Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

"Hullo!" 

For a second John didn't register the cheerful shout as intended for him, too caught in his dismay for the edge of his collar now damp with rainwater. He turns the edge of his overcoat up more securely, tucking his head back towards his neck as if he could retreat inside his clothes like the noble tortoise. Perhaps it is not very flattering, but John thinks he is cold enough not to care. The sea, which Harry has reassured him was close enough that even this little inland town tasted it on the breeze, is nowhere to be seen. Instead the street is awash with rainwater, unpleasantly warm and persistent against John’s hunched shoulders. 

At the end of the street the coach turns, heading left out of town and towards civilization, the wheel’s clatter fading into the damp hubbub of the town. A child hurtles through a puddle forming in the dip of the street where it meets the road, and shrieks in painful delight. 

The voice calls again. 

“Ey! Hullo?”

He looks up, shuffling out of the way of a family in their weekend best as they pass with an apologetic nod, stepping out of the street and towards the stranger who greeted him as a friend.

"Are you Mr Bridgens, scholar and Knower of things?" 

"Well, that I may be. At the very least I am John Bridgens."

"Henry Peglar," the stranger said, approaching hand outstretched. "I were told you might be looking for a place to stay." 

His pocket burns, a smouldering quiet fire fueled by shame. He hadn't opened Harry's letter till he was already on the train, the slick tearing of the envelope muffled by the slam of the carriage door and the scream of the whistle. By the time he had read it they were jolting into life, and had cursed his sudden and uncharacteristic moment of compulsiveness. He had slept on the journey, barely, fits and starts cut through with wailing infants and the loud foghorn snore of the gentleman opposite. 

The coach, similarly, had been a whirlwind of tight politeness that pounded at John’s weathered patience. They had passed the end of the line, tracks waiting to be laid piled tomblike at the edge of the ditch, piles of gravel and waste and the drawn, bedraggled faces of the navvies passing in a streak of steel that cut across the landscape. He had hoped for something, some spark of inspiration to itch at his fingertips. Instead he had weathered his pencil until the thin lead point had snapped, streaking graphite against his shirt cuff. 

He hopes it doesn’t show now, as he reaches out to meet the man at his greeting. In his the stranger's palm is warm and dry, the skin of his fingertips rough where they brush the thin inside of John’s wrist, his grip strong and sure. John pulls back as soon as is polite, tucking his hand back inside his pocket so it might retain the warmth of the man’s touch a little longer. He seems unbothered by the rain, this strange bright creature, eyes shining out from the curtain of hair plastered to his forehead. 

“I have very little I can give you in return,” John confesses. “But I need little.” 

It is a lie, a polite one. John had been hoping for a town a little bigger. A place with a hotel, or at the least a boarding house, where his meals might be provided for him and an iron for him to keep his shirt collars sharp. He had dreamed of a library even, or a local philanthropist with an interest in history and art who could be prevailed upon for fresh reading material. Instead he finds himself in a wheal town, sprawling out from the pit in a lazy slump, built to corral a workforce of miners and smelters, streets as grey and sodden as the sky above them. 

“I’ll see what I can give you,” Mr Peglar says. “We have space for another at least, which is more than most.”

He swallows his embarrassment, curses himself for building dreaming spires out of a single letter, and nods. 

The walk up to the Peglarsʼ cottage is a quick one, but all uphill. 

John trudges behind Peglar, who insists on hauling John’s bag over his shoulder and hefting his suitcase in the other hand, and somehow still manages to chatter all the way up the hill. He talks of everything and nothing, pausing only to greet a wayward magpie that flutters to a standstill in their path. It alights on a cobblestone and Mr Peglar stops dead in his tracks, John slogging on towards the curling shape of his back as he bows low to the little bird. His laugh chases it as it hops across the cobbles, head cocked peering between his legs to squawk at John. 

“A babe,” he says, as if he can see John hoving upon his back. “A bird.”

“I know birds, Mr Peglar,” John says stiffly. “We are not so bereft in the city.”

Mr Peglar only laughs, the magpie skittering at the sharp sound, taking to the wing and flapping its way into the bushes, out of sight. 

“Ne’er mind the city, you were a sailor! Mr Goodsir told me so.” 

John inclines his head, bending backwards to stretch the ache of travel free as they pause. 

“Ah, mostly seabirds to see there.” 

Pedant, he scolds himself, but Peglar snickers again as if it was some clever parry. 

“Not much further, Mr Bridgens,” Peglar promises, turning into the sun to squint down at him.

John waves a defeated hand in his direction and corrects his posture, all too aware of how Mr Peglarʼs eye sweeps over him. 

He wonders what he sees before him, a panting hunched man of middle years in clothes that were barely smart enough for the hustling silken press of Exeter station yet here transformed into something altogether too fussy.

The town falls away from them after a few minutes, and with it the rain stops. The sun warms them from behind a curtain of cloud, perspiration quickly replacing rainfall on John’s brow as they climb further in the muggy heat. Terraced houses built into the hill peeter out as they round the bend and find a small shale cottage tucked at the end of the road. Behind it there is a clump of bracken; a barrier of cathedral spires, the largest thorns John has ever seen, and then farmland, to John’s surprise a dusty gold, falling like a curtain the rest of the way up the rise. 

“Da!” Henry cries as he throws open the door, pausing only to sling John’s suitcase onto the thick wooden table that takes up most of the cramped front room. “Guess-”

“Look what the cat dragged in now.” 

John stifles a smile despite himself, as he watches Henry roll his eyes at the interruption but nonetheless turn with a flourish to reveal John to his father. The room is neat at the centre, where the elder Peglar sits at the table before a small pile of mending, but spilling outwards with life in all four corners. It is part cobblers, part woodworkers, part bakery John thinks, tools for a hundred and one trades litter a narrow workbench made of driftwood shoved beneath the window in the outerwall. A shaggy colley dog lies belly up on a rag rug behind the table. The range is a blot of ink against the wall behind the table, radiating heat that diffuses through the Peglars’ twin smiles. 

The elder Peglar half rises out of his seat to reach a hand across the table. “John.”

“Yes?” 

“Ah-” he chuckles properly at John’s bemused frown, slapping his hand on the table instead. “No, that is to say. Good to meet you, sir, I am John Peglar.”

“John Bridgens,” says John Bridgens. 

He looks helplessly to the younger Peglar, hand over his mouth poorly stifling his amusement at John’s distress. “This is going to get confusing, I suppose.”

John Peglar shakes his head, still grinning. “Not unless our Harry thinks he’s too good to call me his da, for it’s just the two of us now.” 

He drags his eye up and down John’s weathered form, twinkling smile remaining until his gaze alights on the slowly spreading puddle of rainwater beneath their feet.

“Oh, for goodnessʼ sake, lads, you’re sodden.”

The family resemblance is clearest when he gestures for his son to head round to help him clear the table of a day’s worth of debris, heads bent together. John Peglar is not quite all white, but certainly it is creeping up on him, but underneath the blush of copper still shines in the lamplight, the same as Henry’s. Their shoulders shake in the same rhythm, fingers tapping out rhythms on the soft wood of the table, dancing excess energy in shadows across its pale surface. Neither of them are tall men, and John Peglar directs his son to haul the drying rack higher above the range so John might shuffle closer to the heat. 

Indeed, he is pressed to take a seat in the wooden armchair propped nearby, and to settle his boots close to the fire so that they might dry. The Peglar’s bustle around him, dancing around the space worn by comforting familiarity. 

It is only when the pot has been filled and boiled, John’s socked feet have started to steam gently, and the tea poured, that John is pressed on what profession could drive him so far from the press of the city. Mr Peglar is delighted by the confirmation that the small wooden box still cradled in his lap is a painter’s case, gesturing to his son with a broad arm. The younger Peglar turns from their conversation, clearly embarrassed, and John finds his eyes following him, intrigued. 

“You’re not from here neither are you, Mr Peglar? If you’ll pardon the impoliteness.” 

Peglar inclines his head. “Quick you are, Mr Bridgens, and not originally from London.”

He does not ask pardon, nor does he ask where John hails from. Instead he smiles indulgently, just enough that you must be sat close enough to see it. 

“Tamworth,” he says. He clarifies, “Staffordshire.”

“Monmouthshire.”

“Then may I ask what brought you here?” 

His host laughs again, mirth coming easy to the Peglars, wrapping around the room in another layer of warmth. 

“Of course Mr Bridgens, though I am surprised our Harry didn’t give you a potted history on the walk up from the town, known to chatter like a lark this one-”

“Da!” Henry complains softly, meeting John’s eyes only to roll his. “It’s like you forget I am a grown man now, and know when to hold my tongue.” 

He turns from the cupboard where he is fetching plates and shoos the dog out from underfoot with a sharp whistle. She is a pretty beast, shaggy sand-golden earth-brown, yoke of white about her neck like some fine lady’s lace fichu. Her step is languid with age but her eyes, when they turn to the elder Peglar, are still bright with cleverness. He whistles, now clicks, her ears pricking as if they were in conversation, and she turns about herself to disappear up the stairs.

“She herds nowt but children now.”

John huffs an approximation of laughter, caught in his curiosity. Peglar pats his knee as she returns, jaws clamped gently over a bundle of papers.

“Here, since you are a stranger.”

John takes the handful from him, moving his cup to the side to spread what unfolds to be a map across his lap. Across the page, worn with time and use, spreads the fine spidery veins of the mine, radiating from the smudge of a little black mark – the mine buildings above ground, John supposes. Thin pencil marks divide the earth atop the inked cobweb of shafts and tunnels into rough fields and farm boundaries. His fingertip follows the worn crease of the page up the crest of the hill to find the Peglars’ tiny cottage, another mark in pencil. X. Home. 

“P’rhaps not the most useful for you to navigate by, but what we have might as well be made useful to you.” John Peglar makes a soft sound of effort as he leans forward, picking a splinter of kindling from the wood basket beside him to point out the local landmarks. “And Mr Goodsir’s laboratory, and the wheal house, and the pond… the sea comes off this side here.” 

“The wheelhouse?”

“Wheal Rose-” John startles, not expecting Henry Peglar to be quite so close as he is, settling plates on the table behind them. He peers over John’s shoulder, elbow just brushing as he reaches to point. “The mine. ‘S not marked but there's a second, here, near the coast.”

“Here?” John lets his finger linger next to Henry’s, almost touching. In the vertical crease a small smudge of pencil is preserved, half erased. “Is this not the mark of it?”

“Well.” Peglar falters, looking up and over John’s head at his father. John cannot see what passes between them. “It’s not used anymore, and I doubt there’s anything there for a scientist to find.”

John coughs. “I wouldn’t call myself a scientist Master Peglar.”

“You are friends with Mr Goodsir,” John Peglar says shortly, and with a good deal more cheer than the sentiment merits. “That’s scientist enough for us. Now, a drink?” 

A hum of agreement fills the room. 

“There should be some of the Blanky’s good cider left.” John Peglar winces as he half-rises, and winces again as he is waved off and he lowers himself back down. “Seems a lifetime ago I was your age,” he bemoans.

“T’was,” Henry says, halfway to the cupboard for the golden bottle, “mine.”

Dinner is hot and steady in John’s gut, but not so warm as the Peglars’ company. There is an enviable ease about them, all at once friends and enemies in the way only family could be, dancing their words along the knife edge of politeness in deference to their guest. 

Even the dog, greying and slow as she might be, pads beneath the table to rest her chin gently upon John’s knee. Her drool soaks the fabric of his trouser leg and he winces, thinking of the pump outside and the tiring slog of ironing. He still slips her a little piece of ham. Across the table Master Peglar smiles at him softly as he looks up, slipping his hand back onto the table. John flushes, caught, mouth falling open to excuse himself but Henry only winks, slipping his own hand beneath the tablecloth. 

It is Henry that leaps to his feet again at the end of the meal to clear their plates. He is light on his feet, even after a full dayʼs work, busies himself with the sink and the soap and the tedious task of cleaning. The kitchen fills with the soft sound of his humming as he does, packed like soft cotton wool around the crackling fire and the gentle repetitive scratch of his fathers fingers through the dog’s coat. John thinks he might melt into his chair. It would be so dreadfully impolite, but his eyes grow heavy without his permission.

“It was a twist of fate Mr Bridgens,” says John Peglar suddenly, turning to him, “what brought me here.” 

He nods decisively. 

“As true and as sharp as an arrow it was, perhaps it is the same for you?”

Beyond the main room downstairs an open doorway, covered in a sun-faded curtain, leads to a plain, narrow space. On the right, at Harry’s gesture, a small bed takes up the width of the room. At the foot of it a picture is nailed, a small daguerreotype, the figures all too tiny for John to make out. 

“Grief!” says Peglar, hauling his case onto the bed. “Tell us what’s in this thing, Mr Bridgens. Now I’ve hauled it around twice, I’m curious what could weigh this much.”

“It’s not so bad,” John splutters halfheartedly. “I only thought to bring a few volumes for reference.”

He moves to take the handle and lie the case carefully on its side. It pops open with a little effort, the ageing canvas interior almost yellow in the awkward candlelight. 

“A library!” Peglar exclaims, letting himself fall to sit on the bedspread with a soft oof . “Are you a librarian as well as a scientist and a sailor?”

“'Tis only six books, Mr Peglar, no match for some fine libraries.”

They sit nestled in the folds of his clothes, spilled from the neat piles by the jostling of the coach and Mr Peglar’s arms. He watches John unpack, lounging about the space as he was sat in a theatre box, watching John huff and puff and haul for his amusement. Soon enough he waves the hand not busy stroking carefully up and down the spines of Ivanhoe . 

“Any illustrated?” 

“That one, yes,” John nods, watches carefully as Peglar plucks it free and thumbs through the pages. “And the Hibbart – but with sketches of the landscape of Scotland, so perhaps not as interesting to you as the knights.”

“Nothing wrong with a landscape, Mr Bridgens,” Peglar raises an eyebrow, as if he was not already engrossed by the fine woodcuts. “Though I prefer to be in amongst it, and feeling it breathe around me.”

“Quite.”

Peglar hums lightly.

John feels the conversation judder to a halt around them, but gives it up for a lost cause and casts his sleepy mind to the task of unpacking. At the opposite end of the room a few steps away is a wooden chest of drawers. The top is just long enough for his books and his shaving kit, with the few past copies of Annals and Magazine of Natural History he thought important enough to keep ownership of laid flat and neat beneath them. The top drawer is propped open a sliver and, when John tugs at its handle experimentally, invitingly empty. Mr Peglar nods when he turns, half gesturing. It slides out fully with a slight rattling sound, a lone and forgotten button rolling to rest in the bottom corner next to John’s hand. A sweet little thing, pearlescent even in the candlelight, and John slips it into his pocket with only a brief twinge of guilt. The space is a good size for what he has, his spare shirts and stockings taking up barely half, his one fine waistcoat sitting lonely on the opposite side topped with a neatly darned cravat. He wonders absentmindedly what the lower drawers contain.

Behind him, Mr Peglar exclaims. When John turns he finds him with the book scant inches from his nose. 

“Be careful, Mr Peglar, you’ll develop a squint.”

He lowers the book with a laugh. “What do you think I do all day underground?”

John frowns, surely they have lights. He opens his mouth to say so, but all that exits is an unsightly yawn. His jaw clicks uncomfortably as it closes. 

“If I poked you, you’d fall flat on your face,” Mr Peglar purses his lips. He closes Ivanhoe and steps over to slide it home on the end of the line, taking the paperweight from John’s palm to settle as a bookend. Then he takes John by the shoulders and steers him to sit on the bed in his place. “Now sleep, and we’ll be quiet.”

He pauses at the curtain, turning back to see if John has registered his words, watching as he nods clumsily and leans down to untie his shoes. When John looks up, laces loose, he is gone, the curtain hanging statuesque in his place and beyond the quiet deliberate silence. 

He takes the next morning to go up to the big house. 

It has a name, he ought to check his notebook for where he made note of it before he left London, but the big house is what the Peglars call it, and the big house it has become in his mind. Broad and pale, it towers over the path upwards, a fine path in white gravel like crushed seashells. A fine white drive for a fine white house, almost incongruous against the blue sky, as if it was just another cloud. All along the borders pear trees stand sentinel, a guard of honour bearing fruits of the earth. He passes two young men who wave to him, canvas strung between them drooping with collected fruit. One of them grins, as if he was familiar to him, and shouts-

“Are thou Professor Bridgens?”

The sun shines through his hair, rustling like a wheat field upon his head, and he must shade his eyes to meet John’s. 

“Almost,” John says, for the second time in as many days. “For I am John Bridgens.”

“Not a professor, Tommy,” says the other, taller and dark as rye from his tanned face to his close cropped hair. “Just has enough books to be so.”

“Says who?” John thinks perhaps he knows who, pictures biceps flexing as he hauls the heavy travel case across the threshold of his father’s house. 

“Henry Peglar,” the man says with a laugh. “Who else. As wily a gossip as any old maid, and twice as likely to cheat you.”

“He wouldn’t,” says Tommy, with an elbow primed in defence of his friend. “You’re just bad at cards, John.”

“They’ve been very kind to me,” John feels like he must leap to the Peglars’ defence as well, even to their friends. 

“Sure, they’ll be kind to anyone – just wait till they’re cruel.”

Tommy sighs dramatically, though he’s smiling. Older and younger then, though he can’t quite tell which is which, a lifetime of teasing made easy. 

“It’s your own fault, Johnny, and it’s your pocket that’s empty, and I’m not small enough for you to shake the coins out of my pockets anymore so you’ll have to do without.”

John leaves them to their bickering with a shake of his head and a backwards wave, cheerfully returned on both counts. It is not so much further to the house, a small gravel path curling away from the drive and behind the tall stone wall of the garden. The boughs of fruit trees, laced with the last of the year's blossoms, beckon him around. They peek over the top of the wall, fluttering in the slight breeze, mirrored on the other side of the path by wild growing elderflower, sprays of white tickling his ear as he pushes through the overgrown fronds. He pushes through.

The back of the house is no less grand than the front. Whitewashed walls shine like a beacon under the high sun, almost too bright to look at for John’s eyes, dulled by years of London smog and the cool, dim embrace of darkrooms and libraries. It seems like another world altogether. 

Briefly he considers the greenhouse, tucked along the outer edge of the walled garden he had just passed, a half-hidden figure moving in its embrace. In his hand the package weighs heavier than the book it contains, the half-promise of a connection to be made resting between the crisp folded pages. Perhaps he ought to have gone to the main entrance after all, presented himself as a gentleman and not-

“Oh!”

John turns. A footman, clearly making preparations for one of the family to leave, looks at him in bewilderment above a towering armful of bags. His eyes are the colour of the sky, cloudless and sharp, and altogether too pale against his dark curls. 

“A great friend asked if I might drop this by,” John says, carefully practised, brandishing the parcel as if it were a shield against his gaze. “As I was to be in the area.”

“Right. Sorry, ‘cuse me,” the young man frowns, seemingly wrong footed. He turns over his shoulder to call to someone in the house. “William, can you please hurry up? There’s a,” he pauses, minutely, but long enough for John’s cheeks to threaten to burst into flames, “gentleman here. He’s got a parcel.” 

He looks back to John, gestures to the low balustrade running around the corner of the building.

“Just drop it here.”

“I was hoping to deliver it in person… but I see you are busy,” John finishes hurriedly, placing the parcel on the stone with a careful pat. “Would you mention, ah. It is no matter. Another time perhaps.” 

The footman hums, but does not echo his sentiments, and John is not a man fond of deceiving himself. He leaves him with the folio, and as many pleasantries as he left with the young men in the field.  

If he returns much earlier than planned, John Peglar doesn’t comment on it.

He apologises, even, as they sit opposite each other at the table, too used to Harry filling the silence for him to remember how to make small talk. It does not matter so much to John, though their conversation is a little stilted at first the silence is comfortable and without demands. He sits with The Warden in his hands, determined to reach slightly further than the three pages he managed on the train. 

Opposite him John Peglar had a little knife and a rough hewn bit of wood, an old piece of sacking spread across his knees to catch the shavings. Dog sits at his feet, chin on the battered rise of one of his boots, and it is her breathing that fills the quiet. 

He asks Peglar what he is carving, and he shows him the block. It is, says he, a bear that he will fit with little wheels so that the youngest Hartnell may stalk his sister’s dolly across their floor with it. The sort of toy Harry has long grown out of. To John it looks much like a rectangle, but he offers his paint skills nonetheless, in service of little black eyes and a pink snout, to the delight of his host. His gaze is directed to the log basket propped beside the fire, the pointed snout of a little wooden dog peeking out from the dusty shadows behind it, long forgotten by its now-grown owner.

In turn John Peglar asks how he is finding the town, and laughs when John confesses to still getting a little lost. When John describes how he had taken a wrong turn getting back and ended up on the other side of town he nods sagely, and reminds him if in doubt to turn right – upwards. 

“Walk towards the sky Mr Bridgens, we’re the only ones who live this far up the hill.”

It had been a strange detour, but a good excuse to walk up the little high street, steep and unsteady though it might be. He had seen a few faces he recognised, and a few more who recognised him. In the sun, without the thundering curtain of rain, the low roofs and dark stone had glittered like silver fish in the river of the valley. There had been a hum; of work, of life. It had filled John, his gaze kinder with a full belly and a night of good rest. 

Under John Peglar’s delicate touch the snout is taking shape, block pointing out like the arrow of a compass as the body of the little bear breaks free. His cheek, dark with stubble, twitches as if he is chewing on something. It is a look not unfamiliar to John, though much too often it is followed by an uncomfortable question. He settles the teacup into the saucer, willing his hand not to rattle it as he does, and takes up his pen. 

It has no sooner touched the paper than John Peglar speaks again. 

“Did you see Mr Goodsir on your travels?” 

