to the mess of the soiled dish-rag, disintegrating blotting paper, and her unreadable shorthand exercise from earlier. There was a stain growing on the table that Faith strongly suspected no amount of scrubbing would lift. 'You put up with this lot,' Kitty said. ' I was sort of taking that as read.'
'Good,' said Faith. 'Don't forget it, either.'
More practically, Mara touched a hand to the teapot, gauging its temperature. The tea, freshly poured out, was a hair's breadth away from tepid. In the grate, the fire guttered to a final stand-still, which fact prompted Christopher to register his frustration with the universe in a squeal that jeopardised the integrity of Faith's inner ear. In answer, a robin alighted on the windowsill and beat a tattoo with his beak against the frosted glass. Still, it was good, Faith thought. To sit at the spindly-legged table with its imperfect light and defective heating, the three of them some kind of knot poised to confront the cosmos. Kitty's hands were flying as she imparted the news story of the hour, Mara entirely failing to keep up with her. Christopher deigned to quiet, leaving only the robin to hymn the close of the day. Even the ungrounded feeling of earlier had ebbed, leaving Faith unconvinced that there wasn't some charm in play after all. She must have said this aloud, because Mara shook her head, eyes laughing. No, she said, only the ninth sacrament.
Kitty's eyes went wide – 'Aren't there only two?' – and they were back to amicable laughter.
'Of course there are,' said Faith, but then failed to argue as Mara counted them off against her fingers.
Baptism, Eucharist, on and on, and at the end of them all, Tea, and Friendship. There was nothing for it, but to nod acquiescence. Less ambivalent theology, this, more wholehearted agreement that probably God was to be found in tea well-made and existed absolutely in the friendships she had forged over the years. He had been there in the Swallowgate days, the give and takeoff the girls as they caught and bolstered and let fall each other as the moment required. There again in Lili, blue-lipped and dying as she entrusted their war and the memory of it to Faith. Here too, she thought, in the chaos of Kitty's imperfect shorthand, smell of ink permeating the room, and the Assam cooling on her tongue, rich in taste and long-in-the-mouth. No doubt Susan would have been horrified by the conjecture, but Susan wasn't there, and anyway, Faith thought, as she gathered the detritus of tea together, it was true.