Chapter Text
The rain was heavy today. John did so hope that Beatrice was keeping warm and dry.
She was currently at one of the Oxford Society for Women’s Suffrage’s rallies. John sometimes went, as a fellow member, but his leg was giving him great pain today. At least, with John at home, they did not have to leave Edwin in the care of the Household staff.
Edwin was currently sat in John’s armchair, swinging his legs back and forth, as he read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He’d read the book before with Beatrice and John but was now capable of reading it independently. Meanwhile, John was sat at his desk nearby, marking his students’ latest submissions. The fire was roaring, keeping John’s office warm and toasty, as they sipped from cups of earl grey tea.
“Edwin?” John called.
Edwin looked up from his book. John opened his desk drawer with a sly smile and pulled out his secret biscuit tin. “Can you keep a secret?”
Edwin nodded enthusiastically as he slid off the chair and darted to John’s side. He pushed himself onto his tip-toes as he held onto the side of the desk, looking up at John with his mother’s pleading eyes.
“I must swear you to secrecy, old boy,” John smiled. “Otherwise your mother will eat me out of house and home.”
Beatrice’s sweet tooth was legendary.
“I swear, papa,” Edwin nodded again. “Cross my heart.”
John winked and opened the lid to reveal some gingerbread biscuits wrapped in baking paper. Edwin’s eyes widened— gingerbread was his favourite.
“Take a couple of pieces then,” John nudged him. “I think it is a fine afternoon for some biscuits, do you not agree?”
Edwin reached in, gently took two biscuits, and held them close to his chest. “Thank you, papa,” Edwin breathed.
John bent down and pressed a fierce kiss to the top of Edwin’s head, laying his cheek against Edwin’s soft hair with a sigh. He felt overwhelmed with love for this precious boy, his beautiful son. “You’re a good lad.”
“Papa… can you sing the song, please?”
“Oh, I am sure I can spare a moment for you,” John smiled. He scooped Edwin up underneath his arms and sat him on John’s strong leg. Edwin begun to nibble his biscuits.
“In the evenings when I sit alone a-dreaming,” John sung. “Of days gone by, love—”
John paused to chuck Edwin under the chin. Edwin giggled around his biscuit, crystal clear and so sweet. “—to me, so dear. There’s a picture that in fancy oft’ appearing, Brings back the time, love, when you were near…”
John had not thought, had not dreamed in his darkest nightmares, that, in that moment, he would have a mere decade left with his son.
John shudders to think what his afterlife would look like if it were not for Emily.
When he died, he had thought Death would be waiting for him, thought he would be ready in his desperation to join his beloved family… but Death never came. He’d had the sense, even then, that he was not supposed to linger on Earth. That he should be moving beyond but, for some reason, was not allowed. He had felt abandoned, alone. The last few years of his life had been without Beatrice, as well as Edwin, and it seemed unfathomable that he was expected to continue on without either of them. It was then that Emily found him, wandering the streets of Oxford in complete despair.
(John and Beatrice had moved to London after John retired from the university— he’d never been the same after Edwin died, no one tried to convince him to prolong his employment or remain in the city. Their family gravestone sat in a London cemetery but John had never visited it. He had no desire to see a visual reminder of all that he had lost. Instead he had returned to Oxford where they had been happy. Too happy, clearly, for God had punished their joy with unbelievable tragedy.)
(Not that John really Believed anymore. Whatever faults He may have found in John, it did not excuse His punishing Edwin for it.)
It was Emily who realised what John’s unfinished business was; the mystery of Edwin’s disappearance, his almost-certain death. Knowing this had not helped, of course. For years John had searched for answers in vain and, throughout it all, Emily was there. She comforted him through every dead end and every failure with no judgement.
(Edwin had loved detective stories. It seemed particularly cruel that John should fail so much, at the the thing Edwin loved, in his attempts to find his son.)
She had truly gone above and beyond the call of duty in the past nine decades.