“Not this time, but soon I hope.”

“He’s not so out and about as some, best be to take yourself to his laboratory.” John Peglar nods firmly as he says it, not looking up from his carving. “Is it Mr Goodsir you have come to work for?”

John’s pen rests, ink leeching onto the paper.

“If he has anything for me.” He clears his throat. “I expected to pay him for his kindness, and now yourself the same.”

He’s not sure if his words sounded reassuring, but John Peglar seems lighter for them. Perhaps he was light all along, and it was John nerves still settling themselves in this new world. 

“A practical man Mr Bridgens.”

“I strive to be.” He pauses. “You and your son are doing me a great favour, I would be adrift without your kindness.”

“Ah now I won't make you pay so much that you need to flatter me.” John Peglar grins like they're laughing together and it settles warmly in John’s belly. “Just a little towards food, and coal once we head into the winter. Does that sound fair to thee?”

He sets aside his work to rise, shaving cascading onto the floor from his lap and sending the dog scurrying out of the way. When he hauls himself up it is with a grunt of effort that echoes in John’s own chest, leaning on the edge of the heavy table until he can reach out and grasp for a slender stick that had been hiding likewise in the clutter of the fireplace. It is a tall thing, rising almost to John Peglar’s hip, its pale wood polished to a shine and carved at the top into a twisting knot that looks much like a wave to John’s eye. Undoubtedly Peglar’s work, when he turns back to the table with the lockbox from the mantle firmly in his grasp he smiles proudly at John’s admiring gaze. 

“You have a great talent.” John says, nodding towards his tools. 

“Took it up when this thing stopped me from working the mine.” He slaps his thigh as he sits again, “Never been one to sit still.”

“Does it trouble you much?”

“Not so much now, though some days are better than others.” 

He seems as unbothered by John’s curiosity as John feels embarrassed for it.

“It was a flood which did that to me, the falling rock and sticky mud of it all. Never let it be said that ours is an easy life down here.” He shakes his head. “I were lucky not to lose my life, though many did.” 

John shudders, reaches out helplessly to pat Mr Peglar’s arm. John Peglar smiles at his fumbling attempt at comfort, and closes his hand over John’s.

“My only relief is that our Harry were too big by then to carry anyways. We have the pump now, so it won't happen again.”

Chapter Text

The laboratory is a squat building set firmly at the far edge of town. With its large windows and gaping entrance it almost seems to dwarf the neat two story cottage it is built against the side of. Away from it the road trails into a cart track, heading off towards the rise of the mineworks, the first signs of which are just hidden from view around the corner. 

It is cool within the doorway, the interior uninsulated stone and the glass of the window covered with long-discoloured curtains – thin lace worn almost into a mesh. The rapp of John’s knuckles on the propped open door echoes into the space. 

“Mr Goodsir?” 

“Mr Bridgens!” 

The cry comes from behind a citadel of glass and copper, towering spires and delicate whirls of tubing rising from a large wooden work table in the centre of the room. John peers in amongst the loops to meet his friendʼs eye, magnified to the size of a pocket watch and blinking up at him from low in the mess of pipes. There is a rustle and a clunk and then Harry Goodsir emerges in short neat movements – discarding his apron and gloves so that he might reach out for John’s hand. 

“Mr Bridgens, I am so sorry-”

John shakes his head magnanimously, extracting himself from Goodsir’s clinging handshake.

“It’s quite alright, your letter was sent quickly but in my eagerness I had already left to stay for a day with an old acquaintance in Exeter. It should be my place to apologise, for acting in haste.”

“Not at all,” he promises, quick hands twisting in the half-abandoned fabric. “Not at all! Perhaps I ought release Mr Collins into the more advanced care of… of someone else, but it seemed a right shame to deprive himself of his community, even if it means depriving you of my spare bed, hah…” 

“It would be,” John agrees, following Goodsir’s gestures to strip himself of his coat and hat and hang them upon the hatstand behind the door. It wobbles dangerously as he goes to set his coat upon a peg, and he looks down to see one leg is absent, in its place the stump resting upon a rough hewn lump of granite. 

“Set yourself down my friend. I’ll be with you again in a moment.”

He elects instead to drape his belongings over the chair pushed half under a writing desk, tucked into the far corner away from the workspace of the lab, yet similarly strewn with papers and instruments in various states of dis/repair. 

Goodsir has disappeared once again behind the workbench and its copper growth. The room is edged in workbenches, all of them much tidier than the central table. That is more reminiscent of the lab that John remembers from Edinburgh, each thing in its place and a place for each thing. Even John, in the end, had been offered a chair and a small corner of table which had quickly become his, to sketch the delicate illustrations which had peppered the pages of Harry Goodsir’s first, and only, publication. It was a sweet time, insofar as John remembers it, having fallen off the deck of his last voyage and into the relief of his first terrestrial employment. Not that Harry could pay him much, but enough to tread water as he rediscovered his place in the world. 

John carefully moves a half-eaten sandwich onto the windowsill, and places his watercolour case at the end of the bench. 

“What’s this? A new titration system.” 

“Oh!” Harry laughs, short and bright. “Of a sort! I’m repairing it for Mr Blanky, an owed favour I’m afraid, it’s a distillation system.” He looks at John sideways. 

“For gin?” John says, amused. “Or whiskey?” 

“Something of his own devising I suspect.” There’s a high pitched clink, and then a muttered sentence whose almost-certain uncouth meaning is lost in the broad scots of his accent. “Terribly sorry one moment.”

“Take your time, Mr Goodsir.” 

As Harry fusses, John tries his best not to peer too closely at the open folios littering the table. It is long strings of numbers, carefully delineated by neat inked lines of red and blue. Nothing of interest to someone whose heart lies within the careful whorls of pigment and paper. He wonders if it is better or worse that the numbers decrease down the page. 

When Harry tugs another chair out from a stack of small palettes and comes to join him, he is carefully busy with his things, and when Harry asks after his most recent sketches, he is ready to oblige. Goodsir waits ever so patiently as he fiddles, flustered by the close attention, leaning an elbow on the table as he chatters away, equally nervous.

“Did you ever hear any more from Mr Don? I meant to write to him earlier this year about his involvement in the publishing of geological matters, but I admit I have not been able to fully dedicate myself to the task.”

John looks up from his sketchbook with a start.

“Oh Mr Goodsir, I’m terribly sorry. He passed away.”

“Good grief!” Goodsir shakes his head. “Oh this is embarrassing, I’m sure I read that now – in fact I’m certain I signed a collective note of condolence from the society to his widow.”

“You seem to have been busy, it’s understandable that some things slip through the cracks.”

“Oh yes, there's always plenty to do down here. The mine is a hive of industry, then my own experiments of course,” he reaches out to gently tap his pencil against the bulb of the distillation chamber. “And private scientific matters.”

“I see, that’s what we’re calling them now, I’ll take a note,” John chuckles. He flips through the pages of his field sketchbook, searching for what he wanted to show Harry. A page of blurred squares, the views from his train window smudged by speed and urgency, a rough sketch of the curious bent of the beanstalks sheltered by the front of the Peglar’s house. 

“I didn’t know you practised portraiture.”

“A fancy,” John dismisses the page, fingertips grazing over the curve of Henry Peglar’s back as he hides him back amongst the fields of wild grasses and rock formations. Each page neatly footnotes with the date, he moves steadily back through the past few months until he alights on a series of delicate watercolours. The edge of the crystalline linarite appears to glint, white cream of the paper and the slightest hint of Phthalo blue for the highlight had been a strike of inspiration for John. He basks in Goodsir’s whistle of appreciation. 

“I was able to see a particularly interesting lecture from Dr Macdonald of Royal Geological Society of Cornwall last month, it was him that said you were to be found down here. He recommended that you might have some particularly interesting samples for me to turn my paints to.”

Goodsir shuffles his feet, eyes shining as he peers closer. John does not trick himself into thinking Harry’s delight is wholly at his paintings. Peer recognition is a powerful force, and thrums through his friend as much as it would any man. He knows, too, that Harry struggles to see himself as a true peer to these men, even after a lifetime dedicated to pursuit of science.

“Well…” he starts, claps his hands. “I was able to acquire a particularly fine example of Torbernite- have you had the pleasure before? A mica viridis crystallina , first found in Saxony I believe. Beautiful thin tabular crystals…”

He disappears as swiftly as he reappears, one hand cupping a small wooden box and the other a slim letter. He waves both towards John. 

“And this! Yours I believe, redirected here. I do apologise for opening it, I didn’t stop to read the name of the recipient.” The paper is smooth in John’s palm, fair quality. He turns it over. On the back is stamped an ink impression, smudged beyond reading with travel. 

“Congratulations.” Goodsir is saying, even as he slips the letter unopened into his pocket. “If it is the same story that you sent me a snippet of in your last letter I am sure it will be popular with the readers of the Southwark Herald, but I hope you have no plans to turn your paintbrush to a pen for good? We would be losing a great talent.”

“Never fear,” John says, the bitter edge of distaste in his mouth. “T’was only on the advice of a friend, and I am rather afraid we are no longer friends.”

Goodsir looks earnest and eager, but John shakes his head. 

They talk for a while longer, about John’s journey and Goodsir’s charge and the weather. But they have always been better at working together than idling by, pressed shoulder to shoulder on the lab bench with matching frowns of concentration. Their friendship is built on companionable discussion and, without something to fill his hands as they talk, John finds he must take his leave. The image of the Peglar’s armchair springs to mind, the hearth before his toes and the whistle of the kettle on the stove. 

“And what will you do now, Mr Bridgens?” Harry says, as John takes his coat once more from the peg, the corner of his mouth lifting around the question to lighten it. 

“I dare say I’ll darken your door again, Mr Goodsir, if I may.” Goodsir inclines his head, ducking it slightly to hide his embarrassed smile, still delighted by a reminder of their friendship after so many years of acquaintance. “Otherwise it is into the embrace of nature for me, to drown myself, and hope to find something worth capturing.”

“I wish you well.” 

The tower of the mine rises above the countryside, crowned in brick and soot. Around its base the workers scurry like ants, pinpricks winking in and out of view. 

They are miles away but from the rise of the hill they look close enough to touch. It is as if John could reach out with a cupped hand and pluck one of them from the milieu, settling him in the palm of John’s hand like some small creature of the dirt. In his careful grasp the man would be safe, warmed from the heat of John’s skin, lifted from the haze of smoke and grit into the light of the afternoon sun. 

He wonders if all the men who work in the bowels of the earth are built like the Peglars; short and dense – yet supple, bending like a willow bough to fit in the close spaces of the tunnels. Good miners must all have large eyes set deep, pupils blown from squinting in the dim underground, soft purple-bruised underneath from early mornings and late nights. Built for their work, John muses, like the hardened beetle or the humming bee, they must be. Thickly haired for warmth and protection; dark on their heads and chins and arms, long eyelashes, coarse from the dust.

Mr Peglar always comes searching for him.

If the sun is still in the sky when he emerges blinking from the rock face, he comes up over the crest of the hill looking half like he was hewn from the ground himself, face tanned with smudges of red dust, shirt turned brown with sweat and stains. 

In the heat of the summer he stinks, often, and John takes to carrying a second pouch of water along with him. Under John’s hand he sinks gratefully to kneel beside the hedgerow, head bent in benediction to John’s handkerchief, grumbling only slightly as John tilts his head this way and that. Behind his ears is the worst bit, grit tangled in the fine short curls of his hair, but the back of his neck is easy. The tendons leap as John presses his head further forwards, tips of his fingers skating below the neckline of his shirt as he scrubs him clean.

Then he turns, letting Mr Peglar shove the cloth roughly beneath his armpits in privacy – letting John adjust himself in his trousers, praying his blush is not so noticeable beneath the pink of the sun. 

It becomes a ritual almost, the sun pitches low into the sky and John must pack away his finer sketches and watercolours as the light changes too much for his eyes. From the bottle of beer he set off with in the morning he will sip, then nibble on what may remain of his lunch, and watch the horizon carefully for a sign. 

Today he comes padding along the field boundary with a dogged look in his eye, cheek jumping from some idea or another being caught firmly between his jaws. He can be as quick and determined as a terrier, John has found, when he gets a thought in his head it rattles around not long before spilling out his mouth. 

John’s heart thumps near from his chest at the strong set of his shoulders, arms swinging as he heaves himself up the trodden path up from the cart track. When he spots John he stops to wave both hands above his head before he carries on, as if John hadn’t been watching keenly for his arrival already. 

“Won't you call me Harry?”

John starts, looking up from where he is peering at the finer lines of his current project.

“Umrgh-” he says around a mouthful of paintbrush. Takes it from his mouth, fingers shaking with speed and embarrassment, and shakes his head, catching his lip between his teeth for a moment before consciously letting it free. “I fear it begets familiarity, Mr Peglar. It's best that we don't.”

Mr Peglar, grins, almost relieved. “We wouldn't be mistaken for family, Mr Bridgens, not ‘ere. So won’t you be friendly with me?”

“Oh…” John says, “well.” His heart skips a moment. 

“Come on, Mr Bridgens, you live with us do you not?”

He leaves no room for arguments, he is not even looking at John. Instead his hands are busy buried deep within John’s travel box, stroking curiously over the tubes and tins, tapping the small tin lid of each bright watercolour cake in sequence. Chromium Oxide Green, Alizarine Crimson, Raw Sienna; John runs through each in his head as Harry counts. One, two, three. He doesn’t realise they’re both muttering aloud until Mr Peglar stops-

“Isn’t blue blue?”

“Pardon?” 

“Well, last week you were talking about mixing on the page, when you were making your little puddles-”

“Swatches.”

“Right, swatches of paint. But if you can mix any colour you want, why do you have two different blues?”

Cobalt blue and Prussian.

“Oh well, there’s different intensities of course, different effects when you mix them.” Five and six, out of twenty-four. A decade’s collection. “There ought to be a tube of Ultramarine in there also, another blue.”

“Tubes as well as tubs! How fancy the tools of your trade are.”

His voice is light, teasing. It cuts like the northwind.

There is a rummaging sound, but a careful one. Harry is always careful with John. Then, a sound of triumph. John considers the half drawn fern on his page. It does not look so much like a fern at the moment, as a dappled green sea, the values bleeding into each other awkwardly. Too little attention on the page, he thinks, and too much on Harry Peglar. 

“They were a gift.” 

Harry hums. “It doesn’t seem like they were a welcome one.” He offers no judgement. 

“Not between friends,” John says carefully. “For services rendered.” 

“It must have been a beautiful painting, to be worth payment and a gift.”

It is John’s turn to hum. “Here,” he says, holding out the paintbrush handle first. Harry looks surprised, a delighted kind of surprise, John hopes. “We can test them, so you can see for yourself.”

Harry closes his hand around the handle, with a grin. From behind the clouds an errant ray of sun peeks out and blinds John, hidden in the curve of Harry’s mouth, and he looks quickly to his sketchbook. He slips a piece of blotting paper carefully between the pages, promising to return to the fern later and rescue it from shapelessness. When he comes to a clean page, fresh with polish, he gives it over, settling it on Harry’s expectant knee. 

It should not be a surprise that Harry takes to it quickly. Harry follows his every instruction diligently, his movements sure and steady. His hand never falters even as his face moves through concentration to delight. John wonders if he looked the same, the first time he held a brush. 

“Where did you learn to draw so well – and all these names also?” 

“At sea,” John says shortly. “Careful, look, your hand will smudge the paint holding it like that.”

Harry adjusts his grip on the paintbrush, knuckles rolling like a wave as he does. 

“You went to sea when you were young.” 

It’s not really a question, more a fact. As if Harry had known this already, plucked John's story out of his head with those clever fingers and was simply waiting patiently for John to help him decipher the words. What little story there was. 

“As soon as I was able, and of my own accord now, don’t think it’s exciting. T’was better than the clergy and I never thought to be a teacher-”

“You teach grand,” Harry butts his forehead against Johns shoulder in lieu of smacking him with the palm of his hand, still preoccupied with his brush. “Look at that now.”

Three rows of small blue stripes neatly line the top of the page, fading in from the purest vibrant strike of true pigment on the left and moving through, each slightly fainter, some mixed with other colours. They stand sentinel above a field of flowers. 

“Forget-me-nots.” Harry says proudly. 

Each flower is a little cluster of five strokes with a void in the centre where the cream of the page shines through. Each cluster is a different hue, some bright, some faded, some start vibrant and trail off into almost invisibility. They speckle the page like raindrops. One stains the tip of John’s finger as he touches it, subconsciously reaching out. 

“Very good.” He clears his throat, looks up at the shine of Harry’s smile. “Very pretty.”

“So you learnt at sea-” Harry prompts. “Who taught you?”

“A young naturalist, a strange pious man, we were floating off the shores of the Galapagos, and he had more plants to take note of than ink in his pen and I had only so much silverware to polish.” 

Harry raises an eyebrow. John coughs awkwardly. 

“But it was like nothing else and so, when I left I thought I could do this instead.”

“I ought to have liked going exploring.” 

Harry seems to be looking past John now, out towards the horizon, green hills rising out further and further around them like a wall of earth around their little lesson. The breeze, until now only barely whispering through the overgrown grass, leaps to tug through the curls just growing in above his ears. John can picture him at the prow of some great sailing ship, tousled from the salt spray and not the rock dust, hands calloused from hauling resting so gently on the Taffrail.

“It was weather most foul,” John laughs at his affronted expression. “Filthy wet heat and no shade nor water to drink. Cantankerous weather.”

“Not like this.”

“No.”

John turns his face to the sun, letting it paint the backs of his eyelids in bursts of burnt orange and gold. It kisses his cheeks softly, chasing the shade of the tree away from them as it meanders across the sky. When he lets his eyes flutter open again Harry is smiling softly, amused by his delight in the small pleasures.

“Why did you stop?” he asks, then stumbles over himself to say, “only if you want to tell.” 

John shrugs. “By then I had had my fill of adventure. I was almost 40, you see, and already tired. It had been nothing like I hoped and a whole lot more bloody.” 

“Ten year or so ago?” John nods. “That was when my sea fever was the strongest, to hear Da tell it.”

“You thought of it?” 

It is Harry’s turn to shrug.

“Looe is not so far away from us, a day or two perhaps along the coast. Falmouth too. It was a strange time round here, and I was barely 20 and already tired of the mine, thinking of making something more of myself, seeing something more.”

John hums, daren’t interrupt for fear of stopping him in his tracks. Harry stops anyway, meandering to a halt as he tilts his head towards John, almost resting it against his shoulder. 

“But then the packets went to Sou’hampton, and left us here with none. S’not… I tried… I have no patience for fishing, even less when I were young, and that was that.”

John tries to imagine Harry young – younger. He doesn’t quite think he can, there is no silver thread of hair on his head to imagine bright and shining brown again, nor no lines upon his face to imagine smooth. Except for those brought on by joy and laughter, creasing the corner of his eyes and mouth like tokens of gratitude, but John can only imagine Harry was born with good cheer in the hidden corners of his face. Perhaps he was smaller in the shoulder, not yet built with the muscle of labour, or perhaps his face was bare, only the patchy attempt of a beard. 

It wouldnʼt suit him, John decides, to be any younger than now. 

“It’s strange,” Harry says in the present. “Perhaps I could have helped you polish your silverware.”

“A quirk of fate,” John says, studiously not thinking about it.

Harry hums as he shifts his grip again, holding the paintbrush more securely between his fingers. 

Comfort comes easily to John here. It helps that the Peglars seem to be creatures of it, finding the slow moments in the day and holding John there with them, to marvel at the small parts of life when they can see them. Their time is so short above the ground, as Harry explains it, that he feels he ought to find something new about it every time. 

Though slow, they are never idle, there is always some task to be done, and dragging themselves sometimes they do it. Today it is beans that John Peglar is shelling, two big baskets sat upon the ground beside his chair as John spies him through the downstairs window, his lap covered with sacking to catch the pith and the dog’s chin to eat what she can snatch. He waves, and is greeted with a wave back, as the two men set about their tasks. 

Between them hangs a dark piece of cloth, a mockery of a darkroom as John preps pages of paper with cyanotype solution. They talk on and off through the darkness. It is so easy. John marvels.

A single candle lights his way as he sets out the bottles, clicking like bells against each other as they line up against the table's edge. Outside there is the click of paw on stone, then a scraping at the door to John’s left. 

“Oi!” John Peglar yips. “Leave be, Dog, Mr Bridgen’s needs darkness for his magic.”

“It’s just science, Mr Peglar, I’m afraid.”

John smiles to himself, unbidden, as he hears the dog plod her return along the outside of the house, and land to great affection back at the feet of her master. He sets out the square dish John had tugged from deep within the bowels of the sideboard, and tossed across the table to him. The poor thing is quite battered, the metal blackened from years of use on the range. It’s probably the same age as him. He says so to John Peglar, pitching his voice so he can be heard through the cracked open front door. 

“Aye,” he calls back, the ping of the little beans against ceramic punctuating his chuckles. “I certainly didn’t buy it – don’t cook clever enough to be roasting anything.”

He coughs roughly at the end of his sentence. It is not so uncommon, John finds, the bright sunny days are drying the earth to dust and everyone he talks to seems to have something permanently stuck in their throat.

“‘Scuse me Mist-” John Peglar is halted, wracked again. 

“Are you alright, John?” 

“Fine.” His voice is reedy thin, splintering already. He coughs sharply again. “Don’ worry.” It doesn’t stop John’s heart from racing. 

John waits. His hand hovers, little paper envelope half-tipped towards the dish beneath, ready to drop it at a momentʼs notice. He’s seen him wave off Harry’s concerned looks and hovering hands with a frown enough times to know it would be extremely unwelcome. Outside John Peglar creaks out a swear before gulping, loud and wet, from his cup. He gasps when he is finished, but the gasp is clean and crisp, and he does not cough again.

