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Chapter Text

Tadfield, July 1649

The first time Aziraphale ever saw Antonia, as Crowley called herself then, he was running away.

Later, when he was more aware of his – their - power, he wouldn’t have to run anywhere – merely desiring to be at a particular place would be enough to send him there, so long as it was a place he had been before or the someone could describe to him. But this was near the beginning, or so Aziraphale thought then. That kind of travel was far off in the future, and so he ran into the sunlight, sprinting down the lane, loose leather boots skidding in the sandy dust as he rounded the corner at speed, risking one quick glance over his shoulder. He could see no one following but he didn’t stop, instead veering off the road, leaping a shallow ditch before rolling behind a tree growing hard against a dry stone wall and lying behind it, leaning his head back and laughing breathlessly. Too close! Worth it, though, obviously...

The boy’s brother had so nearly caught them right in the act, it was just lucky they had been kissing in the barn so that Aziraphale could cut and run out of the side door while the boy (didn’t even get his name) tried to act natural as he climbed down the hayloft ladder....he ran his fingers through his white blond hair, dislodging several sticks of straw and a dried corn husk. Leaning against the tree, getting his breath back, laughing through the breathlessness. He clutched at a stitch that was needling his side.

Aziraphale – he’d actually been calling himself Ezra, lately, it was easier to say and sounded less, well, Papist - lay down behind the wall and squinted up at the blue sky shimmering through the leaves of the huge tree growing at the edge of the field. It was hot, and quiet, the only sounds to be heard in the countryside were birdsong and bees droning past on their way to and from their hives. This was an amazing time to be alive and carefree and enjoying the best season of the year – high summer in England. Everything was changing, no one knew when up would become down, left become right, and mysterious strangers riding in to the village late at night and catching the eyes of all the girls and some of the boys were almost ten a penny, thanks to the shifting armies and the upheaval that had come with the new Commonwealth. There was danger, yes, but rightly or wrongly he felt impervious to it – aside from youthfulness and naivitee, he had a secret so delicious it sometimes felt it would just escape from his heart no matter how close he held it to himself. Just now, for example, with the boy in the hayloft whose name Aziraphale didn’t even know, he had wanted to tell him, to talk to someone about what he was learning and discovering and...he didn’t know exactly how to describe it, but it felt like remembering.

He was not like other people – at least he didn’t think so. He’d never met anyone else who was like him. Never seen anyone else who could do the things he was finding that he could do. Aziraphale fell to pondering these mysteries, lazily gazing up into the bright sky through the shifting leaves....

And suddenly, with no prior warning, a lance of white-hot pain flashed through his entire body from head to toe. Aziraphale convulsed, clutching at his stomach and retching, sure he was about to start coughing blood or something even worse...and then just as suddenly the agony disappeared, and his body relaxed, flopping backwards against the tree-trunk, the pain completely gone.

Well, that was weird.

Frowning, he looked up again into the canopy of the tree. It was a horse-chestnut, its full leaves swaying in the light summer breeze, its gorgeous candle flowers dropping pollen into Aziraphale’s dusty hair. The morning sun winked and flashed through the shifting foliage. It was a beautiful day. Shrugging, he went to get to his feet and was doubled over again, this time with a stabbing pain right in the stomach, exactly as though he had been punched there, and punched hard. His right hand was cramped around into a painful fist. Glancing at this hand, he saw blood ringing two of his fingernails, and felt sharp pain in those fingers.

What the hell was this?

He staggered to his feet, and then promptly fell right over again. In front of him, hovering in the sunlight, was a ghost. At least Azirphale thought it was a ghost...he didn’t know what else it could be. A pale figure hovered in the spinning dust motes and sunbeams, distinctly female, but also distinctly transparent. Her face was white and anguished, red lips moving silently. The figure turned, spinning, and it held out its hands towards him – two fingernails were bloody, the mirror of his own hand – and then the vision froze, and vanished.

Aziraphale slowly got to his feet, alert to the possibility of more stomach-churning pain. There was none. He held his hand out in front of himself, gingerly, to examine the damage and realised his fingers were shaking.

It was early, but he decided at this point that he really needed a drink.

Aziraphale chewed his lip as he listened to the gossips in the rough village ale house talk about nothing else but ‘the witch’. They were going to burn the witch today. Antonia Crow, she was called. They had a cast-iron case against her – witchcraft, predicting a fire before it happened, which was to say, causing the fire. Burning was a fitting end for someone who was going to end up in hell, anyway. So the ale house jury had decided.

He finished his beer, not drinking right to the bottom of the jug, as long experience had taught him that he didn’t want to see what was in the dregs, and stood up. His fingers were still sore, and his stomach, and he had seen the ghostly girl twice more on his way to the alehouse, standing by the side of the road, beseeching. Coupled with the talk at the bar, Aziraphale was becoming sure that his ‘ghost’ must be this Antonia, and she wasn’t a witch at all, but another one like him. She must have somehow sent a message to him from her prison cell, and another from the burning pyre itself, but now it must surely be too late, because he’d been in here for most of the day, drinking steadily to try and rid himself of the horrible feeling that he was supposed to do something about this. He thought it was called guilt. Casually, he asked the nearest drinker when the burning was taking place – said that he’d never seen a witch burn and was curious about it. Aziraphale was told that the witch was going to the devil at sunset, in the village field nearest to the river.

Not too late after all.

He slipped deeper into the baying crowd, unobserved. A witch burning was unusual enough in these days that people had travelled to witness it, from even further away than the usual five villages – this wasn’t Scotland, after all, where they’d done hundreds of them – there must be over a thousand people in the field surrounding the huge pile of smouldering wood and bracken with a whole tree trunk wedged in the centre of it. On top of this, looking very small and thin, was a figure dressed in a black shift. Glancing up, now that he was close enough to see her face, confirmed that it was the girl he’d seen in the….visions, hallucinations, whatever they had been. She had called him here. So she really was a witch, then. As am I, he thought grimly, remembering some of the things he’d found that he could do, starting with that day in the cellar and the mysterious light, which reminded him so much of….something else....he shook his head. He could examine this later. He had done, already, several times, but agonising over it hadn’t really revealed any answers.

He edged forward, pulling his hood lower over his eyes in case anyone recognised him. His pale curly hair in particular was distinctive. Memorable. Aziraphale didn’t think anyone here knew him, but you could never be sure. And there were people from so many different places here today – it was better than a church holiday, not that there were any of those any more. No more Easter, no more Christmas. People had to get their entertainment where they could. There were even stalls set up around the perimeter of the field, in addition to the roving salesmen selling hot meat pies (and the pricier ones even had named meat) and trinkets.

The girl on the pyre – the notorious Antonia Crow – was tied to the huge tree trunk, standing barefoot on top of the pile of wood. Already, smoke was billowing around her – the summer had been damp, and the wood would not have been dry, piled up in the field like this for days beforehand. Even from this position, still near the back of the crowd, the heat was noticeable. Without really realising he’d done it, Aziraphale made a decision.

He slipped through the crowd until he was right at the foot of the pyre. Now the heat was fierce. There were several armed men standing guard around the bottom of the wood pile, to prevent any attempted rescue of the prisoner – not that it seemed anyone had tried. Not yet. He drifted to the right, hoping to see a gap in their defences, but there was none – the ring of men from the Witchfinder Army with drawn swords and the occasional musket was solid all the way around.

Aziraphale moved on. And suddenly, there was an opening. A young witchfinder, much greener than the rest of the guard, who was not looking out at the crowd but back and up at the top of the wood pile. He was as heavily armed as the rest of them but he was not going to use his weapons. In fact, he looked like he was about to faint away any minute, in pure terror. Aziraphale sidled up beside him, not really sure yet what he was going to do. It didn’t matter – the young witchfinder did it for him. He turned toward Aziraphale and his face was glazed over at the horror of what he had been asked to do. There was a reason why none of the other men had looked up at the fire, or more especially at the girl they were going to burn.

“What’s your name?” Aziraphale asked.

“P...Pulsifer. Private Pulsifer,” the boy croaked out.

“Well, Private Pulsifer, why don’t you let me through?” Aziraphale suggested, not really expecting that the young man would just capitulate, but he did, stepping back and lowering his sword. Quickly recovering from the shock of having someone just obey his word without a murmur (how useful that could be!), Aziraphale stepped onto the stack of branches and logs and began to climb toward the top.

He clambered around behind the girl with his dagger drawn, and a moment later the ropes fell away from her arms and from around her waist, and then finally the last bond that held her legs against the stake was severed, too. As soon as Antonia was free he grabbed her arm to lead her down from the precarious pile of wood. She didn’t want to move. Aziraphale took off his short leather cloak and hood, and wrapped it around her shoulders, covering what was left of her bright red hair.

“Come on, Mistress Crow,” he said. “I think it’s time to get out of here, don’t you?”

Then he grabbed hold of her hand again and pulled her backwards, down the woodpile and past the stricken young Private Pulsifer, who had watched the whole rescue, open-mouthed, but had not alerted any of the others. Aziraphale gave him a wink as they slipped past him, and he gave a shaky smile in return, knowing that there was now probably going to be a lot of trouble, but also knowing that this must have been the right thing to do. Aziraphale hoped he’d be allowed to resign. He didn’t look cut out for witchfinding.

Somehow, he got both of them through the back of the crowd and away from the mob, who were still baying for blood as the fire burned, smoke swirling thickly around the field, not realising that their cage was empty and their bird had flown.

They slid through the doorway into the cool darkness of the barn and Aziraphale pushed the door firmly closed. Neither of them spoke for a moment. The silence seemed deafening after the roar of the flames and the yelling and screaming from the baying crowd around the pyre. When their breathing had slowed, the girl looked up at him with frightened eyes. Her face was streaked with soot and grime, her reddish hair, where it has not been shaved or pulled out, was clotted with blood and dirt, and her clothes were singed and ripped. She shrugged off the leather cloak, looking down at her dress in dismay. She flinched away when Aziraphale held out a hand to her, but then recovered herself and let him pull the remains of the rope from around her wrists, wincing as he touched the burns on her hands and arms.

“Are you….are you alright?” he asked her, awkwardly now that they were alone.

She blinked, nodded slowly. “Yes, I think I am…I am in need of some fresh clothing, I think.”

Aziraphale hurriedly removed his linen shirt and handed it to her with a grimace. It was singed almost as badly as her ragged dress, but at least it was whole. She flinched as the fabric snagged at her burned flesh, but smiled gratefully once she had the garment on. “Thank you,” she said. “It isn’t enough to say, but…”

“You called me,” he said. “I had to come, I think. How did you do that, anyway?”

“How did I do what?”

“Send that….I don’t know what it was….this morning, I saw a kind of picture of you. I was sitting under a tree, minding my own business, and then there you are, a vision of a burning girl, asking me for help. I had no choice, I couldn’t ignore it!”

“I didn’t know I’d done that. Maybe you had a vision? They’re from the devil, of course, but I think they’re true. I know I’ve seen things before they’ve happened, many times. That is why I was going to be burned, or part of the reason. I’ve healed wounds without the priest, and found water with a willow branch, too...”

“Those things don’t sound that bad to me,” Aziraphale said, looking closely at her. What else had she done? His heart began to beat harder. Could it be possible…?

Antonia gave him a rueful smile. “You’re not one of the men from the village, the ones who decided I had to burn. They said I started the fire in the hayrick outside the manor house, after I predicted that it would happen. I should’ve held my peace, but I thought that it might be prevented, if I said it was going to happen…I knew that it would happen. I often know things that are yet to be. I only hope you realise that you have rescued a most notorious witch!”

Aziraphale threw himself down into the pile of the deep, fragrant straw. “If seeing visions makes you a witch, I must be one, as well,” he said, making a decision. “Not just visions, either – what would the witchfinders say if they could see this?”

He held out his hand and concentrated for a few seconds, just long enough for a faint glow of white-blue light to seep out of his skin and surround his hand with a nimbus of light. Antonia gaped at him. Her eyes were unusual, he saw, gleaming almost amber in the dim light of the barn. Her pupils were slightly slitted. No wonder the men from the village were afraid of her. She was beautiful, even beaten up as she was, and she was powerful. Couldn’t have women walking around doing things like that. It might give the others Ideas.

He shook his hand to clear the light away. “That’s not the half of it. I passed through the crowd without any of them seeing me. That young witchfinder let me take you because I asked him to. I also carried you away through the same crowd and no one noticed it. If you are a witch, Mistress Crow, I am one too, and worse.”

In answer, Antonia held out her hands, still livid with burns, and flexed her fingers. An answering bluish glow issued from her fingers, darker than the light from his, tinged faintly red, or purple. She looked up at Aziraphale, her eyebrows raised. “I never thought I’d see that devil’s light anywhere but my own body,” she whispered. “Both of us are damned.”

“Is that what you think it is? The devil’s light?” Aziraphale asked. It hadn’t occurred to him that it might be anything...evil. He had been excited, curious, rather than afraid. “I have no evidence it comes from the devil. I rather thought I was doing it myself.”

“How could that be? It isn’t natural!”

“How so, not natural? Let me tell you. The very first time I saw that light appear, I was a young boy, I think, not more than seven or eight years old. I was trapped in a cellar, I forget why, and I needed to be able to see so that I could get out – and then my hands started to glow, like that, and I could see well enough to find the door and break the lock. I don’t recall seeing the devil. Besides, do you not have to bargain with him for him to give you gifts? Offering him your soul is traditional, I think. Well, I have certainly not done that! I have never met him. I am not sure that he exists at all, personally.”

Antonia crossed herself, and then looked around nervously, as though realising that this, too, could send her to the stake. Papists were just as bad as witches, in these Puritan times. Maybe worse.

Aziraphale hadn’t told her the whole truth, there. That memory....there was something about it, something wrong with it....but he had examined it many times and he couldn’t tell what. It was one of the very few memories he had of childhood. Again, he shrugged it away. Now, sitting in the straw grinning at her, the danger passed, he could see endless possibilities. Now that he knew it wasn’t just him....

Antonia scowled, and pulled his linen shirt more closely around her. “I’m glad you think this is funny,” she said. “The damnation of your eternal soul!”

“I would not think that was a cause for laughter, if I believed that it was going to happen,” Aziraphale replied, seriously. “But listen, Mistress Crow. I took the king’s shilling – the dead man’s shilling – and went for a soldier, and I saw things during the war that you would not believe, things I try very hard never to think about. Not to mention some very….creative executions. Burning at the stake isn’t half of it. The people who thought up those things are going to hell, if anyone is. I know that you have never done anything so bad that it would get you down there with the likes of them. Neither have I, and I’m certainly no saint. I’ve seen evil, Mistress Crow, up close – you are not it.”

“I’m a witch!” she whispered, shaking her head. “It must be unnatural!”

“So what if you are a witch? Listen – I am convinced this is something that was in me – in us – from the day we were born. You aren’t going to hell, Mistress Crow. In fact…if you are the same as me, I don’t think you are even going to die, if you don’t want to.”

“What...?” she whispered.

“Well – how old are you? I know people don’t always know. But I fought in the war, I worked on farms, before that...basically, I am not the age I am supposed to be. It’s as though I stopped getting older, at a certain point. It’s the same for you. I’m right, aren’t I?”

Antonia didn’t reply but the look in her strange amber eyes told Aziraphale the truth of it.

It was hours later. A small fire had been lit in the doorway of the barn, and they sat against the sun-warmed wooden door watching the flames and talking. They’d found a store of wrinkled year-old apples at the top of the barn that the rats hadn’t discovered, and now were eating their way through a small pile of them. Aziraphale was starving and had eaten several. Antonia was making her way through one fruit, slowly.

She flexed her fingers cautiously. She looked closely at the burns by the firelight. “I think….these burns are fading already,” she said, prodding gently at the wounds. “And this has happened before. How is that possible?”

“I think that’s another part of it,” Aziraphale replied, throwing his third apple core into the fire. “This witch thing. I was once stabbed in tavern brawl – it’s a long story – but the wound healed within days. It had closed up within a very short time – hours, maybe. I had to cut it open again when someone wanted to see it, otherwise they would have been crying ‘witch’ at me, then, too.”

“I know that I can heal other people’s wounds,” Antonia said slowly. “Not completely – it would be dangerous to do that, anyway,” she gave a wry smile, “and besides I didn’t know I could do it, at first. But I did some work as a midwife and wise woman, and I was finding that I could heal people, take their pain, if it wasn’t too bad.” She paused, and then threw her own apple core into the fire. “How long is the story of your brawl? I think I know it. You were going after a girl, and some other man thought she was his. Am I right?”

He laughed. “You are a witch!” He leaned back against the barn door and looked up past their little fire at the spreading stars. “Right in nearly all details, except, well, it was a boy. Oh, I wish we were in a tavern right now. This is a perfect night to be drunk. And after the day we’ve had…”

Something made Antonia turn and look into the darkness beyond the barn – some little sound perhaps. There in front of them, sitting incongruously in the long summer grass, were two mugs. Scrambling to her feet, she picked them up, sniffing the contents. Beer in both of them. She handed one to Aziraphale. “Where did these come from? Did you do that?”

He took a drink, cautiously. It tasted fine. “I must have, I suppose. I haven’t done anything like that before. That could be very useful!”

Another memory was snagging at him...was that the first time he had done that? He tried to chase it down but these weird memories were like trying to chase another person’s dreams. There was nothing substantial to catch on to.

Antonia shook her head, and put the other mug down, untouched. “You can’t tell me that’s natural. Creating something out of nothing? You don’t get to do something like that for free. There’ll be a price to pay the devil for that skill. There must be a price. And we don’t know what it is. How high it is.”

She looked out into the dark for a long moment, before gathering herself, and stepping out of the circle of firelight. “I don’t want to pay it,” she said. “I thank you for saving my life. And for your clothes. But this has to be the end. Don’t follow me.”

She stood for a moment, and then a curious, serpentine shudder passed through her body and she...changed. Nothing too drastic, really, but she was now...Aziraphale’s mouth dropped open. Because now Antonia was definitely...

Anthony.

And Anthony was gorgeous.

“You can’t tell me being able to do this is natural,” she – no, the voice, the face, the body – he said, bitterly, running larger, masculine hands through shorter flame red hair. “But they won’t find Mistress Crow anywhere around for a little while.”

He wrapped Aziraphale’s shirt around himself – it fitted better, now - and strode away into the hot summertime darkness.

Aziraphale stayed by the fire, and drank both mugs of beer. He was waiting for her – him - to come back, sure he would change his mind, but he did not return.

Chapter Text

Kashmir, December 1705

The storm swelled and shifted among the high mountains, weird clouds filled with lighting casting eerie light on the peaks and leaving dark shadows in the deep valleys. Aziraphale (Zira was his name, for now) hammered on the heavy wooden door, holding a leather hood over his head to avoid the lashing rain. He could hear shuffling, slippered feet on the dry floor behind the door, and then it opened a little way and a wrinkled face peered through the gap into the wild night. All he could really see were her eyes, the rest of her was swathed in veils and cloths like all the women in this part of the world.

“Who comes here?” asked an ancient sounding voice.

“I am looking for someone. He...might be she, actually...he’s called Anthony. Or he was, when I knew him. He might have...changed. He does that.”

The old woman’s eyes widened slightly. “Do you mean Antonia? We have one here with that name. The one who walked around the world to find her place with us?”

Aziraphale paused, shifting the hood a little higher to stop the ever-more torrential rivulets of rainwater from pouring onto him. Ah. So he was she again. He was never sure who he was going to find.

He nodded. “That sounds like...her. Will she see me?”

“We’ve been waiting for you,” the old woman said, and pulled the door wide, admitting Aziraphale into a shadowy hall scented strongly with incense and cloves, and with golden icons gleaming dimly in the candlelight. She picked up a small silver bell in a tiny hand and rang it once, a clear little sound that was very loud after the rain and then the silence in the hall. Aziraphale shrugged off his leather cloak, found he was not as soaked as he could have been underneath it, and laid it on a wooden bench built into one wall.

A girl with short dark hair, wearing a simple tunic robe appeared at the sound of the bell, stopped short at the sight of Aziraphale for a second before bowing to the old woman. “Please fetch our new guest some tea, and bring our lady friend out to see him. I think she will be pleased that he is here.” The girl stared openly at him, wide-eyed. She opened her mouth as though she was going to speak. Her face had gone chalk white. The old woman clapped her hands in front of her face. “Muriel! The tea!”

The girl shook herself, looked at him again and whispered something that sounded like, “How are you here?”

The guru raised an eyebrow. “Everyone is where they should be,” she said mildly. Muriel nodded, bowed again and darted off into the shadows.

“I am afraid she is a simple one,” the old woman said. “Born in the valley and sent here. Arrived one day with a basket of food and nothing else. But she is a good girl.”

“I’m sure....” said Aziraphale. He had had one of those odd memories float to the surface at the sight of her. She seemed familiar, although he was one hundred percent sure he’d never met her before. How would he have done, a local girl from mountains he had never seen?

“You have travelled a long way without going very far,” the old woman said next. Aziraphale felt a little shock ripple through him, disguising it by making a show of rubbing the rain drops out of his tightly curled hair. The old woman gestured forwards to an area of the hall with cushions and throws laid out, and sat there herself, cross-legged and seemingly comfortable. Aziraphale slipped off his sopping shoes and cautiously squatted beside her.

“Thank you for inviting me into your home. I had no right, as a stranger in the storm. My name is Zira Fell. Has...Antonia...spoken about me?” he asked.

The old woman clasped her hands together, closing her eyes for a moment. “Forgive me, forgive me. My students call me...Mother...amongst other things. Your friend came to me as a student all those months ago. She never spoke of you, but I saw you in her heart. Ah, here she is now.”

Aziraphale half rose from the cushion as she came in, astonished at the change in her. Gone was the ginger-haired witch in the ragged white dress and sacking with burns on her hands and feet and a haunted look in her eye. Also gone was the man she had become before she left, although she had kept his colouring. Her hair was straight, now, and darker red, almost black in the candle light, and her skin porcelain in its clarity and freshness. She had utterly changed, so much that she appeared to be a different person altogether, although her amber eyes were the same, with their odd, slit pupils. There was no sign of scarring on either of the hands she held out to ‘Mother’. She grasped them, and said softly, “My child, someone has come for you.”

Antonia turned and saw Aziraphale for the first time. She gave a little gasp, and one of her porcelain hands flew to her lips. “You!”

Aziraphale smiled sheepishly. “Me,” he said.

“Did you….have you walked here, like me? Did you take a ship? How did you find me?”

He smiled again, properly. “I have to show you that, Anthony...Antonia, I mean. I didn’t have to walk, or sail. Your guru here has the right of it – I have come a long way but without taking many steps. I have discovered a way to travel that you won’t believe. It is…amazing.”

The girl reappeared, holding three wooden cups on a polished tray. Bowing yet again, she offered the first to her guru, and the second to Aziraphale, giving him another fear-laden glance, before Antonia could take the third cup. “Thank you, Muriel,” she murmured. Muriel smiled eagerly, and retreated.

“Why do you come to be here, my friend?” asked Mother, sipping her tea.

Aziraphale took a sip of his own, thinking how to answer this. “I have been…I realise that it was wrong of me to leave Antonia to her own devices as I did, even though she told me she wanted to leave,” he said. “I realised this, but then, I could not find her. It has taken me a long while to work out how I could find her.”

“I have been expecting you for quite a while,” the old woman said, as mildly as she always seemed to speak. Antonia looked from one to the other, amazed at how much she seemed to know without ever being told anything. She knew she had never mentioned Aziraphale’s name (any of his names) in her hearing.

“Am I late for something?” Aziraphale asked. “I came as soon as I figured out how to. It was not straightforward.”

“No matter,” Mother pressed her palms together and then spread her hands. Her eyes did not leave Aziraphale’s. “You are here now, which is all that matters. You have come for your partner, your helpmeet, which must mean that you are ready to begin your work.”

“What do you mean?” Aziraphale took another sip of the delicious strong tea.

The guru continued. “You must know that your time of recreation is over, and you must now find your purpose, the thing that will keep you grounded here. Otherwise, why would you have been given these gifts? There is a lot more to this than attaining a life of leisure, collecting books and drinking wine without working to buy it.”

Aziraphale looked a little stung at this description of his life. “Obviously, I have thought about it,” he said tersely. “At first I thought it was just me, alone, but then when I met Antonia and I realised that there must be others like us. I see I was right about that. You, for instance?”

The guru gave a wide grin. “Oh, no, not I! I do not have power like yours,” she said. She seemed to find the notion funny. “But I....know of people like you. I believe that there are more of you here, on the earth. Some just alike and some, maybe darker. You need to find the others, Zira Fell. Aziraphale. You know this, you have always known it....”

Aziraphale nodded slowly. “I have suspected. I have long thought that it cannot be that we two are the only ones.”

After seeing the two of them off down the mountain track, Antonia carrying her small pack and Aziraphale with nothing at all but the cape he had arrived in, the old woman turned to Muriel.

“Are you alright, my dear?” she asked.

Muriel nodded, but bit her lip, anxiously. “I....I never thought I would see them here,” she said. “How are they together? I was sure what I did...what I wrote....would keep them apart. Would save them.”

“Some things are inevitable,” the guru said to her, resting her hand on the girl’s shoulder. “I do not think anyone could keep them from finding each other.”

“Did I do the right thing?” whispered Muriel. “I had no choice....I tried and I tried but I couldn’t find another way! Doing what I was told to do – erasing them from the Book – it would have destroyed everything!”

“Your actions are part of the plan, Muriel. All of it is.”

Muriel sank to the ground, clutching her head in despair. “But how do I know, Mother? How do I know?”

Chapter Text

Mr Azira Fell and Miss Antonia Crowley had been travelling around England for more than a few years, going from town to town, following rumours of witches or fortune-tellers or mesmerists in the hope that they would turn out to be people like them. Aziraphale in particular had become a little obsessed with finding others. Perhaps they would one day meet someone who could explain it all; their endless lives, their power, which seemed to strengthen with the passing time. Explain the dreams and memories that felt wrong or feelings that were not quite right or...the words Aziraphale had come up with was imposed upon him. As though they weren’t really his thoughts.

So far, though, they had had no luck at all, and Antonia was getting more and more awkward. Three days previously she had decided she had had enough, and she had point-blank refused to ride any further on horseback. She hated horses with a passion, anyway, and the feeling was apparently mutual. They left their possessions at a little falling-down cottage on the moor that they had been using as a base when in this part of the world, and gone into the nearest town to see if they could acquire a carriage. Money being not much of a problem, they headed straight for the most well-to-do area of town and found a place to lodge, Antonia sighing with relief at the sight of a wash basin and jug with soap and clean towels. Once ensconced in the room, she then refused to move out of it, so Aziraphale went out on his own to ask around about the possibility of buying or hiring out a carriage. There were none in town, but in return for a penny a young boy led him to the town livery stable.

There wasn’t much to it – a few tired-looking old nags who were only loosely tied to the rings, so dispirited were they. The stable owner himself was a gypsy, gold teeth and all who called himself Roman, and Aziraphale turned on the easy charm as he arrived. They were soon deep in conversation as fellow travelling people, discussing the price of wheat, the new Poor Laws and the accompanying riots, and the other men hanging around in the centre of the street.

One man in particular had caught the dealer’s attention. “Seems to me, he’s been flashing the cash around here,” said Roman, with a cynical little smile. “Says he works for a Lancashire mill-owner but I don’t see where the money is in that. They keep it all for themselves, in my experience.”

Aziraphale glanced over at the man the horse-dealer was talking about. He did seem very richly dressed and well-heeled for what he said was his station in life. He was a smug-looking gentleman, overweight and flabby, wearing a gold watch-chain and too many chunky signet rings. The two of them wandered closer, pretending to look at one of the scraggy horses the dealer had for sale. He was talking to another gentleman, laughing raucously and gesturing with his pudgy, richly-ringed hands.

The more he spoke, the more intensely Aziraphale disliked the man. He could already hear Antonia telling him not to get involved, but then, she wasn’t here, and that was her own fault.

Gesturing to the covered cart he had parked up by the side of the street, the man grinned obscenely and told his audience that he was going to make ‘enough money to never work again’ on the back of what was in there.

“What’s that, then? Silver-plated turnips?” spat Roman.

“Better. Workers for the mill. Paupers’ children.”

Aziraphale stepped closer still. “How does that make you money, then?” he asked, deceptively mild in the questioning, because he already knew – they’d heard of this before. The man explained. He had seen an opportunity in the notorious new ‘poor law’ that made it legal for factory-owners to find their workforce amongst the people who had gone on the county: official ‘paupers’, in other words. They had no choice about this – if the demand came through for ten workers to go and work, then ten were collected. If they were lucky they knew where they were being sent.

“So I have a whole little workforce there in the back of the cart,” he explained, “and they’ll work for free. I told them I’d be sending their wages back home to their families, but, what would they do with it? Spend it on drink, waste it all. It’s better for me to keep it for them. They can have it, if they ask me for it.”

“But of course, they don’t know that you’re keeping it for them, do they? Very...clever,” Aziraphale said. He’d already heard enough to make him feel thoroughly sick. Hearing a vague rumour in a coffeehouse and seeing it with your own eyes were two different things. Even Roman, who was absolutely no angel, was frowning as the agent told them his big scheme. Aziraphale caught Roman’s eye, glancing across the street and back again. The gypsy gave him a lightning-fast wink in return; understanding completely, and agreeing that he would go along with the plan. Such as it was – all he could think of immediately was that he had to get that cart away from the mill agent.

Between them they persuaded him to join them for a drink in the nearby Old Boot tavern. Roman kept the drink flowing, and at a certain point, when the agent began to sway and slur, the horse-dealer slipped unnoticed out of the back of the pub. The agent didn’t see him leaving, as he downed another pint of beer and demanded more, waving the jug around his head. Thoroughly disgusted by the whole thing, Aziraphale finished drinking him literally under the table, left half of the money owed for the ale, and followed the gypsy outside. While the agent slept it off slumped under the bar in a foetid pool of beer and piss, he met up with Roman again, gave him the rest of the beer money as payment for untying the agent’s horse and getting the cart ready to go. Then he leapt up onto the block and persuaded the horse to a brisk trot down the cobbled street. Roman raised a hand to him as he departed, in the driving seat of a stolen cart, complete with the agent’s ‘workforce’ still imprisoned and unseen in the back of it, whipping up a harnessed horse (also stolen) and haring out of town with no idea what he was going to do next. Aziraphale stopped at the guest house and dragged a protesting Antonia out, telling her roughly that he had found them some transport, but that there had been a change of plan. She quickly agreed when he told her the details. 

“You should have come back for me,” she protested. “I could have helped.”

Soon – finally – after far too long a journey on the swaying cart, as both of them were beginning to feel quite seasick from the swaying motion (Aziraphale wasn’t used to driving), they stopped in an inky-black village street and he clambered stiffly down from the drivers’ block. It had occurred to him that they would need food, so they went to buy a selection of dubious meat pies from a roadside cookshop. There were two candles guttering one at each side of the door of this hovel. Antonia sashayed down from her seat with her usual ease and elegance and disappeared into the depths of the shop without a backward glance to bargain with the owners. She herself wouldn’t touch food from a place like this. To be honest, this was probably sensible.

She emerged from the smoky doorway of the shop with a greasy package which she placed on the running board of the cart before walking around to the back of the rickety vehicle. She threw back the oilskin tarps from the back of the cart, and peered into the stinking gloom to see what – who – Aziraphale had actually stolen. A small mass of dirty white faces started back at them. The children, all painfully pinched-looking, blue-lipped and not dressed warmly enough for the freezing weather, boiled out of the darkness as soon as it became clear that here was a friendly face and not the hated mill agent. Antonia handed out pies and perched on the edge of the cart for a moment, watching the dubious pastry and even worse meat disappear very rapidly. They were all clearly ravenous.

They needed to get their breath back and think of a plan. While Aziraphale was leaning back against the running board – wishing for a smoke – he heard a weak rustling from the very back of the cart, in amongst the filthy straw. His first thought was rats, but then another pinched little face appeared. It was another young person...he thought a girl but it wasn’t obvious. All of the children had looked half-starved and very thin and pale, but this one looked absolutely dreadful. He couldn’t believe anyone who looked so ill could actually still be alive. She staggered to her feet on unbelievably bony legs, looking like someone from a famine region, shivering visibly. She took two jagged steps forward, and collapsed. Antonia leapt forwards, and managed to catch her before she fell face-first onto the cart’s splintered boards. She weighed nothing, and her breath rattled in her chest like old bones. She had blood dried in a crust around her mouth, and her lips were a terrible, dark blue colour.

Scooping the girl out of the straw she took the tiny body up onto the cart’s driving block and wrapped her in the thick lengths of fox-fur and luxurious blankets that the agent had had up there to keep warm as he drove. The girl was coughing blood, she could see a fresh smear of it on her face, and she apparently wasn’t long for the world.

Antonia had a gift for reading people’s thoughts, though she claimed to hate doing it, she was very good at ‘skimming’ as she called it. She could barely hear this girl’s thoughts when she tried to listen for them, though she got a name – Wee Morag – from in amongst the pain and fear.

Antonia met Aziraphale’s eyes. “I’ll see if I can do anything for her. Gotta try,” she said, shrugging.

“Have you ever done that before?” Aziraphale asked, anxiously, squeezing his fingers together nervously. Antonia nodded, then shook her head, waving a hand back and forth. “Kinda,” she said. “In my witch days.” But there wasn’t time for more discussion. With Aziraphale looking on, she took a deep breath, and cupped the girl’s ravaged face in her hands, her eyes closing.

Both of them had discovered that they could heal wounds. However, neither of them had never tried it with an illness like consumption before, it had the potential to get very nasty, but Antonia had started now, before she thought about it too much and changed her mind. Reaching inside, she began to do what she thought of as ‘the witch stuff’, began to take the disease from the girl’s body. The sickness was curled around her very soul, but it was still a separate thing, able to be removed. Soon she was sweating and shaking as it took hold of her instead, and she felt a shaft of fear that maybe the cells in her body couldn’t repair this, it wasn’t like a gash or a bruise, not a physical thing but a disease, and maybe she had done something really stupid trying to heal this....but she got Morag free of its grip before it became too hard to carry on and she had to let go of the girl or sink below the surface herself. Falling backwards, hacking and gasping, she dimly saw Morag sit up, blinking her bright eyes and breathing deeply.

Antonia coughed deep in her chest, releasing searing pain, and hawked a clot of dark blood over the side of the cart, then another. She fell into the blankets, shivering, before scouring her lungs one more time and spitting again. Aziraphale anxiously handed her a flask of water. She took several gasping breaths, clutching the rough wooden edge of the cart for dear life. She was running with cold sweat. But already she could feel that her breathing was easing as her cells repaired themselves. Thank Someone it had worked. She hadn’t known for sure that it would. Not for sure. Neither of them ever knew. They just had to trust that it would continue to work as it had before...

Antonia managed a weak grin at Morag’s wide-eyed amazement, then she reached for the greasy bag in which one more dubious pie waited. She handed half of it to Morag but the other half was hers – already the next stage of the healing process, ravenous hunger, was upon her and in the past she had eaten some truly disgusting things at this point in the process. This pie was fine in comparison to old meat scavenged from bins, or rotten, maggoty fruit.

Antonia usually ate almost nothing. Stuffing pastry into her mouth she managed a proper smile. “I hope you feel better,” she said to Morag. Her voice sounded like she’d swallowed sandpaper rather than dodgy pastry, and it felt like that, too.

The girl nodded enthusiastically, breathing in and out deeply to demonstrate how much better. “How’d you do that?” she asked. Antonia shook her head. “That I don’t know. I know I can do it, and that it works, or I should say it’s always worked up until now, but I don’t know how it works. Hey, are you going to eat the rest of that?”

“Yes,” said Morag cheekily, cramming the rest of the pie into her mouth. She laughed, and then winced, as the muscles in her chest complained bitterly at this treatment. It would be a few hours at least before all the effects of this had disappeared.

Later that night, the children had been provided with all of the agent’s soft, warm blankets and furs and told to go to sleep in one room of the cottage. Aziraphale was brooding in one corner of the other room.

After checking that Morag was feeling fine and already looking the healthiest out of all the children, Antonia went outside for a smoke.

“Better change, dear,” called Aziraphale. She nodded, and shifted around to become Anthony. Outside, he tried a cigarette but his lungs were still not up to it. Giving up on tobacco, and glad he had changed (a male shape always felt safer outside in the dark, a fact which he hated, but it was just the truth) he went for a walk in the darkness around the cottage, listening to the night sounds and wondering what the hell they were going to do now.

It was a freezing cold night. His breath came in thick painful clouds as he paced around the perimeter of the cottage. Something else was going to happen in a moment, he could sense some strong emotion coming from somewhere, but he’d come out too early and was getting cold. In whatever form he took he was always cold-blooded, meant for a more southerly life, he always thought. He fancied the desert, the middle east, Persia, somewhere like that, not that he’d ever knowingly been there. He yearned for warmth.

The faint sound Anthony had been waiting for finally came. Slowly, not hurrying, he kept walking around the low wall in the pitch dark and into the even inkier blackness of the little outbuilding, until he saw the furtive movements of a skinny someone rooting about in a travelling trunk. His trunk, wedged up against one wall of the outbuilding and now with the lid flung back and someone stashing things in pockets and inside an upturned cloth cap with feverish speed. He stood watching for a moment in the darkness. Anthony’s night vision was always much better than Aziraphale’s.

He leaned on the door jamb and watched this thieving going on for several minutes. At some point he conjured a candle and lit the wick with a tiny self-made flame. He waited until he judged the moment was right and then spoke.

“Am I going to have to watch all of you all of the time, Elspeth?”

The figure leaped about a foot in the air and dropped the trinkets onto the stone floor with a small tinkling sound. She slammed the trunk shut and tried to run past Crowley into the darkness, but he stopped the rush for freedom easily and closed the door behind them both. He set the candle on top of the trunk, tipping some wax from the top first and sticking it in the resulting pool so it didn’t fall, and sat on one side, motioning Elspeth to sit opposite. As a small demonstration of power, he lit another candle from nothing as the girl watched, wide-eyed, and then he smiled disarmingly and asked Elspeth to explain herself.

Elspeth muttered that she was going to be gone soon and it would be the least trouble for everyone.

“But I could take you up to the judge. Seven years transportation at least for stealing a lady’s jewels. Or worse.”

“A lady?” Elspeth raised an eyebrow, looking him up and down.

“Well...part time lady. Safer not to be, sometimes, at night. I’m sure you know that. With all the robbers about, and so on. I’m the same person. Name’s Crowley, in this shape.”

“Fine. Do it. Van Diemen’s Land can’t be any worse than it is here,” Elspeth replied, not much phased by this revelation. It was just one more thing, at this point. She even held her hands out as though she was going to be manacled right there and then.

Crowley suggested to her very strongly that she tell him what she was planning on doing. I won’t be sending you off to Tasmania, no matter what you tell me. Before she knew what was going on, Elspeth had spilled the beans.

She had been looking for things she could easily take and sell, stealing the jewellery to pay for her way home to find her sister so that they could run away, together with Wee Morag, inside. All the time since she had been taken by the mill agent and imprisoned in the cart she had lived in fear that another agent would come through the village and her sister would go with him, try to follow her, thinking that they would be reunited in the mills. She had seen the trunks, seen an opportunity to be able to stop this from happening, if it wasn’t already too late, and taken that opportunity. She wasn’t usually a thief. “They make us steal. We have to do it, or we couldn’t live,” she said.

“And where is your sister? Where is the village?” Crowley asked.

Elspeth slumped then, absolutely beaten. “I don’t know. I was just going to….keep looking,” she said brokenly, and began to laugh, which was a terrible sound. Crowley put a reassuring hand on the girl’s skinny shoulder. He could feel her bones through the thin smock shirt she was wearing – and he made a mental note to get them all better, warmer clothes, first thing in the morning.

“We might be able to find it. Show me,” he suggested, and hesitantly, making sure she was ok with it, pressed his palm against the side of Elspeth’s head – contact always made the pictures come more strongly. He closed his eyes and saw a collection of tiny cottages, a little church, a dirt road, a much larger house which seemed to be derelict…cornfields around it.

It could have been anywhere in England.

Anthony Crowley, sometimes known as Antonia Crow, notorious witch of Lower Tadfield, knew it straight away. He gasped aloud. It couldn’t be…

“Where?” he said again, urgently. “Show me where.” The only way Elspeth could do that was to show him the journey away from the village, snatches of light from the covered cart, when the agent threw the back open to toss chunks of stale bread in for them to eat, and very hazy directions, an inn with a big oak tree growing behind it, a rutted road over a moor. But it was enough to show which direction to go, and he let the girl go and sat back, recovering himself.

If all the young people had gone on that freezing journey it was astonishing that they had all survived it. Elspeth still looked frozen now. Crowley thought of the agent sitting up on the block with his thick blankets and rich food. He hoped someone had robbed him while he was lying under the table in that ratty inn, drunk as a lord. The rich in their society did have all the luxury they could wish for, but it wasn’t necessary to rub everyone else’s face in it, and basic things like feeding children properly and making sure they had warm clothes….he shook his head, clearing the thoughts away. They couldn’t help everyone, or change the whole world, but they could help these few they had stumbled upon. If he could find the village again, and if they wanted help. The search for other people like them, and answers, which was really more Aziraphale’s quest than his, would not take up all of their time.

A glimmer of an idea began to form in his mind. That village, with its empty houses…a motley group of children, and a possibly vacant manor house…and the fact that it was that place again. Tadfield. His birthplace (was it? That was another one of those odd memories that didn’t ever seem quite right, but there was no solid reason why not). Whatever, it was surely a sign that should not be ignored. Neither he nor Aziraphale had been back there since those civil war days, but he was sure he could find it.

Crowley began to smile a little. Elspeth looked a little dazed; he handed her a strong hot drink and watched her gulp it down, as though afraid it would disappear as mysteriously as it had appeared in the first place.

“If I can find your village, do you all want to go back home?” he asked the girl.

“Suppose so,” Elspeth said. “But they’ll just come back and take us away again. It’s the law, they can take us to the factories if no one is working in the house and you’re claiming the poor relief. That’s what they told us when they came to the village. And there is no work. Even if there is, his lordship don’t pay enough to live on.”

“What if…suppose it was possible to make sure the agents never came to the village in the first place?”

“That’d be good, like a miracle, almost. But it can’t be so. They told us; if no one is working in your family, if you’re heading for the poorhouse, you can be taken up to work somewhere else, in a mill, or a mine, a factory, to make enough money to keep the rest of ‘em.”

“Oh. I see, so if no one goes on the county…”

“That’s right, but how could that happen? There isn’t the work, and the landlords raise the rent every quarter, but wages don’t go up, if you’ve even got a wage. I mean…most landlords do.” She suddenly looked cautious again, as if realising that Crowley was actually of the landlord class, so better not to insult him too much.

“Well....since technically we stole the cart, a horse, and all of you, not to mention all those expensive furs and blankets, I think they’ll be looking for me to be transported, rather than you.”

“Well…that is true. Transported, or worse.” The girl gave a hesitant grin.

He handed her another drink. “I think we can sort something out for you,” he said. “If I can find your village…”

“And you don’t get hung first,” Elspeth added. “They really don’t like you to steal horses.” She paused. “I’m sorry I was going to steal your.....erm, the lady’s things. I’m really not a thief, please, I want you to believe that. But they don’t leave us with any choice. You have to survive. Right?” She handed the empty mug back, her eyes large and anxious, but confident, now, that she had an ally. Gasping suddenly, she rummaged in her ragged skirts and brought out a gold ring. Flushing scarlet, she tried to hand that back, too. Crowley closed Elspeth’s hand over the scrap of gold. “Keep it,” he said.

Aziraphale finished his cigarette and went back towards the door. Smoking was more Crowley’s vice, really, but he had needed a moment to think and make a workable plan, and walking up and down in the dark with a smoke or a drink had always been his preferred way to do this. Ideally with a strong drink, but you can’t have everything. Pulling the creaky door open, he heard hushed voices, and stopped to listen. It was Wee Morag and Elspeth, sitting at one corner of the table talking in urgent whispers.

“...tell you it’s better to leave now while we don’t owe too much.”

“Too late for that, Morag,” said Elspeth.

“Why? I mean to say, I probably owe too much already, but the rest of you could get out now. Go back to the village, or go on, to the mills and get in with some of the other Tadfield people...”

“That won’t work. You know we’d never find ‘em. Listen, Morag, we should stay for now. It’ll come clear what they really want to do with us, but till then I really think we’re better off staying. We’d have no chance finding anyone from the village in Nottingham, we don’t even know if they went there. There are a lot of other towns. Mr...Miss...Crowley told me a little bit...and we know more, besides, from what the agent said. No one has ever come back rich, have they? Apart from those agents. But, look...”

Morag made a sharp intake of breath. “Els! Did you steal that?”

“No. He gave me this, Morag. I was looking through the travelling trunks. I had an idea to head out on my own, get after Mair before she got too far away. Mr Crowley caught me, red-handed, my hat full of jewellery. I was transported for sure, or...or worse. But he was nice to me, Morag, he said he understood...”

“So you owe him, as well, then,” said Morag, so softly that Aziraphale had to open the door wider so that he could hear. He could see the two girls huddled around a candle stub stuck on the corner of the table, oblivious to his presence. He slipped fully inside the room and leaned against the lintel in the shadows.

“I suppose I do owe him. But I don’t think he’ll ask me....”

“You don’t know!” Wee Morag said furiously. “You don’t know! And it doesn’t matter if the favour is called in. If someone saves your life...you owe them. You do!”

Elspeth seemed about to say something else, but Morag wasn’t done. “I was going to die, Els. I already knew it. I saw...,” her voice choked off for a moment, before continuing. “I think I was supposed to die. Does that sound stupid? I’ve never thought I’d make old bones. Could never imagine being older than now. Els, I saw my mother, she was waiting for me, I was...I was nearly gone with her. I saw the bloody tunnel and the light at the end! How do I pay him back for that? And if we stay, I’ll owe more and more....”

Aziraphale couldn’t just stand and listen in any more. “Ladies,” he said, coming forward from his position by the door. Elspeth jumped up, horribly shocked, but Morag seemed resigned to her fate, merely looking wearily surprised. Aziraphale crossed the room and sat at the table, facing the two. Their faces were stark and white in the candlelight. He saw they were holding hands, clutching each other tightly, holding on.

“Still feeling alright?” he asked Morag. The girl nodded, quickly, her eyes shifting around, as though wondering how much he had heard of their whispered conversation.

Aziraphale decided to be honest. “I didn’t mean to listen in on you, but since I did hear you....I’m just going to tell you. I heard most of what you said. No one owes us anything, is that clear? No one owes us, and no one has to stay with us, or come back to the village with us, or do anything they don’t want to do. If you want to leave, tell me. We can give you money, take you where you want to go, anything like that. As a gift. No obligations. Is that alright?”

Elspeth nodded, ready to believe. But Morag was struggling with conflicting emotions, and who was he to know how to deal with them? He didn’t know what it felt like to have someone save your life. Crowley knew, but he never talked about it.

“Elspeth, can you give us a minute?” Aziraphale said. “Go next door and get some sleep.”

The girl nodded and left, no doubt intending to listen to whatever he was going to say.

Wee Morag – she really was tiny, always under fed, he supposed - sat at the table, uncertainly. Aziraphale lit some more candles, and sat opposite, at the corner of the table where Elspeth had been.

“Are you sure you feel better? I don’t mind telling you, she hasn’t ever tried that with the consumption before. Not sure she’s in a hurry to try it again, either.”

“I was ill for a long time. Years before the agents started coming,” said Morag quietly. “I haven’t been able to breathe like this...I meant what I said to Elspeth. I know what I owe.”