She finds him, with news to share, on a sunny and joyful afternoon in the Bodleian Library. John’s been haunting a few Biology lectures recently and is keen to compare the knowledge imparted to students now to what his colleagues were teaching students before. It is a frequently amusing comparison.
“John!”
John looks up from his book and smiles at Emily’s approach. “Good morning, my dear—”
“John,” she says, cutting him off, “apologies for interrupting but I have heard the most remarkable news!”
John lays his book down and offers her a gentle smile; Emily always been a bit of a gossip. He professes not to care for it but he cannot deny his thrill and interest. “Do tell.”
“I have heard that some famous ghost detectives from London are currently visiting Oxford— the Dead Boy Detectives?”
“Oh,” John says, furrowing his brow. “You know, I think I have heard some gossip about them over the years… do you think they may be able to help me learn what happened to my Edwin?”
“Better,” Emily grins, “for I learnt their names: Charles Rowland and Edwin Payne.”
John died of a heart attack so he can say, with absolute confidence, that it feels like he is currently having another one.
After a moment, he asks faintly, “I beg your pardon.”
Her grin widens, smile barely controlled. “The word on the grapevine is that one of the boys died in the 1980s and one during the First World War. I could not ascertain which was which but what are the chances, John? What are the chances?”
He gets to his feet, manifesting his cane. “I— this could be my son?”
She nods frantically. “It is possible, do you not think?”
John doesn’t know what he thinks. He feels like he could burst from his skin with the energy buzzing through him. “I— I need to look for him,” he says, faintly. “Did you find out where they were?”
“No,” she says, apologetically. “Oliver merely heard that they were visiting.”
“Perhaps the family home?”
“Why don’t you look there and I’ll continue asking around?” Emily suggests. “If they’ve been hired for some investigating, someone is bound to know why!”
“Yes, yes,” he says, pulling on the memory of his coat and taking both of her hands in his. “Thank you.”
“You are welcome,” she says softly. “I only wish to see you happy, old friend.”
“Any happiness I have experienced these past decades is in gratitude to your friendship,” he says, leaning forward and kissing her cheek lightly.
She smiles, touched. “Go. Try and find your Edwin.”
After more than a century, finding Edwin finally feels tangible. John might even manage it.
John speeds out of the Bodleian, ignoring the other ghosts (his friends) in his desperation. He’s so desperate, so single-minded, that he doesn’t think to travel via mirror. Instead he makes the ten minute walk from the library to the old house.
It looks to be a beautiful day; students, academics and tourists alike are beaming under the gentle warmth and brightness of an April sun. The sky is a deep blue and any grass that John passes glows with how green it is. It is hard to tell whether the world has changed with the spring or whether the richness of colour is because John may be leaving his own winter.
When he reaches his old home there are two ghosts standing in front of it, admiring the exterior. Their backs are to John but he can tell one is significantly more modern than the other; the male is dressed in a black coat and wearing loafers, whilst the clothes the woman wears look Edwardian. Most definitely Edwardian, in fact. John remembers Beatrice owning a skirt just like that.
Whilst neither are his son, John doubts that ghosts visiting his home are a mere coincidence to his son’s possible visitation to Oxford. He picks up speed, approaching them, desperate to find out what they may know about Edwin. As he draws closer, he begins to make out their conversation:
“—aw, this looks well mint,” says the man.
“Yes,” a woman replies. “It was a lovely home, holding many cherished memories.”
John stops in his tracks, floored. Because that sounds like—
(No, it couldn’t be…)
“Beatrice?”
The woman freezes at his voice. The ghost next to her spins around, a boy rather than a man; he’s skinny in the way a whip is, with a head full of dark curls and a charming smile on a pretty face. He appears, from his manner of dress, to have died in the 1980s.
“Hey mate,” he grins, offering a hand, “you know Beatrice here?”
The woman turns slowly; dark auburn hair (with less grey in it than she had when she died), light eyes that oscillate between grey-green-blue depending on the light, a spray of freckles across her nose, surprisingly broad shoulders, a heavy gold locket around her neck. John had bought her that locket for their first Christmas as husband and wife, though he had not been able to gift her the locket until the 26th for their beautiful son had been born shortly before Christmas lunch…
His darling wife. God, she was even more beautiful than he remembered. How was that even possible?