“Awf’ly sorry, Mr Bridgens,” he says, still somewhat breathless.

John swallows. From the package the thin stream of powder dribbles into the tray. He smiles as he speaks, the expression uncomfortably false on his face but he hopes carefully cheerful in his voice. The dribble becomes a stream. “Peril of age, Mr Peglar, I’m sure.” 

“Perils of t’ profession such as they are,” John Peglar says slowly, testing his voice one word at a time. “This is what coal does to a man, I reckon I must be younger than yourself.” 

“Not so-” John finds himself arguing before consciously snapping his jaw shut. “I apologise, I only mean…”

John Peglar’s sour laugh already echoes. “'Tis the way, never fear, for us all – Tin being the same, only prettier to hear Dr Goodsir describe it.”

Tin. That sweet burning ore that threads through the ground beneath their feet. He touches two fingertips to the lip of the dish, paintbrush firmly clasped in hand and then, with the other on the thick paper beside it, blows out the candle. Somewhere far below Harry’s pickaxe rises, pauses, strikes with careful precision. A cloud of dust blows from the rockface through John’s mind. Not so, he thinks, he refuses to believe. Not for his Henry. 

They work for a moment in silence, the darkness muffling the world from John until his eyes adjust. When John speaks, he changes the subject, asking John Peglar if he would mind keeping an eye out for young Elizabeth Hartnell. 

“Running your errands as well as Mr Goodsir’s now, is she?”

“Gainful employment is the joy of any child,” the smile in Peglar’s voice catching, John’s own mouth quirking up. “I’m expecting a letter from London, and she in return is expecting a sweet.”

“Shares your sweet tooth, does she?”

“Hmph,” says John primly. “I’m sure I don't know what you’re on about.”

He doesn’t have to see John Peglar’s head shake to know he does it. 

“What’s it like in London nowadays?” 

“You’ve been?” 

“You sound surprised, Mr Bridgens, do I strike you as so well rooted here?”

“Well,” John fumbles, embarrassed. “It’s rather far from here, and further I think from Wales.”

“True, true.” John Peglar laughs. “Upwards where life is brisk, this must seem awful slow for you, Mr Bridgens.”

“Oh…” The brush drags through the mixture slowly, swirling over it in little eddies of movement. As he lifts it up to coat the page it drips a cold tear against the back of his other hand. “Well yes, it would be a lie to say it isn’t another world.”

“Will we be expecting a barrage of such letters from your family? Our Betsy’s rates may increase.”

“Ah, I am afraid this is just business.”

“Business?”

“News of a future commission.” 

His hope might sound like confidence to the untrained ear. John lines up plants on the sheets of paper and then draws back the curtain to let the light fall onto the table where his art sits. He has no thought of what to do in the time that they process, but John Peglar sees his dithering and directs him to place the kettle on the slumbering range and fire them up with something hot to drink. They have a few tea leaves in a tin on the shelf, beside it another, the smiling bright face of a child daring John to crack open the lid to sneak a piece of chewy sweet toffee from inside, despite what John Peglar might say.

He brings it to him outside. It is almost a perfect afternoon. The sky is clear and the sun is warm on his skin. Mr Peglar has set his chair perpendicular to the wall so he does not have to look directly at its glare. He gestures for John to move the discarded basket of bean shells off the little stool beside him and sit. They are neatly in the narrow shade of the slate roof overhang and so not in trouble of getting burnt at their leisure, both pairs of boots extended out into the sunshine. It is quiet, except the humming of the insects amongst the plants, and the occasional comment on the various aches and pains of age, or the particular colour of the beanstalk’s flowers. 

Eventually though, their conversation turns back to Harry, as it always seems to. It is John Peglar who starts it, with a somewhat strange question. 

“We don’t keep you awake, do we, Mr Bridgens?” 

John looks sideways at his companion, who drains the dregs of his tea from his cup with a smack of his lips. He sees him looking. It seems a queer family trait of the Peglar’s, always able to sense John and meet him. That or his skills of silence and subtly finely honed over his stewarding career, and after, are finally slipping from his grasp. 

“You’ve been delightful hosts, Mr Peglar.”

“I’ll take that as a yes then.”

“No, no,” protests John. “It was genuinely meant.”

“If you insist, but if it ever becomes a problem... I snore like the devil, so I’m told at least, and Harry will say the strangest nonsense in his sleep if he’s had even a sip of a pint.”

“I’ve heard nothing.” John promises. “Though I’m sure it is no worse than his usual efficaciousness.”

“He does have a way about it, right that.” The dog, restless from their conversation, stands and turns about herself before settling once more in the shade of John Peglar’s chair. “His mouth runs like a river  doesn’t it, old girl, best and the worst thing I ever did was teaching that boy to talk.”

He peers at John, squinting as if he could read something written into the lines of his face. 

“You know how we came to be together?”

“Ah. Well.” John says, blinking comically. John Peglar is almost leering, leaning back against the wall, shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter at John’s fumbling. “Your wife, who I presume- That is… I assumed the usual way of nature?”

“Not as such.” John Peglar shakes his head slowly. “Harry belongs to the earth.”

“No-one belongs in the earth.” 

“Quite.” John Peglar says, as if they are in agreement. “I’m surprised you haven’t been told, we’re well aware it’s… Well I suppose you don’t spend so much of your time in the White Hare do you Mr Bridgens.”

“Not as such.”

“I found him.”

John Peglar isn’t laughing, though John cannot be sure he isn’t internally.

“Pardon?” He says. 

“Midsummer, long enough ago that it makes me feel far too old. Fortune smiled and there was a wreck.”

“Fortunate, that you were there.” John can picture it all too easily, stomach rolling with the waves as they batter the wooden grave of the ship against the shore. Strong men slipped off deck in weather far gentler than that which wrecked ships, never mind children, never mind babes. “And no-one else…”

John Peglar shakes his head. 

“It drove part way up onto the sands, when we climbed upon the deck – what was left of it – there he were, in his wee blankets caught in a knot of rope. He cried like Tregeagle till he were curled up against my breast.” He pats his chest solidly, cupping the air as if it were a babe that still laid there. “Used to fall asleep just like that out here, in the hot summer when he were teething something fierce.”

“And you’ve been here ever since?”

“Aye. Then I was where you were, in need of a bed and a hot meal or sev’ral, turning up at this door. It was Mrs Pengelly’s house then, before t’was ours. Thought this would just be another stop in my wanderin’ till he was in my arms.”

John thinks of Harry’s bright, carefree smile. “He must’ve been a handful.” 

“Es’s a handful even grown.” Peglar grins, the same. “When he puts his mind to something there’s no stopping him.”

He settles the cup and saucer together on the arm of the chair, freeing his hand to scratch behind Dog’s flopping ears. She perks her head up, moments before the sound of clattering footsteps make their way to John’s ears. 

“Speak o’ the devil.” 

Harry grins, hand half raised as he crouches to fuss over his fine old lady. When he stands again to greet them properly he presses both hands into the small of his back and groans. He looks low, heavy with tiredness, his white shirt turned dusky brown from the earth. Perhaps John Peglar was right, he can imagine him hewn from the ground beneath their feet. John coughs, settling his cup and saucer neatly back into his lap. 

“Afternoon, Master Peglar, how fares the mine?”

Harry swears, carefully turned so as not to aim it at John but at the cloudless sky. 

“Like a nagging wife,” he says. “May I never have one that follows me back to bed.”

His father hisses sympathetically. “She giving you little?”

“Just a lot o’ louster.” Harry shakes his head morosely. “And nothing at all to show for it. Sorry, Mr Bridgens-”

“Forgiven.” He smiles at Harry’s clasped hands. “I relieve you of your lesson.”

“Bed for you,” says his father. “We’ll rouse you for supper.”

He shakes his head at the sound of Harry’s meandering step as he passes them, the uneven faltering rhythm of him clattering up the stairs.

“One day he’s not going to make it up them steps,” he says, turning to squint into the sun at John. “We'll find him collapsed on the first soft surface he finds, and you’ll be out of a bed.” 

He chuckles, passing John his cup as he stands to shuffle inside. John thinks of Harry, face down atop the quilt, boots and trousers long abandoned on the floor, the tails of his shirt just enough to cover the curve of his behind. He shuffles faster, the blush of his cheeks hidden in the cool shadow of the kitchen.

One day Harry does not turn up for a lesson. 

John doesn’t quite notice until his stomach starts to turn, twisting with the first pangs of hunger, and he looks up to realise the sun has settled firmly in the western part of the sky, and still Harry is nowhere in sight. He contemplates returning home – to the Peglar’s home – to see if the day had simply been too hard for learning. But exhaustion does not often stop Harry, not if he has already trekked out to find John in some far flung field. Instead it merely has him sinking beside him with a huff of effort, and pleading with drooping eyes to simply observe the careful strokes of John’s brush instead. More than once he had slipped into slumber with his back to some great beech or another that they had sheltered under, chin tucked to his chest. 

His feet take him instead to the mine. 

The mine is a towering monolith, a monument to industry sitting incongruous just off the track path. It rises before him as John rounds the bend; the solid bulk square building in rough hewn granite, a wooden lean-to attached to the brick chimney that rises from its base up into the sky. Just to its left the pump shaft stands like an ancient oak, stanchions planted in the earth. The great iron cog wheel peeks out from its branches at the peak, draped in chains no doubt thicker than John’s wrists. The curve of the building shifts to reveal an empty foreyard. As the wind whistles through the empty courtyard it seems to sing through the skeleton of the shaft and lifts. John fears to look at it too long, for it seems to sway under his watchful eye. He hurries on. 

The ground of the courtyard is hard as rock, rust red from the clay-rich soil, all plant life that once grew here snuffed out by the trod of a hundred boots. Under his hurried steps the wind kicks the top layer of loose dust up to whirl around his legs. He will beat it out of his trousers later, he knows, but never quite completely. In a decade, when this place is yet another memory trapped onto in the paint of John’s sketchbook page he will still carry the ghost of its earth with him in the fibres of his clothes. 

Usually this is a place hustling with workers; men, women, children, wandering in a haze of dust and laughter. Now it is quiet, tools downed for the afternoon. He checks his pocket watch, frowns. Later than he thought. 

“Are thou lost?” 

He looks up at the call. The side door to the overseerʼs office has been propped open, and a familiar-unfamiliar man is standing half-over the threshold. He frowns at John, hand raised to move the curve of his fringe out of the wind. As John steps closer a sliver of the room beyond slips into view. Inside a group of men are huddled around the table in the centre of the room, some he recognises some he doesn't. Harry, his eye is drawn to immediately, and one of the other shift leaders who had seen often coming in and out of Mr Goodsir’s lab for one thing or another. 

“I was looking for-'' He fumbles at the sight of Harry’s set brow, edge of his thumb caught between his teeth as one of the foremen leans across to gesture at the papers spread out on the table before them. “ -Mr Goodsir.” 

Two men in fine silk waistcoats and dark coats he doesn’t recognise stand on the opposite side of the table, patently ignoring the interruption. One gestures to one of the foremen with a wave of his fine leather gloves, clasped casually in his hand. The wind changes direction, picking up the scent of the sea as it twists a loose lock of hair across his eyes. 

The foreman who had been in conversation with Mr Peglar turns to John, now, and nods. “He ought to be on his way, you must have just missed him.” He smiles too, perhaps it is something in the water that makes the people so readily cheerful. Though if this is the case perhaps the man blocking the door is more of a partaker of wine than the water. He glowers at the continuing interruption. 

“I won’t bother you by waiting,” John placates, eye drifting again to Harry. He raises his head, nods briefly at John and looks away just as quickly. “Thank you gentlemen.” 

He does not wait for the door to be closed in his face before he inclines his head and turns on his heel.

Chapter Text

Weeks pass, turning softly into months without much notice. They are caught away from the world here, correspondence comes in drips from London, and never quite as cheerful as John hopes for. August blossoms with searing heat, blessedly dry and bright. Around John the hedgerows are splattered with sprays of wild yarrow, releasing a heady bitter scent on the scant wind. Wild mint brings sharp sweetness, bursting on John’s tongue as he strolls. His frock coat, dark and heavy, is long abandoned – slung over his arm, and with no one around to see his shirt unbuttoned as far as the waistcoat will allow. He had intended to stop just outside the town, somewhere where the flowering paths might give him shade and attract plentiful little creatures for his study. But the day had been so pleasant, and the view over the valley and out towards the sea from the track over the crest of the hill so beautiful, that he had found it nigh impossible to stop his feet from marching on. He walks somewhat aimlessly, stopping here and there to peer through gaps into fields of fallow and delicate lilac linseed flowers. These he finds growing all the way to the boundary, spotted amongst the tussocky grasses like jewels. He cannot resist plucking one and tucking it carefully into the watch pocket of his waistcoat, bright against the dark navy twill. As he steps back and out towards the road he spies a pony and cart clattering toward him.

It slows as they approach each other, John shading his eyes to see that it is Harry and Thomas Hartnell at the helm, and they are waving. Harry stands as he calls out a greeting, wobbles as he waves his hat, and is tugged firmly back down by Hartnell’s grip on the back of his waistcoat. 

They stop perfectly beside him with a click and a, “woah pretty lady.” They look lax and carefree, also in just their waistcoats and shirtsleeves, rolled up above their forearms. Despite their wide brimmed straw hats each cheek is pink with the sun, and John shudders to think how his own must be faring. As if he knew what John was thinking Harry leans back over the seat of the cart, rummaging amongst the empty baskets and loose folded tarp that litter it until he emerges, triumphant, with a shout. 

“Here! You left without one this morning, thought I’d bring this for if we saw you.”

“Oh,” John is certain his face is red with more than the sun now, a quiver shooting through him as Harry leans down from his perch to settle it firmly upon John’s head, easing the brim up so he can meet John’s eye again and wink. “Thank you.”

Whatever problems the mine were having seem to have righted themselves, Harry comes home ever more tired but still in good cheer, and rises the same in the morning. When John has occasion to pass through the mine foreground the door to the office stays firmly closed. But today is a Sunday, and he had still been in bed when John had arisen, instead John Peglar sitting in the kitchen had greeted him with a wink and a finger on his lips. He had left quietly as he could, sneaking out the door and down the path, turning back only to see that the comforting scene of the Peglar’s home was undisturbed by the squeaking of the gate. 

John, flustered, asks where they got the pony from; “I thought I would have noticed a horse in the yard.”

Harry only laughs and shakes his head, saying they’d borrowed it from the Blankys on the understanding that Tom will deliver it to their daughter down in Truro afterwards. 

“A trip to Truro, Master Hartnell? That’s a fair few miles away, will you be gone long?”

“Ah, not so much as all that,” Master Hartnell says, “I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon.” 

"And you won't take your brother with you?"

"Oh only God knows where Johnny's taken himself, off in some trouble somewhere. Our mum always said it ought to have been me born first and him the five years after."

He laughs, and Harry, and John helplessly with them.

“So you are off to Truro, too, Mr Peglar.”

“Don’t be daft, John, I'll not go with him the whole way.” Harry says, waggling his eyebrows. “We’re headed to the coast first, it’s the perfect Sunday for a swim.” 

“Why don't you join us Mr B?”

Harry nods his agreement to Tom’s offer, clasping him on the shoulder. “Yes, do, there’s plenty of room in the back.”

John cannot see any reason not to, besides that his scramble up onto the back of the cart is ungainly and awkward. He lands on his knees with a groan of effort, shuffling to sit with his back to the cart’s edge. Harry twists to check he’s seated, then they’re off again with a click of Tom’s tongue.

Tom doesn’t turn from the horse and the road, but calls as best he can over his shoulder, “So, Mr B! What’s in the box?”

“Watercolours,” Harry puffs out his chest only to deflate with a laugh as Tom shoves him with his shoulder. 

“Cheek!” He says, “I was asking Mr B not thee.”

The wheel hits a rock, probably nothing bigger than a pebble, but the jolt rattles John and his paintbox. It tips dangerously towards the floor of the cart, caught by himself and Harry both. Now it is John’s turn to smile, hauling it back into his lap more securely.

“He’s right, Mr Hartnell.”

“And you’re good enough to make your living off it, aren’t you, Mr Bridgens?”

“A good-” John falters, “a friend of mine is currently working on a manuscript. I think he is perhaps more ambitious than the day is long, but it is coming together under his watchful pen. I hoped to provide him with illustrations.”

“So you are working on commission then?” 

“Ah,” says John, thinking of his dwindling savings, the few pennies in his pocket a lead weight, “of a sort.”

Harry hums with a knowing look. “To know the needs of your officer before they themselves know them.” He smiles tightly. “I always knew you were a gambling man, John Bridgens.”

When they arrive they tie the pony to a nearby gatepost at the top of the small track down to the beach, there's a field just the other side of the road proper and Tom disappears into it with an empty tin bucket, returning shortly with water for the horse. This must be a favourite spot for them, they do not need to look at the path as they stride through the bracken towards the cliff's edge. Harry turns to him as Tom starts to clamber down the well trodden path towards the beach. 

“Good things wash up after a storm.” He stops, hands already tugging the buttons of his waistcoat free of their docking. “Won’t you join us for a swim?”

John shakes his head mutely, to Harry’s clear disappointment. He disappears then, the both of them, into the cliff face. An illusion of the angle perhaps. John watches for a long moment. A gannet lands on the outcrop of rocks that fall, crumbling, into the calm waters. The lower rocks are coated in seaweed, brilliant blue-grey sea lapping at their bases, but the upper cliffside is clearly a well loved avian home. White splodges land, fuss, take off again – circling in the air above the waters of the cove. 

John stays on the cliff tops mostly, fascinated by the wildflowers. They are full and plentiful in the height of summer’s glory, vivid blue and purple scattered across the scrub bush of the headland. 

He picks an armful without meaning to, thinking with each quick twist of a stem of another acquaintance whose correspondence has been forgotten in the whirlwind of travel and then the process of settling in. He will dry them out, he thinks, pressed between the pages of the solid hardback bible that sits forgotten and dust coated on the Peglar’s mantlepiece. It is the only book of any good size, John having packed only slim texts to save on space. 

He considers the seaweed that litters the shoreline. Most of it must be common, Dusle perhaps, or else Wrackweed, but still worth having a handful to consider. He doubts he’ll come this close to the coast for a while, not unless Harry and Thomas intend this to be a regular venture, it is almost too far to comfortably walk in a day both ways. He edges down the path a little, following the tumble of the grass to a lower slope. 

He looks up from his ungainly scramble, one hand braced on the cliffside and the other clinging to his box, at a shout. There’s a splash and Harry, or Tom he can’t quite tell, shrieks again. They have abandoned the shadows of the cliffs for the sandy stretch of the shoreline. At the foot of the cliffs lie two dark piles, their shirts John realises, turning with pink cheeks to the sound of their calls. In the sun they shine, golden skinned, glittering with water as they hurl themselves at each other amongst the surf. Harry, dark haired, stands out like a gem against the pale water, a pinhead. He dips below the surface, then surfaces, a glittering arc of droplets following the sweep of his head as he tosses it back. John’s step falters. 

Tom dives at his friend and they fall, wrestling into the shallower water. The curl of the cliffs are a natural amplifier, and the bright spark of their laughter strikes like lightning to John’s heart. He feels a little sick, dizzy suddenly with the bright sun and sharp salt in the air. Harry emerges from the water like something from a dream. He trudges the first few steps, his shoulders set low and sure, water tugging at his chest like a lover reluctant for him to leave her bed. Then he bursts free from her grasp as the water reaches his knees and instead runs splashing in a shower of glittering droplets onto the shore. 

He is naked. He shines in the sun. 

John looks at the sky behind him, pale and dotted with clouds echoed in the sparkling waves with their crests of foam. It shimmers as if the whole scene was a mirage; the water, the fine grit sand beneath his feet, the towering cliff which cuts off the edge of the cove, tumbling out into the waves like some long abandoned fortress left to rot. Harry seems most unreal of all, skin glowing under the sun, face and arms golden against the milk pale skin of his chest, crowned in glowing curls. He is laughing – Harry is always laughing – turning first to Tom’s form still bobbing out on the water and then to John, grinning when he sees him with the force of a thousand suns. 

He calls to him, stretching his arms above his head to wave, and begins jogging up from the waterline to where John waits at the foot of the dunes. John can only raise his hand helplessly in return. As he gets closer John can see the dark hair of his arms echoed on his chest, his belly, and further-

He swallows, all of a sudden parched. John drags his eyes away from Harry's cock, soft and pink and so tempting. He’s shrunk a little from the cold water, skin of his belly pebbling like goose-flesh as the breeze wraps around them. 

He looks away only to meet Harry's steady gaze, skidded to a halt inches away. Harry reaches out and tugs at his jumper, fingers catching only on the sleeve. The wind picks up as Harry leans in closer, trying to get John to join in. He is saying something that John cannot parse for embarrassment. Something of John’s turmoil must show on his face, as soon as he leans in he leans back again. His hand drops from his forearm, folding across his chest, hands tucked firmly into his armpits, shoulders rolling forward. 

“Sorry hah- not fit for polite company right now am I.”

John wants to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth; wave away Harry’s apology and offer his own. Instead he shakes his head and turns back to the scenery. Above them gulls screech, tumbling off the low cliffs into the water shining below. 

Harry turns to wave at Tom, still a golden drop in blue, then flops loose-limbed to the ground and gestures for John to join him. He cannot help but be dragged downwards by the force of his desire, lowering himself to sprawl beside Harry on the grassy dunetop. The fronds tickle his wrist as he leans back on both hands, watching his companion through lowered eyelids as he wriggles around like a fish out of water; front to back to seated again. 