Aziraphale put his hand over Wee Morag’s still very thin hands. “And I meant what I said.” He tried to meet her eye in the flickering light. “We won’t accept payment from you. In any kind. We chose to help you – you didn’t ask us to do it.”

Morag mulled this over. Aziraphale watched her. She was very young – hard to know how young, really, but probably not more than mid teens. Their hard lives had given them serious faces, though, lines between their eyes and watchful looks.

Finally she spoke again. “You said we could stay with you and your lady. I will.” She spat on her palm and held her hand out. Aziraphale did the same and took it solemnly.

After a moment she let go of him.

At that moment Crowley opened the door and slammed it closed behind him, slouching against the wall.

Aziraphale tried to lighten the mood. “Changed again, my dear? I can hardly keep up.”

“Always safer at night. So it’s decided, then? We’ll take them home.”

“I think so.”

“Morag, can you tell us about the village?” Crowley asked.

“What do you want to know?”

“Alright....the manor house, for instance. Is it empty?”

“Yes. No one knows who owns it. The landlord uses the farm office on the quarter days to collect the rent, but the rest of the time it’s empty.”

“What else is there?”

As they was talking, Aziraphale had a sudden idea. Well, if they were going to live with them, even for a little while, they’d figure out all the stuff that they could do, sooner or later. They’d already seen Antonia change. Might as well just tell them now. “Let me show you something. You too, Elspeth,” Aziraphale called, as she was clearly, as he had thought, pressed to the door, listening hard. Elspeth sheepishly came back into the room, looking not in the least bit ashamed.

“We’re going to go there. Now,” Aziraphale said. “For a little visit.”

“What do you mean, a visit?” said Elspeth, suspiciously.

Aziraphale decided to be a bit mysterious. “Close your eyes. Do you trust me?”

“Not really,” Elspeth said, surly. Morag had already nodded and shut her eyes tight. Crowley rolled his eyes. Aziraphale grabbed one of each of their hands, and they travelled out to the old, familiar village. Back to Tadfield.

Once over the shock, they loved it, obviously. Travelling in the usual way was such a pain. Aziraphale had to admit, he never got tired of that.

Chapter Text

Extract from Aziraphale’s journal, November 1814

More confessions, should I need to continue to make them. Before this certain point in time, I have not really had too many deep thoughts about poverty or about helping other people, beyond the obvious. Crowley and I travel around on our somewhat half-hearted quest to find other people like ourselves, and I occasionally try to talk to her about some of the things that the guru, the one called Mother, had said to me back at the ashram. But mostly we are living as we wish. Diary, you can tell me that given what we have been given you would do differently, but I will not believe it.

But then, on our latest trip up and down the Great North Road, it has all changed. We stole a horse and cart from a total heel I met at an ostlers, and inside it was our future – a collection of young people destined for pretty-much-slave labour in one of the new mill towns. We have seen the mills, of course, and the new industries, and we have mourned the loss of the countryside and the blackening of the sky, but not otherwise taken much notice of them. The world has changed so much, in all ways and all directions, since we were both young, after all. But, as far from being a good man (whatever that means) as I am, I find that I can’t just leave those children to their fate. I can’t look at them, talk to them, without wanting to do something. I cannot see how any man could – or any woman. Possibly more so for dear Crowley, who is presenting as a woman frequently just now. I feel it makes her more compassionate, although this may be my own male bias talking. Crowley is compassionate in all forms, after all.

I finally began to take notice of the things the guru had been trying to tell us when we realised that the children had all come from the same village as the one that Crowley was from. The place it all began for us. Tadfield. Yes, the universe has had to shake a coincidence of that magnitude in my face before I begin to listen. But it has finally succeeded in gaining my attention.

The four of them landed in an overgrown kitchen garden behind a large manor house. The place had a neglected appearance, as though it were indeed nearly empty. Crowley’s lungs were burning again, from the exertion required to get them here so fast. Wee Morag accepted this form of travel straight away. She looked around wide-eyed as they landed, with an incredulous look on her face, but no fear. Elspeth, the other, was more cautious, walking a little behind them as they trooped over the long grass and around the empty vegetable beds. Crows flew overhead, back to their messy nests in the gone-to-the-wild trees at either side of the sweeping, weed-strewn drive.

“Why is this place empty?” Crowley asked, rhetorically, his throat rasping again.

Morag shrugged her skinny shoulders. “We never knew what happened to the family at the manor. There was a lot of comings and goings, and then one day they packed all of their belongings into a load of carts and then they left. Since then they’ve sent someone up on the quarter days but we haven’t ever seen any of the family.”

“Rumour was there was some scandal,” offered Elspeth from behind them. “A baby? Something with the lady of the house. We never found out. Would have been ten years ago, now.”

They reached the big picture windows that looked out onto the neglected gardens and peered in. Dust-sheet draped furniture lurked in the gloom, thick with cobweb and dust. Clearly, Elspeth was right – no one had lived in the house for years.

The big house might have been deserted, but as they moved down the hill toward the village they could see signs of desultory life. A cart listed by the side of the dirt road outside one of the little houses. Smoke drifted thinly from a few chimneys, and somewhere someone was shouting. Heavy clouds hung low in the sky over the little cluster of houses. Morag was still looking around, wide-eyed that she was suddenly here, past all hope of ever seeing the place again. But as they got closer, she became more and more subdued, glancing at her companions nervously.

“Can you feel...?” she began to ask. Aziraphale nodded. Elspeth brushed a hand across her face, and she realised that she had chewed her lip so badly that it was bleeding. She wiped the blood away impatiently. “There’s something happening.”

They reached the top of the dirt road and started to walk down it. Ahead of them in front of one of the tiny houses was a small pile of broken household things lying at the edge of the path. As they approached, a chair came flying out of the door to bounce roughly off the top of the pile and smash into three bits in the street. A high-pitched wail followed the chair out of the little house.

“It’s the bailiff,” Wee Morag said grimly. “Looks like an eviction.”

“It’s widow Pulsifer,” Elspeth said. She frowned as Crowley, for some reason, flinched.

They arrived at the doorway. Mrs Pulsifer was standing to one side, weeping as the two heavyset men collected up the last of her belongings and threw them out into the road. One of them then took her arm and tried to drag her outside.

Aziraphale stepped around the doorframe and strode forward with a tight smile on his face. “What’s going on here?” he demanded.

“Non-payment of rent, no one else to pay for her and too old to go to the mills,” snapped the bailiff. “Whether that’s anything to do with you, I can’t say.”

“How much is owed?” Aziraphale asked.

“Two quarters plus fines for arrears,” the bailiff replied.

“Who owns the houses here, anyway? There’s no one up at the estate house.”

“A distant cousin of Lord Ligur of Diss, I believe. He’s never been here. Just wants his rent, reasonable enough, I’d say.”

Aziraphale stepped forward. Behind him, Crowley leaned casually on the doorpost. Aziraphale made a show of looking around the cottage. There wasn’t much to it – it was a hovel, really. He wondered how much the rent was – probably nothing much. Morag and Elspeth stood a little way off, and exchanged worried looks. Widow Pulsifer gave the two a small, sad smile.

“I’m in the market for a small estate, is why I ask,” Aziraphale continued, making it up as he went along. Crowley muttered something that sounded like, news to me.

The bailiff looked decidedly sceptical.

“Do you think he’d be of a mind to sell, this cousin of...who did you say? Lord Ligur’s?” Aziraphale persisted.

“I should think so, if you had the means,” the bailiff said. “Not sure I would tie my own money up in a place like this, though.” He pulled roughly at the other side of the door frame and a large piece of the wood fell away in his hand. Widow Pulsifer gave an involuntary gasp.

“Oh, I can see the potential in it,” he said. He had begun to smile a little bit more. All roads lead home. “Meanwhile, if I’m going to be the new owner I think I’ll waive the rent arrears for now. Hard times, you know, and good tenants are hard to keep.”

“What about my fee?” The bailiff’s assistant stepped forward, threateningly.

“I wouldn’t try that,” Wee Morag stage-whispered to Elspeth, who laughed quietly and shook her head.

“Here’s your money,” Crowley said, stepping forward and pressing several coins into the man’s greasy hands. “Now get off our property.”

The man opened his hand and made as if to count his earnings.

“Come on, now, don’t you trust me? It’s all there,” Crowley said, raising his eyebrow. Aziraphale stepped back from the doorway to allow the two larger men past him with a small, ironic bow. Neither seemed to want to look anyone in the eye as they passed.

Mrs Pulsifer watched them go, and when they were in their cart and on their way, she finally relaxed. “Wee Morag and dear young Elspeth! Who have you brought back with you from the city?” she said, scooping the two girls close to her and hugging them tight.

“Azira Fell, at your service,” he said, bowing slightly.

“Anthony Crowley,” said the other.

Mrs Pulsifer bobbed a small curtsey in return. “I will repay you, of course, when my circumstances improve,” she said with dignity. “I cannot offer much now. But if you are indeed to move into the big house, I used to work there as housekeeper, in better times. I can offer those skills again, as a way to repay the debt.”

“That would be very useful, Mrs Pulsifer. But there isn’t any need to worry about the money. Pay me back whenever you can – or never. It doesn’t matter. But we’d be glad to take you on as a housekeeper. Now, do you have everything you need here?”

“You are very kind, Mr Fell. If young Elspeth could stay here and help me get my belongings back inside, I should be very grateful. Morag...Morag, you should go and see your little sister. Lil’s not well, Morag, not well at all.”

The girl on the straw mattress was pale, sharp cheekbones showing through her skin, dark smudges under her eyes. As the three entered her house, she struggled to get up, but couldn’t manage it. She held out a hand instead, literally skin and bone, her fingers clawed. The sight of her shocked them all. Crowley looked sickened.

“Morag!” she said, a rictus smile lighting up her face. “You came back!”

“Yes I did, Lil, yes I did,” she said, kneeling beside her sister and grasping her bony fingers in her own. She was hiding her own reaction (but none too well) which was pure horror at the sight on the mattress. Aziraphale put a hand on her shoulder, hoping to convey reassurance. He didn’t feel much of that himself, though. His eyes were being ripped open to make him see the world as it really was.

“You look well, Morag,” she said. “Was it alright up there, was the work good? Was the money good? You did bring something back for us, didn’t you?”

“Lil, I didn’t get to the mills. I didn’t bring anything. But these men are...”

“Morag,” Lil said, dropping her hand and closing her eyes in despair. “Oh, Wee Morag. You were our last hope. There’s nothing else left.”

While this exchange was going on, Crowley had begun to pace about, and quickly scouted around the little two-room house. There was hardly a stick of furniture in it, and not a scrap of food. The fire was laid with some meagre kindling but not lit, even though the room was freezing cold. He went over to the fireplace and got the fire going, doing it the old-fashioned way with flint and tinder so that he could have a few moments to think clearly.

They hadn’t known. They hadn’t known, going merrily about the countryside on their ridiculous quest. They had seen poverty from a distance, sure, knew about it in an abstract way, had even debated the Poor Laws in drunken arguments in coffee houses and bars and condemned it, as all liberals were supposed to do, but they had seen nothing like this, nothing so up close, visceral, personal and real.

Aziraphale, too was cursing himself for an idiot. The universe had had to practically slap them both in the face with a massive coincidence before they would pay any attention at all. But now that they did know, there was nothing for it but to do something about it. Aziraphale finally understood the guru’s complaints – or, was beginning to. What you do with the power is up to you, but you know very well what you should do with it.

They turned from the fire and crossed the room. Aziraphale knelt down next to Lil’s bed. Her eyes opened, flicked to the fire, and closed again as though her eyelids were too heavy. “That’s the last of the wood,” she said softly. “I was...saving it...”

“Lillian,” Aziraphale said. She breathed, slowly. He brushed her thin hair back from her face and said her name again, inside her head as well as aloud. This time she opened her huge eyes again, agonisingly, and looked at him quizzically.

“Is this the bailiff, Morag?” she asked. “Tell him he can have the house, as soon as I’m done with it. It won’t be too long.”

“No, Lil, he’s come to help us. At least, I think he has?” Morag looked at him then, fear in her eyes as though she had suddenly realised that she knew nothing about his intentions or what he meant to do. There was naked, heart-ripping appeal in her face, and that was that. He could never turn away now, not unless he wanted to see that look in the girl’s eyes every time he went to sleep for the rest of his life. He wasn’t totally sure that he wouldn’t see it anyway.

“Absolutely,” he said firmly, and put his arm around Lil’s shoulders to help her to sit up. “Morag, you’ll find some bits and pieces in the pantry, let’s get a broth heated up for your sister.”

Lil laughed softly. “There’s nothing in there, sir...” she whispered. Attempting a smile, she added, “The cupboard is quite bare in these parts, you know.”

But her sister was already back with a crock of soup and a loaf of bread (hastily dropped there by Crowley) and a pail of fresh water to pour into the iron pot hung over the fire. Lil looked at them both with questions in her eyes, but she was far enough gone to accept what she saw happening in front of her.

Very soon she had a cup of hot soup in her skinny hands, and was sipping it slowly as Morag cut fresh bread on a board and handed her a slice. “Eat slowly,” Morag warned, knowing she wouldn’t be able to take too much, coming from as close to starvation as she was. Lil nodded, knowing it herself. Aziraphale figured that she had probably seen it before.

The fire crackled in the huge hearth. Already the sitting room seemed warm. After breaking into the house by opening the rusted over bolts from the outside, they uncovered the old furniture that was stored in the house, removing mildew covered dust sheets to reveal some moth eaten and old fashioned chairs and tables. They would get some new stuff, but there was no rush. Morag and Elspeth raced from room to room, uncovering and moving things around, making the house theirs with astonishing speed.

Later on, they ate at the huge dining table. The girls did not ask where the food came from, they had apparently decided their luck was in, and while it was, they were going to ride it. No point in worrying about it – it would probably change again, but until it did....

After this, Elspeth fell asleep on one of the sofas in front of the fire, and Aziraphale draped a blanket over her. Morag sat beside her, stroking her hair. Crowley had become Antonia again and was off somewhere in the village trying to talk to the women, trying to find out how many other young ones had gone off with the mill agent and whether they had heard from any of them, a job she did not relish but which only she could do. None of the housewives would tell Mr Fell anything, they were too intimidated, and he didn’t want to use suggestion on them unless it was unavoidable.

He felt Morag’s forehead, checking for fever, but she was fine. The healing had worked.

Aziraphale sat down in a dusty easy chair facing the fireplace. Forgetting he wasn’t alone, he gestured a bottle of brandy into existence on the table beside him, and brought some of the old crystal from the sideboard in the dining room. All without moving. It was long habit, by now, this stuff. It was only after he had poured a glass that he saw Morag’s face, pale and shocked. He shook his head, smiling ruefully. It would take getting used to, living with other people. Other than Crowley, of course. “Sorry,” he said.

“’S’alright,” Morag said. “I’ve seen in before, now.” She gave an approximation of a cheeky grin. Aziraphale relaxed a little. He thought they would get used to it. Used to them. Eventually.

At this moment Antonia returned, sweeping into the room with a blast of cold air from outside, making the candles flicker and dance at her passage. She threw herself into the chair at the other side of the little table and removed her hat and gloves, threw them carelessly aside. “Give me some of that,” she demanded, grabbing a glass and letting Aziraphale pour. “More. I need more than that.”

Antonia looked shaken, a vanishingly rare occurrence. She drained half of the brandy, and then slammed the glass down onto the table. “Jesus, Aziraphale...” she said, biting her lip. “I don’t think I can do this.”

“Sure you can,” he replied. “Why not?” He topped up her glass.

“Let me describe how utterly peculiar it is being back here at all,” she said. “The village...the street....they’re all the same – except they’re not. Its like seeing two daguerreotypes at the same time, overlaid onto each other. THERE is the hill where they built a pyre for me. THERE is the cottage where I was arrested. THERE is the house where the fire started and I was blamed.”

“Well, yes, but it was all a long time ago...”

“And that’s not even the worst of it. The people...some of them...most of them! Direct descendants of the people I last saw gathered up there on the hill to watch me die. Some of them look so similar, it’s like seeing living ghosts...Widow Pulsifer! She must be related to that witchfinder, the one who let you through to the fire. She looks identical. His grand daughter, something like that.”

Antonia took the brandy glass again and drained it. “I never go back anywhere, Aziraphale, never. I told you that, never go back, no good will come of it. I haven’t ever been here again, after...the trial, after I left with you. And it turns out there’s a bloody good reason why!”

At this point Morag, who had been listening to this with a kind of fascinated horror, moved slightly and both of them turned to look at her. They had, once again, forgotten they weren’t alone. Her eyes were wide. Aziraphale held his hands up. “Again, I am sorry. We should be talking about this elsewhere. Morag, if you want...?”

“I didn’t understand everything,” she said. “But you have been here before? A long time ago. There’s a story in the village of a witch trial and the witch escaping the fire. That was you?”

Antonia nodded slowly. “You believe that?”

“I’ll accept anything you tell me,” declared Morag boldly. “We came on a five day journey in a minute, you took the fever from me, you got rid of the bailiffs. If you say you’ve lived a long time and come back to where you lived a hundred years ago, why wouldn’t I believe it? All of us would, all of us you brought back home.”

Aziraphale inwardly flinched at the idea that getting rid of debt collectors was at least as unlikely as healing someone of consumption. In this village maybe it was.

“Well, alright. Its nothing to worry about. We have been here before, that’s all. A long time ago. In fact it’s how we found our way back without any of you knowing the way you’d gone. When you showed me where you were from, in your mind, I recognised the place.”

Antonia pulled herself together. “Anyway. I did what you asked. Spoke to the women. There are a lot more people missing from here, not just young ones either, and most of them were seen leaving with that mill agent, at various times. No one has heard from any of them since, and certainly no money has been sent back, as was promised. Most of them have had the bailiffs in. I tell you, the village was in better shape back in the day. Even with the war on and the witchfinders,” she said darkly.

Aziraphale was only now getting an idea of what he had taken on when he’d spotted that covered cart in the streets of Nottingham. He wondered if the guru had known this was going to happen, and was even now laughing her head off. He poured more brandy, thinking. “How can we find them? I assume they don’t all get taken to the same place.”

Morag cleared her throat. “The agent said a name a few times. Duke Hastur, it was. Does that mean anything?”

Well, that was good a place as any to start.

The next day Aziraphale went out of the big house himself and walked down the muddy lane to the village. He hoped that now they had spoken to Antonia they might talk to him. Of course, there were a few people there, Elspeth’s sister, the old housekeeper Widow Pulsifer, who might vouch for them, in a way. He took Morag with him, too. There was deep suspicion of people from Tadfield Manor - the big house - though, and he didn’t blame them, even though they were not really part of that class at all. While he and Antonia were wealthy, their money had been acquired through very long term investments, rather than inherited or even earned, so they did not really move in the conventional social circles. Both much preferred a disreputable tavern to a society party, and while Crowley – as Antonia - did like the Season and all that came with it, she swanned through it alone, not making much conversation with people she mostly considered – with good cause – to be chinless idiots.

The next house, or cottage, or hovel, was set back from the mud road, and had an air of neglect noticeable even in this village where all the houses looked abandoned. Aziraphale tapped on the door hesitantly. Morag stood next to him, anxiously. She nudged him and looked through the window. He tried the latch and the door opened. He had to duck his head to pass through the door, so he saw the floor first, beaten mud, not boards, and then he raised his gaze to a completely empty room. There was a young, skeletally thin girl sitting in front of the cold fireplace with a baby bundled up in her arms. She barely moved as they came in, just raised her head and gave Morag a weary smile. Aziraphale felt that cold anger he had felt before as he looked at her, barely surviving and trying to feed a baby, too. What was happening here? What had they allowed to happen? Why were so many people starving and destitute, and why did they not know about this before?

He crouched next to the girl on the damp floor. “Hello,” he began, uncertain.

Morag sat down in front of her. “Lacey, can I see the baby?” she said. “Was it a girl like you wanted?”

Lacey smiled again and pulled the blanket back from the infant’s face. “She’s called Sarah,” she said. “But she’s....I don’t think she’s going to....” tears filled her eyes and she wiped her face, humiliated to cry in front of a stranger.

Morag had taken the bundle and was rocking her from side to side. The baby wasn’t crying at being handed to a new person. Aziraphale thought she probably didn’t have the energy. He rested his hand on Lacey’s shoulder, feeling the bones through her thin clothing. She looked up at him, as he did one of the things they had worked out they could do, and passed some energy to her, some warmth. He could almost hear words that went with this, words of blessing perhaps, but that was another one of those errant memories that vanished like silverfish into the dark when he tried to chase them. He had taken from her, too, taken information that only increased that cold anger. About who had fathered this baby, and what he had done afterwards.

“It’s going to be alright now,” Morag said, with complete surety, putting the fear into Aziraphale, because how could he dare to fail in the face of such confidence?

He introduced himself, shaking the girls hand and getting more of her terrible story as he held her thin fingers in his own. As he stood there, in this hovel, he made another decision. The house was enormous, there were more than enough rooms to house the few people who were still here in the village, and besides, they could always add more rooms....in fact he thought that improving houses like this might be very easy to do, though he hadn’t tried it before. Just a question of moving the walls....needed to ask Antonia, really, but she wouldn’t refuse in the face of all this.

Lacey had struggled upright, and he was still holding her hand. “Look,” he said to her. “I’m just going to say it. Say the word, and we will find that baby’s father and do whatever you want us to do to him.”

Lacey snatched her hand away. “Morag!” she hissed. “How could you tell him...?”

“She didn’t say a word to me,” Aziraphale said. “She wouldn’t break your confidence, she hasn’t.”

Sod it, he thought, and cupped Lacey’s face in his hand, trying to pass the knowledge to her without speaking, as gently as possible, which was only somewhat successful, as she broke contact by bending over and throwing up bile onto the dirt floor. After this, though, she stood up, wiping her mouth, and narrowed her eyes, nodding thoughtfully.

“That all true, is it, Morag?” she said. Morag nodded eagerly, handing the baby back as she started to squirm in her arms. “All true, and more,” she said, her eyes shining. “I’ll bet he didn’t tell you everything. There’s a lot more!”

“What could he do to Lord Ligur, though, eh, Morag?” Lacey said bitterly. “No one will speak against him.” Aziraphale filed the name away for future reference. It too seemed....if not familiar, exactly, then also not a name he had never heard before. If that made any sense at all. He didn’t think it did.

“Come up to the house,” he said. “I think most of you from the village can stay there, for a while anyway, until we sort out the houses down here. What do you think?”

“Oh...no, we couldn’t...”

“Yes, you could,” Aziraphale said firmly, steering the girl towards the door. She stumbled over before they could reach it, too weakened to walk properly. He took them all, Lacey, baby plus Morag, the short distance up to the house, and in fact into the sitting room, with its roaring fire. Wee Morag, who obviously would never get bored of doing this, was grinning again and saying, “You see? You see, I told you, its all true!” to an astonished Lacey.

He left them to it for a moment to go and get some food, and tell Antonia his plan for the house – new rooms, convert the attics, another wing, extend at the back....when he came back with things for the starving girl to eat he leaned in the doorway for a second, watching Morag animatedly telling Lacey how amazing it all was. He allowed himelf to smile. Maybe this was what the guru had had in mind. It wouldn’t be all bad. Not bad at all. Something about this was exactly right.

“So her father is Lord Ligur? I take it you had no choice in that?” Antonia asked, as she sat opposite Lacey and watched her slowly eat some soup and bread, drink some hot tea.

Lacey put down the cup carefully and shook her head. “No, ma’am, not much choice.” She bit her lip, but then raised her head defiantly. “But Sarah is beautiful.” She glanced over at the crib they had found in one of the bedrooms, which now contained the little girl. “I can’t regret her life, can I?”

Antonia raised her hands. “You’ll find no judgement here,” she said. “Not on you, anyway.”

From his seat at the bureau in the corner of the room where he was supposed to be looking over the books that had been left here to find out how much money they had, Aziraphale could see she was coldly furious. Her lips pressed together, stony faced. She, with her history, always felt injustice so strongly.

Later, she told Aziraphale her plan. She thought that she might go to some Society parties soon, after all, and talk to the chinless wonders. Well, at least one chinless wonder. Aziraphale wouldn’t have to do anything about Lord Ligur. Lord Ligur was hers.

“He’s got no legitimate children,” she said. “I think its about time he had a, oh, I don’t know, some kind of dreadful boating accident, maybe? Then little Sarah becomes his heir. Well, she will, if he knows what’s good for him."

Chapter Text

They had one more problem. Elspeth’s other sister, Mair, the girl they had come looking for, was no longer in the village. They were too late – she had gone off up the Great North Road after her sister and no one knew where she had gone.

So, with his newfound (or rediscovered – he wasn’t honestly sure) desire to help everyone, Crowley, appearing as male once again, for safety, went after her. The trail was fairly cold. She had left just after Elspeth had been taken, thinking that she would be able to follow the route the agent’s cart had taken, but it was no good. He had meandered about the countryside, avoiding detection, and she had lost him very soon. And then she found that she was lost herself. No way home and no way to know which of the northern mill towns her sister was headed to. It could have been one of a fairly large number. She’d apparently decided on one at random and started to walk.

Their search was proving fruitless.

As Crowley worked the dingy room he kept Morag in the corner of his eye. She was watching him closely, sitting on the rough wooden bench. Half hidden underneath her hat, which she had stuffed her long hair into to appear more like a boy, she watched him as he asked around after Mair. He didn’t always use words. Morag was learning the techniques. A glance and a little smile, catching a woman’s eye – she would tell him anything, then, and sometimes, also, not in words. He would always chat to the barmaids or the owner of the establishment (however seedy).

Crowley caught Morag’s thoughts easily at times like these, loud and clear. He was actually a little afraid of how much she trusted him and the way she would unquestioningly do whatever he wanted. He wasn’t used to this....this hero-worship. It unnerved him, to tell the truth. He felt it was wrong, that he definitely didn’t deserve it. He just wasn’t that nice. He knew that he was eventually going to let her down.

Today they were in a really, really seedy place. Sawdust on the floor would have improved it no end. It was a dive. Crowley liked places like that, where no one knows you and that’s just fine, everyone minds their business. Easy to get lost there and no one remembers you later, which if you’re going to live forever is a definite plus. But Morag should have been worried – those places are dangerous, after all, especially to a young girl, however well disguised. Crowley knew he wasn’t in any danger, but she didn’t know that – she just absolutely, completely, one hundred percent trusted that he wouldn’t let anything happen to her. Trust on that level scared the shit out of him.

He finished his circuit of the bar, bought a drink and headed back to the table. He handed Morag the cracked jug of suspicious-coloured ale and sat down opposite the girl on the splintered bench. Crowley automatically positioned himself so he had a clear view of the door – it was that kind of place. He took a drink of his own ale, and nearly gagged on it – it was foul.

“One drink here and then we leave. This place is too much of a dump even for me. Mair didn’t come in here, I’ll guarantee it,” he said, grimacing as he took another drink. There was a scum floating on the top of the baleful-looking ale. Crowley and Aziraphale were wine drinkers, ideally nice vintage stuff, but he knew better than to ask for that in a place like this.

Morag took a drink from her own jug and replied, “We could ask, though, someone might remember her.” She looked around, fearlessly.

“Aren’t you scared to be in here?” Crowley asked her, curiously. There were some extremely dodgy characters in this bar, and he thought they had already drawn too much attention. He knew he would win a fight, if it came to it, but he didn’t fancy it right then, not least because he’d have to look out for Morag in any scrap he got involved in, and he wasn’t used to that. Usually it was just him, or him and Aziraphale, who pretended he didn’t like to fight but was actually much more handy than Crowley was. Crowley would usually talk his way out of violence.

She drank again, and mused on the question seriously. “No,” she said finally. “You’re here. We’ll be fine.”

Bloody hell. He put the jug down, hard, and leaned forward. “I don’t think....” he started furiously, but didn’t really know how to carry on. What could he say, after all? “You don’t....you don’t know me. Why are you so sure I won’t leave you to it, somewhere like this? Why do you.....trust me so much?”

Wee Morag looked at him seriously. “You saved my life,” she said, his eyes burning into his. “Why would you do that? Sometimes, sometimes I have to take a moment to check that half of what’s happened to me is actually real. I was so ill, after all, there’s a chance that this is all a fever dream and I’m still lying in the straw in the back of that cart on the way to Nottingham. Some of it certainly feels like it could be a fever dream. Like....the way we’re travelling....sometimes we walk, yes, and we’ve ridden the stagecoach, but then yesterday, we just left somewhere and then...arrived somewhere else. Is that real? Would you show me that, if you were just going to leave me behind? You could have left me yesterday, gone on your own, but you didn’t.”

It was true, Crowley did become impatient with the slow pace of travel, anything involving horses especially, and then he would travel them forward a little way. Mainly when it was raining. Walking along through sodden, muddy roads was very tedious when you knew you didn’t really have to do it.

“I suppose you’re right. Listen, Morag, I have to tell you something.” He’d been working up to this for a few days. “I don’t think we’re going to find Mair. I don’t know where she’s gone, and we’ve heard of no traces at all. I thought I’d be able to find her, but...” he trailed off, taking another drink of the disgusting beer. It was true, he was worried. He’d thought that it would be easy to find the girl but she was proving elusive, to say the least. He’d planned a couple of days away with Morag, find the girl, back to the village and then back up north with Aziraphale and forget the whole thing had ever happened.

But...it wasn’t turning out like that. Morag had cleaved to them, was obviously determined to follow them body and soul, to the ends of the earth. That’s what you get when you save someone’s life, he supposed, although he wasn’t clear how he was going to shake off such hero-worship. It had to be done; Crowley just couldn’t maintain the level of sainthood expected of him by the girl. And then there was the rest of the sad little village. He had a horrible feeling that he knew what was in his future concerning that place. It wasn’t going to let him go, not again. He could hear the guru’s voice constantly, telling him to get on with what he was really supposed to be doing. And he always pretended that he had no idea of what that was.

He finished his thoughts. “So I’m going to suggest that we go back to the village. There’s a lot to do there and we should probably start on it. I should also probably let Mr Fell know where we’ve got to. Are we in agreement? If she ever does come back, then you and Elspeth will be there.”

Morag nodded, her eyes wide. “Do you think she’s dead, Mr Crowley?” she asked, almost whispering.

“I don’t know,” he said, honestly. Although - there it was again – whenever he touched on this subject, there was a nagging feeling in the back of his mind that he did know how to find out if someone was alive...and he did know how to find someone missing - he just couldn’t grasp the memory and recall what it was that he had forgotten. It was very frustrating.

Morag appeared to think about this. Then she nodded firmly. “Yes, we should go back. Are we going to walk the whole way, or...?”

Crowley smiled at that. “I wasn’t planning to walk at all. Finish your drink, if you want it. Better go outside, then. I mean everyone in here is pretty drunk but I think they’d notice the two of us just disappearing into thin air.”

Tadfield, February 1815

They couldn’t believe the front of the man. The mill agent, back again like a bad penny. In a way both Antonia and Aziraphale were glad to see him, because all that anger had to go somewhere, and they did at times enjoy a good fight, but at the same time neither of them could believe it. Aziraphale stood, leaning on the fence at the top of the lane, his hands clasped loosely behind his back, looking down into the village, watching the slimy little man going from door to door and wondering why all the houses were empty. Antonia, in a full crinoline and a dress of black and red lace, was beside him. Behind them the newly enlarged Tadfield Manor was bursting at the seams with all the village residents, a temporary measure while they renovated the cottages.

The man was gradually working his way up the hill towards the house, coming closer and closer, higher up the lane. They waited for him to spot them standing there at the top. The way the lane curved meant that the whole village was spread out before them from this point. The agent got quite close, only a few feet away, before looking up. Aziraphale was gratified to see all the colour drain from the man’s face as he recognised them.

“You!” he barked.

Antonia raised an eyebrow. “Yes, us. What do you want?” she said.

“You are a thief! I ought to...”

“Let’s talk about theft, shall we?” Aziraphale said, pleasantly enough. “Theft of wages? Theft of children? A mangy horse and a rented cart, is what I stole. You can have those back. Nothing else I took in Nottingham belonged to you in the first place.”

Aziraphale moved, very fast, so that he was suddenly on the other side of the fence and right up close to him. He took a step backwards. Behind them, behind the fence, Morag and Elspeth had come out, and they were now leaning there next to Antonia, waiting for the show.

Well, I’d better give them a show, then.

Morag was eating an apple. As the agent glared at her, she grinned and waved. Aziraphale felt that weight that Crowley had felt on the North Road, that expectation. They were so sure that he was going to take care of this. They had no fear at all that they might fail.

Better not fail, then. He flexed his fingers, releasing some of the anger, the energy, sparks from his fingertips. The agent took one more step backwards.

“You are standing on my land,” he said conversationally. “I don’t want to see you here again. This village doesn’t have anyone on the county anymore, so there’s no need for you to come back. No one owes any rent or anything else. Its all paid. So we don’t want to see you here again. I don’t want to see you anywhere. I’ll give you long enough to run to the boundary. Run, mind you. Then, well, if you’re still here after that, we will have to see.”

“I hope you stay!” shouted Morag. “I want to see what he does!”

“Me too!” yelled Elspeth.

“Now, girls,” Antonia chided them. “We don’t want to do violence.”

“Shame,” said Morag, pouting.

Aziraphale raised his eyebrow this time. “Well? What do you think? You can stay and accuse me of theft if you like, or you can get off my land.”

“You don’t own this place,” he spat. “You stole this, too, one way or another.”

“Really? You think so? You’re going to stay and argue the point?” He was aware that behind him the fence was now full of spectators. The whole village had come out of rhe Manor and was standing there with him. “That’s fine. And – sorry, girls – I won’t do anything to you. I don’t need to. I’ll just leave you to them.” He indicated the crowd gathered behind him. Right on cue, someone yelled, “Let us at him!”

That was all it took. The agent looked up, and saw a wall of angry people, angry people who had now been empowered by someone standing up for them, and he knew he was beaten. He retreated, pausing only to shout, from what he believed was a safe distance. “You owe me! You haven’t heard the last of this!”

“You know, I rather think we have,” Aziraphale said. Behind him, the village began cheering and yelling. Some apple cores and clods of mud were thrown. The agent turned around and started to run, to further jeers.

Just to make absolutely sure, as the fleeing agent passed the big beech tree at the bottom of the lane, a large branch crashed down inches from his heels, sent to the earth in a dart of blue energy.

“That was amazing!” yelled Morag.

Aziraphale hadn’t hated it. He couldn’t lie about that.

Chapter Text

Aziraphale’s diary

We are back in the North again. Antonia is in hiding after the scandal of the Season (which she caused, of course) and I am following a lead. Morag and Elspeth gave us a Clue as to who was behind that scheme with the mill workers, so I am following it up.

The scandal surrounding Lord Ligur’s terrible boating accident is going to take a long time to fade. It will take Society a long time to get over a story like that, a peer of the realm found dead in such a compromising position. In a boat on the lake at St James Park, no less! The poor ducks will be traumatised. The addition of the orange (especially placed where it was) was, I feel, a little too much, but Antonia calls it the finishing touch. I do have a concern for Antonia – she felt that young lady’s pain very closely and I do only hope that exacting revenge on her behalf has helped with her own demons. Still something like that will leave a mark on a person. I wish she had not done it, though no one could have stopped her.

In any case, until the scandal dies down, Crowley needs to stay out of London (or at least, Antonia does), so we have come north again to find the mastermind of the whole mill workers scheme. He is a man known as Duke Hastur, although a glance in Debrett’s* informed me that he is not an actual duke. He’s not in there at all. He is new money, not that I care about that. We are not gentry ourselves after all, however we might appear now in our new house.

I insisted on doing this part alone. I confess I cannot talk to Crowley yet about where all this is going. Besides which he needs to keep out of sight. Even changing as he does, his hair, his eyes, are so distinctive. He needs to exercise some caution. If he were to be recognised.....transportation to the penal colonies....it does not bear thinking of.

Aziraphale raised a hand and knocked heavily on the peeling, filthy door. He knew that no one should be coming to the back door at this hour, since the gate should be locked and bolted and there should be no way that anyone should be allowed to come through the warehouses unaccompanied. The dark-haired girl who opened the door looked flustered and worried, and glanced behind her at the shadowy corridor that led out to the warehouses. He shouldn’t have been down there, clearly. Her face went totally white at the sight of him, so pale he thought she might actually swoon. Her hand flew to her mouth and she gasped. But then she visibly pulled herself together and opened the door wider and showed him in.

The rooms of the upper apartments were incredibly sumptuous, their large bay windows lined with thick velvet curtains, deep-piled carpets, luxuriously upholstered chairs and couches, mahogany tables scattered around. Muriel, the maid, was dressed in a black parlour-maid’s uniform with a white apron and cap, and looking demurely at the floor. Or else avoiding eye contact. Her name nagged at Aziraphale’s memory, but he couldn't grasp the thought.

The maid led him into the drawing room, bobbed a nervous curtsey and left him looking around at the oil paintings and an enormous silver mirror hanging in the centre of the room above the fireplace. The fire roared and danced beneath it, making the room almost too hot – such a contrast with the rooms below that it was difficult to believe it was within the same building.

Muriel was right to be suspicious about how Aziraphale had arrived – if that was her problem with him. He had gone through the warehouses and dormitories downstairs before arriving at the side door – not exactly the orthodox way in – well-to-do visitors were certainly not meant to see the squalor below, the young workers sleeping four to a straw mattress, the guttering whale-oil lamps, the dirt that covered every surface and the bowls of thin porridge each worker was clutching in their frozen hands. There was no fire down there despite the chill, and the walls ran with damp. He’d seen rats, bold enough to sit and watch as he walked past them, and none of the huddled people had batted an eyelid at the sight of one of the creatures shinning up the wall behind the door within touching distance of one of the younger workers’ faces. From this desperate scene he had gone straight up to the apartments and was now sweating in the opulence of a room furnished by someone with far too much money and absolutely no taste or, apparently, morals of any kind. The young people they had already rescued from the mill workers’ racket and taken to Tadfield Manor had had a lucky escape from this place – even by the low standards of the other mill towns.

The owner himself, ‘Duke’ Hastur bustled through the door, dripping with gold rings and many layers of rich clothing. Aziraphale swallowed a queasy feeling at the sight of him, and turned on a bright smile for his host as he snapped his fingers at Muriel for tea. She had come back into the room and was hovering behind them. Hastur was already clutching a glass of port, and indicated the crystal decanter as he took a seat on one of the soft couches. Aziraphale took a glass, noting the fine quality of the glassware and the smooth taste of the drink itself. The ‘Duke’ only had the best, clearly.

He had originally come here, with Crowley’s full, if reluctant, agreement, intending to play it straight, offering to buy the mill business outright with an offer that Hastur couldn’t refuse, but this inclination had evaporated at the sight of the dormitories, and in particular the look in Muriel the maid’s eye as she opened the door to him. She had seen the way he had come in, up the stairs – not up from the wide street entrance but from around the other way, through the warehouse – and her eyes had widened and she had glanced at his face, so quickly another man might have missed it completely – and then away behind him. She had communicated, clearly, that she wanted to say something. Now she reappeared again carrying a tea tray with pots and cakes and fine china cups, and as she handed him a cup she looked at him again, quizzically. Aziraphale flicked his eyes up to meet hers and away again, saying the single word, outside, without speaking, but with a smile crossing his face, lightning fast, and she quirked her lips in return and glanced at the door, then back at him. Then she bobbed another curtsey and left the room with her eyes still cast demurely downwards.

Aziraphale made small talk with Hastur for a while and finally excused himself and went out into the corridor. Muriel was waiting at the end of the hall, ostensibly with the tea tray at the ready in case it was required, but as soon as she saw him she hurried up to him, finger to her lips, and indicated that she should follow her a little further down the shadowy hallway.

“How are you here?” she whispered furiously. “It’s impossible!”

“What?” said Aziraphale, intelligently.

Muriel shook her head, blinking rapidly as though to clear something from her eyes. “Never mind....never mind. Perhaps a coincidence.....Are you...are you here to help the workers?” she whispered. “There’s talk among them....” She paused, flushed. “Sir, if I’m wrong, I can only…”

“You’re not wrong. But how did you know?”

Muriel’s gaze slid away. “Well...everyone knows about the mill workers that went missing. Your....face is on the posters, though it does not look very like you. Your hair is....distinctive. Besides, I saw that you had come through the dormitories. Those gates are always locked and bolted, always. I’ve never seen it otherwise.”

“Oh, really? I didn’t notice that,” he said with a quick smile. “Never mind, I’m sure they’ll be locked again later when everyone has left. The people down there did notice the door was open, I suppose?”

“No one would dare leave their bed. I could go down….but if he finds out…” Muriel had visibly paled again.

“He won’t,” Aziraphale said urgently. “Go down, let everyone out, and when they’re all waiting out the back behind the mill, come back up and let me know. Then…well, I’ll see what happens then. But just to be clear – you won’t work here any more by the end of the night. Is that alright?”

Muriel pursed her lips. “I don’t know, sir…the Duke was very good to me when I first came here, he took me in and gave me this position, it’s a good position and there aren’t that many…and references you know…it’s not easy. It wasn’t an easy choice to work here, but better here than down there, I thought.....” she was flushed now, and babbling. The girl seemed incredibly nervous.

He put a hand on her shoulder gently and shook his head. “Don’t worry. I’ll get him to write a glowing reference for you – or I’ll write you one myself.”

She looked up at him, and there was still something in her eyes that didn’t quite...fit, but she looked less afraid now as she made up her mind. “Right. I’ll go down and let them out. Give me – perhaps ten minutes. Do not let him ring for me, or we’ll both be scuppered!” She hurried away down the back stairs.

Aziraphale strode back into the drawing room, his mind made up. While she was down below letting the prisoners escape, he had to let Hastur know what she was doing. It was no fun, otherwise.

They were a sorry group even outside of the filthy dormitory. While Muriel hovered in the background wringing her hands, Aziraphale bundled the ‘Duke’ outside to stand in the icy rain in front of them, humiliated and shortly to be stony broke, as well.

“Sit here,” he demanded, pushing him down to sit on a packing crate facing the house with all his workers ranged behind him. “Now, do you have anything to say to these people about how much of their money is going home to their families, and how much is going into your port and cigar fund?”

“All of my money was acquired honestly….” he began, blustering.

“Are you sure? So if I was to look into your affairs, it would all be above board, would it? No dodgy deals, no taking of wages for housing costs when, really, you couldn’t say they were living in a house, exactly, could you? No stash of money that’s meant to be going home to their families?” He grabbed a handful of Hastur’s thick velvet coat and forced him to look towards the hulking house, inky black against the smoky sky.

“All your money is in the house, isn’t it? No banks for you – you don’t want the Revenue to find out how much you’ve got, do you? No, it’s a big box of cash under the bed for you. So risky though. All it would take would be one little tiny fire.”

Hastur scowled at the words, and as smoke and flames began pouring from the upstairs windows, all of them at once, he struggled vainly against Aziraphale’s grip. He was very strong when he wanted to be. “I think we’ll stay here,” he said. “Your workers all need to get round a good fire, they’re freezing cold.”

“You know, I was going to offer to buy your business from you, but I thought, why should you gain anything from this?” he continued, conversationally. “I mean, it’s all dirty money, better to burn it, I would have said.”

Leaving him where he stood, he turned to make a dramatic exit by striding out of the yard, but was stopped in his tracks by several of the workers, looking a lot more lively now they were out of the dark dormitories.

“You know, we could’ve found a use for that big stash of money you mentioned,” said the biggest, hardest-looking of them. He didn’t look altogether thrilled at being rescued from penury.

Aziraphale quickly made some adjustments, moving that to there and changing the position of this... then he flashed him a smile and stepped back. “Lucky, then, that it’s all stashed in those couple of crates round the front. There’s enough for everyone…” he called this last at their retreating backs as they ran towards where he’d pointed. There was indeed enough for everyone, although some of the notes were a little singed round the edges.

He leaned against the wall, observing the fire and also watching Muriel closely. Her reaction on seeing him at the door was puzzling him. She seemed to almost recognise him, and the excuse that she had seen him on a wanted poster seemed...off, somehow. But he knew he had never seen her before. At least, he thought he knew. Watching her now, though, was there something familiar in her short hair, her innocent smile? There couldn’t be, and yet....Aziraphale mentally shrugged. He had got used to these odd not-memories over the years. He’d almost given up on ever figuring out what they meant. Crowley had them too. Maybe everyone did.

Muriel’s earlier courage seemed to have evaporated, and she was now hovering, uncertain and overawed at what she had done to her employer. She retreated as the workers streamed past her on their way to claim their wages. She sat on the low wall opposite her former home watching it burn. In the distance the inmates of the warehouse crowded in a huddle around an open crate, and one of them was handing out packets to each of the rest of them – this was the money they had been owed for all their labour. The fire was warming her frozen hands. Muriel closed her eyes and tipped her head back to feel the full heat of it. Aziraphale watched her, tuning in to her whirling thoughts. She probably had no idea what she was going to do now, or where she would go. When her guardian and employer discovered that she had helped to bring this terrible night about, she would be turned out, no money, no job, no home and no reference, and if she was fortunate, she would end up in a place like the mill, working for just enough food to be kept alive. All for five minutes of madness. And there were, of course, worse fates. The future hung in front of her like a dark cloud.

Two figures extracted themselves from the crowd around the crates and came towards her. They were young, neither of them more than twelve or thirteen, and she recognised them as two cousins she had given extra blankets to last winter after she had seen them sharing one threadbare piece of cloth to keep out the bitter winter cold at night. “Miss, you need to go and get your wages,” said the older girl as they reached the wall. Both turned and faced the fire as Muriel was doing, drinking in the warmth even as they looked at their home in flames. Muriel shook her head. “I am not owed any,” she said sadly. “I worked for my keep, and I had that.”

“Still, though, miss….you can’t work here any more,” said the other girl. She had a dreadful cough and was holding on to her cousin. Aziraphale thought it could be another case of consumption. Both girls were very pale in the leaping firelight.

“There’s talk of a village near here where we can go and stay for a while,” continued the first girl. “A few of us are going there tonight with the gentleman. Are you coming?”

He smiled to himself at being described as a gentleman. Astonishing how the rumour mill worked, too. They hadn’t told anyone about the Manor. Maybe there really were posters out there with his and Crowley’s faces on. A slightly worrying thought.

“No, I will stay,” Muriel said. “The Duke may still have need of me.”

The second girl spat onto the ashy dust by Muriel’s feet. “Hastur has gone,” she said dourly. “We saw him running up the road without his coat or hat. I reckon he’s forgotten all about you. You’ll have to shift for yourself.”

This new shock seemed to hit Muriel only dully. “Do not worry about me,” she said, with an effort at a smile. “I’ll be alright.” The two cousins wandered away, the younger still leaning heavily on the elder as they walked. Muriel watched them go. Aziraphale saw her swallowing past a dry throat. In truth, he had no idea whether she would be alright or not.

The crowds around the crates were dispersing. Workers walked past Muriel clutching their packets, secreting them away in pockets and bundles as they approached her. A few of them spared her a sympathetic look, but most did not glance her way at all. In their eyes, by living in the big house and taking their food and shelter, she was as guilty as Hastur.

Lost as she was in watching the fire, she did not seem aware of Aziraphale leaning on the wall next to her for several minutes. When she glanced across it gave her a start to see him, also watching the fire and seeming not to acknowledge that she was there at all. However as she noticed him, he stood up and inclined his head to her politely before settling against the wall again, arms folded.

“I should thank you for your assistance earlier,” he remarked, still looking straight ahead at the fire. The flames were dying away now, and the bitter cold was seeping back towards them.

Muriel swallowed hard. “I am sorry I did it, sir. I am sorry for all of it. I do not think he deserves all of….this.”

“Perhaps you don’t think so. But maybe you don’t know all that he is guilty of.” He gave her a sympathetic look. “Do you have somewhere you can go tonight?”