(He remembers well the last few weeks of her life, dying of tuberculosis. “At least,” she had struggled to say, her eyes bright and her skin feverish, “I shall die beautiful, hm?”
Still trying to make him laugh. She had succeeded, too, but it had been a strange laughter. The kind of laughter that balances on the edge of tears. He had reached for her hand, kissing the back of it fiercely before cradling it to his chest. “You are always beautiful to me, Beatrice darling,” he had whispered. “As beautiful as the day I met you.”
And she had been, right to the end. When John lost her, five years before his own death, he lost the last vestige of beauty in the world. And, now, all beauty had been returned.)
Beatrice covers her mouth with a trembling hand. She still wears her wedding and engagement rings. “John?” She gasps, eyes welling up with tears. “Darling, is that you?”
The boy spins back around to look at her. “This is John?”
“Bea,” John says, simply. What more is there to say?
She squeaks and begins to run towards him. He holds out an arm, steadying himself against his cane with the other so that when she throws herself at him, he can bear the force.
Oh, she is perfect in his arms.
“John, John,” she murmurs, lips moving against his neck. “Darling, I… oh I thought I should never see you again…”
“I have missed you so much, my love,” he whispers. “I cannot believe… you are really here?”
She leans back, stars in her eyes. “I am really here,” she whispers, smiling, before kissing him fiercely.
Beatrice’s mouth is soft and lush on his, gorgeous and addictive. Kissing her feels like life.
“Charles, why is my mother kissing someone?” A clear and eloquent voice asks.
John freezes. He does not recognise the newcomer’s voice but there is only one soul that can call Beatrice ‘mother’.
He pulls back from Beatrice who is beaming at him (it has been so long since he last saw her this happy, not since 1916…) whilst behind her, standing next to the 1980s ghost, is—
(a complete miracle)
— his son.
Edwin looks like he’s stepped right out of 1916, still in the St. Hilarion’s uniform and with his hair immaculately styled. There is something in his expression though, something unyielding and fierce that makes him look more like a man than a boy…
Of course there is. Edwin still looks 16, the same as when John last saw him, he died a child… oh God, he really did die. John had not realised how much he had been cradling the hope that Edwin had merely run away until now, when he now knew that was an impossible dream. The weight of that young death bears down upon his son’s handsome face.
Edwin’s eyes, Beatrice’s eyes (how had John forgotten?), widen and his expression relaxes in surprise. “Father?”
Beatrice lets him go, allowing John the freedom to approach their child.
(The last time all three of them were together was in January 1916.)
John stumbles forward, so desperate that he’s not using his cane as he should, and takes Edwin’s face between his hands. Edwin has to tilt his head up a little to look John directly in the eyes. He looks unsure, a little nervous.
“It’s really you?” John whispers.
Edwin nods. “Yes, Father.”
John laughs. It bursts out of him without his permission. Pure joy distilled into a single sound.
“My perfect boy,” John whispers again. “I have grieved you every day since we lost you.”
Edwin swallows, eyes darting across to Beatrice momentarily, before he says softly, “I have missed you too.”
John pulls Edwin into his arms and holds him tightly, the way he’s wanted to for over a century. Since Edwin was young(er), in fact. Though John had often longed to, it was not the done thing to “coddle” one’s son. Especially when the Great War broke out. Then you must toughen them up, turn your babies into strapping young soldiers, turn them into cannon fodder.
(John had spent the first couple of years of the War praying that it would end before Edwin came of age. Every night he prayed that he would not lose his darling son to the Front, the Front that John himself was barred from. He should have been more specific. Do not take my boy, he should have prayed, do not take him anywhere that I cannot follow.)