He, Harry, looks to John's lap as he curls cross legged and finally settles, a passing glance that almost slips John’s attention, head tilting as if he would fall to rest there. John tries not to think about it; the reassuring weight of Harry’s head across his thigh. His trousers would grow slowly damp from his wet hair, clinging to his fingertip as he brushed it carefully from Harry's eyes, watching over his pinkening cheeks in case he burnt; delicate under John’s careful touch.

The way he is sitting, elbows leaning on his knees, hides his prick but not the rest of him. The hair on his chest is as curled as the hair on his head, but darker, disappearing down across his belly, thick on his arms and legs. They are pink from the sun and pale from being underground, corded with hard-won muscle. He wonders if it is soft to touch, if he ran his hand down the curve of his bicep if it would tickle his palm. Across the small of his back is a slip of tanned skin, where his shirt is constantly slipping from his trousers as he works. Especially in the morning, when John rises and catches sight of him through the window half dressed, braces hanging loose from his waistband, his shirt hitching up and out of his trousers as he collects water from the pump. John can never seem to duck back in time, he always seems to catch his gaze with a wave and a grin and a gesture for John to start breakfast, as if he hadn't woken with a rumbling stomach and immediately thought of Harry’s own.

When he twists, watching something across the hilltop rustle in the long grass, the fresh healed cut behind his ear shines. It had bled something fierce, as all head wounds do, dripping in a rivulet across John’s wrist as he had fussed about him. A glancing blow, a tumbling rock no bigger than his thumb. Harry hadn’t even noticed till he was above ground again, had laughed at John’s consternation as he stained his best handkerchief dabbing the wound clean. He had given it to Harry to keep in the end, good only for emergencies. All around the stretch of his shoulders and his forearms are constellations of little scars and pockmarks etched into his skin. It worries John as much as anything.

“What?” 

John starts – blinks. 

He opens his mouth to apologise, cheeks aflame, but Harry's hand is heavy on his knee, his forehead solid and damp as he rocks against John’s shoulder. His words stick, caught in his throat. Harry is still laughing, sun warm as John lets his hand cover his. 

“Ignore us being uncouth,” he pulls his hand away from John’s and gestures loosely to his bare chest. “Always been a menace to society, me.” 

“You’re an upstanding man,” John says, far too solemnly. He smiles as Harry shakes his head, eyes wide. 

“First to say so.”

“It seems to me your father thinks far too highly of you to see you as a troublemaker,” John says with a raised eyebrow. 

“True!” He laughs, hoarsely. “My Granny, she used to say she were the only one with a shred of sense in the house, though it weren’t true. You’d have liked her, I think, you grumble about the springs in that old bed the same way.”

“Oh,” John falters, unsure of what to say. “I’m sure I would have.” The sun dips for a moment behind the only cloud in the sky. “She must have been a clever woman to put up with the two of you.”

“Ah now tha’s fishing John Bridgens-” He cuts himself off, pressing his lips together. “She were. Did her best to teach me what she knew.”

John thinks of John Peglar’s sure grip on the wooden carving, of the intricate webbing of the lace curtains blowing in the windows of the cottage, of Harry’s questioning fingertip lingering over the woodcut illustrations on the pages of Ivanhoe . Harry is not looking at him anymore.

“She forgot where she was sometimes,” Harry says, “at the end. She woke in the storms and called out for men she had lost years ago, used to wander out of the house and down towards the coast path fretting about the boats and her crew.” 

He shakes his head, pulling at a clump of nearby grass with trembling fingers. “Frightened us half to death.”

John hums, reaches out a hand to rest it on the ground closer to Harry. Just in case. 

“Her husband was a fisherman?”

“That was a long time ago, even before Da moved here and became her lodger.”  There’s a pause, a flickering look. John says nothing, not his place. “She was always just Granny Pengelly to me.” 

Harry says it like it was a royal title, nothing short of sainthood and John believes it. His face is still turned to the grass, tugging up tufts only to let the wind tug them from his fingertips.

Above them a bird screeches. The sun, so briefly sheltered, peeks back out at them, Harry sighing at the wash of warmth. The wind tousles his hair, curls leaping crisp with salt from the sea. He smells bright and clean and slightly sour from exertion, the edge of his beard and hairline dotted with a fine lace of sand.

In the endless blue sky above, a gull calls it’s mate on the cliffside. From far below Tom calls something unintelligible. Harry just waves at him with a shake of his head. 

“In some other life,” Harry says, “I would have liked to have been a seabird.”

“You don’t belong underground.” 

Harry laughs at John’s words, but it’s the truth. He looks made for it, short and dense as he is, with his big drooping eyes and small ears – but he’s not.

John turns to gaze out across the water, Harry shining like the sun in the corner of his eye. He thinks if he looks at him straight on, it will blind him with longing. Still, he cannot help but peek, comparing the golden stretch of sand far below them to the stretch of his arms as he opens them, basking in the afternoon warmth. 

They walk back towards the village together. It makes sense of course, they are both heading towards the same cottage. 

Tom peels off early with a cheerful wave to take the cart, now-stacked high with driftwood, and the poor pony with it towards the promise of Truro’s excitement. They had hopped down, John with his case and Harry with a basket of seaweed in hand – plenty of Dulse, for eating, and a few strands of Saccharina Latissima for John’s study. John hadn’t thought to ask what else they’d found as they piled the driftwood into the cart and covered it with a sheet against the elements, he hadn't been able to get a word in edgeways between Tom and Harry’s chatter. But soon it is just the two of them quiet in the low afternoon light. The road carries them a fair few miles between low hedgerows and empty farmland, till they come to a style, half covered in bracken. 

“You should be ashamed to be seen with me.” 

Harry takes a few seconds to realise John has stopped walking, hand resting on the wooden post, feet still planted on the road. When he turns back to look at him he has to shade his eyes with a hand. The hum of insects in the twilight fills the space between them, where John’s shadow stretches long and dark in the fading sun. It is a pit at his feet, a portal straight to hell. Behind Harry the field rolls out and down into the valley. For a long moment he is as silent as he is distant. He thinks he should fall in it, if Harry denies him now, and never return. He thinks about Harry’s hand on his thigh earlier, about his grasp on his wrist earlier still, and hopes.

Harry shrugs unaware of John’s turmoil – or perhaps uncaring for it. 

“Oh for sure,” he says, still smiling. “You're an Englishman.” 

John doesn’t laugh so much as sigh. Harry holds out his hand, basket propped against his hip. He cannot bring himself to take it. 

“I would never hurt anybody.” He tries again. Harry scoffs, but stays silent.  

“No man.” It's a sharp, bitter taste in his mouth. Underneath his feet the earth stands solid, dry crusted dirt and gravel stone. It is not the sea, nor this a ship, but the hairs of his neck stand all the same, waiting to be watched. “No boy.”

The sun is in his eyes, but Harry does not break their gaze. “No unwilling creature.”

Harry’s hand is still outstretched, unwavering. Beckoning, he curls his fingers. The corded muscles in his forearm tense, strong under the weight of his heavy pickaxe; under the weight of John’s shame relieved. He is steadier than any post, supporting John as he clambers over the field boundary, guiding him softly to step around the base on the other side. His hand slides as John finds his footing again to ghost against the small of his back, holding them close for a moment before he steps away towards the footpath.

Harry walks in silence for a minute more, shoulder brushing John’s with the swing of his step. John watches him out of the corner of his eye, hands deep in his pockets, tongue flickering against his lips as he squints at the road ahead. 

“Should I be giving you a secret in return?” he says, finally. 

John has to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth to answer. “No...” 

“No?”

“No.” A part of him wants to know what Harry could offer him, yearns to crack his chest open and peer into the dark corners of him. But he couldn’t – he does not think he could bear to ask that of Harry. “You give enough.”

All he remembers, later, of the day is that it was a Thursday. 

He had gone down to Goodsir’s laboratory on some minor errand or another, only to see a gaggle outside. 

“Mr Bridgens!” the Harrys cry in unison, gaggle parting at their enthusiasm. 

Goodsir darts forwards, clasping John’s hand in his and tugging him into the cool shade of the lab. Peglar pressing against his back as he is shuffled through the entryway, then steps back, leaning against the doorframe with his arms folded, filling the space so that the crowd does not creep in in their excitement. He nods at John as he glances back at him, mouth twitching as if he is smothering a smile. 

The workspace in the centre has been cleared, the bare wood that barely sees the light of day for the dearth of Harry’s equipment looking strangely unfamiliar though it is certainly the same table. There is a curtain drawn firmly over the corner where a door leads back into the adjoining cottage, and John would put money on it being the hiding place for some of Harry’s less official experiments. It is strange, too, to see the space packed so tightly. There is Goodsir of course, elbow to elbow with the town’s doctor – a tall imposing man of sharp wit. There are the mine’s men, and the footman from the Big House, who nods, and then at the far end of the room, shining against the flat grey slate of the wall, there are two strangers.

One is so thoroughly caught up in looking over Mr Goodsir’s notes that he does not notice John coming through the door. He shifts slightly as his gaze moves back and forward, one hand carefully clasping his chin as if he could disguise his restlessness behind a calm and collected facade. They are a striking pair of peacocks; hair coffered, one silver, one dark, their whiskers neatly trimmed in the fashion of the moment. It is not the faces of either of the men that John recognises, but their clothes. They are fine, cut in bright silk and soft wool, close to the body. They sing of the city, they stink of its fog underneath the heady scent of dried citrus, no doubt pressed in the folds of their packed luggage. The wings of their neckties are sharply creased, not by their own hand. They carry themselves tall, though as they move around the table he notices the subtle bow in the legs. Navy men, or merchants, he suspects, he suspects he knows their gentleman’s gentleman, by reputation if not by face. 

He suspects their gentleman’s gentleman might know him by his.

“-colleague and naturalist, Mr John Bridgens,” Harry Goodsir is explaining hurriedly to the men gathered around his worktable. “I’m sure you’ve seen his work in-”

“We’ve made an acquaintance,” one of the overseers – Gore, John thinks – says with an extended hand. “Lodging with the Peglars, are you not, Master Bridgens?”

John nods, shaking his hand once neatly before tiding himself into a corner with his equipment. As he turns to the workbench to place his watercolours he spies the youngest two Hartnells peering through the lowest pane of the window with curious eyes. Betsy sticks out her tongue as they spot him, and he wiggles his fingers back at them, carefully hidden behind his case. 

Behind John at his post in the doorway, Harry Peglar glows in the corner of his eye, backlit by the sun. Beside him the other shift leader, and a nervous looking boy with his head bowed low in deference. They have all planted themselves firmly on the right hand side of the room, between the windows and the curious gaze of the crowd outside, and opposite the well dressed strangers. John glances at them as he pulls free his sketchbook and papers, careful to move quietly so as not to disturb with some unintended rustle. 

Mr Gore seems to be the most confident, clasping his hands and rocking back slightly onto his heels. It is him the audience of two turn to. He and Harry Goodsir seem equally excited, darting eyes moving from the table to John, and back again. 

The stranger speaks first. “Well, Mr Gore. I suppose you ought to share your important news.” 

“Firstly, I fear I must stress that the tin, our main export, is still in decline. This seems unlikely to change in the near future.” There is a worried shuffling from the tight shouldered shareholders. Gore clasps his hands together as he continues. 

“But we reckon we’ve found something better-”

“Copper.”

The room thrums with excitement.

“Trace amounts,” Goodsir warns, a hand hovering carefully over the gathered rocks on the table. “Nothing to get over excited about.”

Outside a murmur goes through the crowd. They look much like nothing to John, grey and rough hewn. He thinks perhaps if he took one in his hand and held it to the light, but it is difficult to imagine such a thing crushed and smelted into the shining copper of kettles and pipes. 

“Mr Bridgens?”

John turns, the summons tightening like a corset around his chest, straightening the habitual curl of his shoulders. “Yes sirs.”

The shareholders look pleased, this is promising for business, chattering about themselves like a flock of birds. 

“Is your speciality scientific illustration?” One emerges from their discussion, only to wave a hand, impatient at himself. “No. You come recommended by Mr Goodsir, it will do either way. How quickly can you have images produced for the rest of the board?”

“By the end of the week.” 

Their heads bend together; silver and dark. The one in navy and gold paisley seems to be tighter, more difficult to read; the other rests with his back turned to John. 

“Thursday, I return to London then from Plymouth – Mr Goodsir knows the address. You’ll be paid for the expedition of course.”

“Thursday, sir. Can I suggest two copies? One for yourself and one for the shareholders.”

“Yes, very good thought. Two copies.”

As they leave Harry slaps his back with enough force to stumble them together, and orders that they might stop by the grocers on the way back home, and pick up some tongue for dinner. He calls it a celebration, and his father will do the same, and they will drink to John’s health and fine brushmanship – even if John insists that is not a real word. He is beaten at cards, and then graciously allowed to win, and when they retire to bed it is the back of Harry’s hand against his that lingers the longest, and the sweetest.

That night the first autumn storm rolls in.

Chapter Text

They come without warning, bright skies covered suddenly in a sweeping curtain of grey. 

The rain falls hard and fast out of nowhere. One moment it is cool sunshine, comfortable enough to sit without a coat in the little yard before the cottage, and the next stumbling against each otherʼs shoulders as they bolt from the rain into the shelter of the house, shirts soaked through. It is enough to wake John from his slumber some nights, pulled from the twisting tunnels of his dreams to the pitch of his bed. 

Something beyond the doorway creaks. 

A small glow bobs just beyond the doorway, a candle shielded in someone’s hand. It lights barely anything, just highlights the edge of the door frame before it, the curve of the person’s chest. John forces his breaths low and even, face turned carefully to watch the door out the corner of his half closed eyes. The light pauses. 

Henry?

A rustle of clothing, and then the light winks out of existence, plunging the house into a pit of darkness again. John watches the ceiling, waiting for his eyes to adjust enough to see the windowsill, moonlight filtering slowly through the branches that rattle against it. A gust blows them against the thin pane, creaking like the opening of a door, tapping like footsteps on the path below. 

Then nothingness again. 

Something drips down the back of John’s collar. 

“Henry,” he pleads, or tries to, voice cracking in a half whisper. “Henry?”

Henry’s laugh echoes in the dark, bouncing like a peal of church bells off the rockface. The grit cuts into John’s palm as he leans against it, scooting awkwardly around a sudden gape in the floor, head spinning. The ground beneath his feet is slippery wet, shining like spilled oil under the candle light clasped in his other hand. Before him the tunnel shines, Harry’s light winking in and out as he threads through the eye of the needle-sharp twists in the passageway before them. 

John steps forward hurriedly, anxious to keep up, boots sliding on the rock. The roof of the tunnel almost bends him in half, what once barely grazed his head now presses his shoulders to curl towards his stomach. 

The rough wall catches on his hands, scarlet smeared on the dark void. He hisses, sound slithering around him, the passage contracting like his own chest as he gasps in pain. But he presses on, searching for the fading glint of Henry in the distance. 

He stumbles, foot caught on a crack, or possibly a long abandoned axe, and he falls hand over foot. He lies for a second, crumpled and panting. Above him the pitch darkness could be the vast expanse of the sky, whirling with strange shapes and fades clouds of almost-black. In the distance he hears Henry humming, half remembered melodies. Henry – he must find Henry. He pushes himself up on his elbows.

Crack.  

He falls back with a moan, pain blooming bright and cold in the centre of his face as he clasps a hand over his nose. Blood leaks between his fingers, flowing sluggishly, dripping like ice water beneath the cuff of his shirt. He presses a hand up carefully, feeling the wet sharp cut of the ceiling inches above him. He presses, wriggles his shoulders. It does not move. Surely moments ago- no, no!  

He tries to call out and his mouth fills with blood. He splutters, both hands firm against the ceiling and tries to turn onto his side, coughing and spitting a river. The rock catches on the sleeve of his jacket, pinned. 

John avoids Harry the day after. 

It’s easy enough, he is deep in the earth by the time John pulls himself out of bed. He does not quite manage to avoid John Peglar, but slips from the house with politeness that tinges on desperation, feeling his curious eyes following his hurried form out of the door and left, onto the woodland path. 

He hopes that today Harry will choose to go drinking with the men, or perhaps that he will not think to search for John amongst the trees that line the northwestern border of the estate. Henry would know, John thinks, would smell the lingering fear that clings to him like a bloodhound. It would do them no good to see each other until this strangeness had passed. His hands itch at the thought of Harry, fingers twitching as if he could conjure him from the yawning shadows of the trees, and run worried hands across the stretch of his shoulders. He wouldn’t be able to resist the urge to confirm for himself that Henry was still in possession of all of his finer parts; his small, quick hands, the thick, strong stretch of his wrists, his nose, his ears, the curious, gentle droop of his eyes. 

Instead he hides in nature’s embrace, collecting himself and the anxious, scattered parts of his mind beneath the stretching boughs of the little woodland that borders the estate. He finds himself walking in circles, loath to go too far from the cottage, but desperate to keep moving. Aimless, he wanders. 

He comes across a hare, just as the sun and his stomach agree that it is lunchtime and conspire to remind him of his forgetfulness in claiming some kind of provisions in his hurry to leave. It bucks weakly, neck caught in the string of a trap. As he slows to approach it flails against the ground, cheek grinding into the dirt to look up at him with one wide and rolling eye. 

It does not wail as John reaches out, but continues to twitch as its body cools. He sits almost till his bones calcify, the little blood that trickles from the corner of its mouth pooling in the web of his fingers locked around its neck. The stain remains even after he stumbles back to the cottage and thrusts his hands beneath the pump, a smear on his skin. 

From then on, John insists on meeting Harry at the mine entrance. 

The children, sprawled loose limbed and exhausted in the dirt, beg John for stories and sips of his water as he waits for Harry to emerge. He indulges them, when he has breath to, spinning the crashing waves just visible on the horizon into scylla and charybdis, the weary children forming Jason’s motley crew. Harry joins sometimes, begging a rest before the walk back into town, always willing to become a pillow for a tired head. 

Then they study, whatsoever captures Harryʼs attention that day. The days are not quite long enough to trek down to the cove and return before the night draws in, but they explore the woodland and the little meadow of wildflowers that stretch above the town. Each hedgerow is a world unto its own, it opens up under Harry’s curious eyes and reveals itself to John. His favourite is the mice and wild rabbits that burrow into the safety of the bracken, forever chasing their blurred shapes across the stretch of the page. When John suggests focusing, perhaps, on the swirl of bark in the beckoning Pinus Pinaster , he rests his tired head against the bark of one such tree and rests his feet against Johnʼs legs to keep them connected. 

Then, when they are both in danger of falling asleep where they sit, they retire to the pub.

Sometimes they meet other people, but sometimes they are alone. Tonight he is not sure which it will be. As they enter the bounds of the White Hare there is a general shout of recognition, a pitch in the hum of the barroom announces their arrival to Diggle, behind the bar, and to the miners sprawled around one of the few low tables playing cards.

John knows them by name now, has seen them pass through Mr Goodsir’s door. They nod to him in the street, and smile when he nods back, though they have never exchanged a word. There is Strong, who stands from the table to slap Harry’s back as he passes, and two slight young boys barely into adulthood. Evans and Chambers; to John’s shame he cannot pinpoint which is which. Johnny Hartnell’s coat rests on the counter even if he himself is absent, and Magnus Mason, who Harry spoke of giving some of his old tools too. Harry greets them happily, the force of Strong’s arm swaying him into laughter, but doesnʼt join them. 

“Don't deprive yourself on my behalf.” John says, when he returns with two pitted tankards in hand. “You’ve laboured long enough with me today.”

Harry shakes his head and sits firmly with his back to the men. “I have no interest in cards.”

He rolls his eyes at John's scoff, and drinks deep. “Alright, perhaps I have been known to play a game or two.”

“So go,” John insists. “Be with your friends, not some old fool who can barely hear you over the chatter.”

Harry shuffles closer. “I would not say they were my friends, such as…” John’s puzzlement must show on his face, for he lowers his voice a fraction and leans in. 

“When I first worked in the mine I became great friends with the foreman. He’s long gone now, but he was a good man, a kind man. But it was not good for us to be overly friendly, not when some disaster happens, or might happen. I knew his faults and flaws, and when I needed to follow him unquestioningly I did not, and it almost killed me. It killed him. Thems need to know me as a captain, so that they might turn to me and obey when itʼs needed. This gives us distance, Mr Bridgens, let them have their own world and I shall have mine. Kind words, yes, and good cheer for my neighbours, but I shall never not call one a true companion. They are not as dear to my heart as some.” 

He looks at him, really looks, as if he could peer through John’s eyes into his soul. 

“It’s a simple caution, John Bridgens. In all things.”

“Then do you have any friends? Besides the Hartnells.”

“Oʼ course, but few in the mine. That is my toil and not my joy.”

“You are a serious man, Mr Peglar.” John doesn’t know when the formal address became so unfamiliar in his mouth. 

“Aye,” he says, twinkling. “Have you only just realised? I’ll stick with my old fool, if you don’t mind.”

John sips at his own beer, filling his mouth with foam to keep his tongue caught. The rain outside that was but a fine mist when they entered slowly builds its intensity until it is a heavy pour. It falls like a heartbeat against the rafters, thrumming underneath the conversation that flows around them. His ale is nice, flat and smooth the way he prefers. The room smells musky-deep in the same way; from the sawdust on the floor, from the polished wood, from the ever present press of men and the evidence of their labour. 

Harryʼs tongue darts out to wet his lips. He has a little of his pint’s head caught in the edges of his moustache. It speckles bright against the tan of his cheeks, the dark hair of his beard, the soft pink of his lips. His mouth moves gently, half hidden beneath his beard but for the flash of his teeth in the corner of his smile. 

He is saying something.

“Hello?” Harry taps the centre of his forehead lightly with the knuckle of his forefinger. “Anybody home?”