Muriel drew herself up. He saw her hopeless pride, the last thing to be stripped away. “No, sir. But I shall find somewhere. A friend, perhaps….” She pushed herself up off the wall and adjusted her shawl around her shoulders. Her hands were already frozen as she gripped the thin woollen material between her fingers. Muriel realised with growing dismay that she was holding onto all that she now owned. She wasn’t even wearing what had been her thickest shawl. The last of the flames had vanished back inside the ruined building now and she began to shiver violently with cold and shock.

“Come with us back to the village,” Aziraphale suggested, laying a hand on her arm. “Several of the workers are going to come with us, we’ve space for everyone. You can’t stay out here, it’s far too cold.”

Muriel drew back from his, rather forward, touch. “I will be fine, sir. I cannot go with you, or any of the workers. It…it would not be right.”

“Well, if you’re sure. We will leave soon. Come and join us if you decide you want to.” He walked away towards the smaller group of people who were waiting at the cart for him. He didn’t look back. He assumed she was following.

There were lamps burning in every window of the house as the cart drew up outside it. Morag and Elspeth were waiting outside, warmly dressed and holding large lamps, welcoming their new house guests with smiles and warm drinks and blankets. The bewildered mill workers were ushered inside and gathered in front of the huge fires that were laid and lit in every room as though waiting for the house to be filled. Sometimes, the power they had discovered was very useful. But then, so were Morag and Elspeth.

Aziraphale leaned on the side of the cart watching everyone disembark and stagger toward the warmth of the house. It was becoming bitterly cold. He lit a roll-up cigarette and exhaled a cloud of smoke into the air, turning to Antonia, frowning. She was bundled up in a thick fur, only her nose and eyes visible, hands encased in a muff and a thick scarf wrapped over her head. She hated the cold. She wasn’t enjoying the mini ice age at all.

“Crowley,” he said, taking another drag. “That girl from the house, the maid. She’s not here, is she? I must have left her at the house...you know, there was something weird about her. When she saw me she went white as a sheet. I could have sworn she recognised me.”

Antonia shrugged. “Well, what about her?” she sniffed. “She said she didn’t want to come.”

“I assumed she would, though. She had nowhere to go. She’s going to stay out there tonight, and it’s freezing. She won’t make it.”

Antonia closed her eyes so she could ‘see’ clearer. “No, you are right. She will probably be frozen to death by morning,” she said. “It was her choice to stay, surely. Free will and all that.”

Aziraphale pitched his cigarette end away into the frosty night. “I’m going to go and get her. We’ve made her homeless, Crowley, after she helped me. I can’t just....abandon her.”

“Whatever you want to do, Aziraphale. But what about everyone in there?”

“It won’t take long. Sod the cart, let’s just get this done. If she’s adamant that she won’t come here with all the mill workers, I’ll take her somewhere else for a while.”

It was much later. The cold was deep and vicious, the fire inside the house having completely died away. Muriel sat huddled beneath the wall she had been sitting on, her thin shawl wrapped tightly around her body, but she could not stop the shivering that wracked all through her. The night was bitter, the darkness nearly total. After the cart had left, carrying all the workers who wished to go the village, she had been left completely alone. She had no plan, but could in any case not do anything now, sitting as she was in the pitch dark. She was waiting for the sun to come up and hoping that no one dangerous or nefarious would chance upon her in the meantime.

Muriel had dozed into a dangerous, frozen sleep when she was awoken by whispered voices and a strange, wavering blue light dancing across the road towards her. She tried to scramble to her feet, thinking to hide, but she was so cold that her limbs would not behave and she found that she was unable to move. She heard rustling and muttering in the darkness, followed by a woman’s voice saying: “Someone’s sake, Aziraphale, don’t use that! Light the lamp!” Then a flare that clearly showed two faces, and a more normal yellow candlelight came bobbing towards her place behind the wall. A man’s voice then saying something indistinct, “…all very well, but it’s hardly bright enough….” And then she saw the man she had let into the house all those endless hours ago. She had hoped he had left her. Her heart sank.

They saw her and hurried over. Antonia bundled a thick blanket around her shoulders. A lamp was placed onto the little wall and by its flickering light she saw who it was. How has he got back here already?

“Don’t worry about that now,” Aziraphale said. “Crowley, she’s freezing cold! We should have come back straight away.”

Muriel looked from one to the other and back, wide-eyed, sure she had not spoken aloud. And....straight away? What?

Antonia reluctantly unwrapped a fur-lined cloak from around her shoulders and draped it over Muriel’s. It was luxuriously thick, and she grabbed onto it and pushed her frozen face into its soft warmth. She found that now she could move, and pulled herself to her feet.

“I…thank you, but…I can’t…”

“You are coming with us. I’m not taking no for an answer,” Aziraphale said, sternly. He tried to sound severe but hopefully Muriel could see a hint of warmth in his eyes, and a trace of amusement. “What do you think we’re going to do, leave you to freeze to death underneath a wall?”

“It is nearly morning…I am not so cold…”

Muriel was walking between them now, still protesting that she was fine.

“We don’t have the cart here. You haven’t really thought this through, have you?” said Antonia over Muriel’s head.

Aziraphale shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, Crowley, we’ll just bring her with us....”

Muriel suddenly pulled away from both of them.

“I am sorry,” she blurted out. “So sorry for everything, for all of this! I can't go with you. I...I just can’t!”

“Whyever not?” Aziraphale asked. Muriel looked properly distressed, her eyes darting here and there, a trapped animal searching for escape.

“Because....oh, I am so sorry. So so sorry, I tried to save as much as I could but....so much is wrong, the wrong people in the wrong places.....You would never be able to forgive me. For what I’ve done! Done to everyone. Done to you!”

She wrenched her arm from Aziraphale’s grasp and staggered backwards.

Then, as they both watched, open mouthed, she reached her hand up and pulled it down again, seeming to gather something, some energy, from the very air. It was a strange, graceful, familiar gesture.

And then, she vanished.

Chapter Text

Crowley was brooding. He couldn’t really remember why he had originally thought to come to Australia, other than as another way to put some distance between him and Aziraphale, who was now completely obsessing over the search for answers. He had been holed up at the Manor, for years now, gathering books, papers, evidence, searching ever-more-obsessively. After seeing Muriel the maid vanish into that bitter cold night in 1815, the need to find out had become stronger and stronger. Crowley had, finally, disengaged in despair.

Once Elspeth and Morag had left to go and run their farm together, Crowley and especially Aziraphale had less and less to do with the people in the village. Tadfield residents had come and gone, and Aziraphale gradually withdrew from them to focus on research. His latest thing was prophecy books, reading the words of ancient mushroom freaks and oddballs from across history as they variously predicted the end of the world. Nostradamus, Mother Shipton, and all those lot. Crowley had humoured him at first but it had started to drive him crazy. He didn’t see the point of it. Muriel and her vanishing act had been a shocker, true, but surely she had actually been the proof he had been looking for? Yes, there were more people like them, no, they weren’t on their own, and that was that. If the others wanted to be found, he was sure they would turn up.

Yes, Crowley had always felt the presence of the mystery over his life, his unexplainably endless life, but by now, he also felt like he was used to it. He didn’t think about it. Aziraphale though, couldn’t accept it. And that was without the dreams. As far as Crowley knew Aziraphale didn’t have the dreams that he suffered on occasion. Dreams of falling and fire and screaming. He’d heard somewhere that if you landed during a dream where you were falling, it could actually kill you for real. He’d not shared that, in fact he had done his best to forget he’d ever heard it.

Crowley did miss Aziraphale, missed having someone else there who just knew everything, so no need to be careful all the time, but he’d had to get away from the books and the anguish. So that was how he came to be in Australia in the austral summer of 1933, sitting in a tatty breakfast room in a squalid guest house in Sydney reading about a murder trial in the Morning Herald. It was a little snippet of national news, a court report from Adelaide about a young man who was being tried for the severe beating and cold-blooded murder of one of the owners of the collective farm where he had lived. It was a small piece, two or three paragraphs at the most, but Crowley read the whole thing and something in the story chimed with him. He had no idea why.

He sat and searched his memory for any indication that he might know this young convict, whose name was Adam Young. He came up with nothing, but the story wouldn’t leave him alone. The name kept repeating in his brain. Adam. Adam is important. Believing that there was no such thing as coincidence, he finished his cold coffee, paid the bill, and made his way to Adelaide.

Very quickly.

So quickly that he got there in time for the last day of the trial, and sat at the back of the public gallery watching the proceedings. He still didn’t recognise the defendant, but two things had quickly become apparent. Firstly, even though Flanagan, the farm owner, wasn’t dead, Adam was being tried for murder. He was pleading guilty, so he obviously didn’t know that Flanagan was still alive. And secondly, he seemed to want to be found guilty. He was obviously, from the answers he gave the judge, very intelligent and certainly cleverer than his country-yokel state-appointed lawyer. But he didn’t defend himself, he didn’t plead for his freedom – in fact, when he was led down from the dock Crowley caught a final glimpse of his face and saw that although his head was down, and his eyes were closed, on his face was the last expression one would expect to find on a man beginning a life sentence. He looked relieved.

Crowley hung around outside the jail-house, and when they arrived with Adam Young in tow, he followed them in. He could be very unobtrusive when he wanted.

The searing heat was even more intense inside the jail-house building. The dust of the outback roads, still clinging to Adam’s ragged clothing and bruised skin as he was hustled out of the horse drawn prison van and inside, was raised in a red, gritty cloud as he fell into the cell, skidding across the concrete floor until he slammed into the back wall. Blood seeped sluggishly into his eye from a filthy cut on his face, his hair hung in red rat tails covered in dirt. Lying there, he opened his eyes, smeary with tears and blood and gunk, and saw a spindly shaft of sunlight slipping through the bars above his head, and red dust whirling in the thin light. Pushing himself upright, he wiped his face, spat a bloody gob of saliva onto the floor, and began to laugh. Staring up at the bars in his tiny window, staring ahead at a 25-year sentence, he looked like he’d realised he was free at last.

Adam Young sat back in his rock-hard prison chair and studied Crowley as he sat down in front of him. He was dressed conventionally in a shirt and tie, and had a battered briefcase and notebooks and pencils, and he’d said he was a lawyer, but he could see he wasn’t convincing Adam. Crowley wasn’t Adam’s lawyer, after all, and Adam didn’t have an appointment with one anyway. He had no plans to appeal his sentence, no reason to seek any legal representation whatsoever. But the way to get in to see him was to start yakking on about ‘your appeal’ and all about how they would go to court next week with a strong new case….Crowley could see that Adam had already stopped listening.

“Adam? This is a good opportunity. It’ll get you out of here, for a start.”

Adam lit one of the cigarettes Crowley had offered him and sat back in the stiff chair. “I don’t need to get out of here,” he said.  “I’m in the right place.”

“Why would you think that?” He was genuinely interested.

“What?! You’re not serious. Why would you ask that? I don’t know if you know, but I am actually supposed to be here. I don’t want to escape, or get off, or anything else.”

“Why not?”

“Because, I’m guilty. I killed someone. Where else should a murderer be?”

“Well,” Crowley said. “Murderers should be here, yes, I agree. Mostly. But I’ll tell you a couple of interesting things about your case that you may not know. I doubt your original, wholly useless, lawyer has even found this out. You might say it's absolutely vital to your case, though. Firstly, from what I heard at the trial, it was a clear-cut case of self-defence. And secondly, you didn’t kill anybody – Flanagan isn’t dead. They set you up. So, you’re not guilty at all.”

“Bull. Shit. How do you know so much about it? You weren’t at the trial. No one was. And if you’re such a hot shot lawyer, what are you doing here talking to a lost cause? I don’t need a lawyer – I’m not appealing or anything else.” He angrily stood up to leave, throwing the cigarette butt onto the table.

“Adam? Please sit down.”

Looking surprised at himself, he did so. Behind them the guard on duty yelled out that they had five minutes left.

“Flanagan isn’t dead, you say?” Adam whispered, as the information sank in. “Shit.”

“He’s back at Roo Creek, from what I’ve heard.” Crowley leaned forward and grabbed Adam’s hand. “Listen to me,” he hissed. “I don’t care if you want to appeal or not – you’re appealing. A trip to court gives you the perfect opportunity to get the hell out of here and so you’re going to go for it, understand? This whole thing stinks from beginning to end, right back to when they took you out of England – “

“How the hell do you know anything about that?” Adam whispered furiously.

“I know a lot more than you think. I know you’re not spending the rest of your life in here. You are needed elsewhere.”

“What does that mean?”

“You interested? Prove it. OK, you don’t want to appeal. Fair enough. Next time I see you, we’re going to do a jailbreak.”

Crowley lowered his sunglasses a touch, his eyes gleaming. He’d just thought of this, but it was a great scheme.

Adam snorted a laugh. “Yeah, and I’m the king of England,” he said. “I don’t know who put you up to this, but tell them I’m not as stupid as I look. Jailbreak? Yeah.”

Abruptly Crowley dropped Adam’s hand and stood up to leave in one fluid movement. “Well, thank you for your time, Mr Young. I’ll see you in court, I think we’ve got a good case.” He spoke loudly, with a glance over at the guard waiting by the door. And with that he strode off down the narrow space between the visitors’ tables, without looking back, confident that the seeds had been sown. Adam sat back in astonishment, watching him leave.

Much as he despised doing it, Crowley then did some research of his own. What he found out was not a pretty story. Adam had been one of the ‘Home children’, inter-war British orphans sent off into the Empire for the good of king and country, to populate the wild places with civilised Britishness - whatever it was they were meant to be doing. Crowley wasn’t entirely sure. He thought it was something Aziraphale would have been incensed over, if he wasn’t so distracted back in his growing library. What Adam mostly had been doing was hard manual labour on a sweltering farm with fifty others, his life full of routine violence. The fact that he thought the Adelaide jail-house was a better place to be than the farm spoke volumes. The fact that he had deliberately committed a terrible crime – and he thought he had killed the man, no matter that he was still walking around – on purpose to be sent away from Roo Creek Farm – said even more. It said he could have been brutalised, traumatised and embittered by his experiences, but he hadn’t. He was methodical, calm, and behind his eyes lay a fierce intelligence. He was obviously very clever. Crowley had some idea, having spoken to him, about offering him a job. Well, kind of a job. Research assistant, maybe? Crowley was feeling like he shouldn’t leave Aziraphale alone for much longer, but he couldn’t stand sitting in that library every day, drowning in paper and frustration. Maybe Adam would be interested, though. Bring a fresh perspective. For a while. But that was in the future. First he had to be persuaded. This was a recruitment drive.

Crowley left it for three days, and then paid Adam another visit, this time out of hours, appearing in his cell, leaning on the wall casually, at three o’clock in the morning.

Adam, a light sleeper through the strongly ingrained habit of self-preservation, awoke instantly.

“What the hell are you doing here? How’d you get in my cell?” hissed Adam, slamming himself back against the brick wall at the head of the bed. “I knew you weren’t a lawyer!”

“Well, no, Jailbird, you’re right about that,” Crowley said, picking up one of Adam’s cigarettes from the home-made shelf bolted to the wall and lighting it. Adam looked affronted by this, but dared not speak. Crowley leaned back against the other wall and took a deep drag. Adam gave a sour little grin as he winced at the foul taste. There was very little tobacco in it, and a lot of sawdust and lint.

“You’d better leave,” Adam said. “If the governor catches you talking to me…”

“I was thinking about the conversation we had before,” Crowley said as though he hadn’t heard Adam’s protest at all. “I accepted you don’t want to go for an appeal. But, now that my attempt at a conventional route has failed, it looks like we’re going to have to do a proper jailbreak after all.”

Adam leaned forward. “Why? Why are you so desperate to get me out?"

“I’ve found out a lot about you. Long story short. I need you to come and work for me. I’ve got a....a friend, close friend, with a big research project. Huge. He needs help, needs a man of your intelligence. You’re coming out with me, now, tonight. You are no murderer – Flanagan is still walking, talking, breathing and eating on Roo Creek, and you’re in here for killing him! You are an innocent man, Adam Young, and you will be a lot more use to me than you will be stuck in here sewing mail bags, or whatever it is they make you do.” Crowley finished the horrible cigarette and stubbed the butt out on the little shelf.

Adam sat back, digesting this information. “Today we dug holes out in the yard,” he said, randomly.

“Well, there you go. If that’s all you think you should be doing with your life, then I’d better leave. But aren’t you even a little curious? How I got in here? About this job I mentioned?”

Adam fell silent for a moment. He reached past Crowley and grabbed one of his two remaining roll-ups, sticking it between his teeth while searching in the near darkness for matches.

Crowley lit the roll-up for him with a small gesture, two fingers passed over the end of it, a tiny flame, no more. Adam’s eyes widened, but he accepted it straight away. He narrowed his eyes again and nodded. “Ah. OK. It’s that kind of deal, is it? Do I sign my soul over now, or wait until later?”

Crowley smiled. “I don’t do deals. Never have. No contracts signed in blood or anything else. No strings at all, in fact. Just come and work for my friend for a while, and then you’re free to do whatever you want.”

Adam smoked his roll-up thoughtfully. “You said that Flanagan is still alive. He’s back at Roo Creek. If I get out of here, I have to help the rest of them, the ones that’re still there. They covered for me, helped me. He’ll be making their lives hell, if he’s back with them. Would you help me to do that? Get them all away from there?”

Crowley frowned. “Sounds like a deal you want. I said, I don’t do deals, Jailbird.”

Adam shrugged. “I can’t leave them. Those are my terms.”

Crowley inhaled, exhaled. Something chimed in his memory, one of those odd overlapping, untraceable things. Deals.....he shrugged. “OK. OK. Of course. We’re going to....buy the farm, give them an offer that’s too good to refuse, and then kick all the old guard out. Would that be acceptable to you?”

Adam finished his roll-up. He nodded firmly. “Yes. Give me evidence that you’ve done that, and I’ll come with you. Not before.”

Adam stuck out his hand and Crowley, after a moment’s hesitation, shook it. “Alright. You’ve got yourself...a deal. Huh. How about that. Give me another few days. I will come back here with – let’s see – the deeds to the property signed over to me – hell, to me and you, confirming the change of ownership.”

Adam nodded again. “Bring me that, and I’m your man.”

Adam shifted on his bunk, listening to the silence that wasn’t really silence at all, filled as it was with hundreds of other men. Suddenly he became aware that the noisy quiet was now just...quiet. He couldn’t hear anything except footsteps, one set of them, walking along the corridor. They stopped outside his cell. Adam’s heart was beating fast, faster. He’d all  but decided that he had imagined the incursion the other night, the stranger who had claimed to be his lawyer and then turned up in the dead of night and offered him...what, exactly? A deal, and exit from prison, but how, and why? But now, there was definitely something happening.

He felt very little surprise when the cell door swung open, and swung silently, which wasn’t what usually happened. No harsh screech of rusting hinges. Beyond, in the gloom, there he was. Adam swung his legs around and sat up. The stranger was leaning on the doorframe, dressed all in black, sunglasses in place, smoking a cigarette – a proper one, by the inviting scent of the smoke surrounding his face. The smell of quality tobacco alone should have been enough to wake up half the wing, but all was silent out there.

“You ready, Jailbird?” he asked.

Adam laughed harshly. “Just like that, is it?” he said.

The man finished his smoke and folded the butt into his fingers, an oddly graceful movement. Two steps forward and he was inside Adam’s cell. “Pretty much, yeah,” he said.

Adam groped around for sanity, found it, held on. “You told me you would help the guys on Roo Creek. Have you? Is Flanagan gone?”

Crowley pulled out a roll of papers and handed them over. Adam unrolled it. He didn’t really know what he was looking at – he’d never seen a property deed before – but there at the top it said ‘Roo Creek Farm and environs’ and there at the bottom it said, ‘signed on this fourteenth day of December nineteen hundred and thirty three’, and there was Flanagan’s name and there was Anthony J. Crowley’s and there was his own, Adam Young. He rolled it up again and passed it back.

 “OK. OK. Have you been there? Did you see them, the others? Are they alright?”

Adam thought he saw a frown, or a hardness, come into the stranger’s face. “They are now, yes. I won’t lie, they hadn’t been treated well. But they’re all patched up now and we sorted out some decent food for them, too.”

Adam absorbed this. Between the lines he could clearly see that things had been bad at the farm. He nodded slowly. “Alright. We had a deal and you’ve done your end of it. I’ll try and come out with you. But, you know....I don’t know how you got in, but then I guess they’ll let anyone get in. Getting out isn’t so easy. We are in a prison, you realise.”

Crowley gave him a half-smile. “I am aware of that, yes. It’s not a problem. Do you need to pack anything?”

Adam looked around his cell, picked up his family photograph and stuffed it into his pocket. He grabbed two roll ups, then recalled the rich scent of smoke that still lingered in the corridor, and rejected them. “That’s it,” he said. He shoved his feet into his prison issue shoes.

“Come on, then,” Crowley said, and Adam stepped out of his cell. Looking up and down the corridor he saw no one, no patrolling guards, no other prisoners. He closed the cell door behind him and started to follow the man down towards the end of the corridor. His footsteps echoed strangely. The whole prison felt empty – he would have sworn to the jury that they were the only people in the building. They reached the first barred doorway at the end of the row of cell doors. Crowley seemed to do no more than snap his fingers and pull the handle and the gate slid aside, silently, unlocked. They stepped through, Adam now looking at him in suspicious wonder. The gate slid back and audibly locked behind them. They continued through a further three of these gates, and down a flight of echoing stairs, until they were in the corridor on the ground floor which housed the governor’s offices. Treading through here on the threadbare carpet, Adam had a growing sensation that this whole thing was a dream. When they reached the front door, the public face of the jail, not the barred entranceway the prisoners used, Crowley reached forward and opened this door, too, with a flourish.

Outside, the moonlight gleamed on a deserted Adelaide street. Adam hesitated. Was this real? Once he stepped through this final door, he really had done a jail break and would be hunted like a fugitive....he hadn’t thought this through at all, though he had done nothing but brood on it since Crowley’s first visit. What was he going to do after leaving this place? He had nowhere to go, and his fate rested completely in the hands of this stranger. He began to shake, overcome.

Crowley grabbed his hand. “Come on, Jailbird, we’re nearly there,” he said. “I’d quite like to get this bit done, if you don’t mind, so I can let everybody go.” Adam saw a sheen of sweat across the man’s face. What did that mean?

Adam crossed the threshold, and Crowley slammed the door, making a shockingly loud, loud echoing bang. They hurried across the road and down a winding little alleyway. At the end of this dank little thoroughfare, Crowley leaned against the wall, and then lifted his hands and lowered them again. Sounds returned to the night as though a lead curtain had dropped. Shouts, cries....and the prison siren. Adam leapt to attention,  knowing this whole thing to be huge, huge folly....

However, Crowley had started to laugh. “Oh my God, I'm exhausted! Good job, Jailbird, I thought you were going to quit on me at the last minute! Holding everyone still like that, it’s really hard work with so many.”

There were hurrying footsteps in the alleyway coming toward them. Adam darted off to the left, where it seemed the alley went, but it was a dead end. He looked the other way, saw that was cut off too, and panicked now, looking into Crowley’s face with a deep look of betrayal. He was still laughing, but now he grabbed Adam’s arm and pulled him up next to him. “No worries, Adam, just give me a minute and we’ll be out of here.”

“We don’t have a minute! And this is a dead end!” Adam hissed. As he said it the armed prison guards came hurtling around the corner towards them.

“OK, don’t have a minute, never mind,” Crowley said, taking a deep breath, trying to summon a bit more energy. He gave the advancing men a little wave, grasped Adam’s arm and murmured, “This might feel a bit strange, but just go with it.”

“Go with what...” Adam began, but then the alleyway, the guards, even Adelaide itself, all vanished. There was a second of icy darkness, and then they were falling onto cold, wet grass. Crowley began to laugh again, exhilarated beyond words.

Adam jumped up, looking wildly around for a second. Crowley was still on the ground, propped up on his elbows, grinning. “I’ve never broken anyone out of prison before,” he said, seemingly delighted with it all.

“Wait...why didn’t we just do that...that travelling thing....from inside my cell?” Adam asked.

Crowley raised an eyebrow, impressed. “Well, I could have just brought you here straight from the cell, of course I could, but where’s the fun in that? Wanted to impress you, a little bit.”

Adam didn’t look convinced.

“Listen. I’m pretty sure you still think you’ve sold your soul. I wanted you to think it was at least worth it.”

“Well, I’m glad it was good for you,” Adam said, shakily. “Where – I can’t believe I’m asking this – where are we?”

Crowley sat up. “Good question. We are in my garden. This is my house – our house - over there,” he waved a hand and the porch light shone out behind them, above a solid green painted door. “I don’t know what state it will be in, mind, I haven’t been here in years. Let’s find out,” he said, getting to his feet.

Adam shook his head. “So, we aren’t in Adelaide anymore, then?”

Crowley threw an arm around Adam’s shoulder and steered him towards the door. “We aren’t in Australia anymore, Jailbird. You’re back in England. Can’t you tell?”

Adam laughed, astonished all over again. “Actually....yes. I can. I never thought I’d come back....I mean to say....” he stopped, overcome with emotion. “Are you sure the others will be alright? I feel like I should go back and...and I don’t know, make sure.”

Crowley stopped and faced him, his expression now serious. “If you need to, we can. But they are fine, and they will be fine. We can go and see them any time you want. You own half of the farm, now, of course, and as you see,” he gave a little half-smile, “we can go pretty quickly. No need for three months on the boat.”

“If you give me your word they’ll be OK, I don’t want to go back,” said Adam, carefully. “I hate that place – I mean I hate it. Prison was better. The food was better in prison, and they didn’t work us so hard. If I had my way I would never go there again, not Roo Creek, not Adelaide, not even bloody Australia itself. Like you say, three months at sea being sick as a dog thinking we’re going somewhere amazing and that’s where you end up! How anyone can treat little kids like that....some of us were only eleven or twelve, you know.”

“I know it. I think it will be a big scandal, what they did to you, in years to come,” Crowley said. He clapped Adam’s shoulder again. “It’s fine by me if you don’t want to see it again. I’ll go over now and again, now we’re the owners, we should keep an eye on it.” He smiled again. “I can sort out your seasickness, by the way. If you want. No need to suffer with that.”

Adam smiled back. “That would be...amazing, actually.” He paused. “I was going to ask you how, but...it’s just another thing you can do, right?”

Crowley grinned at that. He was getting it already. He had known he wanted Adam as soon as he read about him. “Yes, you’ve got it. OK – you want to see my house? Let’s go in and I’ll introduce you to Aziraphale. Not sure what he’ll be like, either, mind. Not seen him for a long while.”

“OK,” Adam said. “I wouldn’t mind a drink, either. Tea! I’d love a cup of tea.”

“Whatever you want,” Crowley said. As they approached the door, he gestured it open so that it swung back by itself, as if to welcome them home.

Aziraphale’s diary

Adam Young, the boy dear Crowley found to help me, has already become indispensable. He is so clever, he has already found new connections and ideas in books I've already studied twenty times or more. I have begun to think we really will be able find out who we are, and solve the great mystery.

Adam claims he doesn’t care about his old family but Crowley and I have done some small amount of research into his past. It is a tragic story. We traced the family to Southend, and we paid a visit to Adam’s old house. However, there was not much of a building left. A shell of bricks only up to about waist height, blackened and shattered. There had been a huge explosion, a gas explosion, eight months before, just about the time Adam – former resident of this former residence – was placed under arrest for a murder that never happened.

Now, here is a dilemma. Do we tell Adam about this? The work we are doing, the research, means that he might one day have the means to easily find out about it himself, but what good would it do for him to know it now? The fact is, Adam left England thinking he was already an orphan. What good would it do him to know that he hadn’t been, no, his family had all still been alive when he was shipped off to hell at that Australian farm? But since then, this horrific accident has occurred. So far as we could determine, the whole family save one sister had been blown up. So now Adam was truly an orphan. Only his early abandonment to the orphanage, done because the family had too many mouths to feed and his father had always believed that Adam wasn’t his child, (he looks very different to his siblings), had saved his life. God (or Someone) does work in mysterious ways, their wonders to perform. So they say.

What would it do to Adam to know this? If it were myself, would I want to know? I do not have a clue, frankly. Neither does Crowley, though he inclines towards honesty and telling him everything.

Anyway. We have decided not to tell him. Is that the right choice, in hindsight? I’ll be damned if I know.

Chapter Text

Aziraphale’s diary, April 1938

Paris in the springtime. Such a cliché, but Crowley, as Antonia again, loves it – she’s in her element. Lounging around in cafes, smoking gitanes and talking to earnest young men in glasses about fascism and art, drinking coffee and wearing Chanel – she was born for this city. Myself, not so much. For one thing I hate speaking French. Oh, I can do it, if required, but despite Monsieur Rossignol’s best efforts, I always feel like I’ve swallowed a handful of snails.

Good coffee though. And wine, of course.

I cannot recall why we first decided to live in Paris in these precarious years. Before this, I had been in Tadfield, perhaps spending a little too much time with my books (so says Antonia). I had not seen Crowley for several years. He had been in Australia persuading Adam Young to come and work for me. We never do stay together all the time, but that was a long separation. Australia being so far away, it was as though we really were both alone, and I did not like it. Simply: I miss him when he is away. As time passes my feelings have not changed, exactly, but grown stronger, I suppose. Probably Paris was Crowley’s idea; he has frequently expressed a desire to live here. And what do I always say if he makes a suggestion? I always say yes, of course. I can never refuse him.

Of course all of the sophistication and conversation is a thin veneer over the knowledge that something bad is going to happen. We know what it is, of course, in a vague way, but everyone knows that something is coming. There is a feeling of fatalism in the air, as though we are hurtling towards something, powerless to prevent it. There has been so much bad news – the civil war in Spain, the anschluss, the blackshirts in London, and the dark rumours coming out of Germany.

We had been staying in hotels for the past two or three months but since we have decided to remain in Paris for a while I have acquired an apartment on the Rue Demoulins. Walking down the street in the sunshine with Antonia, we could be any normal pair of lovers. Apart from the fact that we actually are not lovers at all, much to my regret, it has never really happened although I will freely admit that I love her. I am never sure if she feels the same. For long periods we do not see each other. We always return to each other, because...well, she has been around for three hundred years or so, and so have I. Old habits, I suppose we are, to each other. I cannot imagine carrying on with this endless life without her, whether nearby or far away. So long as she is in the world, I will stay, if I can. If Crowley were to leave me though....could I continue? Without him? On my own?

Upstairs from their little place on the Rue Demoulins, there was a family living in a double flat, the LaPierres. As they walked up the stairs to let themselves into the apartment, the family were coming down, footsteps clattering on the bare boards, a tall, slim woman in a cloche hat accompanied by two children, a young boy in short trousers and a youngish girl with brown curly hair half-covering her face, biting her lip as she saw us.

“Bonjour, Madame,” Aziraphale said, raising his hat and introducing them.

The woman bobbed her head in reply “Bonjour,” she replied. “Are you our new neighbours? My name is Avelina LaPierre.”

Aziraphale barely heard her, captivated as he was in her huge grey eyes, framed with lashes that fluttered as she looked up at him. He dimly heard Antonia suppress a sarcastic snort of laughter behind him. She always thought it was hilarious when a pretty face fell for Aziraphale.

“...I’m sure we won’t disturb you,” she was saying.

“I’m sure. We’ll be hardly at home, I shouldn’t think,” he said. Then they were moving past, going out somewhere. “I hope we will see you again, Monsieur, Madame,” Avelina dimpled prettily as she walked by.

As they rounded the corner Aziraphale turned to Crowley, expecting an acerbic comment about the frank and open offer he had just received right there on the stairs. Antonia was leaning back against the crumbling plaster of the stairwell, a hand clutching at the neck of her dress and her face a peculiar green shade. She had shifted back to how she looked when he had first seen her, tied to the stake. Eyes wild and amber, red hair long and knotted.

“What is it, what’s wrong?” he asked, taking her arm to steer her up the stairwell.

“Aziraphale...didn’t you see....?” she whispered, eyes staring out of her blanched face. Her freckles had reappeared and they stood out starkly against her lack of colour. This was a little quirk of hers – she never looked quite the same as the last time you saw her. She changed herself like other people changed their shoes. Changing, all the time.

“Did I see what?” Aziraphale said impatiently. They were half a flight away from their new front door. Their new neighbours were all around, behind paper-thin walls lined with even thinner plasterboard and peeling paint. This was not the moment to have an Antonia Crow Psychic Moment, but it appeared that this was in fact what had happened.

“They are all doomed,” she whispered. “When Hitler comes into Paris this building will be one of the first to burn.”

“Well, no wonder the rent was cheap,” Aziraphale said dryly. “Come on, Crowley – are we going to go inside or stand around out here until Hitler actually arrives?”

“The young girl, Betony,” Crowley continued, whispering now, looking sick and ill. “That isn’t her true name...I couldn’t see her true name. But when I took her hand....oh my God, Aziraphale, the things I saw when I touched her. The things I saw.”

“Well, but we can help her, fix it, though, right? If we already know what’s coming.”

“No!” Crowley almost wailed. “This can’t be changed, it’s what will happen! We can’t change this – we shouldn’t even be here now!”

Aziraphale laughed. “We’ve changed things for hundreds of people,” he protested. “What about Adam? For a start.”

“No. We’ve changed things that we saw happening and were able to stop. What I see, when I....SEE, like that....it’s what will happen. It's the True sight. The full-on curse, just like the people in the village thought. They were right. I see the future, things that can’t be altered. What is the point of that gift, tell me that? What I see is what is.”

“You say so. But –”

“I know!” she yelled at him. “Please, Aziraphale. Everything I saw just now is going to happen. It’s never any different.”

August 1938

There was a knock on the door of the apartment – very tentative. Aziraphale thought it might be Avelina, though she wasn’t usually the tentative type. He hadn’t been wrong about her. She came round quite often, and it wasn’t long before she was telling him her husband didn’t understand her. She was trying very hard.

He was always the perfect gentleman, however. Not interested at all. He sprang over to the door and opened it with a flourish, only to find, not Avelina wearing a fur coat and nothing else, but her daughter, Betony. The one Crowley insisted was doomed.

“Betony? Is everything OK?”

“You tell me, Monsieur. Is my mother here again?” she asked, her eyes flashing as she peered around the apartment. It was empty, however. Antonia was off shopping or drinking coffee or something. He had been reading the newspapers and trying to work out how much of the material was propaganda and false information, based on what he and Crowley could glean from their limited knowledge of future events. It didn’t look too good, he had to admit.

“No, she hasn’t been here today,” he replied, hoping that would be it. But she had somehow shouldered past him and was standing in the salon, looking at his newspapers and frowning. Luckily he’d shoved his diary into a drawer before answering the door, as it might have been tricky to explain entries such as: Poland – September 1939?? Czechoslovakia before/after fall of Paris? Unclear. Relevance of Warsaw?? Crowley – is St Pauls on fire?? – not sure when. Fall of London?? Seems unlikely but may be possible. Nothing in Nostradamus or Shipton. German air force???

Betony picked up a copy of Le Monde and put it down again, restlessly. “I don’t like to read these,” she said. “Maman says that there will certainly be another war. She says you have to live for the moment.”

“That’s good advice,” Aziraphale said cautiously, wondering where she was going with this. Betony was a strange girl. She was just a little bit brighter than the rest of the LaPierres, somehow. The rest of the family were completely normal and ordinary, but she was always asking questions, always worried about something. At the age of fifteen she read the newspapers avidly, and consequently knew far too much about what was going on.

“My father works for the government,” Betony said. “But he says he’s going to join the army, he says that France will need her protectors. Grandpere doesn’t agree, of course, says he’s crazy. Would you fight, if it came to it?”

Aziraphale shook his head, shocked that the mild-mannered Geralde was thinking of becoming a soldier. He couldn’t think of a less likely person. To be honest he was probably much more use to France as a local government clerk, or whatever it was that he did. “No, I wouldn’t fight unless I had to,” he replied. Aziraphale wondered how much to say. His reasons were strong, but he couldn’t really tell Betony that during the English civil war he had disembowelled a man with his own sword in a bloody pool of liquid mud and shit in a field in Scotland, and that doing that once was once too often.

“Some people would call you a coward,” Betony said scornfully. “Waiting at home with the women.”

Aziraphale was stung into a reply. “Betony, it’s just that I’ve seen wars before. I’ve fought before. There’s no glory in it. And I’d still say the women waiting at home have the harder job,” he finished, speaking softly. He was remembering the civil war, that terrible time, when there was no real way of getting news of the conscripted infantry soldiers, and a lot of desperate wives and daughters and mothers waiting, waiting, and sometimes never finding out. Never knowing what had happened to their men, their husbands and sons. No, he thought, if it came to a choice of fighting or waiting, he’d fight. But preferably, neither.

“I wish my mother wasn’t...friends....with you,” she burst out. “If my father goes off to be a soldier, I don’t think he’ll come back. And that will be your fault. You know, it was better before you came here. I wish you’d leave.” She paused ominously. “If I could make it happen, I would.” And then she whirled around and out of the apartment, slamming the door behind her.

“Are you serious?” Aziraphale asked, placing the wine glass down carefully on the table. If he held onto it it might well go flying in sharp furious shards, if he had heard the accusation correctly.

Avelina nodded, the colour high in her cheeks. She pulled her coat around her, roughly tying the belt. “Quite serious,” she said, tightly. “You need to stay away from my daughter. Seeing me is one thing but I never imagined....”

“Neither did I!” he said, outraged. “I promise you I haven’t gone near Betony. I’ve not even thought of it! She’s a child!”

“That’s not what she’s implied to me,” Avelina snapped, snatching up her handbag from the sofa.

“Avelina, someone is lying to you,” Aziraphale said, trying to soothe her. “Seriously! What do you take me for!”

“A man who tried to seduce his neighbour within moments of meeting her?” Avelina was openly furious now. “His married neighbour? A man who lives with another woman who is definitely not his wife? That’s the kind of man I know you are!”

“Oh, right, I’m seducing you? You’re round here all the time! I don’t think I am the one trying to do anything of that nature,” he replied sarcastically, angry himself. “It wouldn’t be very difficult to seduce you, Avelina, if I had any inclination to do so!”

“Well. You won’t do the same with my daughter, Monsieur Fell, that I will tell you now! If I catch you even speaking to her again, I shall go to the gendarmes!”

“Go ahead,” he said, holding the door open for her to flounce through it.

“Don’t give me a cause,” she hissed, and slammed the door. Betony’s words echoed in her wake: If I could make it happen, I would. Presumably this was how she had decided to do it.

Antonia had been in the kitchen and had heard the whole sorry row. She came strolling through, dressed in her own version of a Chanel dress she has seen someone wearing at the Moulin Rouge. “Az, what have you been up to?” she said, lighting a cigarette in her silver holder.

“Not seducing fifteen-year-old girls, that’s for sure,” he said crossly. “If she wanted to stop coming round – not that anything happened! - why not just say so?”

Antonia shrugged. “Feels guilty, I suppose. Listen. How much longer are we going to stay here? I have a strengthening feeling that we should get out of here sooner rather than later.”

“I know, I know. I just....I feel bad about leaving everyone just as the proverbial hits the fan, Crowley. Don’t you?”

She shrugged again. “It’s not the first time we’ve done it. Only an insane person would purposefully walk towards trouble, right? And trouble is certainly coming here. I had another flash today. Not as bad as the one with Betony, because, shit, nothing is that bad. So nothing like that. But bad enough. Tanks in the Champs-Elysee. A red flag hanging over City Hall, a fucking swastika flag. I reckon it’s time to go, Aziraphale, I really do.”

He opened the drawer and pulled the hastily-stashed diary out of it. Flipping through their notes, he said, “When? You have 1940 here, in the summer, that’s still two years away.”

“But it could be wrong. And I’m getting a strong impression that we should be back in England by then, anyway.”

Aziraphale closed the book firmly and shook his head. “You can leave now if you like, Crowley. I’m staying until we know for sure the war is coming.”

“It’s bloody well coming!” she almost wailed. “Can’t you taste it? When you go outside can’t you see the shadow over all the people who’re going to die? I can almost hear the bombs. How much bloody proof do you need?!”

“I’m not as sensitive as you are,” he said. “You know, I wish Adam had been able to find the Nutter! The Nice and Accurate Prophecies.... it’s generally agreed, you know, that the Nutter prophecies are true. Right. Genuine. But, the book is lost.”

Crowley shook her head in despair. “I don’t need any more prophecies! I’ve made my own. War is coming!”

The truth was, Aziraphale could sense most of what she had described, but he was in denial. He had never really believed that she could sense the future, regardless of how many times they had done so. He crossed to the window and looked out down the avenue at the swaying boulevard of trees, the late sunshine, the beauty and the peace. How could all of this be destined for destruction in under two years? It couldn’t be real.

Paris, September 1939

It was all going to hell in a handcart. Crowley had packed up all of their possessions and was now frantically clearing the apartment of any traces of the two of them. The Germans had invaded Poland just as Crowley had forseen, and they knew what was coming next. They had to leave. They were headed for England, which they were fairly sure was safe. They had Tadfield Manor there waiting for them, anyway.

Avelina caught Aziraphale red-handed shoving bulging suitcases out of the door of the apartment.

She grabbed his arm as he tried to sweep past her down the stairs. “Monsieur Fell!” she said. “What are you doing?” Her eyes were big and afraid. “What’s happening? Do you...do you know something? Have you heard something? Why are you leaving?”

He tried to shake her off. He’d never forgotten what Antonia said was going to happen to the LaPierre family when the Germans reached Paris. She had also insisted in very strong terms that they couldn’t change it. It would be wrong. There would be repercussions. She could feel the badness of it.

This was how she said she could tell which things couldn’t be changed. Sometimes a cold black dread seized her when she tried and those events they learned to leave well alone. Crowley felt it much more strongly than Aziraphale, but even he could taste the rank badness of trying to change what was going to happen in Paris.

But looking down at Avelina now, he thought that he had to do something. Give her half a chance. He pushed the door open and she stepped inside.

There was nothing left in the apartment to sit on, so Avelina sat on the floor by the kitchen door. Aziraphale crouched beside her, chewing his lip and wringing his hands.

“Why are you leaving? Have you heard something?” Avelina demanded again.

Aziraphale sighed. “I have heard plenty,” he replied. “But....listen, if I tell you what we know, you cannot, you cannot, breathe a word of it to anyone else.”

Avelina drew in a breath. “Are you spies?” she gasped.

He laughed and shook his head. “No, nothing like that. The fact is, Avelina, that Antonia is...she has some....psychic ability. She has seen things that are going to happen in Paris. Things that will happen to you.”

Avelina has started to laugh, but he must have looked serious enough that she stopped, and held her hand in front of her mouth instead, chewing her thumbnail. Her grey eyes were still large and wide as she started at him, disbelieving but not unbelieving. “Psychic ability?” she said. “Really?”

Aziraphale nodded. “Yes. Listen to me, Avelina. You need to leave Paris. There is going to be an invasion. The Nazis will be in Paris by June next year – we think. The timing isn’t clear. What Antonia has seen clearly is that the French army’s defence strategy will not work – Hitler will get through it like a knife through butter. That’s what she says. By the end of the summer France will have surrendered. She’s seen Hitler sightseeing at the Eiffel Tower.”

Avelina began to laugh. “I’m sure!” she said. “And how exactly has she seen all of this? How does she know what the French army’s defence strategy is? Psychic powers! I don’t think so, Monsieur Fell. I think you are German spies, or traitors. Why should I not go to the gendarmes right now with this?”

“Because we aren’t spies! I’m telling you the truth. We are clearing out now because Antonia has seen this coming. She’s been on at me to leave for over a year now! We have a place in England, we’re going to go there. She doesn’t think that England will be invaded, although she can’t see for sure. It gets more fuzzy the further ahead she looks.” He took Avelina’s hand. “There was more that she saw. About you, and....and about Betony especially. You need to leave Paris. If you stay here you won’t make it. This building is not safe, you are not safe. Geralde needs to stay off the front line and come April or May next year you need to pack a bag and get out to the countryside. Go south. Head for England or Switzerland. There is –”

Avelina ripped her hand out of his. “Are you serious? How do I persuade Geralde to stay off the front line? He’s a soldier, a volunteer! Switzerland? Oh, of course! We’ll just move to Switzerland at the drop of a hat, because your crazy common-law wife has been at the absinthe and thinks she’s seen Adolf Hitler on tour! You’re both insane.”

“I’m just telling you what Antonia has told me. She isn’t normally wrong. She says this building will be shelled during the invasion. She says...she says that you and Richarde won’t make it out of here, that Gerald is killed in battle, and that Betony....”

“What about Betony?” Avelina was breathing heavily.

“Betony will join the Resistance,” he said quietly. “And she will be captured.”

Avelina was silent. Aziraphale hadn’t told her everything that Crowley had seen. It was Betony’s ultimate fate that had made her stagger away from the girl that day they first met the LaPierres, not just her capture but her torture at the hands of the Gestapo.

“I don’t believe you,” she whispered. “How can you know that any of this will happen? I must talk to Geralde....”

Avelina staggered to her feet and made her way to the door.

And Aziraphale...panicked. He couldn’t let Avelina leave with this knowledge! He shot across the room and grabbed her shoulder, pretty violently it has to be said. He forced her to turn around, made her meet his eye. “Forget I said any of that, Avelina. Forget it all.” He turned on the suggestion all the way up. Suddenly he was drenched in cold sweat. Avelina’s eyes glazed over and she nodded, dreamily. He hated to do this but he had to. Whatever had possessed him to tell her everything in the first place?

“Avelina, you were never here. Go back upstairs and forget you ever saw me.”

She picked up her handbag dreamily and turned around, walking dazedly towards the door. She passed Crowley on the way out, who knew what had just happened with one glance at the departing Frenchwoman.

“Aziraphale, are you fucking insane?” she hissed at him. She had her hair tied up in a red peasant scarf and looked very un-Crowley like. “You actually told her what I saw? I thought you’d lost the plot before but now I know you have. You need to stay away from vulnerable young people, Aziraphale, for your own protection. One look at a pretty girl that needs help and you’re all over the bloody place!”

He shook his head. “No, I just can’t up and leave people we’ve been friends with, people we like, to face...whatever it is that’s coming.”

Crowley slapped the wall beside the doorway in pure frustration. “You can and you will. We have to go. Tadfield Manor is all ready, we’ve even got Jailbird back there already setting everything up for us. Now come on. Pull yourself together. Are you ready to leave?”

Looking around at the empty apartment with a heavy sigh, Aziraphale nodded. Yes, he was ready to leave. He put all thoughts of Avelina and her family firmly behind him.

Crowley looked at him anxiously. “We come, we do what we want, we leave when it gets too hairy. That’s what we’ve always said, right? We help people who we can help, but those we can’t: no regrets. Right?”

Aziraphale nodded, firmly, though he felt far from firm on this. He always felt they could do more. He tossed his keys onto the empty table standing by itself in the centre of the salon. In eight months, this room, this building, would be ashes.

No regrets? he thought. I can’t say that. As the man once said, I’ve had a few

Chapter Text

Years later, it was the smell she remembered. The hall was dingy, with damp wooden floors and curling wallpaper, and filled with the musty scent of mould. Rain beat down on the tin roof, a continuous hollow sound above them. For a long time afterwards, Marjorie Potts could not think about their first, horrible night in Tadfield without physically shuddering, and the smell in certain buildings gave her vivid flashbacks in which she was back there, standing in the hall as the night wore on. A space was growing and spreading around Marjorie and her younger brother Lockie (which was short for Warlock – as with many other decisions their mother had made, Marjorie had frequently questioned that) as other children were led away in ones and twos by well-heeled ladies in sensible skirts and fur-collared jackets. Activity and sound swirled around the two of them, but she and Lockie were still and quiet.