John could never bear to be hard on Edwin. His own father had been a cruel man, cruelty born from his constant disappointment in a soft-spoken son who required a walking aid. But, still, John had not held his son in his arms like this, had not told him that he was proud of the spectacular man he was shaping up to be; fiercely intelligent, astonishingly talented, refined and good. John had been breathtakingly proud of Edwin for every second of Edwin’s life and for every second after.
And he was not sure that Edwin ever knew that.
“You are a miracle,” he tells him now. “Always have been.”
Edwin’s eyes shimmer.
“And you!” John says, spinning around to look at his wife (his wife!) who stares at him with boundless joy, approaching her. “You are a miracle too, my darling. You found him. You found our son, Beatrice!”
Beatrice giggles as John wraps an arm around her waist and lifts her off her feet.
“I cannot take all the credit,” she says, laughing. “I actually found Charles first.”
John looks around her to look at the 1980s ghost. There’s a split second where the boy doesn’t realise that John is looking at him. In that tiny fraction of time, he looks anxious, before he forces an easy looking smile back onto his face.
“Nice to meet you, Mr Payne,” Charles says, holding out a hand. “I’ve heard loads about you.”
John casts his mind back to his conversation with Emily in the library. “Charles Rowland, is that correct?”
Charles blinks in confusion. “How did you—”
“Only professionally, Father,” Edwin says, setting his jaw. “Charles’ surname is Payne.”
“Charles is Edwin’s husband,” Beatrice explains with an intense stare.
Of course she would be worried for John’s reaction. The eras in which they were alive were not kind to any difference, let alone homosexuality. John remembers how nervous Emily, having died in 1884, was to reveal that she loved women. Suddenly Edwin’s behaviour in the last months of his life (withdrawn, quiet, unhappy) make a heartbreaking amount of sense.
(John had been as supportive as possible of Emily but he would be lying (purposefully hiding his own flaws, of which there were many) if he said that he accepted her news, in his heart, immediately. It was against all that he had been taught; that homosexuality was supposedly unnatural, a reflection of a sinful soul… but Emily was no sinner. Neither was Edwin and look how He had hurt John’s son. John suspected God was rather flawed in His judgement of what was Right and what was Wrong.
Emily was kind and unbelievably supportive of John. John would be kind and unbelievably supportive in turn. And thank the Heavens for her; her true self, unhidden, had been a gift in its own right. But it was a gift that kept giving, for now John could feel nothing but uncomplicated joy at his son’s marriage. Marriage!)
“Married!” John breathes, awed. “I never dared hope… I have a son-in-law?”
Beatrice bursts into a bright beam, looking like the precious sunlight of a brand new day. Edwin and Charles still look a little tense.
John approaches Charles and finally takes his hand, shaking it. “It brings me the utmost pleasure to meet you, Charles.”
Charles’ smile looks a little more genuine. His smile is disarmingly charming, brighter than the spring sun above them. It is a smile not dissimilar to Beatrice’s. John can only imagine how his son might have fallen in love with that smile.
“Perhaps we should seek out a more private setting for reconciliations?” Edwin suggests. “Then we may all catch one another up of the past century.”
He shoots Beatrice a strangely intense look which she swallows. “Agreed,” she says. “Do you have a form of residence, John? Or shall we return to London?”
“I mostly live in the libraries of Oxford,” John says, “but I do have a friend who I must inform if we are to depart.”
“I could find them,” Charles offers, “if you three want to go on ahead.”
“Nonsense,” John smiles. “You are family, yes? We shall find—”
His breath catches in his throat, voice strangled by joy. Family. A family.
Without meaning to, John begins to cry. He hides his face in the palm of his hands.
“John? Darling? Are you—”
“Father?”
“Only an hour ago, I thought my family were lost forever,” he sobs. “Now I learn it is bigger than I ever dreamed.”
Beatrice’s arms wrap around him, pulling him into her arms, warm and safe. The safest place he’s ever known, with the memory of her perfume grounding him a little. She kisses his shoulder.
“We are together once more,” she whispers, “and we shall not leave you again.”
He clings to her tightly, holding on and holding steady, vowing that no one shall take his family away again.