He blinks, smiles – hopes it doesn’t look half as dopey as he feels. Harry leans in, grin smushed into his palm as he rests his lolling head on his hand. The beer is warm in John’s throat, chest fluttering with the flicker of the lamplight. Beyond the hub of the pub seems to dim in the glitter of Harry’s eyes, cradled in the shadow of the booth as they are. Quiet reigns gently over them for a moment as Harry studies him. The warm wood curls closer. The easy set of his shoulders has tightened, his brow frowning in concentration, tongue peeking from his lips. 

This is a vanity he would normally never allow himself, but he's compelled to ask, as if he already knows the answer. 

“What are you looking at?”

“Your face,” he says, “creases here.” 

He traces a finger down the divot of his own forehead, tracing the seam of his frown. John shivers, imagining the same feather light touch. 

“And here,” he gestures across the plane of his forehead. “It looks like th’ cross – see you’re doing it now!”

John fights the muscles of his face, blinking comically wide as he tries to settle into some pleasant neutral expression. Harry just smiles softly, not even laughing as he is wont to do, but watching unblinking as John furrows and unfurrows his brow. 

“Habit,” he says apologetically, and Harry waves a loose hand. 

“Pssh-” he says. “You care deeply about all manner of things, all manner of beings. It is no wonder that you squint as often as you do, admiring the little creatures.”

His hand settles back under his own chin, support for his smile. Under the table his foot knocks gently against John’s calf. 

It’s true, he thinks bitterly, that he squints more often now to see the finest details of the plant life he is trying so hard to capture. Perhaps he ought to invest in a pair of eyeglasses not unlike Dr Goodsir’s.

Harry hasn’t stopped talking.

“As still as a statue you can be, when youʼre deep in your books, I’ve watched you, you stare and stare and stare and then close your eyes slowly as if you will sleep, and then open them the next second to stare some more. As if you cannot bear to look away.”

John opens his mouth, finds his words stolen from him. He blinks. Harry crows.

“See! like a big cat,” Harry cannot help but laugh at John’s indignant noise. “You are, you give Frankie’s mouser a run for her money sometimes, the haughty looks on the pair of you.”

They lean closer and closer, like they cannot hold themselves apart. Harry hums, opens his mouth again, this time his finger lighting upon John’s own face.

“It’s a proud brow,” he says, “like any great ship. You would make a fine figurehead I think, you would look like Neptune crashing through the waves.”

John flushes, heat pooling at the base of his neck as Harry leans back, stretching his arms along the back of the bench seat. His fingertips just brush the edge of John’s coat, barely perceivable to anyone else their flickering touch is like flames. Harry’s gaze is soft, John could think it pleased, tongue tracing the corners of his smile. 

It's been a long time since he was called on to paint a figure. 

Their lessons are slowly but surely coming more and more specific; Harry’s grasp gets surer and more secure with each practice. Yet his concentration slips, jumping from one interest to another without being able to settle long enough for a truly absorbed study. He thinks that Harry would find portraiture more interesting perhaps; at the least more adaptable to quick little sketches that can keep up with the heat of his inspiration. But itʼs been so long since John did any, he is sure that he will embarrass himself in front of his friend.

In theory he thinks he remembers all the little foibles of the art, but his sketchbook is bare of proof. The only studies between its pages are ones drawn on his first arrival, when the Peglars were new and fascinating creatures that called to him. They slip in and out of the landscapes, dancing in miniature between the heavy press of bark and berries, tricking into the corners of rock formations as surely as the stripes of mineral running through which first fascinated John. The quick sharp twist of their fingers, the broad strokes of their joy. He does not think he can bear to show them. He needs something more recognisable to Harry than the uncomfortable attention of what was then a stranger. He needs a crowd to mine, people who are busy enough not to bother with the stranger following their every move, and so the mine is where he heads.

Perhaps Mr Peglar will even be freed early by some chance of luck, ready to laugh kindly at John’s fretful nature, and prostrate himself at the feet of his teacher. 

His wishing seems to make it so.

He hears the shouting before he sees a thing. It spills in a wave of sound round the corner, harsh clashing syllables muddying words into nothingness. Someone shrieks – ringing like a panicked bell through the chorus. 

There is a great shaking crack, echoed in a peak of shouts. 

His feet take him, unbidden, no longer at leisure as he races around the corner and into the crush. There are so many people – more than he’s ever seen in the foreground. 

Someone climbs up the carcass of the pump and shouts-

FLOOD, FLOOD-

It picks up a toll, each mouth caught in the chant as they haul, pump, claw at the slowly collapsing ground in desperation. They move as one press, shoal twisting around itself as they run forward and back, sucking John in towards the centre. He cannot make out a single face except-

There! 

Mr Goodsir, dashing past without thought. He thinks to call out, the sound of his voice is swallowed. The ground is wet, slipping from under him as his arms fly up, sliding towards the epicentre of the crowd. It tilts, the earth swinging up towards him. 

“Mr Bridgens!” one of the workers grabs him, ruddy face streaked in blood and dirt, fingers clutching at his coat as he passes. “Mr Bridgens!”

His mouth is so close to John’s ear and yet he has to shout. 

“Can you haul?”

He nods yes – “Yes, where?” 

Magnus, for it is Magnus peering out at him from under the grime, points him to the edge of the pit, the gathered crowd swarming around the wound like maggots, pale faces streaked with watery mud. Beside them the crane has fallen from its wooden throne, spar piercing the pumphouse and sending jets of water everywhere. 

The shaft is not unlike a pit into hell. It yawns beneath them, darkness sucking down the stream of muddied water as it runs back into the earth. The roaring is a great flood, sweeping through John’s head as his blood pounds. Henry! He thinks. Henry? He thinks he cries, falling forwards as his feet carry him to the edge of what once was the pit shaft, rust red clay pouring into the abyss below.

Henry Collins turns, arms wrapped around a rope, wrapped around some brave soul venturing to grasp down below. John swallows his disappointment. Each rope looks tiny, precious lifelines anchored by teams of men and women, curled over the cord that tethers them to the mineshaft. They heave together to the shout of an overseer, dragging back one, then another man from the brink. 

“What can I do?” 

He has to shout over the pounding of blood and water.

“They’ve only just headed below!” Collins calls back. 

John doesn't dare ask who they were. 

“They should be near the surface, here.”

He reaches forwards towards a figure hauling themself out of the disaster, and drags them the last few inches to safety. They look like some fossil from the cliffside, coated in sludge of earth and clay, barely standing. They collapse as John reaches out, hacking clumps of mud from their mouth as they fight to breathe. 

He takes them from Collins, and doesn’t look back. Someone has hauled buckets full of clean water up to the edge of the courtyard, and he dunks the man in one face first. The shock makes him swear but clears his mouth of mud and when he can wash the rest from his face in great waves of movement, it is Evans that is clinging to him, torn from the membrane of the earth. 

Time blurs. 

Someone sets hammer to bucket and the chime echoes under the current of their voices, alarm ringing through the valley. Others come rushing towards the mouth of the mine from the town, John doesn’t see them arrive, they flood out of thin air and are suddenly just there, lending their hands. Bandages appear, cloths, more water- 

It doesn’t slow, the rhythm just settles into John’s bones. The pull of the rescuers, the washing of the rescued men. The first cry of the injured never fails to shock him, the wordless wail of a broken leg dragged across the ground, all manner of good sense departed from them in their desperation to tug the trapped free. That too becomes regular, the jolt of his heart in his chest, the slide around him into pulsing waves of sound. 

Once he drops, curling over his charge at the sound of a cannon, only to raise his head at Goodsir’s call to realise it was the pump shaft, half resurrected, being manually hauled back to life. His thoughts rattle, he cannot grasp them. There is only earth, and blood, and the ever present gnawing fear of Harry, Harry-

“HARRY!”

Harry has scrambled out of the mine into the sunlight soaked. Collins hauls him, hand over hand out of the mine’s maw, and passes him to Goodsir blindly, already reaching for the next man. John considers the distance, so small. He could drop his charge, lunge for Harry before his hand reaches Goodsir. He knows it is Harry, even covered in the thick mud made from copper deposits he knows the tilt of his head, the slightly lopsided set of his shoulders, the sound of his breath. He would know him blind.

One leg is clearly injured, his body twisted in favour of the other. His face is white, even at this distance, even covered so.

John looks down at the body in his hands. The face is blue-tinged-white beneath the grime and twisted, it does not respond to John’s curious fingers. He can pull the lips apart and push within, scooping out clumps of earth. They fall to the floor soundless, simply absorbed back into the slide of mud beneath them. He thumps his chest, urging him to cough. 

Nothing happens. 

Across the way, Harry chokes. It is a sputtering sound, water against a working tongue. 

In his arms the man doesn’t move. His hand lies long discarded, knuckles dragging on the floor. Already his skin is cool, his eyes glassy where they peer through the haze of dirt. Like kohl it rims his eyes and drags them into darkness. He is one of only a few. 

Later that will be celebrated. Now John curses and thumps his chest again. 

A lump of mud falls from the back of his jacket, shaken loose. Too slow. He cannot set the man down, he cannot move on, he can only rest his cold cheek to his chest as he casts about for a helping hand. It is someone he doesn’t recognise in the end, who comes to his pleading gaze, and cradles him to her chest like he was her babe, as she carries him off to be washed. Washed and cleaned, only to be put back into the same earth he was just dragged from. It settles John’s grief a little, as he looks over to where Harry is barely standing before Goodsir.

He will not go back, not if John has hands to hold him to his side. 

Harry sways where he stands, wavering back and forth with the slightest kiss of the breeze. His waistcoat hangs off him, buttons torn loose with his scramble, his shirt ripped at the shoulder. Beneath the skin is already blooming, dark under the red of a graze, sharp lines pricking with droplets that shine. A glancing rock perhaps. Or else the slide of tools caught up in the flood. 

Goodsir turns as John approaches, face breaking in a grateful sigh. It is not a smile, it is close enough. 

“John, thank god. Did you see Mr Gore, did he-”

John shakes his head.

Harry follows his gaze, head lolling as if it was too heavy for him to hold up. Under his eyes the habitual circles have blossomed into true bruises, sinking them deeper into their sockets. The slag is clumped in his hair, the same thick dark brown. His neckerchief had been tied about his nose and mouth and it has protected him from the worst of the flowing mud, though he is still coated in it. It hangs now, loose about his chin, quivering as he gulps in mouthfuls of fresh air. John tugs it down properly to see his smile, habitually breaking over his face. Not his neckerchief, John’s neckerchief, John’s-

“Harry.” John says, caught. “Oh Harry.” 

His mouth moves, though no sound follows. John cups his cheek gently, thumb tracing the edge of his lips and he mouths; John, John, John .

“Hello.” 

Harry sighs, wavers. He is bleeding a little from his nose, not broken but tenderly bruised – the steady drip of it stains John’s palm. The track of it cuts through the grime already, trickling down his neck and onto his collar. 

There is something in John’s eye. Harry leans into his palm, head heavy. 

“You know I’ll- I’ll never forgive you if this neckerchief ends up ruined.”

It takes a moment for him to recognise the hacking sound as Harry’s laugh. He waves, swaying like great oak until suddenly he is cut, laugh caught in his throat as he chokes on his own breath. John stumbles first, grasping to catch him as first his legs, then his neck, give way and he crumples into John’s hands. 

Goodsir’s hand is a brand against his shoulder, normally frantic tongue stilled by John’s worry. 

“Help me get him up.” 

John’s own words echo inside his head, rattling around as the fog of his worry rolls in. Harry doesn’t move, Harry curls into his shoulder as he squats – heaves. His precious head slots into John’s shoulder as Goodsir finally moves, slinging Harry’s arms around John’s neck where he cannot lift them. His breath is warm and damp on the slip of skin between John’s hair and collar. 

John’s world narrows to the faint shiver of Harry’s chest rising and falling, the pant of his breath against John’s neck. The shoal of people parts before him as if he was some rock on the seabed, sound swirling around as they close off behind him, ushering him from the disaster. In his arm Harry is comfortingly heavy, weighted down with the life still in his lungs, twitching softly as he is jostled. All he can think of is one step, then the next, then the following, gaze not on the road before him but the sluggish trickle of blood from a cut on Harry’s cheek. 

A hand- he blinks, looking down towards his own arm. Someone has closed a hand around his elbow, grip tight and steady as they lead him gently around a small tumble of stones at the edge of the path. 

“Easy,” John Peglar says, panting as if he was out of breath, as if he ran to be with them. 

John’s step falters. 

“Almost,” John promises him, one hand in his son’s hair and the other brushing John’s from his face. John can see his shoulders shaking. Always he shuffles forwards, keeping them moving even as John’s arms start to ache. “Almost there, round the corner now.”

The cottage swings open before him by some other hand, Dog whines, paws clicking on the stone as she paces between the door and them. John Peglar swats her gently out the way as he shuffles in behind them, shutting her out of the way even though she howls to be let close to Harry. 

It seems strange to enter home. The table is still half-set with John’s paints, a few prints hanging to dry across the window. Harry’s spare shirt is strung upon alongside John’s and his father’s, obscuring the black hole of the range in the wall. Nothing has changed and yet, everything has shrunk, pressing in against them as he inches them through. He lumbers through, twice as clumsy for his refusal to look anywhere but the flutter of Harry’s lashes against his cheek. A chair scrapes as he clips it with his hip, Harry moans as John flinches, grip tightening for a second. Ivanhoe clatters as it falls from its perch on the arm, lands spine down. 

From the exposed page Rebecca cries out from the parapet, buffeted by the winds, finger wagging the air. Harry had laughed, when he had seen her, called her more a stubborn schoolmistress than a maiden in peril. He had needled John into mimicry, pronouncing with clear delight that John’s telling-off was much more fierce. 

Now in John’s arms Harry groans, too exhausted to cry out. He stirs slightly, clings as best he can to John’s collar, trapping some of the fine soft hairs at the back of John’s neck between his fingers. The prickle of it soothes John’s rabbiting heart, he cranes his head forwards a little to ghost his comfort against Harry’s forehead, to feel the tug of his grip.

“Hold on, Henry,” he promises, borrowing John Peglar’s words for his own. “Almost there.”

He doesn't bother with the stairs, arms like lead and Harry’s pained breaths from being jostled already drive him straight on through to Johnʼs bed. 

“John-” 

Itʼs a half gasp, half prayer, cut off by the gentle bounce of his limbs as John lets him down onto the bed. Underneath him the counterpane twists, riding up around his shoulders as if the bed would swallow him. He sinks, John sinks with him to his knees. 

“I’m here.”

Harry grins, or tries to, face churning as he does. It’s more of a grimace than anything. John’s heart leaps, face tingling with warmth. He’s still so beautiful. 

“Can we sleep?” 

John strokes his hair back away from his face. 

“Yes,” he promises. “Yes.”

Chapter Text

The cottage holds its breath as they wait for Harry to make it through the first night. 

John rests against the doorframe, arms curled around himself. Harry is sleeping, fitfully, waking gasping in jumps and starts even though his body is too exhausted to do more than tremor as he splutters on nothing but air. John clenches his muscles tightly, willing himself not to push past his father and rush to Harry’s side. John Peglar has climbed in the bed with him, curled him to his chest as if he were a babe again, and rocks him as he whimpers until he falls silent once more. 

A small and selfish part of John is jealous. He wishes for a moment it was him to brush the lock of hair from Harry’s forehead, and trace his fingertip across his palm to tempt it out of its angry fist, kissing the halfmoon divots left behind. 

John Peglarʼs voice is hoarse, strained from the endless soothing he has been pouring into Harry’s ear. 

“I have lived more of my life with Harry in it than without.”

He strokes the side of Harry’s face carefully with his thumb, skirting the edge of his bruised cheekbone. John does not know what he will do if John Peglar starts to cry, he does not think he could stand it. Already his heart is stopped, caught in the grasp of their affection.

“I hope to never live anymore without him. That is every father’s wish, I think.”

John says nothing, but shifts to lean on the doorframe, letting himself melt into the buildingʼs sturdy embrace.

In the morning Harry wakes, face sallow and bruised, but graced with a smile. 

He reaches first for John, clumsily carding his hand through John’s hair where he had finally succumbed to exhaustion at the side of the bed. As John lifts his head, so does he, just an inch. John says nothing, cautious of John Peglar still sleeping, just turns his cheek to press against Harry’s palm, his thumb catching at the edge of his lips. It is enough to see where sleeping pressed to his father’s chest has left the memory of a button pressed as a red curve into the high apple of his cheek. 

He dreams away the first few days. There is no hum or half muttered phrase from his lips, uncharacteristic silence that hangs like a pall over the cottage.

Healing takes time, and John is at lesuire to dedicate all of his to Harry. He is talking now – joking even – but John’s heart still drops to his stomach at each wince, as if his life still hangs in the balance. With each rise and fall of Harry’s chest the tide of worry ebbs a little.

It is only when it has receded enough that John’s head is above water again that he can see the other’s floundering in their grief. It makes each stride out onto the sand easier, as he takes their hands and leads them into the relief of Harry’s cheer.

He is not the most patient of patients. His energy, even as it wanes, seems boundless to John. He tired quickly, but does not stop from bursting out into activity where he can, it is all John can do to keep him still enough not to injure himself further. Finally, John drags one of the kitchen chairs outside and bundles Harry up in his quilt to sit in the garden for some fresh air whilst John putters about, fussing over the growth of their little garden. Harry directs him to care for the few plants they have growing, hardy leafy greens and broad beans that spiral in canes against the side of the house. The greens wonʼt keep us for long, he says, but the beans should last.

It is strange to be watched as he potters, John Peglar’s gaze is never quite as keen on his movements. His son is bright even in his exhaustion, John’s soul so tethered to his that he feels he cannot wander far from the house without the ache of Harry’s absence in his chest. Mostly they coexist in comfortable quiet, Harry’s chatter waxing and waning with his energy. Occasionally, when he has fallen silent for too long, John wanders back over to push Harryʼs hair back from his forehead and check his temperature, pulling his arms free from the blanket bundle to check the cuts and scrapes are healing well.

John pegs washing next to watercolours, each drying the same in the low sun, and waits for the last few inches of fear to drain from his boots. He doesn’t think it ever will.

The Hartnells had been over nearly every day since the mine collapse. Sometimes they came for an hour, sometimes an afternoon.

They had come clattering through the door the morning after, half-true stories poured into their ears by the shaken men who had been there. It had been up to John Peglar to sit them down and tell them the short truth of the event; the unexpected slide of wet mud, the lucky nature of Harry’s injuries, a ribald joke at John’s expense to get them laughing before he lets them up to see him. The smile had fallen from his face as soon as they had left the room, frown falling into place as he went back to chewing his lip in worry. 

John feels like he shouldnʼt intrude, but busies himself instead with errands, knowing Harry is well watched over. He misses no gossip however, for Harry is ever willing to share.

Some of it is happy, most of it is worrisome, especially as the days stretch into weeks. Even as Harry regains his strength and comfort, till it is almost nothing but memories that plague them. John listens to all of it, drinking in each syllable that passes Harry’s lips as proof of his existence.

In the town a babe is born, strong and hale and with a voice like thunder. John fancies he can hear it echo up the valley as Harry describes her, sounding all the more like his father as he does. A good strong set of lungs and tight little grip, luck- Harry says, her father was blinded in the collapse. He’ll still love her, John finds himself driven to reassure, even as Harry looks at him strangely. 

At the outskirts the Hartnells fall foul of a poor harvest, and poorer habits. The elder brother is let go from the estate’s farm, it had only been the protestations of Mr Blanky – citing his leg keeping him from hanging the shot game properly in the store, and a variety of other menial tasks – that, to hear Harry tell it, had bored the landowner so into admission that Tom had been allowed to stay. 

The autumn tightens around them like a string belt; cutting into the flesh of the town. The Peglars feel it as much as any of them, Harry more so than any of them, relegated to blanket lump by John’s worry.

“It’s doing none of us any good having me loiterin’ here all day. They say it’s not regular pay, but-”

“No.”

Harry blinks, mouth dropped in a half-formed word. John swallows, feels the spittle slide down the back of his throat. 

“Not underground.”

“What else would you have me do? It’s as dangerous as any other-” His gesturing twists something not quite fully mended, cutting off his words at the root. 

John does not say, see. Only out of concern for Harry's dignity. Still, he stops, sighs, closing his hands tight on his lap.

“If t'will make you worry. No mining.” 

John feels his face tightening as he frowns. He pegs up another leaf of paper, the curled eye of the ghost fern stares back out at him, barely more than the faintest impression on the paper. It is only this close and with time and practise that John can make out where the whorls and curves of each leaf will settle, tracking the slow spreading blue blush in the shifting reflection of light. 

“I will always worry.”

“Aye, you are built of it.”

Harry’s fiddling with a button on his waistcoat. It shines pearlescent between his fingers, blue-purple-white in the light, like the edge of the bruising that still skirts Harry’s wrists. Not quite matching the rest, but John had found it waiting in his overcoat pocket as he searched for something to mend the poor thing with. He thinks it suits Harry, the little sparkle, like the flash of tooth in the corner of his smile. If John had his way he would- No matter. It will do well enough, until he can find time to slip away into the town and get some better ones.

He catches John looking, and does not let him look away. 

John doesn’t argue further, just presses the back of his hand to Harry’s forehead. Under his scrutiny Harry’s face seems flushed, pink under the freckled tan of his skin. When he reaches for John’s wrist his grip fumbles, pressing awkwardly into the pulse at the base of John’s thumb. 

“I wish you wouldn’t.” 

John draws away, apology pinched into the tip of his tongue, but Harry will not let him. He lets him only a little, then tugs his hand down to rest on his lap, amongst the blanket’s folds. 

“Worry, John.” He says sternly, hand fast around his wrist like a bond. “I wish you wouldn’t worry so. When was the last time you slept?”