Quiet, but not calm, because the nagging feeling she had been keeping at bay all day was getting stronger and stronger as time stretched out, and she became more and more sure that the two of them were in the wrong place. The crowd that had pressed into the dingy little hall was wearing thin, and most of the children she recognised from the train had already gone off in various directions. A man in Navy uniform had come and peered at them for a long moment, before shaking his head and moving along the line, eventually picking out a little girl with blonde curls escaping from underneath her hat.

In Marjorie’s mental revisits of this endless night, they never did move, but stayed put, frozen to the spot as the lights were turned down, the blackout put into place, and the hall door was locked and bolted. They were left there in the dark. Spiders scuttled over their frozen feet….Then she would snap out of this, with a physical shudder, and remember that this had not happened, or had only happened in her over-active imagination.

Lockie had started to get restless, scuffling his worn shoes at the scratched wooden floor. One shoe was broken almost in half, held together with string and the other looked sure to follow it soon. Marjorie held onto his right hand, more and more grim-faced, clutching him tighter as the room emptied out, thinner and thinner, less and less people. He was starting to grizzle, kicking his tattered shoes together, pulling away from his sister as she held onto him. Lockie was holding his left arm awkwardly again, as well, holding it away from his body so the painfully mis-set bone in his elbow wasn’t touching anything.

Her own hand was numb and sore from clutching the battered case that their aunt Harri (which was short for Harriet, but if you knew what was good for you, you never let her hear you use that name) had handed to her before they left the house. Just before they had boarded the train she had said sternly (but she was always stern), You make sure you keep hold of that case as well as your brother, before turning around and leaving them at the end of the platform. Marjorie hadn’t dared to let go of it since, and her fingers were cramping in agony, freezing cold in the chilly hall and stiff as ice too.

Earlier in the evening, when the place had been fuller and she had still felt hopeful, as though this might be an adventure, a nice-looking woman in a green suit and an actual fox-fur stole had come up to them, smiling kindly, saying, “Are you our girl?” Marjorie pulled her brother forward, muttering that she wasn’t going anywhere on her own, her brother had to come, she had promised. “Oh, no,” the lady said, her kindly expression changing abruptly to one of vague disgust, “our girl is on her own.” And then she stalked away without a backward glance.

Since then no one had approached them. Marjorie had been wondering, with a growing sense of panic, what happened to evacuees with nowhere to be evacuated to? Aunt Harri didn’t want them back in London – Marjorie remembered the enthusiasm in her aunt’s voice as she told them about going off to the country to be safe from Hitler – but at the same time, Harri’s own children – their cousins – had stayed in the city. If it really had been such an adventure, so much safer, why hadn’t Billy and Col and Sara come, too? They were still back home in East London.

They had only set off early that morning, but it felt like a lot more time had passed. It had still been dark as pitch outside when Harri had crept down the stairs to the front room where the two slept on a thin mattress wedged into the corner beside the dead fireplace. She shook them awake roughly and ordered them to get dressed.

“You’re going away today,” she said. “Out to the country, keep you safe from the war.”

Rubbing her eyes, Marjorie started to ask a question but her aunt hushed her with a flap of her hand. “The others are still asleep. Quiet now,” she whispered with a hiss, and neither of them spoke again. They dressed quickly in the freezing room (the fire would only be lit when Billy came in at the end of the day) putting on raggedy vests, a faded skirt, a shirt with one cuff missing. Lockie struggled to get his pullover over his head without wrenching his injured arm, so she helped him, silently, automatically holding her hand over his mouth so that he could moan in pain without anyone hearing him.

While they were dressing Harri put a pan on the stove and made some thin, grey porridge. While it was boiling she put a tatty old case on the wooden table with a paper label tied on it. “There’s your clothes,” she said, spooning the gruel-like porridge into cracked bowls. She gave each of them a cup of weak tea as well, and stood over them while they hastily ate this poor breakfast.

As soon as they were done eating she whisked the bowls away and held out their thin coats to put on. Marjorie’s in particular barely fitted her any more. “Hurry, now, you don’t want to miss the train,” Harri said. Opening the back door she peered furtively down the alley before ushering the two children out in front of her. She seemed anxious and nervous, chewing her lip and pulling a strand of hair down from under her black hat, worrying at it.

Marjorie carried the case as they walked to the station. It was a long way, and her arm was aching by the time they were halfway towards their destination. She didn’t complain. Lockie could not carry it, and their aunt wouldn’t, so it was up to her. The cardboard box containing her gas-mask kept banging into her shoulder, and she could feel a bruise coming up. She tried to shift the weight without slowing the route-march pace that Harri was setting for them.

Harri had not said a word since they left the house and Marjorie had a horrible feeling in her chest that something was not right about this. Everyone had heard about the evacuations, some of the children from around their street had already gone, but they had done it all together with their schoolmates, gone to the school on a Saturday morning with their belongings and all set off together in a big, desperately cheerful crowd. This was not how Marjorie had imagined it was going to be like at all, this furtive scuttling through the darkened streets.

At last they arrived at Euston and Aunt Harri took them through the back entrance rather than the front from the Euston Road. There was a crowd of children waiting on the station, all loaded down with bags and gas-mask boxes and coats, and Marjorie breathed a sigh of relief when she saw them – maybe it was going to be alright after all.

Harri bundled them onto the train, and it was only after the engine had gathered pace and started to steam out of the station that Marjorie and Lockie realised that neither of them had any idea where they were going. ‘The country’ was a big place after all. Looking around with growing unease, she saw that all the other children were in a school uniform of green blazer and striped neck tie and straw boater-style hat – and each child had a label tied to the collar of their school blazer.

“Why don’t we have labels?” whispered Lockie, as he too noticed the difference between the two of them and everyone else on the train. Marjorie shook her head, not wanting to voice the growing suspicion that was forming. If she said anything out loud, it would make it true.

Of course, Aunt Harri’s house was pretty small. And Marjorie wasn’t stupid. Quite the opposite. In fact she thought her aunt was probably on her knees at this very moment, thanking her lucky stars for sending Hitler and letting her get rid of her dead sister’s children. Marjorie was only thirteen years old, and Lockie just eleven, but Harri would have seized the chance to get rid of them, it must have seemed miraculous to her when this opportunity arose. I’ll get my peace and quiet back, she could hear her voice now, as though it had been so calm and peaceful in that two-room back-to-back house before two more arrived to sleep on the floor beside the fireplace and eat their dinner by the back doorstep in all weathers because aunt Harri couldn’t afford any more chairs. More likely she just didn’t want to spend any money on them – the lengths she would go to to avoid opening her purse, and she wasn’t that poor – not dirt poor, bread-and-dripping every day and count yourself lucky poor like some of her neighbours were. Harri wasn’t poor, but she was tight. This reluctance to ever spend money made her try things like setting Lockie’s elbow by herself, with no help but a tot of gin down his throat to dull the pain. No, Marjorie wasn’t stupid. She knew, she had known as soon as she saw the other children, with their blazers and their labels, what their aunt had done to them. They had been put on the train with a lot of other children who had actually been signed up as evacuees, but her and Lockie hadn’t been on the list. She had sent them away without even telling them that was what she doing, and without knowing where they were going. And, probably, without caring.

Marjorie knew that if no one claimed them tonight that they couldn’t go back to Harri’s. Probably, they could never go back there, which was just fine by her, apart from the more pressing question: where would they go instead? She wondered if Harri had given them the blanket that they shared from the bed that they had to make up on the floor every night – she suspected not, as the case was quite small and fearfully light to contain all the worldly possessions of two people. Surely with their two sets of clothes there wouldn’t be enough room for any luxuries…but if they had the blanket, threadbare though it was, at least they could bed down somewhere in the village. It wouldn’t be nice, being a cold spring and all, but they might survive long enough for her to come up with a better plan. Marjorie had some bread with her and a little bit of cheese (these had been stolen from another train passenger who had fallen carelessly asleep and left his bag open near to where they were standing – she didn’t feel especially good about this, but Harri had not thought to provide anything to eat at all, and she had also not given them any money, or their ration books. That was another problem she was trying not to think about.)

The hall had practically emptied out. The few people who were still there seemed echoey and far away. Marjorie had begun to feel dizzy, the dim lights were pulsing behind her eyes and the sounds of the hall became muffled. A man in a warden’s uniform was pulling down the blackout curtains and turning the lamps off at the back of the hall by the stage. She looked around and saw that they were the only children still there. A woman with a clip board was leaning on the side of the stage, speaking to another lady in a red hat, pointing at the board and then looking over at them. As Marjorie watched her, the lady bustled over to them, heels clicking sharply on the wooden floor. “Are you two still here?” She nodded, sullen, not meeting the lady’s eye.

“Well! And neither of you have labels! I suppose you had better come with me for tonight, but you’ll not be staying there, so don’t unpack anything. Mary!”

This last to another officious-looking woman who was standing by the door holding a large set of keys and obviously waiting to go home.

“Yes?”

“Was there anyone who wasn’t here tonight who could have had these two billeted on them? Pulsifers were in early, weren’t they?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so. They took that lovely-looking girl with all the curls. No, I don’t think there’s anyone….they must have miscounted. Look, they don’t have name tags. I wager they’ve been missed off the list altogether. Doesn’t surprise me, the way this has been organised.”

Marjorie frowned, thinking of her own straight dark hair and rather pale skin, and Lockie’s too – no match for ‘lovely-looking’ English roses, were they? She had been having horrible thoughts about their aunt all day, and they had now intensified and formed a solid mass of panic that threatened to fill her head. Would she…really? Just to be rid of them? Did she hate her sister that much? Dark thoughts crowded into her over-tired mind, and she pushed them away. Now was not the time – now she had to find somewhere for her and her brother to sleep. Disbelief could wait until they had a bed for the night.

Suddenly there was a flurry of footsteps outside the hall, and the door was flung back, letting in a swirl of rain, and nearly knocking Mary over. She dropped the keys. A lanky young man stood in the doorway, long brown hair curling into his eyes as he shook water from a large black umbrella.

“Are we late?” he said, completing his dramatic entrance. Behind him was an incredibly stylish woman in a smart hat and gloves. Hope stirred itself in Marjorie’s heart – not a lot of it, but some. Here were more people, after all.

“Yes,” said the woman named Mary grimly. “But is the Manor not full already anyway? You aren’t on my list, Mr Young.”

“There’s always room for a couple more,” said the woman briskly. “I dare say your list is wrong, anyway. Military precision, right?” The young man smiled over at the two strays. They made a forlorn-looking pair, standing alone in the middle of the empty hall, the girl clutching a threadbare suitcase, the boy biting lips that looked blue and pinched with cold.

They turned to the officials again, the man looking sheepish. The officious woman pursed her lips. “You’ve been well-matched, anyway, apparently. They’ve been missed off as well,” she snapped. “I’m sure I don’t know what is going on.”

Marjorie was still clutching Lockie’s hand. She couldn’t feel the muscles in her arm at all now. The stylish woman came towards them, bent down to Lockie’s level, and said, “Hello there.” She was wearing a hat with a feather, and red lipstick. He had never seen anyone so glamorous, not close up anyway. You saw them dressed like that if you went up to Kensington, or Oxford Street, but they very rarely went up west.

Lockie’s response was to put his fingers in his mouth. His sister nudged him furiously, but didn’t dare let go of him for long enough to pull his hand down again. She didn’t want to yank that arm around anyway – if anyone saw that the first thing they would have to do for him was fork out for a doctor, they’d have no chance of getting out of here.

“He’s shy, miss,” she said, her voice croaky. “It don’t mean he can’t speak, or nothing.”

“That’s fine. Now, Mary – Miss Hodges, is everything in order for us to take these two home with us?”

“They have no labels, and they are not on my list, Mrs Fell. Neither are you on my list. But other than that…I’m not sure. The vicar may be prevailed upon I suppose…”

The floppy-haired man – he wasn’t very old, on closer inspection, maybe sixteen or seventeen, the same age as their cousin Billy - smiled at the two of them again and gave a little wave. Marjorie decided he looked friendly enough – she wasn’t as sure about the stylish woman, Mrs Fell, who was smiling as well, but looking slightly pained about the whole thing – and of course, she thought, you could never tell. Aunt Harri charmed a lot of people, but it wasn’t what she was really like. She had seen Lockie’s arm the previous morning when he had got out of the tin bath – You can’t go off to those people looking like the filth my sister raised you as – and it was still black and blue. She couldn’t even remember what his indiscretion had been – probably stealing food, or cheeking Billy, something hardly worth mentioning. But Billy had been told to get the strap out, and he did so, whaling on the poor kid until he was screaming and then slamming his elbow in the back door just for good measure.

“That’s fine, Miss Hodges,” the man was saying now. “We’ll take them for now anyway – we’ve got the space.” He turned back to the brother and sister standing hopefully behind him. “Come on, then.”

He reached for their case, and Marjorie limply gave it to him. As she uncurled her fingers they screamed in protest, although not as badly as she’d feared. He seemed to lift it with no effort at all, reminding her again of the probable lack of anything useful inside it.

They left the hall, with Miss Hodges emphatically closing the door behind them as they walked away from it – the building hulked like a prison in the dusk behind them as Marjorie glanced around at it. The young man swept his umbrella up over them to keep the misty rain off their hair as they walked.

For about five minutes they walked in silence, both of them lost in their own thoughts. Marjorie was practically dragging Lockie along, and tiredness had hit her, too – her eyes felt gritty and dry, and kept closing on their own. She was walking along in a kind of dreamlike state of horror, because she knew that this was not going to be the end of it – they were going to find out that far from being missed off the list they had never been on it in the first place, and once the people in this house found out that they were stowaways, they would be sent away again, to God knew where.

As they approached the house – it was dimly visible, a shadow against the slightly lighter sky – the rain was clearing a little - someone opened a door and light, warm and inviting, spilled out of it. The light seemed to shift and multiply in front of her desperately drooping eyelids. The woman said something about attic bedrooms…attic bedrooms! Billy had a room in the attic back in London and she loved going up there, even on pain of being discovered by her violent cousin. She would wedge herself in the window seat and look down onto the street from the great height she was at, above the tops of the old electrified gas lamps. And then, of course, the war had started, and the lights were turned off to hide the city from the Luftwaffe….but she remembered. She replied – or thought she did – that she would love to sleep in the attic, and then they were stumbling over the doorstep and into the warmth and the light, the horrible day behind them temporarily forgotten.

The next morning, Marjorie opened her eyes and saw a clean white painted ceiling above her. Turning her head to the light she could see a small curtained dormer window, with sunlight streaming in through a gap in the floral curtains. There was a wooden chest of drawers beneath the window and a chair beside it on which was placed their little case and the threadbare coat she had been wearing to travel here. She stretched out her limbs in the smooth, warm sheets – such luxury having this much space to sleep, and no one else in the bed with her kicking her legs! It was so warm, too – the room had a little fireplace, and curtains, and – she peered over the edge of the high bed – a thick woollen rug, too, rather than a threadbare rag rug. It smelled clean and fresh, and it was very quiet.

There was a light tapping on the door (turning to look in that direction she saw a fluffy robe hanging on a hook on the back of it) and the young man from the village hall stuck his head around it. The previous night seemed like a bad dream, although she knew it was going to come back. This was the dream. It had to be.

He was still grinning. “Are you awake? Did you sleep well?” he asked. He came into the room and perched on the end of the bed. “There’s breakfast downstairs when you’re ready, and then you can meet everyone.”

Marjorie realised that she was completely starving. She had also forgotten there would be other people – other evacuees. He saw her panicked expression and tried to reassure her. “Everyone is really nice, or I want to know why not. Don’t worry if you don’t like everyone right away. My name is Adam, Adam Young.”

“I don’t know if we’re staying,” Marjorie mumbled.

Adam stood up and moved back to the door. “I know there was some mix-up. No labels, or something? Don’t worry, this stuff happens all the time. No one has a clue what they’re doing! It’ll get sorted out.” He opened the door, making the robe swing on its hook, and stepped through. Halfway out he paused and turned back as though he had more to say. “You’ll both do alright here,” he said to her. “It’s a good place.” He smiled again, gave a little wave, and closed the door with a soft click.

There were three other evacuee children at the house already. Lockie and Marjorie sat quietly next to each other at the large wooden table in the bright kitchen, shy suddenly, as they introduced themselves over delicious thick toast and honey, and a choice of hot tea and coffee. Aside from Adam, who seemed a little old to be an evacuee, there was Wensley, small, clever and dark-haired, and Pepper (“If I tell you my real name I’ll have to kill you”), who was very pretty and dark, but looked fierce to Marjorie. Finally there was a scruffy urchin-like child called Brian, who spoke with such a strong cockney accent that even Marjorie, an east-ender to the soul, had trouble understanding him.

The door opened, and a tall, red haired man breezed in. He was dressed all in black. He went straight for the coffee pot standing on the counter and only when he was furnished with a large mug of it did he turn and lean on the edge of the counter, surveying the kitchen and all of the evacuees, including the two new charges.

“Hey Crowley,” said Adam. “These are the two I picked up last night – Marjorie and Warlock Potts. Lockie, I think he prefers.” He was spreading butter thickly on his toast as he spoke.

The man leaning on the counter brushed his hair away from his startling eyes (were they yellow?) with one hand and raised the other to them in greeting across the table. “Welcome,” he said, drinking coffee. “Got everything you need?” He glanced at their plates and gave Marjorie a grin. “You can eat more than that, you know,” he said. “There’s plenty to go round.”

Marjorie had cut a piece of toast in half and was sharing it, dry, with her brother. She swallowed nervously, thinking she had better get this over with. But where to start? “We don’t have our ration books here with us, sir,” she began, almost whispering.

He shrugged one shoulder, finishing his coffee and placing the mug in the stone sink. “Adam told me there was some confusion. Don’t worry. We can sort anything like that out easily enough. The WVRS ladies are coming round in a little while to sort out your paperwork, but eat your breakfast first, there’s plenty of time.” He unfolded himself from the counter and then breezed out of the room again.

Lockie had taken him at his word and was scooping jam onto his bit of toast with sparkling eyes. Marjorie, her face burning with shame, picked up her dry toast and tried to eat some, but it tasted like ashes in her mouth. She looked around the kitchen, bright in the morning sunlight, at the table heaving with food, at the friendly young faces sitting around it. Imagine staying here! But it was pointless to dream. When they were found to be stowaways, they’d be kicked out at double speed and that was all there was to it.

After breakfast they all went out into the garden – it was a Saturday, so the horror of the half-day lessons with the local kids at the country school was put off for a couple of days – Lockie and Marjorie trailing after them. They were supposed to be digging vegetable beds but not much work was getting done. Marjorie was getting more worried about Lockie - he had barely said a word since they arrived, apart from yes and no. He was pale, with dark smudgy shadows under his eyes, and obviously in some pain from his arm. The other thing she was worried about was Miss Hodges, who could very well demand that they go back to Harri’s and come back when they were actually registered and supposed to be here.

The evacuees were exchanging gossip and scandal, Marjorie guessed it was for their benefit as they must have known all these stories already.

“My sister’s goin’ steady with a man din’t look a day over a score and five but they found out he was forty and already hitched,” Brian was saying. “When they was caught out he tried to tell ‘er that that was his brother. So my ma said anyway.”

“Wow! What did your ma do?” That was Pepper.

“Well,” Brian went on. “She was spittin’ furious. She screamed at Fanny all night, and at the end of it she chucked ‘er out of the house and said she could only come back if she promised never to see ‘er Mr Richmond again. I ain’t never heard language like that from my ma! But….” Another impressive pause. “But she refused, flat refused to listen to any of ‘em, and they eloped! He dumped his wife and his five kids, and they wen’ up to Gretna Green on the train and got married at the blacksmiths. At least, that’s what my other sister says. We aren’t supposed to mention Fanny any more ‘cause she’s living in sin.”

Marjorie thought that their story was no less interesting, but she wasn’t about to tell it. In fact, she had made up her mind on the train journey, wedged into a seat with three other slightly-less-scruffy east-end urchins, that no-one was going to find out about Aunt Harri and cousin Billy and how their mother had gone off to live in America without them, letting her own children believe she was dead.

Aunt Harri didn’t think that Marjorie knew that, but she had heard talk, and you couldn’t keep a shameful secret like that in a place like their old street. She had been peeling vegetables on the back doorstep one day, trying to scrape the peel off each rotting potato thin enough to pass Harri’s inspection. They were slimy and squishy under her fingers. Harri’s two neighbours, both with their hair wrapped in scarves and tied at the front, aprons on, were hanging washing across the alleyway, pulling the lines back and forth out of the bracket nailed into the bricks next to the upstairs window and gossiping as they pegged out their families’ faded clothes.

“An’ then there’s those two in Harri’s, o’ course,” said Glenda, taking the last peg out from between her teeth so she could carry on talking. “Harri’s spittin’ about her sister leavin’ ‘em here while she’s galivantin’ around America.” Marjorie had started paying attention at this point, although she didn’t stop peeling. She’d been caught like that before and she didn’t want Billy to get the strap out again if she could avoid it. He seemed to like using it on her a bit too much.

“Well, you know Harri’s told ‘em she was dead,” replied Martha, pulling the washing line towards her with a squeaking sound.

“She never did! Oooh, that’s bad…”

“Aye, but Harri knows Edie’s not going to come back. Easier all round, if they think she’s dead, I suppose.”

Glenda sucked air into her mouth, shaking her head. “Hard on them kids though, Martha, very hard…”

Marjorie had stopped peeling, and she had ended up getting the strap again. She had hardly felt the belt hitting her, so mild was the pain compared to the body-blow she had experienced sitting there on the back step and hearing that her whole life was a lie.

Back in the street, everyone except her and Lockie had known the dreadful truth – they had been abandoned. But here, in Tadfield, so far away from all those people, it was nobody’s business.

Even though she wasn’t going to give any out, she would nevertheless have liked to hear more East End gossip, but at that point the elusive Mr Fell came out of the house and called Marjorie and Lockie’s names from by the back door. She must have looked worried, as all the others rushed to reassure them.

“Don’t worry!” said Wensley. “If he’s got them two from the WRVS in there, you’ve got nothing to worry about. Both of them are actually half in love with him, you know. It’s actually quite pathetic. They’ll do whatever he says.”

Marjorie scrambled up, dusting dry winter grass from her brown skirt and knee-high socks. Her heart was thumping again. “Hope so,” she muttered. She personally doubted that the old witch with the clipboard who they had seen last night could be ‘in love’ with anyone.

They walked slowly towards the back door across the fine brown grass. Parts of the lawn were marked out with strings in preparation for the vegetable beds to be dug, and Marjorie nearly tripped over one of these markers as they made their way towards the house. She heard gales of laughter behind them as they walked, but it already sounded distant, as though it were happening in another country. She knew what was going to happen even before he said anything – they would be back in London by tomorrow morning. But where in London could they go? She could see them ending up trying to bed down in the Tube tunnels. Others had been doing that. At least it was warm down there.

Walking past the budding apple trees towards the house, Marjorie felt like a prisoner going towards the gallows. Beside her Lockie was clutching his elbow again. She grabbed his shoulder to make him stand straighter and leave the arm alone.

“Hello, Marjorie, Lockie, good to meet you properly,” Mr Fell smiled at them. He had a kind face, she decided, but again (look at Harri, everyone in the street loved her) that didn’t mean much on its own. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here last night to meet you both. Are your rooms alright?”

Alright! They didn’t know where to start with a reply to that question. A whole room to herself, and one for Lockie, with that huge bed, warm blankets, pillows….. “Yes, thank you,” Marjorie mumbled.

“Good, good, well, if you want anything, just let me know.” He opened the door that led to the little parlour room opposite the large, homely kitchen where everyone had eaten breakfast. “I heard there was a slight problem at the hall yesterday. Don’t worry - Miss Hodges and Mrs Barrett are here to sort it all out.”

Marjorie must have looked terrified – she felt tight and strained, as if she couldn’t remember how to breathe. They couldn’t send them back, they couldn’t, they couldn’t… if not for her sake, then for Lockie’s. Every day away from their brutal cousin was a good thing. And what would happen to him if they were reduced to sleeping on the streets?

“Hey, don’t worry,” reassured Mrs Fell, who had appeared behind them. “They won’t bite, not in this house.” She placed a hand on her shoulder to steer her towards the parlour door.

The parlour room was surprisingly dingy compared with the sunny brightness of the rest of the house. Mrs Fell sat down opposite them. They called her ‘Mrs Fell’, but they didn’t act as though the two of them were husband and wife. Maybe she was his sister? And who was Crowley? Adam would know – if they could stay here for long enough to ask him Marjorie had not unpacked the tiny case yet, she hadn’t even opened it, as she was sure that by tonight she would be back on the train going back to London and their aunt – if she would have them back.

The two WRVS women were perched uncomfortably on the edge of the stiff leather couch, knees primly together, each holding a cup and saucer. Each of them had a hat and bag beside them on the seat, and they were both in uniform skirt suits with their hair scraped back in severe chignons. Miss Hodges put down the cup as they entered. “Thank you so much for the tea, Mr Fell.”

“That’s quite alright. Marjorie, go and sit with your brother.”

Lockie perched on a stool near the dead fireplace. Marjorie went over and sat next to him on the edge of the other couch. His smaller hand crept into hers, and she clutched his fingers, remembering the despair of their last meeting with these women.

“Now if we may – Mr Fell, there are some paperwork problems with these two. Basically, aha, the problem is we don’t have any paperwork. It’s my belief that they are, ah, stowaways of some kind.” Mrs Barrett shook her head indignantly. “They were not supposed to be on my train at all!”

Mrs Barrett glared at them. Lockie clutched at Marjorie’s hand, tighter than ever.

Mr Fell smiled again at the two women. Miss Hodges looked flustered, obviously trying to avoid his eyes. He really was turning on the charm, pouring her more tea, positively oozing. Mrs Barrett, however, wasn’t impressed.

“They can’t actually stay here, you realise,” she announced briskly. “We don’t have any records of them. I mean, who are they? We don’t even have names!” Her voice had risen to a screech. Lockie was actually trembling – she could feel it carrying through his hand. She squeezed his fingers, reassuring him mutely through touch as she did whenever Aunt Harri had one of her screaming fits, which terrified him in their violence. The touch that said, I’ll look out for you, just stay next to me.

“Well,” Mrs Fell said, leaning forward with a plate of carroty biscuits and offering it to Miss Hodges, “the way I see it, since they’re here, they may as well stay. We can sort out the administration retrospectively, I’m sure that wouldn’t be too much trouble. We have plenty of room here, and there are other children already here. I’m sure they feel at home already.”

Marjorie thought it would be a good idea to agree, and nodded. Lockie didn’t move.

“Have you really got enough space here, Mr Fell? You do already have four.” She took a dainty bite of biscuit. “Oh, you must give me the recipe for these, Mrs Fell!” she gushed. “I take it carrot features somewhat, it usually does after all, but they’re so sweet!”

“Oh, yes, carrot, I expect, I don’t really cook myself, you know. Antonia does all that, don’t you, dear?” he beamed at the stylish Mrs Fell, who looked daggers at him in return but then nodded sweetly. Her eyes sparkled with humour. There was something curious going on here. They seemed to be having far too much fun. Marjorie was sure that both of the Fells were trying very hard not to laugh aloud. She swallowed past a dry throat. She wished they would share the joke – she was still terrified.

“Of course there is plenty of room. I’ll have to show you ladies round the Manor sometime, won’t I, Miss Hodges? There are some interesting antique pieces, from my grandfather’s day, you know,” said Mr Fell.

Miss Hodges actually blushed. Marjorie was amazed. The woman was acting as though she was about fifteen years old and talking to one of those RAF pilots who were always hanging around in their uniforms chatting to the girls. And in front of his wife! Or whoever she was…

The other woman staunchly stuck to her point. “It’s all very irregular, Mr Fell. We don’t even know….what are your names?” she shot across suddenly. Marjorie jumped slightly, but managed to answer.

“Marjorie and Lockie Potts,” she replied. Her throat had gone bone dry.

“Can he not speak for himself?”

“He’s shy, miss.”

“Quite.” She tutted her teeth together. “You know, the vicar has agreed to take some more evacuees.”

Mr Fell smiled fully at her then, and actually reached out and touched her arm. “That’s very good of him, Mrs Barrett, but we are perfectly happy to have them here.”

He held her gaze. The tension in the room grew and grew. No one spoke for a long time. Marjorie thought she would have to scream soon to break the thrumming silence. What was happening? Eventually the woman smiled rustily and moved her hand away from his. “Very well. If there’s any trouble, they can move down to Reverend Clunes later on. If you change your mind, I mean. Come down to the hall and register them at your convenience, Mr Fell. I assume they have their ration books and things?”

Marjorie shook her head miserably and paled still further at that, but Mr Fell smiled again and said he was sure there would be no insurmountable problems.

Mrs Barrett stood up, shaking out her skirt and putting her volunteer service hat back on. Miss Hodges hastily stood up, too, gathering her own hat and bag.

“Well, thank you for coming. I’ll see you out,” Mr Fell said, and held the door open as the ladies hastened through it with a clatter of officious heels. Mrs Fell followed with the empty plate and cups on a tray.

Lockie and Marjorie followed them out without a word. The door creaked shut behind them. Marjorie let go of her brother’s hand at last and they exchanged an incredulous look. Lockie was grinning. “We can stay here?” he whispered. She nodded, smiling herself. “I think we can!” she whispered back. They gripped each other’s hands, both grinning excitedly.

Mr Fell was leaning on the front door-frame, head resting against one uplifted hand, watching the two WRVS ladies twitter their way down the gravel driveway. “Sure I've met her before. Anyway, she’s a tough one,” he murmured, apparently to himself. Hearing the two of them behind him he stirred himself from the door, closing it and turning back to face them.

“See, that wasn’t too bad was it?” he said. “They do like their official forms and their name tags. How did you get here without any of that, anyway?” He looked at Marjorie with a curious, probing look on his face.

They both stood staring, mute. Neither of them were going to say a word. Lockie shifted beside her and took a breath as though he might speak, and she dug her nails into his hand to make sure he stayed quiet. After a moment Mr Fell shrugged. “Fell through the system, I expect. Never mind, I expect you know who you are. Looks like you can stay.”

“Yes,” Marjorie croaked. Her throat was still desert-dry. “Thank you, Mr Fell…”

“Well – welcome, then, properly. And we use first names here, you’re going to live here after all, no need to be so formal. I’m Aziraphale.”

They both nodded again, wondering how they would remember a name like that.

“Right. D’you want a drink, either of you?”

Marjorie nodded. “Yes, thank-you,” she whispered through her dry throat. She was feeling light-headed with relief.

Mr Fell swept past them towards the kitchen, accidentally knocking Lockie slightly so that he was nudged into the door-frame as the man passed. A cry escaped his lips, hastily cut off, and he clutched his elbow. Lockie’s face was deathly, with a terrible green-tinged pallor. He was nearly retching with the pain. Before anyone could see anything, Marjorie grabbed him and pulled him away down the corridor towards the other sitting room, a finger to her lips.

Mr Fell – Azira something, had he said? - looked around sharply as he heard Lockie’s hastily suppressed cry of pain. Marjorie tried desperately to hustle him out of the starchy parlour room. She dragged him towards the stairs, thinking that if she could just get him to lie down for a while he would be fine again – they had discovered that the pain normally came and went in waves. But this time she didn’t make it that far. She heard her name being called again, and something in his voice called directly to her and she stopped fighting. Her body physically slumped, relaxed forward at the knowledge that their shame was about to be discovered. She just couldn’t fight any longer. Let whatever was going to happen, happen.

Marjorie surrendered. In a way it was a relief.

Mr Fell took Lockie’s hand – the good one – and led the boy into the kitchen. He told Marjorie to go outside for a while and help the others with the vegetable beds. She had no choice. She couldn’t think of resisting. The kitchen door swung shut behind her, slamming closed with a stark finality. Her heart was thumping away again – she thought it might wear out if she didn’t stop being terrified soon. But soon it would be over, one way or another. Lockie would probably tell him everything – he was too young to really understand why he should not. But it would become apparent that a doctor would need to be sent for, and paid for, to look at Lockie if they stayed - and they would probably be sent away anyway, despite the temporary reprieve that they had just been given. The temporary glimpse of a better life.

In a kind of fog, Marjorie wandered out into the garden. In the distance she could hear the others running around and laughing (they seemed to be spending a lot of their time doing this, and hardly any time digging the vegetable beds) but she couldn’t face joining them. She didn’t think that she could ever join them. She wandered away from them round towards the back of the house, behind the big flowerbeds (they hadn’t yet been earmarked to be dug up to plant carrots, but it was only a matter of time. There was a spade stuck into the earth in preparation for someone – presumable Adam and the rest if they ever stopped messing about – to dig for victory). She found a big, hollow bush, with big glossy leaves, in the middle of one of the beds, and bending down, she found that she could actually crawl inside it.

She felt churned up and anxious inside. The wardens were gone. They could, in theory, stay. But that had been decided before anyone knew about this. An expensive doctor’s bill just as they arrived, which would not endear them to the Fells at all. Marjorie sat in the middle of that bush, searching for an answer, but she couldn’t see how to get out of this. She was tired, tired of feeling like this, as though she had to hide secrets and always be on her guard. But Lockie was her brother. Her whole family, now. She was always on guard. She was young, though, too young to shoulder all of that, although plenty did, and far worse than her, she knew. Marjorie knew that she was being weak, that she just needed to get on with it.

From her position hidden inside the bush, she realised that she could see the through kitchen window. Lockie had been led in there while she was banished to the garden. She could actually see the two of them sitting at the kitchen table. Mrs Fell was there too, at the counter with a cup of coffee.

Lockie’s sleeve was rolled up and he was having his excruciating elbow gently prodded. His face was white. Even from this distance, Marjorie could see the pain in his eyes. They were shadowed, with lines around them that no young boy should have. She sat, transfixed by this sight, the sight of all her half-made plans unravelling. There was no way to get out of this now. It would all come out like poison from an infected cut. Their aunt, their mother, Cousin Billy, the lot. The only thing he would not find out was that their abandonment had gone even deeper, and that their mother was not dead at all, but living in America...Marjorie had shouldered that alone; Lockie had no idea of the level of her betrayal. But it meant that he couldn’t tell their hosts anything about it. He didn’t know.

Marjorie sat and watched, breathing in the sharp clean smell of crushed leaves. She had a leaf between her fingers and was tearing it into little tiny bits.

Cousin Billy was a thug. He had actually spent some time in prison, years before, when he was only just old enough to be sent there, before Marjorie and Lockie had arrived on their aunt’s doorstep. Now, he had no job but he always had money, and Harri asked him no questions. In her eyes, he could do nothing wrong, even the prison time could be explained away by the fact that he had selflessly taken the blame for someone else and was, of course, innocent. Marjorie had no doubt that he was guilty, and of a lot more than the robbery he had done his time for. Whenever she or her brother transgressed (which could be anything from wasting food, to not cleaning thoroughly enough, to cheeking one of their other cousins), Harri would call for him to get out the strap and he would make them stand braced against the kitchen table and beat them with it. He liked doing this, she could tell. He had pushed her up against the wall a couple of times, too, groping her and going on about how he knew she wanted it. She knew she did not. Marjorie would have been happy never to see him again. She knew that he was her blood, but she didn’t care. Blood hadn’t meant a lot to Harri, or their own mother, had it, for that matter.

Mr Fell and Lockie were speaking now, but Marjorie obviously couldn’t tell what was being said. He touched the most swollen part of Lockie’s injured arm – even from here she could see the injury clearly, the skin stretched over the crooked bone - and he flinched and pulled away, furiously wiping at his eyes with his other hand. His sister had tears pouring down her face in sympathy.

He had let go of Lockie for a moment and was speaking to him again, looking him in the eye, talking to him seriously. Marjorie was kneeling in the leaf litter, biting her fingers now, so hard that she drew blood from the skin beside her nails. She begged Lockie silently not to tell, to lie, to make something up, an accident, even a flat denial. She saw her brother shake his head slowly, then say something, and then nod. Tears of pain were streaking his face. Don’t mention Billy, don’t tell him, don’t tell him….

Lockie’s eyes then widened in terror, and he backed away from the table. Marjorie gasped aloud. Had Mr Fell mentioned doctors? Obviously these people were less stingy than Harri – it was a possibility that they would pay for treatment, she supposed. They were already looking after four children, after all. But Lockie was deathly afraid of doctors, since a dimly-remembered visit from one once when Billy had used the strap too fiercely even for their loving aunt to ignore, and he had a deep, pouring cut that wouldn’t stop bleeding. She must have thought he might actually die, as she wouldn’t have spent the money for anything less. Marjorie remembered the stern old man dabbing something on the wound that obviously stung like fire, and how Lockie had screamed and yelled! He’d only been about six years old when that had happened – it hadn’t been long after they had arrived. Since then Harri had decided that doctors were too expensive, for her sister’s children, anyway. But, no, Mr Fell was shaking his head now, and Lockie seemed to relax a little.

It was at this point that the world Marjorie thought that she understood went insane. She saw him press his hands directly and firmly onto Lockie’s swollen elbow. She actually opened her mouth to cry out a protest, despite the space and the glass between them, but then her brother, incredibly, started to laugh. Uncontrollably, and loud – she could hear it faintly through the window. Then Mr Fell removed his hands and Lockie flexed his arm out and pressed his fingers into his elbow. Marjorie would never forget the look of puzzled joy on his face.

Their host pushed his hands through his white curls. He reached across to pat Lockie on the back and winced, pulling back a little as though he were in pain. Lockie, on the other hand, was cautiously moving his arm every which way, clearly no longer in any pain at all. His eyes were sparkling. And Mr Fell looked suddenly exhausted, although he was smiling too. Mrs Fell put her coffee cup down on the table and came to look out of the window, directly towards Marjorie’s hiding place. She was frowning, and pointing straight towards her. Mr Fell got up from the table hurriedly and left the kitchen, Lockie and Mrs Fell following behind.

But out in the bush, hidden from view, Marjorie didn’t see this. She was on her hands and knees, actually gasping for breath. Terror clutched at her lungs, making the air hitch in her throat. Retching violently, she bent double and threw her breakfast up all over the dry leaf litter inside the hollow bush. She felt dizzy and faint, suddenly unbearably enclosed inside the enormous plant, as though she had been locked in the cupboard back at Harri’s house again. She felt pale, shivering, her lips turning blue as she gasped for air.

The image kept replaying, over and over and over. Already she couldn’t imagine ever not thinking about it. The smell of her vomit was making her feel as though she may be sick again, so she hauled herself out of the enclosure of branches and tried to stand up. Her legs were too rubbery, and she fell over clumsily.

At that moment, Wensley came dashing around the corner, holding a trowel. His skinny knees, sticking out of his brown shorts, were covered in mud stains, and he had a big, stupid grin on his face.

“Hey, are you alright?” he asked, stopping short at the sight of Marjorie. She was a sight, a scruffy, pale and trembling girl covered in sick. But he only looked concerned.

“I….I’m sick.”

He stopped, looking worried. She obviously looked scared half to death. Behind Wensley, Adam and Pepper hurried towards them. Marjorie had got to her knees, but started swaying again, the world fading out round the edges. Adam reached her, and put a steadying hand on her shoulder, looked into her face.

“Has something happened?” Adam asked, carefully.

“Like what?” Marjorie tried to sound frosty, but it came out as merely trembly.

“Well…something strange? Maybe?” Adam sounded concerned. She must look awful, pale and shaking.

Marjorie managed a nod. Adam nodded too, looking thoughtful. "I thought I knew that look. Seen it in the mirror, a time or two." He reached out a hand and she grabbed at it gratefully, pulling herself up.

“They think the kids don’t notice,” Adam said. “But they’ve all seen stuff. Like...I bet you've already worked out that you never see Crowley and Mrs Fell in the room at the same time? Yeah...don’t know how they think they’re hiding that, but there you go. At first you think you’re mad – stark raving, ready to be carted off to the rubber room if you want to know. Well, that was what I thought, at first, a long time ago now…We don’t talk about it, but it’s there. And it’s fine.”

Marjorie couldn’t move. It was anything but fine.

Adam looked sympathetic. He put a hand on her other shoulder, trying to look her in the eye. “We don’t think it’s anything bad. In fact, I know it isn’t.”

Adam had got her walking. Just as they rounded the corner of the house, however, Mr Fell himself came hurrying out of the front door with Lockie close behind. He was eating a sandwich, quickly and somewhat out of place, as though he was starving.

“Lockie!!” Marjorie screamed at her brother and tried to run towards him. But her legs were still too rubbery for that, though, and as she fell another wave of nausea gripped her stomach and her throat, and she felt unbearably dizzy. She knew she was going to faint.

Marjorie never fainted, the girls at school who went in for fainting were all seen as being a bit wet, swooning at the drop of a hat. The girls like her never did it, not the ones who faced the world down and didn't flinch. As she fell to the ground she saw Mr Fell hurrying towards her, throwing the last of the sandwich aside. He nearly got to her in time, but not quite. Marjorie lay on the grass, and she felt strong arms go around and underneath her and lift her bodily off the ground in one smooth movement, as though she weighed nothing. As he carried her inside, surrounded by the anxious evacuees, she stirred and moaned, but didn’t wake up. Or she chose not to wake up. Right now she just couldn’t face the world at all.

Chapter Text

"Adam, warm up some milk or something,” Aziraphale ordered, laying the half-fainting Marjorie down on the settee. “Pepper, some blankets please.” They scattered on their errands, leaving him and Crowley with Marjorie.

“Are you going to tell me what is going on?” he asked the girl gently. Marjorie shook her head, her eyes remaining closed. He made the decision there and then. He knew she would never tell them anything of her own accord.

“Fine. Would you….mind….if I found out anyway?”

Marjorie flinched away from him. He laid a cool hand on her burning forehead.

“What are you doing?” said Crowley softly.

“I was going to, you know, have a look. You can do it, if you prefer?”

“No, no, you go ahead. Be careful, though, angel, you know how it can be a bit rough.”

Aziraphale did know, very well. They had discovered over the years that they could see random thoughts, without permission. If the person was open to having their minds read, they could do it easily, but neither of them ever did it lightly. It was simple to do, on the surface, but there could be repercussions. It could leave the person with a lasting taste, a strange, fey, alien sensation of a foreign mind inside their own. The otherness of it. She might never forget it, she might always feel the embers of it burning in her mind. Especially if she resisted.

He closed his eyes and exhaled deeply. He wished for a cigarette. He put both hands on either side of her face and listened.

The thoughts were close to the surface of her mind – this was all he needed to do to be there. There was actually no resistance at all.

Aziraphale was in the locked cupboard with her for the second day as she begged for a glass of water…

behind the mouldering kitchen table with her as her cousin beat her brother with a leather strap…

at the same grimy table with her as her aunt told her she was worthless and she didn’t want them in her house any more…

waiting on the platform for the evacuee train with her, listening to Harri tell her she wasn’t to come back…

back in the slum with her as Billy held her up against the wall and threatened to kill her if she ever told anyone what really happened to Lockie’s elbow...

sitting with her as she held her brother down while her aunt tried to set the bone, a stick between his teeth and cheap gut-rot gin in his mouth...

and then crouched in the bush while terror washed over her at the sight of something happening to her brother, the sight of Aziraphale helping him, but in a way that she didn’t understand.

All the while Marjorie tried, feebly, to prevent him from seeing it all, but in a way that also let him in. She didn't resist, but she did put up a token defence, as though she knew she ought to, she shouldn’t just let someone do this, but he gently moved it aside, understanding that it was placed there through desperation. She was paralysed, because she wanted him – or someone, anyone – to know, for someone to take it from her, just as much as she wanted to keep it locked away.

Aziraphale sat in the armchair by the settee waiting for her to wake up. He drank tea, primly, from an antique china cup, the matching saucer in his other hand, and waited. He may have looked calm, holding a teacup and drinking slowly, but it was a dangerous calm. Inwardly, he felt rage. Crowley was in the other chair, and he had alcohol. His anger was not hidden.

Adam knocked on the door and poked his head around it, before coming through with the hot milk. He had waited a long while, until he judged enough time had passed for them to do what they needed to do. Aziraphale was glad to see him.

“Aziraphale?” He was glad of that, too, the use of his real name. He would have to get Marjorie and Lockie to use it, too. He never liked ‘Mr Fell’.

“Is she alright? She looked awfully sick before.” Adam placed the bowl of milk on the table and perched beside it.

“Yes – yes, I think she’s fine. Adam, did she tell you what was wrong?”

Adam shook his head.

They fell silent, watching Marjorie sleeping. A deep frown lined her young forehead, even staying as she dreamed. “Adam,” Aziraphale said. “I wish she wasn’t so afraid.”

“She said that...she saw something,” said Adam, avoiding his eyes, for a moment, and then meeting them defiantly. “You know what I mean. Something to do with you.”

“I think she’s seen a lot of things,” Aziraphale said softly. Adam flashed a questioning look. He shook his head. “You don’t need to know.” He paused. “Did you see Lockie sleepwalking? Any of you?”

Adam nodded. “Yes, last night. But a lot of the younger ones do it when they first get here. It’s creepy, but…they don’t remember it, afterwards.”

Silence fell over the room. Sleepwalking. It was a little bit creepy, but that was all. Their aunt’s insistence that it was the devil working though him…that had been another little scene he had watched. If she wasn’t careful she would truly see the devil’s work. All three of them had seen Lockie walking out, like a pale ghost, and Adam had led him to a seat until he woke up, but even then he wouldn’t say anything about his dreams. His face had been utterly blank – it had sent a shiver down Aziraphale’s back, and he wasn’t easily scared.

“How did Lockie come to break his arm, Aziraphale?” asked Adam quietly.

“That is a very good question,” he said grimly. “Lockie wouldn’t tell me, but I could see it clearly, in his head and in his sister’s. His cousin did it, on purpose. He was in agony, Adam! How he hid it even for this short time...”

“And why he hid it,” said Adam.

“Oh, that’s easy to answer. The tow of them lived with their aunt before coming here. She has drummed it into them that no one will ever spend any money on either of them, because they aren’t worth it. Something about her sister - their mother - running off to America – I didn’t get all of that. She wouldn’t get a doctor to Lockie, so is it any wonder that Marjorie wouldn’t dare to ask us for help? If family won’t help you, why would you expect anything more from strangers?”

“Sometimes help comes unexpectedly,” Adam said softly, rather choked up for a second, remembering Australia.

When Marjorie had jostled her brother into the door-frame on the way out of the parlour, Aziraphale saw straight away that he had gone completely white as a sheet, and was obviously in pain. He put a hand on his shoulder to ask what was wrong and his skin was burning. Decision made, he led him into the kitchen, Crowley following, closed the door and made him sit down. He pulled a chair round and sat at the corner of the table, facing him. Lockie’s face was livid, now, his eyes rimmed with red and his lips frankly startling in their hue. He was holding that left arm away from his body, not resting it on the table but just holding it as though afraid to move it.

“Is there something the matter with your arm?” Aziraphale asked him. Lockie shook his head instantly, and hard.

Aziraphale raised an eyebrow. “Let me see,” he suggested, and he carefully, reluctantly laid it on the table, looking fearfully at his face. Aziraphale rolled up his sleeve, so, so gently, feeling the fever in his flesh even through the fabric. His cuffs were frayed, he noticed, and the pullover he had on had darns of many slightly different colours.

Touching the swollen skin stretched over the elbow joint told me all he needed to know. The elbow had been broken, months ago, and set crooked, so that Lockie couldn’t straighten the joint without intense pain as the muscles contorted. There was also a bone infection, which explained the fever in his face. He stroked his fingers over the injured area, feeling the way towards healing it.

“Can you do it?” Crowley asked. At some point he had changed back, leaving Antonia in the drawing room, and Lockie hadn’t even really noticed. That was how far gone he was.

“Of course, I can,” he said. He could....but Lockie was looking at him, obviously terrified. He would need to reassure the boy, first.

“You have a break here that isn’t healing properly,” he said. “It can be fixed, though. Now, the way a doctor would do it would be to break the bone again and then set it straight, then it should heal smoothly and you’ll be able to move it again.”

Lockie’s eyes widened in terror, and he tried to back away from the table. But Aziraphale was still holding his arm, and a white bolt of pain shot through his elbow as he pushed backwards. Crowley winced in sympathy.

“Shh, Lockie, it’ll be alright,” he said, sending soothing thoughts towards him; but Lockie wasn’t soothed. “I’m not going to do that, though, not exactly. Will you let me help you?”

Lockie shook his head, violently.

“Well...I think I need to,” he persisted, trying to catch his eye.

The boy swallowed, once, twice. “Will it....will it hurt much?”

“No. I promise it won’t. And it hurts now, doesn’t it, all the time? I admit that there might be one second where there will be pain, but it’ll be so quick you’ll probably miss it. Shall we try?”

He nodded slowly. “OK. OK. But...but...please don’t make it worse.” He was begging, his eyes large.

“No pain afterwards, none at all,” he said firmly. “Now, listen. I’m going to hold your elbow, quite hard, and that should be agony, but it won’t be, OK? You won’t feel it at all. Look into my eyes, keep looking right at me while I do it. Keep looking, that’s it, really stare at me, into my eyes...”

While he was saying all of this he had in fact grabbed Lockie’s elbow and wrenched the bone violently back into it’s right place, shoving the damage into his own bones. He then drew the infection out into his own body, which would heal it quickly. He kept on babbling to Lockie, getting him half-hypnotised, staring into his eyes, when a lance of agony rammed into his own elbow as he took his pain. Jesus, it was strong.

Finally, it was done. Aziraphale dropped the boy’s arm, grabbed the glass of whiskey Crowley had materialised and thrust towards him, drained it and fell back into his chair, sweat pouring down his face, agony slicing up and down his own arm.

“Are...are you going to do it?” Lockie asked nervously.

Aziraphale brushed a through his damp hair with a shaking hand. “It’s done. I told you it wouldn't hurt much, didn’t I?”

Lockie experimentally stretched out his arm, and a look of joy crossed his face.

“It doesn’t hurt anymore! It’s stopped hurting!”

Aziraphale nodded tiredly. “Yes, I hope it has. You must tell me if any pain comes back, but I don’t think it will.”

He rested his non-screaming hand on the boy’s head for a moment. “Lockie, how did you come to break your arm, anyway?” he asked, carefully. He clammed up immediately.

“An accident,” he said. “Marjorie says not to talk about family stuff.”

Marjorie! They had both forgotten all about her. Crowley stood up and hurried to the window. Shit. Apparently she had seen the whole thing, without explanations or warnings. Damn.

Aziraphale’s diary.

These two who have ended up on our doorstep have lived a life of cruelty and torture at the hands of their own flesh and blood – their aunt Harri and her thug of a son, Billy. The pain Lockie had been dealing with...I can still feel it, faintly. It was harsh, it was monstrous. No wonder Marjorie is so fierce in her protection of her brother – she has seen him beaten and starved so many times without being able to help him.

Adam spoke to me later. He was hesitant to break into my thoughts, but he was also needing to say his piece, I think.

“All the evacuees know that this place isn’t like most other places,” he said, and he was nervous, awkward as he has not been with either of us since he first arrived and Crowley still called him Jailbird.

“I think these two will…get better, if they can stay here long enough. But….I think…please, don’t take this the wrong way…she needs to remember all this…stuff. I know that…sometimes….you can, I suppose, help someone to lose a memory, or make it get lost. I know you’ve done it before, to some of us. But…sometimes you need to know. Sometimes you need to be angry. I know all about that. I needed to remember everything about Australia, for example. Or the rest of it might stop making sense. I might start to think that it wasn’t that bad. I need to remember that it was.”

Something flashed into his face, then, and was just as quickly gone. He smiled bitterly, for a moment not looking quite like Adam at all. I really like this young man, he impresses me a lot with his thoughtfulness and his intelligence, not to mention the progress he is making with my – our - research. Crowley was not wrong - he had known how useful he would be the first time he saw him, handcuffed and ready to be sent down to that Adelaide jail-house.

“Thank you, Adam. You know, when we came back here, we thought we could be very subtle and do what we always do, and none of the evacuees would notice a thing. I also know that we have been proved wrong about that. Well, you know all about it, anyway, of course. But we do appreciate your….discretion.”

Adam laughed. “What would they tell?” he asked. “Who could they tell?”

I couldn’t give him an answer to that, so I stayed silent. We let Marjorie sleep.

Adam is right, of course he is. I think that Marjorie will only be better when she can tell me – or anyone else – freely, what I saw in her mind. I don’t know, though, if she ever will. God, or Someone, knows there are probably things buried in my subconcious that have never been brought out. And as for Crowley...sometimes I look at him and think that I do not really want to know all of his secrets. Those dreams of his...

And of course there are other things we don’t know. I have never forgotten that young woman, that Muriel. These unanswerable questions could drive us mad. Sometimes I am afraid, so afraid. What if the truth is something terrible?

In the end the WRVS ladies gave up trying to find out what had gone wrong and why they had turned up in Tadfield, and Marjorie and Lockie were allowed to stay at the Manor. To the outside observer, they settled into the slightly odd life lived in the big house with all the other evacuees, as well as the Fells. After what she had seen through the window through the leaves of the bush she had hidden in, Marjorie was still jumping at shadows but she did gradually get better and stop planning for their imminent departure. It seemed that their unofficial status did not matter, and there was no need to worry about the cost of medical treatment either, although she never thought directly about that, which seemed to help her sanity somewhat. New ration books were obtained, from somewhere. She didn’t question this directly, either. Everyone else at the house seemed to be fine with all the slightly off-kilter oddness, so at times she felt that she was the only sane one. They heard nothing at all from their aunt in London, and good riddance to her. If anyone else thought it strange that they never heard from their family, no one said anything to them about it.

But Lockie wasn’t so settled. He began to think and over-think about the healing Aziraphale had done in the kitchen, swinging between fully believing it had happened and wanting to stay, and doubting his own sanity and wanting – needing – to get out, get away, and be alone to try and process this huge thing that had happened to him. So, he kept disappearing, here spending a night on the moor, there going to sleep in the churchyard. He went a little further and stayed away a little longer every time. Marjorie didn’t breathe a word about this to anyone, though, so terrified was she that the Fells would be angry. She was so afraid of their displeasure. She had found their kindness and charity so fearsome – so how bad would their anger be?

Adam came hurrying into the kitchen, a frown creasing his forehead. Crowley, making coffee, was mildly surprised – Adam was usually in charge of the evacuees and rarely asked for help. He was, after all, so much more than one of them. But, today he looked genuinely worried about something.

“You alright?” he asked.

To his even greater surprise, Adam nodded, gave a fake smile, said that everything was fine, and hurried out again clutching a woollen jacket he had pulled from the back of a kitchen chair.

Everything was not fine, but Adam would say no more. He left Crowley in the warmth of the kitchen and hurried back outside into the bitterly cold day – it might be May but there was still a chill wind blowing in from the continent. He went down to the bottom of the garden, to the little stand of trees that had been left up when the rest of the parkland had been converted to beds for growing vegetables and fruit bushes. He slipped around the little clump of trees, chewing his lip.

Marjorie was still sitting on the stone bench at the bottom of the garden, hidden in the young trees, hands curled around her knees, hunched into a tiny space in the corner of the bench, and she was weeping. Proper, heart-rending sobs. She hadn’t noticed Adam’s coming and going at all, even when he had shaken her shoulder and called her name.

Adam now sat beside her again and draped the woollen jacket around her shoulders. She felt him, this time, and a physical jolt went through her. She was always very nervous of everyone, really hated people being close to her, and Adam didn’t know why. Well – he did know why, or half a story from Aziraphale and what he could glean from the little that Lockie would say, but he didn’t know what was wrong now. He knew that she was afraid of everyone, especially Aziraphale, he could sometimes almost see it in her face when he entered a room she was in, although she was very careful to hide it. Adam, who was very perceptive, had tried to reassure her, as had Pepper and the rest of them, but she was unreceptive to their entreaties. She knew that their aunt had fooled everyone, knew how easy it was to do. Wasn’t about to get fooled again by someone who everyone else thought was nice. Nice could hide anything.

“Marjorie? Has something happened?”

She sniffed, trying to wipe her eyes, denying there was anything wrong, although her whole face was swollen, red and tear-stained. “’S nothing,” she said, her voice cracked from crying. She pushed her hair back off her face with a shaking hand.

“Are you sure? Is there anything I could help with?” Treading very carefully, Adam tried to meet her eyes (something else that she would never do with anyone) and gave her shoulder a tiny nudge.

“It’s Lockie – he’s run away. I don’t know what to do. They...they will be so angry with him.”

Adam sat beside her as she recovered herself a little. “They won’t be angry with him! Why would they be? Everyone is free to go wherever they like, you don’t have to stay here – whatever Miss Hodges and her busybody cronies might say. Though I think you won’t find much better.” She even smiled a bit at that – he knew she had hated the warden on sight when she first met her that first day.

“Don’t worry. We’ll find him. Listen, let’s go back to the house now. We’ll ask Aziraphale to...”

“No!” Marjorie jumped to her feet, vehemently shaking her head. “No! No, please, don’t tell him. Please, Adam...Adam....please don’t let them know this...” she was nearly sobbing again.

Adam was taken aback by this. “Marjorie, he can help you. He really can.”

“Please, Adam. Please. Promise to me. Swear.” Her eyes were huge, pleading with him.

Sighing, he nodded. “OK, alright, for now we’ll keep it quiet. Hopefully Lockie will turn up. He always has before. Hey! Remember the bothy up on the moor, where he went that first time – have you looked there?”

“No! No, that could be it! Let’s go up there, that’s where he must be!” Marjorie leapt up, now almost sobbing with relief that she had something she could do, some action. Adam followed her slowly as she hurried back towards the house. It was pretty cold to be living in a bothy, an abandoned sheep-farmer’s hut, up on the moor. And what was he going to do if Lockie wasn’t there?

Crowley wandered down the path to the little stone bench recently occupied by Marjorie and Adam. He leaned on the wall in front of the stone bench, looking out over the moor. It was dark and lowering, the gorse showing very few flowers and the bracken straggled and bare, branches scratching at the iron-coloured sky. The top of the moor was obscured by heavy cloud, the atmosphere brooding and dark. It matched how he was feeling. Crowley smoked a contraband cigarette (he could conjure his own, he had discovered, but there was a black market to keep going in the village, much-needed money changing hands), thinking. He couldn’t believe half of what he had heard about this Harri, except that he knew it was true, because it had been in Marjorie’s head! But nevertheless he decided that he needed to go and see for himself. No need to mention this to Aziraphale. He might not approve. When he had finished smoking, he closed his eyes for a moment and then he was no longer standing in the garden. He had vanished.

Lockie, who could be very quiet when he needed to be through long practice and good survival techniques, hardly gasped at all when he saw this from where he was hiding in the little thicket of trees. He had gone off over the moor a week ago, needing to get away from the clinginess and claustrophobic atmosphere in the house, and had been on his way back to the house, willing to give it another go, when he saw his sister sobbing her heart out on the stone bench as he made his way through the stand of trees. Just as he had been about to show himself, Adam had turned up, and then after he had left, there was Crowley. Who had then vanished into thin air. He could feel the atmosphere thrumming around his head. It was the final straw for Lockie. He decided there and then that he was going to leave this fucked-up place for good, just as soon as he collected the rest of his belongings. He was sorry to leave his sister, but she would cope.

She always did.

Chapter Text

Crowley didn’t drive to London, though he had a new car, a black Bentley, that he loved, absolutely adored, actually, an embarrassing amount. He didn’t use it for this, though; he just went, materialising (for want of a better word – he didn’t actually think he ever dematerialised, he just left one place and then arrived in another in the next heartbeat) in a pitch-dark street deep in the East End and leaned against a wall for a moment to get his bearings. He was in a little London alleyway that was dingy and silent. Everyone had their blackout curtains up of course, but even without them, there would not be enough light to see more than a foot away. He could see in the dark, though.

Far in the distance was the sound of explosions and anti-aircraft fire chasing the Germans around the sky. No bombs would fall in this part of the capital tonight, though. In the past weeks they had taken a battering – crushed glass was heaped in the deep zigzag cracks on the pavement. Opposite was a house with no roof, and half a wall gone – abandoned, with broken furniture standing ruined inside. Crowley was leaning against the building facing this ruined house. There was a brooding air to the night. No wind was blowing. The moon was just visible through a thick haze of cloud and smoke. The bottoms of the clouds were spasmodically lit by fires elsewhere in the city. The faint light was by turns grey and blood-red. He lit another cigarette and sidled down the side alleyway next to Marjorie’s old house.

The ubiquitous blackout was hung over the window and the cracked glass in the door. The house seemed abandoned from the outside. But a thin smear of smoke could be seen rising from the crumbling chimney, and a paper-thin strip of wobbly light was visible underneath the ill-fitting door. Knowing better than to knock at the front in a place like this (that door was only ever opened to vicars and undertakers), he slipped down the alleyway beside the house and found the side door. He rapped on the grimy wood. No one answered, but he knew there was someone there. He knocked again, louder. Still no reply. Trying the handle revealed that the door was bolted on the inside. He could hear someone trying to be quiet in the kitchen behind the door. The thin strip of light had vanished.

“Harriet?” Crowley called her name softly. The slight movement he could hear stopped dead. Now all he could hear was the sound of silence – someone trying to make no sound at all. She was holding her breath. Crowley concentrated for a moment and the bolt slid back rustily. He tried the door again and this time it opened.

The woman was sitting tiredly at a grotty kitchen table, her pale face the only thing really visible in the shadowy room. There was a thin scrim of candle smoke floating in the air around her. She looked terrified, but as she saw him she relaxed a little – obviously, she had been expecting someone worse. Or at least, someone different.

“Who are you? If you’ve come to see Billy he isn’t here,” she snapped. Crowley closed the door behind him, shutting out the London chill, and plunging the cramped little room into pitch darkness. Marjorie’s aunt Harri fumbled around for matches and the candle she had extinguished. Once lit, the flickering light from the cheap candle flame showed very little.

“The gas is off,” she said, lighting a second candle from the wick of the first. “Who are you? I told you, Billy isn’t here.”

“I came to see you,” Crowley said, pulling out a rickety chair and, uninvited, sitting down on it.

“Me? What the hell for?” Harri asked sourly.

Truthfully, he hadn’t known what he would do when he got here. He’d come on the spur of the moment, impulsively. But Crowley usually managed to handle these situations. “I am one of the people who’s looking after your nephew and niece – you remember them, I suppose? Marjorie and Warlock?”

“So?” Harri took up a mug she had been drinking from. The fumes of cheap gin floated out of its depths. She made no move to offer Crowley anything.

“What did you think would happen to them when you sent them off to the country? I don’t think they were supposed to be sent to us. They had no labels, no paperwork – they weren’t from the same schools as the other children they arrived with. And you haven’t ever written to them, have you? To find out how they are?”

Harri looked at him through narrowed eyes. “They aren’t my responsibility any more,” she said. “What do you want from me? They done something? Is it money you’re after?”

He shook his head. “No, we don’t need money. I just wanted to meet you, after finding out what it was like for them to live with you. I wondered if it was really true, what they’d told me.”

“They should’ve not been telling you anything,” Harri snapped. “Family business stays in the family. It’s nothing to do with you.”

Crowley felt a dull stab of anger at her. He had seen this side of people so many times before. The indifference. It made him almost hate the world, at dark times like these. He leaned forwards toward her, amber eyes flashing dangerously in the candlelight. “No?” he said, deceptively quietly. “I disagree. You know, the first thing we had to do for your nephew was reset a broken bone in his elbow that you had done yourself, months before, it must have been. He’d been in pain every day since your little surgical experiment. And your niece tried to hide it from us because she was afraid – afraid to the point of physical sickness – that if we knew we would have to pay for medical treatment for him they would be sent away. I think that type of thing makes it my business, don’t you?”

Harri looked sullen, wary. “I told you I don’t have money for you.”

“And I told you I don’t want money. Luckily for Lockie, we actually know how to set a bone properly. He is fine, now.”

“Well, then – why are you here? What do you want from me? I warn you, if my Billy catches you here, I can’t be responsible for what he might do…”

Crowley smiled then, which was a terrible sight. Too many teeth. The candle flames flickered and shivered, throwing sinister shadows over his face. “Oh, I do want to meet your son, too,” he said. “I think I might have even more to discuss with him than we two do.” He let a small flare of blue fire play around his fingertips for just a second. Just enough for Harri to see, and then doubt that she had really seen. Her face grew even paler in the shadowy light.

“Harriet, I want you to tell me the truth,” he said, and now he captured her eyes with his gaze. He could feel his eyes were sharpened, looking more openly snakey than he usually allowed. He put the strong suggestion onto her that she wanted to answer. “Their mother is not really dead, is she?”

Harri had fallen very still. Her face had slowly blanked over, her eyes wide and unblinking under the intensity of Crowley’s interrogation. She shook her head slowly from side to side. “No.”

“Did she really mean to abandon her children?”

“I do not know,” Harri intoned tiredly. “She went to America and she told us she could not return. She left me with her bastard children.”

“But she didn’t do it on purpose?”

“No,” sighed Harri, and now she just looked tired, exhausted, too weary to raise her head and carry on breathing. “Billy told me to refuse her,” she whispered. “He hated having them here, hated them. And the months turned into years and they were still here….there was no money left, and nothing I could do.”

Crowley released her. Inside her head was such a conflicted set of emotions – she hated her sister and the children for being there, for being a burden and source of her son’s increasing rages, but at the bottom of it all she was a mean, cruel person who would have found another reason to mistreat them if Billy hadn’t minded them. The resentment had grown up and up and up until it was all she could see when she thought about the children. He felt sorry for her, but she was just too pathetic. He couldn’t forgive her.

“What did you do to me?” she asked, her voice raw.

“Nothing,” Crowley said flatly. “You would know if I had done anything. Made you feel as afraid as Marjorie does all the time? Or, let you feel the pain Lockie had to go through every day he was in your house? I could have done either of those things, but I didn’t. I chose not to. Do you understand that?”

She nodded mechanically, her eyes locked onto his face with a growing terror behind them.

“I choose not to hurt someone weaker than I am, who would be defenceless. That’s not to say I don’t want to.” He got up from the chair. She followed him with her eyes, large and fearful.

“Who – are you?!” she asked again. “Are you….are you a devil? I knew he would come.”

Crowley quirked his lips as he pushed the chair back into its place and stepped towards the door. “Think that if you want to,” he said. It was as good a guess as any they had come up with. What would she say if she knew he remembered the civil war? He opened the door, letting in a fog of smoke and cold misty night air. “Your niece and nephew are fine, by the way. I notice you never asked me that.”

Crowley had been going to leave without saying any more, but her justifications and whining had riled him more than he had expected they would. He and Aziraphale had seen a lot in their long lives, but pointless cruelty was amongst the worst of it, for him.

“They are safer with me than they ever were with you,” he said to her. “And you think I came from the devil? What does that tell you?” He paused again, weighing the words he had left to say.

A kinder man with light in his heart would not have done what he did to her. He would have held the words into himself and let them pass unsaid. But he was not always kind, and there was always the possibility of darkness. There was something in Harri that predisposed him to be cruel.

“You’re going to lose Billy, you know,” he said, tasting the bitterness in his mouth as he spoke the words.

For the first time she looked aware, awake, worried. “What do you say?”

“You’ll lose him. He’s going to leave, and won’t come back.”

“How? He won’t leave me. And you can’t take him, whatever else you think you can do.”

“Me? I don’t want him. Hitler does, though. He won’t see the end of the war.” Crowley was sure about this. He had cast forward, as he could do, sometimes, and this was what he had seen: Billy in a sailors’ uniform, and then a great expanse of grey, heaving sea and then nothing but the featureless North Atlantic sky.

“You’re a liar,” she said, but she was shaken. “You can’t know.”

Crowley raised an eyebrow, twisting the knife. In a dark part of his soul, this was bleakly pleasurable. “No? I say I do know.”

“No. No!”

Crowley didn’t speak again. He turned, and strode through the door, slamming it shut and leaving behind a trail of blue sparks to make sure she remembered his exit.

He was halfway down the foetid little alley when he heard her howling behind him in the house, an animal sound of pure despair. There was a crash as she threw her gin cup across the room. The scream lanced through him. Looking inside he saw her tearing her hair and clutching her head in an agony of pent-up despair and emotion. Crowley nearly, so nearly turned around, nearly went back inside to comfort her or take the knowledge back, but the memory of Lockie’s pinched face sheeting white in pure pain as Aziraphale touched the skin over the broken bone stopped him. He had felt an echo of that pain himself as Aziraphale took it from the boy, and he knew that it had been on the edge of what could be borne – of what he could take himself, never mind a young boy. So instead he waited in the alleyway, his hand resting on the damp wall, breathing slowly, trying to calm his own rage while listening to her despair. Finally, he sent her the suggestion to sleep, and as a small gesture to his own confused emotions, left a box of candles on the kitchen table and lit the fire that was built in the dead grate.

Then he leaned against the wall outside, lit a cigarette, and settled down in the dark once again, waiting for Billy to come home.

Crowley extinguished the half-smoked cigarette on the floor, crushed the butt with his heel, and dramatically stepped out of the shadows right in front of a girl. She stifled a scream.

“For gawd’s sake!” she hissed. “Look where you’re goin’! You scared three shades of shit outta me!” She squinted at him. “You waitin’ for Billy?”

“Yes. You think he’ll be here soon?” Crowley spoke pleasantly enough to her, but she could sense, underneath anything that she could have told anyone about, that there was an undercurrent that made her back away a little, clutching her bag to her side a little closer.

“No idea,” she said, chewing her lip. “I was just passin’. Don’t really know him at all, not really. You gonna let me past, or what?”

He nodded, smiled and moved aside with a flourish, letting her totter past on her heels. He called after her. “Lisa? Don’t come back tonight.”

She glanced behind her, and then turned and ran, the sound of those heels skidding on the wet stones echoing down into the alley. She wouldn’t remember seeing him, later, would just have a gap in her memory.

Half an hour passed. Crowley smoked another four cigarettes. Another person was walking along the alleyway. This must be Billy. Crowley wasted no words. All he did was appear out of the shadows, spin the man around – and he was big, this guy, muscular and tall – and throw a punch right into his jaw.

“What the hell…?” Billy spat blood onto the stones. He put a hand to the damp wall to steady himself, staring up at this madman. He looked wild, his eyes shining darkly, reflecting the moonlight.

“Are you drunk?” Crowley said. “That’s no good, you have to remember what I have to say to you.” He gestured towards Billy. The other man retched suddenly, and then sobriety flooded his body like a cold sweat. His eyes focused, he stood up straighter – and he looked a lot more afraid.

“I have a message from your cousins, Billy. I’ll only say it once, but I think you’ll remember it.” Billy found that he couldn’t look away. Transfixed, he stood frozen, unable to tear his eyes from the sight of the terrible blue fire that flickered around him. Behind him, unnoticed by Crowley himself, there was the shadow of black wings.

“What....is this? What are you?”

Before he could answer, Billy had torn himself out of Crowley’s grasp and run off down the alleyway.

Crowley bent down and picked up a black feather that had drifted to the ground beside him. Puzzled, he twirled it in his fingers. It was glossy, almost glowing....another mystery for the ages. Shrugging, he dropped it, and walked away, not sparing another glance for Billy’s retreat. “I'm damned if I know,” he thought, striding into the darkness.

Chapter Text

One morning, Adam stopped Marjorie in the kitchen and spoke to her in the serious older-brother tone he adopted with the rest of the evacuees sometimes. They were sitting at the table with cups of tea. Pepper was there too, making toast and pretending everything was normal.

“Marjorie, we’ve looked everywhere. It’s been a long time. Let me ask them, properly, to help us. Let’s come clean.”

“No!” Marjorie’s denial came out as a breathless squeak. She avoided speaking to Crowley when at all possible, preferring to stay out of the way of him in case she saw anything….anything like she’d seen before. Aziraphale was mostly in the library or off following up other leads in his mysterious research.

“I don’t want to,” she whispered.

“Marjorie...” he said helplessly.

Pepper came and sat opposite the two of them with her toast. “Do you know why he runs?” she asked suddenly.

Marjorie looked at her with eyes full of pain. “I think so,” she whispered. Pepper waited. Willed the girl to speak. And, finally, she did.

“We lived with our aunt in London. She sent us away. She...she bundled us onto a train to get us out of her house. She didn’t know where it was going or what was going to happen to us. She didn’t care, she only saw a way to get rid of us.”

Adam looked at Pepper with new-found respect. This was more than she had ever said to any of them. Finally, she had admitted it.

Marjorie continued, pulling the words from the depth of her soul, one at a time.

“No wonder Lockie can’t actually believe that anyone would willingly take us in. Our family didn’t. He’s younger than me, he doesn’t...he doesn’t remember our mother. And then for the first thing that they had to do for him here was...was...”

But Marjorie still couldn’t talk about what she had seen through the kitchen window on that dreadful day. She still couldn’t look directly at it in her mind, nor could she remotely deal with what had happened to her afterwards – the way Aziraphale had taken her story from her mind. It had felt so fey and strange but she had also felt so safe, in those few moments. It made no sense.

Adam handed her a fresh cup of tea. “I’m going to tell you a story,” he said. “The day you two arrived, I was called into the kitchen and told to go and collect you. I was told your name and what you’d look like. So someone was expecting you be on that train.”

“Really?” she breathed, looking up at Adam with hopeful eyes. Maybe...

“Well, yes, of course. Aziraphale said to me, there’s two more kids coming tonight, you and Antonia had better go up to the hall and meet them. We were late because, well, we’re disorganised. Nothing to do with their clipboards and lists.”

Pepper looked from one to the other. Was she buying it? It was probably true, of course, but that didn’t mean that Marjorie’s estimation of her aunt was wrong. In Pepper’s limited experience of distant relatives, she thought the Potts children had been lucky she’d been prepared to take them in at all. She hadn’t seen her paternal uncle for dust after her own father’s death. Luckily her mother had stuck around.

Adam continued. “Also, do you not remember that you each had a room all prepared? Now how would we have known to do that, if no one knew you were coming?”

Pepper knew that what Adam really meant was that they had each had a room created – the attic had been a dusty, spider-filled space the day before the Potts turned up with their tiny suitcase and their sad little story.

Adam remembered asking if there was space in the house for two more kids. Crowley had grinned at him. “There’s always more space,” he’d said. “We’ll add another couple of rooms on the top.” Adam had shaken his head, hiding a wry smile. Well, of course it was no problem. He had momentarily forgotten who he was dealing with. As though to remind him, Aziraphale then told him one of the little half-tales that he came out with sometimes.

“Remind me to tell you about 1816 sometime,” he said.

“What was 1816?”

“There was a volcano, or something – it might have been Krakatoa, actually – anyway, a big one, enough to shoot ash all the way up into the sky and block the sun. They called it the Year of No Summer. It was certainly cold, I do remember that. Harvests failed the world over, frosts in August. We had to buy food for everyone. Someone suggested it would be more economical for the village to all come and live in the big house so we’d only have to heat the one place and do all the cooking together. I thought about it, and they were right. So we did it. That required a few extra rooms as well.”

So anyway, yes, they had been expected. For at least forty-five minutes, ever since Crowley had seen the special train go past and divined that there was someone on it that they were supposed to meet.

Pepper gave Adam a look that conveyed to him the fact that she was totally aware of this fact. He avoided her eyes studiously, swirling the dregs around in the remains of his mug of tea. “So, you see, Marjorie, there was always a place here for you – for both of you. They really won’t be angry if we ask them for help finding Lockie. I promise it would be OK to ask.”

Marjorie leapt to her feet. “No! Adam, you promised me. I’ll find him on my own. We look after each other. You can’t tell him about Lockie’s running away. You promised me you wouldn’t.”

Adam looked anguished. Marjorie stormed out of the kitchen, leaving Pepper and Adam sitting opposite each other at the large kitchen table. “Do you think they’ll be able to find him?” asked Adam in a low voice.

“Adam, just ask them,” Pepper said quietly. “I know less than you do about all this.”

Adam shook his head, resigned. For all their years of research, he didn’t know much, either. Well, he thought, that just about puts the tin hat on it.

To further complicate everything, Aziraphale and Crowley were both away. Adam still prevaricated long and hard before picking up the phone. It was unusual enough for a private house to even have a telephone that he’d rarely ever even used it, and he didn’t want to telephone anyone else in the village and go through the operator (who was probably a WRVS warden in her spare time, anyway). To avoid all that, he had a card with instructions on how to call Azirpahale and Crowley on the ‘red phone’.

In an emergency ONLY:

DO NOT speak to the Operator.

Dial ‘0000’, pause, dial ‘000’ pause, dial ‘00’, pause, dial ‘0’

Hold for a connection.

It took a few moments to dial all those zeroes – ten times right around the dial. No chance of doing it by accident. The line sounded hollow as Adam pressed the receiver anxiously to his ear. Faint crackles could be heard. He stayed listening to the silence in the ether for two long minutes. Finally he drew in his breath to ask the void if there was anyone there.

“H-,”

There was a tinny clattering sound on the other end of the line, followed by the sound of someone picking the receiver of their phone up off the floor and fumbling around with it, and then finally, a voice.

“Shit….Hi, Jailbird, everything OK?”

Adam swallowed, choosing to ignore the fact that there was no way the person on the other end of the line could know it was him. “Crowley? Is that you? You’re very faint.”

Further crackles and fuzzes followed, and then he was back, much stronger. “I’ve put the aerial up now, is that better?”

“Yes, much,” Adam said, wondering what he was talking about.

“Good, good. What’s up?”

“I’m sorry to call you. I mean, probably it isn’t that bad at all but…I think you need to come back, if you can. You’re needed here.”

“What’s happened? Spit it out, don’t worry, I’m sure we can fix it, whatever it is.”

“It’s...a few things. The news from France is very bad. And...Lockie…he’s disappeared. Properly, this time. Marjorie’s in a bad way. I think we need your help. She didn’t want to ask you, but…”

“We’ll be back in a few days. Don’t worry.”

Adam took a deep breath. “I think you might need to come back before that. Quicker than that. As soon as possible. I think we might need you to use your…other abilities.”

There was a short silence on the end of the line. Adam never asked either of them directly to do anything that involved, as he had put it, his ‘other abilities’. Normally he could sort it, whatever it was – he was practical, it didn’t occur to him to ask for help.

“Oh. OK, then. No problem. Thanks, Adam.”

The line buzzed and then went silent as Crowley hung up. Adam leaned back against the wall, the receiver clutched in his damp hand.

When the front door flew open and admitted both Crowley and Aziraphale, in a swirl of wind and stray leaves, running their hands through their hair and looking like they had just run the length of the high street, not come out of the blue from God-knows-where, Adam was still standing there, pressing the receiver to his forehead in an agony of indecision.

“You can put the phone down, now,” Aziraphale said, taking the handset from Adam’s fingers and replacing it gently into the cradle. “Message received and understood.”

Adam exhaled shakily. “I…wow. I never really know if I imagined all that stuff in Australia, you know? I mean, I know I didn’t, you don’t forget being broken out of jail, but....every now and then, I wonder if it really happened. And then you prove, it, again, prove that it did.”

Shrugging his coat from his shoulders Crowley gave him a half-grin and strode past him into the kitchen. “It all happened, rest assured. Now, first I would kill for a cup of coffee,” he said. “And then, Adam, you can tell us what’s going on?”

Adam followed him into the kitchen, biting his lip.

“Like I said, Lockie’s disappeared. He’s been gone for more than three weeks, and I’ve tried everything I can think of, everywhere he could have gone…I don’t know, it’s not like the other times…I have a bad feeling about it, very bad.”

Crowley looked up sharply. “Three weeks?! And what ‘other times’?”

Adam flushed miserably. He had screwed this up badly. “He’s run away before, too. We’ve always found him pretty quickly. Marjorie told me on no account was I allowed to tell you about it. She made me swear not to tell you. She didn’t want you to know anything was wrong.”

“Why the hell not? If there’s a problem here, in our house, why would we not want to know about it? She’s so…never mind. You did the right thing, Jailbird. We’ll find him.”

Adam sat down at the table, fidgeting his fingers. “I don’t know if this is the right thing. She made me promise not to tell you. She’ll never forgive me.”

“It was the right thing,” said Aziraphale. “You’ve tried everything you can think of, right? And come up with nothing. Nothing wrong with asking for help, and as you say, we have other resources to draw on. She’ll be fine once we’ve got her brother back here and sorted this all out, won’t she?”

“I hope so. Like I said, I’ve got a bad feeling about the whole thing. I feel sick to the stomach, if you want the truth. She’s in a bad way, she hasn’t eaten for days, she looks terrible, and she says she’s cold all the time.”

Aziraphale finished his coffee and stood up. “Go and fetch her, will you? And get Pepper as well. The sooner we start the better, it seems to me.”

“Marjorie, you need to eat something. The reason you’re cold is that you’re starving yourself, which won’t help us to find your brother, will it?”

She was shivering, despite the layers of woollen cardigans she was wearing, and her face was as pale and pinched as she had looked when she first arrived from London. But she pushed away the plate with its tempting sliced of cake (Adam had almost looked more surprised at those than at the speedy reappearance) and folded her skinny arms across herself stubbornly.

“I’m not hungry. You can’t make me eat anything.”

“Actually, I could,” Aziraphale said, very mildly, picking up one of the sliced and breaking it in half. “I don’t want to, but…well, I’m not letting you starve to death while you’re living in my house. What would Miss Hodges say?” He ate a bit of the cake.

“I don’t care,” she muttered.

Pepper was aching with sympathy for Marjorie. The girl reminded her so much of her younger self that it almost brought tears to her eyes. “You aren’t helping,” she said, glaring at the three well-meaning but useless men. “Listen, I know kind of how you’re feeling right now. I can promise you I have felt exactly the same way, as though you’ll throw up if you eat, but you want to, but you can’t…it goes round and round, am I right?”

Marjorie nodded, a small movement of the head.

“Well, in my experience, the only way to get out of the circle is to start to eat something. The first bite is the worst. I promise that’s true.”

Marjorie picked up a slice of bread and began to nibble the edge. Pepper nodded. Adam looked at her again with his new-found respect. She shrugged. It was only her experience.

There was a pause. Then Crowley weighed in. “Right, now, I hear that your brother had gone missing?”

Marjorie instantly put the bread back down on the plate and refused to touch it again. “Yes,” she whispered. “But it’s fine. He will come back. I told Adam not to bother you with this. He broke his word.”

She batted Adam’s hand away when he tried to pat her shoulder awkwardly, and not another word would she speak, except to whisper scathingly to Adam that she had trusted him, and wouldn’t be doing so again.

Just then, the kitchen door burst open, and Wensley stood there with a wild look in his eye. “The wireless....its the prime minister, actually.....the news from Dunkirk....” he said, obviously in shock. One glance at his face and everyone was on their feet and hurrying to the living room where the wireless was kept in its wooden box.

It was hours later, and it had grown dark outside. Pepper silently lowered the blinds and stood by the darkened window, unsure of what to do. Adam had silently switched off the wireless at the end of the news bulletin and slipped back to his seat on the footstool by the door. One by one the others had withdrawn into themselves, all shell-shocked in their own way at the news from Dunkirk. Only Marjorie had not moved at all. She was left sitting, arms wrapped around her knees, eyes staring unseeingly into the fire. For weeks the bulletins had been unrelentingly bad, from whole swathes of London flattened in bombing raids to this, the fall of the French and the sinking, dreadful feeling engulfing each person that the war was probably going to be lost.

Crowley sat in the armchair across from the settee, leaning his head on one hand, the other resting on his knee which was drawn up underneath him. The pose probably passed as comfortable, for him. He glanced at Aziraphale, but he was chewing his lip and looked a little green – not much help to be had there. He looked across at Marjorie’s traumatised expression, and around the room at the other evacuees, a couple of whom were now crying silently, and made a decision.

“Gather round here,” he said, moving over to the settee where Marjorie had taken root. Slowly they all did as he said, the two girls coming to sit either side of him, Brian squashed in at one side next to Wensley and Adam perched on the arm behind them, picking at the fabric with his fingers. Crowley took Marjorie’s hand and looked around at all of their white, strained faces.

“This sounds bad, I know,” he began, feeling his way very cautiously. He didn’t know what he was going to end up telling them, but he had to tell them something. “But whatever happens, I can promise you that you are all safe here. That is an absolute promise. Aziraphale and I will defend you with our last breaths, if it were to come to that.”

“What about Lockie?” they were the first words Marjorie had spoken since coming into the living room.

“We’ll find him,” he promised. Rashly, perhaps.

“Thousands of people are going to die, aren’t they? Actually, I mean – thousands more than have already,” said Wensley, dully.

Aziraphale nodded slowly. “I’m afraid they will.”

“The war will never be over...It’s all so....” Marjorie faltered on the words, not knowing how to continue. Her voice was flat with despair. This was dreadful. They were far too young to have no hope at all.

“It will end,” Crowley said firmly. “Of course it will end.” He came to a decision. “Right, I am going to tell you something, all of you, but it doesn’t leave this room, alright?”

Five heads nodded solemnly. Aziraphale frowned.

“I’m completely serious. This is an absolute secret. Can I trust all of you?”

Five heads nodded again, eyes sliding left and right as they glanced at each other, mystified and a little nervous.

“You know we have been studying, here in the library and elsewhere. We’ve been researching the past....but also the future, as much as we can. As far as we can tell, this is the worst it will get for us here in England,” he said. “And the war will end. Not soon – I can’t say that – but it will. We’ll do alright, in the end. This country will not be invaded. However bad it looks, that won’t happen. A lot of terrible things will happen, in Europe, elsewhere, things you won’t believe, things i don't bloody believe, but they won’t happen here.”

“How do you know?” asked Pepper, speaking for them all – well, all except Adam – he had a fairly good idea, already.

“I can’t tell you that. But I do know. Do you believe me?”

Five heads nodded again.

“How long do you think it will it last? The war, the fighting?”

“It’ll be long. Maybe another five years. By the end of 1945 it will all be over.”

“Is that all? I was thinking....I don’t know how long. Decades. Only five years? Are you sure?” Brian’s eyes were wide.

“Absolutely sure.” Crowley looked around at them again, making sure he had their full attention. “Right, guys, I’m sorry but I have to make sure that none of this leaves this house, or this room. Everyone look at me.”

They already were. They were riveted.

“You cannot speak of this. You will not. It is so important that you do not say a word about what I’ve told you. If you try, you won’t be able to. Just keep the knowledge inside.”

Adam, sitting a little behind Crowley, could feel an almost physical sensation bearing down on his mind as he said these words. He watched closely as the suggestion hit home, and one by one their faces cleared. Adam gave him a hurt, resentful glance before his mind buried the conversation in its subconscious.

Aziraphale stood abruptly, giving Crowley a look that could probably have melted steel. Hurrying to the door, he opened it and slammed out of the room.

Aziraphale drank the last of the chicory coffee and put the mug in the sink. He was shaking with exhaustion and fury, and the fake coffee was not helping with that at all, lacking the vital ingredient of caffeine. When the door opened he whirled around, jittery beyond belief. “I don’t believe what you....” he began, and then visibly sagged when he saw Adam standing there.

“Are you alright?” he asked, concern on his face.

Aziraphale felt a wild laugh threatening to escape, and controlled it with difficulty. “Yes, of course. I just needed a minute, that’s all.”

“I...I know the news was quite bad,” Adam said cautiously. “But I think we’ll be alright here, won’t we?”

“How should I know?” Aziraphale said, bleakly. “No one can see the future, right, Crowley?” He turned as the door opened again, and Crowley swept in. Adam took one look at his face and left them to it.

Crowley was sitting – lounging, actually, as if such a thing was possible – on the apex of the roof, leaning back against the chimney with a cigarette in the hand resting across his knee. Aziraphale was sitting precariously against the opposite chimney, trying not to remember how high up they were, or that they had just floated up there from out of the kitchen window. He was too nervous to smoke. He would have had to let go of the roof to light a cigarette, anyway, and he wasn’t about to do that.

“I cannot do this,” he said, finally. “What I just saw in there...”

“What did you see? Tell me exactly.”

“I saw....I saw you doing some kind of...of gaslight extraordinare on a bunch of little kids, that’s what I saw!” Aziraphale hissed.

“You think I should have left it how it was? Probably it was a mistake to tell them anything at all, but you saw them, you saw how afraid they were. We know that everything’s going to be alright, there won’t be an invasion, the war won’t last forever – should I keep that to myself? Let them spend the next five years being terrified?”

“That argument doesn’t work,” he said furiously. “We aren’t sure! Besides, you told them and then you wiped their memories so they can’t discuss it! What was the point of that?”

“Think about how it would look if any of them told anyone what I’d said. Might make them look a little bit like spies, don’t you think, or make us look like that. There’s already some suspicion in that area, you know that, after that business with the prophecy books. This way, they just aren’t as scared. They’re confident. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.” Crowley finished the cigarette and pitched the end over the edge of the roof.

“You told them it didn’t get any worse! I think the residents of Eastern Europe, Poland, Russia, bloody Dresden, Stalingrad, all of those fucking places, might have something to say about that!”

Crowley leaned forward towards him. “But it’s like we always say! You can’t help everyone. We just have to do the best we can. We have to choose, and I chose to help these people here. We can’t stop the second world war! Be a bit presumptuous to even try something like that, no?”

“Paris, in 1938,” Aziraphale said, slowly. “We knew what was coming, but then, so did everyone else. You could taste the war coming, everyone could. Bur Betony. That girl....Avelina and the rest of them. We just left them to die, Crowley.”

“And I know you always felt bad about it. But listen, Betony joined the Resistance, does loads of ridiculously brave and reckless things, one of which will kill her. But she inspires a load of people, do you see that? We can’t change the big stuff.”

Aziraphale gripped the roof tiles with numb fingers. “I see it,” he whispered. “I see that we have this long, long, pointless existence, where we know what will happen, and we can’t do anything to change any of it. We see the storm coming but we can’t even get out of the way of it. We can’t even buy an umbrella. It’s worse than not knowing at all. All our research and wondering has told us nothing, Crowley, nothing about why we are here or what we are meant to be doing. This is a curse. I have thought so for a while. We are cursed. Cursed to make friends, care for them, drink with them, eat with them and watch them die.”

Crowley didn’t disagree with him, which was somehow worse than anything else. He’d thought it himself, many times.

“Alright....alright. There must be things we can do that won’t affect the war effort, the future of the world, whatever. Though I don’t know how you know which things are important and which aren’t....”

“Alright,” Crowley said. “Alright. Something we can do. Find Marjorie’s brother. There – there’s something we could sort out, we could find Marjorie’s missing brother. Surely, we could do that? There would be a point to that, we’d be helping someone, changing something bad.”

Aziraphale stayed silent for a moment. “Adam is afraid that Lockie’s run off to join the merchant navy, apparently,” he said finally. If that was the case, even with the news blackout hiding the worst of the nautical events, he thought Lockie was pretty certain to die. In any case no one had heard from him in over three weeks, which couldn’t be good however you looked at it. “Yes. We’ll go to London. He might have gone back there, back to his aunt’s house. I think he had….unfinished business there with his cousin.”

Chapter Text

The East End’s streets were dark, inky black. The blackout was in full force, and no lights were showing at all. By all conventional wisdom neither of them should have been able to see a thing, but Crowley could see alright, could make out the shapes of buildings, the blacked-out windows and shadowy doorways, grimy gutters and random broken bricks and splintered wood spread across the street. Broken glass crunched underfoot.

“There’s been an air-raid, a few days ago,” he whispered. Aziraphale nodded. He had never been here before, and Crowley belatedly realised that he had never told him about his confrontation with the kids’ aunt Harri. He had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach, and was starting to think that coming here was a colossal mistake. He was just about to say as much when they reached the entrance to the back alley, and it was too late. He stopped and swerved them off the main road and down a pitch dark alleyway lined with more broken bricks and rubbish. A strong smell of cats assailed them as they crept down this little passage.

They stopped outside a grimy window with two of four glass panes blown out. It had no black-out curtain, but it didn’t need one, as the interior behind the glass was dark as the Underground at three in the morning, and just as welcoming.

“This is the house,” said Crowley, and Aziraphale glanced sharply at him. His voice was strangled. The sense of dread was stronger and stronger, coming in waves.

“There’s no one here.”

Crowley shook his head. “Harri’s here somewhere. And so is he.”

He pushed Aziraphale back from the window as a shadow passed across it. He stumbled back in the dark and tripped over a dead-weight bundle blocking the passageway. Almost in slow motion he turned to look down into the inky darkness and see what he had kicked against, and then opened his mouth and staggered backwards. That smell….utterly alien and horrible, and yet also unmistakeable. Crowley, lightening fast, grabbed Aziraphale and slapped a hand over his mouth so that his violent scream could not be heard.

There was no way he could stop Aziraphale from doing it – he had the absolute horrors. Holding onto his struggling, bucking body, Crowley made a violent gesture with his other hand and blue light flooded the passageway for a moment, illuminating the dead body that he had tripped over. He made as if to scream again, in total shock, but Crowley held his mouth closed until the impulse was passed. Don’t scream, don’t make any sound at all, clear?

Aziraphale struggled briefly, then nodded. Crowley moved his hand. His face was white, but he had more control over himself, and he moved forward to roll the body over and look at the face.

Aziraphale fell back bonelessly against the wall of the passageway, cutting his hand badly on the broken brick but not noticing at all. They knew the face. It was Lockie, of course it was. It was the boy they were all looking for. Marjorie’s brother Lockie. He was dead, very dead, of a broken neck by the look of things, although there was also dried blood, from a wound he could not see. And he had not died right this minute, judging by the horrible, maddening stench. He was gone, though, and not coming back to the village to comfort his tortured sister. Dead, as Crowley had known he would be as soon as he had kicked against that dreadful, heavy weight.

Aziraphale stumbled out of the unbearably dark, close alleyway, and threw up by the entrance to the main road. He had no choice. His stomach heaved again and he retched.

“Crowley, oh my God…”

He joined the other, looking grim, his lips drawn together. “I didn’t see this coming,” he said, sounding, shocked, obviously, but also, a little surprised. He paused for a moment, chewing his lip, seeming to think things through in a logical way, before speaking again. “We can’t tell Marjorie this. Not until I know what it means.”

“What it means? It means her brother is dead! What do you mean, we don’t tell her?”

“This….this was not the plan. It cannot have been the plan.”

“The plan? Whose plan???”

“The Great Plan,” said a voice behind them. Crowley whipped around, hissing in shock.

It was Muriel. Different to when they had seen her last, no longer dressed as a maid but now in a police uniform, although it was completely white, down to the helmet and shoes.

“You!” said Crowley.

Muriel clasped her hands together, wringing them. She looked desolate. “I am so sorry,” she said.

Crowley stepped forward aggressively. “You said that before. What do you mean? Why are you sorry?”

“Mr Crowley....Mr Fell....you don’t understand….there is more to this....the plan has gone awry.....and I am trying to mend it. Warlock was not meant to be here, not in this time and place.....”

Crowley stepped back away from her, shuddering with revulsion. They were coming to it now. She reached out a hand but he slapped it away with all of his strength. “Don’t touch me!” he hissed. “Don’t come near to us! You did this? You killed a kid because of some plan that’s only inside your head as far as I can work out?”