He thinks of the cobwebbed pattern that laces the ceiling of his little room; half spider webs, half cracks in the limewash. The tangle of his hair on the pillow as he tilts his head, craning to hear the soft and muffled sounds of Harry turning above him.

“I have always been an early riser.”

“What would make it easier?” Harry presses. “Or will I have to tie you to the bedposts to make you rest?”

John shrugs a little, helpless. To rest his hand on the sweet curve of Harry’s ribs as he breathes in rest, to hear him mutter wordless against the base of John’s neck where he could rest his head. These things he cannot say, he does not have the words. 

“Give me plenty to do, to see you well. When this is past, and you are whole.”

“You do so much-”

“Not enough.”

Harry quietens, turning his palm up to tangle their fingers together. 

“You can’t hope to fix everything John, not even you have that power.”

“I can try.” 

Harryʼs breath catches, as if he was steeling himself. 

“Youʼre a stubborn old fool, John Bridgens, but a sweet one.” 

He leans forwards, tugging John’s hand into his lap. The ground is rough under John’s knee as he kneels before him, their gazes level. John finds himself gazing at the little creases at the corners of his eyes, pockets of joy hidden in the curves of his face, instead of the blushing dark bruise of sleeplessness beneath them. He almost wants to close his eyes as Harryʼs free hand comes to cup his cheek and stroke softly through the overgrown mess of his beard; in deference, in worship, in fear. 

“My old fool.” 

John shudders, tipping forwards towards Harry’s warmth as he catches him, tugs him up and finally, wonderfully, kisses him.

John takes to taking Harry with him out into the fields as his assistant. He carries Johnʼs gear, willinging, for a small wage – John cannot afford to promise him much, but Harry is happy to be paid in kisses for his overtime. Each comes easier than the last, smoother and more sure. John has known himself a sodomite for almost as long as Harry has been alive but kissing was not something to be indulged, he could not be allowed to indulge in. He feels like a stumbling colt in the sun of Harry’s affection. 

Before them the dull winter sun kisses the lip of the hill, the path disappearing off the rise into the hazy grey of the sky. As they climb they drift, steps beating the rhythm of their heartbeats into the arid dirt. There has been no rain since the last storm, though clouds gather threateningly on the horizon. The collar of John’s shirt clings to his neck, damp with sweat, the very air itself pressing down against his skin. They stop halfway up the rise brought to a halt by Harry’s wavering hand, which claps just as quickly to his knee as he fights for breath. 

John doesn’t know if it helps but he lays a hand across the curve of his spine anyway, gliding lightly up and down as if with some small moment he could encourage the muggy air to lift and brighten. The collapse fades like a distant memory and yet flutters before his mindʼs eye as if it was happening again. 

“I’m alright,” Harry says. John must be frowning still, because he reaches out to cup his face, pressing his thumb against the corner of John’s mouth as if he could will him to smile. “A little further, yes, just a little.” 

He does not argue when John takes the painting case from his hand gently.

They walk over the rise and into the shallow valley, following the sound of water till they find a swarth of green cut with a brook across the bottom. The field is slant, narrow where they enter, John’s eye lingering guiltily on the curve of Harry’s thigh as he hops the stile, and broad at the other end, hedgerows disappearing into the fuzz of the horizon. 

Here the brook is a slip of a thing, barely more than a step for Harry to leap across it, bouncing back and forth. This side, then there. A look, when he is there, a touch when he is close enough to brush his hand against John’s. His steps draw a neat lattice across the tumbling water, lacing the dim morning light with his simple pleasure as it meanders wider. Then suddenly he is taking a run up, two steps back and then a great bound with a shout as he leaps, legs tucked under himself like a spring, like a wild thing. He hits the other side with a thump that thrums through the ground and a two step, stumbling with the force of his jump into John’s side. They sway, laughter punched out John as he rocks back into the solid press of Harry’s body, clinging together to stay upright. 

“Alright, alright- here,” Harry apologises, breathless. “How’s the flowers here? Pretty enough for you?”

“They’ll do just fine,” John says magnanimously, even as Harry is already peeling away from him to wander beneath a nearby tree.

The spot is near perfect, he finds as he looks around. The brook is a haven of moss and spotted with bright clusters of snowdrops, vivid green of life even in the crackling cold newness of the year. 

John sighs. The breeze is gentle on his face as he turns into it, cutting through the heavy air like birdsong. “Is this not Eden?”

“The soil is far too poor for that,” he can hear the laugh in Harry’s voice, dancing around him as Harry wanders somewhere to his left. “'Tis but metals and granite beneath our feet.” 

He wants Harry to drift back over, into view. He closes his eyes, he wants Harry to sit beside him, the heat of his body to warm the exposed skin of his arms. 

“Do you want another lesson?”

Thereʼs a thump as Harry takes up the unsaid invitation, landing beside him and leaning back on his hands. “No,” he says, “I do not have the patience for paint today.”

John cracks one eye open, peering through his lashes at Harry. He is already looking back, watching patiently for John to carefully unpack his equipment. He crouches, nominally to open the lid of his watercolour box but also to peer out the corner of his eye at Harry’s comfortable sprawl.

“Come then, if you will not be student then at least be assistant – there is work to be done.”

Harry breaks the vague tune he’s humming with a smile, cracking one eye open to squint across at John. 

“I h’am providing h’essential services,” he says through his nose, flattening his voice in a huffed imitation of high society as he can. “Tha’ being musical accompaniment.” 

He clears his throat. John shivers. 

His voice is hoarse, just a little, rough around the edges with ore-dust. It wavers in the air, sinks flat on occasion with the weight of the afternoon, but expands to fill John’s chest fit to bursting.

“Re-oh.” 

Harry stops, mouth hanging open for a moment before snapping shut. “Sorry?”

John straightens, shading his eyes from the sun to peer down at Harry. “It’s Re-oh, not rye-o. Rio, the Rio Grande.”

“Oh is it?” Harry laughs and says, “I suppose youʼd know,” he says. “You sing then.” 

John is mute with desire. The song lingers around them, unfinished. His mouth is dry, like a long abandoned river bed, he tries to think of the last time he sang.

“Ah,” he croaks, “I don't know any songs”

“Thaʼs a lie.” Harry still smiles though, small and neat on his face. “What then? A love song?”

John’s cheeks catch aflame, Harry crows in delight. 

“A love song then! For my lover!”

John hisses, a reprimand barely caught in his teeth. There is no-one here to hear them. All the same his hackles rise, head sinking between raised shoulders as Harry sways towards him to bump their shoulders. 

“If you will not learn,” he asks instead, “and you will not earn your keep, then what do you propose this afternoon be filled with?”

“Talk.” Harry does not hesitate. “Just us, talking.”

“We always just talk, surely you are a little bored by now.”

Harry scoffs. “Now, don’t you finish that thought with by an old man . I’ll say it till I’m hoarse if you don’t believe me, that I would rather your company than any otherʼs.”

“I wasn’t,” John lies quietly, letting his shoulder press more solidly against Harry’s.

Harry shrugs, as if he doesn’t believe him, squinting up at the sky where the sun has just flitted behind a wisp of cloud. The wind picks up, dancing loose leaves across the waving grasses. It whistles a little as it passes through the knot of the tree above their heads. Harry whistles back. It runs like a shiver down John’s spine. 

“I could never be bored of you, John.” His name is softened in Harry’s mouth, stretched and loose like a well-worn jumper. He rolls it, savours it, in a way that John cannot name. “Sometimes I feel like I barely know you.”

“You know more about me than I have told anyone in a long time.”

“Not even your London friends?”

John pauses, pushes off his hands to sit straighter. 

“They were never particularly interested.” 

“They did not know what they were missing!”

Harry flops back to lie on his back, his head landing squarely on John’s lap. He freezes as Harry wiggles, settling himself. Harry’s head is a reassuring weight on his thigh, tethering him to the ground as his head fills with lightness so much he fears it might fly away completely. Each sense narrows down; the sound of Harry’s effort as he stretches out his legs away from them, the soft sensation of his hair spreading overgrown curls that slip down the crevice between John’s thighs. He brushes it carefully from Harry’s eyes, shading them from the bright sun with his palm until they flutter closed, his lashes lying dark against his cheek. He wishes he could lay Harry out in the sunshine like one of his plants on a piece of parchment, and let the sun set a copy of his body onto the paper forever for Harry to keep with him. 

“Why do you stop?” 

John looks at his hand, hovering scant inches above Harry’s arm, caught taught on the line of politeness. His fingers twitch. He thinks about moving them, finds the skin of Harry’s arm rough and patient beneath his hesitant touch. 

“I suppose I am not used to it.”

“To touch? I touch thee,” Harry cups his face like a promise. 

His palms cradle him even as John shakes his head. Like this he can see each freckle on his face, the wavering lines of the creases at the corner of his mouth and eyes. There is a little patch of lighter skin above his right eyebrow, where his hair often lies. It is just a shade paler, barely visible but for the concentration of John’s gaze. 

“To joy.” 

John curls, like a plant towards the sun, except Harry is the sun, and Harry is in his lap, and Harry is smiling up at him. His mouth is dry, he is parched he thinks, desperate for the fresh bright taste of Harry’s laughter. But he does not laugh.

“Then let me teach you,” he says, the tip of his nose brushing John’s. “My friend, my lo-”

Harry’s mouth is the sweetest thing John has ever tasted.

It isn’t long before that isnʼt enough for Harry. 

One of the young boys comes to collect him late on a Thursday evening a week later, a pale apparition at the Peglar’s door, and Harry slips out without a second glance towards John.

The kitchen is silent when John comes home. 

It has been too wet the past few weeks for John to work out of doors. Although he is content to read and refine his sketches, and he finds Goodsir has plenty of small jobs that need a light touch, Harry has little to do other than continue to rest, alternately sent mad with restless energy and sapped off all strength. 

The cold presses in against his father’s bones, makes each step laborious, he retires ever earlier to bed. With him goes Dog and so it is increasingly John, alone, in the bowels of the home to putter towards some form of meagre contentment. 

Each morning too, is harder to leave, dragging himself from his bed only for the small pleasure of Harry’s greeting. He sits at the table, arranging and rearranging his case before him as Harry, stripped to his shirtsleeves, putters around bouncing from one half finished chore to another. After he settles the kettle on the stove, boiling water to mix with the little honey they have left, he leans towards Johnʼs cheek, resting against his shoulder. Against John’s jaw his hair settles like seaweed on the shore, tacky-wet from the haze of morning rain outside. 

“Mornin’,” he says, half-muffled in John’s shirt collar. John is frozen with desire. 

“Have you eaten?” he asks instead, settling a hand cautiously cupping the base of Harry’s skull. Before him his papers flutter in the rush of cool air flowing through the open window. Against his neck Harry shivers, shakes his head. His mouth is dry, tongue clinging to the roof of his mouth, fighting through sleep for each word. “Do we have anything to eat?”

“Bread,” Harry says fuzzily, dragging his head back up. “Potatoes in the loft, butter- I think.” Against John’s cheek his lips brush, cracked and rough. 

His head turns easily as John pinches his chin, turning it this way and that gently. It is not only his lips, cracked with the dry cold, but his cheeks above his beard are dry. “There is salve in my case,” he says softly then, louder and more sure, dragging the energy from the pit of his belly. “Go on, make yourself presentable. I’ll do breakfast.”

As he stands Harry’s head follows him, bobbing in the space until the last touch is broken. Only the memory of his kiss lingers. John studiously ignores him as he hoves around the edge of the table, keeps his back turned to him not out of any grievance but out of longing. He hopes Harry can tell. His palm is warm and solid against the small of John’s back as he passes him. He thinks Harry knows him completely. 

There is a pack of bacon on the top shelf of their little larder. Two rashers between the three of them is not bad, but no eggs. The floor is frozen beneath his feet, clad only in stockings, and he does not stop to look deeper. There would not be much to find, he thinks. Some smoked fish maybe, he can hope, something for their supper. 

Harry exits his room and clatters up the stairs, his movements morning-clumsy. Upstairs there’s a thump. Twin thuds of feet onto the floor, a low murmur of talk, the splash of water into the small tin bowl. He imagines Harry’s arms, water trickling over his wrists to soak his cuffs, dripping from his beard onto the collar of his shirt. 

It exhausts him, thinking. 

Each movement is an effort. Here, the kindling for the slow to rise fire, there the poker to stoke. In his hand the cast iron pan. At his feet the dog herds him towards the table as he sets out plates, butter, bread. As he pulls back it spots the creeping grey-green of sickness across its surface. He looks down at the dog at his feet. 

“Our secret my dear,” he says softly, bringing one finger to his mouth. 

She nudges her cold nose against the back of his hand. He looks down at her gratefully, knife in hand. It is the work of a moment to cut the mouldy edge off, carefully slicing the rest of it into thick doorsteps. He checks each, holding it up to the light and running his thumb carefully over the surface before putting them onto the plates. The heel, and its fuzz of discontent, he tears with shaking hands and scatters out the door for the birds. 

As he turns back the Peglars appear at the foot of the stairs, enticed by the siren crackle of it in the pan. 

“We’ll have rabbit tonight,” Harry says, turning to John, explaining he’s going out into the hills with a few friends. John Peglar hums, tells him to be careful around a mouthful of bread and bacon grease.

The dog rests at his knee, Harry lets her lick his fingers. His shoulder presses against John’s as he leans over. John tells him to wrap up warm, swallowing his disapproval. He doesn’t tell him to stay with him, or that he doesn’t think thereʼll be any life to find in the frozen soil. 

Harry closes his eyes when John looks at him, stares down at his plate. 

The nights draw in ever quicker, the lazy afternoons of the early autumn disappearing under heavy clouds that hang ominous over the fields. It chases John home from the fields, rushing in to ambush him unawares. 

As he rounds the corner a dark figure swings into view. It staggers, jolts, trips itself on a cobblestone and tumbles towards the centre of the street. John steps forward as it gives out a strangled cry, reaching out to catch as Johnny Hartnell falls into his arms.

“Master Har- Master Hartnell.” He squirms in John’s grip, arms sluggishly thrown to fight imagined darkness off. “Please!” 

Johnny’s knees give way and he slumps, already exhausted, to the floor, vowels sliding aimlessly around as his hands close around the collar of John’s jacket. His hair is strangely skewed, his hat missing, his necktie undone. He looks a mess and as he rests his forehead against John’s shoulder he feels overly flushed. A little too much of Mr Blanky’s homemade recipe perhaps. Still, he is alert enough to raise his head, squinting at the dimly lit lines of John’s face, and exclaim-

“MIST’R BRUDGENS!” 

He promptly bursts into tears. 

“Hey now,” John rushes, knees sagging a little as Johnny’s clinging grip drags him down. “Here we go-” 

The cobbled street is cold and uncomfortably damp as he kneels, guiding Johnny to sit on the roadside, back against a wall. He still clings, childlike, to John’s collar, then to his cuffs as John slowly disentangles them, keeping up a steady comforting stream of whispers as he does so. For a second he thinks how it would look if someone came across them, him bent so low above his friend’s prone form. The night tightens around them, the low light of the moon and fields stretching into blackness just beyond the houses binding them ever closer. Something in the far hedgehog rustles softly, John shivers. Johnny’s hands rise, clumsy and half-blind, to rub up and down John’s arms, even as he quietly sobs. 

“Now then, Mister Hartnell,” John starts. Stops. There is a handkerchief in his pocket, freshly plucked from the washing line this morning on his way out the door. It smells, like all laundry in the Peglar’s home, of cheap dark carbolic, and the must of John’s coat. Yet Johnny leans into its softness as he wipes carefully at the wet, hollow curve of his face. 

“Th’nk ‘e.”

“It’s alright.” He tucks the handkerchief into Johnny’s grip and moves his hands back to his face, tilting it carefully this way and that. In the moonlight his face is pale, the grey-white of salt spray, but not bruised. 

“What’s the matter, Mr Hartnell, are you hurt?”

“Oh Mr Bridgens,” Johnny moans. “On the inside.” He clutches at his stomach with one hand, and John with the other. “I did myself something awful.” 

“Come now, what have you done? Let me see…” 

Johnny’s hand is clammy under his as he lifts it away from his body, coaxing him to rest it safely on John’s shoulder. When John presses his own hand to his stomach he shivers, weeps softly. 

“Does it hurt when I press here? Listen to me carefully, Mr Hartnell, how long has it hurt?”

Johnny shakes his head. 

“It doesn’t hurt?” John squints in the darkness to see Johnny’s face.

Johnny leans in, speaking low enough that John has to bend almost with his ear to Johnny’s mouth to hear him. “I ate one of them tomatoes.”

“A tomato, Mr Hartnell?”

“Have you seen one, Mr B? Do you have them in London?”

“Well, yes, but-”

“They’ve got such seeds in them Mr B I shouldn’t have- I thought it ought be fine, it was so sweet and fresh. But itʼs the seeds Mr B.” He tugs at John’s cuff. “D’you understand?”

“I’m sorry-” 

Hartnell sobs, louder, curling away from the wall. 

“Mr Hartnell, John, Johnny. It’s alright. Is it a stomach ache? From the tomato?”

Johnny shakes his head. “It’s growing inside of me Mr B, the plant, I can feel it!”

John works his mouth, words stolen. He leans back a little, to let the moonlight shine clearer on his face, as if seeing the finer points of Hartnell’s form in the gloom might in some way reveal his reasoning. It doesn’t help. 

“A tomato plant cannot grow inside a human stomach, Johnny-” 

Mr Hartnell is not listening. He babbles still, over any reassurance, begging for help from John, his voice growing hoarser with every word till they are sandpaper on John’s ears. He leans forward, wild eyed, to press their foreheads together. 

“What will happen to Tommy if I die?” 

As if conjured from the mists of the night- footsteps. Slow ones, halting, and a mumbled call that John can’t make out but is the high and clear voice of Tom Hartnell. At the sound Johnny freezes. John pulls back out of his grip, his hands following uselessly after John’s face, he catches them gently in one of his instead, to keep him calm. 

“You’re not going to die, John Hartnell.” He says firmly. “Though you might feel it tomorrow morning.” 

“Pr’mise?”

Johnny hands tighten on John’s as he pauses, breathing loudly in the stillness. In the distance, Tom calls again, closer this time. 

“I promise,” John says shortly, but not unkindly. 

A shadow wavers around the corner, and he raises his hand. The figure stops, then seems to slump in relief. 

“Where ‘ave you been ?” Tom says all in one breath as he jogs up to them, steading himself with a hand on John’s shoulder as he crouches. Johnny grumbles at Tom’s half-hearted swipe to the back of his head. “Causing Mr B grief instead of me?” 

His breath is sweet-sour with whisky but not nearly as strong as Johnny’s, and his eyes are clear in the moonlight when he turns to John. They heave, John rising with a grunt of effort and Tom without a sound, swaying like a ship- and Johnny is the sail wavering between them. 

“Thank ‘e, Mr B, dunno if I could have managed him on my own.” 

Between them Johnny grumbles something that sounds too close to, “ Icouldtakethebothofye’s ” for John’s liking, head lolling up to glare at where Tom’s second head would be through near-closed eyes. 

“I thought you two were out with Harry tonight?” 

“Oh.” Tom grins easily, “he left to go on watch, there’ll be a storm tonight.” He hauls Johnny’s arm more securely over his shoulder. “Wish he’d taken this one with him, the sodden sod.”

As if in response to Tom’s words the air closes in around them, the last of the stars shuttered out behind the low lying cloud that smothers the town. 

John frowns. “On watch?” 

“Enough ships meet their doom close by, these are treacherous waters, Mr Bridgens, and dangerous times.”

“You ought to have a lighthouse.”

“Ah ‘tis only one or two a season,” Tom says. He lets go of Johnny to waver his hand in the air for a moment. “This year it’s been much worse, maybe three or four this winter. Though mostly it’s fishing boats, aiming for port and missing.”

John pauses. In his head the sound of the cottage door slamming in the darkness sounds like a toll, counting the times Harry has disappeared in the night.

Johnny stops suddenly and says in a very small voice. “‘M gonna be sick.” He flops backwards against John’s shoulder then curls forwards. 

“Oh dear,” John says, the latter half of his words drowned out by the splatter of Johnny’s meagre stomach contents on cobblestones. Tom groans and gags. He sighs, taking his handkerchief back from Johnny’s grip to swipe blindly at his hanging mouth. “Let's get you home, Mr Hartnell.”

The tin basin is only just big enough for John to kneel in, cold and hard beneath as he shivers and scrubs. The cottage is cool, his skin prickles and his fingers cannot quite bring themselves to corporate. He had hoped to scrub from his skin the tiredness of the day, but all his actions just make his limbs heavier. He doesn’t even start when footsteps sound on the stairs. It’s Harry, the pause left in the air by his habit of missing the last step and hopping straight onto the floor. 

He makes a soft sound of surprise, low in his chest, almost faint enough that John misses it over the splash of his limbs in the water. 

“Well,” he says softly. “Waitin’ for me?”

John hums. The soap is hard but slippery in his hand, he concentrates on the shape of it, pinched to one end where it has been worn down by countless hands. He pays no attention to the soft sound of Harry’s clothes rubbing as he strides across the room. The soapʼs surface glistens as he swipes his thumb across it, smoothing lather off. 

The clatter of wooden legs against the stone floor cuts the quiet. Harry murmurs an apology, close enough that it is mostly carried on the day-aged sour of his breath.

Harry’s hands are hot against his skin, glowing as he cups his shoulder to balance, leaning down to scoop a cupful of water and gently rinse away the soap. His movements are sure but soft, starting with the familiar stretch of John’s arm, working his hands in large warming strokes, shaking life back into his stiff limbs. John curls up like a child under the attention. He brings his knees to his chest and props his chin upon them, watching Harry work his way down towards his hand behind the curtain of his hair. Harry flickers in and out of view through the silver strands, dark head bent over John’s palm, working his fingers against the meat of it. It hurts, John doesn’t pull away. 