“No! I...I didn’t do this...” she began, but Crowley could see the lie in her eyes.

She tried to speak again, but he wasn’t done. “I can’t stand the sight of you! Hundreds of years, Muriel, and you turn up again and tell us nothing, and for what?”

She held up her hands in protest but Crowley could see the red mist now and was not going to let her speak her riddles again.

“I don’t care about any fucking plan that involves whatever was done to us, never mind this poor kid here! In fact, bollocks to the whole thing! All of this! What you’ve done here is bad enough, but....is that the end?....how far will you go? How fucking far?! Leave us alone!”

Crowley staggered back away from her, and Aziraphale followed, looking back at Muriel and then back again, and again, that feeling invading his thoughts again as it had done so many times, as though there was something there that he almost remembered. He screwed his eyes closed, trying, trying...sometimes those memories seemed so damn close....but they still remained just out of reach.

“I wish I could explain it all!” she wailed. “Everything, the plan, the Book....”

“Don’t bother,” snapped Crowley. He turned on his heel and staggered down the street, hurrying away from her on shaking legs that felt stiff and numb with fear and anger. He glanced back at the woman leaning against the wall – he thought she would have followed them, or tried to, but she didn’t.

Muriel watched them go with an expression on her face that was somewhere between pity and fear and terror.

“What does she mean, Crowley? What book?” said Aziraphale urgently. But Crowley was unstoppable, swept along by his fury. He wouldn’t have listened whatever Muriel might say. Not if she had started to reveal the meaning of life.

He had had enough of mysteries.

Chapter Text

Aziraphale straddled the rough wooden bench and placed the wine glass, and a plate with French bread and cheese, in front of Betony. She was dressed for work, in rough trousers and a shirt, her wild black gypsy hair wrapped up in a headscarf from which it was trying to escape. The girl looked sullenly at him from under her thick eyebrows, lifting a hand to shove an unruly curl of hair back underneath the peasant scarf. “What do you want?” she said. “Make it quick, I have to be somewhere.”

“Yes, that’s what I need to talk you about. This trip you’re going on tonight.”

“What the hell are you talking about? What trip? Not many holidays around here you know, there’s a war on.” Betony picked up the chunk of the bread and tore a piece from the top. “I’ve never seen you around here before.”

“You have met me before, but you probably don’t remember. A few years ago, in Paris. I knew your mother and father. Before the war.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Hmm, so you say. Maybe. I don’t remember you. What’d you say your name was?”

“I didn’t say.” He took a drink of his wine, and told her his name. She didn’t seem to recognise it. Of course, he had done a memory wipe on her mother Avelina, and Crowley had tried to make sure they left no trace behind when they left Paris. Maybe that had included wiping the families' memories of them completely? He could have done that. He was more than capable of it.

Betony’s face was alive with suspicion. Aziraphale didn’t blame her.

She frowned. “Sounds kind of German to me. You on the right side, my friend?”

He held his hands up. “Of course. Listen, your friends let me in here, right? I came openly. They trusted me.”

This wasn’t strictly true. He had arrived at the temporary camp inside the perimeter fence, so they hadn’t had any chance to trust him, or otherwise.

He leaned forward, trying to catch Betony’s eye. “Listen, Betony, I’m just going to tell you. I know about what you’re doing out there at the chateau tonight, and I know it’s going to go wrong. If you go out into the woods tonight, you won’t come back.”

Betony shrugged one shoulder, ate another chunk of bread. “I know the risks. I know I’m not going out dancing at the Moulin Rouge. We’re trying to take down a squadron of the fucking Waffen SS. ‘Course I’m aware it’s dangerous.”

“Other people could go. It’s just this one night.”

“You don’t understand, do you? Listen, my friend, I’ll do what it takes for France. So will we all. It’s not a question of me, or someone else, or another time. We’re all the same.” Her eyes had darkened, her expression became fierce. He could almost hear the Marseillaise playing.

“Betony.” He made a decision. Even as he decided, he knew it was probably wrong. This whole thing was wrong. Aziraphale should have just walked out of the tent, left her to it. But he couldn’t sit here and watch her any more, eating stale bread and using up the last hours of her life...

He blamed Muriel for this, fair and square. Whoever the fuck she was. He had finally come to terms with the decision they had made about Betony, about not helping her, not saving her....or so he’d thought. Yes, it was cruel and unfair that she had to die. But he had accepted that. But then, from the little they had learned from that meeting in the London alleyway, Muriel had said that nothing was set in stone. The Great Plan had gone awry, that was what she had said. She had killed Lockie to try and put it right. Well, if that was acceptable, then, they could do what they needed to do, too. However much it went against the grain of history, the grain of the right thing.

Aziraphale turned it all the way on, the full force of his mind. She stopped eating, lowered the bread to the plate and sat still, blinked a little.

And then, she shrugged, dumped the bread crust on the plate, drank the rest of the wine, wiped her mouth, and stood up. He sat back, blinking, surprised – shocked – that his mental suggestion had not worked. Usually that was all it took.

She grinned at him, and picked up her knapsack from underneath the table. “Don’t know what that was, my friend, but I didn’t like it much. Au revoir,” she said, swung the bag onto her shoulder, and sauntered out.

Aziraphale picked up his own wine glass, a little unsteadily. What the fuck had he done? He hadn’t had any inkling of it before, no clues, nothing from Adam’s research or his own, but there was no doubt about it: Betony LePierre was another one like them.

Well, there was no way the Nazis were getting hold of her now that he knew that. No way on this earth.

The darkness was total. There were sounds up ahead, rustling and whispering, people moving through the leaves. As he got closer he could see the Resistance group, shifting through the trees like ghosts, and right at the front of them was Betony, utterly fearless. And with cause, if he was right.

In the woods ahead there were other people....a cold wave washed over him as he realised that the wood was crawling with soldiers. The Resistance were heading straight for an ambush. They had been betrayed.

Crowley would have been much more suited to this. His night vision, his almost serpentine abilities to move silently....but for reasons he didn’t want to examine too closely, Aziraphale hadn’t told Crowley that he was doing this. It was a secret mission.

Standing up with his back to a large oak tree, he held out his hands and the power coursed through him, down his arms and out. Bright blue light filled the clearing ahead of the Resistance. The soldiers were revealed, a whole troop of them, stalking through the trees like deadly cats. The French had their weapons out instantly and the woods came alive with gunfire. He took the opportunity to grab Betony round the waist and drag her toward the tree he was hiding behind. Her compatriots yelled out the retreat, and ran past, footsteps thudding in the darkness of the forest, skidding over fallen leaves. One man fell with a cry as a gunshot rang out. He heard scrabbling and then he was on his feet again and following the others, but limping, slow. Aziraphale held onto Betony, arms around her waist and a hand over her mouth to stop her yelling for help. In moments the forest was silent again.

The soldiers melted back into the trees towards the chateau. They had apparently not been given orders to pursue the Resistance fighters – just to defend the chateau. The Resistance group would keep for another day.

“What did you do?!” Betony screamed. “What did you bloody do!”

He held out his hands, trying to placate her fury. But he had no chance against her rage. She whipped out the pistol she’d had shoved into her waistband, cocked it, and fired.

Light filled the clearing again. Against all logic, time slowed to a crawl. Aziraphale had enough of it to watch the bullet coming towards him, see the flash of fire from the gun, and also enough time to run different scenarios through his head. He knew that he would survive being shot – probably - he had done before, more than once. If it came to that, it was sometimes possible to dodge bullets, or at least move them out of the way. He’d done that, too, though it was a little hairy. But if he did that, he would completely freak her out. So, there was nothing for it – he braced himself as much as it was possible to do.....

....and felt nothing, because suddenly Crowley was there, in front of Aziraphale, and her bullets went straight into him.

Fuck! The pain...Crowley could feel the muscles in his stomach ripped and torn up, and blood pouring down from the wound. In slow motion, because he was still holding onto Time, and making it go slower than it desired to, which was bloody hard work, and something he had only recently discovered he could do. Dimly, through the agony, he saw Betony leaping backwards, dropping the gun, her face white. Not so experienced in violence and war, after all. Now she came toward them, fluttering, like a bird, trying to stem the blood and get Crowley to lie down in the leaf litter. But he could feel the cells knitting together already, and he couldn’t let her see the wound healing like that. Even if she was like them, if she didn’t know....He pushed her away, pretty roughly, and she fell back into the leaves, sobbing in fear. There was blood everywhere, she probably thought she’d killed him, this man who had appeared from nowhere to take a bullet for his best friend.

“How...how are you healed?” she asked. Crowley sat back, leaning against the tree. He could have killed for a cigarette but lighting up in a forest crawling with Nazis probably wasn’t wise. It was crucial that he handled this right, that he had to think straight, but it was bloody hard. The wound in his stomach was now itching as it healed.

Aziraphale spoke first. “Betony, I don’t know where to start. Have you ever had anything like this yourself? Ever been injured?”

She shook her head. “No. Lucky, I suppose.”

“Not that lucky. You’re supposed to be dead. You saw all those soldiers out there – someone set you up,” Crowley said. “Lucky I was looking in the area for this idiot, maybe.”

“What do you mean, I’m supposed to be dead?”

Aziraphale took a deep breath. “Betony, I can explain all of this but not here, not now. Listen, as I see it, you’ve got two options. Either you come with me, now, or you stay here and disappear. You can’t carry on living as Betony. Betony LaPierre disappeared from history on this night.”

“What the fuck do you mean?” she asked, not unreasonably.

Aziraphale knew that he wasn’t explaining this very well. “I mean that if I hadn’t turned up and hustled you behind that tree, and if you had not shot me....well, shot Crowley....you would have walked right into an ambush. The rest of your party would be dead. You would be captured and tortured. Eventually killed. And you are hard to kill, Betony, because you are like us.”

Crowley showed her the wound in his stomach, or rather, the fading scar where it had been. “That is what was meant to happen tonight. We’ve...changed it.”

Her eyes became even more wary. “Maybe...maybe I have noticed something like that. With me. Healing too quickly. Not getting hangovers. What does it mean, though?”

“Come back to England with us. We can help you, and I can definitely explain it all.”

“How the hell are we going to get to England? Not sure you’d noticed, but France is under occupation. You can’t just...go to England. Or don’t you think a few people might have tried it?”

Aziraphale smiled. He never got tired of showing people the travelling trick for the first time. It might have been the best thing they’d ever learned they could do. “We can travel quickly. We’ll be there before you know it. And then Crowley can tell us how he found me, and how he managed to stop Time.” He gave the redhead a significant look.

Aziraphale struggled to his feet and grabbed for Betony’s arm. She flinched back, but then squared her shoulders and grasped his hand.

“Just to be clear – you’re saying that you have changed what was supposed to happen? How?”

Aziraphale thought of Muriel. What little they still knew, after all these years. He shrugged. “We....aren’t really sure. But Crowley sometimes sees things, things that will happen. And sometimes we can change them.”

Betony thought about this. “So I was meant to die. But here I am. Tell me, Aziraphale Fell – what do I do now?”

He was on surer ground here, or so he thought. “You can do whatever you want,” he said. He braced himself to travel.

Crowley looked up. “Lift home?” he asked. “I’m knackered, after that.”

Aairaphale took Crowley’s hand in his free one. His palm was soft, his fingers gentle around his. He looked into his friend’s face. Crowley had saved him today, or at least saved him from some horrible pain. The moment he had been shot....for a split second he thought he'd lose him. He clutched at Crowley's hand for a moment, overwhelmed.

Crowley gave him a half smile, his eyes golden in the dimness. Don't worry. Aziraphale breathed out. What would this be like, all this endless life, if he had to do it alone?

Shaking off these impossible questions for a later date, Aziraphale lifted them all out of the dripping forest and back to the Manor house at Tadfield.

The leaf litter swirled and settled as they departed the forest, stray sparks winking out one by one.

Chapter Text

The door gave way at the second kick. As Crowley pulled the rotting, splintered wood away from the frame he reached inside the resultant hole and turned the handle, and both of them stumbled inside. Now they were in the hallway they could hear the voices much more clearly – young, scared voices floating up, eerily, from underneath the floor. Betony hadn’t imagined it. They were really there.

Crowley looked around for a door to a cellar or a basement and saw it, down the corridor, a solid oak door that blocked off the end of the passage, dark, forbidding and bolted top and bottom. Reaching it, he yanked the rusting bolts back easily and pulled the heavy door open. The hinges creaked and squealed in protest. Behind the door was almost pitch darkness, filled with looming furniture covered in sheets and piles of junk, ghostly in the shadows. As his eyes adjusted, he could see uneven steps leading away down into the gloom. And at the bottom of the stairs, swimming in the darkness, were two cowering figures dressed in white, pale and squinting up at the bright open doorway above their heads.

Of course he could see clearly down into the dark, and so could Betony, but the girls down there were only able to make out their silhouetted figures, lit from behind. Crowley flicked the light switch, an automatic gesture, but nothing happened to the dusty light fitting that was screwed crookedly to the ceiling above the door. With an exasperated sigh, he reached up and grasped the bottom of the bulb, sending power through his fingers and into the corroded wires. The light came on, hesitantly, wavering and spluttering as the long-unused wires took the current, still dim but better than nothing, and better, less scary, than using his own light, in this situation.

They hurried down the stairs, only slowing down as they saw that the girls were cringing back against the far wall at their approach.

“It’s OK,” Betony said, softly. “We’re friends. We’re here to help.”

It had been a nice day. Normal, for them. This particular day, Betony and Crowley had been walking through the village, discussing something or other. It was the winter of 1943-44, a bitter one in more ways than just the cold, the country shivering and war-weary and hungry for spring, hungrier still for peace. Betony had on a pair of sheepskin boots – it was very, very cold. The sky was iron-grey, threatening more of the thin, dry snow that had been falling earlier, and ice rimed every frozen leaf. They had been passed by a few people heading out to the shops with their shopping baskets, coupons and ration books, and everyone had merely greeted them with ‘good morning’ and ‘how do you do?’, a raised hat (to Betony), or a little dimple of a smile and a blush (to Crowley, which made Betony laugh and roll her eyes). They wandered past the church, the gravestones grim and stark in the brown dead grass, and towards the little row of shops. Crowley was smoking a black-market cigarette, as usual, and Betony had just lit one of her own gitanes, when she paused, frowning. “Did you hear that?” she asked. They stopped walking.

Crowley took one final drag, exhaled, and raised an eyebrow in her direction. He hadn’t heard anything. “What am I meant to be listening to?”

It was very quiet. He was starting to think that she must have imagined it, but then he heard it too. A faint mewing sound, like a kitten caught in a tree. He thought it was coming from the garden of the large, forbidding house on the left, facing the churchyard with all the graves but not looking at it – all the blackout blinds were down. Crowley stepped towards the gate, because now he could hear it, too. But it wasn’t a kitten, not unless kittens could cry like a human child, not unless they could learn to speak, learn to say, ‘help’.

“Is it...Christmas yet?” asked the smaller of the two girls. She clutched at the mug of tea that Adam had handed to her, blue fingers turning bright red and warm for the first time in days as the heat seeped into her chapped and frozen skin.

Betony looked past them at the bleak January sky, the colour of lead. “Christmas?” she asked. “That was a few weeks ago, now...” A mental elbow nudge from Crowley invaded her brain. “...but I’m sure we’ve got a little bit of it left back at the house.”

Oui, merci, Crowley.

He replied with a smirk.

“Oh – but we can’t go to your house, miss,” the other girl said. “They told us not to have anything to do with you, miss.”

“Can I ask why?” said Adam. He handed the other sister a mug. She took it gratefully, her eyes following him closely.

“Mrs Brown said that odd things have happened there. Bad things.”

“Well, I haven’t seen anything odd there,” Adam said, lying through his teeth. “It’s just a house. Lots of people live there already. Me, for one.”

“Mrs Brown said that everyone there is going to go to hell,” the girl continued. Crowley didn’t really know how to reply to this, since he thought that Mrs Brown could very well be right about that, although probably not for the reasons she meant.

“Yes, because of Mr Fell not being married and...and other things, like the boys dodging the draft,” said the other girl, earnestly. Adam drew in a breath to lay into the Browns. “I did not dodge...”. Crowley pressed his heel into Adam’s foot in a warning to stay quiet. Adam choked off whatever was in his mouth ready to say, turned and left.

There were soon a number of WRVS ladies all fussing around the two girls, offering weak sugary tea and layers of woollens and scarves. Adam had gone and called for help, and the cavalry had well and truly arrived. Miss Hodges, still in charge of evacuees and other waifs and strays, stood back from the clucking little group, studying her clip board and fretting over numbers. Aziraphale spotted her, and came to stand next to her, holding a cup of tea given to him by a fluttering volunteer. He gave her a winning smile.

“We’re happy to have them at our house,” he said, hoping to reassure her – she wore a permanent frown these days, as though she was taking the war effort more and more personally.

“Oh....oh, Mr Fell, this is really too much to ask of you....and I mean, we don’t know how this experience, of being locked up in the dark like that, may have...affected...the girls.” She lowered her voice. “You know, I was sure that Mr and Mrs Brown would be ideal foster parents for those poor children. They were refugees themselves you know, of a kind, they know what we’re fighting. I absolutely cannot believe that they would...they would...lock them away like that! I cannot believe....” Her voice started to shake. She ruffled the papers on her clipboard, biting her lip. Shaking her head, she stopped speaking.

“It’s really alright,” he said, smiling at her and sipping the fairly disgusting weak tea. “They’ll be fine in a little while, I’m absolutely sure of it.”

“It’s just...those poor girls. Locked in the cellar for days while their foster parents went gallivanting around...I can’t imagine...” She visibly pulled herself together. “I’m sorry, Mr Fell. I know that you are better placed than most to take them in, but how many have we billeted at the Manor with you already? Five, isn’t it? And your house guest too,” she said, indicating Betony. “No, we’ll find someone else willing...”

“Miss Hodges,” Aziraphale said, turning the charm up to eleven and slipping his arm through the crook of hers. “Let me tell you about our house.”

She looked up at him with a slightly dazed expression on her face. Behind him, he heard Betony suppressing a laugh.

“There’s always enough space there,” he said. “And we’ve already told them they can stay. They’re looking forward to living with Mr Young – Adam, you know. All the girls think he’s a hero. And the older girls, Marjorie and Pepper, will make them welcome. It’s really no problem.”

Miss Hodges nodded, slowly, as Aziraphale tried to work the suggestion on her. As he had noticed before, she was very resistant to it – very strong-willed, although she herself didn’t realise it. At this moment she had tears in her eyes at the thought of the outrage done to the two girls who were nominally in her care. She was trembling with impotent rage.

He reached round with his other hand and brushed a stray strand of hair back from her face. She moved her hand to stop him, but it didn’t make it all the way to her face. He rested his fingers on her cheek for a moment. She flicked her eyes up to meet his, acquiescing, although not completely.

“It’s this war,” she whispered. “It’s...it’s getting inside people. The Browns would have never done anything like this when they lived in Frankfurt, before the war, or before they lost their boy in France. I’m sure of it.”

Aziraphale made a mental note, even as he was nodding sympathetically, soothing the troubled WRVS volunteer as she bit her lip and struggled weakly.

“This wasn’t your fault,” he said, gently. Miss Hodges met his eyes again, wanting to give in and agree with him, but not quite able to do it. She could feel the safety that he was offering, could almost touch it, could hold out her hands to it as though it was a warm fire, but she couldn’t give in to it. He caught her eye properly, held it, cupping her face in one hands. “Miss Hodges...”

“Mary. My name is Mary,” she whispered. “No one ever uses your name, do they? We’re all so formal.”

“Mary,” he said softly, speaking inside as well as out loud. Her eyes widened a little at this, she was surprised but not shocked. She’d known him for a little while by then, had probably worked out that there was something....

She closed her eyes for a moment, opened them again and looked up at him, and finally, finally, she gave in and let him read her thoughts. She silently told him how desperate she was for an end to the war, to be able to really help the people she was charged with helping, the evacuees, the people homeless after being bombed out, the traumatised soldiers coming home. She showed him their faces, told him their names, told him she was afraid she had failed them all. And in return, Aziraphale told her what he’d told the evacuees on that terrible day in 1940, when they had heard about Dunkirk, told her how much longer she would have to endure, told her there was an ending in sight, that this state was not forever. And then, the same as had been done before, he told her to bury the knowledge, to keep it safe inside.

Then he let her go.

Betony, Adam, Crowley and Aziraphale sat on the back steps of the house, passing a bottle of cheap, rough black-market vodka between the four of them. There was a cellar full of quality spirits from the previous three centuries stashed away, but there was also a wartime black market of home made booze in the village to support. Besides which, all four of them had mutually decided that they needed to get filthy drunk and this concoction make from potatoes and who-knew-what else was doing the job. It would have been a waste of single malt. Crowley was smoking a lot as well, one cigarette after the other, even though he was trying to cut down. He had an idea that smoking was not that great for his health. But stuff like this drove him back to it. And there always was stuff like this, these days. He saw again those two little white faces in the darkness of that horrible cellar.

Adam was in an even worse place than Crowley was. He was agonising over it. “You know, I can’t believe anyone would treat those little girls like that,” he said for the fifth time. “I mean, I thought what we went through on the Roo Creek was the worst treatment I’d ever see towards little kids but I guess I was wrong. I tell you...” he lifted his hands, shrugged helplessly. “This world is a depressing place. It needs changing. Bloody changing. All of it.”

“Parts of it are depressing, I’m not denying it.” Crowley took the bottle. The speed it was emptying, he reckoned they would need another one. Possibly another two.

“It’s better with you in it, Adam. You know you’re a hero to most of the evacuees, don’t you? Those girls didn’t look very sure about coming to us until Betony happened to mention you. Then they were all for it.”

Adam snorted, took the bottle back from him and took another drink. “Nothing very heroic about me. See me avoiding the call-up. See me not being on the list at all. See me actually being on the run from prison. You even used to call me Jailbird.”

“Doesn’t matter, Jailbird. You weren’t supposed to be in prison. And the others all look up to you. Probably be even more impressed, if they knew about that jail break we pulled off.”

Adam waved the empty bottle gloomily. Crowley produced another one. Betony lit another cigarette. Aziraphale leaned his head back against the door, closed his eyes.

“Did you talk to Mrs Brown?” he asked.

Crowley shook his head. “No. I didn’t trust myself. I think I’ll leave the talking to Miss Hodges, although she might not be that safe with her. She was very angry.”

“Don’t blame her,” muttered Adam, taking another drink of the disgusting vodka and cadging a cigarette from Crowley. Aziraphale didn’t move or open his eyes. “I wonder....I wonder if their boy is really dead,” he mused.

“I could check some of my research channels,” Adam offered.

“I could go and have a look round,” Aziraphale countered.

Betony frowned. “What do you mean, ‘Have a look round’?”

“Well, yes – go to France, ask around...”

She laughed humourlessly. “So your plan is what, exactly? Land at Dunkirk? Ask a passing Nazi if he’s seen Colin Brown? In occupied France?”

“Yes, Aziraphale, good luck with that. He’s dead.” Crowley sounded flatly sure of it.

“Maybe, maybe not. I did that for you, Betony.”

“He isn’t the reason they were mistreating those girls. Didn’t you hear Miss Hodges? They’re German. Came here before the war started. No need to look for another reason. They’re pigs, its their nature.” Betony snatched the bottle from Adam and took another drink.

“You can’t say that,” Aziraphale began. He opened his eyes, a look of outrage on his face.

“I can and I do. The Browns – Brauns – brought it with them. I’m surprised they haven’t been interned. I might report them, if Miss Hodges is too soft to do it.” She said it harshly.

“Miss Hodges isn’t soft at all. She’s very difficult to persuade.”

“I could do it,” said Betony, darkly.

Crowley decided they needed to get off this subject. It wasn’t the first time Betony had said stuff like this about the whole German population, who he felt were probably mostly like the rest of the world, just trying to live, and get through the war. And God knows she had reason, with her family, and the Resistance, who were her other family, all murdered. But by soldiers, not by old couples with trauma of their own. “Right, well, revenge can wait a little while, anyway. Need to add another two rooms before Miss Hodges comes back with the girls. Where do you think, in the attic or behind the front bedroom?”

Miss Hodges returned in due course and dropped the girls with them. She looked a little happier, a little less despairing, since her internal conversation with Aziraphale.

Crowley and Adam had whipped up a Christmas in the living room, so they took them there and then Aziraphale went back to the kitchen to pour a drink. Miss Hodges refused. “Don’t you want to join in the extra Christmas you’ve put together?” she asked. He smiled at her as she stood in the kitchen doorway. Beyond her a magical Christmas had been conjured into being for the latest two waifs. He shook his head. “I’ve seen enough of them already,” he said to her, taking a sip of whiskey. “Leave the kids to it.”

“You sound like an old man!” laughed Miss Hodges. “You’re not so bored of Christmas at your age!”

“I’m older than you think,” he replied. He offered the bottle again. Miss Hodges hesitated then sat down on the step beside him, taking a glass.

“Black market, I suppose? I should report that.”

“No, not this. This is from before the war.” She glanced quizzically at the clearly ancient glass. The fact that he meant the Boer war was maybe not totally lost on her, either.

Later, Aziraphale gave her a quick tour, as he’d promised, pointing out bits and pieces in the house that ‘my father’ had acquired. The way she looked at him as he told some of these tall tales, he could tell she wasn’t completely taken in. She’d seen the age of that whiskey, after all. When he showed her the brand new rooms they had just put in for the new girls, she looked at him very quizzically and remarked that she hadn’t known the attics extended so far, as when she’d been here before, when the volunteers came to inspect all the houses which might take evacuees, they had surely been smaller. Aziraphale smiled and kept talking. He could tell she wanted to say something else to him, was desperate to speak, but something was holding her back. He could wait, she would get there eventually.

They got back to the front door and he opened it for her. She walked through it and then squared her shoulders and turned back. “Mr Fell, I...” she began.

“Aziraphale, please,” he said, smiling a little. “First names, don’t you think, after I’ve seen inside your head?”

Taking a breath she started again. “Aziraphale, then. Yes. And I know I said Mary, but...Maria-Lou. That’s my real name, but the village has decided I am Mary. I want to thank you for...for trying to help me. I know you would do more, but I can’t accept...”

He smiled again, “It was no problem...Maria-Lou,” he said her name softly. All in a rush she fluttered forward and kissed him on the cheek, lightning fast, then backed off again, flushing. She now looked mortified. He tried to catch her eye, eventually did so, read in her face what the evacuees always said about her. They always joked about her being in love with him, well, maybe. There was something.

“This whole thing is terrifying,” she admitted. “This...all of it. Who are you, truly, Aziraphale? That’s a very....unusual....name.”

Aziraphale said nothing. Crowley came sauntering out of the living room in search of more alcohol, and the moment passed. He frowned when he saw the two of them standing close together. Aziraphale poured him a glass and handed it over, letting their fingers touch. Telling him silently, that there was nothing going on (obviously! He couldn’t be jealous of Mary Hodges! The woman lived like a nun, by all accounts). He raises his eyebrows nevertheless, glancing between them.

Mary didn’t miss this. She gathered up her handbag and hat, made ready to leave. At the last minute, she turned back to the two of them. “I’d better go. But....Mr Fell....you said you could go and look for the Browns’ son? No one could do that.”

Crowley glanced at Aziraphale.

“And if you were a...a spy or something....then you’ve made a traitor out of me.”

She turned, and fled.

Well, thought Aziraphale. Or something, is right. If only we knew ourselves what we are. If only we could KNOW.

He slammed his empty glass down on the table, cracking the ancient crystal.

Chapter Text

Muriel smoothed down her rough gingham skirt, straightened her hat, and took a compact out of her purse to check her make-up. Red lips, perfectly smooth brows, and a fine wave of hair curled across her forehead. Real self, real face, safely stashed away. Yes, in this form she was ready to meet the queen. Not that she was going to meet her of course, but this being VE day, she and the king and assorted other royals were going to come out onto the balcony and greet the celebrating Londoners, and today Muriel was pretending to be one of them. Germany had surrendered, Hitler was dead (I think....or did they not know about the secret bunker yet? The versions are getting all mixed up. Does he escape, in this one?) and there was more bunting up around Trafalgar Square than you could shake a stick at. Muriel had managed, with extensive use of her elbows, to secure a space on a wall facing the royal balcony and now he was sitting there, tapping her nails against the powder compact, impatient.

She’d actually come here to see if maybe Aziraphale or Crowley would show up to this historical occasion, but, stupidly, she hadn’t realised just how many people there would be, and just how festive the atmosphere would make her feel, everyone smiling, laughing, waving union flags and generally having a great time. A man in some kind of navy uniform with his arm around two giggling girls arrived next to her perch and settled there waiting for the royal party to appear. The sailor handed a hip flask around the people standing nearest to them, and Muriel took a swig when it was pressed into her hands. Gin, and so rough it made her eyes water. Swallowing the fiery liquid sent a spike of pain through her skull, the thumping headache returning yet again. She ignored it – the pain was there more or less all of the time, these days.

Far ahead of the crowd the double doors behind the famous balcony opened wide and some indistinct royal figures appeared to rapturous applause, yelling and clapping and shouts of ‘God save the king!’. The sailor took off his hat and threw it in the air. The sound swirled around and over Muriel’s head and for a moment she was nearly feeling it, was nearly a part of it, but then quite suddenly she had had enough. She boosted herself off the wall and nudged the sailor. “Got any more gin?” she asked him, giving a cheeky half smile. He handed her the flask again, and she raised it, downed the lot, and handed back the empty. The girls he was with were frowning at her in prim disapproval. She didn’t care. The alcohol helped, a little bit. She had needed it.

They weren’t here. In this version neither of them had turned up. It was time to try again. Dressing quickly, Muriel went into the kitchen of the little two-room house and began methodically clearing the shelves of food. A large dustbin stood in the centre of the room and she opened each cupboard, scooped out the contents, and dumped it all, opened or unopened. She dragged the bin outside and left it to be collected. When she’d done this, she pulled a scrap of paper out from under a pile of papers on the rickety kitchen table, found a pencil and scrawled ‘No milk today, no papers today’ on it. Opening the front door, she stuck this note half inside the letterbox, making sure it was secure, and then slammed the door shut, bolting it top and bottom and then turning the key, taking it out and putting it in the cutlery drawer. Finally she poured a bucket of water over each of the fireplaces and pulled the blackout blinds down in all the rooms. The war might be over, but they had other uses, for her.

Going back into the bedroom, she pulled the sheets and blankets straight and then sat down on the bed, legs crossed, and closed her eyes. She examined her body for any aches or pains, sore throats or blocked nostrils. This was important. She basically felt fine, healthy and alive, discounting the constant headache.

This situation would shortly change.

Your head would hurt, too, if it was filled with more than one version of reality.

Taking a painfully deep breath, Muriel dug her nails into the flesh of her knees, squeezed her eyes tightly closed, and pushed. Not with her body, although she had to take that with her – she pushed with her mind. Her face grew scarlet with the effort, and her nose began to bleed slightly. At a certain moment, the concrete surface she was pushing against grew elastic and porous. Relaxing at this moment would have been fatal. Instead, she redoubled her efforts, clenching her teeth so hard that one of the back ones cracked audibly, but still she didn’t stop, she gripped her legs with her cramping and screaming fingers, tensed every muscle in her whole body, and pushed into the spongy concrete of time itself, feeling it dragging at every cell in her body, and feeling each cell individually freeing itself, slowly, painfully.

If anyone had been watching her at this moment, through a split in the ageing blackout blind, Muriel's gin-supplying sailor, for instance, they would have seen a girl sitting hunched up on an old sagging bed, seemingly in such intense pain that she must be in labour or dying of some dreadful disease. He would have heard an animal sound issue from her throat, a growl of agony that instantly flashed him back to the worst day of his war, maybe when his ship had been attacked and he had held one of his mates in his arms as he died horribly with half his body gone. He would have seen her face smeared with blood, and her fingers clawing at her own flesh, and then...he would have seen her slowly lift her hands and lower them again, clutching a large, leather bound book which tumbled onto the bed as though it was very, very heavy. He might then have seen her reach behind herself with one shaking hand and pull a white feather seemingly out from the thin air behind her shoulder.

Then he might have seen her take a deep breath, blanch even paler than she already was, and open the book, using both hands to lift the cover and heave it over as though it were heavier than lead.

It had taken Muriel far too long to realise that she was never going to be able to get it exactly right. And every time she opened the book, every time she took her quill and tried again to write away the wrongness, the effect on her physical being was greater.

She would listen to her body carefully, watch it for any aches or pains or stiffness. Any tiny infection or even a slightly strained muscle would multiply a hundred-fold. It drained her energy so thoroughly that there wasn’t any left to do things like fight infections or heal cuts. She had made the mistake, near the beginning, of trying to retrieve the Book when she was just getting over a head cold – the result of that was three weeks bleeding from her ears.

But in the end I couldn’t stop, I had to keep trying...

Chapter Text

Marjorie clutched her ticket in one sweaty hand, the other gripping the handle of her trunk, ready to drag it up the gang-plank. She was in Liverpool at last. Ready to leave and find what was left of her family.

There seemed to be some kind of delay. The dock was full of people, piled high with bags and cases, packages of all shapes and sizes, and among them hundreds of scruffily dressed children ran, mostly laughing and hiding behind the mountains of luggage. There were a lot of people here who clearly were not thinking of ever coming back. Marjorie had only one small trunk. She had no plans either way. All she had to go on was the name of the area of town her mother was apparently living in, and a train ticket that would get her there. She relaxed her grip on the handle of the trunk, letting it slide to the floor, and then she perched herself on top of it, settling into the chaotic kind-of-queue. It was clearly going to be a long wait.

She put her new handbag on her lap and unclipped the fastening. Around her the turmoil and shouting continued. She was fumbling in the bag looking for her purse – there was hardly any money in it, but she had an idea that maybe she could get a cup of tea at the little greasy café she had seen further back on the dock, heaving, full of families and very dirty, but warm, perhaps.

There was something else in the bag. A package. It felt like….she actually bit her lip hard enough to draw a spot of blood and shoved the package right back to the bottom of the bag. She looked around guiltily – what were they thinking about?! A roll of 20 dollar notes – they call them bills, she thought randomly – did they want her to be robbed and murdered in her sleep?!

She might have known they would do this – she had begged both of them not to help her at all – the idea of this, the whole point, was that it was her fight, her thing that she had to do – and if Crowley and Aziraphale helped her, even just by giving her money, it somehow wouldn’t be real, and she would still be little Marjorie the unwanted child, raised by her aunt in the East End, and she could go right back there and pretend the last six years never happened. Crowley had said she wouldn’t able to do that, that even though the street had escaped the bombs, that the government had some plan to flatten the whole area and make everyone live in tall buildings half a mile from the ground, but that was one of those things he said sometimes – Marjorie didn’t really know what he meant. But anyway, that didn’t change anything – the point was that she was supposed to be doing this by herself. All this was quite beside the fact that she hadn’t let the bag out of her sight since she had finished her packing, so paranoid was she that her tickets would get lost, so there was no way that the money could actually be there. Maybe if she ignored it, it would go away. That worked sometimes, didn’t it?

Not really.

Marjorie had been incredibly nervous about telling them that she was going to leave, and especially where she was planning to go. She desperately did not want to seem ungrateful, or as though she didn’t want to stay – the easiest thing in the world would have been to stay, and to do nothing. And of course, if Lockie came back, and she wasn’t there to meet him…but Marjorie didn’t really think that that was going to happen, not any more, not after all this time.

As so often in these situations, Aziraphale and Crowley already seemed to know what she was going to tell them. There were several signs – the new clothes, for example, that had appeared in her closet. She had avoided wearing them – she didn’t want to know how many coupons the new grey suit, complete with hat and gloves, had cost. Or even if they had come from a shop – there was always a possibility that they weren’t real, as she understood the word. Like the cups of real tea and coffee, and the things like chocolate biscuits that could not be bought for love nor money, but there always seemed to be a lot of them at Tadfield Manor. They told the ladies from the WRVS that this stuff was made of carrot, but if the ladies were fooled, she wasn’t. Even now, when the fighting had stopped but the rationing had actually got worse, there were never any shortages in evidence at one large house in Tadfield.

She came down the stairs slowly, sliding her hand down the familiar wooden banister, not knowing how to begin. Adam was sitting at the kitchen table reading the Tadfield Examiner. He looked up, grunted a hello and went on reading. Betony was there too, smoking one of her French cigarettes. She was a strange one. She’d arrived one night, a few years before, with no explanation from her, from Crowley or from anyone else as to who she was or where she had come from. She rarely spoke to the evacuees. Marjorie had an idea that she’d escaped, from somewhere. That type of thing did happen, around here.

She paused in the archway between the stairs and the warm, bright kitchen. This was now home, more than her aunt’s house in London had ever been, and she wanted to remember it just like this, with everyone still here, and everything as it should be. It was all changing now. Wensley was going home in a few days, and the others all had plans. Pepper was going to university, but even though she was easily smart enough, not Cambridge, who didn't give women full degrees. Brian has left a year ago to be an engineer somewhere down in Portsmouth.

Marjorie watched Adam reading for a moment. She was not aware what he was planning to do now that the war was over. He never spoke about his family or his past at all. Today his brown hair seemed very long, flopping over into his eyes, and he kept twitching it back out of his way. After a long moment he looked up at her again, squinting slightly at him through his hair.

“You going to stand there all day?”

Marjorie shook her head. “No, no, I was just…taking a moment. Adam, can I ask you something?”

He folded the newspaper over. “Course.”

“What are you going to do now? I mean – now the war’s really, really over and everyone’s coming home? People are going back to London.”

Adam smiled. “Well, I never lived in London in the first place, and some of the others haven’t got anywhere in London to go now. Whole streets are gone. I suppose I’ll stay here a while.”

“I want to do something ridiculous.”

Adam raised an eyebrow. “What’s that?”

She took a deep breath. “I want to find my family. Well, my mother, anyway. In America. She was there all along. Crowley and Aziraphale…well, I know you asked them to look for Lockie, and they have been doing, for all this time. They didn’t find Lockie, but they did find our mother. She sailed to America just before the war and then got stuck there avoiding the U-boats. She only meant to be gone for half a year. And our aunt Harri thought she had just left us there with her and gone to have a nice new life in the States away from the war and the madness. No wonder she hated us! But now there are passages to America again, safe passages, I have to go and look for her. Tell her about how...how I lost Lockie.”

Adam was nodding enthusiastically. Betony looked up but didn’t speak. She raised a Gallic eyebrow but didn’t say anything. She rarely did.

“Mad, I expect? How will I even get there, for a start?” she spread her hands.

But Adam was grinning, delighted. “This is fantastic! And you know, you might be mad but it’s a good mad. And I bet you Aziraphale can help you...”

“No! No, he isn’t going to help me any more than he already has, or, God help me, come with me. I’m going alone. If Lockie was here….but there’s just me, now. But – do you think I can do it? Really?”

Adam pushed himself back from the table, and stood up. He picked up his newspaper. “You can do anything you want. Hasn’t living here for nearly six years told you that?”

Marjorie was suddenly overcome by a very clear picture of Adam as she first knew him, a little bit younger, freckled, his hair ridiculous length back then too, but already convinced that he could do anything. Contrast that with her, frightened to breathe too loud. She suddenly knew that he had never been an evacuee, not like the others. He had come here with Crowley and Aziraphale, he was one of them. He had the same air about him, that complete confidence.

“You’re going to go with them,” she said suddenly. “I mean, that’s why you’re not going back to London. You have somewhere else to go.”

Adam just smiled enigmatically. Betony did, too. They were both being very mysterious.

The kitchen door swung open, and Crowley swept inside in a swirl of leaves, dumping a paper bag on the kitchen table and kicking the door closed in one smooth movement. “Hey guys,” he said, looking from Marjorie and Betony and across to Adam.

Adam grinned, grabbed his paper, and hurried to the stairs. “That’s my cue to leave,” he said. “Good luck, sis. Come on, Bets.” The French girl grimaced at the nickname, but got up, slowly, and followed Adam out of the room.

And then Marjorie was already alone with him. Thanks, Adam.

She stood, fidgeting her fingers together slightly. “Well,” she began, and then found that she didn’t know how to carry on.

He decided to make it easier for her. “So, have you decided to leave, like the others have?” he said. He pulled out the chair Adam had been sitting on, and she sat on it, feeling like she was being interviewed. “You know you’re welcome to stay here. But are you going to go back to London?”

“I’ll go there first. But…I have another plan, and I don’t know how mad it is.”

“It’s different, now. Let me warn you. Nothing will ever be the same again.”

Marjorie laughed at that. “Are you still talking about London, now?”

He smiled and waved his hand dismissively. “I’m sorry, that was a bit…portentous. I just meant, things in general. Everything is different now. Adam was right. You can do anything you want.”

She didn’t ask him how he knew that Adam had said that, since he had been outside. There was a strange silence. “What’s going to happen now?” she whispered, overwhelmed.

“Now that is a complicated question. But I think your idea to go and find your family in the States is an excellent one. In fact, we already took the liberty of finding out where your mother lives. After we discovered she was still alive – I was curious.” He pressed a bulky envelope into her hands.

Suddenly she was shaking.

“That is her address. There’s also a photograph in there, so you know what she looks like after all this time. She has a picture of you, also, and knows you are not dead.”

“How would she have got hold of that?” Marjorie laughed shakily.

“I’ve seen her. In fact, I told her you were coming to meet her.”

Marjorie went white – she could feel the blood draining from her face as a physical sensation. “What? How?”

“Not in so many words. I just made a couple of suggestions that you might turn up. A conversation in a bar, a photograph found in a drawer, that sort of thing.”

She was quiet, taking this in. “That’s...you went to America? To do this for me? When?!”

“A few weeks ago. It was no trouble.” He gave her one of those half-smiles.

The world was shifting on it’s axis, expanding into a scary unknown Marjorie wasn’t sure she was ready for. “Oh, God. I….I’m really going to go, aren’t I?”

“We’ve also got you a ticket on the boat from Liverpool, and Subway tickets to the part of New York you need to go to, Queens – that’s where she’s living. They’re all in there. Of course….” He smiled again, mischievously. “If you wanted to avoid all that hassle…..I could just take you there now, travel like I did before? It doesn’t take long….” His eyes were sparkling.

Her eyes widened at the possibility – but then she shook her head, turning her back firmly on this inviting new doorway. It just seemed too perilous. “No! No, thank-you, but no, I have to do this by myself.”

“Let us at least give you some money, then.”

“No! Please, I really have to…do this myself. I need to tell her about...about Lockie and all the rest of it, I need time...”

“Alright, alright,” he held up his hands. At the mention of her brother his face had grown sober. “But you know, if you ever need to come back – to come home – there’ll always be a place here for you to stay as long as you need. That goes for any of you. Not Adam so much, I mean, he’s with us anyway, as you’ve worked out.”

Marjorie suddenly wanted to be gone now. Her mind was too full of different thoughts, hope and fear and longing and nostalgia and love and confusion over what was going on here – what had been going on here all along….it was all too much. She glanced down at the envelope with her future inside it, and was suddenly flooded with tears, and helpless sobs, together with laughter, which she tried gamely to keep inside, but they spilled over and out, and then Crowley had his arms around her and she was sobbing into his shoulder like a little girl. Six years of all those feelings were behind those heaving sobs, and she cried for a long time.

And when she was finished, she was really ready to go.

When the day came, Aziraphale and Crowley both walked with her to the train station, carried her little trunk in to the guard’s van for her, and helped her board the train. They waved her off as the train chugged slowly out of the little Tadfield station as though it was reluctant to leave, loathe to carry her away. She watched the little platform recede into the distance, watched them standing there waving, and then, when they thought she could no longer see them, stop waving and turn together, leaning towards each other. A wave of desperation washed through her, and she actually moved towards the emergency cord that would stop the train and let her fling the door open and rush back down the track towards Tadfield, towards him, towards safety, like a Victorian heroine in a silent movie. But it was too late for that, all too late, she had left, burned her bridges. There was no going back. It was clear that the ship had sailed that would have let her follow them and have that life, the life Adam had chosen. The door was closed. She could almost hear it slamming shut. And so, she turned around and walked into the carriage, resolutely turned towards London, wondering if she would ever feel again what she had felt when, finally, she had flung herself into the long-offered and long-refused safety of their protection. She had been home. For a brief moment in her life, she had known what that word meant. But now she was away again, adrift on the seas once more, only now she carried with her the bitter-sweet knowledge that there was somewhere in the world where she could belong, after all – and she had chosen to leave it behind.

Marjorie travelled to London first with an idea of finding Aunt Harri, although even her new, heady sense of freedom did not help with knowing what she would say to her. The old hovel of a house where they had once lived with Harri was gone. Bombed out. She asked some old neighbours, who didn’t recognise her as the little urchin from Harri’s place, and one of them said he had heard that she was in a hostel with some other widows for a while, but that she’d left there and then she’d disappeared.

The neighbour also told her that her cousin Billy had finally joined up and gone off to fight in the war, in the merchant navy no less, must have been trying to prove something to someone, but he had disappeared into the Atlantic – he was missing in action. MIA, presumed torpedoed. God. He never did anything brave in his life, until it was something so brave it bordered on really stupid. Marjorie couldn’t feel sorry for him. That sounded dreadful when she admitted it to herself, but she couldn’t bring herself to it. Every time she tried, she saw Lockie’s white little face, screwed up in pain. And remembered that Lockie was gone.

She went back to Euston. The pull of Tadfield was very strong.

She was actually walking down the platform towards the Tadfield platform, thinking that maybe it still wasn’t too late to go back (go home) and stay and be safe...but then a sudden resolve stiffened her shoulders and quickened her steps and she spun on her heel and followed the crowd to the Liverpool platform. She boarded the fast train. It pulled out of the station before she could change her mind.

Marjorie Potts had had enough of oddness and strangeness and feeling as though she wasn’t in full control. She wasn’t going back, even though the place was calling to her with a physical pull inside her chest. She refused to give in to it. Rather than go back she would remember it as it had been, the sun shining through the windows of the kitchen, Adam with his feet up on the counter reading the Advertiser with his hair in his eyes, and Crowley, leaning on the door-frame watching them both, smoking a cigarette, his face wreathed in sweet-scented smoke and his strange amber eyes full of mysteries.

Chapter Text

Aziraphale’s diary

1949, already. Betony and Adam are the only two of our crowd of strays still left at the Manor – they have either gone back to London, or dear Marjorie was off in America. We are keeping an eye on Marjorie, of course.

Together with Adam, I am working with renewed vigour on the project of my life, the huge piece of research that will hopefully, at last, give us the clues we need. I have acquired a large collection of rather random ancient books, from house clearances and sales, over the years, and in these years following the war, the social upheaval has meant several old families selling off their family silver, so to speak – in some cases, in the form of their long-neglected libraries.

We have had no further contact with that mysterious girl, Muriel, and searching for her name in the many and various pantheons and tomes has got us nowhere further forward.

Recently, at a house clearance in Lancashire, I ot hold of a copy of a very rare prophecy book that looks very promising. The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, it’s infamous in prophecy circles. Apparently Hitler was desperate for a copy, because Nutter has long had a reputation as a true prophetess.

I am also studying demonologies (which Crowley considers a waste of time - ‘that’s all made up by people eating funny mushrooms, innit?’ is what he says about it).

Adam is compiling it all. He has begun by putting together bits of information that we already know, from mine and Crowley’s past experiences, lists of our powers and abilities, memories that don’t quite fit with what we know as our history - some ideas from Betony, too. I think I am starting to figure out how all these threads and little events are linked together. Crowley is helping, of course, with his unique memories of some things that have not yet happened. It is odd – there are gaps in those memories, too, now that we come to examine them and commit them to paper....

“Hey, you know what’s coming up soon? Marjorie’s getting married, in New York,” Crowley said to Betony and Adam one bright summer morning. “We should go.”

“A wedding?” Betony pouted.

“A trip to America. You can take the four of us, practice your travelling. We can stay there for a while, there isn’t anything going on here. Also, I don’t think Marjorie is supposed to meet us while she’s in America so you’ll be able to practice observing things unseen, and your glamours, as well.”

“Every day’s a school day,” Betony said sarcastically, rolling her eyes. “I’m better at those things than you are already. But, sure, if you want to, let’s go to a wedding.”

Adam sat quietly on one side, chewing his lip nervously. Crowley was fidgeting. He said the floor was hurting his feet, though he couldn’t say why. It was just ordinary wooden floorboards.

Sitting all around them in the modern little church were Marjorie’s family, those people she had heard so little from in all the years she had lived with them. There were a surprising number of people considering that she had believed herself and her brother to be friendless orphans. They hadn’t even offered to pay for her ticket out here (which she’d had for free anyway, but that completely missed the point).

“I reckon it’s a bit of a cheek for this lot to show up at Marjorie’s wedding,” Adam muttered, echoing Crowley’s thoughts precisely. “All come out of the woodwork now there’s a free bar in prospect, haven’t they?”

“Just what I was thinking,” he said, leaning back in the pew, wincing. “That guy there, for example.” He pointed towards the front of the church where the ‘close’ family were gathered. He had done some subtle mental digging to find out who they were. “He’s an uncle of some kind, owns three houses out here, he’s a long way from poor. They all knew about the situation.”

Marjorie had almost become like a sister to Adam in her time at the house. It was obviously affecting him deeply to see her useless family gathered here after ignoring her plight for seven long years.

“I was thinking more of her mother,” he said bitterly. “How could she do it? Just abandon them and…and swan off to America? I mean, I know my parents did it to me, the abandoning part anyway, but they had an excuse at least, they were dirt poor and couldn’t afford to keep me and besides that were told I’d be having a fabulous time in Australia! What was her excuse? She ran away from the war and left her children behind!”

Aziraphale put his hand on Adam’s shoulder, trying to reassure him. “Well, yes, she did that. But it worked out alright, didn’t it?”

“Oh, yes, she was much better off with us,” Adam said, nodding firmly. “But, that’s not the point, you know? None of them knew that you weren’t working them fourteen hours a day, making them sleep in the barn or running some sort of labour farm like, well, like Roo Creek, for example, did they?”

“No, that they didn’t,” he said. He was wondering himself how she had brought herself to forgive her mother. She obviously had forgiven her – the wedding invites (that they, actually, didn’t have one of) were sent from her address, and she was giving Marjorie away in the absence of a father.

“This is so lame,” complained Betony in a fake New York-accented whisper, sliding into the pew next to Aziraphale. She was dressed all in black for the occasion, with a weird bowler-style hat and heavy eye make-up. A glamour of sorts, Aziraphale supposed. “She came all this way, to this great big diverse city, to marry her cousin? Who, by the way, looks like this type of thing has been going on for a long time in their family.”

Crowley stifled the urge to laugh, because she was quite right. Marjorie’s cousin Tyler was nothing to look at, even dressed in his best and waiting at the altar. “I’m just checking she’s OK,” Aziraphale said. “Marjorie is quite vulnerable, you know, especially after her brother…disappeared.”

They had never told anyone what had really happened to poor Lockie; not even Adam knew. Aziraphale had spent the years since that dreadful night supposedly looking for him. That was a dark mark on Aziraphale’s soul, and no one else ever needed to know about it.

“She’s quite stupid,” said Betony. “He’s obviously got some serious trauma issues from the war – I know that look when I see it. Is she going to be able to deal with that?”

Aziraphale sighed. “What would you have me do?” he asked her. “Stop her from marrying him? She wants to be connected to her family again, I can understand that. It’s not our place to stop that from happening. Beside which, Crowley thinks she has to do this so that events will go the way they’re meant to go. He says, she has to get into the position where they deport her, so she’s got no choice but to come back to us. Crowley remembers that she does come back, so she will, at some point.”

“Ah, but you said that you’d torn up the book when you rescued me,” said Betony. “Maybe none of that needs to happen at all anymore.”

“It was more like tearing out one page of the book, or cutting one thread,” he replied. “The rest of it is still in place – I hope. Shh, she’s coming. Make sure she doesn’t see us.”

They sank inconspicuously into the background. Marjorie came slowly down the aisle of the little church. As she passed them, Aziraphale could see her face clearly, pinched and white, her lips bitten with nerves, eyes wide. He had a vivid memory of how she had looked on her first morning in Tadfield. Marjorie’s grey eyes had been shocked and fearful, much as they looked now. Not how they should appear on the day of her wedding.

Aziraphale had a feeling that he hadn’t heard the last of this line of thought from Betony, and he wasn’t wrong. After the horrible wedding reception was over the four of them went to the only bar in the near neighbourhood and proceeded to talk over the events of the day, gloomily. Crowley was rubbing his feet in some relief. Adam said that he would give the marriage eighteen months, it was so obviously going to be a disaster.

Betony wholeheartedly agreed with him. “And you could have stopped it, but you didn’t,” she said to Aziraphale, accusations in her eyes. “In fact, you know, you don’t ever really seem to do very much with your power, your power that you tell me all the time is so great and such a gift.”

Hearing this from a girl whose life he had saved stung slightly. “What do you think we should do, then?” he asked her. This wasn’t the first time they had had this type of discussion. Betony was of the firm opinion that they should use the power to improve the world – and she meant the big stuff, war, famine, pollution, dodgy governments....Aziraphale, and especially Crowley, had frankly never thought that they would have the energy for that type of thing, even if either of them thought it was possible.

“If we see a disaster coming like a big old train crash, we should stop it from happening!” Betony insisted.

“But, Betony, I’ve told you and Crowley has told you, we can’t just storm in and change world events! You have to look at the consequences, always consider the consequences.”

“Can you honestly tell me that if one of you had killed Hitler in 1933 the world wouldn’t be a better place?” she asked heatedly. “Or prevented the Bomb from being developed? Closed some concentration camps? What about Stalin? Come on, Aziraphale, we could change all this! Why are we sitting here getting drunk after not even stopping a good friend of ours from marrying a moron?!”

“People have to make their own choices, including marrying stupidly,” he replied.

“Free will,” put in Crowley, “is sacrosanct.”

“Well, what if I chose to kill Hitler? That would be a valid choice, surely? My free will?” Betony countered.

“You have to look at the bigger picture. There’s a famous phrase that just about covers what I think about this. Adam – tell her what I mean.”

Adam looked up from his beer. “’With great power comes great responsibility’,” he said wearily. “I think Aziraphale wants me to get a big banner of that done up and put in the hallway.”

Aziraphale nodded eagerly. “That’s a great idea, Adam. We need to be reminded.”

“That saying could just as easily mean that we’re meant to act,” Betony persisted. “It might be taken to mean that we have a responsibility not to do nothing!”

“It might,” he said, thoughtfully. “But I don’t think so. If you look at the type of huge changes you’re talking about – how do you know that what happens instead won’t be worse?”

“Worse than the Holocaust?” she said. “Worse than Hiroshima? Your mind is in a fucking dark place, if you can imagine much worse than those things.”

“She’s got a point there,” Crowley chipped in, unhelpfully.

“Our power isn’t enough to change things like that,” Aziraphale said, protesting. “I’m fairly sure I couldn’t deflect the course of a nuclear missile.”

“Not while it’s flying towards a city, maybe not,” said Betony. “Though I’d bloody well try it if all else failed. But you can go back and deflect the course of developing the bomb in the first place. Crowley can stop Time, Aziraphale, we must be able to use that ability to make the world a better place! I don’t understand why you won’t try!”

“Because think about how arrogant that would make us!” he said, shocked at how strongly she felt about this. “We can’t start to do things like that because we think we know what’s best for the world!”

“We do know what’s best for the world!” Betony was shouting now. “A world where bloody Germany never had any power over the rest of us, a world where Hitler was strangled in his cot – that would be a better one! It would!”

“It might. But that’s not the world we’ve got,” he said, trying to soothe her.

But Betony wouldn’t be soothed. She got to her feet, eyes alight with something not quite like sanity. Aziraphale looked at her. She was practically sparking with the power. Her face was glowing, but it was a buzzy type of glow, a dark energy. People were turning to look at their table. She was revealing herself in all her power and Aziraphale was suddenly very sure that he didn’t want to see it.

“Aziraphale, Crowley, I think I have learned all I am going to from you,” she said harshly. Her French accent came back strongly. “You can’t teach me anything more.”

The blue glow surrounding her became blinding. Crowley reached out to grab her hand but it dissolved under his fingers. She dematerialised before their eyes, and utterly vanished.

They looked at each other in silence. A fly buzzed lazily through the space where Betony had been.

Chapter Text

Marjorie walked slowly up the long, curving driveway. Her feet settled into the fine gravel of the sweeping approach to the house as she looked around, slowly taking in afresh a view that she had once known intimately. She realised as she progressed up the driveway that she had only ever come up to the house this way once before – the very first time that she had ever come here, clutching her aunt’s battered suitcase and Lockie’s sweaty little hand. All through the war, everyone had used the side door.

Now things had changed. She had changed – she was taller, she could almost be described as willowy, and her hair was done straight and sleek. Her face had slimmed out and sharpened, and now, her make-up carefully applied, she was trying for the New Look. Today she was dressed in a fine, fitted Dior-style grey skirt suit with matching hat and red trim. Six years in the States had added a slight twang to her fading cockney accent, and she knew that no one she had met in Tadfield so far as she walked through the village had recognised her. Getting off the train, she had been accosted by both of the young station porters, eager to carry her bags, visibly deflated when she smiled and told them that she had no luggage, as she wasn’t staying long.

Marjorie stopped for a moment and stared up at the Manor. It was just as she had left it, as though her memory, so wrong about a lot of things, hadn’t fooled her one bit about this place. There was the same black Bentley parked up in the front of the house, it could still have been 1945, and she could have just stepped out to go to the village shop and come back, a fresh loaf of bread tucked under one arm and a ration book in her pocket.

Tadfield. The place had been hovering in her past like a hazy grey cloud. So why exactly had she walked back into it? As soon as she had left the village, the odder aspects of her time as an evacuee had begun to fade into the background, until after about six months she had all but dismissed them as fantasies. But now…after all that had happened, all that had gone wrong for her, she had come back to England because there was nothing left to do. Divorcing an American citizen meant that she had no right to stay there, anyway. She had practically been deported, although she still had enough of the mysterious money left to book a passage for herself, so they hadn’t actually had to physically send her home.

The compulsion to come back to the village had started to eat at her as soon as she boarded the ship. By the time they docked in Liverpool, it was gnawing at her so strongly that she couldn’t do anything else. She sent her luggage on ahead to London on the train, and got on another one to come back up to Tadfield. The journey was amazingly quick compared to the war-time trains that used to stop everywhere and were packed with troops. The signs had started reappearing at stations, so there was less chance of getting off in the wrong place and having a long walk. It had always struck Marjorie as over-zealous to remove signs on a little branch line like the one that trundled past Tadfield, anyway – who in the whole of the Third Reich had ever heard of the place? Yeah, it had its little airfield, she supposed, but it wasn’t exactly the centre of the world.

Although apparently it was the centre of hers.

Her feet almost seemed to be carrying her towards the house now without her thinking about it, past the village school, past the church hall where she and Lockie had first been herded when they arrived from London.

The Manor still looked the same. In fact, everything still looked the same. It was amazing, really – the world had changed so much, so totally, but this house…it could still have been 1942, the sky could still be full of planes grimly heading towards the Channel, the village in blacked-out darkness waiting to count them back in. This house had never had the black-out up, though – she’d forgotten about that, too.

Marjorie walked around the front of the house and into the garden, not really knowing what she was looking for. Some of the other evacuees, maybe? Betony, that strange French girl? Adam? Pepper? But they were all adults, now, all gone their separate ways. And they probably wouldn’t recognise her, anyway, with her new American sophistication and her foreign accent. She stopped under the horse-chestnut, listening to the birds and the rustling leaves, breathing deeply. The garden was fragranced with spring flowers, wallflowers, daffodils, some early bluebells. She leaned against the rough trunk of the tree, looking out beyond the wall towards the moor in the distance. America seemed very far away.

Finally, her feet carried her towards the front door. She gazed up at it. Still painted green. The same scratches were still on it. There was still a dent missing from the middle of the front step from where Adam and Brian had been carrying a push-bike upside down over the threshold for some reason, and one of them had dropped it, bashing the handlebar against the floor. Marjorie could almost hear the laughter and the shouting. Close your eyes, and it’s like you’ve never been anywhere…

Marjorie shook her head again. She looked back up at the door. No, there’s no reason to be here, after all, she thought, and actually turned to go. But then, the door opened.

Sitting on the train, she had planned what she would do when this moment arrived. It could have played out in so many different ways. None of those things happened. She just looked up, straight into Crowley’s amber eyes, and her face stretched into a ridiculous grin. “Hello,” she said, her voice sounding floaty and far-away.

He was leaning on the door-jamb, casually, dressed in black, looking like James Dean (if James Dean was ginger). Just like he usually did, in other words. “Marjorie,” he said. “What’ve you been up to?”

“Well,” she said, sounding ridiculous even as she spoke, “I was in the area. I thought I’d come and see you. I went to America – but you knew that – and I got married – but, you knew that, too. Then I got divorced and decided to come back. Well, actually I was deported. The whole thing was….well, it was crap.”

There was a pause, and then he laughed, holding the door wide open for her. “Is that it? It’s been – what? – nearly five years? And that’s your story?”

“Yeah. In summary.” Marjorie nodded, then shook her head, laughing as well. Looking at him, she knew it was all true, every fuzzy memory. The laughter was becoming hysterical, threatening to take over. Tears were running down her cheeks, stupidly. “I’m sorry,” she gasped, wiping her face. “This is so stupid. I came back…I came back to come here! It took an age, and four different trains! And I don’t even know why! It was like I was being...dragged here. Why am I here?!”

He smiled again, mysteriously, and led her through the little hallway. It was exactly the same. The sunny little kitchen, all the pots and pans…looking around, she was struck again and again, seeing things she now remembered very clearly – almost as though the place had been reconstructed from her memories of it. Aziraphale was sitting at the table, hands clasped in front of him. He smiled, too, as she came in.

“Have you been here all this time?” she asked him.

“Oh, we’ve been here and there,” he said. “Cup of tea?”

“Tea? I drink coffee now, I’m practically American.”

“Of course. Hang on, then…”

Moments later she was sitting at the table examining her feelings very closely, sitting there in the familiar kitchen, a cup of coffee nestled between her hands. There was none of the old terrible, awkward feeling of fascinated fear that she had previously felt around them. It was odd. She searched around for it, found that she could remember feeling it but not what it had felt like. It was like old pain – as soon as it’s gone, it’s unimaginable.

“So do you want to tell us about it? You didn’t write once, you know. Even when you got married. Even when you got divorced – very modern of you.” Aziraphale said it as a reprimand but with a smile in his eyes. For her part Marjorie was sure he already knew everything that had happened – sure that they had been checking in on her as it was happening. For example, they had sent her a wedding gift. No note, but she had known that it was from them. A painting, of an English village, which could have been Tadfield. She had written to Adam. But noone else – she had felt that there was no need.

“You already know. Or you can guess. But I don’t want to tell you. Because…of a lot of things. I don’t need either of you to feel like you have to act like a big man and go rushing off to Queens to get Tyler back for how he treated me.”

“I won’t be doing that, unless you really want me to?” He smiled. “You were never meant to stay in America. You had to come back here. You’re not finished here yet, you know. With Tadfield.”

He looked tired to Marjorie, suddenly, and older than he had done before. Despite all of this he was still smiling, in a slightly peculiar way, she thought, as though he knew something she didn’t know – well, obviously that was always true, but something specific. It was as though the grin were out of his control. He was practically wiggling in his seat.

Sitting here now, she found herself remembering that horrible day back at the beginning of it all, very clearly. The day she had hidden in the trees and seen Aziraphale reset her brother’s arm, actually fix him, and the effects seeing those things had had on her. There was something that he maybe didn’t know – she had never told anyone that she knew he had somehow been inside her head after that, when she was supposed to be sleeping and so clearly not meant to remember any of it. But she would never forget the feeling of someone else going through her memories as though they were flicking through a loose-leafed book, pages all in the wrong order and put back slightly in the wrong place. He had done it gently – expertly? – but it had still been an utterly strange sensation. She had let him see everything simply because she had had no more strength left to resist it – she had been hiding and lying and trying to protect Lockie for so long, and she just hadn’t been able to hide it any longer. Somehow, after that day, even the bad memories were…better, is the only way she could ever try to describe it.

Of course, everything that came afterwards was another story, Lockie running away so many times and then finally, utterly and completely vanishing. Sitting here in the bright kitchen was bringing it all back to her. America seemed like the dream, now. Stepping into the kitchen had been stepping back home.

Finally, it was apparent that Aziraphale could not wait any more. He stood up and came over to Marjorie, placing his hand on top of her clasped ones and kneeling down next to her chair so that he could look up and into her face. The mischievous smile had become a full-on grin. “Marjorie,” he said. “There is someone here who I think you will want to see.”

She looked at him, questioningly. He let go of her hand long enough to make that come on gesture that she had seen him make before, and the hallway door swung open of its own accord. Standing behind it, with another big smile, was an older, much cooler-looking version of Adam. He grinned at her, flipped his hair out of his eyes, and tipped a sloppy salute. He also looked dead tired.

But Adam was not alone in the doorway. Standing behind him, with the sun shining at his back, giving him a halo effect for a moment, was someone else.

Another man, wearing aviator sunglasses and military clothing, a tall, broad-shouldered blonde man who Marjorie knew she had never seen before, but who nevertheless she knew intimately. She knew him to be her brother, her long-vanished brother, Lockie, MIA for close to ten years and now, finally, here in the flesh. She cried out, she got up from the chair and it fell over backwards behind her (Crowley caught it) as she threw herself towards him and fell into his arms.

Their story was that Lockie had been in Japan as a prisoner of war. Marjorie didn’t believe a word of it. She had seen men in London and in New York who had been brought back from Far East prison camps – they looked haunted and scarred, nothing like this strong, healthy man with laughing eyes and a smiling face.

Marjorie could have asked those questions, but she didn’t want to speak, didn’t want to break the spell that she was under where everything was suddenly going to be alright again after all those years of careering out of control into the darkness, of trying to regain her family by marrying into it. This was her real family. Her brother Lockie. She didn’t care where he had been, or how he had done it, she only cared that somehow he had been returned to her, whole and alive.

Alive.

Aziraphale and Crowley had never told anyone else that they knew Lockie was dead. After Crowley realised he could manipulate Time itself, they each began to wonder if there was something else they could do about that whole desperate situation. One day Crowley had had enough of prevarication and wondering. He felt it was now or never. He got in the Bentley and drove it to London, petrol shortages be damned, back to the East End alleyway where they had found that pathetic little corpse all those months before.

Standing in the alleyway where they had been confronted by Muriel, he stood, eyes closed, and breathed. He could feel the events they had witnessed, there, underneath the stillness of the present. He could remember it, of course, but it was more. He could also remember things that had not happened yet. Time...was not always only passing in one direction, for him. He didn’t understand it, could never explain it.

But he suddenly knew that he could do it.

Slowly, agonisingly, using so much power that one of his ears began to bleed, and he saw stars shooting past his eyes that may or may not have been there un reality....he managed to turn Time backwards. Back to the moments before Lockie had met Muriel and his undeserved doom.

1940, again

The alleyway outside Marjorie’s aunt Harri’s house was as dark as ever. Crowley, dabbing at the blood smeared from his ear onto his cheek, hunched down behind the wall with a cigarette between his fingers (they were shaking) and waited.

After several freezing cold hours, and far too much smoking even for a regular 40-a-day man, he heard footsteps coming down the alleyway. It was Lockie, but he was already with Muriel.

Crowley could feel the blood coursing through him, new and alive with the sparkle of his pent-up energy, and ready to party. This was it. Find out if I’m crackers or if this could really work....He flashed a grin to the dark, and clenched his fists, flexing his fingers a few times to draw more energy down, and then he ran.

Using all of his power like this felt like rushing along in a sea of bright hot electricity – to be honest, if he'd known it would feel like this, he would have done it for the rush alone.

All his senses were honed to unbelievable sharpness, he could taste the oxygen molecules individually in the air and hear every tiny sound with crystal clarity. Even though there was no light at all, he could see everything. And, now, as he ran, even though he must have been moving very fast, he could see everything as though it was happening very much more slowly than usual.

He streaked down the alley toward the two figures walking slowly, ponderously, up it. He saw that Muriel, glowing in her white police uniform, was behind Lockie, and he saw that she had a dagger in her hand and was raising it – very slowly – in preparation for slashing the boy’s throat. It flashed, which lasted hours, reflecting in Crowley’s amber, shining eyes.

Instantly, he was there, and he grabbed Lockie’s shoulders with both hands and, still moving as fast as he had ever gone, travelled both of them out of the alleyway into a wall of brilliant blue light. Behind them, Muriel slashed at the empty air, just catching Lockie’s cheekbone as he flew past out of the last three seconds of his own life.

And Time stopped again.

This time, Crowley hadn’t done it. Lockie was gone, but Crowley and Muriel were still there, the alleyway frozen around them.

“You can’t do this!” she shouted, actually stamping her foot. “You shouldn’t be able to do this!”

Crowley was breathing heavily but he tried for cool, as always, and shrugged. “Obviously, I can,” he said. “Since I just have. I’ve thought about it and I can’t let you kill that boy. He’s done nothing to you.”

“He is in the wrong place,” Muriel said. “The wrong time! We messed it all up, so much...so many people born at the wrong time, so that even if we fix it, the Plan can never work! The Great Plan all in a heap.”

She threw the dagger onto the cobbled. It skittered away. “Listen, Crowley, listen. Do you remember the Book of Life?”

Crowley frowned. He thought it might have come up in some of Adam’s research but he couldn’t be sure. That was more Aziraphale’s area, was reading.

So he said, “Maybe?”

Muriel shook her head, violently. “No. No! You don’t remember. Only I remember. Just me! Just the scrivener. It’s my curse. Only I can write in it so only I can remember. All the versions.” She shook her head, screwing up her eyes, frowning. “Never mind. Doesn’t matter. Listen, though, listen. Adam is on the right track. He is! Listen to what he thinks you are. He’s worked out the one side. Needs to get the other, too. And Agnes Nutter, don’t forget about her. She saw it all, saw true, but she saw the old Plan. No one saw the new one! And the other book, the Crow book...no, wait, that’s later.....But listen to Adam. Chances are, he’ll be right.”

Crowley just listened to this, disbelieving.

And then she did that odd drawing-up motion, again, with her hand, that he remembered from the first time he’d seen her, and just like all those years ago, she vanished. Time came roaring back.

Crowley hadn’t understood any of that, so he, basically, ignored it. Besides, he had a more pressing issue.

He left Lockie at the London apartment and then went to see Adam again to give him the greatest administration challenge of his career.

Adam flung his arms around Crowley’s neck, nearly choking him, when he explained what he wanted him to do. He had to search, triangulate, and find a life-sized space for Marjorie’s lost brother to fit into. Adam had looked startled for a moment, and then his eyes had started to shine, and he had stood up, vaulted over the back of the squashy leather sofa and slapped Crowley on the back, full of emotion, before fully hugging him.

“Thank you,” he said. “This will be a great day’s work.” Then he called for coffee, settled down at his files and his maps and his books of 20th century history and prophecy, and started to solve this ultimate challenge.

Adam summoned Crowley back to the Manor on the telephone, and, staggering slightly under a week with no sleep, he presented him with an enormous sheet of flimsy paper with a continuous line running across its entire width like a golden thread.

“This was the toughest thing I’ve ever done,” Adam said, his voiced cracking with emotion and fatigue. “Basically, what we did was look for lives with gaps – where people have disappeared, and no one had looked for them, where there was a space for him to go. There were quite a lot of them – it’s pretty sad. But tracking them all together and making a coherent life out of them….it should work, but he might need a push now and again – for example he has to spend three years in Panama at this point, you see…and look, here he has to go and work as a gardener for the US Ambassador, Mr Dowling....but I’m sure you could help with those details?”

Crowley followed the twisting thread with his finger, astonished at this piece of work. “I can’t believe you’ve done this, Jailbird. Thank you. It’s amazing. Amazing. I really mean it….” He put a hand on Adam’s shoulder, passing some energy to him, as he seemed ready to fall down on top of his masterpiece. He smiled gratefully, and ran a hand through his hair, shaking his head.

“I just...I need to see this through,” Adam said. “Please, I want to be there when they meet again. If you can really do this, I want to see it.”

“Of course. Aziraphale, too. I’d never have done it without either of you.”

And now, watching the two of them talking together in the little kitchen, animated, fully there and with love in their eyes, Aziraphale knew that it had been totally worth it. Adam sat at the counter, a little distance away, drinking coffee. He joined them.

“Aziraphale, Crowley,” Adam said. “This was a great thing you did.”

“We did it, Adam. If not for your research....”

“Yeah. About that. I might have found something. Something else. In the library.”

Giving Marjorie and Lockie one last glance, the two followed Adam out across the corridor to the study/library. Bookshelves lined the walls floor to ceiling in this room, and two bureau style desks dominated the central space.

Adam took down two ancient volumes and laid them side by side.

“When I was looking for mention of this ‘Book of Life’, I came across something else,” he began. “Very little on the Book itself – it's a legend, basically. There’s a theory that everyone has a recording angel writing down everything they do, but it’s not quite that, either. More like one book that records everything. Which would be very large....But anyway, that's not what I found. In the book I found that stuff about the recording angel in, I also found this.” He opened the volume in front of him and turned the page to face them.

“Aziraphale - that name is a hell of coincidence, don’t you think?”

Aziraphale leaned forward, feeling a chasm of strangeness and change opening up beneath the surface of his mind as he read: Israfil, Angel of the Last Trump.

Aziraphale started to protest. “But that’s ridiculous. I'm not an angel....”

Adam held up his hands. “OK, probably not. But. You could be. Listen. At least consider the possibility. This angel is in Islamic tradition, this one called Israfil, who is meant to sound the trumpet at the end of the world. That name is pretty close, right? And Az, you know you’re probably immortal, or invulnerable, to be more precise because you only remember things since the civil war but both of you say you think you’re older. You collect prophecy books. Why? Because you’re interested in them. Why? Maybe...because you are IN them. But don’t consciously remember. That’s what I think.”

“Who’m I then?” asked Crowley, eyebrows raised. "In this....angel....scenario?"

Adam frowned. “I’m not sure. There’s not anyone with a name like yours in these stories. But, maybe you changed it. Maybe you’re just here to, I don’t know, keep Az company or something.”

Crowley, though, had gone as white as a sheet. If he’s an angel, then I’m the opposite..... And because he was remembering Muriel’s words. He's worked out the one side. Needs to get the other. And: Listen to what he thinks you are. Chances are, he’s right.

What was the other side from an angel?

He remembered that black feather he had found in the alleyway in London after his fight with Marjorie’s cousin. Remembered his dream, the one he had had again and again over the years, the one where he fell forever.

Crowley started shivering. And found that he couldn't stop.

Chapter Text

"Excuse me, I’m looking for the owner of this club. Ah, his name is Mr Crowley, I believe?”

The bar was deserted. Tables and chairs were scattered throughout the dingy room, all gravitating towards a dusty fireplace with no fire in it. In the half light, Muriel could make out a waitress standing behind the dark wooden bar polishing glasses with a white cloth. She had blonde hair, artfully curled, and was wearing a smart uniform with a little white apron. Muriel walked over to the bar and perched on a faded red velvet bar stool. The waitress ignored her.

Muriel had seen the black Bentley parked (illegally) outside the St. Cloud Gentlemen’s Club, so she knew it was the right place. Clutching her heavy bag nervously, she looked up at a fading brown and gold sign over the door and an intimidating slab of a doorman guarding the way in. Yes, Muriel explained, she was fully aware that the club was for men only, and no, she did not wish to use the trade entrance because she definitely wasn’t selling anything. At last the doorman admitted her into the dingy corridors, telling her he would come and collect her if she hadn’t left the main bar in strictly half an hour. Maybe she’d used her special skills again, or maybe she had just shown more leg than was usual in places like this. Either way, he let her in. The place smelled strongly of stale cigar smoke and old men’s cologne – if Crowley wasn’t here she wouldn’t be staying for as long as half an hour.

Finally the waitress put down the glass she was working on and frowned. “He isn’t here,” she said. “And I’m afraid that women are not allowed to come into the bar unaccompanied. How did you get in anyway, past Shadwell?”

“I promised him all sorts of things I have no intention of doing. Do you know when Mr Crowley might return?” Muriel asked, inwardly punching the air because, yes! This was his bar. She had known when she saw the car, and here was Marjorie Potts, again, working the bar, but it was good to have everything confirmed. There was more than one Bentleh in London, after all.

The waitress shrugged. “Could be hours...days...weeks. He comes and he goes. I can leave a message for you, if you would like.” She flashed Muriel a small smile. “If you’d like to leave your name...?”

Muriel held up her hand. “No...no. I....had something for him, but....it can wait.”

“Alright. If there’s nothing else, you had better go. This is a gentleman’s club, you know. Shadwell’s a soft touch but he won’t let you stay too long.”

“Fine,” Muriel said, sliding off the bar stool and striding out of the bar.

Shadwell was still lurking about when she slammed her way out of the front door, pausing on the front step of the dingy little place to gather her thoughts. Across the street a couple of other men were standing in another doorway sheltering from the rain, and they both gave Muriel a long stare as she came out of the front entrance of the club. They stared for so long that she wiped her hand across her face, wondering if she was bleeding again (it happened sometimes, these days, if she thought about all the things she could remember, all at once, for too long) or had something in her hair. As soon as they saw her – and the doorman - looking at them, both men turned their collars up and hurried out into the rain, going in opposite directions. Muriel shrugged, and forgot about them.

Because she had spied the Bentley again, and had an idea.

An idea so outrageous that she sat down on the step for a minute to think it through. Shadwell took a menacing step or two towards her, ensuring she stood up again hastily and walked towards the car.

If the door is open, that’s a sign from...from Someone, she thought, desperately.

She tried the driver’s side door.

Locked.

Scooted around and tried the passenger side.

Which opened.

Muriel slid into the leather seat, and closed the door, letting her held breath outnin a long, trembly sigh. She sat for a minute, before opening her large handbag, and taking out a bulky package that could only be a book.

A Book.

She rested her hand on its ancient leather cover for a second, looking around the car's interior, and then leaned forward and opened the glove box. It was empty apart from an actual pair of leather gloves which were so stiff with disuse that she was sure they had been there since Crowley had first bought the car. Muriel took the Book, and slid it into the space beneath the dashboard, shoving it right to the back and slamming the little door closed.

She clipped her much lighter bag closed, opened the door of the car and stepped out.

Then she began to wait for Crowley to open the glove box and discover what she had left for him.

But of course, the state of those gloves should have told her something important: he never opened the Bentley’s glove box....

Chapter Text

Aziraphale’s diary

Dear Crowley has finally run out of patience with me, I fear. He and I had a....I will call it a disagreement, a serious one, over my continued research and my close following of our old friend Betony’s new career in French politics. I feel that we should be more concerned over this new direction, not least as she appears in press photographs not to have aged a day since we last saw her over 40 years ago. Without a doubt she is one like us but she is alone and as we know, desirous of using her power - for good, she claims. I feel that this does not bode anything well. Crowley has washed his hands of it, at least as far as he will admit to me. I cannot really believe that he does not care but he claims it is so. He wants no part in my continued research.

He is currently in South America, dare I say, sulking a little, and I have not heard from him in months now. Adam has spoken to him by telephone and assures me he is alright. I fear he is drinking alone and brooding on things he will not speak of. I confess I am worried.

I broached another sensitive topic with Adam as we were studying pictures of Betony on the campaign trail in Paris – he also has not aged, much, although he looks a little older than he did, he clearly is not aging at the proper rate. He believes this is our influence, mine and Crowley’s, but I do not believe that, as others who have lived with us have had lives of ordinary length. He does not, as far as we can tell, however, possess any ‘powers’.

Another mystery! All of research seems to do is uncover more that we do not know.

I wish Crowley were here. Even though he does not share my interest (he says obsession) in this, he lets me speak freely on it and listens to my rambling theories, at least he did so, until recently. I do miss him a great deal .

Crowley was telling himself that he was having a great time on his own. It was true that he did love to spend time in Rio, dangerous as it was, walking, taking in the heat and the sights. He had several old friends here, as well as a couple of properties. Having street urchins pick your pockets was such a way of life in parts of Rio that people regularly carried two wallets, one they didn’t particularly mind losing filled with expired cards and small banknotes, and one, well hidden, with their real cards stashed inside. Now Crowley had never had any trouble with pickpockets, but on this particular day there was a scruffy young girl in a tatty red shirt trailing him through the crowded streets, hiding as he stopped to buy apples at a street stall. As he haggled with the vendor in Portuguese, out of the corner of his eye he saw her slip behind the stall opposite, two tables piled high with sandals, shoes and fake designer bags. Continuing through the teeming crowds, he knew she had picked up his trail again, saw her flit behind him as he crossed the street, dodging beeping scooters.

He slowed down, deliberately, letting her catch up, and in a flash of red she was past him with his empty shoulder bag hanging from one skinny wrist as she ran on. He followed her, standing still while the crowds surged past on either side. He saw the maze of alleyways she ducked into that led eventually to a shanty building of tin and hastily nailed-together wood. Crowley carried on walking through the melee until he came to another seemingly random alleyway. Here he stopped, leaned against the crumbling wall, and lit a cigarette. When he’d smoked that one, he lit a second from the stub.

When she came darting down the alley, here and there, avoiding the central gutter flowing with putrid water, he threw the butt away and grabbed at her wrist as she passed. The girl let out a shriek, and promptly twisted her head around and tried to bite him, but Crowley manoeuvred her against the damp brick wall and held her there by one shoulder. She stopped struggling, looked at him through bruised eyes peering out from underneath a straggle of curly black hair.

“What do you want?” she snarled in rough Portuguese.

He replied in the same language, matching her accent. “I just want to talk to you.”

“You can’t,” she said, and spat. “And you can’t have anythin’ else without Hastur sayin’ you can.”

Crowley was insulted at this. “What? How old are you? I don’t want anything like that, for fuck's sake. Just wanted to tell you, you can keep my bag – there isn’t anything in it, anyway. If you ever need anything else, come and find me. If you need help.”

She snorted. “What does that mean? I don’t need any help you could give me. Listen, I'll level with ya. Don’t go for people like you normally, your type ain’t as easy as most others, you, you shiny ones, but Ligur said to have a go, he liked the look of you. He’s watching right now, so you better not touch me again.”

Those names....well, they certainly rang a bell. A bell from centuries ago. Crowley frowned, and let go of her. The girl didn’t run, though. She was still looking at him, curious, but wary, like a half-wild cat. “I seen you round before?” she asked. “Think I have.”

“Maybe. Listen, Hastur and those guys – they’re no good. Don’t you want to leave them behind?”

She barked a laugh. “I won’t be leaving,” she said, and pulled down the neck of her red shirt to show a crude home-made tattoo, a smudge of blue that made an ‘H’ entwined inside a flame. “You see that mark anywhere outside this particular favela, you let me know, mister. I’m staying.”

“That can be hidden. If you ever need to get lost, come to me.”

She stepped away, suspicion clouding her eyes. “Yeah, ‘cos that don’t sound sinister at all. I need to get lost from you,” she said. “Gimme a smoke.”

Crowley handed her a cigarette, and lit a match on his fingernail for her. “Shouldn’t smoke at your age, kid,” he said, knowing full well that she had probably been smoking for ten years.

“Shouldn’t smoke at your age, mister,” she replied sassily, mimicking him very well. She took a deep, practised drag, stuck up her fingers in the horns, and bolted. He lit yet another cigarette, not realising at first that his hands were shaking slightly.

God! So here was another lead, then. Hastur and Ligur, back again. Both had dropped the aristocracy, apparently (been dropped by them, more likely). Those names could be a coincidence but Crowley didn’t think so. And then there had been that flash when the girl brushed past him in the street as she snatched his bag – before that, even, when he’d sensed her tailing him through the market. That had been why he had followed her, initially. But then, when he’d grabbed her, it had been all he could do not to drop her arm as though it had burned. It didn’t happen often – the ability to look ahead wasn’t a skill that came easy, though he could do it, but sometimes it just shouted out to him, some event, or, as in this case, some dreadful future that some innocent, unknowing person is about to get dumped head-first into. So it was with this girl Anathema.

And what did she mean, by shiny ones? Could she see his true nature? Did she know what he was, whether the dark suspicion, never aired to anyone, was correct? Possibilities bloomed before his eyes.

Anathema ran, bare feet slapping the uneven pavement, unheeding of the dirty water she splashed through or the rubbish and garbage she was kicking out of her way. This was as fast as she could run – there was nothing more in her. Adrenaline soared through her body, but tough and wiry though she was, she had been running for hours and she was so, so tired. Racing round a right-angle bend she dimly realised that she was in another area of the favela, one that anyone bearing Hastur’s mark should not enter. But she was lost, now, couldn’t tell the quickest way out of the maze of alleyways and tracks. Ligur wouldn’t follow her here, either, but he was the least of her worries if she saw anyone else, if they knew her as one of Hastur’s people.

Anathema’s lungs felt too full. Any moment now she would have to stop, no matter where she was –

Smack! She ran into someone, head on! She shrieked, found new strength from somewhere, and struggled wildly for her life, biting, scratching, kicking. She looked up at his face, convinced it would be Ligur, or worse, the boss himself, and for a second she actually saw Hastur’s disfigured face with the scars and the missing teeth. But it was someone else…..

“What…?” she managed to say. The guy from before, the one who gave her a smoke and a weird little speech after she’d hawked his bag. He was one of those bright ones, like Hastur was, she could tell that straight away, but he was cleaner, his shine not as dark and maggoty as her boss’s was. What the hell was this one doing here in the darkest part of this huge shanty town, down here where no one with honest money ever ventured?

“This is a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”

“Once was coincidence,” she gasped, still fighting for breath. “Twice means you’re following me.”

“What I said before, about needing to run – you running already?”

Anathema spat. “Looks like it, hey? But not to you. Just...away. I gotta go, Ligur, he’s not far away…you don’t want to see him. He’s one like you.”

“Like me? Listen, what do you mean by that?”

She shrugged. “You know – bright. Your aura is....bright, somehow. Can't describe it. I just see.”

At that moment a crashing, lumbering sound reached them from down one of the pitch dark alleyways, followed by a string of curses, followed by a brute of a man with a deep scowl on his face. His eyes glittered in the light coming from a slatted window in the cement building behind them. He had a gun stuffed in his belt, and he was sweating like a pig in the heat.

The guy gestured with his head. “That him?”

Anathema leapt away, ready to run again in pure terror, aching limbs and burning lungs forgotten. Maybe he’d hold Ligur up for a second while Ligur shot the guy, and give her a head start. She edged out of the dim shadow of light. The guy held his hand out and said, “Wait there.” For some reason, she stopped. Looked at him, curious. Ligur was roaring drunk, and high as well, but he wrenched the gun from his waistband and took aim, snarling.

“You won’t shoot us,” the guy said. “Go home, Ligur.” And he turned his back on the gangster, grabbed Anathema’s unresisting hand, and led her away down one of the other alleyways.

After a while he let go of her, and she kept walking alongside him. She realised that she could see where they were going, wondered if dawn was coming already. It had been a long, terrifying night. He kept looking at her, carefully, seeming to consider a number of things. Finally he offered her a smoke, and lit the match with a fingernail as he had before. He took one himself too, inhaling deeply, closing his eyes to exhale. Well, she thought he did. He was wearing shades, despite the darkness.

“He’ll find you,” Anathema said. “Hastur’ll make him come find you. You let me go now, it might not be so bad. I’ll tell him you died. Ligur could’ve shot you. He’ll never say otherwise. Wouldn’t tell anyone that he missed from that close!”

“You can go if you want. I’m not stopping you. But if you want, you can come to my place. There’s other people there, it's nothing weird. You know what I’m saying.”

“He’ll know. And you’ll lose your fancy house, mister.”

“No,” he said, looking right at her. In fact he stopped walking, and turned to face her. “No one can find my place, unless I want them to. Believe this. If you come to my house, you’re safe for as long as you stay there. OK? And…listen to me. You might think this is crap, I know it sounds like it. But if you stay here, with Hastur and the rest of them, you won’t see another Carnival. You’ll be dead before it comes around. Don’t ask me how I know it, but I know it.” He looked very serious. Something clicked inside Anathema, suddenly – the adrenaline switching down a gear, maybe – and she was tired, suddenly, so tired of the fear.

Anathema let herself be led. They left the favela, crossing the train tracks at some point, and were then walking down a wide boulevard lined with trees and paved with white stone. He turned into one of the spacious driveways leading off from this airy street. “Here we are.”

“How can he not find this place? It’s right here,” Anathema murmured. She was dizzy. She hadn’t slept in the two days since snatching this guy’s bag, too afraid to let down her guard while Hastur was in one of his killing rages. But now she felt like she could sleep, and would have gladly curled up on the steps of the apartment building. Crowley half-carried her in to the cool gloom.

The night was hot. The air, sultry and heavy, with smog, with cigarette smoke, and richer, deeper scents of the city. Cicadas buzzed and chirped their clamour all around, a sound that often actually seemed to be inside a person’s head, blocking their ears from the inside with a thick, fuzzy tropical noise. Behind Crowley, inside the house, covered over with a thin cotton sheet, the girl lay still. He could hear her thoughts on the edge of sound, like distant traffic. Looking up, the stars were all but obscured by the soupy air, but he knew where they were, and what time it was. Late, later than that, so late it was early again. He lit yet another cigarette, inhaling deeply, and exhaling the smoke out, upwards, tilting his head back towards the shadowed stars and watching the vapour drift beyond the confines of the courtyard, upwards into the Rio night.

The girl’s dream/thoughts were louder. She was entering REM sleep, rerunning the day’s events over again, her unconscious trying to make sense of them. The bruises on her face had been healed, but there were deeper ones. Now her thoughts were no longer a soothing traffic sound in the background of the night, but louder, more urgent, jagged. He took another deep drag from his cigarette, again inhaling deeply, exhaling upwards, watching the smoke. He sent some of the calm that he felt out here in towards her. She seemed to settle into deeper sleep. But she was still waiting for them.

Her mind was full of blood, and the people who had made it this way were coming. Closer, closer. What had she said, about the bright ones? She wasn’t in any danger from them here. No one could come into his house unless he wanted them inside. He had told the girl that, and it was the truth. They wouldn’t have even been able to find the street unless he’d let them do so. He had wards all around. But let them find it – this had to be finished tonight.

There were two of them. They both had power. Crowley had known this, but he felt the strength of it and was a little surprised. These two were the same....entities....they had met in England all those years ago, but Crowley had thought Lord Ligur was dead (thought he had killed him himself, in fact, as Antonia, in a fight on a boating lake), and Duke Hastur had disappeared after they had burned down his house. Apparently it wasn’t just him and Aziraphale reinventing themselves through the centuries – they’d dropped the titles, but here they were again.

He finished his cigarette. He rested against some of the discarded boxes that littered the little courtyard. He could hear them blundering up the avenue, kicking at cars and dustbins as they passed other buildings.

They appeared at the open gateway. Crowley didn’t get up – just gave the taller man a questioning look, a raised eyebrow – no more than that.

“You have something of mine,” he said in throaty Portuguese. Crowley didn’t really hear language any more. The meaning arrived in his head, past the words. It wasn’t magic – he had to have heard the language before for it to work. But it was a very useful skill.

“No, I didn’t take anything that belonged to anyone,” he replied.

The thin man shook his head slowly. Behind him, his bodyguard was cradling a pistol. “You don’t understand,” he said, sarcastically. “I paid for her, therefore, she is mine.”

Crowley didn’t say anything. The man’s thoughts were spreading from him like a ghostly oil slick, filling the little yard with dark, clotted hatred and twisted memories. Some of those memories were old. Older than Crowley’s. He put that thought away for later.

Behind them, inside the house, the girl stirred, aware of her enemy by some primal survival instinct. Crowley tried to send her more calm, but she didn’t sleep again – troubled tendrils of thought were sent out into the dark, making sure that she really was safe.

“Nothing here has ever belonged to you,” Crowley was saying. “I guess you should leave. You have the wrong house.”

The gangster signalled to his muscle. Ligur cocked his pistol, ready to fire. He had killed before. A lot of people.

“Last chance, my friend,” the taller man said, his voice harsh. Crowley raised both eyebrows in disbelief. Did people really say things like that?

The girl was awake. Her thoughts were suddenly white-hot and wide open. She wrapped the sheet around her, pattered out of the room towards the open door, stopped, froze – but the gangsters had seen her.

“Chica,” said the tall man. “Come on, we’re leaving.” He stepped forward.

Crowley at last got up from his seat on the crates and grabbed the girl’s hand in one smooth movement. She relaxed, still nervous but no longer afraid. In fact, she thought the two armed thugs in standing in front of her in the yard looked ridiculous. Her fear had vanished. She gave them a little wave. The thin man’s face twisted with fury at this little gesture.

“She is staying here, Hastur. Let it go.” Crowley raised his other hand, stretched out the fingers, as though admiring a ring. But he wore no rings. Around each finger-tip, and fading imperceptibly up towards his wrist, was a faint miasma of electric blue light. Hastur was staring at him, now, rather than the girl. Ligur was still aiming his gun at them both.

“Do you suppose that she is safe here?” Crowley asked, in a very low voice. “I think she is. But do you think you are?” He flexed his fingers. The light danced.

“How are you doing that?” said Hastur. He had gone a strange colour. He glanced over at Ligur, who did not look scared. Oh – more levels of interesting. Hastur didn’t remember that he had met Crowley before - he didn't recognise him! Ligur, on the other hand, knew exactly, probably remembered the fight, but he hadn’t told his boss everything. Not about losing a fight in a rowing boat with a woman, for sure. It was maybe useful to have a secret like that.

“That’s bullshit,” announced Ligur, apparently fearless, and he strode forwards, grabbing the girl’s free hand. She gave a little shriek, terror leaping up in her throat. “She’s marked, for you, Hastur. She can’t go anywhere else with that mark on her.” He pulled the sheet away from her neck, but no tattoo was visible. It was no longer there.

“Don’t touch her again,” Crowley said. The blue light had spread, engulfing her, and onwards to Hastur, who froze in his tracks. Competing expressions of horror, ecstasy and fear flickered across his features. Behind them, the heavyset gangster watched his boss for a couple of seconds, before flickering his eyes to the girl, and to Crowley – and he decided it wasn’t worth it. He’d been in some bad places in Rio before – usually places he’d shot his way out of, but this was different. He didn't want to go up against Crowley again, not unprepared.

Crowley gripped the girl’s hand tighter, sweat beading across his face. Then, as last, the humming, stretched tension in the yard was broken with an almost audible twang, and Hastur wrenched his hand away from the girl’s, backed away, and ran. Ligur lowered his gun and backed out of the yard. He stopped in the gateway, and snarled something – this isn’t over, or something of that nature, but then he caught sight of something – something in Crowley’s face, perhaps, or maybe in the girl’s – and he turned and ran, too. They could hear him crashing into piles of trash as he hared away down the road.

The girl dropped Crowley’s hand, and stepped back as he slumped back onto the packing crate, breathing heavily. She was laughing, wide awake now, and all traces of darkness gone from her mind, for now. “That was so cool!” she exclaimed. “You’ve got to do that again! He’s never scared, never! Neither of them are.”