“I did this,” he says, voice soft, almost a whisper, “for my Granny, when she used to tatt lace. Her hands used to curl all up in themselves – all that pulling and twisting as if it were her own fingers she were knotting. I reckon painters is the same.” 

John feels his fingers twitch as Harry digs into the muscle, stretching each finger in turn, bending each joint gently as he does. The smile falls from Harry’s face as he looks up from John’s palm and meets his eye. 

“Al’right?”

John shakes his head carefully. “There’s something blowing in, the pressure-” He gestures to his head vaguely as Harry coos.

“My poor old fool.” 

He should scoff at Harry’s tone but it is so light that the blow to his pride is barely a tap. Harry brings his mouth to John’s open palm, cradled in his, and kisses the centre of it – takes up the other and does the same. John sighs as he does so. For a perfect moment he stays bent over John’s hand, tethering them together. His beard is soft against John’s fingertips, the corners of his lips not quite touching John’s skin, his smile too large. 

He reaches out in return to cup Harry’s hands and bring them to press over his heart. Thus suspended, leaning awkwardly over the lip of the tub his weight pressed to John’s chest, he kisses Harry. Once he starts he cannot stop, their lips moving hypnotically together, luxuriating in Harry’s smile soft and generous against him. He can taste the sweet bitterness of the mint leaves Harry’s been chewing. His beard rubs prickling warmth against John’s cheek. They part, panting softly. John lets go of Harry’s wrists. 

“Tomorrow…” he trails off, letting his hands slip beneath the low line of the water. Harry makes a questioning sound, even as he settles back. “When the storm comes in, let me come with you.” 

“Don’t tell me you’re jealous of Tom Hartnell now.” Harry says, carefully light. “I spend half as much time with my friends as I do at your side, do you not see my face enough as it is?”

“Henry-” 

“Come on, pass us your other hand.”

John keeps his hands to himself. 

Harry sighs when he doesn’t reach back out, swinging his outstretched hand back around to rub across the back of his neck roughly.

“You don’t know what you’re asking for.” 

“Come on now, Henry, which of us has seen the world?” 

Harry’s expression shutters. John presses on.

“To talk around it as if it doesn’t exist… you must know it cannot be sustained.”

“To hear you say that! As if you did not attempt to brick up the hearth of your own affection.” 

“That is different.”

“How so?”

“This is your life , Henry, you want us to know each other? Will you not let me see this part of you?”

“No.” His mouth twitches downwards. 

John cannot bear to look any longer. Instead he stares at his knees, pale mountains above the water, still spindly even long after his youth has softened and sagged from the rest of his body. As he shivers the water swirls, little eddies of soap scum pulsing out.

Suddenly Harry is pressed hotly against his back, arms encircling his and pinning them to his sides. His hands come to cradle John’s forearms, tugging him back to lean against Harry’s chest, chin slotting into his shoulder as if the divot there was made for him. He waits patient and still as John stops breathing then, cautiously, relaxes muscle by muscle until he lies prone in Harry’s arms. Outside some small feathered thing calls softly, overlapping responses bouncing off each other between the branches that shade the window. Against his shoulder the touch of Harry’s lips is almost a whisper, brushing shivers up and over John’s face, his eyes shuttering closed against the tenderness. 

“Why did you come?”

“I’m a painter and an amatuer-”

“No,” he shifts, gently turning John’s face to his. “I know what you do, but you never say what brought you here.” Johnʼs breath quickens, pulse fluttering against the weight of Harryʼs fingertips against the underside of his chin. He is pinned by Harryʼs gaze, unblinking, eyes falling into shadow as his brow crumples.

His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth, cracked lips parting reluctantly. "Don't you know, Harry? I came searching for you."

Harry laughs, there is no mirth in it.  

“You did not know me, you barely knew yourself.”

“I had lost myself.” John confesses. He rolls the thought of it across his tongue. “I did not know the shape of what I was searching for.”

“But you found me?”

John nods, covers Harry’s hand on his cheek with his own. 

“Don’t you miss what you left behind?” 

“I rather think he had forgotten I existed long before I left.”

“Alright.” Harry says. “No more secrets.”

Chapter Text

The night falls like a blanket on the town. 

Inside the Peglars’ home it falls first; the clock on the mantle ticking into silence, the three of them sat stoney-faced around the table. There is a hole where the panting of the dog ought to be, collected earlier by the youngest Hartnells, uncharacteristically quiet and polite as they had teased her from the house with scraps of hard cheese. They had watched from the doorway as they disappeared round the bend, then John Peglar had risen slowly from his chair and disappeared for a while. Harry had not followed him, but waited, his hand curled in John’s where they sat on opposite sides of the table, waiting for evening to creep in.

John watches the rise and fall of Harry’s chest, counting the shuddering half-hiccups of John Peglar’s breaths until the two men seem almost to be breathing as one. The air is close and tights, hanging on the knife edge of the storm. John finds his own racing to catch up, pulse quickening as John Peglar watches the sun set behind the gathering storm through the window with a keen eye. 

Then all at once they are moving, chairs scraping as father and son rise in unison and turn to stride out through out through the door, John bracketed between them. 

He turns as they cross the threshold, watching Henry at his back blow the candle at the window out, plunging the cottage into darkness. It takes everything with it; the clock resting on the lacy crest of the mantlepiece, the carefully smothered grey embers of the hearth, and Harry. 

Harry.

It’s only a half a moment until he emerges from the sucking blackness of the doorway, brow set firm, pressing John on with one hand at his shoulder. John closes his hand over Harry’s even as they hurry together to catch John Peglar, opening his mouth as if he could verbalise his fear; the blackness seeming to smother those too. 

John Peglar leads the way down the road, tall walking stick in hand. He carries it like a campaign flag; his gait weaves their way down the street, the pause where the strike of the staff on the cobbles would normal fall is louder than the clack of wood on stone ever was. 

The night follows their strange trail. Each house they pass blackens, candles and lanterns flickering and dying in their wake. A child cries out, and John turns to see from where it came. He starts to find Tom Hartnell striding beside him, cap pulled low over his straw blonde hair. He looks left and finds Johnny there too, tall form hunched, all but seemed to have melted from the air. 

As they reach the foot of the town the party turns as one.

He turns his eyes when the men begin to unpack the pony cart to build the beacon. They have stood him between the Peglars carefully out of the way, as if they knew he would be of no use to them. John Peglarʼs hand rests for a moment on his shoulder, a weight that sinks him surely into the earth. They are watching the furtive work; when John turns to face Harry he is met with wide eyes shadowed by a deep frown. He has no words for him, but nods. Out there the rain is already falling, the deafening crash of it against the heaving sea inching closer. The wind rushes through the long grass at their feet, rolling in waves across the headland. John has never been cursed with seasickness, not even on as their ship pitched in the deadly storms around the cape, and the men clung to each other with no thought to proprietary. Now, he wants to throw up.

He thinks of Henry lean with hunger, losing the little softness in his belly. He thinks of him stumbling and uncoordinated with lack of sleep for worrying. Harry, weakened, crying out at the suggestion of John’s touch against his tender skin. 

In the corner of his eye the beacon flares. A smoulder spits, crackles, becomes a flame that swallows the stacked bracken. The bitter scent of burning pine swallows him. The flames dance up and out of the periphery, six feet, ten, more than he cares to count. His sight in the dark is smothered by the brightness of the fire beside them. It races skywards, establishing itself fiercely against the oncoming rain. The sea and the sky bleed into one big ink blot before him, swallowing any suggestion of the distant ship and her crew. Shame burns the side of his cheek. Harry’s little hand slips into his, and is engulfed. 

The sun is sharp and cold on his face, as he steps off the track path. Beneath him the cobbles of the bridge shine speckled silver in its light, glittering with frost. He thinks the sun has become ice also, as he turns into its gaze it prickles over his skin. It fades out into nothingness, half blocked values and half fine inked detail, blurring as John squints into the light. 

On the other side is a figure, tall and dark, more shadow than solid form. He thinks there are more people, swarming back and forth like fish in a stream. There is a stream under the bridge, a brook that bubbles with the roar of the crashing ocean, beating against the piers as raindrops. It shakes. He wonders where the crush of people are, that he can feel them still against his skin. 

He wonders where Henry is. He wonders if he’s waiting for John. 

The stone railing sticks to his palm, clawing at his skin as he rips it away, stumbling back. Under his feet the deck rolls. The river rises howling to wash the bridge, and his feet away with it, the wet sandstone darkening to oak. He falls, scraping his palms as he’s thrown upon the deck. The prow of the Beagle crashes against a wave, pausing for a long second at the crest of her roll before tilting. The force hurls John backwards towards the Taffrail. He scrabbles hopelessly. Beneath his hands water pools. She dips, the sun rises. 

Light pulses against the prow of the ship. His back thuds into the rail. She settles, breathes, begins her tilt in reverse. John scrambles to his knees, locking hands over the bar as the ground disappears from beneath him for a breathless moment. 

From behind him Harry cries, but he cannot look back. Around him the river rushes, water pounding against his ears. He wants- he stretches an arm back, neck caught in the net. Henry. He opens his mouth to cry and his tongue is torn from him. 

Something pierces his cheek, white hot-cold shock hooking through into his mouth, head twisting with the force of it and then he can see Henry, his Harry, arm outstretched. He glitters, his Harry, like ice, like scales, like ore specks in the rockface. 

Around them the fish swarm, light glinting off their scales bright enough to blind. A train horn sounds. The line pulls taught. The crowd presses in. 

His grip slips; his feet hit unmoving stone and crumple beneath him. When he blinks no-one is there, except the road, and he himself is on it.

As he crests the rise of the hill into town the sun is only just starting to slip back below the horizon. The road and John and the bracken of the hedgerow are bathed in the yellowing glow, like curled parchment. He slows on the incline but does not pause, letting the momentum of his footsteps drive him onwards. Beneath his feet his shadow stretches, spilling ink black over the ground. 

When he turns the corner to begin the descent, he finds his path blocked. The stranger sits tall on the back of his horse, a raw umber so dark brown it is almost a shadow itself. He does not wear the clothes of an ordinary traveller; his head sits proudly under his tophat, his chin and whiskers rest on the edge of his high leather collar. It is not raining, John’s own shoulders are still dry, but the spread of his oilskin cape shines. 

A kestrel hovers in the air current above them, perfectly stationary high above the hill. The earth itself stills, unmoving even as John feels his world spinning out on an axis. Pleasantries pass without registering, his mouth moving in a mimicry of politeness, head bowing deferential. The gentleman is agreeably mellow, even though the weight of his sideburns seems to drag his face down. As they talk he shifts back in his saddle, and the heavy front of his cape swings open. He wears a pistol on his hip. It takes all of John’s control not to let his eye wander, he is largely unsuccessful. The man moves his arm and his cape falls, covering the handle. 

“Just a precaution.”

“In such a place as this?” John says, squinting into the dying sun. “These are good people, it’s…” He thinks of how easily the flames had rushed up the stack of wood, even damp. How the set of Harry’s brow had shone golden and determined in the light. “It’s a simple life.” 

“These people.” The Lieutenant shakes his head. “You don’t sound like a mining man.”

“I am not.” 

He nods at John, then leans forward against the pommel of his horse to look more closely at the wooden painting case clutched in his hand. His gaze seems to weigh it down, the polish handle turning to lead in John’s palm and anchoring him to the spot. 

“A painter… what have you found around here that is worth capturing?” 

“Plants mostly,” John says politely. “There are some interesting wildflowers just over the rise there.” He goes to point back up the ridge but his arm judders and he ends up more waving vaguely. For the first time in his life the polite small talk seems suffocating, the man’s hum of interest tightening around his neck. He smiles neatly, pulling himself back into the worn shape of his stewardship. “If you have time I’d take the route through there, they’re perennial blooms I believe, and a haven for wildlife.”

Go that way, he thinks to himself, take the detour, stretch your legs. Please God tempt him to do so, that we might have a little time. 

The lieutenant straightens on his horse and smiles back, following John's pathetic gesturing towards the skyline behind. “It has been a rather dreadful journey – I might, thank you, sir.” 

John nods back at him, mouth dry. The horse huffs as she passes him, mane brushing his cheek as the narrow path presses travellers together for a brief moment. Before him the road is clear again, a burst of wind nips across a landscape barren and scrub. The kestrel has disappeared from the pale grey sky. He better not linger, tugs the paint box closer to his side before setting out the march on

Behind him, the hoofbeats stop. 

“I’m dreadfully sorry-” 

John stops, glances to the heavens, turns again to face the Lieutenant. “Yes sir?”

“I forgot-” he shakes his head mournfully, hanging low between his shoulders. “You are Mr Bridgens the naturalist, are you not?

John unsticks his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “No,” he says quietly. Then, louder, so that it might bridge clearly the distance between them. “I’m afraid you are mistaken sir. I am not John Bridgens.” 

The lieutenant looks surprised and John smiles, hand outstretched placatingly. “A John, yes, I am, but no more.” 

“Oh,” mutters the Lieutenant, deflating. He looks down at his hands, tightly wound about the reins. “T’was just the paint box I assumed- no matter. Pleased to make your acquaintance Mr…”

“Peglar.” John says without hesitation. He bites his tongue; he shouldn’t have, he-. “Apologies for the confusion.” He lifts the box. “I am just an amateur.”

“No, no,” he waves off Johnʼs meek deference, “it was just a point of interest. Perhaps it is better, that you are a lover of something, than employed in it.”

When he gets to the pub Harry is waiting. 

It is far warmer inside than out and John is grateful, the bar is packed, friends and strangers standing shoulder to shoulder. The room thrums with the low hum of conversations John is not privy to. The others are not there yet and when John hurries in through the door with his case clutched to his chest he shoots from his seat like a shot. 

“They said you were waiting for me.” 

Harry grins at John’s worried look, and does not seem to notice the question itching on the tip of his tongue. 

“Always,” is all he says. 

There is the usual faff of chair and box and John; Harry pushes him into the comfortable embrace of the booth with a sure hand. He leans across him, one hand on the back of John’s chair and the other on the table just beside John’s box. His look flickers across towards the bar before he presses in. He smells sweet, meadowsweet like cut hay; bright and shining through the musky of the barroom. It is heady, in its brightness. 

His hand lands on John’s breast. He pats him once, twice, gently, fingertips just slipping under the heavy drape of his overcoat. When his hand pulls away he has tucked a little sprig of forget-me-not neatly into the top watch pocket of John’s waistcoat.

“Take ye coat off, get comfortable, the others will be here in a moment.” 

John nods, mouth dry, aching as Harry pulls back. 

“I’ll get us both a drink, it’s good to see you.”

John cannot help but smile, saying he’s glad to hear that, as Harry walks away. He looks back at John’s words, fingertips brushing his lips absentmindedly, playing with the coy edges of his own smile.

Harry must have got here plenty early to find one of the few seats free, but he doesnʼt wave from his path as he heads to and from their table, so John comforts himself that he cannot be so drunk yet. Still, he chooses to sit beside John instead of across from him, slipping low in his seat so as to rest his feet on the stool out the other side of the table, his cheek resting dangerously close to John’s shoulder. As John turns his head to thank him for his drink his lips unintentionally brush Harry’s temple. He hopes his flush is soft enough to blame on the brandy, and sits forward, elbows on the table, to sip.

He feels young with Harry pressed against his side. As if the toil of twenty years had been sloughed from his shoulder. His movements are so confident and sure, settled inside himself and his community, in a way that John has never quite managed. It makes John sick to think of it being disrupted. 

“I didn’t see Johnny at the bar,” Harry is saying. “They ought be along soon enough. Perhaps they will bring Magnus with them, I haven’t seen so much of him late.”

John considers the fill of his cup, and how quickly he could drink it. 

“I’ll leave you to it, but I am glad to catch you first. I…”

“First?” 

John waves his hand. “I was waylaid. It was a strange encounter, Harry…” 

He trails off at the look on Harry’s face. He looks drawn, pinched down into discomfort. He sets his hand palm up against the table, a scant fraction of an inch from John’s.

“They’ve never made you feel unwelcome… have they?” 

John shakes his head, mouth dry. He tries to think of a way to explain it, without calling Harry little more than a child at play with his friends- which he is not. Not by any measure, he is all man, sure and confident in his place in the world. His community has grown around him, and with him, so that they are twisted up together like honeysuckle in the hedgerow. They feed back into each other, John can see it, almost breathing as one. It is more than John, even with his seniority, could ever hope to have. He does not think he could tear Harry from his roots here, his belly churns at the thought of it, the fear settling low and hard in the base of his throat. 

As if he could see John’s face turn, Harry turns his hand palm down, so that the tip of his littlest finger might rest against John’s knuckles where he is clinging to his tankard like a lifeline. 

“I don’t choose to sit at this table with you out of duty, John.” 

His voice rumbles low and soft, almost close enough that John can imagine the faint sour puff of his breath against his jaw.

“It’s for safety,” John says softly, “yours and mine. I would not see you hurt.” 

Harry frowns, but does not argue. 

“There are other things…”

“John.” It’s a warning.

“It’s for your safety. You shouldn’t go out tonight.”

“I am out.” He gestures broadly to the pub and all the patrons milling in her belly. “Having a drink with a good friend. I plan nothing more, you worrywart.”

“You know what I mean.” He sighs, tries again. “It is not so bad now, perhaps you don’t need to…”

“It is good because we go.” Harry closes his eyes. “Did I not say you shouldn’t have seen?”

“It’s not that, Henry-”

“It’s in my blood, John.” He drinks deep, as if it was water. He pauses with the edge of the cup against his lips, teeth chiming on metal. “If I was a sailor-”

“I would still warn you from trying to sail on a doomed voyage, somewhere unknown and with far too many dangers.”

“No,” he says. A full sentence, as sure and solid as the table he leans on. “You would come with me.”

It is a condemnation and forgiveness all at once. He doesn’t look at John, but out and across the bar, eyes flickering towards the door and back again. John lets the breath he was holding free. Harry doesn’t need to look in his eye to know he’s struck true to the heart of the matter. 

“This life has seen me well John.” His voice is low, his gaze caught on their hands where they lie next to each other on the table. “It has seen my family well. It brought me to my father, and it fed us when we were hungry for thirty years before you came.”

“But perhaps-”

“Perhaps what?”

“Perhaps this has become too dangerous. The mine is dangerous but it is a known danger, it is honest work under men who need it to succeed.”

“You’ve changed your tune.”

“You will make it, Henry, without getting killed.”

“It is not this which is killing me, John; not yet. The mine nearly killed me, it nearly killed my father. It has killed my friends. The sea could take me, perhaps it will, but I will not slave underground for a pittance that was only ever sometimes given to me.”

“It is not just the sea that concerns me, today I-”

The door swings open with a shout. Harry turns, attention torn. The jagged end hangs from John’s mouth. He swallows, throat rough. 

The Hartnell’s have arrived, to a hum of recognition, Magnus and another lad John vaguely recognises in tow. They are all cheer, grins splitting their faces, widening impossibly more as they spot Harry. In the corner of John’s eye he sees him raise a hand, then drag a smile upon his face. He waves his empty cup at them with raised eyebrows. Johnny Hartnell points to John’s own half-full glass as they traipse to the bar, but he shakes his head.  

“John.” Harry says lowly, face turned to watch the progress of his friends across the room. “What is it that has you so worried?” 

His hand rises as he speaks unconsciously, as if he was going to smooth the crease of John’s brow. At the last moment it judders to a halt mid-air, lands as a slap on John’s shoulder instead. He sways with the force of it, letting it rock him in towards Harry’s warmth. 

“This morning I met a police lieutenant.”

Harry’s hands tightens. 

“What a privilege.” He says, eyebrows raised. “In such a place as this?”

“He was dressed for rough weather, I’ve never seen a collar so high or a cape so broad.”

“Oh, it’ll storm tonight for sure, I pity the poor bugger on watch in the cold.”

“You ought to come straight home.” 

Harry shakes his head at John’s words, reaching out to take his half-finished drink from before them and throwing it down his throat. He smacks his lips. 

“That drink Johnny owes me will just go to waste if I go now.”

“When you’ve drunk it then.”

He lets go of the last thread of decorum and reaches out to close his hand around Harry’s wrist. The glass clatters from his hand, open in surprise, the last few inches to the table. They freeze. The sound seems swallowed by the hubbub of the room, no-one bothers to look their way.

“Alright,” Harry says, reaching back to slide John’s hand down to his, letting their fingers tangle briefly before he leaves it carefully placed on the table. “Alright. I’ll have one more drink; maybe two, maybe a round of cards. Then we’ll come home.”

“Don’t go getting lost along that coastal path now, straight home.” 

“Straight home.”

Harry nods. The youthful cheer is chased from his face, his frown deeping the lines of his face, sinking his eyes ever deeper. It is only when his gaze slides from John to a point behind him, that it breaks again into a grin. The crowd presses in around their table, Harry’s attention caught in the swirl of socialising. 

John rises. He steps away.

Harry does not stop him, but as John looks back from the doorway he touches his fingertips to his lips. Half a kiss. The other half lingers in the air between them, waiting.

It does not quite soothe his nerves completely. He finds himself unable to concentrate on any one project when he returns home. John Peglar tries to tempt him into conversation, coaxing a few platitudes at a time out with a well turned question and a hot mug, but still his mind curls in on itself. There is a small spark of guilt when he is given up on, and Peglar slaps both hands on his knees to rise and go outside on some errand or another, but it dies as quickly as John’s mind turns again to Harry. 

He wonders if the other’s will convince him enough to go out tonight besides. Harry would go, if Johnny was, if Tom was - to watch over them, to see them return safe and unharmed. But he would also not break his promise to John, he has to believe that, or else…

“Good thing I brought this in now, it looks like it’s about to rain.” 

John Peglar wrestles his way through the door, the spread of his arms laden with kindling and small logs from the woodpile that leans precariously against the side of the house. It falls from his arms with a clatter into the basket beside the fire. He himself already looks a little soggy, curls tinged with the fine mist that has descended to hang low over the valley. 

John pushes himself up, not quite awake enough to leap to his aid, but is waved away. 

“Just stoke it well f’me, when Harry comes home from the pub he sure will be soaked. Best we get the old thing roarin’ well ahead of time.”

John prods the fire with the sharp end of the poker, watching the sparks jump and scatter up into the chute. The whole thing rattles as John Peglar tosses another small log atop the pile, dropping into his chair with a great sigh. He settles down in his seat, still in his overcoat – head sinking between the fabric’s folds like a turtle into its shell. 

“Your coat, Mr Peglar, shouldn’t you…”

“Ah tis fine.”

“You’ll catch a chill.” John says firmly, dragging his mind back into the present like some unruly calf. “We can’t have two invalids at a time.”

“Hah! Try to tell Harry he’s an invalid still.” 

At least John Peglar moves to do as he’s asked, heaving himself up with only a minor grumble to fiddle with the buttons on his coat. 

“Tis’ your job to lock up an’ all then, when the boy gets in. I’ll not be putting this old thing on again.”

It is an easy thing to agree to, especially with the promise of a stolen moment to take with Harry. The sky rumbles outside, threatening to make good on its promise. His fingertips twitch at the thought of holding him in his arms, warm and easy, loose-limbed from whiskey and good company. How he can play off Harry’s stumble as that of a well-cheered fellow, to tug him closer, to feel the heave of his chest with muffled laughter, and know he made it safe home.

Bang! Bang!

Outside the cottage, the heaven’s open.

John leaps to his feet at the pounding on the door. Peglar, already standing, shuffles for the lock as the hammering comes again.

Bang! Bang! Bang! 

They spill desperate into the kitchen. 

The rain follows, driving in behind them, striking the stone floor like half-muffled bells. John grunts as he shoves the door closed again behind them, the slam shakes the building frame. They both wince as the windows rattle. 

“Did you lads get caught in the storm?” 

John Peglar’s laugh dies on his lips as he takes them in. 

Harry stands, shaking and wild eyed, his gaze fluttering but never landing around the room. His face is white. John tries to catch his eye but he just stares straight through him. It falls on their shoulders, tight and shaking, the hand clenched into a fist at Harry’s side. Peeking below his cuff his knuckles are torn red raw from their scramble, prickles of bush standing proud caught in their coats. Tom has landed on his knees, crashing through the door and to the floor in his haste. There he sits, strings cut. Dog pads over to him, letting him bury his shaking hands in her fire-warm fur.

“We went round the back,” Harry rasps. His coat is streaked with mud, rust red clay clinging from their scramble. “We came through the woods.”

“Through the back…” The words scratch John’s throat as he speaks them. “You went out to the coast?”

“No.” Harry says firmly. “No. I promised.”

John’s heart leaps, then plummets like a gannet towards the waves. “Then what-”

“Twas them that came to find us. Diggle let us out the backdoor of the pub, through the kitchen. It was so loud, their dogs and their horns.” 

“Johnny’s gone,” Tom Hartnell says dully. It’s only when he lifts his head they can see the tear tracks cutting down his face. “Johnny-” He chokes on his own words. Dread settles low and cold in John’s stomach. John Peglar reaches down to grip Tom’s shoulder, pulls him up into a tight hug that seems to last too long, and not long enough altogether. 

Harry hovers over his shoulder, restless energy shaking in the corner of John’s eye. He wants to reach out and settle a soothing hand on his hip, and let Harry curl around his back as if this was another lesson. 

In John’s his hand is cold. 

“What happened?” John Peglar says. 

Tom does not answer, his senses left him, only his brotherʼs name as a harsh whisper on his lips. Instead it is Harry, who is left to describe the cold shock of the thrown-open door, the frenzy of dogs and strange men in uniform. It falls from him in short, bitter words. The bright candles snuffed with the force of their movements, a friend seized, a bottle thrown in protest, a shot-

The light filters grey through the storm clouds as they roll overhead, washing all life from the Peglars cheeks. Tom moans a little, a strange soft sound of pain. He curls in on himself like a wounded animal; forehead to the cold stone floor as if he could burrow into his own grave. 

When John Peglar stands it is with a hand on his back and a hand on Tom’s shoulder. “Why did they come?” His voice rasps, mouth dry and sticking to itself. His gaze is on Harry, and Harry’s hand in John’s. “Who did they come for?”

“I thought we had time.” John says.

John Peglar looks at him queerly. He waits for John to speak again.

“The lieutenant- I thought we would have more time.”

The table jams into his spine as John Peglar lunges for him. His hand is ripped from Harrys, slammed against the table, his knuckles ground into the wood by the force of John Peglar’s grip. He’s quick, driven by pain; John frozen by the same. The room twists around him, his world narrowed to the bruising pressure of the hand at his throat. 

“We took you into our home!” He roars, spittle like seafoam breaking on his wavering voice.

“CHRIST, DA -” Harry scrambles after them. “Let, let go of him!"

They topple, John pulled forward by Harry’s grip on his father’s wrist. 

“No!”

“Let-”

“What’s his right, should’ve warned you away from him-”

“- he did nothing!”

“He’s got our Johnny killed!”

Their voices get louder, closing in over John’s head. 

“-ohn.” He can barely squeeze the syllables out. At the edge of his vision Tom cowers still, pale face slowly eaten by the spreading pulse of white. “Plea- ah!”

John falls, puppet strings cut. He stumbles back, hands dropping to his sides, head turning to stare at the high corner of the ceiling and body following loosely behind. He barks – hoarse. Not laughter, this is not the taste of joy so frequently on the Peglar’s lips. This is a sound of exhaustion, too far pushed for pain. John feels frozen, unable to relax his shoulders even as Harry’s hands land there, soothing. 

“He tried to warn us. ” 

There’s a hand on his chin again, feather light. He shivers even though he knows it is Harry, peering down at him. John looks up from his half-sprawl over the table at John Peglar. He doesn’t look at John, but at his feet. At the distance John can see him for what he is. An old man, standing lopsided from the weight of the world. 

Out of the light of the fire he is pale, and thin, no good cheer to mask his tiredness, stripped of goodwill in the face of grief. His coat is faded at the collar, the style one long since passed, fraying at the seams. It hangs past his knuckle even as he reaches out a hand to Tom, who takes it and is hauled into his embrace, the coat falling around them both. 

They stand there, one long moment, turned from their gazes. Harry, curled protectively over John’s side, slips his small hand where his father’s had been, around John’s waistcoat collar.

“I saw one,” John coughs; lets Harry rub a soothing thumb across the base of his throat. “I thought they would be waiting. On the cliffs. I never thought they would come hunting.”

“Apologies.”

It is rough-hewn, choked out of his throat. John Peglar swipes his arm across his eyes roughly. He coughs. 

John nods. It is all he can do.

“Right,” he says. He starts again, face set in a frown. “You went out the back?” 

Tom is still curled into his side like a child, eyes wide and unseeing. Harry moves away from John, the air cold in his absence, the inches between their bodies a mile. 

“Yes.”

John Peglar shakes his head. “Someone will have seen you. Maybe not.” He doesn’t sound confident.  "You ought lie low for a while; stay indoors, stay quiet. A few days, till they've moved to cause trouble in a different town."

He looks down, wipes something from the edge of Tom’s face with his cuff. He tsks, taking up Tom’s hands in his to pull his cuffs from his sleeve. 

“You’ve got something on these my lad, best get changed. Best you all get changed, and give that to me to soak.” 

When Harry opens his mouth to say something he only shakes his head.

“No. Go on quick now, John can… John can help you. I’ll make us some tea, yes, and then we’ll have a think about what to do. You can stay here tonight.”

“Me and you in the big bed,” says Harry softly, stronger when Tom’s gaze turns helpless to him. “Like when Betsy was born, and the three of us all climbed in to wait for her together. We’ll fit still, I bet.”

Tom shivers when John’s hand cups his elbow, but he lets them lead him away from John Peglar’s warmth. Him and Harry move as one, up and towards the bedroom, voices silent but conversing between their touches in a way John is hopeless to read. John follows them, one hand on the bannister and one at the ready just in case. He pauses, the step before the upstairs swallows them, his heel dangling in midair. 

Across the way he sees John Peglar wrestle himself from his coat and lay it softly upon the chair, pressing both hands into the tall back and his forehead to his hands. He looks like he might fall if his grip on the chair slipped. The light of the fire casts his face in shadow. His shoulders shake once, twice, before he hauls his head upright again. 

John’s throat pulses, leaping as he swallows. He leaves him to his grief. 

The top step is a boundary into another world. In all his months of living with the Peglars he never thought to give a second to the upper bounds of the house, except to imagine Harry in it. It was no different in his mind to a dream; where he sought Harry also. 

He stands now, not in the void of John’s imagination or some large feather mattress he had conjured there, but a small sparse room. It is colder than the lower floor, a small patch of damp under the window where it had been left open and hurriedly shut. A battered ironwork bed sticks out into the centre of the room like the prow of a ship. One of the curled post-tops is missing, John has half a mind to wonder how it was lost. It is footed by a large wooden chest, open now and spilling it’s contents to the floor. There is a fireplace here too, smaller, set before with a well-trod rag rug, and flanked by a second low wooden framed bed – unmade. Harry’s, of course. John has half a mind to laugh, the ordinariness of the sight sweeter in the tight atmosphere. Tom sits on the edge of it, stripped from his shirt, arms wrapped around himself. He nods at John as he creeps awkwardly towards the centre of the room. 

“-ought send warning to your mother; not us, not through the town now. Maybe…”

Harry is halfway in the chest and still chattering, emerging triumphant with a spare shirt in hand. 

“John! Ah-” 

A fist slams upon the door. Tom leaps to his feet, outstretched hand grasping for Harry’s. They tumble away from the window, into John who staggers frantically not to fall. The pause stretches out an eternity. Below them, the sound of John Peglar stops, starts again, before-

Bang. Bang.

The shutters rattle. 

Tom’s elbow is digging into John’s chest where they stand huddled against the far wall, but none dare move. Below, Harry’s father hauls himself up with an exaggerated groan that echoes up the stairs, and answers. 

They cannot hear his words. At least John cannot, only his cadence. He sounds calm - pleasant even. If Harry was not clinging to his hand fiercely John would think this was any ordinary caller, lost and asking for directions or else hoping for one of the Peglar’s to turn a skilled hand in their assistance. The stranger has a horse, it brays and stamps it’s feet impatiently below the open window. Perhaps it is a traveller; there is not the yowling of dogs that chased Tom and Harry from the pub, and John Peglar is content enough to talk a while. 

Perhaps it has only been a moment. Perhaps. It seems like an age. 

When John Peglar climbs the stairs again his step seems even slower. He hauls himself up with a hand on the bannister, silent as the grave except for the rattle of his breath in his chest. Fear shudders through John’s chest. The air around him tightens as he watches Harry square his shoulders. 

“That was the constable,” John Peglar says, voice low. “He was asking for you Harry.”

“And?” 

“Said I hadn't seen you since you left this morning, suggested maybe you had gone out to the Blankys’.” 

John Peglar shakes his head. He looks grey, sober. Harry is the same, the colour of the gathering clouds.

“They thought.” He swallows hard, John’s heart sinks. “They thought Johnny was you.”

“What-” Tom says. He bobs awkwardly as his breath catches in his chest, head swinging between Harry and his father. 

“What?” he says again, desperately.

“Till our Sarah came- ‘m so sorry Tom,” John Peglar sucks a breath through his teeth. “Someone went to fetch her when they heard what they were calling him.”

“My name. Fuck.” 

If Harry was drawn before now he is dragged, so white his eyes and the curl of his hair look black. 

“You should go. Both of you.” 

John Peglar pauses, as if they might protest. They don’t.

“Before we find out why they want you. Before we find out what they want to do to you.” 

John looks between Tom and Harry, caught fast to each other. If Harry goes, he knows he will follow, the weight of it sits heavy in his stomach, feet already itching with the same need that drove him down into the far reaches of the country in the first place. Beside him Harry vibrates, unable to stand still.

“I can’t.” Tom’s voice is soft but steady. “I have to take it, whatever it is that is waiting for me."

Harry makes a soft, animal sound - half protest half grief, the prospect of a second brother lost that evening. Hartnell stands firm and unrelenting. He lets go if Harry's hand.

"I can take a few weeks in the jail, I can take a fine. They can whip me if they like, Johnny survived it an’ so can I. But I cannot give up the chance of being able to lay him in a good grave.”

“We’ll make it so.”

John Peglar nods quickly, mouth turned and tight as if he dare not open it for fear of letting the full force of his emotions out. Instead he bends with a groan to fish a battered canvas bag from the depths of the chest, letting the lid swing down with a resounding thump. 

“Food. Water. A shirt if you like, but quick about it.” 

He swallows what else he had to say, pressing the bag to Harry’s chest till he takes it. Tom moves first, clattering downstairs with an uneven step, Harry following close behind him. John Peglar slaps him on the shoulder as he passes his father. John goes to follow, thinking already of what he cannot bear to leave behind, when he is caught. He teeters, heel missing the next step by an inch, John Peglar’s hand firmly buried in the crook of his elbow. 

“Wait, Mr Bridgens.” 

Harry pauses, a step below. He looks up at the two of them, frowning when John doesn’t follow. Reluctantly he continues at the insistent press of John’s hand on his shoulder, gaze lingering as he descends. 

Like this they are eye-to-eye. John Peglar is a few steps above him, one hand still caught on. His grip is tight, unyielding. It is strange and comforting to be stood like this, twisted to look back up the stairway. There’s a glimmer in the corner of John Peglar’s eye, caught on the crease of his face. 

"You'll go too?" 

There is no other answer than yes.

“I know how the rest of this tale goes, Mr Bridgens.” His hand loosens slightly, the other rests on the bannister as he leans in, voice lowering. “‘Ee’s a good lad, grown into a good man, but now he’s going to make the one promise tha’ he must break. I doubt I’ll ever see my son again, Mr Bridgens, and you cannot let him grieve it.” 

“We’ll-” John tries to unstick the tongue from the roof of his mouth. “We’ll make it back- We’ll try.” 

It already lands hollow on his ears. 

“See.” John Peglar’s mouth twists, as if he wants to smile but cannot bring his face to comply. “ We is not me and him any longer, it’s he and you. Though I didn’t think you’d be so quick to promise the same.”

“Are we not friends, Mr Peglar?”

“John, please. I would hope that is so, and if we are then I ask one favour of you.”

“Whatever.” It should not land so easily on his tongue, but Harry makes it so. It is his hand which rests on the tiller of John’s life, sweetening all the bitter. He nods, settles his hand atop Peglar’s. “I have half a mind what you will ask of me, and it is already my intent.”

“Take yourselves to the coast and wherever it is that the wind carries you, let it be age that takes him in the end.” 

Downstairs Tom is raiding the pantry for little bits of dried fruit and solid, hardwearing cheese. He comes up with a little, hurrying to stuff it wrapped in muslin deep into the pockets of John’s overcoat. They tangle themselves briefly, Tom unwilling to quite let go and John so unused to being dressed, but they make it. 

Harry is wrapped already, lumpy knit scarf tucked beneath the collar of his overcoat, cap pulled low and tight over his face. He looks up at John’s soft grunt of effort, from shoving a fistful of paint tubes and tins into the top of his pack. They are treasures from John’s box, the metal tubes glittering in the low light for a second before they're tucked into the dark safety of Harry’s canvas bag.

Their eyes meet, and John’s heart breaks within his chest. If they’re caught, he thinks, he would be happy to die like Johnny Hartnell, between the cold barrel of a soldier’s gun and Harry.

John Peglar clings to Harry for the last time, the ease of their affection bittersweet. He tucks Harry into his neck, keeps him there with a hand cradling his head, chin hooked over his shoulder that his tears may run unseen. Harry’s shoulders shake like the earth itself was quaking. Tom turns so that he is not watching but John cannot look away. They need his witness, he thinks, someone else to remember for them, so that in a week, in a year, in a lifetime when the pain is dulled enough that Harry can speak his father’s name again, John can take his hand and say he loved you. 

His Harry; his son. 

Outside the rain seems to briefly lessen, downpour turning into a fine mist. John Peglar pulls back. He touches Harryʼs shoulders, marvelling at their breadth, cradles his face, strokes a careful thumb over the wetness of his cheeks. When he leans forward to kiss his forehead he leaves a smudge behind. 

“I always knew I’d lose you to her someday,” he says, voice cracking. Harry squeezes his eyes shut against the thought, nods jerkily. “I’ve had more time with you that rightly I ought, but now I don’t want to give you back – oh Harry, I am grateful for every second o’ it.” He laughs, a wet and hacking thing. “I reckon I ought to know that she’d come as someone good and wise too, to take you back with her where you belong.” 

He looks up then to meet John’s eye, and smiles through his tears.

They are soaked as soon as they step outside. Harry shivers and huddles closer, sheltering against John’s bulk. He looks strange, hair plastered to his skull, his eyes glow strangely in the light of the single lamp in Tom’s hand. 

They pause, unwilling to leave. 

“Watch out for traps,” John Peglar says from the doorway, squinting out into the rain to try to see them. He has both his arms trapped beneath his armpits, Tom’s arm against his waist to keep him from reaching after them. “Careful of your tread, there’s plenty laid for rabbits out there. All sorts, all sorts…”

He trails off, voice juddering to a halt. Harry nods, more a movement against John’s chest than anything he can see. He slips his hand into Harry’s, he breathes a sigh of relief when he squeezes back. 

The dark shape of the cottage blurs into the edge of the sky as they leave it behind. The faint glow of the hearthlight is not strong enough to pass through the window, the night too low and heavy to distinguish the shape of the stones from their cradle of bracken. John tries not to look behind them, Harry cannot tear his gaze away. He doesn’t have the heart to call him to look forward, to deny him the last glimpse of his home. 

When he stumbles John takes his hand, becomes his eyes as they plough through the driving rain. 

They go through the woods. 

The wind whistles through the trees above them as they scramble over the stile at the edge of the estate’s land; John first, Harry’s hands on his waist to steady him. As he lands on the other side he groans, the impact shaking up through his knees. Around his boots the earth clings, reluctant to release his feet from the sludge. Rainwater runs down the drop of Johnʼs mouth, open as he pants from the hurried paces of their steps from the cottage, tricking in an insistent stream through his beard. He reaches back, wordless, fearing the wind will blow the sound of their voices back towards the road, and the cottage at the end of it. In the pitch he can barely make out the wall let alone Harry, still on the other side. 

In the night his hand hovers, ghostly pale. The dark of his coat blends into the dark and so his palm lies face up, isolated in midair as if it was severed at the wrist. The rain pools there, waiting for the cover of Harry’s hand. 

He waits. 

Opposite him is sheet rain, unbroken. An empty hole, too dark to make out the shape of anything, the shadow of the trees so dense at the border of the woodland sucking all they can from his sight. The thin and snaking tendril of doubt worms into his ear. 

In the distance something yelps. A fox, he tells himself. Against the back of his neck the rain beats down, pattering a nonsense pattern on his skin.

Suddenly Harry’s face, pale as the moon, looms out of the darkness.

He had been turned. The dark of his hair and coat blending into the night as surely as John’s own. John wants to laugh, relief bubbling up into his chest. There is the shuffle of fabric as he lays his hand on the post, leaning forward to step up onto it.

It is only when John moves forward to lay his hand on the wooden fence next to Harry’s that he can spot what he’s noticed. In the distance, in the dark, a bobbling trail of lights wind their way up the steep incline towards the faint splotch of the Peglar’s cottage.

“Maybe it’s Magnus.” 

The wind howls around them, trees bending under the force enough to block their view for a split second. Harry seems unbothered by the rain, even as John curls his face towards his shoulder, flinching at the passing brush of a leaf. When the bough rights itself the lights are still there, flickering faint in the distance, three of them bobbling together clustered near the rise of the hill. Harry moves as if to step back along the path – John fumbles for his hand. 

He is not quite quick enough.

“Harry!” 

He dares not raise his voice above a whisper, though the howl of the gale muffles almost all sound below it’s whirling clouds. Harry half turns, enough to call back.

“Diggle grabbed them, it must be them! We didn’t see them leave, perhaps-”

“We can’t.” 

John doesn’t know when he started crying, only that his face is wet with more than rainwater, that each breath draws harder from his lungs. 

“Harry, we can't go back.”

He stretches out, the sharp wooden line of the gate cutting into his belly. The weight of his own arm drags itself down, prickling in the muscle the longer he holds it aloft, wavering. His fingertips can just brush the edge of Harry’s sleeve, heavy with wetness, nowhere close to pressing against the hot skin beneath.

“Please-” 

Harry turns at his half-sob, looks down at his outstretched hand as if he was seeing John for the first time, half-emerged in the darkness.

His eyes are wide, stretched so that they seem to take up his whole face, cheeks sallow. There is no light to admire him by, no sun to kiss his cheeks and filter warmly through his hair. He is all rough values muddled into each other, the dark of his coat, the wan circle of his face. The wind blows his hair forward, plastered to the edge of his face. It carries his whisper across the border.

“It’s not Magnus, is it John?”

Beckoning, John curls his fingers. 

Harry’s small hand is so hot in his it almost burns, dispersing the little sea in his palm as he settles there. His grip slips a little in John's as he hauls himself over the gate. The rain beats relentless over them, blanketing the sound of their movements. When they look back up towards the ghost of the cottage, blinking rainwater from their eyes, the flickering lights have passed.

No-one is there, except the road, and they themselves are on it.