“Hey, give me a minute,” he said, wiping a sleeve across his face. “So, now, you believe me when I say you’re safe? You’ll stay here a while? And will you tell me your name? Mine is Crowley.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t tell people my name,” she said. “I think you know it already.”

He shrugged. She waited a long moment for him to say something, but he didn’t, and in the end, she gave an exasperated little laugh and said, “Anathema Device. It’s from some old book. I don’t like it. It means, ‘the worst thing’. Literally. Who names a kid that, eh?”

“Well, what do you want to be called?”

“Ana. I like the name Ana.”

“OK, well, I can call you Ana.”

“OK, then in that case, I’ll stay. For now. But I don’t do cooking and cleaning. I’m making that clear from the beginning. I ain’t no maid.”

Crowley burst out laughing at that. “OK, it’s a deal. But...I think you have other skills. Abilities.”

“What ability?”

“You knew those guys were coming here. You knew I wasn’t a good guy to try to rob. You said Ligur and I were both ‘bright’. You have…feelings…about people. I think you’re a witch, or could be one. I am trying, we are trying, to find more people like me and you’d be able to help us. Sound OK to you?”

Ana nodded. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. The Devices are all witches. My abuela was, for sure. That sounds OK.”

“And you can leave whenever you like, right? The minute you’re bored, or you want out, just tell me, and you’re gone. Totally free to do whatever you want. No tattoos or contracts or obligations. Do we have a deal?”

“Give me another cigarette and I’ll decide.”

“You shouldn’t…”

“Yeah, yeah, I shouldn’t smoke. Neither should you. It’ll kill you.”

“No,” sighed Crowley. “I don’t think it will.”

Chapter Text

Newton Pulsifer was desperate.

He hadn’t eaten a thing for two days, but hunger wasn’t what was driving him on down the street, breathing deeply in the polluted air, psyching himself up to do what he had to do. They had sent the boys round again as they had threatened to do, and this time he only had tonight to find the money. Four short hours, if they kept their word and even gave him that much time. They had taken every last penny that was in the flat, even finding the emergency stash of pound notes hidden inside the dog food tin – they’d gone straight to it, in fact, suggesting that Nicola had told them where it was in a bid to stop them wrecking the rest of the place looking for cash. It hadn’t worked – she was back there now, trying to fix something over the smashed-up window.

Newt was walking through the darkened streets, compelled onwards into areas of the city he’d never been before. He didn’t know where he was going, he was just obeying his feet. For one wild second he saw a dirty neon Tube sign and saw himself leaping the gate, boarding a train to Paddington and back home, properly back home, back to Wales and his childhood bedroom with his model planes and his failed computer projects and his techie magazines and safety... but he shook his head, brushed the idea away from his desperate imagination. He couldn’t leave Nicola to those people. Even though the debt was his, they would go after her, and...somehow, she would have to pay them back.

He saw the train leave without him, in his mind’s eye. He knew he wasn’t ever going home again.

And here was a likely target, stumbling out of a spit-and-sawdust boozer, a man, blond and soft looking, well-dressed in old fashioned clothes, and far gone, an umbrella dangling carelessly from a flailing hand as he tried and failed to walk in a straight line. A woman was behind him, her purse loose in one hand, long red hair trailing in her eyes. Both of them were laughing hysterically; well, Newt was glad someone was having a good time.

He zipped his collar up to the top so that his jacket half-covered his face, and pulled his cap down over his eyes. He hated to do this, really did, he was no robber, no gangster, his hands were sweating and his heart was pounding, but at this point in time it was them or him, and, bottom line, he’d rather it was them. Gripping the knife in his pocket he put his head down and strode towards them, stopping when he was close enough to be threatening. He whipped out the blade and held it in front of the bloke’s face, trying not to notice that it was shaking. He held out his other hand and said, ‘Gimme your wallet, hand it over.” Newt’s voice was croaky with the terror trying to close his throat over.

The bloke had stopped walking, but he was just looking at Newt, stupidly, not making any move towards his pockets or even looking particularly scared. He tightened his grip on the knife handle, which was slipping in his sweating fist. He brandished the knife, slicing it left-right through the air. “Come on, don’t mess about. The girl too, gimme your purse.”

“I don’t think so,” said the woman, languidly. She was smoking a cigarette in one of those old-fashioned silver holders, like Audrey Hepburn.

“No, I don’t think so, either,” the man said. Astonishingly he didn’t look worried at all. He looked pissed off, if anything. He was frowning like a school teacher about to give a scolding. Not afraid at all.

“You wanna listen to me. I’m serious,” Newt said desperately. “Hand your money over.” He waved the blade again, closer to the bloke’s face.

“You know what?” said the woman, and she actually took a step towards Newt’s position on the pavement. “I have had a really, really bad week. Month. Year, fucking decade. All terrible. So get out of my face, before I do something I might regret. Or not. Something you might regret.”

Newt backed up a step, uncertain. The knife was still out in front of him. This was not going to plan. All the previous times that he had done this (and there had been a few, each of them done with a solemn promise to himself and to Nicola that it was the only time he would ever do it) the victims just handed over whatever they had, money, watches, necklaces – they’d been afraid of what he might do, of how crazy he appeared to be, afraid that he could use the trembling blade, and had just done what he asked. A couple of times Newt hadn’t even had to get the knife out – the threat of it had been enough.

He made a decision, and darted forward to shove the blade right up next to the woman’s face. “Your purse,” he snarled. Her eyes widened (but her eyes were strange...he shook off what his brain was trying to tell him), and at last he thought he was getting somewhere. But instead of ripping her bag off her shoulder and shoving it into his hands as though it was burning her, she stepped back again and her face, rather than showing fear, was showing anger.

“What are you going to do with that, hey? You going to stab me? You think you’re going to kill me for what’s in this bag? You don’t even know if I have any money! We’ve been drinking all day, how much cash do you think we’ve got left? Get that knife away from me and piss off!” She reached forward then with one manicured hand and actually shoved Newt’s flailing knife-arm away.

He blinked.

“I would do as she says, Newton,” said the man, raising an eyebrow, and now he was taking out a box of fags and a match book and he was lighting a cigarette, too, completely unconcerned. The woman had gone back up the steps of the pub, and back inside, pitching her cigarette end out of the holder and over the rail as she opened the door to step through it, with just one backward glance.

Newt stepped back, uncertainly. Another step, and then another. He shoved the blade back in his belt, eyes shifting left and right, thinking, now, that they were so calm, so unconcerned at his threats, that the whole street must be surrounded by coppers, or that maybe they were in another gang themselves, though he hadn’t seen any sign of that. Newt turned on his heel at that thought and began to run. And at that moment a realisation physically stopped him in his tracks.

The man had known his name.

He felt himself turning around, his body not obeying his brain, which was yelling at him and telling him to get the hell away from here, try and hold up a corner shop, maybe, to get the cash for the guys he owed, it would be much less dangerous than this had turned out to be.

The man was still there, leaning back on the rusting stair rail, smoking. He found himself walking back towards him, watching his feet take him forwards as though from outside himself. His palms were sweating again. He swallowed past a dry throat. Was he one of their friends? Had he just made a really bad mistake, trying to rob one of their own? How else could he know who Newt was?

“Want a cigarette?” asked the man, when his reluctant feet had carried him right back to the foot of the steps. He held out the pack. Newt shook his head. “I don’t smoke,” he croaked.

The guy shrugged. He didn’t speak for a moment. He appeared to be listening for something, although the night time streets were quiet. During this time Newt felt a tension growing and growing in his head, as though he would scream if it wasn’t broken by sound, by movement, by something – anything. Newt felt as though something were drawing out of him, thinner and thinner. His eyes seemed frozen in place, locked with the other man’s, which were blue, very blue, unnaturally so.... He couldn’t move, but he needed to run….and then with a snap the tension was gone.

“Newton, you’re in trouble,” the guy said, a statement, not a question. “How much do you need to pay them off?”

He didn’t reply. Couldn’t, actually. What the hell was going on? Had the guy just…read his mind? Was that what this was, what he had just felt inside his head? He watched dumbly as the man brought out a wallet, now, of his own free will, opened it, and handed him a thick pile of notes. Newt nearly dropped the cash right there in the street.

“Is that enough?” the guy asked.

Newt flicked the edges of the notes against his thumb. Easily, easily enough. Twice, three times what they needed. He cleared his throat. “Why would you give me this?” he asked, his voice husky with old terror. “And how do you know me?”

The man smiled slightly. “I don’t know you. Just your name. And your family. You’re another Pulsifer, right? You have a certain look. I....knew some of your family. Long time ago. As for the money, you need it, right? You were going to steal it from us. So take it, now I’ve given it to you, and don’t ask so many questions.”

Newt nodded furiously. “Right, right.” He stuffed the money into his jacket. He shifted from one foot to the other, unsure how to finish this now, still suspecting a trick, a squeal of tyres and a load of policemen.

“Get on back your flat,” said the guy. “And be careful on the way home, yeah? There’s a lot of dangerous people out there.” He looked Newt full in the face, then, and his eyes actually flashed, dark, for a fractional moment. Then the mild mannered librarian look was back in place.

But for a second he had seemed much more dangerous.

Newt was feeling stranger and stranger. His mind seemed to be flowing backwards. He suddenly collapsed back into himself, his mind wholly his own again. He felt something release him, and suddenly he was running, his adrenaline going overtime, running through streets and streets back towards his smashed-up apartment and his girl and his baby. The money sat snug inside his pocket and as he ran, he made swift calculations, that if he paid off the heavies, he would still have enough for a deposit on a new place, a place far from here, a safe place to live.

Then he really would be telling the truth when he said he’d never do this again.

Chapter Text

Anathema screamed and dropped the coffee cup with a violent crash. The coffee splashed onto her hand, scalding her skin, but she didn’t even notice. The man in the lounge hurried over to the doorway, sweeping the broken crockery aside with one foot. “Ana?”

“Shit – I’m sorry, you almost gave me a heart attack. I thought you were…I thought I was on my own.”

“Sorry, sorry. Just thought I’d come and see how you were getting on, since Aziraphale sent you over all those prophecy books to work on....Agnes Nutter, eh? Said she was an ancestor of yours, small world, innit? Thought I’d just come and check you weren’t too bored.... are you OK? You look…Ana, you’re shaking like a leaf! Come through and sit down.”

Trembling still, she followed him into her lounge and sat on the edge of the sofa. Now that she knew it was Crowley here she knew that she was safe, but she found that she couldn’t stop shaking.

When Crowley had first met Ana, he had taken her to London to live in their apartment above the bar. She grew to hate London, though, hated the climate and the people, everything about it, really. Tadfield was no better. Same climate after all.

However, at first it had been fine.

She had met Adam and immediately known there was something about him: "Now you’re an odd one. Not like them, but not like me, either. Not normal. Your aura is....intense."

Nevertheless they got on like a house on fire, sharing a passion for, well, getting drunk and working their way through the rest of the library: "Oh, hey, Crow Road! I’ve been wanting to read this, the TV series was awesome. You know one of the main characters has Crowley’s car? An old Bentley. Weird, huh?"

She had laughed like a drain at the sight of Aziraphale’s collection of prophecy books, picking up the Nutter and casually flicking through it: "Bloody hell, you’ve actually got a copy! This is where my name is from! Look, here ....and ye sharll be theyr also, Anathema. Not seen a copy since my abuela sold ours. Its got a rep as being true but its all bullshit so far as we could work out. All this business about four plus four shall ride. No clue."

Anathema had stuck it for six years and then told them she wanted to go back to Brazil. But since then she had been afraid, all the bloody time.

Firstly actually telling them that she wanted to move out of the London flat, get her own place – leave home, when it got down to it – it had taken her a good few months to screw up the courage to do it. The fact that as soon as she managed to get the words out, both Aziraphale and Crowley had been fully supportive, sorting her out somewhere to go, an apartment in uptown Rio (she was still Brazilian, after all, well, kind of - at some point in the Nutter-Device history, they had hopped across from California to Mexico and eventually to Brazil, staying ahead of all those people who didn't much like families of psychic Spanish witches). Their encouraging and enthusiasm just made her feel worse. She nearly gave in and told them she would stay, but she kept looking out at the rain and the mist, and made up her mind.

Leaving had been hard to do – especially Adam, and after all, Ana had been with them for over six years. She chose her moment, downed a double vodka while standing at the bar of Cloud, the bar that Crowley owned, and walked up the stairs to the door of the apartment. She opened it cautiously. Aziraphale was there, sitting on the sofa, a cup of tea beside him on a little table, little reading glasses on, reading the Times. He was frowning at a story about French politics. There was a new player on the scene, apparently, a small, dark haired woman who seemed a little familiar to him. Nicknamed ‘La Bonnett’ because there was some story about the French mountain of the same name - plus, she was never seen without a hat on.

Ana looked around, nervous. Clenching her hands together, she coughed, and then said, through a dry throat, “Can I have a word?”

Closing the paper, he looked up and nodded. “Of course. Is everything alright?”

“What’re you reading?”

“Oh – just about this French lady. I think I know her from somewhere. Doesn’t matter. I got distracted, though, away from my Dostoyevsky. I’ve read him before, of course, but not in the Russian.” He waited. Jenny perched herself on the edge of a dining chair, fidgeting. After an agonising moment Aziraphale got up and went over to the coffee machine.

“Is....Crowley not here?” she asked.

“Oh – no, he’s off somewhere,” said Aziraphale. She paused, undecided. Then made up her mind.

“Aziraphale, I want to leave,” Ana burst out. He turned from the coffee machine with a look a surprise. She was slightly gratified that this was possible, to shock him.

“I think…I want to go back to my old life. I’m so grateful to you both for…for saving my life, that’s what you did after all, but I need to get back to where I’m supposed to be.” Anathema was aware that she was babbling. “I’ll still work for you, if you want, the research, if I go home I can have a hunt around, see if I can find any more Device archives.…I know there’s rumours of a second book....but I warn you, my family have always said that Agnes was Nutter by name, nutter by nature.”

He handed her a small cup of fierce coffee. “If you want to leave, sure. I’ll be sorry to see you go, but we’ve always said, you’re free, absolutely free, to do whatever you like, and we’ll help you to do it. I can hardly complain if you take us up on the offer.”

Anathema downed the espresso in one, and gave a shaky grin. Now that she had done it, she wasn’t sure why she had been so nervous. “I want to go back to Brazil. It’s my home after all, even though I haven’t been there for six years…”

“Sure. If you want to wait a couple of weeks, I think Crowley has a place in Rio you can use, if you want. No pressure,” he held up a hand, “but it’s no problem. The place is empty.”

In the end she had given in and taken the offered apartment. And the place was gorgeous – airy, spacious, with huge windows looking out over the Ipanema beach, stylish furniture. She did have some doubts over whether Crowley actually had owned this place until two weeks ago – it seemed a coincidence, and she knew how they worked these things. However, she had also seen the bulging file that Adam kept at the apartment which contained details of all of their property portfolio. It was quite the little empire.

At first it had been a fantastic place to live. But then the odd things had started to happen. Ana would come back to the flat and the door would be ajar. And you would not leave it open like that in central Rio, or in London come to that. Or a window would be open in the morning that she knew she had left closed, and locked as well. Odd things…like sometimes she didn’t think that she was alone, when there was no way anyone could be there with her.

And all along she had a horrible, sinking feeling that she knew who it was who wasn’t there.

Crowley materialised a large glass of brandy for her which she took, wincing as she noticed the scald on her hand for the first time. He laid cool fingers on the red burn, fading it away. Taking a drink from his own glass, he asked again what was going on.

“Nothing…I’m just a bit jumpy is all. I’m not used to living on my own.”

“Jumpy? Ana, you’re terrified and I want to know why. I notice you have five different locks on your front door.”

“Not that they stopped you from getting in here, did they?” she said, biting her lips. “Oh, who am I fooling? I can’t live alone. You guys looked after me for too long, I guess.”

“You can always come back?” he suggested with a half-smile. “But you don’t want to, I’m sure of it. So what’s happening?”

Ana took a shuddering breath. “I think…I think Hastur has found me. I thought I saw him when I was walking on the beach, just a glimpse, and I think after that he has been following me home. Him, and his buddy Ligur. He’s messing with my head.”

Crowley had had several dealings with those two before, of course. The flat was warded as strongly as he could manage. “Ana, you’re safe here. It’s one of my houses. It’s as safe as anywhere in the world. You know that’s true. I promise it is.”

“I know that, I know...Listen, I know that he would never get into the London place or the Manor. Maybe. But – together with his man Ligur, you know that he’s strong. Maybe I’m not safe anywhere from him.”

“Well,” Crowley said, affronted, leaning back in Ana’s armchair and placing the brandy glass on the table beside him. “Not to brag about it, but I’m still stronger than he is, I reckon. I’ve killed him once – which is a long story. I’ll tell you what, I’ll stay here tonight. I’ll watch. If either of them come near the place then I will know about it.” He drained the brandy glass and turned it in his hand, making it disappear. He gave her a grim smile. Anathema nodded.

“That would be...actually that would be great. I’d love to be able to get one decent nights’ sleep. To feel safe enough to close my eyes.”

Crowley sat in the dark, waiting.

He had seen genuine fear in Ana’s eyes, and seen the image of the two gangsters, the same people from years ago, impossible though that should be, given that he had seen one of them drown and the other flee his burning house, two hundred years ago. Yes, they were another pair like him and Aziraphale. Must be. Maybe more like him than like Aziraphale, given their actions they couldn’t be on the side of...of angels. Crowley shied away from thinking about this, as he usually did. What the opposite of an angel might be. He refused to name it. Naming things made them real, after all. He’d spent decades in denial, ever since Adam had shown them that damn book, and it had worked just fine. No need to change.

He lit a cigarette, taking a deep drag. If he had to sit here all night, then he would.

His mind was drifting off, sending out little tendrils of thought towards Aziraphale and what he was doing. He closed his eyes and searched deeper….they had been wondering if they could use something like telepathy from a long distance, and this would be the perfect opportunity to test it....and nearly missed the thing he was sitting here in the dark looking out for. Tossing his fag into an ashtray, he stood up and in one fluid movement headed silently to the front door of the apartment, which had begun to swing open on its quiet, well-oiled hinges. Anathema’s five locks had all been undone – from the outside.

“Gotcha!” Crowley reached out into the pitch dark and grabbed at a skinny little arm. He could feel the bones under his own stronger fingers, brittle, scarily easy to be snapped in two. The owner of the arm made a muffled gasping scream, hastily choked off into a gulp of fear. Whoever it was then began to struggle violently, twisting and squirming in a desperate bid to get away. They were fighting so fiercely that Crowley had to catch hold of the wriggling prisoner with his other hand, too, to stop them from hurting themselves, and hold them still. The intruder was bony, wiry, his ribs and collarbones digging sharply into his hands. He let go with one hand long enough to gesture the lights on, and then he got a look at who he’d captured.

A street urchin, literally dressed in rags and no more than seven or eight years old. His dark eyes were wide with terror and he still struggled wildly to get away from Crowley’s grip. He had no chance. He pushed the boy back against the wall to hold him still, firmly but not unkindly – he was obviously terrified and too young for this to have been his own idea. He slowly ceased his struggles. He was breathing in little sobs, his eyes darting left and right, looking for a way out. But he was just a kid. Hopelessly young, and obviously sent here by Ligur to scare Ana. So Crowley’s wards had held. They only worked against (don’t name them) people like them. Not ordinary human people.

Crowley read his mind, with frightening ease – it was far from the first time someone like him had invaded his thoughts, and he almost welcomed the intrusion. Almost – he still fought the alien sensation of another mind inside his, as everyone did, but faintly, half-heartedly, as though he had already given up. Crowley saw Ligur clearly, with his scarred face, and Hastur as well. The boy’s mother, standing outside a little favela shack with her hands clutched around the door post and a couple of armed thugs inside barring her way. So that was how they had persuaded the boy to do this. She could have her house back if….he probed a little deeper….Pedro, that was his name...would just do another little job for Uncle Hastur.

Pedro had stopped struggling as soon as Crowley started to read his mind. It was as though a switch had been turned off. His jaw went slack, and his eyes glazed over completely. When he withdrew his thoughts, the boy blinked a few times, trying to focus, and then fell down in a dead swoon. Crowley scooped him off the floor (he was so scrawny that he weighed almost nothing) and carried him into the lounge area, where he laid the boy out on the sofa and covered him up with a pink throw he’d found folded up in a cupboard.

Quite soon Pedro stirred and his eyes flickered open. He was glazed, confused and disoriented, and had no idea where he was. He tried to fight off the suffocating throw in a mad panic, tangling it in his emaciated limbs desperately trying to free himself. Crowley held his hands out, calming the boy down. He obviously had no memory of the last few hours – maybe much longer than that.

“Do you know what you’re doing here?” he asked him. Pedro just looked at him with wide, wild eyes, shaking his head.

“Never mind for now. You hungry?” This was a good guess, as Pedro nodded eagerly. Crowley went into the kitchen and brought back some bread and cheese and a bunch of grapes. The boy threw these items down his throat as though he hadn’t seen food for days.

When Anathema came through into the lounge the next morning, there was sunshine streaming through the huge windows in the apartment, dancing off the glasses on the kitchen drainer, slanting through the blinds and shining in the eyes of a cheeky young boy sitting on her sofa with a wide grin on his face. His laughter had woken her up from a blissfully sound sleep. Crowley was perched backwards on a chair opposite him showing him the magic trick with the cups and the three balls that kept appearing and reappearing – but he was cheating, and making them change colour and float in the air as well as vanish.

“This is my intruder?” asked Ana. Crowley turned around at the sound of her voice and nodded. “Yes, this is him. Not so scary, is he? Oh, Ligur sent him, you were right about that. But the poor kid was more afraid than you were, and Ligur has done a pretty good head-fuck on him. I don’t think he remembers any of it.”

“This is where you live?” Crowley indicated a shanty street much like all the others, halfway up a mile-long roughly cobbled street, and Pedro nodded and started to climb up the steep cobbles on his bare feet. He had been offered shoes, and new clothes, but had declined all offers of help except for food, of which he had eaten an incredible amount of and had another big bag of it with him for later on.

“OK, well, thank you and everything but I can find my own way from here,” he said after a little while.

He was too late, though, because there was a screech from a shack up above them, and a large woman in a pink headscarf and a flowery house-dress came barrelling down the steep hill, enfolding the little boy in a fierce embrace.

“Where have you been, Pedro, where have you been?” Turning on Crowley, she looked him up and down, and then she berated him. “Who are you, why have you got my boy here?”

He held up his arms to ward off the blows she was aiming at his face. “Hey! Mind the shades, they’re Ray Bans!”

“They told me he’d be two hours, two hours! Where the hell have you been? Who are you? Where’s the boss?”

Crowley grabbed her flailing arm and tried to calm her down. “Who do you mean? Do you mean Hastur? Ligur?” A remarkable change came over her face at the mention of these two names. “I don’t know those people,” she said, tonelessly. Her arms dropped to her sides. Pedro looked fearfully from his mother to Crowley and back again. He raised an eyebrow at the boy.

Pedro shrugged. “Sometimes she’s like that. They all are. It’ll pass in a minute.”

Crowley thought back to how easy the boy’s mind had been to read. Someone was using these people regularly, using the ability to control them. Those two, their old adversaries. He didn’t like it at all. It was so alien to how he and Aziraphale did things.

He watched as Pedro led his mother back into the shadowy doorway of her house. The boy came out again after a moment and stood awkwardly, as though he wanted to say something.

“I’m sorry for scaring your friend,” he said eventually. “I don’t remember why I did it. I think I was told to go to her house....” he trailed off. His face was working, as though he was peering over barriers that he wasn’t even meant to know were there. It looked as though it hurt him to do this – he was squinting his eyes and grimacing. Crowley relented from the idea of asking him any more questions. “Don’t worry about it. I know it wasn’t your idea.”

“We’re OK, then? No...no...” No retribution was what he was trying to say.

“Absolutely,” Crowley said firmly. “Go and take care of your mother.”

He walked slowly away from the little shanty street. He could feel eyes on him all the way out of the favela, watching him leave – unfriendly eyes, eyes that were storing up the sight of him to show to someone else, later. It made him shiver. Crowley wasn’t used to feeling like this – uneasy and on edge.

First things first, though – Anathema had to come back to London. It wasn’t safe for her out here in the world, not any more, not if Hastur was going to use her to get to them – as it clearly appeared he was trying to do.

Chapter Text

Newt knew he was in trouble again as soon as he opened his eyes.

He was instantly wide awake, his heart pounding. He could see a shadow against the curtain, the ominous shape of an unmoving man. Beside him, the icu machines hummed quietly, and in the next room along, behind the partition, the other patients breathed and slept, oblivious. He swallowed, the thick bandage at his throat constricting as he tried to wet his dry mouth. Flexing his fingers he realised that he still had a drip in his left hand, tying him in place, and so, bracing himself, he pulled the needle out, ignoring the pain, and let the thin little tube slip to the floor, where it continued to leak dark blood. He needed that blood himself, he was still very weak, but the need to able to move quickly out of the bed was more urgent. The shadow on the blind had still not moved. Newt lifted the sheets away from himself and slid out of the bed and onto the cold floor. The bandage on his throat wound pulled away painfully, and he gritted his teeth. The other, deeper, wound in his stomach he preferred not to think about. The painkillers were working, as well they should be as he was half-drunk on morphine, but he could feel that something was not good down there, the cuts had not closed and if he had to run, he was going to lose more blood, which he couldn’t really afford. Apart from all that, he felt terrible, and tired, so, so tired. But he had no choice, unless staying here and letting them finish the job was a choice. Not yet, it wasn’t.

There was a small sound at the other side of the bed – the curtain was being pulled aside, slowly opening. Newt scouted around on the floor for something he could use as a weapon, but he found nothing. He crouched, ready to make a run for it, however much it was going to hurt. Now he could hear footsteps advancing towards his empty bed, silently, stealthily. He peered underneath and saw two feet right by the bed, one of them treading in the spilled blood from the drip. Newt thought he was going to pass out right there, and then it would all be over.

In hindsight, he should never have gone back to the flat. After he had come into the money (and after how he had come into the money, especially after that – a man he had intended on mugging getting his wallet out and handing him thousands of pounds, apparently freely, and telling him to get off home), he should have just taken his family and got right out of there. And that had been the plan. They had left the city, and he had assured himself that they were going to stay away. The new house in the country that they had talked about for so long had actually happened. It was almost ridiculous how beautiful it was out there. Their cottage was the stuff of fairy tales. There actually were roses around the door. Nicola and baby Emma absolutely loved it there. Emma soon showed no sign of even remembering the city flat, but Nicola did. She would talk about it every now and again. Over a year had passed but she was never really settled. There was unfinished business back in town for her. Recently, she had started to whittle about some things she had left behind as they fled their old place. In particular she wanted an old diary of hers, which she said she wanted to keep to show Emma how they had started out. She went on and on about this, got a real bee in her bonnet, until finally he had agreed to go back and get this book, if it was even still there.

Travelling back into the city by train, he became sure that he was being followed. Someone picked up his tail as he exited the Tube at Edgeware Road and he couldn’t shake them off. Finally, after hours criss-crossing the Underground trying to get rid of them, he gave in and exited at Broad Green, the stop nearest their old flat. As he walked the familiar streets around their old home he grew more and more uneasy. He still couldn’t see anyone, but he knew, absolutely knew, that there was someone behind him. He could feel their eyes on him, right between the shoulder blades. As he crossed the derelict car park he felt completely exposed, like a rabbit caught in headlights. Putting up his hood, he reached the enclosure of the front doorway and found that he was literally sweating with fear. He took the stairs two at a time and was soon jimmying the lock off of the door to their old studio flat. It gave way easily and then he was inside.

Most of their old possessions were still there, smashed up and rain-damaged from the broken window, but otherwise untouched from the day they had left. No one had come here, no one had tried to rent it out again. Newt paused to look around at their old home. He didn’t know where to start looking for this diary, other than over in the curtained-off corner they had used as a bedroom area. As he headed over there he heard a phone ringing, strident in the hushed dimness. The sound made him jump violently, adrenaline coursing through his blood. He was sweating more than ever. He pulled the Nokia out of his pocket. Almost mechanically he pressed the green answer key. It was Nicola.

“Hey, Nic, I’m here, where did you say the book...?”

There was silence from the other end of the phone, and then a choking sob and Nicola’s voice: “I’m sorry, so sorry...” and then the line went dead. A wave of dread swept over him. He had known, known that something was wrong, he had ignored the feeling but he had known....

Frantically Newt tried to redial but she didn’t answer. His heart was thumping in his chest, painfully. Spinning around, he headed for the door as a dead run but his way was blocked by the two guys, who had obviously been following him all the way from the Edgeware Road.

Crowley wandered down the little country lane, smoking a cigarette, enjoying the summer weather. Every now and then he came out this way, into the Sussex countryside. He owned property out here, a little cottage rented out now to...he forgot just who it was. He was very slack about collecting rent, generally. Adam looked after the property portfolio, but if tenants pleaded poverty he was a soft touch. They didn’t need the money, after all.

Here it was, a cottage with roses round the door, whoever it was who was living here was living the country dream...complete with large vans blocking the roads, he thought with a grimace as he squeezed his way past a tatty blue transit skewed across the lane. As he brushed down his dark clothes he heard what was unmistakably a panicked scream coming from inside the picture-postcard cottage.

Crowley was through the little picket gate and up the path in three strides. Another scream and the sound of a child wailing, and then a thump. He tried the door, but it was locked. This didn’t stop him – a moment’s concentration and the door swung open. He quickly took in what he saw, and at that point he remembered who it was who was renting the cottage. He had let it to that Welsh guy who had tried to mug Aziraphale and him (well, Antonia) outside the bar that time. They had had the mother of all arguments, not spoken for five years, and then been mugged at the end of it - not a great decade.

But Welsh guy wasn’t here today. The only people here today were the girlfriend, who was standing with her back to the wall and the phone to her ear, and the little girl who was struggling in the arms of a scuzzy-looking man. He was holding a knife to the girl’s throat.

The man jerked around as Crowley burst in, and the blade nicked at the side of the baby’s face. She immediately began to scream in pain, and Nicola (that was her name, he remembered) raced forwards, heedless of the knife, towards her daughter. He had reached the guy at the same moment and with no messing around with, punched him in the gut and snatched the bleeding child out of his arms. He then grabbed Nicola’s shoulder and then he turned it on, alright, travelling all three of them out of the cottage and into the kitchen at Tadfield Manor, where she nearly fell into Aziraphale’s lap where he was sitting at the kitchen table.

Adam and Anathema were drunk. They had planned this very carefully, as a serious experiment, but after drinking a shot from every bottle along the top row of optics in the conservatory bar, the science had gone right out of the window, although they were still making a show of discussing it seriously. Ana even had a notebook in front of her on the bar, and was jabbing at it emphatically with a pen.

“So. So you see,” Adam said, waving his glass around his head dangerously. “There is obviously a pre-dis...pre-dipso...I can drink more than you, ‘cos, I have had more experience. Being British an’ all.”

“No, no no,” Ana countered earnestly, tapping her notebook. “I have a genetic tolerance for alcohol. Family of alcoholics, see. Blood half booze already, from when I was born. The Devices....were always drunks. Look at Agnes’s book! She didn’t write any of that shit sober, did she?”

Adam picked up a bottle and poured some whiskey into his glass, getting nearly all of it inside. “But tha’s wrong, though, you have a tolerance for addiction to alcohol, and I think that this e’speriment has proved beyond all reasonable doubt that you cannot take your drink as well as I can.” He drained the glass.

Ana took the bottle from him and filled her own glass right up to the top. “I have never had a hangover,” she stated, drinking a mouthful and then, after a queasy pause, the rest of the glass.

“Nor have I. Wha’ about that thing where you forget half of the night?”

Ana thought very closely about this. “I have had that, yes, I have had that....bu’ I’ve drunk way more today an’ actually don’ feel drunk, really at all....”

A crashing sound in the kitchen made the two of them turn (drunkenly), Adam almost falling right off the bar stool, and knocking over three of the sea of shot glasses that covered the table. Two of them rolled to the floor, smashing into little tiny pieces in the way that only very old, very valuable glass will do.

Crowley’s head appeared around the door. “A little help here...” he trailed off at the sight that greeted him. Every bottle in the place was scattered on the table and the floor, every glass upturned and empty, and Adam and Anathema absolutely wasted in the middle of all this, giggling like idiots.

“When you sober up – please, have some coffee, now – I need some help in the kitchen. Make it quick, please,” he snapped, and slammed the door.

The two of them looked at each other and Ana said, “Oooh Adam, I think we’re in trouble.” This struck Adam as being hilariously funny, and for about five minutes he couldn’t move for laughing. Tears streamed down his face as he rocked precariously on his tall bar stool. When the giggles finally died away, he wiped his eyes, and then concentrated very hard and said, “Do you think.....that we should find out what he wants?”

Ana nodded, wiping tears from her own eyes. “I...yes. Yes I do. Better make some coffee, I s’pose.”

Aziraphale took the little girl from her mother’s arms, and examined her face. The cut wasn’t deep, and it was the work of a moment to seal the edges together and begin the healing process. Nicola had fallen into a kitchen chair and sunk her head between her hands, sobbing.

“She’s alright, Nicola, it was just a really tiny scratch. There’s a lot of blood but it’s really OK...” he held the child up to show her. “See, it’s nearly gone already.”

Nicola grabbed the little girl and held her, still sobbing. When she could speak she started to shake her head, only then seeming to notice that she weren’t in her house any more.

“See? Emma’s fine,” he cajoled, brushing her fine baby hair back from where the cut was now all but invisible. “And we’re in my house for a minute, no need to worry...”

Nicola shook her head, fighting the calm that Aziraphale was trying to instil in her. “No...no...you don’t understand. It’s Newt...”

That was the Welsh guy’s name, Crowley finally recalled. “What? What about him?”

Nicola closed her eyes in pure despair. “I set him up,” she whispered, brokenly. “I had no choice. They kept ringing me, ringing me....telling me to get him back to London, to get him back to our old place. They said he owed them more money.”

“He did not,” Aziraphale said grimly, remembering of the amount of cash he had handed over to Newt at their attempted mugging. There had been more than enough for anyone.

“I had to do it. I had no choice. They had a knife to my baby’s throat. Do you get that? They had a knife to my baby’s throat.”

The conservatory door opened slowly, and Ana and Adam peered around it, looking decidedly green. “Look after these two for a bit, will you?” Aziraphale said. “We have to go to London. To find Newt.”

Ana snorted laughter. “Newt? Is that his real name?”

Crowley landed in the grim little flat, a little breathless but ready to party. They had left Nicola and Emma in the ‘capable’ hands of the two lushes he’d found in the conservatory, partly because he didn’t want to leave them alone, but partly as a just reward for drinking nearly all of his best single malt.

The flat was trashed, but there was no sign of Newt. He found a single splash of blood on the floor near the door (which was half off its hinges), but that was all. No trace of the people who had attacked him, and no trace of Newt himself, apart from that ominous stain. Closing his eyes for concentration, he searched the area, looking inside each dark little apartment in the block, and all around the grounds.

There was no one here now, but there were echoes for those who could hear them. Crowley saw that Newt had played dead until the two men had left, and then he had staggered out of the flat, holding onto his gut where one of the guys had stabbed him. He had made it to a main road where a passerby had taken one look at him and run away in the opposite direction, but this guy had hidden round a corner and called for an ambulance, so Newt was picked up a little while later. He was in the hospital but he wasn’t safe, because when the two guys came back to dispose of the body and found that there was no body, they would have to make sure that there was one by the end of the day or else they wouldn’t get paid....Crowley whipped out his Nokia 8210 (which he loved - a mobile telephone - what a great invention!) and called Aziraphale.

Newt was bleeding, much too heavily. Moving out of the bed had made the stitches burst open – he had felt them go, even through the morphine – and now he was growing more and more dizzy. The feet were advancing around the bed, now leaving one bloody footprint as they came. He tried to swallow again but nearly choked, his throat was so dry. He tried to stand, but his legs would not support his weight. A grimy hand reached down and twisted itself in his bloody hair, pulling him up to his feet. Through vision that was fading in and out with the agony in his stomach, he saw the blade come flashing towards him...

...time seemed to slow down. He had heard that this happened at the end of your life, that you noticed everything and saw every tiny detail. How anyone knew this was another question. Afterwards he wondered how many people had seen what he saw...or what he imagined he saw, because it couldn’t have been real. None of the staggeringly clear details.

The blade seemed to glow suddenly in a blue light, and then it shattered. Pieces of metal exploded upwards, into the darkness above Newt’s head which must have contained his assailant. They seemed to move slowly, trailing sparks. The hand gripping his hair fell away, and Newt fell face-first onto the floor, cracking a tooth as he hit the lino (which hardly hurt at all, not then), so he could not see what caused the horrible sounds he was hearing, or see where the flashes of bright blue fire originated from. The next thing he did see was a concerned face which also looked vaguely familiar, and if he glimpsed a reflection of that blue flame just vanishing from the dark centres of the eyes in this face, he disregarded it. It was either that, or go crazy. Because he knew this man. It had been ages, but he knew him.

“You...” he managed, before curling up as a huge cramp hit all the abused muscles in his torso and blood started to really pour from his stomach wound.

“Yes,” said Aziraphale grimly. “Me. And you need rescuing again, I see.”

He hoisted Newt to his feet, and then moved him back onto the hospital bed. He moved Newt effortlessly, as though he weighed nothing. There was no one else in the room with them, not a trace of the two guys who’d come to kill him. Newt wondered if he was about to die.

With a surprisingly gentle touch, Aziraphale pulled aside the sopping bandages at his neck and stomach, despite Newt’s gasps of pain. The whole area was swimming with blood and gore.

“You want me to sort this out?” Aziraphale said, indicating the horrible, torn-open stab wound.

Newt gasped again as another wave of pain and faintness washed through him. “Call the nurse...” he said faintly.

“I’ll do a better job myself,” Aziraphale said, with a ghost of a smile. “Quicker. It might feel a bit...odd, but don’t worry. Soon be done.”

He flexed his fingers and then laid his hands across the gash. Newt had just enough time to think, oh god i’ve got a nutter here, and then he felt the most incredible sensation, his flesh crawling, actually moving and knitting together, and a deep radiant heat emanating from the palms of Aziraphale’s hands as he groaned in pain and bright blood appeared on his own shirt in the same place as it was on Newt’s hospital gown. Removing one of his hands (covered palm and back in slick blood) he slapped it onto the side of Newt’s neck, and he felt that crawling, knitting feeling again, around his throat. This time he saw the cut open on the side of the man's neck, saw it quiver and bleed a little but then begin to heal over, with amazing speed. When the man removed both of his hands, he was grey and breathless, and had dried blood smeared across his clothes, but Newt’s wounds had gone. Just...gone.

“How did you....?”

“Don’t worry about it. Just hand me that bag of grapes, will you?” he pointed at a soggy bag of half-rotten fruit left by some previous visitor. Newt watched as Aziraphale ate every one of them like a man starved for a fortnight, and then sat back on the bed with a grunt of pain and lit a cigarette he had apparently produced from thin air.

Chapter Text

“Let’s see the scar,” Crowley said, finishing the last of his coffee.

“There isn’t one. Just this tiny white mark,” Newt said, pointing it out.

Crowley nodded. “Nice job, angel,” he said. Aziraphale smiled and blushed a little bit.

“Neck, too?”

He nodded, pulling his top aside. Nothing there either. Newt bit his lip and then spoke again. “Look, I’m just going to ask. Did you kill those guys in the hospital?”

Aziraphale looked away for a minute. “Would it upset you if I said I had?”

“No,” Newt replied. “Is that bad? I would have done it myself when I heard about Emma’s face.”

“Well, no, I don’t think it’s bad. For what it’s worth, I didn’t kill them, but they won’t bother you again. Don’t worry about them anymore.”

Newt still seemed to be wrestling with himself. Finally he spoke again. “Listen. I want you to know that....mugging, and stabbings, and all this....its not who I am,” he said, chewing his lip. “I mean, I know I can say that and you don’t have to believe me, I came at you with a blade, I know that, but...”

“I knew you wouldn’t stab me,” Aziraphale said. “It isn’t in you.”

“I don’t know...if I’d been there today...saw them with my little girl...”

“That’s different,” he said.

Newt was quiet for a minute. He wanted to say something else.

“I am still in so much trouble,” he finally said. “I believe you that those guys from today are gone. But there will always be more of them. I tweaked their boss’s beak and made a run for it and you don’t get away with that, you just don’t. They’ll find us eventually, and...well, I can’t always expect you to be there, can I? I can never go home. We’ll be on the run for life.”

He sank down into the nearby armchair, head in his hands.

Crowley sat down opposite, thinking. An idea was forming in his mind.

A properly crazy idea.

Hours later, Nicola and Emma had been reunited with Newt and sent to one of the bedrooms upstairs. Tomorrow they would sort them out with somewhere else to live, as they both agreed that they could not go back to the rented country cottage. They now needed a place that was properly protected in the manner of their other ‘safe houses’ across the world, like the one in Rio.

This one would be here, though. In Upper Tadfield, the new town that had sprung up like a ring of mushrooms around the old village of Lower Tadfield, since the war.

Crowley couldn’t keep a serious face as he told them his crazy plan to keep them safe. He went to Nicola first as he thought she was the more outgoing of the two. She agreed with this outrageous plan so he then went to Newt with it.

“I think you’re right that more and more of those guys will keep coming,” he said to him. “But we can hide you where they’ll never look. A safe house, you could call it.”

He shook his head, ready to disagree. “The police safe houses, those guys know them all,” he began.

“They don’t know mine, though. Especially not this one. I’m proposing we hide you in the future.”

He had a grin on his face. He looked very pleased with this. Newt looked at him as though he’d gone insane. “What?”

“We take you to one of our houses, but also, take you, and Nicola, and the baby, forwards in time. Where are we now, 1996? I reckon we can go about 15 years, how does 2011 sound?”

Newt looked at him. “You’re actually serious,” he said. Crowley smiled, nodded.

“You wouldn’t be the only one out of their time. Ana, the girl you met before, for one. Adam, for another. He’s...there are other things with him, too, that we’re figuring out, but basically, he’s the same. He’s the one who’ll sort out your new IDs and everything.”

“I’d have to ask Nic....” he croaked, looking desperate.

“I already have. She thinks its a good idea. Said there wasn’t much keeping you here.”

At that moment Nicola herself came through the door. Newt looked up at her. “He’s told you this...this insane thing he’s saying he can do?”

She nodded, came to sit beside him. “If its real, I think we should do it,” she said. “Think about it. We’ve got no close family. Nothing holding us here, and people after us, who won’t stop coming. I think we should do it.”

“Hide...in the future? How is that possible?” Poor Newt was struggling. Crowley let Nicola do the persuading, but he was ready to help her.

“You weren’t there in the cottage, Newt. The baby had a gash on her face, blood everywhere, would have had a scar. He took it, healed her. And then, one second we were in the cottage, the next we were here, there was no time between, I didn’t fall asleep or pass out, he brought us here in a second. If a man who can do that tells me he can hide us in a different time, then I believe he can do it.”

Newt was rubbing his stomach, where the knife had gone in, where Aziraphale had laid on his hands. Crowley sent a little ghost of a suggestion to him...but nothing much. He could tell he was nearly there.

And if he agreed, Crowley would then have to figure out exactly how to do it. He knew he could stop time, and go backwards within it, so it stood to reason he could start it again at a different point.

He thought.

In theory.

Crowley and Aziraphale sat at the bar in the conservatory and studied the sad and depleted remains of their collection of rare alcohol. Beside them sat Anathema and Adam, looking a little contrite.

“You drank all the single malt scotch?” Crowley said. “And my one bottle of 100-year-old sake? Tell me you didn’t get to the vodka on the third row...”

“Erm...we might have done. Was it, er, a special one?” Ana twirled her hair around her fingers as she always did when she was nervous.

Crowley sighed. “No, no, not that special. It was just one of the last bottles from the Russian Imperial court known to be in existence. Absolutely fine to use that on a two-day experimental bender.”

“You can get more scotch, though?” ventured Adam.

“Not that stuff. I bought the whole years’ worth. Right after the Act of Union. Hey, never mind. There’s a bit left.” He held up the dusty bottle with a small golden oval left in the bottom. Crowley poured it out into four glasses and handed one to Adam, one to Aziraphale and one to Ana.

“Here you go,” he said. “Savour it. When it’s gone, it’s gone. Slainte.” He drained his glass.

Crowley wasn’t really angry. In fact, he was remembering that there was actually another crate of the Imperial vodka, as well as a couple bottles of the Union scotch, stashed away in a packing crate somewhere. Possibly in the library. The sake had been one-of-a-kind, but no one liked that, anyway.

Ana looked wistfully into her glass. “So that was Newt, huh?” she said reflectively. “I remember you told us about him. Shame he’s attached. He’s a cutie, that one.”

“Well, you’ll see him again. Maybe. In fifteen years.”

“So. You can really do that, as well?” Ana asked, chewing her lip. “Time travel? Maybe we can go back and ask Agnes what the hell she's talking about in that damn book of hers.”

Crowley waved a hand. “I don’t do it lightly. I mean, the potential for fucking up is high. I would think.” Truthfully he hadn’t known it was going to work at all until he actually did it and managed to take Newt and Nic forwards without scrambling their brains.

Fingers crossed, eh? Never in doubt. Crowley reached for another bottle of scotch.

“Can Az do it too?” mused Ana.

“He’s never tried, I don’t think. Maybe not. We don’t seem to be...exactly the same.” Crowley suddenly wanted to shut this conversation down. They were heading towards The Things He Didn’t Think About again here, for sure.

“What about you, Adam? You’re not aging either. I think you need to approach the possibility that you’re one like us, as well.”

Adam shook his head. “But I haven’t got any abilities. And I knew my mother and father. They were normal.”

Crowley sighed. “You said yourself there was a strong possibility that your dad wasn’t your real dad. He could have been anyone.”

“Yeah, but, like, not an angel. Definitely not.”

“Aziraphale doesn’t really believe that he is, you know. An angel. It’s just a theory.”

Ana shifted in her seat, remembering. “We know there are others. I can see them! Your auras are...crazy. Those two from Rio, Hastur and Ligur, for one. That French girl Az is spying on, Betony. Muriel, from what you've said, she has powers. Maybe greater than yours. There could be more. And..."

Ana was collecting her thoughts. "They could easily have had children, any of them could, with a normal partner.”

“The nephilim,” Crowley said slowly. “You found them, in your research, right? Half angels.”

Adam laughed. “Which half?”

Aziraphale scowled. “Not your silly theory again, Adam,” he said, reaching for another glass for himself. "We do lack haloes or harps or whatever else an angel would have. Wings?"

“It’s not that silly,” he protested. “Not as silly as what Crowley just came up with.”

“Ah, yes, the nephilim. I confess I had thought of them. It would explain....some of it.”

“It doesn’t explain much,” Ana said. “From what you told me, this Muriel is the key to it. But she just appears when she wants.”

"And the poor girl is clearly not well," said Aziraphale. "She may well know everything about us, but she says things that don't make much more sense than your Agnes."

“Whatever we are, does it matter?” asked Crowley, desperate to get off the subject.

Aziraphale, seeing his distress, even though he didn’t understand it, really, grabbed his hand. “The main thing is we’re all here. Newton is safe, because of your abilities, however you acquired them, my dear. Right?”

Crowley looked surprised at this public affection. But he laced his fingers through Aziraphale’s, nodding. “Right.”

They sat for a while longer, drinking the last of the priceless top row. Crowley did not let go of Aziraphale’s hand.

Adam smiled to himself and lit a cigarette. He didn’t feel much like an angel, even half of one, but there were two of them right beside him. And between them all, they could handle whatever the truth really was. He was absolutely sure of that